Faust – Archaeologies of the Weird


The Vinciolo Journal turns 1 year old January 5th, two days after J.R.R. Tolkien’s Birthday, so in celebration of both events, I am making a series of Tolkien-related posts. This is the first of several … 7 ways Saruman resembles Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and geographer John Dee.

In comparing these two figures (the visual similarities are themselves suggestive), I am in no way trying to slander John Dee or imply that he was a maniacal, power-crazed wizard. He was a humble, lonely man–as lonely as any man favoured of the Queen could possibly be, although his intellectual influence had enormous implications, not least with regard to the colonization of the New World. However, there are so many similarities between these two magicians that it cannot be easily ignored.

So, without further ado, here is my list:

1. Physical resemblance to Christopher Lee

Not only is John Dee a magician, but he looks like a wizard himself–and Christophe Lee portrayed the wizard Saruman with exquisite tact in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The flat gaze and the white beard are the chief forms of resemblance between the actor and wizard. Although Dee’s hair is not as long Lee’s Saruman, his hair may still be white, provided he is not bald beneath the black bonnet he’s wearing in his portrait. Set Saruman in black robes and attach a starched ruff around his throat and, after a haircut, you basically have John Dee.

2. Crystal balls

Saruman has his palantír while John Dee has his shewstone. Both are crystal balls they use for magically surveying the land. Made by Fëanor, greatest of the Noldor and maker of the Silmarils, the palantír stones were mostly lost in Middle Earth, except for a few. The stone seen in the film is at Orthanc in Isengard, the same stone Saruman uses to communicate with Sauron and keep track of the progress of the Fellowship of the Ring. There is another stone in that the steward of Gondor controls at Minas Tirith. As for the shewstone, or “seeing stone,” of John Dee, it is displayed currently at the British Museum. You can see it if you like. Rumour has it that it is a sacred Aztec polished obsidian stone taken from Mexico during the Spanish conquest.

John Dee's Shewstone at the British Museum — John Dee’s shewstone at the British Museum

palantir — Saruman and the Palantir of Orthanc

3. Spoke with ‘angels’

The warning Gandalf gave Saruman about the palantír, that “you never know who else might be watching,” is also applicable to Dee’s shewstone. Both crystal balls give you the power to speak with spirits–but also for the spirits to talk to you. Dee and Edward Kelley used the shewstone to communicate with angels, who gave Dee revelations from the world of the dead. Supposedly, the angelic language Dee developed called Enochian came as a result from such spiritual meetings.

In a similar way, Saruman uses his palantír to speak with a fallen ‘angel,’ Sauron. Indeed, The Silmarillion reveals that Sauron is a god-like or at least angelic being. He is one of the Maiar, the spirits who serve the Valar, though one who became corrupted by evil in his service to the Great Enemy Morgoth. When Saruman begins to peer into his palantír in search of knowledge, he discovers the Ring of Power, which he comes to desire for himself. However, he becomes twisted, desiring power above all else. In the end, he betrays the forces of the West and captures Gandalf in his tower, committing “the treason of Isengard.”

4. Consorted with a necromancer

This one was implied in #3. Edward Kelley was a necromancer who communed with angels and the dead. On the other hand, Saruman communicates with “the Necromancer,” which is a name given to the vague, evil presence that lurks in the shadows of Mirkwood in The Hobbit and later is revealed to be Sauron himself. Supposedly, Sauron was into demon summoning and raising the dead back to life at this time, instead of leading orcs to war against Gondor.

5. Polymath Wizards

Saruman and John Dee were both wizards of great learning and were capable (or thought they were capable) of using magic. Furthermore, both wizards possessed plenty of non-magical knowledge. Dee was a mathematician, cartographer, and mechanic, once in his younger years designing a bird with artificial wings that could fly. Saruman was something of a chemist as well, designing the gunpowder which his uruk-hai use to demolish the walls of Helm’s Deep.

6. Spy Network

Astonishingly, both John Dee and Saruman had spy networks. Frodo and company must worry about spies from the White Wizard as much as they worry about Sauron’s own Black Riders. In addition to the ruffians Sauron employs to infiltrate and scourge the Shire in The Return of the King, he has a swarm of crows called Crebain, which he uses to spy on the Fellowship. John Dee’s spy network consisted of a network of foreign agents abroad, many probably on the lookout for Catholics plotting in France to return to England and kill the Queen. He may also have used spirits and the magic of his shewstone to spy on enemies abroad.

7. Similarity to John Faust

At last, Saruman and John Dee are both so attracted by mysterious power that they make deals with the devil they later severely regret. They have what I call a Faust complex. Doctor John Faust was a historical scholar in Germany who is said to have made a deal with the devil, whom he summons at a crossroads at midnight in a necromantic ritual, in order to attain forbidden knowledge of magic. In the end, after squandering his time, Faust is dragged to hell by demons. His story has been adopted innumerable times: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe and Faust Parts I and II by Goethe being the two chief examples. The Godfather is another takeoff on this archetypical story: Michael Corleone makes a “deal with the devil” to enter the mob and then remains locked in, becoming supremely powerful at the price of his soul.

Saruman’s deal with Sauron is a similar complex. “There is only one Lord of the Rings,” warns Gandalf, “and he does not share power.” Saruman learns how to breed uruk-hai from Sauron and plans to ravage Middle-Earth for his new master, planning to find the One Ring for himself and become master of all. But in the end, his designs fall flat. When nature rebels and the Ents take over Isengard, a powerless Saruman is force to flee to the Shire, where he avenges himself by desolating the land. Finally (spoilers here), his longtime servant Gríma Wormtongue stabs him in the back, frustrated by his own master’s cruelty.

John Dee’s Faustian narrative is a little less extreme. Of course, his story is not fantasy, but historical. Nonetheless, Dee makes a deal with Edward Kelley to speak with angels and becomes mystified. Actually, scholars now believe Kelley created an elaborate hoax: Dee never spoke to angels directly, but through Kelley, who they supposedly possessed. Kelley may well have faked the whole thing, however. Upon his return to England, he became unable to acquire aristocratic patronage, probably because many could not see the value in his knowledge, or because they were frightened by his connections to the occult. When he died, it was of natural causes and in poverty. Real life often doesn’t follow the contours of archetypical plots. Nonetheless, Dee’s gradual isolation and loneliness as a result of his ties to the occult might have seemed damnation enough to him.

Photo Credits

Faustus woodcut: http://en205uaakersfall2010.blogspot.ca/2010/09/marlowe-dr-faustus.html

John Faust: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Georg_Faust

Palantir: http://www.tin-god.com/newswatcher-team-america-world-assassins/palantir/

Dee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee

Shewstone: http://www.flickr.com/photos/james_hastings/4429958552/

Kelley:http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/museum/Necromancy.htm

Saruman: http://www.ilsolco.com/la-sindrome-di-saruman-e-pietrangelo-buttafuoco/

Sauron: http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Sauron

Is it even possible to canonize all the things I have learned in my three and a half years studying literature at Canada’s best university to 10 items? I believe my critics will be able to deconstruct the bejesus out of this list. They’d probably base their argument on how I privilege my subjectivity over those of the “other,” namely the other people in my classes. But authors must never write for their critics. Besides, to restate everything I learned would be a heresy of paraphrase.

Lit-crit puns aside, I thought that at this point in my academic career, a retrospective analysis of what I have learned is up to order. Alas, in writing down what I learn, there is so much I must omit. Writing is an erasure as much as an act of creation. An erasure of the blank page. An erasure of infinite possibility–a terrifying possibility we can’t help but whittle down to a finite reality.

Here we go.

1. Writing is murder.

When I first came across this pronouncement, I thought my Canadian poetry teacher was using a gruesome metaphor for shock value. But ask yourself, “What gets killed when I write?” Aside from the trees that were chopped down to make the paper you’re wasting, you silence voices when you write, even as you create one. Whose voices? Those of the spirits of the dead who call after you from the whiteness of the page.

Every time you write something down, you exclude so much more. This is true even of the structure of language itself: “warm” only means “warm” because it does not mean “cool.” When you write “warm,” you murder “cool.” Still think it’s a funny metaphor? Then think about this: “male” only means “male” because it doesn’t mean “female.” So what happens when you write “male,” or write from a male voice? You murder the female. Patriarchy explained.

