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Overview
The first three chapters examine the Cartesian character of a Faust engaged in superhuman but vain attempts to reconcile the intellect and the libido. A fourth chapter discusses the differences between Goethe's and Valéry's protagonists and as well between Goethe and his Faust. Throughout the book the author explores Valéry's linguistic experimentation, which, through charades, paranomasia, onomastics, and etymological puns, brings into full play the mystifying and mythologizing aspects of language. To resolve the stylistic problems associated with this fragmentary work the author adapts the tone of his exegesis to the diverse stylistic levels of Mon Faust. His analysis illuminates the Cartesian potential inherent in Valéry's protagonist.
Originally published in 1976.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691617053 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1683 |
| Pages: | 276 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Figure of Faust in Valéry and Goethe
An Exegesis of Mon Faust
By Kurt Weinberg
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1976 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06304-1
CHAPTER 1
LUST, LA DEMOISELLE DE CRISTAL
1. The Liturgical Comedy of the Intellect
Valéry's ideas on the drama parallel his thoughts on the novel. They matured in his early twenties, between 1891 and 1894, half a century before Mon Faust, under the impact of works as diverse as Huysmans' A Rebours, Mallarmé's Hérodiade and Igitur fragments, and Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. They reject the complementary concepts of the stage as a world and the world as a stage, and they condemn narrative fiction on the order of "La marquise sortit à cinq heures." For Valéry, the only stage for drama and novel is the abstract theatre of the human mind, where reason and will enact their unceasingly comic feud with the Puissances trompeuses, the deceptions of desires, passions, memory, and imagination. The mind, both stage and audience, observes itself in the exercise of its functions. "J'ai relu le Discours de la Méthode tantôt, c'est bien le roman moderne comme il pourrait être fait," Valéry wrote to Gide on August 25, 1894. "A remarquer que la philosophic postérieure a rejeté la part autobiographique. Cependant, c'est le point à reprendre et il faudra done écrire la vie d'une théorie comme on a trop écrit celle d'une passion (couchage)" (Corr. AGPV, 213).
These sentences mark the prelude to Monsieur Teste, Valéry's cerebral non-novel about a true monster of intellect, shown in the process of watching, speeding up, and reversing his own thought processes. Monsieur Teste, Valéry's transparent and lucid embodiment of Descartes' cogito, ergo sum, was invented in 1894. The last episodes were published in 1946, one year after Valéry's death. The elaboration of Monsieur Teste, like that of Goethe's Faust, spanned a lifetime. So did Valéry's ideas on Descartes' Discours de la méthode as an epic work on the life of the intellect, worthy of a place on a par with Dante's Divina Commedia and Balzac's La Comédie humaine. These remarks were made on July 31, 1937, before a Sorbonne audience, in Valéry's address to the Ninth International Congress of Philosophy. "Dans cette vaste Comédie de l'Esprit à laquelle je souhaitais un Balzac, si ce n'est un Dante, Descartes tiendrait une place du premier rang" (P.I, 799). And again, in 1941, the Discours is compared to Hamlet: "... le Discours de la méthode, est un monologue dans lequel les passions, les notions, les expériences de la vie, les ambitions, les réserves pratiques du héros sont de la même voix indistinctement exprimées ..." (P.I, 818).
Maurice Bémol, in his excellent study on "Le jeune Valéry et Goethe," traces back to 1887 Valéry's first reading of Goethe's Faust in Nerval's rather awkward translation. His painstaking analysis leads to the conclusion that Goethe's Faust "semble done avoir été pour Valéry, au cours de son Odyssée spirituelle, un repère assez constant, en dépit de ses intermittences" (ibid., 12). It is hard to determine the exact date when Valéry decided to write his own version of Faust. Mon Faust, written down in 1940, but planned since 1932 at least, completes Monsieur Teste in more than one sense: it adds a body to the monstrous intellect bent upon the narcissistic pursuit of its own elusive image; and it releases Monsieur Teste from his self-imposed isolation, from his habitual posture that shows him with his head turned towards the wall, in contemptu mundi.
