My Problem With Faust

Faust is originally a German folktale about a guy who makes a deal with the devil. There’s loads of those and Faust used to be only one of them until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) happened to it. It’s Goethe’s plays which I do have a problem with, not the original folktale, which has Faust strike a deal with the devil about the devil serving him for a specific number of years (time span varies from version to version) and then getting his soul as a payment. Faust is not originally a character who escapes from a deal with the devil (although there are plenty of others in German folklore).

Goethe is one of the most prolific and one of the most revered German authors, playwrights, and poets. Despite holding a day job, too, he wrote a large number of plays, poems, and prose. And among all those, Faust is Goethe’s Opus Magnum. He worked on it, on and off, for sixty years and left three different plays behind in the end: Urfaust, Faust I, and Faust II. The Urfaust was an early version of Goethe’s play, Faust I is a rather regular play, while Faust II is highly complicated to understand and demands a good grasp on several mythologies and, perhaps, a membership of the Freemasons. Faust I is staged regularly in Germany, the same goes for the Urfaust, but Faust II is seldom put on stage. Reception for the ‘easier’ parts of Faust was very good from the beginning and several lines of the text have found their way into regular German, such as ‘des Pudels Kern’ (the core of the poodle, referring to the first meeting between Faust and Mephisto, the devil in the piece). So much about the plays as a such and their reception.

Let me give you a short rundown on those parts of the two plays (Faust I and II) which are important for my problem with the story.

Faust I starts with a wager between God and Mephisto, in which they bet that Mephisto will not be able to dissuade Faust from his thirst for knowledge and make him content with where he is and what he’s doing (to long-time Freemason Goethe, striving for knowledge was more important than piety, obviously).

Mephisto takes the bet and goes to earth to meet with Faust, who is seriously frustrated, because he wants to understand the secrets of the universe - something his human mind simply can’t comprehend. They make a deal that Mephisto will serve Faust and show him whatever he wants and will only get Faust’s soul once Faust is content and satisfied. There’s a very nice, rhyming passage about it, but I’m not citing it here, for I would have to translate it, which would then destroy the rhymes.

First of all, Mephisto takes the old man Faust to a witch who gives him a youth elixir - since a lot of the fun things Mephisto will show Faust are not fun for an old man. Then, to put it in a more modern way, they go partying like no tomorrow. After a lot of carousing, fighting, and other things which Faust probably didn’t even do in his own youth, Faust happens to see a young woman - Gretchen. It’s lust on first sight (surely not love) and Faust insists he has to have her. Since Mephisto is bound to serve him, he does his thing, enlisting the help of Gretchen’s aunt and giving a lot of expensive gifts, too. In the end, Faust gets what he wants: he gets inside of Gretchen’s bedroom and it’s everyone’s guess what he and Gretchen are doing there.

Unfortunately, when leaving said bedroom again, Faust is faced with Gretchen’s brother, a soldier who has come home on leave and isn’t happy to see a stranger come out of his little  sister’s bedroom. As wasn’t even uncommon in Goethe’s time, he demands satisfaction, challenging Faust to a duel - which Faust only wins with Mephisto’s help. The brother dies, Gretchen’s mother comes outside, sees her dead son, and dies of shock and a broken heart. Faust has to escape, of course, leaving Gretchen behind and continuing his fun-having and partying.

Gretchen, erstwhile, hasn’t just lost her whole family (Gretchen’s father isn’t mentioned at all, so presumably dead), she’s also pregnant. Given how little interest she had in Faust at the beginning and her overall behaviour, it’s safe to presume that she’s pregnant with his child. All alone in the world (her aunt clearly isn’t much help), she finally does the only thing she thinks she can do: she gives birth to the child in secret and drowns it right afterwards. She’s caught, though, and sentenced to death as a child murderess.

Faust is only reminded of the woman he used to obsess over when he sees a woman who resembles her at a witches’ gathering and learns about her fate: she’s to be executed the very next day. He orders Mephisto to take him to Gretchen’s cell and the devil does as ordered. There, Faust offers to take her away to safety, but Gretchen, seeing through him and Mephisto, rather entrusts her fate to God and, while executed for her crime, goes to heaven. End of Faust I.

Faust II is mostly made up of Faust travelling wherever his fancy takes him and ending up as some sort of Emperor of Earth with the most beautiful woman of all times, Helen of Troy (Goethe was an author of the German Classicism, after all), by his side. This is where he, finally, is too content and decides he wants for things to stay the way they are - deal done, one soul for hell, right? Wrong. Because, as Mephisto drags Faust’s soul to hell, Gretchen’s soul turns up and takes Faust to heaven. End of Faust II with one cheated devil and one lucky Faust.

