One, of course, is to just let yourself be carried (no pun intended) along by a story.
Now that I have a few years under my belt, I also really enjoy reading novels because of the clues they reveal about authors’ minds.
I’ve written, before, about the similarities between writing fiction and dreaming. (My longish essay on that topic, Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness, is available for Kindle here although, full confession, I haven’t looked at it for years. Probably should pull it up and rewrite it!)
I’ve also touched a bit on philosophical idealism, which I think is the most plausible metaphysical framework for describing reality. At some point I’ll post more about that topic (I have a post in draft that riffs off the works of Bernardo Kastrup, who has made the case to my satisfaction for idealism) but the short version is that we humans are participating in an interconnected dream or mental simulation. The seeming “solidity” of reality is a function of how it is generated; even though our interaction with reality is entirely subjective, none of us as individuals “owns” it or controls it. It is generated collectively and that mass attention to “what is real” stabilizes it.
What is fascinating about this, to me, is that “other people” are known to us via an interface between their minds and our own. If I encounter another person, talk to that person, form a relationship with that person, everything I experience is a mix of perception and projection — and probably a lot more projection than most of us realize.
This is a peculiar book, in some ways. I loved it. But I am weird.
I picked it up because I’ve turned back to a novel I’m writing (Scratch) that is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust.*
And as I’ve chipped away at Scratch over the past several years, I’ve read the Goethe a couple times, of course, and Marlowe, and I’ve poked around the Interwebs. And then I found this book by Ruickbie, and bought it, and stuck it on my shelf (my real shelf, not my Goodreads shelf, there’s only so many hours in the day).
And then a month or so ago I started to read it. And I loved every page.
Start with a historical figure, Doctor Faustus, who is with us, today, almost entirely as a myth. He existed. He was a flesh and blood man. But there is scarcely any record of the historical Faust. There are scattered mentions in letters and such, but they are typically little more than a sentence or two. There are published accounts of Faust’s life and deeds, but they appeared decades or centuries after his death; they were typically passed off as authentic, but upon close examination can be confidently dismissed as fabrications. We aren’t even sure what the guy’s real name was.
Enter Ruickbie, who is a historian. And he sets out to write a historical biography of this historical figure, Doctor Faustus. He digs into the correspondence of Faust contemporaries, he digs into legal documents. And he chases down a bunch of “local traditions” that Faust was involved in such-and-such shenanigans in such-and-such a town or inn or house, but when he looks into them, almost all of them appear to have no basis in historical fact.
So now what?
Ruickbie does something that I think is pretty cool: he builds a historical account around what is often an educated guess about where Faust was, what he was up to, and how his contemporaries were reacting (or in some cases would have reacted) to him.
So you don’t really get Faust, with this book (I told you it is peculiar!). What you get is tantalizing wisps of Faust — and then, what you really get is Faust’s milieu. And it’s very granular and vivid, because Ruickbie knows his stuff and has put in the time to build it out in a very granular but vivid way.
And it was a crazy time, the late 1400s, early 1500s.
And yes, I love history, but I haven’t been exposed to a ton of European history from that time period, so for me it was a delight. I didn’t know, before I read this book, about the Peasant’s War (spoiler: the peasants lost). I didn’t know that in 1524 there was a conjunction of seven planets in Pisces (my sign!) and the astrologers of the time predicted massive floods (water sign!) and people panicked. Widespread panic. Half of the population of London at the time fled the city, convinced that if they didn’t the Thames was going to rise up and drown them. I didn’t know that in 1532, Anabaptists took over the fortified German town, Munster, and were besieged and then Munster fell and the Anabaptist prophets were captured and tortured, yick.
I love history. I love how everything is different and yet everything is the same. It makes my head spin — in a good way, like when you look up at the stars and realize how big space really is.
Ruickbie is a good writer. It’s hard to write history because history is about people and personalities; to write history, you have to introduce the reader to piles of strangers; if you don’t make them come alive, your reader won’t be able to keep track of them, and the history dissolves into a mash of meaningless and forgettable faces.
