A.N. Wilson has never been afraid of big subjects. His previous books have tackled the Victorians, Charles Dickens, Dante, Jesus and Hitler, to name just a few. So it’s hardly a surprise that he’s now decided to have a crack at Goethe’s Faust.
How do all the intellectual fireworks fit together? What, in short, does it all mean?
As literary whales go, they don’t get much bigger. In fact, apart from the Bible and the Divine Comedy, there aren’t many works which have had such a decisive impact on western literature. It has so deeply marked the popular imagination that most of us probably know the story, even if we haven’t read it.
It is, nevertheless, something of a puzzle. As Faust’s devilish pact unfolds, the drama touches on just about every major philosophical problem of Goethe’s day – all while bristling with wild, almost psychedelic, action. In the first few minutes alone we encounter God making a bet with Mephistopheles; the floating, disembodied head of the ‘World Spirit’; and a heated discussion about the limits of knowledge. And that’s to say nothing about the oodles of sex, death and bacchanalian revelry which follow. It really has got everything. But precisely for that reason it seems to elude interpretation. How do all these intellectual fireworks fit together? What, in short, does it all mean?
To his credit, Wilson doesn’t pretend to have the answer – or at least not a definitive one. Although he lavishes praise on ‘traditional’ textual approaches, he is sceptical of any attempt to impose unity on to such a complex, confusing pair of plays.
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