2. Cadence comes before meaning.

Two things here. First, what is cadence? Please read Denis Lee’s essay “Cadence, Country, Silence,” a staple essay on Canadian literature and an existential reflection/confession on what it means to be a Canadian poet–and a writer in general. Cadence means the rhythm, the music, the beat that lives inside of you. It is a different sensation for everyone. You feel it in your gut, in the ticks you feel when writing at your desk. It also suffuses place. The cadence on your home street has a particular rhythm to it. In a similar way, words, if spoken in different places, have certain nuances to them that only cadence can describe. For example, “city” means something in the United States, but something quite different in Canada, and even more different in the U.K. or Turkey. Boston, Ottawa, London, or Istanbul? The trick is to write with your proper cadence–the music that is genuine to you.

Editors searching through the slush pile know within thirty seconds or even less whether an author is good. They know before they even understand the meaning of the words they are reading. This is important: cadence comes before meaning. If an editor feels that the cadence of a writer is genuine, then they already know they are good. The content itself is secondary. Being true to yourself comes before what you have to say.

3. Texts are physical and unstable.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has two texts: an A-text and a B-text. Any critic might refer to either or both of them, but the play itself never exists absolutely as any one text. This makes Doctor Faustus an unstable text. But Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which is seventeen cantos long, went through infinitely more censorship and revisions over the course of its composition history. Wordsworth kept adding to and editing his Prelude over his lifetime, as he slid into the conservatism of his later years, producing multiple texts that chart the poem’s corresponding change. These poems are unstable. You cannot read one text and expect its absolute authority. Rather, you must read them in the knowledge that they have been chosen by textual editors.

One of the reasons for textual instability is textual materiality. Books are books. They are physical. They have hard covers against which you can hit your head in frustration as you cram for your final exam. They are burnable. They suffer water damage and texts get damaged–which is a real problem when dealing with rare medieval manuscripts. Different books make it easier or harder to read in certain ways. For example, a “perfect bind” airport paperback novel is meant to be read once and even thrown away (if you’re callous), whereas a hardcover, stitch-binding copy of Shakespeare’s collected works is meant to be read over and over again.

4. Form matters.

Poe's The Raven is inspired by a single obsessive image. Also, see his short stories The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart — Poe’s “The Raven” is inspired by a single obsessive image. Also, see his short stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Sonnets are not just 14-line poems in iambic pentameter that rhyme ababcdcdefefgg. They contain the whispers of Petrarchan love poetry within their lines, something that can be difficult to escape. For some poets and critics, sonnets symbolize a conservative tradition in poetry that revolves around the almighty iambic line, which must be rebelled against at all costs! Even a short story has a form. It is no accident that Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories–which are among the first examples of the form in literary history–revolve around an obsessive image: short stories, being short, cannot encompass more than one deeply symbolic image. (Not that this is the law today, but for nineteenth-century experimenters, it was true.) Form influences how you read literature. Form is tough. Form is political. Form is unavoidable.

5. Things happen and are done in texts.

Eternal Wanderer: a famous painting of the sublime alps, often a cover for editions of Frankenstein. Also an apt name for a literature student. — Eternal Wanderer: a famous painting of a gentleman hiker in the sublime Alps, often a cover for editions of *Frankenstein*. An apt name for a literature student.

When working on a paper for my Romantic literature class, I struggled to come up with a thesis about Frankenstein and the sublime. The course lecturer suggested, “It always helps to think in terms of what the sublime is doing in the story.” The way she phrased this sounded strange to my ears. Is there agency in texts apart from the author’s? Can the idea of the sublime itself be doing something in a story? The answer was, “Of course!” I ended up writing a fine paper about how Mary Shelley critiques the sublime as a female Romantic writer who has some distance from male Romantic aesthetic. I might have also said that the sublime was working in the story to critique conventional Romanticism. Ideas play in a text even if the author does not will it…

6. Authorial intention can be irrelevant.

A common objection in High School English classrooms is, “What if Shakespeare didn’t really mean that?” Exasperated by the complexity of Billy Shakes’ lingo, they throw their hands up in the air and choose not to believe in complexity at all. But ANYONE who has tried to write a piece of creative work, if they have put any thought into writing at all, knows that Shakespeare intended to write what he wrote (censorship, his actors’ poor memory at recollecting the text, and contemporary editing aside). When you take the time to think enough about writing, crafting your language to an advanced level, you better believe you are intending every word that you write.