L’ombre de Marguerite apparaissant Faust (Marguerite’s shadow appearing to Faust), Faust, Lithograph print made by Eugne Delacroix, printed by F Villain, 1827
But Ruickbie pulls it off. I suppose it is because, in the end, he has a point of view about everything that was going on, during Faust’s life–about Faust, his contemporaries, the religious and political leaders who were alive at the time. So Ruickbie isn’t reciting dates and names. He’s pulling the covers back, revealing what all those people were probably like, what probably motivated them to do the things they did. A big example, and pivotal to Ruickbies point of view: did the historical Doctor Faustus really make a deal with the Devil? Or was that a slanderous fiction promulgated by Faust’s contemporaries who, it turns out, were probably competing amongst themselves for lucrative gigs doing astrology and such for kings and princelings?
And if it was a slanderous fiction, where does that leave us? For Ruickbie, the real story is about the religious tensions of the day. Faust lived at a time when the Renaissance was giving way to the Reformation. Faust, like every other person alive at the time, was caught in the current of history. As are we, today.
Highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys history.
*Sidebar: as I’ve mentioned that’s not to say I have the chops to pull off a retelling of Goethe’s Faust. I’m sure I am not up to it. But it so happens that after this awful year, losing both parents blah blah blah I needed to take a break from the lighter romancy stuff I usually write and do something that, to me at least, passes for Art. So I set aside the Marion Flarey project for now and went back to Scratch for a bit.
As some of you know, one of the novels I’ve been working on for some time, now, is a retelling of Goethe’s Faust.
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt.
The translation I purchased when I first got the idea for the novel is the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt. (And if you would like a copy, shoot me a note, because I own two and would gladly give one away.) (Why do I own two, you ask? Because last time I moved, I couldn’t put my hands on my copy and bought another, and of course precisely one nanosecond after copy #2 arrived in the mail, I spotted copy #1 on my shelf, because nothing on this planet makes sense. But I digress.)
With regard to my novel, first let’s get one thing out of the way. I am in no way up to the task of retelling Goethe’s Faust. It’s ridiculous for me to even type the words. I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking the words.
But nothing on this planet makes sense. So: onward.
As I planned the novel — the title is Scratch, in case you’re wondering — I read and re-read my edition of Faust.
Have you ever read it? The whole thing?
It is … not an easy piece of literature.
I knew Act 1 from college. Somewhere, along the line, some professor assigned it and I read it.
You probably know the storyline as well. The devil (Mephistopheles) makes a bet with God that he can trick Faust into surrendering his soul. He then appears to Faust and strikes a deal with him: if he can deliver a certain type of experience to Faust, he can have Faust’s soul.
The experience Mephisto promises is one of total fulfillment. He’ll set things up so that Faust finds something happening to him so marvelous and engaging that he never wants it to end. And if Mephisto can do that, the devil wins his bet.
Faust agrees to the terms.
Mephisto spends the rest of Act 1 trundling out the usual experiences. He makes Faust young again, and rich. Faust falls in love with Gretchen, a sweet young virgin, and Mephisto arranges for them to become lovers, thinking that will be Faust’s ultimate experience. It doesn’t work. Sex with Gretchen is nice but doesn’t quell Faust’s hunger to keep striving for Something Else, Something More. Gretchen’s life, however, is utterly ruined. She becomes pregnant and, in her shame at being an unwed mother, kills her child and is sentenced to death herself. She dies in prison before the execution is performed.
This portion of the play is fairly easy to follow. Pact with the devil, ruined woman, isn’t it awful that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was once considered to be so sinful that it would drive women to commit atrocities.
Marguerite’s shadow appearing to Faust, Lithograph print, Eugene Delacroix
The next four Acts, on the other hand, are complex and often surreal. They are laden with allegorical characters and events that in some cases are comments on contemporaneous European and German politics, on the tension between Romanticism and Classicism, on fiscal policy, on urbanization. The settings are at times “reality” but at times fantastical places — imaginary realms.
