The Tropes of Desire

Here is a research from 1993, performed when I thought there might be a future for me in academia; I lost that ambition long ago, but that piece harrows a depth of our Faust, worth sharing at last with a world here.


DOCTOR FAUSTUS
AND THE TROPES OF DESIRE

December 8, 1993


Euen as a boate, tost by contrary winde,
So with this loue, and that, wauers my minde.
Venus, why doublest thou my endlesse smart?

Ovid Amores II, 10
transl. Christopher Marlowe


Hell-bent passions forge the tragic parabola of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Eros and logos confound into a single galloping impulse so potent that Faustus is willing to broker his soul for a free rein. But the raging scholar discovers nothing sufficient to sate his hungers. Only when an end appears final will Faustus begin to develop a wholly different relation to his desires, and by then it is too late.
There’s fruitful study examining the tropes of desire in the play. These tropes develop many critical inroads: they locate the pulse that gives the play its insuppressible vigor, successfully resist a rigid milieu, suggest some of Marlowe’s deeper intents, and finally offer a self-renewing vision of literature.

Since the roads are plural, this paper will take a winding course to its end. I’ll first examine how desire tropes many ends and many meanings; next, suggest why Doctor Faustus engages passionate study; third, show how Faustus’ desires are paradigms of resitance to official discourse; and finally, explore the new territory that desire leads Faustus, its author, the reader and our criticism into.

Desire’s Meanings

Desire is its own paradox: to satisfy desire is to end it. Desire fixes on an object, projecting fulfillment or closure in its embrace. Faustus desires “joies in full possession” (179) — power, knowledge, lasciviousness — but once “glutted,” these objects of happiness become “externall trash” (62). The object, once consumed, loses an essential otherness that made it attractive in the first place. This otherness relocates in some other object, some other end. Desire eternally leaps toward what it is not.

The energia of desire is achieved in language through tropes. Desire transforms its object into something else, a meaning, a goal, a completion of some internal lack. Desire transforms the inert and insensible into a numinous presence. Rhetorical devices such as metonymy, metaphor, synechdoche, hyperbole or irony “turn” or transmute what is hard and fixed in objects into a sinuous, shimmering otherness.

While accepting that desire is part of our nature, the tropes produced by desire are troublesome. Ends are never satisfactory, and excess of desire proves tragic for both individual and society. Desire gouges the self’s imagined unity, generating affective agonies of loss, emptiness, and need. Passionate acts are criminal because they betray the self and violate the boundaries of the desired object. Desire confuses: by its logic, human beings are booty, objects exalt. Without rein, desire is tyrannous; too rigorously suppressed, desire glows potent, recklessly seeking purchase or vent.

Chasing helter-skelter his desires across the globe, the hero of Doctor Faustus makes a fool of himself while wreaking a heroic havoc. Faustus burns to know what he cannot name. His imagination is torn by contrary desires to reach an end and prevent the end: once given boundless freedom, Faustus continually limits it. Empowered to plunge the depths, hastiness prevents him from truly entering them. For all his passion, narcissistic Faustus loves no one, and self-love surfeits only through self-damnation. Lastly, desire erases the contours of his character, reducing him to a shadowy, demonic power drive.

What makes the tragedy so powerful is that the audience (or reader) becomes ensnared in these passions, too. We rise and fall with Faustus, afforded a view of his follies that might have saved him. If passion is that paradox of possession with a view to deliverance, then his passion is our catharsis. That doesn’t spare us from our readerly passions, as Aristotle believed; we do not engage texts to merely to purge our foolish love of them. Rather, the text sanctions my passionate embrace. Reading is a religious act when when a text so exquisitely nails our mania.
If Aristotle is thus in question, so perhaps some critical assumptions. Traditional criticism has sought for meanings in the text, for pathologies with a view to exegical exorcism. Yet if passion has no satisfactory end, so there are no consummate meanings in criticism. Theories are as myriad and changeful as readers. Writing on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Jonathan Goldberg suggests that desire prevents literature from petrification:

The gloss on the meaning of desire is, ultimately, the desire of the text — ultimately, that is, textual desire. Admittedly, this is to maintain that we cannot go further than the text and its self-reflection. That is not, however, a limiting statement; it really suggests how open this endless text is. (75)

Finally, there is Marlowe to consider. Are his own passions revealed in the text, which arrives to us fragmented from censorship and altered by the hands of others? Is Faustus Marlowe? Is it meaningful that he is, or is not? What are his meanings behind his hero’s passions, and do they satisfy?

Marlowe’s Tattered Text

Despite failings that would send any other work into obscurity, Doctor Faustus oddly remains secure in the canon of Elizabethan tragedy. Artistically it’s sketchy, nowhere as complete as most of Shakespeare’s work. That’s hardly the fault of Marlowe, who wrote the play in his late 20’s and surely would have matured had not his outrageous public manners gotten him murdered. Others would develop his passionate themes: Shakespeare in Macbeth and The Tempest; Milton in Paradise Lost.

Marlowe’s play ran into immediate difficulties. William Empson conjectures it ran for about ten performances in 1589 or 1590 before arousing the ire of the Queen’s censor. A transcript of the play was summoned for review, and as a result about a quarter of the length was hacked out (52). There wasn’t enough of a play left to continue the London production.

Next, the authenticity of the text we now have is highly questionable. Hoping to cash in on the notoriety of the mutilated product, the play was re-assembled for traveling production. The original order of the scenes may have been confused by an actor called on to develop a workable script. The first quarto published in 1604 was written from the memories of actors. This “A” version is generally accepted as more faithful to Marlowe than a 1616 quarto which added back about a quarter of the play’s length with passages heavily darkening the theme of Faustus’ damnation. Empson comments in a note, “(Marlowe) would feel bitterly ashamed, on high moral grounds, if he knew that just after his death his play was being twisted into recommending eternal torture” (41). With all this, it’s impossible to say with certainty what Marlowe’s original intents were. The textual trails leading back to him are hopelessly confused.

But the remnant still trembles with power. Although it would be interesting (and so postmodern) to argue the effect is accidental, the power may actually reside in what’s missing: those gaps and loose ends. A bandage interests; the wound enthralls. What was censored, and why? Spies were everywhere; Marlowe subtly greets them late in the play when Faustus tells his fellow scholars to look on Helen in silence, “for danger is in words” (1696). The emotional impact of the original performances, the physical shading of meaning through gesture and intonation are lost to the reader. The face of the text portrays a Christian tale of pride and fall, but there is greater power in the looming shadows. The absence of those hacked-out sections is yet a presence.

Perhaps because these mysteries surrounding the play may never be resolved, I felt a strong, strange desire to engage and complete the text. Its wounds became my own; those lacunae heat and focus desire. To quote Roland Barthes, “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” (Moriarty, 152)


“... more than heavenly power permits”

Tradition declares that art should entertain and instruct, and Elizabethan theater was a fair disciple. While providing idle amusement for a burgeoning middle class, the theater was also a primer in culture. According to Stephen Greenblatt, “...patterns exist in the history of individuals or nations in order to inculcate crucial moral lessons, passing them from generation to generation” (51). Theatrical education was not unique to the stage. Anglican churches were required by the Queen to include a canon of orthodox homilies in their sermons. Unfortunately, the populace proved to be notoriously slow in their lessons, and occasionally more brutal instruction was necessary. Public executions were a theater of “reiterated terror”:

Each branding or hanging or disemboweling was theatrical in conception and performance, a repeatable admonitory drama enacted on a scaffold before a rapt audience. This idea of the “notable spectacle,” the “theater of God’s judgments,” extended quite naturally to the drama itself and, indeed, to all of literature, which thus takes its rightful place as part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning. (51)

Whoever commissioned Marlowe to write Doctor Faustus must have imagined such instructive potential in the recently published English translation of the Faust story. The story’s homiletic gloss on the dangers of desire, of overreaching, of curiositas (the desire for knowledge merely for its own sake, not as a proof of God) and of devil-dealing would serve as a powerful public reinforcement of state and religious orthodoxy.

