Volume 23, Number 19 · November 25, 1976
Faust: Still Striving and Straying
By Harry Levin
Goethe's Faust: Part I
translated by Randall Jarrell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 296 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Faust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt, edited by Cyrus Hamlin
Norton, 626 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Forever striving and forever straying, the role of Faust has been adopted as a historic model for Western man. As an individual bent upon self-realization, and caught up in a devil's bargain with technological forces, he was ideally cut out to be Spengler's archetype for the modern mind. His black magic has been detected most recently, according to a poem by Karl Shapiro, in a mushroom cloud arising from Los Alamos. His persisting legend, which began in a Reformation chapbook and inspired a powerful tragedy of the Renaissance, has extended to the musical fiction of Thomas Mann and the cerebral dialogue of Paul Valéry. Other legends, notably those of Prometheus and Don Juan, have dealt with forbidden knowledge and facile seduction. But it was Faust who, upon its reaction from the Enlightenment, became the culture hero of Romanticism. And Goethe's was the masterwork among the many dramas that reanimated this theme for the Sturm und Drang.
Review, 3460 words
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