/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21647297]

Part I
>God intervenes to save Margaret's soul despite her committing infanticide and matricide
>Part II
>God intervenes to save Faust's soul after he'd killed several people, ruined lives, and been an all-around asshole, all because he didn't want Mephisto to kill the old couple and because God made sure there was a loophole in his wager with the devil, meaning Mephisto was fucked from the start
Who writes this shit?

[Anonymous No.21647319]

>>21647297
Goethe wrote it

[Anonymous No.21647323]

I really had my hopes up for this one since I´ve seen it among many top 100 lit charts and lists. It was also my impression that it was considered by many as one of the great works of western lit.

After reading Faust (just finished it) I can only say I am disappointed. The thing I found most interesting was the takes on metaphysics and the like. Also the small romantic influences (particularly the descriptions of northern nature). The social commentary (old aristocratic vs modern bourgeoisie society) but that never really got explored further. I also expected Faust to reach the heights of human possible experience but it was all about that damn Margaret. The story didn´t even start really untill 1/4 of the way.

[Anonymous No.21647331]

>be Faust
>be old ass scholar who doesn't like life on earth
>meet satan
>teleport to hell
>satan gives you a potion to restore youth
>teleport back to earth
>see a 14 year old female human girl
>turn into an obsessive coomer
>cannot stop cooming for 3 scenes
>groom the girl with gold and jewelry
>impregnate a 14 year old
>run away for 9 months when she's pregnant so she hopelessly kills the child
>she gets the death sentence and dies
>faust goes to a big party

Am I missing something? This story is fucking awful and all the characters are evil or dumbasses. Fuck everything about this shit.

[Anonymous No.21647332]

Goethe wrote Faust on a dispensationalist paradigm, Part II will only reveal its true meaning when the noospheric ummah reaches a certain level of development in fiqh (Schein/Sein), at which the meaning (Wesen) of Part I appears paradoxical to Verstand, causing a negation of premises of Faustian civilization (promethean conquest of space) and Vernunft is called in to reconcile the paradoxes through the negation of their negation. Until the initial negation happens trying to interpret Part II will be like trying to look at an Escher painting or a four dimensional object from different angles in its three dimensional manifestation, it won't make sense until it begins to make sense as the only way to make sense of the even less making sense paradoxes engendered by Verstand in Part I. Subsequently Faust Part III (Die Zauberflöte) will reveal itself as the negation of Faust Part II and Faust Part IV (Metal Gear Solid series) will reveal itself as the negation of the negation again.

[Anonymous No.21647340]

>>21647323
Me too, I've started part 2 and I assume it focuses more on the do everything attitude attributed to the story

[Anonymous No.21647344]

>>21647297
Wait there's Godly intervention in this shit? Not planning to read it anymore.

[Anonymous No.21647360]

>>21647323
>>21647331
>>21647340
Read part ii

[Anonymous No.21647369]

>>21647323
He was writing it for his entire life.

[Anonymous No.21647449]

>>21647297
It's fundamentally a Christian work. Expecting anything less than absurd illogical morality and comical pettiness from the creator of the universe is pointless.

[Anonymous No.21647458]

>>21647449
Goethe was a pagan panentheist

[Anonymous No.21647475]

>>21647297
Wagner's estimation of Faust did not deter him from from asserting - at a crucial moment in the genesis of Tristan und Isolde - that Goethe's ultimate concern with the totality of Faust's striving obviated the even more significant potential of the original love tragedy. The letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 3 April 1858 attempts to clarify a heated argument the previous evening about the 'versäumte Gelegenheit' ('missed opportunity') of Faust. Instead of remaining 'bei der ersten, so schönen Gelegenheit, der Liebe Gretchens' ('at the first, so beautiful opportunity, the love of Gretchen'), Goethe extricated Faust from this love,

>damit er nun die eigentliche große Welt, die antike Kunstwelt, die praktisch-industrielle Welt, mit möglichst Behagen vor seiner recht objektiven Betrachtung abspielen lassen könne. So heißt dieser Faust für mich eigentlich nur die versaümte Gelegenheit; und diese Gelegenheit war keine geringere als die einzige des Heiles und der Erlösung. Das fühlt auch der graue Sünder schließlich, und sucht das Versaümte durch ein Schlußtableau nachzuholen, - so außerhalbliegend, nach dem Tode, wo's ihn nicht mehr geniert. (so that he can now let the actual great world, the antique art world, the practical industrial world, be played out with as much comfort as possible before his really objective observation. So for me this Faust is actually just the missed opportunity; and that opportunity was none other than the only one of salvation and redemption. Even the gray sinner finally feels this, and tries to make up for what he has missed with a final tableau - lying so outside, after death, where he is no longer embarrassed.)