Yet Marlowe, fallen Catholic, taken to public denunciations of the faith, was a bad choice for such a commission. “Marlowe seems to have regarded the notion of drama as admonitory fiction, and the moral order upon which this notion was based with a blend of fascination, contemptuous amusement, and loathing” (Greenblatt, 51). This must have been immediately evident in the original play. Empson conjectures that Marlowe somehow devised a way in the end for Faustus to escape both hell and heaven (177). Wicked and delightful entertainment, perhaps, but dangerous teaching.

Even in the hands of a more timorous author, the Faust story is by nature problematic, troping orthodoxy into criminal license. Against the “homiletic” instruction of society, Faustus enacts a “diabolic” reversal of such constraint. Elizabethan theater constantly tested the line on how much it could get away with. The ambition of Doctor Faustus and its imitators were too high: for their excesses the Puritans finally revoked theatrical license in 1642.

The reversal begins in the opening soliloquy with Faustus’ rejection of traditional learning for the power of “negromancie.” Faustus is “ravished” by what he may not legally or morally possess; nothing he already owns gives him satisfaction. His medical training is worthless, his legal studies are “Mercenarie drudge” (61) that only litigate ends, and his divinity degree cannot reverse the doom of “everlasting death” (73). Faustus hungers for the forbidden immortal fruit:

These Metaphisicks of Magitians,
And Negromantick bookes are heavenly.
Lines, Circles, Signes, Letters, and Characters,
I these are those that Faustus most desires. (76-9)

In a reverse alchemy, the scholar pitches his golden academic reputation into darkness. By taking up the black arts, Faustus appropriates a creative feminine power, a sinister matrix he desires but cannot naturally produce. He makes an illicit purchase on the “massy entrailes” of the earth, steals the fire of creation from the womb, and forges a writ with hellish powers — criminal activities all, against the society of man and the sacred power of woman. Faustus’ demonic self-impregnation causes him to swell “with cunning of a self-conceit” (20). The end of his art is an opus contra naturum.

This potent and forbidden magic reverses every constriction of his heretofore banal mortality. But rather than soaring unfettered, Faustus is dogged by contradictions. When he wonders how he is “glutted with conceit of this” (105) he refers to the contradictory desires of wanting to scratch the itch (making “spirits fetch me what I please” (106)) versus banishing it altogether (“resolve me of all ambiguities” (107)). Odd, isn’t it, how he gleefully crams his imagination with treasure:

I’le have them flie to India for gold;
Ransacke the Ocean for Orient Pearle,
And search all corners of the new-found-world
For pleasant fruites, and Princely delicates.
I’le have them read me strange Philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all forraine Kings:
I’le have them wall all Germany with Brasse,
and make swifte Rhine, circle faire Wittenberge:
I’le have them fill the publique Schools with silke... (108-16)

But then balks by declaring that “mine owne fantasie ... will receive no object ...” (130-1).

When Faustus does get around to actually doing something, this same contradiction bedevils him: no sooner does he stretch his horizon than he counters by naming its boundary. He sells his soul for unlimited power, yet then limits his freedom to a 24-year term. Completing the writ that flings wide the door of possibility, he declares, “Consummatum est” (It is finished). Demanding to know the secrets of the underworld, he rebuts Mephistopheles’ response by saying, “I thinke Hel’s a fable” (515). Empowered to sate his “wanton and lascivious” (530) lust on any and every woman, Faustus asks for a wife.

