Other Narrative Voices

level of moral ambiguity that, in its systematic implementation, should not be ignored.

The Historia is told not through one voice of absolute moral authority, but through several voices of varying moral standpoints: Besides the narrator’s voice, there are the voices of an editor or commentator, Doctor Faustus, Mephostophiles, the doctor’s servant Wagner, and, in the background, the demon Auerhahn. In addition, there are all those voices that scholars have been hard at work identifying since the Historia first garnered scholarly attention: Hidden quotes, paraphrases and

references. Disentangling these voices, and shedding light on their interrelations, requires that the work is taken seriously; the variances in style that are pointed out below have been regarded as weaknesses in the narrative style of the work and as results of one or more less than ingenious authors’ fumbling attempts at writing popular fiction. This perspective will be replaced in this study by the idea that many Faustian works share one narratological trait, which is their staged impurity, their elaborate positioning of noticeably incommensurable voices and points of view that affect one another and create unsolvable, persistent conflicts.

Spies’s Historia, regardless of the identity of its author, authors or compiler, is a patchwork of quotes and paraphrases, most of them known as such but probably still some unknown, from highly heterogeneous sources. In other words, the book contains a plethora of voices that sometimes are distinguishable from one another, and sometimes not, and which are tied together by the voice of the narrator. Scholars have worked very hard to identify the various hidden sources scattered throughout the book. This endeavour has been prompted by the narrator’s failure to identify his sources: The Historia hides its sources, or at least makes no effort to identify them.

Consequently, the unity of the narrator’s voice is not necessarily challenged by the wealth of other voices that it is intermingled with. When, for example, the narrator includes long, almost unedited passages from Hartmann Schedel’s Buch der Chroniken, it is a matter of impersonation: It is still the narrator who voices these sections, although Hartmann Schedel wrote down the words first. The singular identity of the text’s point of origin, its voice, is no more confounded in those

sections of the book where only parts of the source are quoted, while other parts are changed, such as the verse from Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff in Chapter Seven, where the Historia’s narrator has substituted “Seel / Leib vnd Gut” (HDF, p. 23) for Brant’s “Lib und Blut” (Brant 2011, p. 118 / chapter heading to Chapter Three). The narrator’s implied statement remains the same through these quotes and paraphrases:

“I’m telling you this”. There are, however, some points in the narrative where the narrator explicitly gives up his own voice for another voice, most notably in the two chapters where Faustus’s written pledges are presented, and here, the implicit statement is very emphatically expressing the opposite: “I’m not telling you this, I’m showing it to you.” The narrator becomes an editor, and presents to the reader a piece of embedded text that the narrator does not wish to be held accountable for, but which is ascribed to an actor who is present on the book’s diegetic level. The narrator distances himself from the contents of Faustus’s first written pledge in the sixth chapter not only by identifying the document as something that someone else wrote, but also by explaining that he includes it only as horrid example and warning:

Dieses war ein grewlich vnd erschrecklich Werck / vnd ist solche Obligation / nach seinem elenden Abschied / in seiner Behausung gefunden worden.

Solches wil ich zur Warnung vnd Exempel aller frommen Christen melden / damit sie dem Teuffel nicht statt geben / vnd sich an Leib vnd Seel mögen verkürtzen / wie dann D. Faustus baldt hernach seinen armen famulum vnnd Diener auch mit diesem Teuffelischen Werck verführt hat. (HDF, p. 22) This trope of including or staging found material in a narrative bolsters the

plausibility of the story, and also removes the narrator’s responsibility for the godless, apostatical nature of the work. Apostasy in the Historia emanates from Faustus’s pact, and a piece of material evidence that absolves the narrator is here given, placing the responsibility for all those events that hinge on the pact, and thus for the primary driving force in the narrative, on Faustus. The pact forces the narrator’s writing hand, and here he has demonstrated that he is not responsible for the narrative’s

un-Christian inception.

Faustus’s voice is different from that of the narrator, marked not only by the narrator’s insistence that his hand did not compose the infernal pact, but also by a grammatical oddity that may have slipped through the very fine-meshed net of

Historia scholars: Faustus’s spelling is different from the narrator’s. The word

“vnterthänig”, used repeatedly in the chapters immediately preceding the pact chapter, is here spelled “vnderthenig”.¹²⁴ The book’s grammatical inconsistency is very well known, and is incidentally something that Thomas Mann’s Faustian book’s narrator Serenus Zeitblom makes a point of, but this single anomalous occurrence of a word that is used several times in this part of the book marks a difference between the sixth chapter and the chapters surrounding it. The narrator’s claim regarding this document may actually be true, to some degree: There may be a secondary source for it. The identity of this source is of no great consequence; the indication that the document that sets the book’s narrative in motion is attributable to some voice other than the narrrator’s is. There are so far two voices present in the pact chapters: The narrator’s voice may be called primary, in that it precedes, is a prerequisite for, and quantitatively overshadows this other voice, which the narrator ascribes to the doctor.

