Ed Simon is the Editor-in-Chief for Belt Magazine, and a monthly columnist for Literary Hub and 3 Quarks Daily. He is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, after having spent two decades teaching at various colleges. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review Daily, Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times, among dozens of others. His anonymous reviews appear in Publisher’s Weekly. He is also on the board of Autumn House Press, a non-profit fiction publisher, and serves on the Advisory Council of the International Poetry Forum.
Below, Ed shares five key insights from his new book, Devil’s Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain. Listen to the audio version—read by Ed himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The story of Faust is an intimately human story.
Devilish, diabolical, and demonic agreements in literature, culture, and history are most often associated with the sixteenth-century necromancer Johan Faust, who was later fictionalized in the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe’s eponymous play and the late eighteenth-century poem by Goethe. Tales of the Devil’s contract involve somebody exchanging their immortal soul for some gain, whether political or romantic, financial or professional, or (of course) supernatural. Thousands of plays, poems, novels, stories, films, and musical compositions have explored this tale in a diversity of ways and to different ends, but the skeletal narrative remains—I would argue—among the most important stories ever told.
Scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell writes in his classic study Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World that “The figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary, and the Devil—the single most popular character in the history of Western Christian culture.” In his arrogance and his failure, his negotiations and his capitulations, in the whole litany of abuse which the cankered soul is capable of inflicting upon itself, Faust is the most fully human character to his readers among the litany mentioned by Russell. His contention is far from hyperbole and, amending the word “character” to “narrative,” I’d say that there are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil. Thousands of creative works grapple with the bargain whereby somebody trades what’s most human for power, wealth, influence, or knowledge. Only the myth of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden competes with Faust in terms of influence, and that story is arguably an early variation of the Devil’s contract.
Nor are Marlowe and Goethe’s renditions the final word, as thousands of permutations of the basic story have been produced over the half-millennium. From Goethe to the musical Damn Yankees; Thomas Mann to the Dixie-fried pablum of the execrable Charlie Daniels Band number “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”; high culture like Franz Liszt’s “Faust Symphony” and Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 8”; pop culture from the comic book Ghost Rider to the Jack Black flick Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. The story of the Devil’s contract has been among the most enduring in our culture.
2. Faust’s story is your story.
Any accounting of Faust’s history is, at its core, an autobiography. Faust is a character outside of time, who lives parallel to past, present, and future. His is an eternal story. What the book is concerned with are the implications— culturally, politically, theologically—of these symbolically charged narratives concerning the abjuration of a soul, of the ceding of what’s intrinsic to us, of the capitulations and negotiations that make up any failed life, which is to say every life. More than a history, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all our failings.
“I want frenzied excitements, gratifications that are painful,” Faust tells Mephistopheles in Goethe’s version, “Love and hatred violently mixed.” The work of Goethe’s entire life, his Faustian drama is dedicated to the Romantic desire for experience and energy, fullness and feeling, in which what is created is not a separate work of art but the life itself. As in Marlowe and his predecessors, Faust is a cloistered scholar who signs a contract with Mephistopheles for his eternal soul, but what Goethe’s Faust wants in exchange is rather different. This Faust thirsts for “Anguish that enlivens, inspiriting trouble . . . From now on my wish is to undergo / All that men everywhere undergo, their whole portion, / Make mine their heights and depths, their weal and woe, / Everything human encompass in my single person, / And so enlarge my one self to embrace theirs, all.”
“More than a history, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all our failings.”
It’s as if the classical poet Terence’s humanistic injunction to let nothing which is human be foreign to us was pushed to its utter extreme; what Faust envisions is being transformed into a singularity of all people, a monad reflecting all our species’ baroque glories and degradation within a single life. Thus, the very act of living became a form of art, a type of incantation. Living in all its complexities understood as magic.
3. Faust is an artist.
For all the various ways in which Faust may be understood—as a magician, wizard, a type of scientist—he is primarily an artist, which is to say that his magic deals in illusions, just as with a novelist, playwright, or film director. For example, Marlowe’s play’s most overwhelming anxiety concerns its preoccupation with illusion, with the vocation of the writer as a new priest.
If the Marlovian ethos is that storytelling itself is literal magic, and the author is the mage of this imaginative learning, then there is a profound danger in these skills. Insomuch as Doctor Faustus is about heresy, it’s really about illusion, and only incidentally about how the latter can inculcate the former. “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium” Faust asks Helen of Troy. But no, it’s not the face that launched a thousand ships, regardless of how full and red her lips are or how flaxen her hair is. This is a succubus made to appear as Helen. “Have I not made blind Homer sing to me?” says Faust. Again, no, that was not the blind Greek bard strumming his lyre but another demon made to trick and cajole.
The same fear of illusion exists in how we think about film. The Faustian narrative has always evoked commerce; the central conceit of the fable is the signing of a contract, after all. Yet even if Mephistopheles is riven through all of capitalist interaction, from the manager to the laborer, the producer to the consumer, eternally buying and selling back-and-forth for profits gained and souls lost (and biomes destroyed along the way), the nature of the entertainment industry can’t help but feel even more on point. It’s a bit abstract to say that the production of lug nuts and gears is Faustian (even if it is), but the manufacture of fantastical, dream-like illusions rendered on celluloid two stories high or available anywhere on Earth via the silicon oracle in your pocket would have been rightly judged as powerful magic by our ancestors.
4. The Faustian tale is particularly adept at allegorizing totalitarian politics.
German novelist Thomas Mann, in his variation on the tale, writes that “popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle of political action—fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing whatever to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive nonetheless, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities.” If fascism aestheticizes politics, as philosopher Walter Benjamin had claimed, then Doctor Faustus is an allegory of the dangers of illusion, of the way in which such enchantments can suddenly exert their own dark power over material circumstances. Fascism is the politics of the Faustian bargain, the national soul exchanged for fantasies of the nation made great again.
“Doctor Faustus is an allegory of the dangers of illusion, of the way in which such enchantments can suddenly exert their own dark power over material circumstances.”
Totalitarianism posited a world of nothing but specters, a grim Gehenna, a shadowy shoal. That such evil had no need for a Devil, that it was the product of human emotion and human aspiration and human desire—that was Satan’s greatest lesson for the twentieth century. Like a proud parent, Mephistopheles must dab at moist eyes as Faust matures, content to learn that his wickedness can be found within his own stained soul. The most Faustian of political systems, totalitarianism demands the payment of freedom in exchange for the feeling of incomparable power; ironically, the ultimate valorization of the individual, where every member of the party is as a corpuscular atom in the great Leviathan of the dictator himself, whether he is the voice of the people or the avatar of the race. That is the great analytical failure of rational bourgeois politics—whether left, liberal, or conservative. They’re unable to recognize the threat of the fascist Devil because they can’t recognize the Devil; they don’t smell the sulfur or see his pointed-tooth sneer unless he’s already clawing at their throats.
5. Faust’s tale is increasingly an account of humanity today.
For all the legend’s archaicism, the muttered Latin, and the alchemical conjuration, Faust’s story has always been estimably modern, perhaps the first modern story. Unlike Adam and Eve, with their inscrutable Bronze Age story composed in an idiom so ancient and foreign that centuries of theologians have disagreed on what the implications of each facet of the tale might mean, the details in the Faust legend are inescapably of our time. This is, after all, the story of a contract. The dénouement of most versions of the Faust story involves the signing of a legally binding document, an experience foreign to the authors of Genesis but replete in our own lives, whether interacting with human resources or clicking on an agreement with our phone company.
Faust’s tale may deal with the numinous and the transcendent, but it’s also about bureaucracy and paperwork—our contemporary hell and its sacrament, respectively. We recognize Faust in a manner that no character in the Bible can ever be our contemporary. An issue of signing on the dotted line is superficiality when it comes to Faust’s significance to modern readers; however, because more than any other myth, the tale of the Devil’s contract is a succinct encapsulation of the human predicament over the past five centuries, right as modernity was gestated, born, thrived, and is now in the throes of its own death.
In my book, I call our present day the Faustocene, for never have the immoral negotiations and intransigent capitulations of our broken society been clearer. Never has the light of our illusions and the sound of our spectacles been more entertaining, even as the temperature rises and as the shoreline disappears. Riven by its own catastrophic contradictions, the Faustocene is an age of cold rationality and fervent occultism, of unfeeling irreligiosity and zealous fundamentalism. An age marked by the ability to change and alter the world, to create illusions and demonstrate the illusions of reality itself, to finally call God’s bluff, but to establish a hell in the interim, where magic and technology become indistinguishable. “Half the hour is past,” Marlowe’s Faust cried, and it grows very close to midnight, indeed. Everything in Western hubris has been leading to this moment, our age of Chat GPT-3 and deep fakes, of wildfire and heat-bulbs. All the overweening arrogance, rapacious hunger, and wrathful domination, the desire for power disguised as a thirst for knowledge driving us toward this final act of our Faustian play. What I posit is that perhaps it’s time to seriously consider those old legends, lest we obscure our own possibilities at redemption.
To listen to the audio version read by author Ed Simon, download the Next Big Idea App today:
