NP but WG: More prolegomena

[Erik T. Burns]

well, Goethe's Faust is quoted as the epigram:

Mephistopheles (leiser): Was gibt es denn?
Faust (leiser): Es wird ein Mensch gemacht.

and on page 465 there's an interesting discussion of Faust among the
young NY crowd.

of course the Wyatt-Valentine-Brown relationship is a kind of
Faust-Mephistopheles-Devil relationship, though I would say the
converstion on 465 is key, in that the soul is not one's to give:
--No. It was not his to dispose of. We belong to our souls, not our
souls to us.

This is Stanley speaking, whose work is key to the end of the book. It
also seems to me an expression of the Gaddisian ideal of the artist,
of the effort to do something worth doing. You can't trade your soul
to become an artist; it's not that base an exchange.


On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I read that WG started The Recognitions in a response (of some kind) to
> Faust. Goethe's particularly. But..........
>
> Here's the history of the whole legend
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust
>
>
>
>