America Is Faustian

Gregory Laski interviews Ed Simon about “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.”

By Gregory LaskiOctober 8, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• Nonfiction

IN HIS NEW BOOK Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Ed Simon pursues what he argues is “the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told.” That story is the human temptation to part with our principles in exchange for dominion, money, artistic inspiration, or knowledge. In short: To sign and seal Satan’s contract for a promise we can’t resist.

Simon’s 12th book, Devil’s Contract delivers dazzling readings of subjects ranging from Marlowe and Goethe to the Rolling Stones and AI. It’s an approach that few others could pull off. But Simon balances dexterity with specialized knowledge and the writer’s attention to craft. In August 2024, Simon and I had a wide-ranging email conversation about his newest book, American political culture, academia, writing, the public humanities, and other subjects.  

¤

GREGORY LASKI: You mention in your acknowledgments that you first imagined the book that became Devil’s Contract two decades ago. Tell us a bit about its origin story. What drew you to the topic?

ED SIMON: The germinating idea for Devil’s Contract first came to me in a Chipotle on Baum Boulevard in Pittsburgh in 2006, though as far as I know, Mephistopheles wasn’t present. I distinctly remember that, because I was grabbing lunch on the day that I started my master’s degree in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. I was gravitating towards early modern literature as my focus at that time. While I was eating, I was thinking about what sorts of things I could focus my research on. Not yet familiar with how granular academic scholarship could be, I thought “history of the entire Faust legend” as a possibility. It was an idea I kept coming back to—I think around 2014 I sketched out a lot of what the overall structure of the book would be—but it was mostly embryonic until very recently. What drew me to the topic, beyond all the regular reasons people are interested in the Devil, was the very human nature of Faust, that he’s not monstrous per se, yet he’s guilty of the heinous thing. I found the drama of the tale very compelling.

Did you write the book all at once, or across the years?

I’d say that a good 90 percent of the book was written after it was contracted. There were some portions integrated within that were written maybe a few years earlier, but the bulk of it was composed in about nine months.

Wow! Do your books always unfold at that pace?

That’s a tougher question to answer than it might seem, since so much of writing happens without writing, if that makes sense. Those nine months might be a bit misleading, since so much of this particular book “happened” in the two decades before. A lot of writing happens before writing, often unconsciously. So much of creating a book isn’t just composition, but also meditating, stewing, calculating. But generally, once I have a specific, detailed plan of attack, the execution happens fairly quickly.

In a recent New York Times essay, you deploy the trope of the Faustian bargain to interpret the career of Ohio senator J. D. Vance, whom Donald Trump selected as his candidate for vice president. In the Devil’s Contract, you write that “America itself was a Faustian bargain,” which was signed on the bodies of enslaved and exterminated peoples. What is the fate of the Devil’s contract as an explanatory tool for 21st-century politics in the United States?

My own scholarly background is a combination of early modern British literary studies, primarily 17th century, and early American literature from that same time frame. One of the benefits of my doctoral education at Lehigh University was that a lot of the critical work I read in that secondary discipline was from American Myth and Symbol School criticism, figures like F. O. Matthiessen, Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Richard Slotkin. That kind of overriding argument that America is a Faustian bargain very much fits into my way of interpreting the country.

For that particular supposition, I drew a lot from the great Leslie Fiedler, who could aphoristically speak in that sort of way, but more than just a gimmick. There is something useful in that argument, I think. America is Faustian because America is contractual, covenantal, textual. We’re a profoundly literary nation, defined by words—the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—in a manner that’s unique and very modern.

That contract which is America promises so much—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—but that of course obscures the atrocities on which the nation was founded. American politics has always had religion at its core, even if—especially if—the nation’s ostensibly secular. We’re always the city on a hill, the last best hope, and so on, in our imaginations. I think that anything which conjures the angels brings up the Devil as well, and that a working knowledge of Faust behooves us if we’re to understand that.

You’re a PhD-holding scholar—but, up to this point, all of your books have come out with trade presses, not university presses. Do you see yourself as a scholar first or as a writer first?

Well, a few of the books have come out from academic, if not university presses, such as Bloomsbury Academic or Fortress. I also am currently working on two titles for a more traditional university press, but it’s true that the bulk of what I’ve written is either at a para-academic press or a trade press. If forced to make a choice, I’d say that I’m a writer rather than a scholar, but I think some of that comes out of the way the bureaucracy of academe operates, since I want my writing to do the same things that I wanted my scholarship to do—make arguments, articulate interpretations, expand knowledge, even cause disagreements.

Speaking of the protocols of academia, I wonder how your peripheral relationship to traditional faculty life has shaped your work—how you write and what you choose to write about? You’ve been hailed as a literary critic who is reviving the craft, and yet I am struck by the type of people who usually get to speak with authority about the practice. For example, The Chronicle recently published a roundtable on a Yale professor’s new book on close reading. The book closes with a coda that situates the rise of the public humanities in the defunding of academic labor, and yet the forum’s interlocutors all had full-time jobs in elite departments of English.

