Goethe's pact with the devil

In discussing the history of drama, the all-important question is: "Where is the mask? In the auditorium? Or on the stage? In the theatre? Or in life?" It can only be in one or the other. The most splendid ages of the theatre, those in which the mask wins its triumph on the stage, are those in which hypocrisy ceases to cover life with its pall. On the other hand, those periods where... "the hypocrisy of morals" prevails are the ones in which the actor's mask is snatched away and he is asked not so much to be beautiful, but to be natural; that is to say... to take as his model, the realities, or, at least, appearances of reality, that the spectacle holds before him - and that amounts to the models of a humanity in all its monotony or already masked. The author himself, who also takes pride in his naturalness, will readily undertake to furnish a drama of this kind: a monotonous or masked drama where the tragedy of situations will little by little replace the tragedy of characters.

Andre Gide in 45,4 Pretexts - Reflections on Literature and Morality.

WHEN you come to think of it, theatre is at its most innovative when it has been the least modern, most contemporary when it has dreamed of connecting to some ancient or timeless truth. Poetry, fiction, music, dance and the visual arts have all gone through phases of being attracted to the off-beat and primitive. But the mystery and essence of theatre, more tangibly than any other art, presents us with the past. Paintings may show what the past was like but they are like traces or footprints in the sand; they no longer move, they may disappear. But with each theatre performance what once happened is re-enacted. Each time we keep the same rendezvous: with Macbeth who can't wake up from his downfall; with Antigone who must do her duty. And each night at the theatre, Antigone who died three millennia ago, says: ``We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead.'' Therefore, avant-garde theatre has often been in full retreat, moving backward in time, searching for older, more authentic forms.

Some such reason must explain the continuing popularity of the squalid intensities of Goethe's poetic drama, ``Faust, Part One''. The play, which is in two parts, deals with the eternal truths like fate, the human condition, the existential absurd, or the hidden flaw in the character because of which all of us are doomed to fall. But more than anything else, it deals with the banality of evil, that is masked but present everywhere, at all times.

The play is founded in the Faust legend in which Faustus, a magician and astrologer in the mid-16th Century signs a wager in blood by which he surrenders himself body and soul to Hell after 24 years elapse. During this time, the devil, Mephistopheles, is bound to fulfil all his wishes. The service which the devil offers to which the greater part of the book is devoted is dull stuff: esoteric queries, such as why winter and summer are reversed in the southern hemisphere; rapid transport to far-off places, or the architecture of the wonders of Florence; magic feats performed before a gullible audience like eating a wagon- full of straw, and so on.

Faust realises that the devil is taking him for a ride but he is prevented from revoking the pact by Mephistopheles' threat that to do so would bring his life to an immediate and bloody end. Faust sees his blunder lay in taking the devil literally by his word, that he could not understand his paradoxical imagery and hence the impossibility of their ever thinking alike. How could a piece of parchment bind him more firmly than his solemn word? How can a word bind him once it is seen as something different from what he understood it to be?

Faust's refusal to give value to things means, ultimately, that no pact is ever possible in the traditional sense, since no obligation can be imposed by an external authority, whether the authority of a piece of paper, or of the law whose sanction gives authority to the piece of paper, unless Faust imposes that obligation on himself by his own free choice - in which case, the external authority is superfluous. Faust is interested in living by the spirit of the wager, not in its letter, and Mephistopheles promises himself success not in the first instance, from the letter of the agreement with Faust, but from the opportunity it gives to tempt and corrupt him. Neither party is thus, strictly speaking, interested in an agreement, which is often said to be at the heart of the play.

The most important source of the tension in the play is the question: Which of the protagonists will be proved right? Faust with his sublime striving which to Mephistopheles is so much verbiage, or Mephistopheles with his hidden intention of moral corruption visible to us but concealed from Faust by his own choice? Can the Faustian lead a life without compromising itself morally in terms of Christian values of sin and atonement? Can the attempt to lead a life beyond good and evil by the spirit result in anything more grand than simple, limited, human wrong- doing?

Woven into the Faust tragedy is another, his love affair with a young town girl, Margarete (Gretchen, for short). Mephistopheles, at first unwilling to assist, provides Faust with access to Gretchen's room and gifts of jewellery to her. He arranges a rendezvous in the garden of a neighbour, Mistress Martha, provided Faust is prepared to testify falsely to the death of Martha's husband. Faust is reluctant at first, but Mephistopheles taunts him that he would practice worst deceit on Gretchen. Faust declares his love for Gretchen and despite their profound differences in religious attitudes, consummates his love, lured on by Mephistopheles.

Gretchen's brother Valentin is brought home by rumours of the love affair but is paralysed by Mephistopheles and killed by Faust. The two criminals, now outlaws, flee. Faust, who still has a streak of goodness left in him, is distracted by a vision of Gretchen which Mephistopheles attempts to efface from his mind by entertaining him with the political and intellectual obsessions of Goethe's own time. Faust learns that in his absence when Gretchen needed him most, she was partly deranged, had killed her own child and condemned to death. Mephistopheles appears, warning that dawn was approaching, and demanding that they leave immediately: Gretchen, recoiling in horror from her old enemy, refuses to go along with Faust because that would put her too in the devil's hands.

She entrusts herself to the judgement of Heaven that redeems her of her guilt, Mephistopheles disappears, taking Faust with him. "Faust One" ends in a perfect cauldron of sin, error and remorse fit only for Faust to drown in.

Faust may be remorseful, but is fundamentally unrepentful to the end; he dies as he lives, in darkness. What Goethe says is that any redemption cannot derive from what he has done.

If Faust has to be saved, it cannot be because of his delusion and hardness of heart; it must be in spite of them. That, after all, is what redemption means. Redemption must come from the true substance of life, which Faust as Goethe has painted him, has never more than momentarily glimpsed: from love, in the person of Gretchen, and from beauty in the guise of poetry. Faust, who has entered into a bond with Mephistopheles and becomes his mask with complete self-deception, has chosen negativity in a human form and on a human scale: he has become evil. Many of us may not go that far but the line between pure good and pure evil can be very thin when the darkest black is often just grey.

(Part Two, which is not covered here, is not so much a sequel to Part One but a parallel. A number of Goethe's works present a binary structure - in each the fundamental conflict in the work is fully expounded and brought to what may be described as a provisional catastrophe by the end of the first part, while the second part repeats and varies the themes and the tragic conclusion of the first, on a higher plane, on a higher level of intensity.)

RAVI VYAS

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