The Evolution of Faust Legend in the World Literature
Abstract
Throughout the course of literature, there have been several attempts by many poets and writers to adapt the Faust legend in their work. The development of the Faust legend is perceived from tales and anecdotes of 6th century to Marlow’s drama The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1604, Goethe’s Faust (1770-1833) and ultimately in the Modern literature Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend (1947) every age reflected its own variant of the Faust legend, based upon their own ambition, yearnings and angsts. The Faust legend is not limited in German speaking countries only, but it is expanded to English literature, French literature and across the European continental; many works of American literature and the World literature have been impacted by this mysterious legend.
‘Lust for forbidden knowledge’, ‘pact with the Devil’, ‘Holi Sinner’, ‘an arrogant and reckless scholar’, ‘Soul Seller’, yes all these speculations arise in our mind as soon as we peruse the word ‘Faust’. The Faust Legend has become the piece of inquisitiveness and enthralled many scholars around the world from many ages. The magnetizing word ‘Faust’; what actually it means and from where it came, has been wondering people all the time.
Absolutely, ‘Faust’ is a German word, which means ‘Fist’; it also represents the name of family. Whereas it’s Latin adjective means an auspicious or one who is lucky. There were many stories and tales circulating in Germany and other regions of Europe. Simon Magus is one of the oldest sources that shared few percentages on the development of the Faust legend. A Holi Spirit blessed the powers of apostles to the magician.
However the theme of ‘a pact with the Devil’ was contributed to the Faust legend by The Theophilus of Adana, a tale far from the 6th century deals with Theophilus’ contract with the Devil to become a bishop. Pan Twardowski is another folktale from Polish region where the protagonist made a deal with the Devil for magical powers; at the end, he was ruined by the Devil and left on the moon to live there forever. There were many other stories that didn’t influence the Faust legend directly but contributed in many ways to develop the character and setting of the legend.
In 1587, all the stories, tales and anecdotes were combined together, and the result was published in chapbook by Johan Spies in Frankfurt Historia Von D. Johan Faustus. It was the first printed version of the Faust legend.
Then the legend was bifurcated in two strands; one remained in German speaking countries which inspired further creations and innovation to this ultra-legend. Whereas the second strand went across the region and made its way to England and became the base of Christopher Marlow’s fascinating drama The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1604.
After Marlow’s Dr. Faustus, in Germany Widmann expanded the Chapbook in 1599 and Pfitzer created a new addition in 1674. During 1650 to 1750 English comedians also presented ‘Puppet Play’ on Doctor Faustus. With the motive of saving the Faust legend from damnation, G. E. Lessing wrote the fragments of Doctor Faustus in 1759. Friedrich Muller also contributed to Faust's Life in 1778. Thomas Mann presented one of the finest re-construction of the Faust legend in his novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (1947) which is set in modern Germany at the verge of turmoil. The novel reveals the life events of Adrian Leverkühn which is narrated by his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom. Leverkühn is destined for success due to his extraordinary sense of intellectual creativity; however, he wants to achieve true greatness. He makes a pact with the Devil for creative genius. He is deliberately infected by syphilis, which invokes his artistic madness by madness. Ultimately he renounces love, bargaining his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of artistic creativity to compose music.
And finally, a masterpiece of the World literature, exceptionally influential to the all consecutive adaption of the legend appeared during 1770 to 1808 as Faust, Part One and Faust, Part Two in 1833 by J. W. Goethe. Later adaptations of Faust legend arose all over Europe and America. Every age reflected its own variant of the Faust legend, based upon their own ambition, yearnings and angst.
There are various works of English literature from the 1780s, which are pretty much conspicuously and legitimately connected with the Faust legend. A somewhat remote cousin of Faust’s is the Caliph Vathek in William Beckford’s Gothic novel-cum-Arabian Nights fantasy of that name (1787). Toward the starting we are informed that Vathek had ‘studied so much . . . as to secure a lot of information; however not an adequacy to fulfill himself: for he wished to know it all . . .’ (Beckford, 5). In addition, after his horrible death, the moral is noticed: ‘Such is . . . the rebuke of blind aspiration, that would violate those limits which the Creator hath recommended to human knowledge . . .’ (Beckford, 210). In any case, in the body of the book this topic is not really addressed; the pressure is on extravagance, mischievousness, lewdness and profanation of mysteries. The topic of the quest for knowledge has a start and an end, however no center. A comparative case is that of Charles Maturin’s rambling Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which concerns a man who sells his soul in return for youth, Melmoth’s withering admission contains the words:
‘Mine was the great angelic sin—pride and intellectual glorying! It was the first mortal sin—a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge!’ (Chapter xxxii).
What’s more, once more, this specific characteristic has not had any impact in the novel.
A considerably more celebrated and achieved work, and one as a closer connection with the Faust subject, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (composed 1816, distributed 1818). We know from the author's prelude to the 1831 version that her creative mind was set off by a discourse among Shelley and Byron concerning guideline of life and the likelihood this may be found and life incorporated in the laboratory. In spite of the fact that the work contains no plain reference to Faust, there are clear similarities.
