:LWK+LV%ORRG+H:URWH )XQFWLRQVRIWKH3DFW0RWLILQ)DXVWLDQ/LWHUDWXUH 2OH-RKDQ+ROJHUQHV Thesis for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of Bergen 'DWHRIGHIHQFH0D\ © Copyright Ole Johan Holgernes The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Year: 2017 Title: “With his Blood he Wrote”. Functions of the Pact Motif in Faustian Literature. Author: Ole Johan Holgernes Print: AiT Bjerch AS / University of Bergen 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following for their respective roles in the creation of this doctoral dissertation: Professor Anders Kristian Strand, my supervisor, who has guided this study from its initial stages to final product with a combination of encouraging friendliness, uncompromising severity and dedicated thoroughness. Professor Emeritus Frank Baron from the University of Kansas, who encouraged me and engaged in inspiring discussion regarding his own extensive Faustbook research. Eve Rosenhaft and Helga Muellneritsch from the University of Liverpool, who have provided erudite insights on recent theories of materiality of writing, sign and indexicality. Doctor Julian Reidy from the Mann archives in Zürich, with apologies for my criticism of some of his work, for sharing his insights into the overall structure of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, and for providing me with some sources that have been valuable to my work. Professor Erik Bjerck Hagen for help with updated Ibsen research, and for organizing the research group “History, Reception, Rhetoric”, which has provided a platform for presentations of works in progress. Professor Lars Sætre for his role in organizing the research school TBLR, for arranging a master class during the final phase of my work, and for friendly words of encouragement. Professor Christian Janss, for conducting said master class in a highly encouraging and pointedly critical manner. Johan Fredrik Getz, who has shared generously from his ongoing research into the history of tragedy, and whose relaxed companionship during our daily lunch break has kept me sane and motivated. 4 In addition, I cannot overstate my gratitude towards my wife, Kazima Haidri Sjøvoll, for her unending patience, and for aiding in expanding the subject of this thesis towards English language literature and towards contemporary media. Finally, I would like to thank my father, the late Professor Bjørn Holgernes. He taught me to get going when the going got tough, and to “remember the Alamo” when the going got too tough. I do nothing if not to honour his memory. 5 Contents 1. INTRODUCTION: THE QUOTED PACT 7 1.1 Delineation: Unexplored Perspectives 11 1.2 Method: Tracing a Motif Through Four Centuries, from the Perspective of a Fifth 16 1.3 A History of Faust in Literature 24 2. REJUVENATING A POORLY WRITTEN SORRY EFFORT: JOHANN SPIES’S HISTORIA VON DOKTOR JOHANN FAUSTEN (1587) 40 2.1 Reception of Spies’s Book in the Sixteenth Century and Beyond 44 2.2 The Pact 54 2.2.1 The Concept of the Pact, and the Difference Between Spoken and Written Promises 59 2.2.2 Faustus Summons the Devil and Makes Three Demands 70 2.2.3 The Twelve Articles of the Pact 79 2.2.4 The Contents of the Written Pledge 85 2.2.5 Writing and Ritual 97 2.3 Other Narrative Voices 106 3. “DIE HÖLLE SELBST HAT IHRE RECHTE”: JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE’S FAUST. EINE TRAGÖDIE 121 3.1 “Noch einmal”: The Pact’s Place in Goethe Scholarship 124 3.2 The Pact 131 3.2.1 Faust’s Aesthetic Inclination Towards Ritual 131 3.2.2 The First Type of Agreement: Mephistopheles Proposes to Faust 135 3.2.3 The Second Type of Agreement: The Old Pact 140 3.2.4 The Third Type of Agreement: Faust’s Wager 145 3.2.5 Mephistopheles, the Eater of Souls 151 3.3 Formalities of the Pact 158 3.4 Returning to the Written Pledge in Part II 168 3.5 “Juristerei” and the Old Laws of Hell 172 6 4. BETWEEN PIETY AND REVOLUTION. THOMAS MANN’S DOKTOR FAUSTUS. DAS LEBEN DES DEUTSCHEN TONSETZERS ADRIAN LEVERKÜHN, ERZÄHLT VON EINEM FREUNDE 191 4.1 Current State of Research 197 4.1.1 Which Tradition Does Mann’s Faustbook Belong To? 200 4.1.2 Pact and Implausibility 211 4.2 The Pact 221 4.2.1 Adrian’s Negotiations: Chapter 15 221 4.2.2 Adrian Leverkühn and his Demonic Laugh 230 4.2.3 Promise and Betrothal: Chapter 16 238 4.2.4 Esmeralda’s Touch: Involuntary Einteuflung? 