On Marshall Berman's 'All that is solid melts into air'

Oh yes, I have been looking forward to this as Goethe’s Faust is one of my favourite classic literature and theatre pieces. In fact it was the first opera and one of my first stage plays I have seen. I really liked it although I must admit despite being a big fan of classic opera I do prefer Faust as a play. Later on my teacher in school somehow managed to make the discussion on Goethe’s Faust so exceptionally boring that at that time I completely lost the interest in it until I watched a production of it on TV which was very well made. But this has been quite a while ago now (god time flies….) and I was looking forward to the Berman text to freshen up my knowledge about this great piece. And I have to say, after reading all the previous text over the past couple of weeks, I did draw some parallels to some of those texts and it changed my understanding of the story of Faust. I never really saw it as a piece of anti-capitalism but havening read these texts really seem to have changed my comprehension of it in a way and I now kind of feel like I got more out of Goethe’s piece than before, going deeper into the story and I really liked that. The story of Faust of course is very well known, especially Goethe’s version which took him nearly all his life to write, which is mentioned in Berman’s text as well. He thinks, and I totally agree with him, the reason why this particular version of Faust is so successful is that its characters

‘experience with great personal intensity, many of the world-historical dramas and traumas that Goethe and his contemporaries went through; the whole movement of the work enacts the larger movement of Western society’.

In fact it does mirror different phases of Goethe’s life during the Industrial Revolution which happened exactly during the time when he was writing Faust. Berman’s quite personal analysis of the text is very close to the original and his interpretation of it with regard to our modern world. He divides his text into three different stages that he calls metamorphosis: The Dreamer, The Lover and The Developer.

Goethe’s Faust can be separated into two tragedies, the first one being the tragedy of a desperate man on a quest for knowledge, the scholar tragedy; the second one, the Gretchen tragedy, is the tragedy of the seduced woman who is driven into despair by conceiving an illegitimate child. Goethe connects these two tragedies. Heinrich Faust desperately searches for knowledge, he wants to know everything and hence is God’s favourite human being. Mephistopheles, a devil, argues with God about whether or not he is able to lure Faust away from the path of knowledge into unrighteous pursuit. God accepts the challenge and here through allows Mephisto to seduce Faust.  This shows that, even though Mephisto is the evil one, he is part of the divine order, one of God’s instruments. To me he plays the most important part of the story. The extraordinary about Goethe’s Mephisto is what he says of himself, his negative but seductive being.

                                               ‘I am the spirit that negates all!’

Berman speaks about this too and about the conflict that Mephisto is at the same time

         ‘part of the power that would / Do nothing but evil, and yet creates good’.

Berman says that it is ironic that

‘just as God’s creative will and action are cosmically destructive, so the demonic lust for destruction turns out to be creative’

and that only if ‘Faust works with and through these destructive powers will he be able to create anything in the world: in fact, it is only by working with the devil, and willing

       "nothing but evil," that he can end up on God's side and "create the good"

love how he then rephrases the aphorism The road to hell is paved with good intentions into the perfectly suitable opposite of

                             ‘The road to heaven is paved with bad intensions’.

Faust wants to experience real, vivid life because so far he has not gained any experience outside of the academic world. He goes on a few trips and meets Margaret, Gretchen, and is instantly attracted by her. Mephisto helps him to seduce her and when Faust finally persuades her to sleep with him, he experienced exactly what he has whished for. But this moment of happiness and satisfaction goes hand in hand with a crime. This shows that there is always a price for happiness.

Now having said that through reading the other texts, my understanding of Faust has changed and I have to admit, I am a little ashamed. I think the links to capitalism are quite obvious and I can only assume that I have not seen them in the past because I have been reading and watching this piece too naively. Berman’s text was very well written and I really liked that, although being a Marxist himself, he didn’t force it down his readers’ throats, unlike Lefebvre for example. Speaking of which: I did have to think back very briefly about the terms ‘micro’ and ‘macro’  and how Lefebvre said a split between them should have let to more diversity but instead did quite the opposite by causing alikeness, now this could be complete bollocks but I felt reminded of that when reading Berman’s text about Faust. Faust in the beginning sort of lives in his own little world, his on ‘microcosm’ if you want and then later goes into the world, meets people, makes love…well and kills his lover’s brother but yeah back to the big world, he goes from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ in a way, experiencing a variety of things only after bringing the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ together. When he separated himself from the outside world, living only in his academic little world, everything to him was the same and he criticises the vanity of the various subjects of study by saying the very famous Phrase

 

‘I've studied now Philosophy And Jurisprudence, Medicine,-- And even, alas! Theology,-- From end to end, with labor keen; And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before’.

 

 This actually brings me to the second parallel between Goethe’s Faust and one of the previous texts: Alan Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.  Faust moans about that, even though he is a scholar, he does not get any recognition for it.  

                                                                                                                                                                           ‘Don't imagine your teaching will ever raise
The minds of men or change their ways.
And as for worldly wealth, you have none -
What honour or glory have you won?
A dog could stand this life no more.‘

‘Yes, what men choose to understand!                                                                                                         Who dares to name the child’s real name, though?                                                                                        The few who knew what might be learned                                                                                              Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,                                                                                        And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,                                                                                              Mankind has always crucified and burned.’

This is exactly what ‘Howl’ is about.

 

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked (…) who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull’.

 

Wow I just realized that this blog has gotten pretty long but I am kind of hyped about the fact that I have read the story so many times and only now it feels like I have really read it, if you know what I mean. There are so many analogies to other texts popping into my mind right now. So just one last comparison: Terry Eagleton’s After Theory! He talks about how bad it is that subjects in university have become trivial and how the great thinkers are long gone and the

‘generation which followed after these path-breaking figures did what generations which follow after usually do. They developed the original ideas, added to them, criticized them and applied them‘.

This is pretty much the exact same meaning of Faust’s dialogue with Wagner, his attendant, where Faust says:

‘Parchment then, is that your holy well,

From which drink always slakes your thirst?
You’ll never truly be refreshed until
It pours itself from your own soul, first.’

 

Wagner then answers with:

‘Pardon me, but it’s a great delight                                                         

When, moved by the spirit of the ages, we have sight
Of how a wiser man has thought, and how
Widely at last we’ve spread his word about.’

 

Ok, this is it now. I am still baffled as to how many parallels there actually are to the previous texts and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed reading Berman’s text for this reason!