The Cry for Myth (29 page)

Faust demands to see and have for his lover Helen of Troy, the symbol of beauty and ultimate fulfillment in love.
*
He thinks it will be easy for Mephistopheles to conjure up Helen.

FAUST:
I know it can be done with but a mutter,
Two winks and you can have her on the spot.”
†

But Mephistopheles has a very different view. Faust must go through the Mothers, a strange group which has raised an infinite number of questions since Goethe wrote the play. The Mothers seem to be the only ones who have the power to threaten and to frighten Mephistopheles.

MEPHISTOPHELES:
I loathe to touch on more exalted riddle—

Goddesses sit enthroned in reverend loneliness,

Space is as naught about them, time is less;

The very mention of them is distress.

They are—the Mothers.

FAUST:
(starting) Mothers!

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Are you awed?

FAUST:
The Mothers! Why it strikes a singular chord.

MEPHISTOPHELES:
And so it ought. Goddesses undivined

By mortals, named with shrinking of our kind.

Go delve the downmost for their habitat;

Blame but yourself that it has come to that.

FAUST:
Where is the road?

MEPHISTOPHELES: NO
road! Into the unacceded,

The inaccessible; toward the never-pleaded,

The never-pleadable. How is your mood?
*

We pause, for the above lines are for all the world like a session in psychotherapy, especially with that aside, “How is your mood?” The mother, from whom one is born, who gives us form to start with, who carries the survival of the race in her womb—no topic could be more important. Every patient, in learning to love, must confront the psychological remains of his or her mother’s imprinting. Mephistopheles presses the point home by making Faust take responsibility for his own anxiety and his own distress—“Blame but yourself that it has come to that.”
†

Is Goethe writing in this myth to relieve his own guilt? And what does this passage have to do with assuaging the guilt of his age? The Mothers certainly seem hostile in this description. I am informed that Goethe never went to see his own mother from the time he was twenty-five until her death, even though he went through Frankfurt, where she lived, often enough. We
also know that Goethe was enthralled by women and they by him. Going into a relationship like a storm, he would use the woman up and then leave her. He puzzled his whole life long as to why he could write significant poetry only when in the presence of some femininity. He married late in life and then to his mistress, the last person who would seem suitable; he called her his “bed rabbit.” Sixteen years his junior, she was a small vivacious girl, not really pretty or particularly intelligent, but full of spontaneity.

And now to Helen.

May we emphasize again that Helen has a mythic quality in each of these three approaches (Marlowe, Goethe, and Mann). Goethe has Helen herself say when she is questioned about her relationship with Achilles,

This tells us that Helen was a myth all the way back in history, and the Greeks, in the Trojan War, were fighting for a great myth, the myth of ultimate form
. Helen stands for the feminine form, not in the sexual sense (although she may be given that role often enough) but rather in the sense of the Hellenic
aréte
, with all the ideal quality that her name stands for in Greek culture.
†
Hence the phrase “form of forms” does indeed fit. It refers to feminine beauty raised to an ethical level, a goal for one’s development of the virtue,
aréte
, so prized by the ancient
Greeks. The path to Helen, as Mephistopheles has already told us, leads only through the Mothers, i.e., it can be followed only by those who have confronted their own mother problem.

When he mentions the Mothers, Mephistopheles asks, “Are you awed?” The awe that Faust feels indicates that some deep conflict has been touched.

Mephistopheles then gives Faust a key with the counsel, “Follow it down—it leads you to the Mothers.” At this Faust, like any sensitive client in therapy, shudders,

FAUST:
The Mothers! Still it strikes a shock of fear.

What is the word that I am loath to hear?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Are you in blinkers, rear at a new word?

FAUST:
Yet not in torpor would I comfort find;

Awe is the finest portion of mankind:

However scarce the world may make this sense—

In awe one feels profoundly the immense.

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Well then, sink down! Or I might call it,

soar! It’s all one and the same.
*

Indeed it is all the same whether one reaches the Mothers by sinking or soaring, so important are they. Now that Faust has the key, he can “make them keep their distance,” and he
is
suddenly enraptured by the challenge: “Yes, clutching it I feel my strength redoubled, My stride braced for the goal, for heart untroubled.”
†
Mephistopheles informs him,

Then he directs Faust, “Sink down by stamping, stamping you will rise.”
*
And Faust stamps and sinks out of sight.

The next scene is in a ballroom filled with persons exhibiting jealousy and repartee. Mephistopheles suddenly cries out, “O, Mothers! Mothers! Won’t you let Faust go?”
†
Did he sense some abnormal tie to mothers on the part of Faust? And as Faust continues to seek Helen through the Mothers, Mephistopheles cries, “Mother! Mothers! it is yours to give!” So something of importance is occurring beyond the achievement of Helen, something that makes the “Mothers” of ultimate importance. The form of forms participates in the universe of reproduction of the species. There is in the smile of the Giaconda on Leonardo’s canvas, though his insight is projected from the artist onto the painting. The one in whose womb life is created, the one who carries the implantation of new life, also has these powers such as intuition that alternate between knowledge and magic.