However, the High School student does hint at an important point. Sometimes, a professor or teacher will create a complex argument to argue something about Shakespeare and it will seem abstract. Even a seasoned English student will doubt that Shakespeare ever really intended his listeners to understand his plays in that way. But the student would be wise not to stumble into the intentional fallacy. The author may have intended one interpretation of his text, or sometimes none in particular. Does that mean a reader can’t make more out of the author’s work than even the author saw in it? Absolutely not! Critics can explore every range of possible meaning in a text.

7. You can analyze anything.

Don’t just think because courses revolve around the “big names” of literature–the literary canon–that you cannot study the authors you love. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Browning, James, Eliot … hopefully a literature class will teach you to appreciate the greats, the saints of the religion of English literature. But why not overturn the canon and speak of an non-canonical author? I wrote my Honours thesis on Guy Gavriel Kay, who I had discovered by accident years ago and began reading for pleasure long before I started at McGill. I have now read his completed works. In literary theory, no novel, short story, poem, or play is off bounds.

: Guy Gavriel Kay

8. Topic sentences should be able to read as an independent “phantom” paragraph, or abstract.

I learned this in my first semester.

“I’ll just give you a few statistics,” President Barack Obama said in a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C. One of the people watching Obama’s speech was Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who is intimately familiar with such studies. “The part about democracy is relevant,” Putnam said. “The data show that not only is there declining trust in government, there is declining trust in other people”; although it wasn’t exclusive to them, this shift was “concentrated among these poor kids, the kids who have been left out,” Putnam said. These young people […] were becoming “extremely alienated from democratic politics.”

The above paragraph is the first part of a New Yorker article–but it is a phantom. It does not exist as a unity. Rather, it is a composite, formed of the topic sentences of the first few paragraphs of the article “Economic Inequality: a Matter of Trust?” by Amy Davidson. If you are able to write a cohesive-sounding paragraph using the topic sentences of the paragraphs in your essay, then you have a well-structured essay.

9. English teaches you a skill more than knowledge.

When I began at McGill, I wanted to know more about literature. I wanted teachers to lecture on. But towards the later portion of my degree, I had fewer and fewer lectures. Students participated more in class; we all had our different ideas and were prepared to defend them. At a given point in my second or third year, teachers became supervisors and weren’t imparting knowledge of literature onto us so directly. We became independent researchers and thinkers. We learned the rules of the game of English literature and then were able to play that game on our own–even break the rules.

If a professor tells you what a poet means in his or her poem, then be aware that theirs is not the final word. They have a theory and it might be sound and true. But English teaches you how to criticize and think for yourself. In the end, the program taught me to be confident in my ability to read and think independently. That is a skill.

Not to mention, with instant web-based communication so available, errors and misspellings emerge with frequency (some intentional, others not). English degrees can give you a skill much sought-after in the shrinking pool of people who actually know how to spell. There may yet be hope for the lot of us.

10. Reading poetry must affect you.

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT! Academia can be a vampire. Sucking the joy out of experiencing poetry and literature since the early twentieth century. Just because you exercise your faculty of critical thinking when reading poetry must NEVER prevent you from enjoying it in a visceral, existential, and sensuous way.

Mark Twain said a “classic” is a book we always wanted to have read, but never want to read. Now I actually want to read some of the classics: Byron and Marlowe in particular. Reconnecting to the fundamental experience of reading literature for enjoyment is the task they don’t–and can’t–tell you how to do in school.

Never stop loving it because you studied it. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in High Schools, where students are forced to write essays on books they should, above all, be enjoying. Only through enjoyment and pleasure can you commit a text to real memory, a memory that will follow you the rest of your life, a memory with personal value.

Poetry must affect you and it must continue to affect you. Frustrated with the insufficiency of our learning, we must, as does Goethe’s Faust, turn from the vanity of academia and reconnect to literature through fundamental experience.