250 4.2.5 Signature and Consummation: Chapter 19 253 4.2.6 Signature and Syphilis 259 4.3 Demonic Figurations 272 4.3.1 Rational Language and Demonic Music: The Apollonian and the Dionysian 277 4.3.2 Adrian Leverkühn’s Work Note: A Change of Perspective 291 4.4 The Interpreter’s Role: Returning from Adrian’s Madness 305 5. CONCLUSIONS: THE AMBIGUITY OF PACTS WITH THE DEVIL 322 WORKS CITED 329 7 1. Introduction: The Quoted Pact Johannes Faustus, or Jörg Faustus, or Georg Faustus, lived either in Helmstadt or in Knittlingen sometime during the first decades of the sixteenth century. He was born into an age that considered the act of pledging one’s soul to the Devil in writing not only a realistic offence, but also one punishable by mutilation and death. A fictionalised account of his life was chronicled in Johann Spies’s publication Historia von Doktor Johann Fausten in 1587, the same year that midwife Valpurga Hausmännin was tortured and executed in Dillingen, accused of writing and signing a pact with the Devil, amongst other acts of harmful apostasy. The work was meant to serve a dual purpose: Entertainment and moral education. It warned the proud and the curious of the dangers of devil worship and apostasy, while rewarding the curiosity of those same readers with a generous offering of devilish spectacles. Doctor Faustus’s infernal pact allowed him to transcend the boundaries of his peers’ experience, and, as a literary device, it allowed the God-fearing publisher Johann Spies to present to his readership a surfeit of amorality, debauchery, gluttony and at least the promise of forbidden insights – implicitly referring all criticism back to the infernal document, reportedly written by Faustus himself, that is embedded in the book’s sixth chapter. The book’s legacy within Western literary history is extensive: The Faustian pact motif reappears again and again in works of literature and each time it does, it creates a conflict between that context that gave birth to it and the work in which it appears. Three and a half centuries after Spies published his Historia, writing and signing a pact with the Devil was no longer a punishable offence. However, as a literary motif, it was revived by Thomas Mann, who has his protagonist Adrian Leverkühn announce to bewildered onlookers during the final chapter of the fictional biography Doktor Faustus (1947) that he has signed himself away to the Devil. Readers of this work have been no less bewildered by the presence of this motif in Mann’s novel than those fictional onlookers are as a fever-ridden Leverkühn states that he expects the Devil to come and collect his soul because of the pact that he wrote in his own blood. Scholars have been hard at work since the book was first published to banish the Devil from it, claiming – with increasing fervour in recent 8 decades – that there is no pact, no Devil and nothing demonic in it. The pact and its effects are thought to be limited either to the narrator Serenus Zeitblom’s elaborate mystification of his friend, or to Adrian Leverkühn’s diseased mind. These modes of reading have obscured the peculiar effect that the pact motif has on Mann’s novel as a whole, which is directly comparable to the motif’s function in the first Faustbook. There is undeniably a pact motif in Adrian Leverkühn’s fictional biography, it is undeniably adopted from that first Faustian work, and it comes about as a result of the protagonist’s interaction with a personified Devil. Furthermore, the pact motif affects not only the way that Adrian Leverkühn composes music, but also the way in which his biography is presented. Thomas Mann’s adoption of this motif entails a colouring of his narrative, both within those sections of the book that are at the mercy of Leverkühn’s form of expression and outside of them: The old pact motif, adopted from Spies’s book, is staged as a foreign element in the organism that is Mann’s Doktor Faustus, and among the large number of references, quotes and paraphrases that this work contains, the motif has a particular position, because its presence influences both the arc of Leverkühn’s story and the form of the work. A sixteenth- century system of belief that allows for a pact with the Devil is brought into the work, and this staged anomaly spawns several points of conflict that some recent readers of the work have attempted to resolve by removing or bracketing the pact motif. It is this conflict between an elaborately quoted material – a material that is clearly marked within the work as foreign to it – and the primary narrative voice that motivates this current study. This study is born out of the conflict inherent in Mann’s novel, but the following will demonstrate that the mechanics of the motif in that work is directly comparable to the motif’s figurations in two other Faustian works as well. The primary hypothesis to be tested in the following is that the pact motif appears to be present in a similar manner in several works that employ it: It is made up of text passages elaborately marked as text that has come to the work from the outside and that is embedded in the work, but it also creates an unsolvable, persistent conflict between the adopted, quoted material and other voices in the work.