Valéry's Faust is an aged but ageless, somewhat mellowed, wiser but also more foolish Monsieur Teste. He can be all that because a body has been added to the mere head that was Monsieur Teste: a body with all its frailties that, in the comedy Lust, la demoiselle de cristal, draws the mind in and out of love, causing it to succumb — however little — to the seductions of the senses, and to engage — temporarily at least — in the silliness of gamesmanship and one-upmanship. But, although endowed with human weaknesses, Valéry's Faust still remains predominantly a formidable mind, a cogito at work and watching itself at work, fending off the irrational forces of deception that are deeply rooted in his nature rather than in external reality. Unlike Monsieur Teste, Valéry's Faust has not divested himself of his humanity, although his methodical doubt à la Descartes, in its power of negation, even exceeds the very spirit of negation, Mephistopheles himself. In the end, what distinguishes Faust from Monsieur Teste is the social context where he is placed, a milieu that gives him a center of gravity and a stage where he acts out the comedy of consciousness in the company of fellow humans and surrounded by incarnations of essentially non-carnal temptations of the flesh that is willing while the mind, at times, is very weak. If it is Faust's task to embody the comedy of the cogito, distracted again and again by the passions, his antagonist, "the Other," Mephistopheles, represents the very opposite. Faust is the incarnation of thought, diverted by sleep and dream; Mephistopheles defines himself as the disincarnation of non-thought and non-sleep: "Je suis l'etre sans chair, qui ne dort, ni ne pense" (P.II, 354). It is one among numerous classical alexandrines that are hidden in Valéry's prose, a practice that, in Lust (if not in Les Fées), seems to be related to a principle to which Valéry gave expression in 1939: "L'ecriture des vers en lignes a nui à la qualité. Il faudrait que la lecture seule obligeât à dire en vers" (Cah. XXII, 238). Most Mephistophelian temptations are expressed in alexandrines, concealed in the text. They are perhaps meant to evoke the essence of Racinian tragedy, where passion, more often than not, tends to overcome reason. By defining himself as fleshless being without sleep or thought, Mephistopheles hints at himself as an allegory of human passions and fantasies which never sleep and which interfere with the human substance of being, with thought.
There exists a link, although a most tenuous one, between the conception of Monsieur Teste, in 1894, and Goethe's Faust. In June of that same year, while in London, Valéry had seen Sir Henry Irving's production of Irving and Wills' more spectacular than faithful arrangements of scenes from Goethe's Faust I. This Victorian monstrosity had left Valéry with mixed feelings that he confided to his brother Jules: "The Machinery, the details, the deviltries are extraordinary — but: no drama, no art" (P.I, 22). We shall presently examine exactly what the twenty-three-year-old disciple of Mallarmé understood by "drama" and "art." For the moment, we note that the dubious spectacular at the Lyceum marks Valéry's first, and probably only, encounter with Goethe's Faust on stage.
Almost half a century elapsed before the publication of his own two Faust fragments in 1940. They are titled: Lust, La Demoiselle de Cristal, comédie and Le Solitaire, ou les malédictions d'univers, féerie dramatique. An indefinite number of melodramas, comedies, tragedies, and pantomimes were planned to form Valéry's Third Faust, the preface informs us. This generous plan demonstrates that, despite his merely nodding acquaintance with Goethe's Faust, which he could read only in translation, Valéry must have had a keen intuition of Goethe's intention to use dramatic forms in Faust II, ranging from tragedy, comedy, opera, operetta, farce, and liturgical processions to mummery. There is no trace of Marlowe in Mon Faust, and although Gounod and Berlioz are indirectly mentioned in Lust, the preface makes it clear that Goethe alone gave the impetus to Valéry's Faust. What in particular attracts Valéry to the Goethean model is Goethe's typifying art. Rather than being cast as developing characters, Goethe's Faust and Mephistopheles express "extremes of humanity and the inhuman" (P.II, 276). They are, in Valéry's words, "liberated from any particular plot" (ibid.). Faust and Mephistopheles, as Valéry sees it, perform tasks rather than roles (ibid.), and it is precisely in the transcendence of their roles and in the subordination of plot to archetypal universality that Goethe's Faust reaches beyond the modern stage back to the liturgical genre of Allegory, of the Mystery and the Fool's play.
