Marshall Berman on Faust 'The Developer'
"Suddenly Faust springs up enraged: Why should men let things
go on being the way they have always been? Isn't it about time for
mankind to assert itself against nature's tyrannical arrogance, to
confront natural forces in the name of 'the free spirit that protects
all rights'?
"It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea,
it merely surges endlessly back and forth-- 'and nothing is achieved!'
'This drives me near to desperate distress!
Such elemental power unharnessed, purposeless!
There dares my spirit soar past all it knew;
Here I would fight, this I would subdue!'
"...the Faustian enterprise will be less quixotic and more fruitful,
because it will draw on nature's own energy and organize that
energy into the fuel for new collective human purposes and projects
of which archaic kings could hardly have dreamt"
"'And it is possible!...Fast in my mind, plan upon plan unfolds'.
Suddenly the landscape around him metamorphoses into a site.
He outlines great reclamation projects to harness the sea for
human purposes: man-made harbors and canals that can move
ships full of goods and men; dams for large-scale irrigation; green
fields and forests, pastures and gardens, a vast and intensive
agriculture; waterpower to attract and support emerging industries;
thriving settlements, new towns and cities to come -- and all this to
be created out of a barren wasteland where humans have never
dared to live"
'Daily they would vainly storm,
Pick and shovel, stroke for stroke;
Where the flames would nightly swarm
Was a dam when we awoke.
Human sacrifices bled,
Tortured screams would pierce the night,
And where blazes seaward spread
A canal would greet the light'
"He has replaced a barren, sterile economy with a dynamic new
one that will 'open up space for many millions/ To live, not
securely, but free for action'"
"In order to understand the developer's tragedy, we must judge his
vision of the world not only by what it sees -- by the immense new
horizons it opens up for mankind -- but also by what it does not
see: what human realities it refuses to look at, what potentialities it
cannot bear to face"
"Faust becomes obsessed with this old couple and their little piece
of land: 'That aged couple should have yielded, / I want their lindens
in my grip, / Since these few trees that are denied me / Undo my
worldwide ownership...Hence is our soul upon the rack, / To feel,
amid plenty, what we lack'.
"Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons
Mephisto and his 'mighty men' and orders them to get the old
people out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the
details of how it is done".
"But now he has staked his whole identity on the will to change,
and on his power to fulfill that will, his bond with his past petrifies
him. 'That bell, those lindens' sweet perfume
Enfolds me like a church or tomb'
For the developer, to stop moving, to rest in the shadows, to let the
old people enfold him, is death"
(pp 60-69)