And then comes the final bit, where Faust dies. He’s in the process, during this last act, of reclaiming land from the sea and using it to build out a planned community — an urban utopia. He is also struck blind by Care, an event that is associated in the drama with Faust’s cold-hearted theft of land from an elderly couple (Faust wants the land as part of his urban development project; he asks Mephisto to get it for him; Mephisto murders the couple).
Because he’s blind, Faust doesn’t realize that the digging he hears at the end of the play isn’t workers, laboring at his urbanization project. It is demons, digging Faust’s grave.
Faust proclaims he’s so pleased with the idea that people will benefit forever from his reclamation project and the community he’s designing, that he would gladly tarry in that moment forever. He falls over and dies.
Bingo. The devil wins, right?
Not so fast. Angels intervene, distract Mephistopheles, crowd him away from Faust’s body, take possession of Faust’s soul, and whisk him away to heaven.
And ever since, people have been arguing about those last few plot twists. What, exactly, was Goethe trying to say?
On the face of it, it seems like Mephisto won the bet, and then heaven essentially cheated. Pulled a fast one. He certainly believed he was cheated. “Where do I sue now as complainer? … This thing was wretchedly mishandled.”
Or maybe not. Maybe the devil didn’t win the bet. Mephisto himself says, right after Faust dies:
So it is over! How to read this clause?
All over is as good as never was,
And yet it whirls about as if it were.
The Eternal-Empty is what I prefer.
If all, in the end, is nothing, then Faust’s proclamation that he would tarry forever in the feeling of building his new community is also “nothing.” So did Mephisto, in making this statement, essentially void his own bet?
Another observation. Blind Faust may have thought he was experiencing the building of his community. But he was not. He was experiencing the digging of his own grave.
It was a trick. So was the bet won not fairly but by cheating? And did that negate it?
The Prince of Lies cannot resist lying. It is his nature. Did he undo his own success by founding it on a lie?
Another possibility is something along the lines of theological determinism. Heaven and its beings are outside of time and space and are not, therefore, subject to the same laws as we humans are; outcomes of our actions are pre-determined. Any wager made on Earthy may seem valid to us, but its terms can’t necessarily be applied in heaven, because in heaven, redemption and damnation are decided on completely different terms. Whether we are to be redeemed or not has already been decided, and can’t be changed just because we cut a bad deal with the devil while we’re incarnate.
Redemption, from our perspective, is therefore inexplicable, irrational, and probably undeserved. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Faust is a metaphysical work. Its roots are in Medieval morality plays, which are as straightforward as a child’s story. The devil is evil. To do evil is to enter into a pact with the devil, and the price you will pay is your eternal soul.
But in Goethe’s world, things aren’t so straightforward. His Faust is no saint, but is beloved by God for all his shortcomings (“Though now he serves me but in clouded ways,” God says in the play’s prologue, “Soon I shall guide him so his spirit clears … Man ever errs the while he strives.”)
Perhaps, in Goethe’s drama, the omniscient God is unworried about his wager with the devil because He knows from the beginning that Mephisto will fail, partly because of the devil’s own nature, but perhaps also because of the nature of redemption itself.
And so, Faust was mistaken when he thought that what he heard, in his last day on Earth, was loyal laborers, busily working on his project. “Man ever errs the while he strives.” Add to that intercession — Gretchen, in heaven, prays for Faust — and you have everything you need to overrule Mephisto’s trickery. As the angels say while they’re carrying Faust’s immortal essence up to the highest heavens:
I am writing a beautiful tale about corpses. Very seasonable weather for it.
–Evelyn Waugh
Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.
If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, or hope to write a novel, I suppose you sometimes think thoughts like the ones I’m thinking today.
Why am I doing this?
What am I trying to do, exactly?
I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I’m a loon.
I’m a decent writer. Above average, perhaps. But in this sea of writers — this sea of millions and millions of books — all that being “above average” means is that my head bobs up above the surface once in a while.
Just long enough for me to suck in a quick gasp of air before I disappear again.
I am also, arguably, a confused writer.
