Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

by Ed Simon

I’ve begun to take umbrage at the calculating and self-protective adages surrounding expectation: “Plan for the worst”; “lower your sights”; Any other hackneyed thesis about how it is best to be pleasantly surprised by the bare minimum. All are actively harmful. Fie on them, I say. Anticipation, excitement, and hype are all worthy feelings, in and of themselves, even when they lead to naught. One can live in a vibrant world of hope or choose the self-inflicted misery of constantly bracing for disappointment—it doesn’t make you stupid to be reasonably excited for something, and then to be proven wrong.

I came into Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain with sky-high expectations. It was my spooky month book select, a Halloween treat to prefigure the looming darkness of the season (though I live in a climate where “season” means slightly wetter and mildly chillier, not great bursts of arboreal color celebrating the death of another year). Theming your book selections temporally or via travel destinations is one of life’s great pleasures; you’re in charge! You can read whatever you want! Make it thematic. And so I turned to Devil’s Contract with eyes gleaming bright with October desire.

The book has virtues: the theming is strong; the concepts are so very interesting. To me, though, the contract needed to be proofread a few more times before it was executed. I do not blame the writing because there are chapters that flow smoothly, chapters that feel ironed out, even slick. For the most part, though the small errors in formatting and the larger choices of structure in each individual sentence made the book feel unpleasant to actually read. An example:

Faust’s story begins with Simon Magus, for his is the forerunner of all Faustian bargains, the first to sell his soul to the Devil (or, more paradoxically as the story has it, to sell his soul to God). Whoever wrote the Testimony of Truth was referencing a group known as the Simonians after their founder, a sect accused of any number of impieties and obscenities, of practicing semen- and blood-besmirched orgies as religious rituals, and who called upon supernatural entities to acquire profane powers.

This styling isn’t an aberration but self-selected: most sentences are needlessly dense and branch in ways that don’t lead to interesting discoveries but repetitive backtracking. Lord knows I am not the cleanest writer on the planet: that I love the m-dash; that the anti-parenthetical plea from Strunk/White fell on deaf ears with me; that one labyrinthine sentence will suffice when three should probably emerge. So when I say I strongly dislike the way Devil’s Contract is written it is with full, Faustian knowledge of glass houses and thrown stones. 

I’m not even here for the minutia that I would pick at if Devil’s Contract were a book I didn’t like. Petty oversights, like losing the italics on the back half of the title The Silver Chalice during a line break on page eighteen, or having dozens of paragraphs start with double tabs with no intentionality that I can decipher, are, to me, an issue with under-edited text. This theory seems more reasonable when you look at, say, chapter ten. After finishing the whole book, I was certain chapter ten had to be an adaptation of a previously published essay, and this suspicion was easily proven correct with a fast search. There are no stumbles in chapter ten. It reads really well, the writing is strong and clear, and the tone and voice are consistent with the rest of the book—those other chapters simply lack polish. If the whole book was written (and edited, I suspect) like chapter ten, Devil’s Contract would be a straight banger. The main issue, to me, was the amount of times I was tasked with reading thirty words split apart with five different commas:

In drawing the strange tale of Theophilus to a close, Hrotsvitha’s words were recorded on vellum of sheep or goat’s skin scraped clean and tanned, stained with ink of charcoal gum and tannic acid, like all Medieval literature written onto the corpses of God’s creatures, the resultant manuscript an intricate mechanism of ligament and tendon, the Word become flesh.

This is a nice sentence, in theory. But its impact in reality is not elegant. There is no cohesiveness–no pointed directive–and the signposts that are required to make a grand point in an otherwise complex format don’t exist. In the end, constant musings and flowing, expansive thoughts put down on paper don’t create an atmosphere of trust–I don’t believe that the conclusions we are presented are always where the author intended the text to take the reader. Personally, I know my points get muddled when I don’t re-read and re-write them for clarity, burning off the detritus of my initial flourishes. In the above sentence, for example, I see what I think it wants to be–an object lesson in incantatory phrasing, a written metaphor for thoughts transforming into words, and words into written letters–but I also see what it is: stooped from carrying too many clauses.

The lack of polish–polish that only comes from reading and editing and reading and editing–simply pops up far too often:

Any presumed different between the urbane, sophisticated, and educated Dr. Faust and the women accused of witchcraft has more to do with the vagaries of class and gender than it does with any appreciable difference between the two types of story.

This is on page 117, followed by only half a page of text, and then:

That witchcraft isn’t commonly thought of as Faustian may be attributed to the vagaries of class and gender, a separation between the high culture character of the necromancy and the low culture figure of the witch, but both were in communion with the devil.

These were certainly the same thought, clearly written at temporally distinct times and then sutured back together without a cohesive edit. I don’t think they should be so close, so similar. I do think that Devil’s Contract has the shape of an intended audiobook, or a podcast (non-derogatory). Perhaps even a personal, self-edited website. Quelle horreur.

I have to emphasize, again, for you and for myself in the future, that I intuited that chapter ten was constructed in a distinct way without knowing that it was an essay published online two years before the book was released. As much as I am disappointed in the joylessness of reading such an interesting subject, there were still some clever turns and worthwhile structures in some of the other chapters:

Drawing upon stories (scurrilous, apocryphal, and some real) that Alexander VI was in an incestuous relationship with his daughter Lucrezia or that he hosted an orgy with Roman prostitutes within St. Peter’s remembered as the “banquet of chestnuts,” Barnes’s play is prosaic Reformation-era anti-Catholic agitprop, of little interest other than to historians and literary scholars, mostly lacking in the same subtleties that are so engaging in Marlowe’s play. Most crucially, Alexander VI simply sells his soul for power–that old banquet of chestnuts–so that the philosophical considerations that Marlowe makes about creation and imagination, illusion and reality, are totally exorcized.

Solid callback on the old chestnut cliché. That’s good stuff. I have no qualms about having read Devil’s Contract, nor even any in recommending it—the subject matter is interesting, and style is simply a matter of taste. You might love how it is constructed. I fully recommend being excited before you pick it up: grudging, cautious obligation toward a text is best reserved for actual legal contracts.