It is the end which simply doesn’t make sense to me. Gretchen is, when all’s said and done, collateral to Faust’s new experiences with fun and not having his nose in a book at all times. Her fate is tragic, but resolved at the end of Faust I with God taking mercy on her soul and her entering heaven, her sins forgiven. There is no reason why Gretchen should have had any interest whatsoever in saving Faust. There was no love between them to begin with, not in any emotional sense, and she sees right through him before her end, turning her back on him and any possibility of being saved, trusting God more than Faust - and rightfully so, too.

In all likelihood, Goethe had written himself into a corner with his Faust. The whole ‘you can go on as long as you’re not satisfied’ deal, when coupled with human nature (which is rarely really satisfied), could have made Faust wander earth eternally, looking for new stimulation, - or Mephisto just rage-quit the wager, admitting that God had won. The Deus Ex Machina of Gretchen’s intervention at the end is just slightly less annoying than God taking a hand in it himself would be. Clearly, Goethe wasn’t going to let Faust end up in hell, even though that’s what all folktales about Faust do (and most modern interpretations of the tale as well). And as Faust I was already out and staged at the time he finished Faust II, he couldn’t go back and change the relationship of the two from the beginning, giving his end more sense.

Let this be a lesson to you. If a prolific and highly successful author can write himself into a corner and come up with something rather stupid to resolve his problem, you don’t have to be ashamed of the same thing happening to you. Try to avoid the Deus Ex Machina solution, though, rather go back and make changes or accept that you won’t get the ending you were aiming for.

Lord Darcy - A Working Magic System

Randall Garret invented his detective Lord Darcy (who is clearly from the Holmes blueprint) in the late 1970s and wrote a couple of short stories and a novel (“Too Many Magicians”) about him. Later on, Garret’s friend Michael Kurland added two more novels to the collection (“Ten Little Wizards” and “A Study in Sorcery”). All are set in the same alternate reality of the late 1970s and the 1980s. And that alternate reality is what I want to talk about, because it comes with a rational magic system which presents a backdrop without getting in the way too much.

In Lord Darcy’s version of the world, two things happened in medieval times which changed the course of history:

Richard Lionheart survived the battle in which he died in our reality, found the time to re-evaluate his life, and returned to England to rule for twenty more years, surviving his younger brother John (who this way never got a chance at proving how bad a ruler he was) and leaving England in the capable hands of his nephew Arthur. As a result of this, the Plantagenets still rule and a sizable portion of Europe is part of the Angevin Empire, which encompasses France in addition to Britain and has a strong influence on other western European countries.

In addition to that, a monk discovered the rules behind magic, which allows for everyone with the Talent (the inborn ability to use magic) to be trained as a mage of some kind. This has changed the development of technology severely - many modern ‘inventions’ such as refrigerators or telephones exist, but they run on magic instead of electricity.

As a result of both changes, the world is very different from the one we know - the society is much more based on old feudal systems, magicians are their own class, healing is a topic as well, and things seem quite fantastical to the reader.

Randall Garret could have let his imagination run amuck with all of this. He could have told stories of how magic made solving crimes so much easier. But he didn’t - and with good reason. Where would the ‘mystery’ in ‘mystery story’ be, if a magician only snapped their fingers and everything was cleared up? Nowhere, that’s where.

By giving clear limits to magic, both on moral grounds and on actual technological grounds, he made it clear that magic is not solving all problems in this world. Master Sean, Lord Darcy’s assistant, claims often enough that he’s a sorcerer, but not a miracle worker. It’s Darcy’s little grey cells (to quote another detective) which solve the case, not the magic. The magic assists, very much the same way as science assists in our world. Master Sean as a forensic sorcerer can tell how long a body has been dead, identify poisons, tell whether a bullet came from a specific weapon. He can’t just conjure up a picture of the murderer or revive the body to ask it (unlike a certain Mr. Johannes Cabal, but I’ll talk about him in another post).

And magic in the world of Lord Darcy is complicated and hard. Sorcerers and witches need a lot of material, such as different wands, different parchments, different inks, a lot of tools which are expensive. Magical spells can take hours to weave and often come with complications - some demand far more than one sorcerer to work out. Magic is a full-time job with a long training phase.

Since most people do not have the Talent, however, most crimes committed in the world of Lord Darcy (who is a detective by profession, not an amateur) are committed without the use of magic, so Lord Darcy (who doesn’t have an ounce of the Talent himself) is very much suited to solving them. Master Sean provides him with information, as a forensic scientist in our world would, and sometimes provides a sounding board for his colleague and friend.

What magic provides in the stories is not the solution to the case, but the backdrop. The immediate reaction of witnesses to ‘locked room mysteries’ in a magical setting is ‘a sorcerer did it.’ Then, without fail, Lord Darcy proves that a sorcerer had nothing to do with it and it doesn’t take magic to commit a crime the way it was committed.