I’m envious of writers who live and breathe genre, because if you’re a passionate fan of genre, and then you decide to write genre, a big chunk of the “why” question is automatically answered. You’re writing to contribute to the genre. Genre readers are always looking for more genre to read. What you’re doing is participatory — reciprocal.
I like genre. I’ve read a fair share of genre. But I have never honestly felt completely at home in any genre community.
And look. Here’s what someone posted in a new review on my novel, Can Job:
Really 3.5 stars because it’s solid, but it never makes up its mind about what genre it wants to be.
You get a sense that this is going to be a romantic chick-lit romp from the cover and some of the scenes, but the majority of it reads like an attempt at big business satire.
Is it “art” if you look like you don’t know what you’re doing?
A totally fair critique, I’m sure. From someone who obviously reads a lot and who doesn’t know me, and so isn’t even subconsciously inclined to just “go along with it” when I color, awkwardly, outside the lines.
And the thing is, it’s intentional. I’m doing this to myself, on purpose.
Sigh.
So I’m working on another novel, one of 3 or 4 WIPs in various stages of done-ness. And wrestling with the same kinds of questions.
Faust is the arrogant guy who renounces Christianity and trades his soul in exchange for, basically, magical powers.
Peel that back and the story asks the questions: what is good? what is evil? what is truly most important and why are some people foolish enough to trade the most important away?
The answers are based on the assumed 16th century virtues of obedience and faith. Faust, like Lucifer in the Historia’s tale-within-a-tale of that angel’s fall, “rose up in insolence and vanity.” He thought he was too (good? smart? something) to heed the guidance of the Church.
Goethe’s Faust, written some 300 years later, asks the same questions but frames them completely differently.
Romanticism, suddenly aware of dynamic (even irrational) principles underlying both man and nature, took striving–tentative progression and development, and pure endeavor–and made it the defining quality of mankind.
From “Masterpieces of Romanticism,” edited by Howard E. Hugo, in The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces.
A being of searchings and questionings, living a life of constant aspiration towards goals but dimly seen–this, as described by God, is the being He has created in His own image.
And of the devil’s pact with Goethe’s Faust:
Here is no simple temptation to be naughty …
If Mephistopholes can destroy Faust’s sense of aspiration, if Faust can say of any single moment in time that this is complete fulfillment of desire–then the devil wins, and God and man are defeated.
I.e. “evil” is the cessation of striving toward something.
That something is still God. But it’s not obedience to God in the narrow sense articulated by the first Faust chapbooks. To Goethe, to be “good” is to be an active participant in God’s plan–to actively fulfill your part in God’s plan for humanity.
Obviously we see, here, the ideas of Progressivism in its modern/political sense, stirring in the minds of 19th Century Romantics. Or anyway, in a 1956 essay on Romanticism by an English professor at Berkeley ;)
So two final things and then I hit “publish.”
First, here I am in 2018 pondering two versions of Faust, one of which was published 450 years ago, and the other 200-ish.
And the ideas communicated by these two works are effing immense. You almost can’t get your head around them, they’re so big. Poke at them and they start to rattle you.
And part of me wonders, what is the point of writing a novel that is any less than this — that is any smaller?
Second: what kind of mind could possibly wrap itself around these same questions today?
Set aside that I wouldn’t dare to suggest I am personally capable of such a feat. I’m not that smart, and my world–including my intellectual world–is far too parochial. Pains me to know this, but I know this.
The fact is, it’s quite possible nobody could pull off a new Faust today. We’re drowning in noise–and we’re so fractured by social technology that no one mind can hope to bridge us.
And yet, I keep writing, and I keep thinking there’s no other novel that’s really worth writing, except a novel that tries …
Faust seducing Gretchen. This part of the story: easy to follow.
I struggled to understand the “other” part of Goethe’s Faust. The part after Gretchen’s death. Have you ever read it? Crazy.
Then I came across a bit mentioning that the play is an alchemical allegory. Really good piece on that, here. The Alchemical Drama of Goerthe’s Faust, by Adam McLean.
It all makes sense, now. In a cosmic allegorical kind of way.
