Faust
Goethe’s Faust is a Greek tragedy wrought from Germanic myth, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Arabian Nights. It’s a stimulating book: and, I think, a book for free thinkers. Perhaps Goethe’s status within his contemporary Germany gave him the freedom to make his own story from such hallowed materials.
Goethe takes liberties with the well-told story of Doctor Faustus, deviating from the source material wherever it suits him. Most notably, in Goethe’s telling, Faust is not dragged down to hell; instead, a host of youthful angels drive Mephistopheles into a suitably Hellenic paroxysm of homoerotic desire, while Faust is transported up to heaven from right under the Devil’s cloven hoof.
There are Shakespearean notes throughout the play, but especially at the end of Part Two: the elderly Faust inhabits a castle by the sea, on a polder which he reclaimed from the waves like a devilish King Lear. His paranoia and avarice are reminiscent of Macbeth in Dunsinane, as Birnam Wood laps against his battlements.
The Trojan War is just another lump of clay under Goethe’s poetic hand; Helen of Troy is the object of Faust’s desire throughout Part Two, but the plot diverges from Homer. When Mephistopheles visits Helen in Menelaus’s palace. Helen tells the disguised Devil that her husband asked her to prepare for a sacrifice:
but careful though
His orders were, they told me of no living thing,
No offering he would slaughter for the Olympian gods
Helen only realises that she and her servants were to be sacrificed when Mephistopheles points it out. Goethe’s addition to Homer’s story does not just call to mind the story of Isaac, whom Abraham betrayed in the same way, but also draws a parallel with Iphigenia, sacrificed not by her husband but by her father. Just as Helen takes on the role of Isaac, the chorus inverts Scherazade as they beg Mephistopheles to keep talking and avert their execution: “Patience enough! To listen is to still be alive!”.
So in this scene, Goethe draws on both the Arabian Nights and Old Testament; but he does so in a way that encourages further reflection on the recast myths. If Helen is Isaac, what other parallels should we draw? If we’re comparing Biblical and Homeric sacrifice, is Iphigenia akin to Jesus? If one sacrifice was justified, why not the other?
Goethe’s exercise of this freedom is made possible through his deployment of one of the greatest literary tropes: the journey to the underworld, or katabasis. Through this journey, or alternatively through a nekyia, or conversation with the spirits of the dead, an author can introduce any character to any other, creating collisions as required. Faust performs his own nekyia at the start of the tale, when he summons Mephistopheles, and the trope continues throughout the book in various forms. We see similar collisions in books XI and XXIV of the Odyssey, and book VI of the Aeneid, where is inspired by the future glory of Rome, not to mention Dante’s Inferno.
Great novelists provoke more questions than they answer: they lever up their creativity. Goethe’s permissiveness with his source material grants the same liberty of imagination to his reader.
I enjoyed David Luke’ introductory essay to the Penguin translation, which provides a fascinating distinction between dramatic and epic form. In Goethe’s 1797 annus mirabilis, Goethe agreed with his “close intellectual partner” Friedrich Schiller that, as Luke has it:
Drama as such is characterised by logical consistency and economy, the precipitation of the action to the denouement, the subordination of the parts to a single purpose which the end will bring to fulfilment. In the epic style, on the other hand, ‘sensuous breadth’ is of the essence: a certain discursive lingering over pleasing detail and episode for its own sake, a tendency of the parts to pursue their own enjoyable autonomy rather than remain functions of a tightly controlled, end-directed whole.
Schiller preferred to write in a dramatic style; Goethe was instinctively epic, which is ironic given that Faust is subtitled Eine Tragödie; a form of drama. Drama means narrative; things happen in sequence, and they couldn’t be re-orderd. Drama also means tension and suspense - what happens next? Epic poets don’t go in for such base tricks. For example, Homer spoils the story of the Odyssey right in the opening lines:
Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy… And all the gods pitied him save Poseidon; but he continued to rage unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he [i.e. Odysseus] reached his own land.
I think it’s worth stressing the point: Homer presents us with episode after episode of risk and derring-do - Circe, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis - but deliberately sacrifices all the real jeopardy in the story in the opening lines. The sacrifice of the overall narrative of the story enables the reader to linger over scene, because that’s all there is to the story.
That being said - who could come to the Odyssey without already knowing what happens? The paradox of epic is that these stories are so pervasive that only the youngest children can fail to know the ending.