Here we must fall back upon the fundamental truth that Goethe, great poet that he was, possessed a degree of prescience, a capacity to speak from the unconscious depths of his society. The poets as well as the other artists of any culture tell us of myths that go quite beyond anything they consciously know. In this sense they are the predicters of the future. Wizards of femininity, they (the Mothers) must be rescued to help form and reform the new culture. The Mothers have, by nature of reproducing the race, whether they are conscious of it and take responsibility for it or not. They have the key to transformation as they had for the forming of the fetus in the womb at pregnancy.

But this Industrial Age is one of patriarchal power. Such power is gained by overcoming its competitors; it works by thrust, by attack, by mechanical activity. The seamy side of the Industrial Age is sweatshops, life-killing assembly lines, child
and women labor, smoke-filled skies over Liverpool and Detroit, the whole arsenal of competitive, adversarial systems. The feminine characteristics ideally are receptivity rather than aggression, tenderness and creating rather than destroying.

Is Goethe doing penance for his worship of progress and for his epiphany of industry? Ostensibly he believed in this patriarchal gospel and he had a long drawn-out battle within his soul as to whether it was good or bad. Faust’s later building of the great dike to “give life to millions,” where he is on the creative side, is one aspect of the acting out of these beliefs.

Power, attack, the thrusting mode—all these are called, somewhat as a cliche to be sure, masculine and patriarchal. Goethe was in a paradox about this chief myth of modern times, which includes our time in the twentieth century as well as his. The paradox comes out of his poetic soul in dealing with the Mothers as the source of love, tenderness, caring, instead of toughness, cruelty, slaughter. Could the “magic” be the hope that the transformation could occur without great loss of life and without cruelty? The episode of the saving of Gretchen at the very end of the drama would seem to rectify Faust’s original cruelty; and the ultimate saving of Faust by having his immortal remains carried to heaven by flocks of angels—all this gives a positive answer to the question. Goethe may have meant it as an affirmative cheer for “progress”; this is the overall impact of this great poem.
We take the drama here as a demonstration that sole patriarchal power is bound to come to grief
.
*

CULTURAL CREATIVITY

Faust does meet Helen and has a child by her. He seems then to change his character, becoming more sensitive to human need. Does this mean that his change of character has something
to do with his having loved the “form of forms”?

He rebukes Mephistopheles,

Faust then becomes a man of wealth, inhabits a castle, rises to the position of Generalissimo and Emperor. He grows in power and in far-reaching plans for improving life for human beings. Faust’s lands stretch out before him; he can now say, “from this palace the world is wholly in my reach.”
†
He is completely absorbed in this cultural creativity:

Still this planet’s sail

For noble deeds grant scope abounding,

I sense accomplishments astounding,

Feel strength in me for daring toil.
**

Here in the drama we are introduced to an old couple living in a little cottage on this land. Goethe calls them Baucis and Philemon, the very names of the old couple in ancient Greek mythology who gave hospitality to the gods, unknowing of their identity, and were rewarded handsomely for their kindness.

Baucis takes tender care of her elderly husband Philemon, cautioning a wayfarer who visits them to lower his voice so that Philemon may finish his nap. The old couple are told about the plans of Faust to clear all the land, but they have also been promised that they will be allowed to stay. But Faust is ambivalent.

He sends Mephistopheles to deliver his message that they will be moved to a new house. But Mephistopheles comes back to report that a fight had ensued with a stranger,

About their house:

Faust bursts out in anger at Mephistopheles,

But now Faust finds himself wholly involved in his great cultural creativity,

This is surely the best aspect of the Industrial Revolution, an illustration of laudable progress! The building of dikes and making farms for human beings is the noble use of tools. It is interesting that Kenneth Clark, in his pictures of art through the ages, shows in the nineteenth-century photographs not of paintings but of trains, tunnels, bridges, and other constructions of engineering in the art of the nineteenth century, the work of men and not women. In contrast to Vasari’s book,
Lives of the Painters
written in the Italian Renaissance, Samuel Smiles wrote
Lives of the Engineers
in nineteenth-century England, when the triumph of patriarchal power was almost complete.

But not quite. Faust still cannot accept Care, a curious character introduced to test Faust.
†
Leaving him sadly, Care remarks:

Faust now arrives at the fateful words which bring him close to breaking his original pledge to Mephistopheles,

Mephistopheles does not hear that word “might.” But the statement is subjectively a
loss to the devil
in any case. As Freud would say, Faust
considers
this satisfaction, and that is in effect capitulating to Mephistopheles. Negations have no meaning in dreams or other phases of the unconscious; one calls the item or person to mind, and that is enough. Faust here at least considers the serenity and the happiness. So the great wager is lost!