Arrears blogging: June 1: Let's go Devils!

You know that film cliche where the angel appears on one shoulder and the devil on the other one? I think we may have a source for it right here in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Faust is on the verge of repenting and this random old man comes out to urge him to do so. I puzzled over who this old man might be, and, smiling at the idea that I might read the rest of the play, decided that maybe he's supposed to be Faustus's conscience:

Old Man. Ah, Doctor Faustus, that I might prevail
To guide thy steps unto the way of life,
By which sweet path thou may’st attain the goal
That shall conduct thee to celestial rest!

One of the things I might point out is the smooth way that the old man refers to him as "Doctor," even though I believe that Faustus is not an M.D.. Non-M.D. doctors love that, I have found.

Now, you'd think Mephistopheles would make a counter-argument: Women! Fame! Grapes out of season! (Which just happened in the previous scene.) But you don't get to be a devil by not knowing how to deal with the weak -- instead, he goes for intimidation, and it works:

Meph. Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul
For disobedience to my sovereign lord;
Revolt, or I’ll in piecemeal tear thy flesh.

This works and Faustus asks Mephistopheles to torture the old man -- another classic sign of the weak.

Finally, after some time, the jig is up for Dr. Faustus, and this leads into a long monologue that makes one think that the Elizabethan stage must have been noted for its shouting:

My God! my God! look not so fierce on me! Enter DEVILS.
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books!—Ah Mephistophilis!

Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS.

I would love to know how the devils and Faustus exeunted. Did they have smoke bombs in the 16th century?

Arrears blogging: March 22 -- High-Strung Dudes Of Literature

I see by Wikipedia that Faustwas played recently by Bruno Ganz, who I remember seeing as the soulful, soulful angel in "Wings of Desire" just before I fell asleep in it. Based on this translation, anyway, I think someone more skittish is appropriate. Hugh Laurie, maybe, but then I think he'd be good in anything -- and not serious "House" Hugh Laurie, but Bertie Wooster-goes-to-graduate-school Hugh Laurie. David Cross, maybe?

Because Faust is at the end of his extravagantly educated rope here:
And dost thou ask why heaves thy heart,
With tighten’d pressure in thy breast?
Why the dull ache will not depart,
By which thy life-pulse is oppress’d?
Instead of nature’s living sphere,
Created for mankind of old,
Brute skeletons surround thee here,
And dead men’s bones in smoke and mould.

Followed by a complete mood switch:

Up! Forth into the distant land!

As I may have mentioned, I read Faust when I took German in college, and it always bugged me that he was redeemed just for striving. I was bad at German, so I know that may not be the actual ending, but my poor opinion of Faust is confirmed in this excerpt because he consults Nostradamus. At times he also sounds like a guy on a street corner telling you why Communism has never really been put into practice:

The few who somewhat of these things have known,
Who their full hearts unguardedly reveal’d,
Nor thoughts, nor feelings, from the mob conceal’d,
Have died on crosses, or in flames been thrown.

It's the system, man! And then he quickly moves on to contemplating suicide. How interesting of Goethe to being with a scene telling us that all intellectuals are crazy.

August 28: Against traditional values

Bicycling? You harlot!

I'm reading these books that were musty when my great-grandfather bought them, so yeah, I guess you could say I have conservative tendencies. Maybe I should describe myself with the Canadian phrase "Red Tory," which is meditated on here, but which I idiosyncratically define as a posture (and really, it's not much more than that) that advocates massive spending on public schools so that we can teach Latin in them. Or as an Episcopalian friend of mine once said, "Radical in theology, reactionary in liturgy."

But I could never be a real conservative as it's defined today, and it's because I'm so horrified at the way Goethe treats poor Gretchen in today's Faust excerpt. Mephistopheles as allowed Faust to knock up Gretchen (who confusingly is also called "Margaret"; I feel that if a character is called Jim Bob he should stay Jim Bob and not alternatively be known as James Robert) -- and her brother tells her whose problem it is:

The time already I discern,
When thee all honest folk will spurn,
And shun thy hated form to meet,
As when a corpse infects the street.
Thy heart will sink in blank despair,
When they shall look thee in the face!

(Yes, yes -- the real crime is the translation. Tell me something I don't know.) And why is her brother so appalled at Gretchen's single-mom-ness? Because he loses face with the guys at the bar:

When seated ’mong the jovial crowd,
Where merry comrades boasting loud
Each named with pride his favourite lass,
And in her honour drain’d his glass;
Upon my elbows I would lean,
With easy quiet view the scene,
...Then smiling I my beard would stroke,
The while, with brimming glass, I spoke;
“Each to his taste!—but to my mind,
Where in the country will you find,
A maid, as my dear Gretchen fair,
Who with my sister can compare?”
Cling! Clang! so rang the jovial sound!
Shouts of assent went circling round;
Pride of her sex is she!—cried some;
Then were the noisy boasters dumb.

And now!—I could tear out my hair,
Or dash my brains out in despair!—
Me every scurvy knave may twit,
With stinging jest and taunting sneer!