Desire also causes Faustus to trope authority into rebellion. Faustus rejects all paternal figures: he would become a “Demi-god” (89) with powers that exceed “Emperors and Kings” (84). In his antics, Faustus apes the Holy Communion, mocks the spiritual power of the Pope, rescues the heretic Bruno, conjures cuckold’s horns onto the knight Benvolio and sicks a horde of ravening devils onto the kindly Old Man.

Critics have read this pattern of paternal reversal as literal pathology. Constance Brown Kuriyama sees the play as “still another re-enactment of the Marlovian son’s confrontation with the hostile, threatening father” (116). Kay Stockbroker suggests that Faustus has no sense of his sexuality except through the desire to commit patricide: “Since the idea of God extends from an image of paternal authority, Faustus has his glimpse of sexuality only when he declares himself in prideful rebellion from that authority” (209). Such anatomizing is a critical orthodox, but I think these critics mistakenly examine Faustus’ ends rather than his desires. The questions raised by Faustus’ dilemmas are far more engaging than the “answers” these critics provide.

The comic interludes are a third diabolic reversal. A tradition of carnival-parodic reversals reach back through the Fools’ Mass of the Middle Ages, Roman saturnalia, Greek satyr plays and the tricksters and shamans of primitive societies. The dogged popularity of these practices suggest that desire will always find shady places beneath the sun-stricken canons of official culture.

Such comedy also tropes dramatic action into something else, making possible alternate readings and further meanings. According to Mikhail Bakhtin,

For any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct discourse — epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical — may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a parodic travestying “mimicry.” It is as if such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word — epic or tragic — is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. (55)

The comic scenes turn Faustus fustian, his high-minded seriousness into mere foolishness. When the servants get hold of his magic books, Faustus’ desire for knowledge is used for bacchanal swiving and swilling. Celestial and carnal knowledge, high ambition and bucolic folly reveal two faces of the coin of desire.


Beyond the Ends of Desire

Again and again someone in the crowd wakes up, he has no ground in the crowd, and he emerges according to much broader laws. He carries strange customs with him and demands room for bold gestures. The future speaks ruthlessly through him.

-- Rilke

Doctor Faustus ends with a powerful homily. At midnight of his twenty-fourth year of license, the scholar yields to Mephistopheles’ physical and spiritual ravishment. One of the Scholars remarks to his companions,

... twixt the houres of twelve and one, me thought
I heard him shreeke and call aloud for helpe;
At which time the house seem’d all on fire,
With dreadful horror of these damned fiends. (1991-4)

The Chorus soberly instructs:
Faustus is gone, regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendfull fortune may exhort the wise
Onely to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepenesse doth intice such forward wits,
To practise more than heavenly power permits. (2005-9)

This statement frames an appropriate end for a tragedy: the audience is sent home with a sober warning against criminal desires.

Read this way, Doctor Faustus serves the orthodoxy well, although there’s no lasting art in such melodrama. Neither is there much substance to a diabolic reading, since the unorthodox merely apes the orthodox. For most of the play, Faustus’ desires are defined by the theology he rebels against. Faustus may only founder in a marginal state contradicted by desire and damnation. Greenblatt writes,

If the heart of Renaissance orthodoxy is a vast system of repetitions in which paradigms are established and men gradually learn what to desire and what to fear, the skeptics, Barabas and Faustus, remain embedded within this orthodoxy: they simply reverse the paradigms and embrace what the society brands as evil. In so doing, they imagine themselves in diametrical opposition to their society where in fact they have already unwittingly accepted its crucial structural elements. For the issue is not man’s power to disobey, but the characteristic modes of desire and fear produced by a given society, and the rebellious heroes never depart from these modes. (54)

Is there yet a third relation to desire outside the Christian boundary that Marlowe sensed but could not realize? I think there is, and I believe it is this other desire which engages readers in the text today.

