Day 98: My Favorite Faustian Bargain

If you've never heard the term Faustian bargain, it's just a fancy name for a deal with the devil. It refers to the classic German legends about the magician Faust, who was actually a real person, Johann Georg Faust. The real Faust was an astrologer, magician, and alchemist who grew into something more as the tales about him spread and became exaggerated after his death. The stories about him are so entwined with the life of the real person that it's pretty much impossible to tell historical fact from fiction. In all the original legends though, Faust makes a deal with the devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for earthly knowledge and pleasures, damning himself to an eternity in hell in so doing. There are plenty of breakdowns all over the internet about the what's what of Faustian bargains, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about how they work. Instead I'd like to focus on my favorite Faustian bargain, the story of Robert Johnson, and how this story has influenced my writing. If you want to learn about Faustian bargains, you can check out this YouTube video that inspired today's post.

My favorite Faustian bargain is one of the most famous stories in all of blues culture, the story of Robert Johnson. Despite recording only 29 songs over a 7 month period, and then promptly dying in 1938, Robert Johnson is recognized as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time, with many of those 29 tracks becoming blues standards. Like Faust, his real life is so mired in the legends that it's hard to say what is true and what is pure fiction. As the legends go, Robert Johnson was a terrible musician. Laughed off stage multiple times for his off-putting guitar playing, he vowed to become one of the greats, and then disappeared for a few years. When he returned, his mastery of the instrument was astounding. Based on his nomadic life style (Johnson would roam from place to place, often known to stay in a town for a few days at a time with the women he had wooed), the devilish themes in his songs, and the tragedy that seemed to follow the man around, the legends about his crossroads deal expanded over time, exploding in popularity after his rediscovery in the 1960s. From there on out, details about his life story and the deal he made stacked up. Some versions of the story involve a detailed description of the devil himself, a tall black man who met Johnson at a crossroads at midnight in the nude, and offered to tune his guitar. The devil took his time tuning the usual six, and then added a seventh string, and taught Johnson how to play it all night long. After that, he was the king of the delta blues style.

The best part of the story in my opinion, is that many people believe the legend didn't originate with Robert Johnson at all, but a man named Tommy Johnson who has a very similar story. Tommy Johnson hasn't seen a sliver of the same popularity as Robert, and that's just too fitting for a man who made a deal with the devil. Having his story stolen and attributed to another, just as talented, but a lot more marketable, is the perfect just desserts for trying to achieve greatness by selling his soul. Because that's just the thing about a Faustian bargain. A deal with the devil is bound to go wrong.

I love using these themes in my own stories because the nature of Faustian bargains entail a certain lesson that fits so well with the art of writing itself. Choosing the fast lane instead of the slow and steady route may yield great results in the short term, but can leave you struggling with an unstable foundation later in life. Skipping straight past the basics to achieve greatness immediately is a powerful draw, so powerful that the tales of the devil using this against people to steal their souls have been around for centuries. I see people selling their souls all the time, writing cheap, dirty novels as fast as possible, pumping out tons of lackluster material to sell as many books as they can as quickly as they can. I especially see this in the film and television industry, where committees of no doubt shockingly underpaid writers are driven to produce more and more and more. I see it in every remake, in every fifth sequel to story that's already complete, in every show and movie that just makes you think 'who is this for exactly?' It's the same rationale that makes executive producers, cheap online magazines, and news outlets from hell believe that all writers can be replaced by large language models. The truth is, AI is only capable of learning from real writers, and replacing the real thing en masse only erodes the basis for our new technology. Like a Faustian bargain, pumping out massive amounts of text in no time at all is bound to bite you in the ass hard. Really hard. And I have no doubt that the massive influx of AI generated content is going to erode the technology just as pumping out remake after remake, or crappy novel after crappy novel will erode the skills of a good writer in no time flat, and has eroded the quality of cinema and television already.

That being said, I can't judge too hard. There's a place for cheesy writing in our world, and I can't really claim for certain that my writing isn't cheesy. I can't even claim that I wouldn't sell my soul either, seeing as no big executive has ever offered me thousands of dollars to write 50 episodes in two weeks for a CW show that nobody will watch past season 3. But when the reward for selling tons of crappy material is so much greater than the reward for producing a few pieces of powerful literature, I can't help but feel a lot of writers will never realize the true value of their skills, and I think that's really quite sad. So in my stories, when someone makes a Faustian bargain, you can be pretty sure it won't end very well for them.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley