A Deal With The Devil.
I’m a fan of Faust. Not the guy, obvs. In all versions of the story he’s clearly a massive bellend but his tale feels like a brilliant idea for a story but is it? And does it matter?
Let’s set out some terms. The elevator pitch is that Faust’s a scholar, Benedict Cumberbatch maybe, crazy smart. So smart, he’s smart enough to know he’ll never know everything. Frustrated he turns his incredible intellect towards the dark arts, summoning a daemon called Mephistopheles who, charming as Tom Hanks, promises Faust access to all the knowledge of the universe for the price of Faust’s eternal soul. It’s Indecent Proposal but instead of a million dollars you get to know everything and instead of letting Robert Redford fuck your wife who is Demi Moore, you get to burn in hell for all eternity.
Mephistopheles’ deal is one of the best inciting incidents in the global history of story telling but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the only bit of the story that you actually know, because it’s the only bit of the story that’s actually any good. The real tragedy of Faust is that this pitch showcases the classic failing in high concept ideas which reach for something they cannot possibly deliver. Faust unlocks the secrets of the universe, cool but how to write it unless the writer has themselves already gathered at least the gist of absolutely and completely everything? Maybe Bill Bryson should do a version.
Marlowe’s approach to this problem was to ignore it and instead have Faust magic himself to Rome to take the piss out of the Pope and bang Helen of Troy. To be fair, Marlowe is just sticking to his source material. Printed a year or so earlier the Faustbuch takes a standard tone of moral condemnation to retell a bunch of folk stories as slanders of the real Dr.Faustus, who had died some 40 years before. I say slanders because I don’t believe the real Faustus actually did a deal with the devil, though he does seem to have been banned from Ingolstadt in 1528 for practicing black magic and buggery. If nothing else this suggests he would have ordered Mephistopheles to bring him Achilles rather than Helen. Marlowe strays from his source by drawing our sympathies toward both Faust and Mephistopheles. He also gets into the weeds of Calvinism in a way that feels less of a hot button 400 years later. (Unless I missed Buzz Feeds 15 Most Frustrating Things About Predetermined Salvation - number 7 made my jaw drop.)
200 years later, the young Goethe, also inspired by the original chapbook, wrote his first take on the pitch. Goethe was riding high after the success of his gloomy pro suicide novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, a sort of early Manic Street Preachers album for all the 19th Century indie kids who hadn’t got laid on the Grand Tour. Unlike Marlowe’s, Goethe’s Faust is less clown more suffocated intellectual, so rather than rushing to Rome to kick the Pope, he has a much more spiritual ambition for his new gift of total knowledge and power. He wants to fuck a peasant girl called Gretchen.
It’s Indecent Proposal if Robert Redford was the main character and instead of offering a million dollars he just used magic and then Demi Moore falls pregnant, gives birth, drowns her baby and is sentenced to death for murder. Faust does attempt a rescue but Gretchen refuses to avoid her death thereby securing heavenly salvation. It’s a plot, but yet again we’re running in the opposite direction from the premise. Faust doesn’t need all the knowledge in the universe, just very early access to Porn Hub.
Goethe’s Faust has been considered not just a masterpiece but a key text in European literature. Laurels like this encourage you to stick around for Part 2, which took 25 years to write and so must be where all the profound and less rapey bits happen. Sadly Part 2 is Goethe’s Chinese Democracy or perhaps his whatever George R Martin is currently not finishing. A pretentious, tedious mess Part 2 abandons story telling for theorising about culture. Faust does again get to bed Helen of Troy, but this time to demonstrate the union between 19th Century German and classical Greek cultures. But fumbling the dramatic demands of your story is the narrative version of not being able to draw hands or do perspective.
However the power of Goethe’s text is not the story but the language, specifically his use of common, often crude, demotic German speech. Faust is a man of the people. Not just any people but a people just forming their national identity. When Goethe published Faust 1 there was no such thing as Germany. Politically it doesn’t solidify until the 1860s, but culturally the concept of Germany builds from Faust onward. Goethe’s writing is a cultural lodestone, a defining artistic statement in the creation of 19th Century German identity. For Goethe this story is a vehicle to raise up the everyday Volk and place them equal to the Hellenistic culture that seemed to belittle them.
There is a tragedy beyond bad story telling in the author’s failure to draw out the real narrative implications of that incredible central pitch. 100 years after Goethe’s death the cultural imperative of Faust 2, the placing of Germanic culture on a par with the Greeks and Romans found fruition through a German Chancellor who for a short while was perhaps the most powerful man in the world and who unleashed horrors that make stage demons pale.
Whether Nazism was predetermined by Goethe’s storytelling is a question for Marlowe but like all nationalisms, Goethe’s is inspirational but incoherent. Rightly damned in Part 1, Part 2 ends with Faust off to heaven, forgiven even by the spirit of his betrayed lover, not because he’s redeemed himself but because his audience too closely identified with him and damning them is never comfortable.
I’m running a half day taster session for my 9 week screenwriting course on the 26th November. Information here. My full screenwriting course returns in January.
I’m also reading Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia which is amazing for many reasons but in passing points out that the word “tragedy” literally combines the Greek words “goat” and “cry” and directly references the sound made by a sacrificial goat. This tells you a lot about stories where the main character fails for the audience’s benefit.