Tolstoy also writes epic. While Anna Karenina and War and Peace have narrative and dramatic tension, the detail and episode are what make the novels special: the borzoi hunt, the ball, the horse race, the card game.
With this lens we can categorise not just men’s writing, but also their own lives. Does each thing in your life have its own enjoyable autonomy, or are they subordinated to a single purpose? Drama means focus; it means outcomes; but if you live an epic life, you will wander like Odysseus. You will visit the lotus-eaters, and leave them to it; you will hear the siren’s call, but tied to the mast. Epic or dramatic; ADHD or Adderall?
To extend the Hellenic theme of Goethe’s zweiter Teil, one might draw a contrast between Procrustes and Proteus. Procrustes liked to offer passers-by a bed to stay in; if they were too tall for the bed, he would chop off their feet; and if they were too short, he would stretch them to fit. By contrast, Proteus is the Old Man of the Sea, a slippery, ever-changing character who is impossible to pin down. Procrustes forces things to fit, destroying them in search of order; Proteus refuses to fit, refuses to be part of anyone else’s order. Neither extreme is to be desired.
If you’ll permit me a brief tangent, this is exactly the difference between Palantir and its competitors. When you bring software to a business, you can either change the business to fit the software, or the software to fit the business. The earliest ERPs, like all software, were custom-built by hobbyist engineers; SAP, in particular, changed all that by insisting on the clean core; the enterprise would fit into the categories defined by the philosopher-kings of Walldorf. Hasso Plattner was Procrustes, and the MARA table his bed. By contrast, Palantir glories in the diversity of the enterprise; in all the ways their process doesn’t fit into the schema, and sets out to build technology fit around the business. As such, Palantir wants to sell to businesses that have not been properly served by traditional SaaS companies, because their problems are too rare for anyone to build a scalable business selling software to solve merely that problem.
Most notably, Palantir won their contract with BP by writing a memo explaining the value of linking BP’s production divisions with their trading desks (interesting, the link was a competitive advantage for Koch Industries in Christopher Leonard’s book Kochland); Palantir’s protean technology would provide an informational advantage to a business that could not buy software off the shelf.
I found another marvellous contrast in 1968 postscript to Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: between the Heraclitean and Eleatic. Only fragments of Heraclitus’s work survive to us; he is most famous for a reference made to him by Plato in the Cratylus:
Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.
The world is in constant flux; nothing ever stands still. As such, one’s interpretive lens needs to be longitudinal.
In contrast, the Eleatics (a group of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers from Southern Italy, including Zeno), everything always stands still; due to the world’s fundamental unity, motion is an illusion: rather, the world progresses through a series of fixed and particular states. Arrows don’t fly in a continuous motion; they pass through a discrete series of states. With this philosophical framing, the roots of Zeno’s paradox become clear.
This distinction might remind an economist of the distinction between stocks and flows; but Elias uses it to criticise the work of Talcott Parsons. Whereas most twentieth-century philosophers followed Parsons in treating society as an Eleatic snapshot in time, contrasting (for example) different sections against each other, Elias preferred to see it as a Heraclitean process characterised and driven by change over time, and in doing so professed to be returning to sociology’s nineteenth-century roots.
In allowing Faust to escape the consequences of his pact, I think Goethe allows me to make an admission: I like Faust! I used to have the words of his pact in my internal bio at Palantir;
Werd’ ich beruhigt je mich auf ein Faulbett legen;
So sey es gleich um mich gethan!If I ever lie down in sloth and base inaction;
Then let that moment be my end!
Wie ich beharre bin ich Knecht,
Ob dein, was frag’ ich, oder wessen.Once I stand still, I shall be
a slave - yours or no matter whose.
Hell yeah! Faust pledges himself to action and novelty, constant movement - and to die if he ever slows down. He’s a man who lives fast, doesn’t die young, and then doesn’t even go to hell for it! Sure, he dies wracked by fear, an old man in a castle, but faced with the question of the meaning of life, he does at least give us an answer: and if anyone thinks his answer is selfish, naive, or unsustainable, then so be it.
Goethe’s Faust would have liked Peter Barton’s framing in Not Fade Away:
It was my father's early passing that persuaded me to live as if my life was an extended two-minute drill with no time-outs, to cram a full span's worth of living into fifty years or even less.