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.

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.

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:

Pure spirits’ peer, from evil coil

He was vouchsafed exemption;

“Whoever strives in ceaseless toil,

Him we may grant redemption.”

And when on high, transfigured love

Has added intercession,

The blest will throng to him above

With welcoming compassion.