In other words, Gretchen has no worth in herself, just in the honor she brings the family. When I hear the phrase "traditional values," or, we need to bring back shame, Gretchen's fate -- she goes crazy from her disgrace -- is the kind of thing I think of. Licentiousness brings about its evils too, but in this case I don't know whether a conservative return to the ancien regime is the cure. If you're driving on the left shoulder of the highway, driving on the right shoulder is not the solution.

June 4: I'll pass

I guess one of the things I'm hoping for out of this project is to make up for my haphazard education with this equally haphazard spin through 1908's judgement of what I ought to know. To find, there in a junk store on the side of the road, with its red-white-and-blue "ANTIQUES" flag flying, a dusty, but still perfectly serviceable, intellectual knickknack -- a Neglected Classic. Why aren't we paying attention to this?, I might think, and then I would have a curio that would stick with me forever. And in fact I'm grateful to have picked up Cellini in this way (although that's hardly intellectual).

Today's reading, however, is the kind of thing that goes right back on the shelf.

It's more Act I Scene i Theater, this time from Goethe's Egmont, and, if I may say so, I don't believe Goethe manages his exposition well. Imagine sitting through the following dialogue -- which I assure you is about a third of the entire speech -- when it's being spoken, not by a great actor, but by an OK one:

They did not help us much, ’tis true; they could only approach with their smallest vessels, and that not near enough;—besides, their shot fell sometimes among our troops. It did some good, however! It broke the French lines, and raised our courage. Away it went. Helter-skelter! topsy-turvy! all struck dead, or forced into the water; the fellows were drowned the moment they tasted the water, while we Hollanders dashed in after them.

In my mind's eye I see acting that features a great deal of over-gesticulation and unnecessary pauses. By the time scene ii rolls around, everyone in the audience has long beards -- even the women, for their boredom has made them desperate.

Add on the fact that these bluff, hearty peasants (as if there are any other kind) are expositing about the Dutch religious settlement of the 17th century, and what we have here is the type of play that, if your local rep company were doing it, it would be the one whose tickets you'd have to buy in order to get tickets to the play you really wanted. In order to see Patrick Stewart do "A Christmas Carol," you have to buy tickets to "Egmont" too.

Apr 12: Talk to the Chair

It is difficult to get psyched for today's passage, in which Faust begins his campaign to woo Gretchen, in uninteresting 19th-century verse. What I imagine I'll remember from it is this:

(He throws himself on the leather arm-chair beside the bed)
Receive me thou, who hast in thine embrace,
Welcom’d in joy and grief the ages flown!
How oft the children of a by-gone race
Have cluster’d round this patriarchal throne!

That's right, Faust starts talking to the armchair. He snaps out of it, though, so I don't guess the passage is long enough for an "Addresses to Furniture" anthology, but still.

The plot, however, is, as they say, corking. Faust has set his eye on Gretchen and Mephistophles (which I typed without looking at the passage...now I'm going to go see how I did on the spelling) Mephistopheles, I mean, places some jewels in her dresser, because you know how it is with the ladies and the bling; and, indeed, it does its magic in a passage that needs a little more stage direction in it:

Here by a ribbon hangs a little key!
I have a mind to open it and see!
Heavens! only look! what have we here!
In all my days ne’er saw I such a sight!
Jewels! which any noble dame might wear,
For some high pageant richly dight!

With poetry like that you see why they had to invent Modernism. Also, you want that golden light effect, like when they opened the briefcase in "Pulp Fiction" (Tarantino doing Faust would be great).

So far so good, but immediately -- one of the things that's kind of shocking is how short Goethe keeps his scenes -- Mephistopheles is P.O'd:

I’d yield me to the devil instantly,
Did it not happen that myself am he!

There's got to be a funnier way to say that. It turns out Gretchen's stupid mom has given the jewels to the Church, because they might be unholy. So get more jewels, Faust says. OK, says Mephistopheles. But as a consequence of this up-and-back seeming incident, Gretchen takes her new jewels over to her neighbor Martha's for safekeeping; and, to get in good with Martha, Mephistopheles manages to come up with evidence that her long-missing husband is dead -- basically, by getting Faust to join him in witnessing to this fact, which results in the four of them, all mixed up. What happens next I don't know (even though I have allegedly read this book), but it's some good plotting.

Feb 29: I sing the monotonous hexameter

And so on Leap Day today's reading is Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea
Which was written in noble hexameters (so beloved of the Greeks and the Romans)
But preserving the meter in English makes the poem sound kind of retarded
For the ponderous length of the line makes characters talk just like windbags:

“Tell us,” the pastor returned, “what legerdemain he made use of.”
“That will I gladly relate, for all may draw from it a lesson;”

(That's my favorite part of the reading, involving not Hermann, nor Dorothea
Instead it's just business, delaying the entrance of our nominal heroes
And to us imparting a lesson -- that the cure for impatience's the coffin:

Then that house of boards they will busily bring over hither,
Which must at last receive alike the impatient and patient,
And which is destined soon with close-pressing roof to be covered.’

The poem otherwise is a love story -- she's French and he's a big German
She's running away from the Terror, and he hires her as his servant.
What our would-be maid's little suspecting is that she's to be wedded instead --
Although in terms of the workload there seems to be little distinction.
What a treat it must be for a French girl, to become Mrs. Hermann the hausfrau!