For ease of reference, here are the links to the entire series:

Part 1: Faust the Innovative Throwback
Part 2: Faust and the Preemptive Crisis of the Professions
Part 3: Faust and the Tragedy of Misfired Modernity
Part 4: Faust and the Redemption of Modernity
Part 5: Faust Beyond Faust

I hope the unaccustomed pace of posting was okay, especially for my email subscribers. For my part, I was excited simply to have new material to post for a week straight! It felt like old times.

Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene: A Compilation and Coda” →

[See Part 4 here, or go back and read the series from the beginning.]

I have compared Faust’s utopia to the American dream, although admittedly the notion of social solidarity in the face of disaster hits a sour note from that perspective. What makes it feel so American to me is that it is so profoundly capitalist. It presupposes that life demands constant labor and striving, that true freedom requires exposure to danger, that nature’s power is wasted unless it is conquered and redirected by human interests. This connection is far from hypothetical. Long passages of Part 2 revolve around Mephistopheles’s plot to introduce paper money into the German empire, and as Marshall Berman notes in All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Goethe himself was fascinated by vast world-shaping projects like the Panama Canal, which finally assert humanity’s mastery over nature.

In our current moment, it is ironically this very triumph of modern developmentalism that appears most naïve and even retrograde in Goethe’s Faust. Capitalist domination over nature has proven more profoundly world-shaping than Goethe ever could have anticipated—delivering potentially every nation on earth to the condition of Faust’s ocean-threatened utopia. Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene, Part 5: Faust Beyond Faust” →

[See Part 3 here.]

When Marlowe adapted the Faust story for the stage, it is only a slight exaggeration to say it was “ripped from the headlines”—the original German chapbook had been published only a few years prior, followed by an English translation. By the time Goethe took up the same material over two centuries later, Faust was an established legendary figure in a much more assertive and confident modern world. Far from being an edgy countercultural tale that had to be wrapped up in traditional piety for plausible deniability, the Faust legend in Goethe’s Germany was a story for children, commonly performed in puppet shows. (Indeed, Goethe himself seems not to have read Marlowe’s play until very late in his life, when he was already working on Part 2 of his massive drama.)

In many ways, as with our contemporary glut of adaptations of established cultural legends, Faust is an exercise in nostalgia—nostalgia for a lost naïve faith, nostalgia for the pure emotional receptivity of childhood and youth, even nostalgia for itself, given the fact that Goethe composed the play over the course of many years. Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene, Part 4: Faust and the Redemption of Modernity” →

[See Part 2 here.]

This dynamic plays out almost literally in the opening monologue of Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which was written only a few years after the publication of the original Faust chapbook. When we meet Faustus, he is surveying the fields of human knowledge to determine which is of most value. He starts with Aristotelian logic, which claims foundational status and yet achieves no more than to help one “dispute well.” Faust is dissatisfied: “Is, to dispute well, logic’s chiefest end? / Affords this art no greater miracle? / Then read no more; thou hast attain’d that end” (1.1.8-10). Already we can see the mismatch—surely disputing well is not miraculous, but neither does it claim to be. Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene, Part 3: Faust and the Tragedy of Misfired Modernity” →

[See Part 1 here.]

So far I have emphasized how Life and Trust embodies the unique combination of forward- and backward-looking elements that have made the Faust legend such a fertile ground for reflecting on the dilemmas of modernity. In terms of its narrative frame, this immersive theatrical experience’s portrayal of Faust as a disillusioned banker also draws on a more understated theme. Again and again, we see Faust (or the stand-in character) as a member of one of the professions. In the film The Devil’s Advocate, for instance, Keanu Reeve’s Faustian character is a high-powered lawyer. Goethe’s own version winds up making a transition that I’m sure many of us have considered, moving from professor to political fixer and property developer. And both Goethe and Marlowe, drawing on the earliest versions of the Faust legend, agree that their hero mastered all of the professions of his day and held doctorates from all four major faculties of the university: divinity, law, medicine, and philosophy.

Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene, Part 2: Faust and the Preemptive Crisis of the Professions” →

[Editor’s note: I was invited to give a keynote address for this year’s Romancing the Gothic online conference. Given that the theme was “Devils and Justified Sinners,” I chose to discuss the Faust legend, which has been a big part of my teaching for many years but not something I have devoted any concentrated writing to. Since it is my first experiment in writing about Faust, it is closer to a blog post than a formal article in spirit, and so I will be posting the talk here in serialized format over the course of the week.]

It may initially seem strange that I am proposing to connect the two themes in my title. What could the story of a deal with the devil have to do with our contemporary ecological crisis? Here I could invoke any number of superficial parallels—we “made a deal with the devil” of capitalist growth and now the bill is coming due, etc., etc. That would doubtless be a satisfyingly clever way of saying the things we already know to be true about climate change, but it would not shed much fresh light on either the Faust legend or the Anthropocene.

Instead of jumping right into the comparison, then, I will largely take everyone’s knowledge of climate change for granted and focus initially on an analysis of the most fundamental themes of the Faust legend.  I observe first of all that the Faust legend has always provided a way to use the old to think through the new. Continue reading “Faust in the Anthropocene, Part 1: Faust the Innovative Throwback” →