Inherent in this criticism is a fundamental antithesis between the objective 'große Welt' ('great world') and the subjective 'Seelentiefe der Liebe' ('soul depth of love'): by objectifying Faust's striving, Goethe neglected - according to Wagner - the true realm of salvation, the subjective consciousness, since in Faust's episodic progress through the world, 'das Subject nie dazu kommt, das Object, die Welt in sich aufzunehmen' ('the subject never gets to absorb the object, the world').

[Anonymous No.21647480]

>>21647475
However, Wagner's opinion of Faust improved in later years:

>The poet implies to us that an outrageous crime is perpetrated on Mignon; yet he transports his hero beyond the same sensation in order to lead him into a sphere liberated from all violence and tragic eccentricity towards a state of cultivated serenity. He has him look at pictures in a gallery. Music is made at Mignon’s death, and Robert Schumann later composed music on this theme. It appears that Schiller was outraged by the last book of ‘Wilhelm Meister’; yet he did not know how to help his great friend out of his strange aberration; particularly since he had to assume that Goethe, who had invented Mignon and brought to life with this creation a wonderful new world, must have in his innermost self fallen into a distraction, from which his friend could not wake him. Only Goethe himself could awake from that distraction, and he awoke: for in extreme old age he completed his Faust. Whatever distracted him, he here combines into an archetype of all beauty: he conjures up Helen herself from the realm of shadows, the perfect ideal of antiquity, and marries her to his Faust. But these shadows are not to be completely banished; they evaporate into a transcendent cloud, and Faust’s gaze follows it with sensuous yet painless sorrow. Only Gretchen could redeem him; the untimely sacrificial victim, she who eternally lived on unnoticed in his innermost soul stretches out her hand to him from the world of the blessed.
- Wagner's Beethoven 1870

[Anonymous No.21647483]

>>21647480
>Before us Germans lies an equally uncomprehended artwork [as Antique Tragedy and Shakespeare], a riddle still unsolved, in Goethe's Faust. It is manifest, as I have already insisted, that we possess in this work the most consequent outcome of the original German Play: if we compare it with the greatest creations of any nation, those of Shakespeare not excepted, it reveals an idiosyncrasy exclusively its own, ranking it for the present as theatrically-speaking impracticable, for simple reason that the German Stage itself has shamefully made away the originality of its own development. Only when this shall have been recovered, when we possess a Theatre, a stage and actors who can set this Germanest of all dramas completely properly before us, will our aesthetic Criticism also be able to rightly judge this work: whereas to-day the coryphaei of that Criticism presume to crack bad jokes and parodies upon its second part. We then shall perceive that no stage-piece in the world has such a scenic force and directness (Anschaulichkeit) to shew, as precisely this maligned (no matter what the pose adopted!) and un-understood second half of the tragedy. And this work, which roots in the plastic spirit of the German Theatre as ne'er another, had to be written by the poet in the air: the only signs by which he could fix its type, or the "example" as I have called it, were rhyming metres taken chiefly from the rugged art of our old folk-poet, Hans Sachs. Yet if we want a witness to the supreme ideality whose germ lay lurking in the homeliest element of the German Folk, awaiting its development by a faithful chosen spirit, we have only to regard this wonder-building raised by Goethe on that so-called knittel-verse [doggerel]: he seems to never quit this basis of the most completely Popular, and yet he soars above it to the highest art of antique Metrics, filling link upon link with fresh inventions of a freedom unknown to the Greeks themselves, from smiles to grief, the wildest bluntness to the tenderest sublimity. And these verses, in a tongue the truest to our German nature, our actors cannot even speak!
- Wagner's Actors and Singers 1872

[Anonymous No.21647497]

Lotta perturbed plotfags itt, you hate to see it

[Anonymous No.21647511]

TIL
>The Eternal Feminine

This concept intrigues me greatly.

[Anonymous No.21648063]

>>21647297
>Who writes this shit?
Goethe

[Anonymous No.21648123]

f-f-ff-filtered