Frankenstein depicts his initial quest for knowledge in wording which review both the first Faust’s desire ‘to explore all the foundations in heaven and earth’ (Shelley. 87) and the craving with respect to Goethe’s Faust to infiltrate the inward insider facts of the universe: ‘It was the privileged insights of paradise and earth that I wanted to learn . . .’ (Chapter ii). The record of the energetic Frankenstein inundated in progress of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus and in any event, attempting to summon spirits fallen angels, with its inspiration of a dead zone of prohibited and mysterious knowledge, May even be a conscious token of the Faust legend. Afterward, at the college, Professor Waldmann’s words about the intensity of science to open privileged insights and release concealed powers incite in Frankenstein the craving to ‘unfurl to the world the most profound mysteries of creation’ (Chapter iii)— a showing of scholarly egotism extremely like Faust’s (particularly as found in Marlowe). Frankenstein before long starts to focus his enquiries on the secrets encompassing the beginnings of life, considering himself a divine being, a Promethean-maker of another race of men who will owe their reality and their appreciation to him: ‘new species would favor me as its maker and source . . .’ (Chapter iv). Again, we are close to Marlowe’s Faustus, with his fantasies about getting divine through enchantment and of picking up control over life and demise.
The most talked about works among those which can somehow or another be viewed as same-like pieces to Faust seem to be, obviously, Byron’s sensational poem Manfred (1817) and his fragmentary dramatization The Deformed Transformed (1822). In his day, indeed, Byron was blamed for plagiarizing both Marlowe and Goethe, despite the fact that we presently understand that the first of these charges was false and the greater part of us would feel that the second was unreasonable.
Byron’s concept of Goethe’s Faust at the hour of composing Manfred was received from hearing Monk Lewis decipher a few scenes verbally in 1816. This perusing more likely than excluded Goethe’s first study scene, since Manfred’s Act I monologue, set in a ‘Gothic exhibition’, gives the closest thing to a veritable connection with Goethe. Nevertheless, the point made is an alternate one. Manfred Certainly disappointed with knowledge, as was Faust, and is tormented by the polarity of information and life, as Faust had been: ‘The Tree of Knowledge isn’t that of Life’ (Coleridge, E. C. 85)
Likewise, Manfred evokes spirits speaking to different natural powers. Nevertheless, what he needs isn’t more noteworthy extravagance and force of understanding yet neglect, self-blankness, escape from his feeling of blame. A portion of his words, truth be told, reminded Hamlet instead of Faust: ‘. . . yet we live, /Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.’ (Coleridge, EC108)
While his blame is a significant purpose behind his despondency, there are different causes inside his character. He is a great instance of Romantic Zerrissenheit, a man whose internal life is inconsistent with the world:
ABBOT: And why not live and act with other men?
MANFRED: Because my nature was averse from life . . . (Coleridge, E. C. 125)
Manfred is more an expectation of Lenau’s Faust than a duplicate of Goethe’s. Goethe’s own remark in a letter to Knebel of 13 October 1817 is an only one; Manfred was positively helped into being by Faust, yet Byron’s work is something particularly his own, getting its impossible to miss properties from the writer’s inward nature:
This strange witty poet took my fist in himself and sucked the strangest food out of it for his hypochondria. He used all motifs in his own way so that none is the same, and that is precisely why I cannot admire his spirit enough. . . .
Because of The Deformed Transformed Byron himself discloses to us that the work was established mostly on Goethe’s Faust, halfway on a novel called The Three Brothers. This tale, composed by one Joshua Pickersgill and dating from 1803, recounts an adolescent, Arnand, of incredible blessings and excellence, who is harmed and forever twisted. In his sharpness, he first thinks about suicide, at that point enters on an agreement with the Devil, swearing his spirit as an end-result of renewed physical magnificence.
Byron acquires this plot, calling his protagonist Arnold. Like Pickersgill’s Arnand, Arnold mulls over suicide however is kept down by the presence of an outsider in dark. There is an agreement and the Stranger causes the figures of different popular men noted for their attractiveness to march before Arnold (there was a comparable scene in Pickersgill). Arnold chooses to accept the type of Achilles and the change happens, the Stranger expecting the disposition of Arnold himself and the name Caesar.
The scene changes to the Siege and Sack of Rome (1527), where Arnold absolves himself with extraordinary valor, however in no time a while later the part severs. The fundamental, for sure the main, obligation to Goethe is in the figure of the Stranger, the Devil. Goethe, conversing with Eckermann on 8 November 1826, says:
His devil emerged from my Mephistopheles, but it is not an imitation, everything is entirely original and new, and everything is short, efficient and witty.
Nevertheless, Goethe is excessively kind, as he usually is to Byron. The Stranger is just a pale shadow contrasted with Mephisto. He is taunting and harsh, a skeptical denier, yet he does not have Mephisto’s savage intensity of discourse. Here is Byron’s Devil on humankind:
And these are men, forsooth . . . This is the consequence of giving matter . . . The power of thought. It is a stubborn substance, And thinks chaotically, as it acts, . . . Ever relapsing into its first elements.
Well I must play with these poor puppets: ‘tis The Spirit’s pastime in his idler hours (Coleridge, E. C. vol.v. 509)
The entry appears to be bloodless close to Mephisto’s criticism in the Prologue in Heaven (lines 280—92). Therefore, Manfred demonstrates some likeness to Faust as a character despite the fact that the plot of the work shares nothing practically speaking with that of Faust, while The Deformed Transformed has a Devil and an agreement, yet no Faust.
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