POINTS OF INTEREST
The figures examined in this text are all monomaniacs; they are not particularly interested in other people; they are completely engaged in their own individual enterprise; they are defined by whatever they have somehow decided to do or be. All exhibit a special quality in the “presentness.” All have undefined kind of ideal, but do not succeed in reaching it; they are not, in any obvious sense, achievers, but rather emblematic failures. They are either punished for their attempt to realize their aspirations or merely survive in a kind of eventless posthumous existence. In the Romantic period there arose, largely out of the formal study of ancient myths, an apotheosis of the idea that there is boundless validity in certain narrative fictions. Watt defines myth as a traditional story that is exceptionally widely known throughout the culture, that is credited with a historical or quasi-historical belief, and that embodies or symbolizes some of the most basic values of a society. De Tocqueville: “Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with égoisme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends.”

DEFOE’S Robinson Crusoe
Illustrates the psychology which Defoe hand earlier described in Jure Divino, “self-love’s the ground of all we do.” Crusoe reflects, “it seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude;” and points out that solitude is not “afflicting, while a man has the voice of his soul to speak to God, and to himself.”

Faustbuch (1587)
It was Luther, Melanchthon, and their contemporary Protestant followers that eventually transformed the historical George Faust into the legendary figure of myth, by inventing his pact with the Devil and his terrible end. Luther had reduced rituals to a minimum – there were no longer guardian angels, patron saints, or the Virgin Mary to act as beneficent mediating spirits; relics, talismans, penances, masses for the dead no longer promised daily protection against fear and loss; and the Lutheran Church no longer offered the ceremony of exorcism against evil spirits. To this, Erasmus reproached Luther for having created a void between God and man; the individual was left alone in a world whose demonic terrors had increased, and where recourse even to white magic was stringently forbidden. However, Luther’s work for education and his development of vernacular literature had created a vast extension of the reading public. In the 1580s, books about demonic possession already formed and established genre, and one much favored by Frankfurt printers. It was for this enlarged but relatively uneducated group, which had a particular need for a defense against the tireless activities of the Devil, that Faustbuch was penned.

MARLOWE’S Doctor Faustus (1616)
Basic themes: the excitement of knowledge, earthly beauty, and spiritual damnation. Marlowe sets his Faustus much more firmly in an academic environment. Universities, it has been argued (Mark Curtis, 1962), were rather dangerous places at this time because they prepared too many men for too few places. Lack of viable options, along with other variables, led to the formation of an insoluble group of alienated intellectuals who individually and collectively became troublemakers in a period of growing discontent with the Stuart regime.

GOETHE’S Faust (Part I 1775-1808, Part II 1825-1831)
Faust’s individualism is essentially a ceaseless and active search for experience, for the deed; he knows there is no final peace in sight, and apparently welcomes this. He sees virtually everything as humanly unworthy, or at best subject to endless and bewildering change. Yet he continues to search for some worthwhile kind of happiness, and rarely admits defeat or discouragement. Faust is something of an antisocial nay-sayer; his love of fellow-man is geared toward do-good intellectualism. Impersonal, theoretical, antiseptic.

CERVANTES’ Don Quixote
Dream dualism: “for me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one.” Marks the end of such standard fixed oppositions as good and evil, truth and illusion, knowledge and folly; but also a new kind of complexity in the relation between the actual writer, Cervantes, and his narrative.

TIRSO’S El Burlador/Don Juan
To the reader, Don Juan, the amoral fornicator, attracts a certain amount of envy and admiration because: (a) he seems to be engaging more recklessly that the rest of us in a silent but virtually universal war against society’s norms, and (b) he exhibits the youth’s boundless present – death is only something that exists as a word; repenting, reforming, settling down are all thing for the future. Hence, the problem of the play is to know what power, if any, can confront the challenge Don Juan poses to the moral order. Tirso uses the widely distributed European folk tale known as The Double Invitation – the power of the dead; the long hand of the ancestor reaching mysteriously from the grave to mete out justice to the unworthy living. ( )