Doctor Faustus comes to UB

Doctor Faustus is having a bad day.

The stage lights are glowing in diabolical shades of sulfur and lava.

The fog machine has kicked into overdrive.

Depending on the production, Beethoven, Nine Inch Nails, or Radiohead is blasting on the speakers.

Doctor Faustus begs for his life back, for another chance, for a scintilla of heavenly grace.

But Mephistopheles’ cackling laughter echoes through the theater, and now it looks like there is some kind of trapdoor or something, because Faustus is being dragged down into the floor by dancers in red leotards.

And then that’s it.  The play is over.  

You’re probably not too surprised.  It’s Faustus, after all.  That’s how it ends.  They’ve been telling the story in different variations for 500 years, but being dragged down to hell is always Faustus’s dramatic fate.

In fact, as Professor Aaron Dell Cioppa explained at a recent Necessary Voices lecture hosted by the University of Bridgeport’s College of Science and Society, the history of the Faust legend and its retellings parallels the history of the modern world, becoming one of the most representative narratives of contemporary socio-cultural discourse.

Professor Aaron Della Cioppa

The Faust legend originates during a time when the traditional values that had dominated the medieval imagination were being challenged by emergent ways of thinking that are recognizably modern: technological, scientific, and industrial forms of thinking that would go on to create the world we live in now.  Finding himself at this crossroad, Faust feels stifled by the strictures of the past but also overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of this dawning future.  He sells his soul in exchange for mastery of the new knowledge, but the bargain – forever thereafter known as the Faustian bargain – is always already doomed to disappointment, failure, and damnation.

In this sense, Faust is us.  His story is the parable of modern Western techno-cultural citizenry who have tied their fate to the magical power of technology.  Our phones give us access to knowledge that would make Faustus’s head spin, give us the ability to project our voices and images and words in Mephistophelean ways.  They entertain us, teach us, comfort us, and do our homework for us.

But are there times when we put the phone down and wonder what price the Faust in us has paid?  Have we bought these magical powers in exchange for our lives, our minds, even our souls?

Professor Della Cioppa’s Necessary Voices lecture transported his audience from the Holy Roman Empire to the domestic robots of the not-too distant future, from epistemology to demonology, from the idle thoughts of a fictional character to the fate of the human species, from the sublime heights of scholarly wisdom to the infernal depths of our tragic destiny.  And back again.

Then a trapdoor opened in the floor of the lecture hall and Professor Della Cioppa was dragged screaming down to hell.

Just kidding.  That didn’t happen.

See Professor Della Cioppa's talk in this video.

Necessary Voices is a long-running lecture series at the University of Bridgeport. The series is coordinated by UB's English Department, and its mission is to provide UB students with opportunities to hear from thought-leaders and scholars representing a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives.