The mood may shift from high seriousness to levity, from profound sentiment to callousness, from optimism to despair, oscillations that seem almost instantaneous, like an alternating current. They soon reveal themselves as important reflections of the theme or content of the drama; for are not the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in human existence—and the absence of absolutes—important aspects of Faust’s frustration, and are they not near the source of what Goethe explicitly named a “tragedy”?

Even before the “Prologue in Heaven” ends, the vision of celestial magnificence is suddenly cut short by the ironic colloquialisms of Lucifer-Mephisto:

               From time to time it’s good to see the Old Man;

                I must be careful not to break with him.

               How decent of so great a personage

                to be so human with the devil.

(350–3)

And a bit later, when we witness Faust bemoaning his painfully futile encounter with the Earth Spirit, there is a knock on the door. It is Wagner, his disciple and assistant, who had listened to his master’s outcries as they echoed through the corridors. As a devotee of traditional scholarship and loyal defender of the sanctity of venerable texts, he says upon entering the study:

               Excuse me, but I heard your declamation;

               was it a passage from Greek tragedy?

               I should like to profit from such elocution,

(522–4)

Wagner radically misjudges his master. By his ludicrously inappropriate reference to the travails of Faust’s soul, he reveals himself—through an ironic shaft directed at the audience—as a prototypal philistine.

Often there is no temporal sequence of contrary positions, but a simultaneous presence of mutually exclusive polarities. Consider the following: when Faust tells Mephisto that he is bent on a life of all-encompassing experience beyond the reach of ordinary men, Mephisto answers mockingly:

               Make your alliance with a poet,

               and let that gentleman think lofty thoughts,

               and let him heap the noblest qualities

               upon your worthy head:

(1789–92)

The lines are deceptively simple. Actually they contain multi-leveled ironies. The poet with whom Faust is to ally himself here stands for a person who conjures up empty illusions of the kind Faust continuously creates for himself. The reader realizes—perhaps in a double-take response—that the images of Faust’s fantasy are indeed the stuff of poetry and are constitutive elements of the Faust poem itself. It is a case of involuted paradoxes: Mephisto, the no-nonsense materialist contemptuous of poetic imagination, scoffs at Faust and recommends that he make himself over into a dramatic character—only in this manner could he hope to find fulfillment. It is a provocation directed not only at Faust but at the reader-spectator as well. And it is the Faust drama—itself a poetic battleground between poetry and anti-poetry—that continuously generates provisional answers to Mephisto’s challenge. After all, acting counter to Mephisto’s corrosive stance is our realization that Faust need not bother himself to make an “alliance with a poet.” Surely, in his case such a step would be redundant. For the public, on the other hand, Mephisto’s suggestion may be only partially ironic, because it is aware of the “as if” condition of the stage. Mephisto’s radical critique opens unsuspected avenues into our minds and nerve centers. We are compelled to measure the distance between fantasy and quotidian reality and “get inside” the process of poetic transformation. We might indeed take upon ourselves a share of Faust’s own frustration:

               Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast,

               each seeks to rule without the other.

(1112–13)

as we come upon the one explicit and unironic expression of Faustian ambivalence.

While a diversity of approaches to the Faust poem have, over the approximately century and a half of its existence, produced indispensable insights, critics with an all too single-minded perspective tended to obscure values that are accessible only to a different optic. The poem’s philosophical problems—for example, those having to do with the nature of truth and of cosmic governance—have been explored perhaps more intensively than any other aspect. Psychological analyses of the characters have been carried out, as well as researches dealing exclusively with the rich field of Faustian imagery. We are fortunate in having comparative studies dealing with the literary and spiritual influences that went into the composition of both parts of the poem. A considerable body of evidence also has been marshaled in support of the proposition that a far-reaching analogy exists between Goethe’s vision of life-forms in the earth’s flora—such as dicotyledonous plants—and the principles governing the structure of Faust.

When all is said and done, however, the simple question, What is Faust about? is still capable of eliciting fresh responses, if only for the reason that by looking for meaning we are implicitly searching for some underlying coherence or for a metaphor that might convincingly convey a sense of structure. To find textual confirmation for one’s own intuited image of unity in Faust is the exhilarating reward of devoted study. Certainly, even after only a fleeting acquaintance, one must ask the question: What is it that keeps Faust dissatisfied, even though he has mastered all the academic disciplines of his day? Why could he not be proud of his accomplishments and have faith in human progress like his redoubtable assistant Wagner? At least part of the answer may be found in the most concentrated symbol of Faust’s imperious need: the all-encompassing Moment, the Augenblick, that is the subject of the wager with Mephisto and the thematic undercurrent of the entire drama. To experience, in a single instant, the succession of events that mark our existence in time is equivalent to eliminating time altogether; it means an existence in a continuous present tense. As temporal creatures, nervously feeding a shortening future into a lengthening past, we attribute to the gods a timeless mode of being and an existence in total simultaneity. Therefore Faust’s craving for the “highest moment” really amounts to the ultimate hubris; he is reaching for more than mere superiority among men—more than Macbeth, who would be king, and more than Oedipus, the incomparable solver of riddles who was the king and came to know it too late. Faust reaches for divinity and is “hell-bent” to burst out of his imprisonment in temporality.

Since Goethe’s death, in 1832, the Faust story, through its various transmutations, has become one of the central myths of the Western world. The theme fascinated composers like Wagner, Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod, Boito, and Mahler, all of whom created important operatic or orchestral scores inspired by Goethe’s drama. American writers have recently paid renewed attention to the earlier chapbook accounts. Stephen Vincent Benét’s play The Devil and Daniel Webster and the musical comedy Damn Yankees, transposed from a novel by Douglass Wallop, were successful Broadway productions and continue to be popular onstage and on television.