Václav Havel’s Faust Drama Temptation (1985): Or, The Challenge of Influence

Here's the link for the PDF of Bahr's article for my presentation.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/goethe_yearbook/v007/7.bahr.html


Here are my notes:

Václav Havel’s Faust Drama Temptation (1985): Or, The Challenge of Influence

By Ehrhard Bahr

Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America (GSNA) 1994; 7: 194-206.

Bahr began the article by discussing that while the Faust story has been retold countless times, no one has exclusive rights to it (not even Goethe!). Yet, it’s important to note that the Czechs believe the Faust legend remains part of their national heritage since one of the earliest translations was a Czech translation in 1611. The 1985 version was written by Vaclav Havel, a master of absurdist theatre (Their work expressed the belief that, in a godless universe, human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; inadequacy of language to form human connections; nonsense), and a prominent dissident of the “Velvet Revolution” (non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the communist government). He was also a principle organizer of the Czechoslovak human rights organization Charter 77, until he was jailed repeatedly for a total of 5 years. Interestingly, Havel was presented with versions of Faust by Goethe and Mann while in prison, instead of the traditional socialist realism readings, but I’ll talk about the reason for that later. He wrote Temptation after returning home from prison, which turned out to be one of the darkest periods of his life. Being so, he interpreted the Faust story differently, as he attempted to confront the intellectual and ethical problems of his time. His central theme was: “responsibility and the affirmation of individual identity in a time of dehumanizing pressures exerted by the totalitarian state and/or modern society,” which ran parallel to his real life beliefs. Havel expresses that repression and regulation of ideas are the real moral enemies of humanity, and that a “devil” who encourages independent pondering of the deep questions is working for good, not evil. This idea connects to his firm support for dissidents as agents that rebel against a repressive power, which characterized the majority of his political career before he became President of the Czech and Slovak Republic in 1990.

Bahr went into depth on how Havel’s version of Faust was influenced by Goethe and Mann’s versions.

Examples: protagonist’s first name is Henry (Henreich like Goethe’s) instead of the traditional John (Johann); existence of a Margarete figure, named Marketa, who suffers nearly the same fate as her Goethean counterpart; Mann’s motif of a “cutting coldness” radiating from the devil character; appearance and behavior of devil; costume party with Goethean Walpurgis Night theme (everyone dressed accordingly)

Havel goes farther than Mann when his protagonist outdoes the devil in coldness. If you look at scene 9 (p. 61), when Foustka gives in to temptation and thinks he’s manipulated Fistula, the devilish figure’s teeth begin to chatter and he rubs his arms, exclaiming “Man, you must be 100 below zero!”

Bahr then describes the instance where Havel was imprisoned by the secret police of Czechoslovakia, and had a trap set for him. They provided him with Goethe’s and Mann’s versions of Faust in order to distort his statements and ruin his credibility with other dissidents. After reading them, he began to have “strange dreams and ideas” and felt that he was being physically tempted by the devil. He later described this incidence as his greatest moral failure.

Read quote from reading pg. 196

From this experience, Bahr describes Havel’s idea, originally from Martin Heidegger’s existential, of “two souls in one breast.” It became a central idea in Temptation, that it’s immoral to try to shift the blame onto someone else. In other words, “The individual cannot blame other persons or circumstances or shift responsibility onto that “other soul” in his breast. Such an attempt would lead, according to Havel, to the disintegration of one’s own identity.”

Bahr drew his thesis out of this idea. Using the term tessera, which means “completion and antithesis,” he argues that Havel “rewrote the central theme of Goethe’s Faust, namely, the problem of two souls in one breast, because he thought that Goethe had failed to resolve the problem with enough ethical rigor to meet the demands of our times.” Havel had a strong desire to challenge the ethics of the interpretations from the older texts.

In order to prove his argument, he went through the scenes and characters, drawing comparisons and showing how Havel expanded the Faustian myths of Goethe and Mann to accomodate the current state of affairs in Central Europe in the 1980s.

Examples: Dr. Foustka seduces Marketa intellectually, as opposed to Goethe’s Faust’s sexual seduction. In the 20^th century, intellectual seduction is far more powerful; Marketa sent to psych ward which was the customary procedure for handling dissidents in the former Soviet Union…there, Marketa attempts suicide while singing the same song that Goethe borrowed from Ophelia’s Hamlet scene…Foustka lies to save his own skin, not coming to her rescue in the end.

It’s important to note that in Havel’s version, Foustka was not saved by a divine grace in the end. Instead, he was shown ridicule, and his dissidence was trivialized, as shown when everyone began clapping after his impassioned speech on the last page. He was not allowed to get away with his corrupt behaviors of manipulation. As he was not shown as a positive figure, Havel used Foustka’s negative aspect to address his own personal moral failure, and to allow the audience to realize within themselves what is good. Since Havel lived througha tumultuous political era, this interpretation of the Faust story was necessary as a model for dealing with the totalitarian past of Central Europe. He essentially provided an ethics for dissidents in the post-totalitarian states of Eastern Europe.