This brings us to Valéry's definition of "drama" and "art." Surprisingly, we find it fully fledged in another letter to Gide, dating back as far as December 5, 1891. As the then only twenty-year-old Valéry put it, affecting the esthetic mysticism and the esoteric dogmatism of the Symbolist vocabulary: "... tout Drame est impossible, après la Messe. Qui dit Drame, pense exotérisme, spectacle. Seule apparition de l'Art devant tous — tous. Et le drame liturgique est la Perfection — dans la Perfection" (Corr. AG-PV, 142 f.). These are words of an agnostic who has gone through the esoteric school of Des Esseintes. The essence of Mass is defined in the same letter of December 5, 1891, as "la Chair tenaillée puis abolie par la seule Puissance de la Pensée." This formula poetically summarizes the intense drama of Descartes' autobiographical account concerning his preparation for the cogito: that is, to strip away, through the sole power of thought, the flesh, the world and its seductions. What is amazing above all is the permanence of Valéry's thought. Decades later, comparing conventional theatre and liturgy, he comes out again in favor of the latter: "La Cérémonie plus noble que le theatre, pas la grossièreté du simulacre ..." (Cah. VI, 508). In the liturgy, "tout n'est pas — ou plutôt rien au fond n'est pour le public. Il faut savoir et suivre. (...) La messe peut être sans ou avec public" (ibid.). One might say that the Mon Faust fragments are, and are not, for an audience. Their exoteric spectacle presents minimal action, while their esoteric ironies are concerned with the misfortunes of the cogito — thought caught in the web of the body's passions and the mind's superstitions. The Cartesian cogito and its frustrating dialogue with the will of the body, so different from its own, are the elements that weave together into a unified fabric the strands of Valéry's theory on liturgical drama with those of his speculations on the direction in which the modern novel should move.
2. Art as an Exorcism of Nature
Valéry's thoughts on the drama of the intellect are tested in his lyrical poetry as well as in much of his prose, in the "melodramas" Amphion and Sémiramis, the libretto Cantate du Narcisse, and, last but not least, in Mon Faust. The liturgical comedy Lust presents, in a new décor and under new masks, the same allegory of the cogito that underlies most of his work. It is the secular drama of consciousness observing itself in the exercise of its very function. It dramatizes man's estrangement from himself, the circumstances and consequences of his fall from innocence into the irreversible state of reflectiveness. This drama turns into tragedy, if the hero stands with his back against a wall and has no choice left — in other words, when recognition comes too late for escape. It turns into comedy, when tragedy is averted by way of accommodation, when the liber arbiter has the resource of retreating into anticlimactic possibilities. Since it is the cogito that determines the sum, and since its domain is the exploration of countless possibilities, thought can always accommodate being, and — potentially, at least — avert tragedy. It can do so by shocking the mind with a touch of the unexpected, such as adding to the sublime an element of the ridiculous. The human mind is never totally consistent. Fantasies are always intruding upon thought. "Mélange c'est l'esprit" (P.I, 286) is Valéry's formula for the natural incongruity of consciousness, which mixes the sublime with the trivial, the pertinent with the impertinent. With the aid of some bad taste, one might well imagine Oedipus, at the moment of gouging out his eyes, wondering whether he has ordered the proper selection of wines for tonight's supper. If not in tragedy, in common life, such admixtures of trivia and the awesome are certainly more frequent than the total concentration of the tragic hero who is bent on his own destruction.
