Faust, or The Modern Charybdis: A Study of the Faust Myth in Thomas Mann and Malcolm Lowry.

Abstract

Both 'Under the Volcano' and 'Doctor Faustus' seem to be articulated on a paradox which brings to extreme consequences the declared ambition of Goethe’s Faust to grasp within himself the whole of human experience. In Goethe’s work, such an ambition results in a drama whose main movement is one of expansion, appropriately culminating with the dream of an industrial utopia. On the other hand, in Mann and Lowry a Mephistophelian bargain of the same expansive ilk is laid in the hands of characters who withdraw and isolate themselves or, as in the case of Geoffrey Firmin, are in a perpetual fugue state. On the precipice of XX century totalitarian Europe, Faust retreats back to the solitude of his study, consigned to obsessively projecting onto the surrounding walls the virtual image of his boundlessness. Geoffrey and Adrian become personified whirlpools: instead of grasping the “heights and depths of humanity”, they consume it and substitute it with a hypertrophic inwardness. Collapsing under a world they have lost access to, these new Faustian trajectories will no longer be traced by expansion, but by a violent implosion. This inversion also finds a formal correspondence. To "digression as an end in itself" which, as Moretti shows, accompanies the form of the modern epic from Goethe onwards, Mann and Lowry both answer with works where true digression cannot exist; no matter the depth of field, every limb is centripetal, there is no fugue from the main “theme”. If these trajectories too could be defined as attempts at a modern epic, what we have in front of us are epics who in their effort to become the “summa” of their world, are in the end built from the same seeds with which that world destroys itself.