Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present

300 Pages·2018·4.215 MB·English

by  Harry Redner

Ulysses and Faust
Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the
Present examines some of the most important authors of Western litera-
ture: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Goethe,
Joyce, Eliot, Mann, Bulgakov and Pasternak, who based their works on
one or other of the two key myths of the West, Ulysses and Faust. This
volume provides a synoptic view of Western literature, as a foundation
text for literary studies at all levels and as a way of encouraging people
to once more engage with the major authors and traditions of our liter-
ary heritage. Ulysses and Faust considers the artistic revolution known
as Modernism at the start of the twentieth century and the subsequent
events in Europe, such as the World Wars and the totalitarian regimes,
which led to a major break in Western civilisation reflected in its lit-
erature. Consequently, these detailed critical studies illuminate their
authors’ Weltanschauung, their view of life as it was lived in their time.
Harry Redner was Reader at Monash University and has been a visit-
ing professor at Yale University, University of California-Berkeley and
Harvard University. He was the recipient of the Senior Fulbright Fellow-
ship at the Universities of Yale, Boulder and Berkeley; later visiting pro-
fessor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at
Haifa University. He held the endowed ALCATEL Chair at Darmstadt
University (1998) and the Franz Rosenzweig Chair at Kassel University
(2009). He has also published fourteen books across many fields, includ-
ing Sociology, History, Philosophy and Science.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
41 Modernism and Latin America
Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange
Patricia Novillo-Corvalan
42 New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject
Finite, Singular, Exposed
Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván
and María J. López
43 Reading London in Wartime
Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature
William Cederwell
44 The Nature of Modernism
Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas,
T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew
Elizabeth Black
45 Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott
History Repeating Itself with a Difference
Sean Seegar
46 Writing for the Masses
Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition
Christine Colon
47 Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature
Musical Modernism
Edited by Katherine O’Callaghan
48 Ulysses and Faust
Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present
Harry Redner
Ulysses and Faust
Tradition and Modernism from
Homer till the Present
Harry Redner
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Contents
PART I
Tradition 1
1 The Hellenic and Hebraic Traditions 3
Section I – The Historical Background of Ulysses and Faust 3
Section II – Ulysses and Faust after Modernism 12
2 Ulysses in Homer, Virgil and Dante 23
Section I – Odysseus and Women 23
Section II – Aeneas and Rome 32
Section III – Ulysses and Death 41
3 Ulysses in Shakespeare and Cervantes 50
Section I – The Turmoils and Troubles of the
Late Renaissance 50
Section II – Troilus and Cressida as a Problem Play 56
Section III – Don Quixote as the First Novel 64
Section IV – The Novel in Print 73
4 Faust in Marlowe and Goethe 82
Section I – Faustus and Faust 82
Section II – Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 87
Section III – Faust and Paternity 94
Section IV – From Gretchen to the Eternal Feminine 104
PART II
Modernism 117
5 Modernism and Modernist Traditionalism 119
Section I – The Rise of Modernism in the
Twentieth Century 119
Section II – The Impact of Modernism on Five
Major Authors 130
vi Contents
6 Ulysses: Ulysses as Jew 144
Section I – Joyce and Modernism 144
Section II – Ulysses I and Autofiction 151
Section III – Symbolism and Naturalism 161
Section IV – Ulysses II on the Way Out of the Novel 167
7 The Waste Land: The Missing Ulysses 179
Section I – A Buried Corpse 179
Section II – A Wife’s Adultery 187
Section III – Horror and Religious Vision 194
8 Doctor Faustus: The German Faust 205
Section I – Mann and Modernism 205
Section II – A Serial Composition 217
Section III – Breakthrough and Breakdown 228
Section IV – Mann and Adorno 233
9 The Master and Margarita and Doctor
Zhivago: The Russian Faust 243
Section I – Approach to and Departure from
Modernism 243
Section II – Christ in History 253
Section III – The Work within the Work 260
Bibliography 275
Index 281
Part I
Tradition

1 The Hellenic and Hebraic
Traditions
Section I – The Historical Background of
Ulysses and Faust
As Europe entered its time of troubles in the twentieth century and as
Western civilisation began to disintegrate, its major writers turned re-
peatedly to the two leading myths of Western literature, those featuring
the figures of Ulysses and Faust. Each of the writers who took up either
of these themes sought to convey the current historical tragedy through
a recapitulation of the one or the other mythical hero in our literary
tradition, for both figures go back deep into the past, to the very origins
of Western literature. Ulysses derives from Homer, and though Faust
arose at a much later date, his precursors are already there in the New
Testament: his inseparable companion, Mephistopheles, as Satan, is to
be found even earlier in the Old Testament.
Western literature has its twin roots in Homer and the Bible, as his-
torians and critics have long recognised. Already some time ago, Erich
Auerbach began his book on literary history by comparing a passage
from the Odyssey with one from Genesis dealing with Abraham.1 He
focused his attention on the two antithetical styles, the Greek and He-
braic, which would later in history enter into the varied confrontations
and combinations with each other that constitute European literature.
And a century before Auerbach, the even more renowned poet and critic
Matthew Arnold saw the fundamental temperament of the West as
compounded of the Hellenic and the Hebraic. The former, he held, was
disinterested and flexible, “full of sweetness and light”; the latter was
practical, disciplined and dogmatic.2 He believed that English culture
had gone too far in the direction of the Bible and the Protestant ethic and
needed to counterbalance this with some aesthetic lightness drawn from
Hellenic enlightenment, just as the Germans during the age of Goethe
had sought to recapture with their renewed interest in Greece.
Frequently this fundamental opposition is seen as one of Aesthetics
and Ethics. This is, of course, only a simplifying generalisation for not
all art and aesthetics comes from the Greeks and not all ethics and law
from the Hebrews or even Christians. There is a distinct form of Greek