But magic is there, the past has shaped a different present where there’s no cars, where the train is still the best way of travelling, where people are living in a much less stressful and much less enlightened environment, where it’s perfectly normal to assume that the gentry knows what they’re doing (not Darcy, though, despite being gentry himself). The world is close enough to reality (at least if you were alive and conscious during the 80s) to be recognizable, yet unrecognizable enough so it feels like taking a break in another world entirely. As a matter of fact, this magic-based, late-20th-century world has a striking resemblance to Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian age (but with magic and without Queen Victoria, of course).

The magical backdrop in the Lord Darcy stories works, because it is only a backdrop. The rules of magic, the complicated rituals necessary to use it, the limited pool of people who can use magic at all make sure that despite the whole ‘magic is real’ part of the setting there’s never a simple solution through magic. It’s Lord Darcy’s talent (which his friend and colleague is sure has to be magic as well, in some way) to get from the problem to the solution which saves the day, no matter whether it’s in a short story or a novel, no matter whether it’s an original by Randall Garret or a pastiche by Michael Kurland.

With interesting cases, recurring characters, and a world which is both recognizable and unrecognizable, the Lord Darcy stories (the originals are available collected in one volume, both novels by Michael Kurland are also still available) are still a good read many, many years after they were written - and, sadly, many years after their creator left this globe.

An Interesting Take On Gender

This is both a review and an article on writing, although not in equal measure. “Wriggle and Sparkle” is a collection of several shorter stories about a kraken (who can turn human) and a unicorn (who can also turn human). At first glance, it’s a nice take on male/male erotica (and there’s a lot of erotica in it) and the two main characters, Lynn and Anderson, snark as much as they smooch, if not more.

Of the main characters, though, only one has really a defined gender: unicorn Anderson. Kraken, as the reader learns early in the stories, can shift gender - although most of them do it only once in their life. Lynn and his twin Leslie are an exception from that rule, as they shift between male and female whenever they want. In the end, it’s the way the story handles the topic of male pregnancy (Lynn can give birth to a kraken egg in his female shape), but it’s not the only time the topic is raised. During the third story, Lynn and Leslie trade identities, each of them shifting to the opposite gender (since Leslie is female most of the time), so Leslie can pretend to be Lynn and Lynn can leave his place while he’s supposedly under house arrest. At that point, the reader learns that they’ve been doing it for ages.

Anderson, on the other hand, is clearly not only very sex-positive, but also pansexual, having had past relationships both with men and women.

In “Wriggle and Sparkle,” the paranormal/supernatural element serves as an explanation for why it is possible for one of them to shift gender at will. It’s simply stated that kraken can shift gender and left at that. More of an explanation isn’t necessary in this case.

There are other ways to handle it in a fantasy setting, specifically magic, of course, no matter the shape it comes in. Spells, potions, curses - they’ll all work as an explanation for why a character suddenly is the opposite gender or something in between. That is not the problem, though.

A problem which “Wriggle and Sparkle” avoids through making Lynn essentially gender-fluid by birth and from a species where that’s considered acceptable (if not fully the norm). Nobody ever tries to confront him (the same pronoun is used while he’s in his female shape, since he prefers being male, just as Leslie is always referred to as ‘she,’ even when she’s male in shape) - although that might have to do with the pure size of a kraken not in his human shape… Nobody even seems to think much about it, because it’s known that kraken are fluid that way (as a matter of fact, Lynn was born female and Leslie was born male - they flipped to their preferred gender during adolescence).

The problem, of course, is to explain the motivation for the change. One thing to avoid is the ‘for fun’ change - like men in drag, if it’s played for laughs, it usually hurts more than it helps. Forced change is also pretty icky - like a powerful wizard turning a prince into a princess, so he can force them into a marriage. There are other ways to handle it, too, of course.

Some people just are gender-fluid. They don’t consider themselves strictly male or strictly female, but mix and match as it suits them. Or they don’t consider having a gender at all and see themselves as neutral - not male, not female, they just are.

Some people will decide on a reversible or irreversible gender switch for their own reasons. Perhaps a princess wants to be a prince, because only the prince can inherit the throne. Or the prince has always felt more like a princess and wants to go through with it and become one with all that includes.

Or you have, as with the stories mentioned, just a character who is switching between male and female (and, perhaps, stopping off in between whenever they like) as they wish. Loki from Norse Mythology is an example of that. The Jötun, of whom he is a member, are all gender-neutral by birth, able to both father and birth children. Loki chooses the male gender most of the time, but he (in this case, one would assume that he always referred to himself by male pronoun, even in female shape) can shift into a woman whenever he wants (or into a mare, which is how we got Sleipnir). Shape shifters in general are show capable of that kind of shift (which must be easier than shifting into a completely different being). With such a being, there usually is no forced gender switch, because they can shift whenever they like. It’s usually also not played for laughs, but part of the character (and often part of the plot).

