Tag Archives: Fiction

Faustian Pacts

Leave a reply

I don’t remember when first I learned of Faust and the Faustian pact, but it was long before I’d read Marlowe, Goethe and Mann or heard Liszt’s Faust symphony or Gounod’s opera. I knew about gambling at quite a young age because my father used to go to the races, and he regularly enjoyed a game of poker with ‘the boys’ played on a card table set up in the living-room. So it was not surprising that my early understanding of the Faustian Pact was as a type of gambling: balancing loss and reward within a framework of risk.

As a child, I used to wonder what I would be willing to risk to be thinner, smarter, taller, more self-assured, relaxed, calmer. What would I be prepared to give up in the future to be the person I want to be NOW. Of course, for a child, the future is a vague and watery concept and not overly desirable: to be grown up is to be like the older people in your life – not an attractive prospect at all.

I was in my twenties when I read the Fausts of Mann, Goethe and Marlowe – in that order. I read the Mann first (it was during my Mann phase). and being first and also about a musician, it lodged firmly in me, far more so than the other versions. Through the various stations of my life – and at my advanced age there have been quite a few – there have been several re-readings of Mann and Goethe, and each time I have posed the same question: what would I be willing to do and to forfeit, to be or to have X, Y or Z?

The question has changed weight with the years. What was a simple equation of desire when younger has gained considerable moral complexity with age. After all, there are other people to consider and a world in flux; personal gain must be justified and deserved. Literature’s various Fausts paid little mind to broader moral concerns, in fact the contrary occurred in that each case can be seen as involving an exclusively egocentric desire/choice/decision, and like a child, none of them gave much thought to the pay-up time in 24 years.

My consideration of a Faustian Pact has tended to remain in the personal sphere – I’d like to think it was because of literary taste and intellectual curiosity, but I expect life’s dissatisfactions and disappointments provided if not a driving force, more than the occasional shove – but with the dominance of Trump and the surge in right-wing nationalism the notion of the Faustian Pact is being played out in the public arena. 

How on earth do those Republican congress people live with themselves, with their craven toadying, their bending the knee and tugging the forelock to Trump? And the praise they heap on him, fuelling his vanity (one cannot help but wonder at a grown man having such need). And this is all done because they fear the consequences if they cross him, and the consequent spoiling of their ambitions. But what is the role of a congress person if all they can do is agree with the great leader? This is not representing their constituents: the job they were elected to do, they are not doing. Of course they would say they are protecting their job in the future, but does that justify 4 years of neglecting the people who voted for them? 

It’s big business for the devil in Washington DC these days. Indeed, there’s so much work the devil has needed to co-opt a team of AI (the boys at Big Tech have been unsurprisingly obliging).

As for Trump himself, narcissism has no need of a pact, Faustian or otherwise. The narcissist only needs to please himself. Everything is his due. No payment, no pay up time. Corruption? It’s irrelevant to the narcissist; he takes what he wants, what is his right. He may pay some mind to his family, but I suspect none of them cross him – except perhaps Melania. 

No deals with the devil in the Executive Residence, so it’s fortunate there’s so much business elsewhere. 

And I cannot help but wonder what Mann would make of all this, Mann, who lived through the Nazi period, who went into exile to escape Hitler’s regime, who spoke out against Hitler, whose own Faust draws on and reflects upon those terrible years.

IMAGINATION SOUP. How novels begin.

1 Reply

It was 2009, a bright day in early spring, when I took the afternoon off work and made my way to Heidi Gallery and gardens. The gardens were in bud, there was a shadow of brilliant green on the deciduous trees, the river seemed less brown than usual in the sharp white light. And the birds! A rowdy party of magpies, peewees, and rainbow lorikeets flapped through the still air. I meandered around until the lengthening shadows made it uncomfortably cool and then made my way to the gallery itself. There I found an exhibition of the work of Kathy Temin. I’d never neard of her, knew nothing of her art or her background, so I entered the long room of the main exhibit with no expectations. I found myself in a forest of white trees constructed out of white fake fur and soft stuffing. Some trees were stocky, others were slender; there were trees formed from squashed soft spheres piled one on top of the other, there were cone-shaped trees and slender cylindrical ones; some trees were not much more than a metre tall, others stretched to two or three metres.

Kathy Temin. My Monument: White Forest

As I moved among these soft white structures, I was simultaneously silenced by them, dwarfed by them and swaddled by them. I couldn’t have left if I wanted to. For reasons I could not explain, nor at the time did I want to explain, being immersed in Kathy Temin’s sculptural landscape had transported me back to Auschwitz. It was not Auschwitz 1, so nicely spruced up for the visitors with its famous gates and infamous words, Arbeit macht frei, but Auschwitz 2, Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its equally famous peaked gatehouse under which the trains entered the camp, stopping a moment later at the long platform where a clipped Teutonic nod decided who would die and who would live a little longer.

Kathy Temin’s white fake fur trees took me back to Auschwitz.

In November, 1999, Dot and I spent an afternoon walking the paths and woodlands of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s a huge area and apart from a few locals taking a short-cut via the old death camp and a small group of bored Polish schoolboys, we were alone. We wandered the pretty woodlands still rosy with late autumn colour where over half a century earlier Jews were amassed at the peak times, waiting their turn for the gas chambers. We stood silently in the ruins of Crematoria 2, 3, 4 and 5 where hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women and children were reduced to ash. We wandered the umpteen columns and rows of wooden huts. We stood in front of those tiered bunk benches each about 3 metres wide where as many as 12 Jews were crammed in together, the sick, the dying, and the steadfastly-surviving.

At the end of the railway tracks and situated between the ruins of Crematoria 2 and 3 is the International Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz. Built in 1967 in Soviet brutalism style, it consists of huge cement blocks in a geometric pile with plaques set in the brick work under foot. It’s big this monument, but it had no effect on me. The place, this Auschwitz-Birkenau, was monument enough.

Kathy Temin’s sculpture was called My Monument: White Forest. I did not learn the title until I was back home reading the exhibition catalogue. Sue Cramer, one of the curators of the exhibition wrote: ‘If not for the title of Kathy Temin’s sculptural environment My Monument: White Forest, we might not at first recognise this maze-like arrangement of furry white, oddly shaped trees as a monument.’

I knew it immediately.

Cramer continued: ‘Temin describes the work as a “memorial garden, an attempt to translate the feeling I had when visiting memorial sites in Eastern Europe.”’

Touché.

Monuments are an art form designed to convey people, places and events from the past, as well as abstract qualities of courage, goodness, freedom – even memory itself.

At the time of Temin’s exhibition I had only vague thoughts about the novel that would become The Memory Trap. I saw My Monument: White Forest and soon after, emerging from the imagination’s soup, came the character of Nina Jameson, an international consultant on memorial projects. And so the novel began – nothing about Auschwitz, nothing about the horrors of war (the loose-limbed imagination doesn’t work that way), rather four main characters with a shared childhood in seventies Melbourne, four people whose hopes and yearnings, whose loves and obsessions, whose uses and abuses of memory have all shaped the course of their adult lives. There are monuments in The Memory Trap, but as well there’s music and marriage and a swag of very human mistakes.

I’m fascinated by the imagination, I’m gripped by its loiterings and lurchings, but most important of all, I am grateful for it.