Should have read classics discussion

This is the discussion thread for the first part of Faust. This parts goes from March 11-25.

I'm rather confused about the manager, poet and the jester. What is the purpose of the scene? I tried to grasp what was going on, but it did not seem to make sense in the context of the next scene.

I think this is Goethe breaking the fourth wall in his own idiosyncratic way to tell the audience (or readers) a bit about what he's attempting to do in this play. He's arguing with himself about the purpose of art and letting the audience know where he stands and why he felt compelled to write it. This scene functions similarly to the dumbshow before a Shakespeare play, letting us get a little taste of the themes we'll encounter as we go along.

Sorry, don't know why the app is posting everything twice

Thank you that makes sense now that you said that.
I would have to agree with Longhare in the other thread that the next scene with the angels, Meph and the Lord remind me of the Book of Job.

Nina wrote: "Sorry, don't know why the app is posting everything twice"

No problem.

I'm finding it almost as interesting to read through articles about the background history of Goethe's many years of work on Faust as to read the work itself. I ended up buying the Oxford World's Classics translation by David Luke, who included a lot of background details in his introduction, along with describing some of the challenges the work poses for both critical analysis and translation.

Some of this was vaguely familiar to me from my college course-work on Goethe, but one of my favorite bits was this quote from Goethe himself, "In a work of this kind all that matters is that the individual component parts ( die einzelnen Massen ) should be meaningful and clear, although it will always be incommensurable as a whole— while nevertheless for that very reason remaining, like an unsolved problem, a constant stimulus to repeated study." He also told one of his friends, "Faust is really a quite incommensurable quantity, and all attempts to make it rationally intelligible are vain." If the poet himself couldn't quite make sense of it, I don't think we should feel bad about having difficulties with it. ;-)

Goethe started writing Faust in his twenties and kept setting it aside and coming back to it throughout the rest of life all the way up until his death at the age of 82. As such, the pieces don't quite match, reflecting ideas he had in all the different phases of his life. He didn't want to fully abandon the conception he had of it in his youth, even though his conception of it grew into something quite different as he grew older. Most of the major scenes in Part 1 are based on stuff he wrote in his youth and most of Part Two was written when he was much older.

For those using a different translation without much in the way of an introduction, you may want to check out this website, which includes some background details and critical analysis (though be careful, as there are some spoilers): http://wolfenmann.com/gillies/faust-i...

There's also lots of good stuff at the Cliff's Notes website. This is one where having a study guide of some sort is particularly helpful.

Thank you very much Nina! That link is great. I only had one English class in college and it was a writing class. This is quite a challenge to read this one! I noticed in my book that it said that he took 60 years to write this play. I can only imagine how a story would change over the course of a life. I can read a book that I hated in high school and get a completely different meaning from it now.

I'm plugging along with this still. It is just hard for me to get the gist of what is going on still.