It would be nice to find more gender-fluid or gender-neutral characters, especially in fantasy or sci-fi settings (where different species, alien or fantasy, make the explanation a lot easier). They’re harder to put into a regular or realistic setting, of course, but even there, why should all characters adhere to classic ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ gender traits?

Thoughts on Magic

Magic is not a topic I have a lot to do with in my regular books. While the “Loki Files” series (the second half of which will be out at the end of February) does have some magic in it (because how can you have a story about Loki without magic?), my other regular series are centred if not in reality, then at least in a universe with no magic. Steven would have my hide, if I introduced magic to any series he’s in, that much is for sure…

Yet, I have written stories with magic in them. I have written fan fiction both for Brother Bones (where the main character is a zombie avenger) and Artemis Fowl (which is based around Artemis and his encounters with the fairies). I have tangled with magic in the past and it was fun - to a certain degree. Magic also always comes with its own problems, though.

If you write high fantasy, you can avoid a lot of trouble, because you can work your world as you want and it can be perfectly suited for a lot of magic users. Funny fantasy follows similar rules. The moment you step into urban fantasy, though, you have the principle of the Masquerade (yup, always with a capital ‘M’).

Masquerade means nothing more or less than ‘magic is hidden from the eyes of the regular human.’ The reason for this is (for the writer) that otherwise a lot of history would have to be rewritten and magic and technology would be somewhere else than they are in our world. If you want to look at a proper alternate reality where magic exists, I can recommend Randall Garret’s “Lord Darcy” stories and the two later novels “A Study in Sorcery” and “Ten Little Wizards” by Michael Kurland (which also use Lord Darcy). However, in a regular urban fantasy, regular humans live their lives without knowing that magic exists, vampires are ruling the world, and the fae make fun of everyone they can get a hold of. The pure level of magic which must be used to keep the Masquerade up is mind-blowing. Harry Potter is an example of this (since the whole ‘wizards must hide from muggles to survive’ thing is unrealistic to the extreme). Why would wizards, who find new ones among muggles (because accidental new bloodlines happen), try to keep completely apart from them? How come that the muggle-born wizards and witches don’t even try to introduce some of their muggle technology or knowledge to the wizarding world? It all falls apart as soon as you think too much about it and apply some form of logic or common sense. And, yes, I know that the Harry Potter novels are for kids. In my book, though, ‘it’s for kids’ is no excuse for bad writing.

A lot of trouble while writing magic doesn’t even come from the setting, though. No matter whether you have high fantasy, funny fantasy, or urban fantasy (or whatever other sub-genre of fantasy you can think of), there’s always one big problem with magic: the Deus Ex Machina problem.

‘Deus Ex Machina,’ apart from being an inspiration for the title of an RPG series, means ‘the god out of the machine’ and stands for a trick some writers pull off when they have written themselves into a corner. They pull a MacGuffin or another trick out of thin air and use it to save their characters or their plot. Goethe does so when he has Gretchen save Faust (undeserved) at the end of Faust II. And that guy spent 60 years overall plotting his Faust…

If magic is unrestricted and available to the main characters, there’s no reason whatsoever to write anything about their troubles, because they can all be solved with magic. MacGuffin missing? Snap your fingers, say a spell, and there it is. No way of travelling through half of the kingdom in time? Snap your fingers, say a spell, and teleport where you need to be. You get the drift, I’m sure.

Therefore, magic needs to be limited in some way and the writer needs an explanation for why this is the case. Perhaps it takes a toll on the wielder. Perhaps there’s only few people overall who can use it (and the main characters are not among them). Perhaps the MacGuffin is wrapped in an anti-magic field. It depends on the setting, of course. In an urban fantasy story, a main character may risk severe punishment for using magic where the uninitiated might see it. Perhaps magic comes from either gods or demons and the use is restricted by the being which gave it to a character. So the disciple of a nature goddess can’t use fireballs or the disciple of a lust demon can’t use healing magic. But if the main character has magic, why do they never use it? So make them people who can’t wield it? Perhaps even in a world where everyone uses it? That can be interesting, but demands a lot of explanation in the other direction.

Limiting magic can be done, but it needs to be introduced early enough. If your main character has used magic throughout the story so far and suddenly says ‘I can’t do this,’ you’d better have a very good explanation at hand. The alternative would be not to have humans use magic at all. If magic is only in the hands of other beings - be they fae or gods or other spirits of the world -, then the main characters need to find one of those beings and barter with it for help to solve their problem, which makes a good plot.

There is clearly a good reason why I don’t use a lot of magic (unless Loki is involved, but he isn’t human). I prefer not having to do that much world-building at one point - I rather like for my world to develop as I write about it. So if you want magic, keep in mind that it won’t really work that well if you don’t put some limits on it.