However, there is also a third, paratextual voice in this pivotal section of the book:

The author of the margin comments.

The margins of the book are riddled with comments, distinguished from the main narrative by their physical placement: their placement on the page’s physical space indicates that they are paratext, text besides text.¹²⁵ Another indication of this is their temporal distance to the narrative: They are in some form or another all

comments on the narrative, and therefore they follow behind the act of narration in time. This indicates that they were written by an editor, or by the publisher, or even by the author, but after the story was narrated. Throughout the book they consist of 25 bookmarks that neutrally refer to events in the narrative,¹²⁶ 31 place names relevant to the story,¹²⁷ and finally two prayers for protection,¹²⁸ five theological

124 Spelled “vnterthänig” in Chapters 2, 3 (twice) and 4.

125 The term paratext as used by Gerard Genette in Seuils (1987) is discussed in 3.2.5.

126 HDF, pp. 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26 (x2), 28, 29 (x2), 32, 37, 44, 47, 51, 53, 57, 68, 103, 120, 121.

127 HDF, pp. 60 (x4), 61 (x4), 63 (x4), 64 (x4), 65 (x2), 66 (x2), 67 (x3), 68, 70 (x4), 71 (x3).

reflections, proverbs or moral judgments,¹²⁹ and one proper name.¹³⁰ The latter is the instance that most sharply separates the voice present in these comments from the narrator’s: The proper name is one that the narrator refuses to give in the main body of text, due to this person’s high status and the ridiculous nature of his encounter with Doctor Faustus, while the author of the margin comments has no such qualms. The narrator explains, discreetly: “die Person aber (...) hab’ ich mit Namen nicht nennen wöllen / denn es ein Ritter vnd geborner Freyherr war” (HDF, p. 79). To this, a margin comment bluntly adds that the man’s name was Erat Baro ab Hardeck. Erat Baro from Hardeck is a man whose identity beyond his name is currently

unidentified, but who undoubtedly had in some way irked or amused the author of the margin comments. Obvious, then, is the difference between these two writers: The margin comments reveal something that is explicitly not revealed on the diegetic level. Despite the enthusiastic morality of the former elsewhere, the author of the margin comments is here being less ethically sensitive than the narrator.

The two chapters that contain Faustus’s pledges are separated from the narrator’s discourse, actively set apart from the narrative, and it is also next to these anomalous chapters that the margin comments take on a unique form. Only two of the margin comments are prayers for protection, and both are inserted into the margins of the book next to the doctor’s written pledges. The first pact is accompanied by an emphatic “O HERR Gott behüt”, the second with “Behüt Allmächtiger Gott”. Even the voice behind the margin comments distances itself from the embedded documents and the terrible incantations that they contain. These prayers for protection bracket Faustus’s written pledge, placing it in a ritually separated narrative space where neither the narrator nor the author of the margin comments can manipulate it directly, and instead resort to commenting on it before, after and during its presentation. This space is marked as an unholy, dangerous space, containing words that the narrator

128 HDF, pp. 23, 104.

129 HDF, pp. 17, 48, 104, 108, 110.

130 HDF, p. 79.

could not utter himself, conceivably because they are performative words that threaten the utterer’s salvation, and the document in and of itself is capable of tempting Christians to sin, as it did according to the narrator’s introduction to it in Chapter Five with Faustus’s servant Wagner. The first of the two pledges is placed in a narrative space that is isolated from the rest of the book: By the blank spaces separating one chapter from the next, by the narrator’s assertion that he includes the document as a terrifying and dangerous example, and by the prayers for protection that the voice of the margin comments supplies. Despite these efforts, the document is very much present in the narrative. It attests to the pact that is the story’s engine, and it reappears at key points in the story. Although the typeset and format are the same as the surrounding text, the written pledges are both staged as material items that are introduced as strange elements into the relative unity of the narrator’s discourse. The signature that is included in the first document, but not the second, is the final, conclusive piece of evidence that this document is not represented through the narrator’s voice: Doctor Faustus, whether impersonated by the narrator, author, editor, or simply faithfully repeated by the typesetter, owns the voice that is uttering the statements contained within Faustus’s written pledge.