An important thing about my relationship to the public humanities is that I’m not here to convert everyone to writing in a particular way, which also requires me to emphasize that, in many ways, the public humanities require the parallel existence of traditional, peer-reviewed scholarly writing as a resource to be relied on. My own public writing wouldn’t make sense without my scholarly background. I draw entirely from my training as a PhD, in terms of research, what I write about, sensibility, and so on.

I don’t really want to comment too much on the Chronicle thing. Given that they’re the trade publication for higher education, it’s actually fair, in that particular example, that what they relied on was input from others in the profession. If I can push back a bit, I think that regardless of whether perceived gatekeepers (or whatever you want to call them) are those who are allowed to speak with authority on these topics, others adjacent to the discipline are speaking on them anyhow, and often with larger platforms. Economic necessity has, in an ironic way, bolstered the public humanities as young scholars with academic training have gravitated towards criticism that’s easily accessible online, and often read quite widely. So I think the terms of the whole situation have altered.

You recently took on a post as “special faculty in public humanities” at Carnegie Mellon University. What does that role entail, and how do you define the “public humanities”?

That’s a great question—I think that public humanities are in part defined by what they are not, which is why it’s important not to reduce them to “popularization.” There’s nothing wrong with popularization, with translating scholarship into something understandable to the public at large, but I think of public humanities as being a unique means of producing knowledge, a mode, register, and genre in its own right.

When you think of the sort of writing that is done in the public humanities at places like n+1, The New Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I do very much think that the genre can be explained by a series of magazines and sites, it’s not just popularization, but also an attempt at engaging in a novel way with novel arguments, even while it’s also work that can speak to the nonspecialized. In some ways, the public humanities return academic arguments to a kind of early modern Republic of Letters, something that existed before the rise of the research university in its modern guise. That the public humanities are intended to be read as widely as possible is not incidental either.

At CMU, one of the things that I hope to do, in addition to continuing my own writing, is to think about the ways in which universities can begin to more visibly engage with the public humanities, particularly in the training of graduate students.

Do you have a favorite example of public humanities work that you share with students?

This might be a cop-out, but I encourage my students to check Arts & Letters Daily every day as part of their writing life, because I think that the public humanities is a genre that, as much as we as writers might want to produce for posterity, is very present-based. Every day, there are new, brilliant pieces that get featured, and to be intimately familiar with that process feels as if you’re part of an ongoing conversation.

You’re based in Pittsburgh, a city with a rich, dense cultural landscape, spanning the performing, visual, and literary arts. Do you think the “arts” resonate with public audiences and funders in a way that the “humanities” don’t?

I think that that’s probably the case, though certainly there are exceptions. My friend and colleague at CMU, David Shumway, is the outgoing director of the university’s Humanities Center, which for years has hosted the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival alongside the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. That’s an exemplary model of public humanities, bringing people who aren’t necessarily academics to what’s effectively an open conference where they can hear and engage with some of the most exciting scholarship occurring today. That’s a testament to David, the university, and the trust for what they’ve accomplished.

I can personally say that when it comes to funding Belt Magazine, it is easier to receive grants for art projects than for humanities projects. That’s how both private foundations and government funding prioritize certain things. The arts certainly have a tangible quality to them—a concert you can go to, an exhibit you can see—that is less immediately obvious with the humanities.

Historians often seem to have more of a lane on the public humanities highway, with their ability to write biographies of famous people or accounts of real events. Literary scholars, on the other hand, tend to write about texts, as you do in the Devil’s Contract, which are sometimes harder for nonspecialist audiences to connect with, especially if they’ve not read them. Does that framing seem true to your experience?

Maybe a little. History as a genre has always been a big seller, in large part for the reasons you mention, while it’s true that plot recounting is less marketable. Or at least publishers think that it’s less marketable. An exception to that maybe only proves your point, in that literary biography or history does well in a way that criticism and theory don’t. There is a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, for example, that’s gotten wide coverage, but it’s about them and not Treasure Island, so it remains a history book in some ways.

That being said, there are examples of academic writers in literary studies, and not just Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt, who have had a crossover appeal. Some of it, I think, is institutional—literary scholars may just not query trade publishers as much, or if they do, it’s for fiction and not public humanities.

What are you working on now?

Always several things at once, but a project that I’m particularly excited about that I’ve been working on with my agent is something tentatively entitled Nothing Is Real: A Cultural History of the Simulation. Just as Devil’s Contract was the first trade history of Faust, this new project would examine the long philosophical history of various permutations of the belief that everything we experience is in some way an illusion, from Plato to The Matrix, Baudrillard to the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment.

¤

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, a staff writer for Lit Hub, and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions. He is a frequent contributor at several different sites, including The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Aeon, Jacobin, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Killing the Buddha, Salon, The Public Domain Review, Atlas Obscura, JSTOR Daily, and Newsweek. He is also the author of several books, including Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, which published in July 2024. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Ed Simon by Meg Finan.