Faustianism in the Age of Lost Innocence

Abstract

In the course of their development, literary characters raise questions in a way which is of specific significance to the time of their appearance. Thus the literary character of Faust, who first appeared in the Lutheran German Volksbuch (1587) as a presumptuous challenger of untouchable wisdom, and was irrevocably damned (as a warning sign for all who dared too much), became more than two centuries later, with Goethe’s immortal poem, a modern individualist, whose lust for unlimited knowledge has become, in the paradigm of the Enlightenment, more than legitimate and thus deserved redemption rather than damnation. What is the role of Faust today, when the project of never-ending progress and the man’s power to shape the world according to his will has proved not only as a blessing bur also as a curse for humanity? – The answer is sought for in three Faustian characters of 20^th century. The first one is the »hero« of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: again, as in a paradoxical return to the Volksbuch, he is doomed to damnation, but no longer because of the sin of exuberant knowledge, but because of the demonic inhumanity related to the will to reach the absolute. The second one is Mikhail Bulgakov’s writer in his Master and Margarita, who, in spite of many reminiscences to Goethe’s Faust, is not a Faustian character in the proper sense, but someone who has given up hope, and thus also the possibility to affect the world. And the last is Paul Valéry’s Faust in the fragmentary poem “Mon Faust”: growing old and looking back at his life, he no longer wants to know, to act, to crave for more, but just to be: to breathe, to touch, to see. The modernistic ceaseless activity thus gives way to »postmodernistic« passivity. All the 20^th century Fausts are, each in their own way, disenchanted Fausts: they know the prize they have to pay for endless struggle. The »doctors«, longing for knowledge, have turned into »masters«, yearning for life – which, in the irreducible residue of tragedy, can of course never be mastered.