There are three voices present in and around the book’s pivotal sixth chapter:

The narrator, who included the document, Doctor Faustus, whose left hand held the pen that produced it, and the author of the margin comments, who isolated it from the rest of the text with prayers for protection. This argument is not dependent on the pact chapter objectively being written by someone other than the Speyer author, which is a question of minimal interest; the chapter is staged as written by someone else, down to the minor detail of Faustus’s spelling. One consequence is that neither the narrator, nor the author of the margin comments, nor the publisher is to be held morally responsible for the pact’s contents, or for its consequences throughout the narrative.

These consequences include every immoral, forbidden or scandalous action and event in the Spies-book, cleverly blamed only on Doctor Faustus and on his infernal pact.

The author-editor stages himself as a faithful chronicler who can do nothing other than report the obscenities that Faustus has left in writing, signed by his own hand, for posterity to discover.

Although the moral integrity of the narrator is protected through this setting apart of Faustus’s written pledge, the pact and its written confirmation also end up threatening the purity, the unity, of the narrator’s voice. A fourth voice can be added to these three different voices in the book, and this fourth is invited into the book through Faustus’s incantations and pact: That of Mephostophiles. Due to the way in which the narrator occasionally conveys dialogue, his voice at some points

impersonates the various actors’ voices. Sometimes, dialogue is clearly marked through verbs indicating direct speech.¹³¹ At other times, it is indirectly repeated or paraphrased, identifiable as dialogue by the use of the third-person case.¹³² This indirect style of narration, where the act of narration is clearly set apart from its focal object, dominates the Historia. However, there are also sections where it is

impossible to structurally separate the narrator’s voice from the voice that it quotes.

Mephostophiles’s voice is strongly dissonant with the narrator’s voice, so those sections in which they become structurally interchangeable are disharmonious meeting points of conflicting views.

During the preliminary negotiations between Doctor Faustus and

Mephostophiles, immediately preceding the pact chapter, one of the demands that the evil spirit makes of the doctor is that Faustus shall be prohibited from allowing himself to have his mind changed and be convinced to repent: “Zum fünfften / daß er sich nicht wölle verführen lassen / so ihne etliche wöllen bekehren” (HDF, p. 20).

The line is written in the third person, and is not a quoted line of dialogue. It is paraphrased in a style resembling free indirect discourse. By using words generally associated with the language of Christian believers in describing Mephostophiles’s attitude towards a religious conversion, the author firmly roots the list of demands in Mephostophiles’s language and perspective. Here, temptation (Verführung) threatens to lead to conversion (Bekehrung) from what in this section is the correct system of

131 “Doctor Faustus klagte vnnd weynete die gantze Nacht / also daß ihme der Geist in dieser Nacht wieder erschiene / sprach ihm zu: Mein Fauste (...)” (HDF, p. 118).

132 “Er meynet der Teuffel wer nit so schwartz / als man ihn mahlet / noch die Hell so heiß / wie mann davon sagte / etc” (HDF, p. 21).

belief: A satanic one. In the Lutheran translation of the Gospel of John, which is frequently alluded to and paraphrased in the Historia, the word verführen is used twice by the Pharisees in the sense of leading astray in a religious sense (John 7:13, 7:47). In another of the book’s major influences, Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, the word is used similarly, to describe a ruler’s potential conversion to evil ways: “gott liesz, das mancher fürst regiert / langzyt, wann er nit würd verfürt / und unmilt wurd und ungerecht” (Brant 2011, pp. 258-259). The word is also used within the Historia by the narrator to describe Wagner’s temptation through Faustus’s written pledge, this time in the sense of being led from the righteous path: The narrator promises in Chapter Five to later describe “(...) wie dann D. Faustus baldt hernach seinen armen famulum vnnd Diener auch mit diesem Teuffelischen Werck verführt hat” (HDF, p.

22). The word always has a negative connotation when it describes changes in mental inclinations.¹³³ Being tempted to convert back to Christianity has a negative

connotation in Mephostophiles’s list of counter-demands; while Christianity

throughout the work is deemed the correct world view, at this point it is the incorrect world view because Mephostophiles possesses the moral perspective. However, the list of counter-demands is not quoted dialogue or even paraphrased dialogue; the spirit is referred to in the third person in the first of Mephostophiles’s demands. An omniscient narrator thus impersonally repeats in the third person a perspective which belongs to a diegetic actor.

This instance of what Mieke Bal (2009) calls interference consists of a blending of the actor’s voice with the narrator’s: The Historia’s narrator’s voice is tainted by Mephostophiles’s, and the latter is embedded in the former. An

“impersonal language situation” (Bal 2009, p. 54), identifiable by the narrator’s use of the third person, indicates that the narrator has not let another voice take over for his own – as he does when Faustus’s infamous document is presented in the sixth chapter, or as he does when he is directly quoting dialogue, but the moral perspective

133 Grimm: “auf geistige thätigkeit übertragen; verleiten, vom wege abführen, stets in schlimmer bedeutung” (Grimm, vol. 25, 361, “verführen”).

is incommensurable with the narrator’s. The consequence of this interference is that, in this particular instance, the narrator’s voice is formally inseparable,

indistinguishable, from the actor’s: “When there is text interference, narrator’s text and actor’s text are so closely related that a distinction into narrative levels can no longer be made” (Bal 2009, p. 56). This blending results in a momentary

destabilization of the narrator’s moralistic voice.