It is on such discrepancies that Valéry draws for his comic effects. In that, his comic vision is not so remote from Lawrence Sterne's, whose Tristram Shandy owes his pathetic non-nose to a distraction suffered by his parents during the up-to-then quite enjoyable act of engendering their son. A flaw in concentration can indeed give a comic twist to the potentially ponderous gravity of the cogito, ergo sum. It can lend an element of farce or operatic levity to the essentially tragic scene of Adam and Eve consuming the fatal apple. This holds true, in particular, if the author is, like Valéry, an agnostic, and if, like Valéry, he practices cogitation as an Art for Art's sake, in the full knowledge that the only Being that the cogito produces is the verbalization of Myth.
Valéry's thought, then, can play on the cogito, binding it up inextricably with the idea of original sin, and with the events that immediately precede the Fall of Man. They are not events in a literal sense. Stories that never occurred in history, their scene is the human imagination. They never happened in time — even if one were to take them literally: they would have taken place outside time, in the extra-temporal setting of eternity. As myth, they recur in the ever-repeated cycles of symbolic re-enactments of the Fall of Man — in his inability to resist the temptations of intellectual pride and of its allegorical struggle with the distractions of demonic but very real appetites. Man fallen from grace shares Lucifer's revolt against creatureliness by erecting his own verbal creation, his Art, against the creation of the divine Word. Through reflectiveness, man may have lost his natural innocence. What he has gained is the exploration of le possible, of the unlimited possibilities that lie outside the fixed confines imposed upon everything in nature, including his own physical existence. Consciousness can invent its own universe, transcend nature and transcend even itself, by focusing upon the mechanics of its own contrivances. Thought and imagination can reverse and alter reality; they can project themselves instantaneously into the past and into the future, give lasting essence to a floating vision. Art is the exorcism by which man imposes the order of his mind upon the randomness of events in nature, in society, in history, in his own life.
At this point, it will prove useful to go back once more to the young Valéry's letter to Gide, dated December 5, 1891: "... En somme, je puis dire que tout Art est la mise en forme de cette fameuse parole: Et eritis sicut dei (sic). C'est l'opium difficile et rien de plus! C'est peut-être du Démon mais Tout ce qui s'égare hors de cette voie n'est qu'informe et chaotique" (Corr. AG-PV, 143). "And you will be like God," the serpent's words from Gen. 3:5 find their complement in the irreverent twist that, in 1916, Valéry gives to John 1:1 "Rien ne serait sans la parole" (Cah. VI, 456) — la parole being simply language: man's poetic word which, like the Divine Logos, can draw its creation ex nihilo, and bring order into chaos. "Au commencement était la Fable" (P.I, 394). The past exists only in the mind. It is nothing else but a conglomerate of fables, for "ce qui fut est esprit, et n'a de propriétés qui ne soient de l'esprit. (...) a la limite, il n'y a plus que du toi. C'est tout du toi: fable pure" (P.I, 394). Since all history turns into myth, it is little more than a hoax. Hence, "In the beginning was the Word" might as well read: "Au commencement était la Blague" (P.II, 694; Cah. VI, 456). Things invariably start out as fairy tales: Genesis, descriptions of the universe, babies born in cabbages (P.II, 694). In short, myth is all that which cannot exist outside of language (Cah. XXIII, 159). These are the words of Valéry in 1940; they express in different terms what Valéry had said since the beginning: e.g., "Dieu est quelques mots" (Letter to Gide, dated August 10, 1891; Corr. AG-PV, 120). Human imagination (one may conclude, although Valéry does not clearly say so) invents those fictions of life which harden into facts of life. Homo fictor and homo factor are interchangeable with the idea of homo faber: man the maker fabricates his fictional universe of facts, that is, of reality transmuted through verbal interpretation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Figure of Faust in Valéry and Goethe by Kurt Weinberg. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface. IN DEFENSE OF A PARTI PRIS, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xv
- One. LUST, LA DEMOISELLE DE CRISTAL, pg. 1
- Two. LE SOLITAIRE, OU LES MALÉDICTIONS D'UNIVERS. ACT ONE, pg. 39
- Three. LES FÉES, pg. 94
- Four. POETIC SEMI-REALITIES: SELFPERCEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION IN GOETHE'S AND VALÉRY’S FAUST, pg. 152
- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 247
- Index, pg. 251