Marlowe was deeply influenced by the influx of classical thought. It is not mere braggadoacio that leads Faustus to declare to Mephistopheles:

This word Damnation, terrifies not me,
For I confound hell in Elizium:
My Ghost be with the old Philosophers. (286-88)

And when Faustus suffers despairing thoughts of his eventual damnation, he counters the effects with the consolation of art:

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexanders love, and Oenons death?
And hath not he that built the walles of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe,
Mad musicke with my Mephistopheles?
Why should I die then, or basely despaire? (576-84)

There are other classical allusions: he re-visits the curse of Diana on the knight Benvolio by sprouting antlers on the man’s head; imitates the Green Knight when the enraged knight cuts off Faustus (false) head; re-creates Alexander and Helen to delight his fellows. Faustus’ soliloquy to Helen declares a faith in desire greater than the Christianity he rejects:

Come Helen, come, give me my soule again,
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lippes,
And all is dross that is not Helena... (1772-4)

All this suggests that Marlowe was reaching beyond his historical horizon for spiritual nurture.

Toward the end of the play Faustus begins to find a different relation to desire. Aware that “the restlesse course that time doth runne with calme and silent foot” is shortening his “thred of vitall life,” Faustus decides to return to Wittenburg and his beginnings. It is odd that the acknowledgement of his end does not intensify a desire to glut on new and greater delights. Instead, Faustus begins to enjoy things, walking with leisure through a “fair and pleasant green,” falling asleep in his chair, “quiet in conceit” (1484). Faustus begins to discover that pleasure is something that emanates from within, not appropriated from without. In these rare moments, Faustus may experience a secular grace.

Marlowe may be suggesting an alternate end for his hero. Rather than a Christian reconciliation, freedom for Faustus lies between heaven and hell. Faustus’ mortality is paradoxically his salvation. The tropes of desire turn life — finite, fickle, fustian, fantastical, free mortality — into something holy. Faustus’ end is his beginning.

* * *

If Faustus experiences moments of grace, they are only moments. His fate is tragically orthodox. The price for one kiss from Helen is dismemberment and damnation. Like Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Faustus sacrifices himself to a god of passion he poorly understood.

But there remains in the text one last, devilish conceit. “Faustus is gone,” intones the Chorus while the Scholars gather up his scattered limbs. Then there is that curious final line: Terminat hora diem, Terminat Author opus. — “As the last hour ends the day, so the Author ends this work” (2010). The line’s unnecessary for an ending — why this intrusion by Marlowe? The metaphor is simple: the end of a play is like the end of a day. Perhaps Marlowe is suggesting that the coming of the next day begins the beginning of the Author’s next work. This last line then is a trope: in Faustus’ end is Marlowe’s beginning.

Herein also lies this paper’s final trope on desire. An open reading of that last line indicates that desire is self-renewing. Desire warms the hand, fills the inkwell, blots the page, forces the mouth open to speak: registering across the void, this reader hears a voice in the words on the page, and transits desire from author to reader to writer. The tropes of desire produce endless cycles around an unknowable, tantalizing core. Emerson saw this as the foundation of a living literature:
The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility. (231)

Desire may be the genius in language struggling to stay afloat on the wave that is time; its tropes guarantee a meaningful future for literature as long as words delight in their rise and fall.



W O R K S C I T E D

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Circles.” The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley. New edition. New York: Viking Penguin, 1981.

Empson, William. The English Faust-book and Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus.” Recovered, Ed. Introd. and PS John Henry Jones. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Friedenreich, Kenneth, Gill, Roma, and Kuriyama, Constance B., Ed. “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe. New York: AMS Press, 1988.

Goldberg, Jonathan. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning.” Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1973.

Moriarty, Michael. Roland Barthes. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Rabkin, Norman. “Marlowe’s Mind and the Heart of Darkness.” Friedenreich, Gill, and Kuriyama 13-22.

Stockbroker, Kay. “‘Within the massy entrailes of the earth’”: Faustus’ Relation to Women.” Friedenreich, Gill, and Kuriyama 203-219.