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50 Greatest Books

Faust

JAMES M. SKIDMORE

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Latest comment posted at 10:16 AM EST 15/10/08

Not just philosophy but also drama in the best sense of the word. ...Read the full article

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  1. D Mores from GTA, Canada writes: An allegory of the current socio-economic turmoil.
  2. Mark Harding from Toronto, Canada writes: In Christopher Marlowe's version of the legend, the apotheosis for Faustus comes when Mephistopheles grants him Helen Of Troy. The bloodless academic is finally brought to life by "the face that launched a
    thousand ships." Faustus fulfills his destiny by getting the girl that every other man wants; too bad he has to get the devil to do the dirty work for him.
    Maybe Marlowe's Dr. Faustus belongs somewhere on a list of fifty books that could have been great if the author had not been stabbed through the forehead in a barroom brawl before he had a chance to do the revision.
  3. Jim Cohoon from Chilliwack, Canada writes: The various dramatic forms of the legend of Faust have tended to coalesce into a morality play essentially centred on the notion of the 'Faustian bargain'. The 'Faustian bargain' itself is a dramatic metaphor for a very fundamental conflict inherent in the human soul or psyche. This fundamental conflict can be seen in Mankind's seemingly eternal inner battle between 'good' and 'evil', or between 'light' and 'darkness' -- or some would say, between ego and conscience. One book that will not show up on this list (or most lists) of famous or influential books is one I enjoyed and that does shed some (psychological and sociological) light on the 'Faustian' subject of Mankind's 'dual nature': it is "The Duality of Human Existence" by David Bakan (1966).
  4. Jim Cohoon from Chilliwack, Canada writes: Further to my previous post, here is some material from Bakan's book that gives a sense of how it may relate to the issues of Faust: "Egotism, which is the extreme separation of the conscious ego from the rest of being, is characteristically attributed to Satan.... Satan is a projection in which the agentic [or egoistic] in the human psyche is personified.... The psychological problem of the Satanic image is agency unmitigated by communion." The Faustian stories tend to have a dialectical tension between the sacred and the profane, or the divine and the earthly, a tension that many humans try to resolve through religion. Bakan: "The essential task of the religious enterprise is to face the actual termination of individual existence ... and to create a transindividual ego indentification.... One can avoid that other death by allowing communion to function together with agency.... We can be spared the sense of ultimate despair by not separating ourselves from each other." Of course, this resonates with the story of Lucifer being separated from God -- the metaphorical initial rupture of communion that led to 'original sin' and to all subsequent 'Faustian bargains'.
  5. Shadow of the Bear from Canada writes: From Christopher Marlowe's version of Faust:

    "What profits a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

    I leave it up to readers to apply post modern references to this question of all questions.
  6. Dave T from midwest, Canada writes: “Something we were withholding held us back,” wrote Robert Frost, addressing perhaps the forlorn and the heartbroken, the ghosts of history whose lives people the landscapes with the gloomy torpor of unfulfilled promise. Not so with Goethe’s Faust, who, like Goethe’s Werther goes for broke and in the words of Norman Mailer, concocts his design to amass all knowledge for the purpose of enslaving nature, not the natural milieu in it pristine adornments, (though that may have appealed to a naturalist like Goethe), but the limited and enfeebled nature of his own self. Hence, a gargantuan appetite for Faust to become a kind of God, to exist beyond the possibility of becoming, as though that were possible, and for Werther, the absolutist’s idea of love, the love of “the one”, the one who of course is unattainable, already spoken for; hence, Werther’s inevitable self-inflicted death, a death that even as a fictional character allegedly caused a wave of romantic suicides that spread as far away as China. “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” wrote Schopenhauer, a notion evident in the aspirations of our Faust and Werther, where nothing is withheld, nothing held back, a near familial kinship of going the distance and perhaps, too in the larger sense of the times, as apologists for Bonaparte might be quick to suggest. But then, it was Werther that Napoleon carried with him on his campaigns, Werther that caused Bonaparte to summon Goethe to France; it was Werther, too, that Goethe had in mind when he composed his poem Trilogy of Passion: “You smile my friend, with feeling as is due: a fearsome parting brought such fame for you.” So my view, then, would be: take your pick.
  7. Simon Pieman from Canada writes: Dave T must be a university teacher, as his entry is completely indecipherable. I've studied both Die Leiden Des Jungen Werthers and Faust (in German) and both are overrated, unreadable tedium. Schools only teach Goethe and Schiller to make it look like there was something worth reading out of German literature before the 19th century. (There wasn't). For the record, Goethe's original version of Faust, Urfaust, is a much more accomplished work: largely because it's shorter, livelier, and possible to mount on stage, unlike the final version.
  8. leo bloom from radisson, sask., Canada writes: For Shadow of the Bear - 'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?' Mark 8:36...A little before Marlowe, no? As far as the 'Faustian' theme goes, I prefer Alan Parker's movie 'Angel Heart'. Go figure, eh?

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