We were asked to read the chapters on Goethe’s Faust from ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ by Marshall Berman. Berman tells and analyses the story of Faust. Faust is successful, intelligent man, who has achieved a lot. But he is unhappy with the way he is moving through life, and doesn’t feel that he fits into the society around him, and so he secludes himself from it.
‘The further his mind has expanded, the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself, and the more impoverished have become his relationships to life outside – to other people, to nature, even to his own needs and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself from the totality of life.’ He is a prisoner of his own mind.
He is briefly given hope to joining the old world that he has detached himself from as he hears the church bells ring, and he is taken back to his childhood, but this satisfaction soon passes. He realises that he has to participate in society in a way that allows his ambitions and spirit to not be restricted as it was before. In order to do this he makes a pact with the devil.
His pact with the devil enables him to seduce Gretchen, a girl who symbolises innocence and world of his childhood. However, as she personally develops, she looses her innocence, and Faust looses the girl that he fell in love with.
Faust goes on to involve himself with society by becoming a leader, who through politics, develops society in the direction he wants, but this thirst for development is all-encompassing, and with it, Faust looses complete control of what he is doing by unknowingly killing an innocent couple who represent the goodness in the past. Faust is saved from hell, because of his commitment and continuous striving for development to improve the world around him.
There is a lot to learnt from this story and I think that I will come back to it and probably realise a few more important messages each time I read it, Berman certainly makes it clear in the way he breaks it down.
After reading this text, along with all of the others so far in this course, I feel that development must happen. We must keep moving forward but not disregard what has happened in the past. We must learn from everything that has happened to us, the good and the bad, and use this knowledge to move forward again. There will be mistakes made along the way, but the attempt to move forward is more important than this. It is better to do this than to not try and to not take risks. The past means a lot to everyone, if we loose sight of the things that we love about the past, we could loose sight of the part of ourselves that helped us become who we are today.
We must not see ourselves moving forward in an attempt to eventually arrive at our destination and then stop. Going back to Eagleton’s ‘After Theory’, we must not settle. We cannot expect to be presented with the answers that will solve every problem, so we must be prepared to accept that we will constantly have to think in new ways to deal with new issues.
As said earlier, this text shows that we can be torn between two different worlds – one which holds onto the past in a nostalgic way, and one which is moving forward from this first world into something different. In this process of development, we must never stop, and we must never loose sight of where we have come from.
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