The narrator’s voice, when interfered with by Mephostophiles’s voice, formally differs from others present in the book, a fact most easily confirmed by comparing it with the narrator’s voice when it is influenced in the same manner by the apostate doctor. During the negotiations between Doctor Faustus and the demon that lead to their pact, a sharp line is drawn between Faustus’s offhand, untidy and careless demands that he makes of the demon, and Mephostophiles’s precise, formal and convoluted counter-demands. The confusing and confused use of pronouns in Faustus’s second set of demands contrasts the syntactic precision with which the narrator subsequently presents Mephostophiles’s final counter-demands. Faustus’s second list is explicitly directed towards the spirit: Faustus “(...) begert vom Geist wie folgt” (HDF, p. 20), yet the subject of the first demand is not the spirit, but

Mephostophiles: “Erstlich / daß er auch ein Geschickligkeit / Form vnnd Gestalt eines Geistes möchte an sich haben vnd bekommen” (HDF, p. 20). Contextually, this first demand makes little or no sense when read as a demand Faustus makes of the spirit.

The sentence rather concerns Faustus himself, and so the subject, which should be

“der Geist” if it followed the form the list is given through its introduction and which the rest of the list conforms to, is Faustus. Faustus wants to have the abilities, form and appearance of a spirit, yet it is very vaguely and imprecisely formulated, as is the rest of his list of six requests. As Mephostophiles presents his first counter-demand, it immediately becomes apparent that there is a significant difference between the two voices. While Faustus in the above quoted introduction to his demands “wants the following from the spirit”, Mephostophiles requires that he in return follows certain articles, which is a juridical term for sections in a legal text or a contract: “daß er im dagegen auch etlich fürgehaltene Artickel wölle leisten” (HDF, p. 20). This juridical

precision is reflected in the first of these counter-demands as well, which is impeccably clear in its prudent identification of actors: “Erstlich / daß er / Faustus / verspreche vnd schwere / daß er sein / des Geistes / eygen seyn wolte” (HDF, p. 20).

There is no confusion of pronouns in Mephostophiles’s list. His language is unequivocal in its juridical precision: He, Faustus, promises and swears that he will be his, the spirit’s, own. The contrast between wishes and legal articles underlines the difference in approach between Faustus and Mephostophiles. To Faustus, the

exchange is a route to fulfillment of his vaguely formulated inclinations, while to Mephostophiles it is a legally binding, contractual exchange of services. The Devil of Faustian literature is, as previously indicated, consistently a business-minded Devil, who places great emphasis on and trust in formalities of law. The difference in precision between the two lists that are presented in the same chapter can hardly be construed as accidental, and should be seen as a deliberate staging of dissonant material: Mephostophiles’s voice is established as markedly different from Faustus’s.

Mephostophiles is also not purely characterised as a malicious spirit in the book. Towards the conclusion of the Historia, after Faustus has realised and accepted that his body and soul are forfeit due to his written pledge,¹³⁴ Mephostophiles

consoles him and tells him that he shall not suffer like the other damned souls in Hell, but that the Devil has promised to give him a body and soul made of steel: “hat dir doch der Teuffel verheissen / er wölle dir einen stählin Leib vnnd Seel geben / vnd solt nicht leyden / wie andere Verdampte” (HDF, p. 119). The narrator immediately judges this idea to be false and contrary to the Holy Book: “falsch vnd der heyligen Schrifft zu wider” (HDF, p. 119), but why does Mephostophiles tell this lie to Faustus at all, when the doctor is already irredeemably condemned and does not need to be further convinced? The inception of this idea that the worthy apostate shall be given a privileged place in Hell is not negated by the narrator’s immediate comment claiming

134 “Die 24. Jar deß Doctor Fausti waren erschienen / vnd eben in solcher Wochen erschiene ihm der Geist / vberantwort ihme seinen Brieff oder Verschreibung / zeigt im darneben an / daß der Teuffel auff die ander Nacht seinen Leib holen werde” (HDF, p. 118). Faustus himself believes that because of his written pledge, his body is forfeit: “Doctor Faustus / der nicht anders wuste / dann die Versprechung oder Verschreibung müste er mit der Haut bezahlen (...)” (HDF, p. 119).