Sisko's Faustian Bargain

Or: Have you ever danced with Goethe "In the Pale Moonlight"?

I don’t usually teach Star Trek. My main area of scholarly and teaching expertise is the history of Christian thought, and one of my most popular classes is “Deals With the Devil,” which focuses on variations on the Faust legend. I also happen to love studying languages, and after teaching Goethe’s Faust so frequently, I decided it was time to read it in the original (at least Part 1). Whenever I study a major work in the original language, I do see fresh nuances, but I find that the real payoff isn’t in finding some “secret” meaning unavailable in translation. The big benefit comes from being forced to slow down and attend to every detail.

This deep-dive has meant that everything is Faust to me lately. Some of those connections are presumably a stretch. But there’s one that strikes me as a slam dunk: Deep Space Nine’s “In the Pale Moonlight” is a Faustian narrative, with the disgraced former Cardassian spy Garak playing the role of Mephistopheles to Sisko’s Faust. Admittedly, the stakes of the story are very different—manipulating a foreign power into joining a war, as opposed to seducing a small-town girl. But the trajectory of the hero’s moral corruption, punctuated by ineffectual regrets, is strikingly similar.

Rewatching the episode for my class, I noticed how gradual Sisko’s corruption is. Throughout the convulted tale of how he and Garak try to deceive the Romulans into joining the Federation side in the war against the Dominion, Sisko consistently finds that he has to take just one more step beyond what he’s comfortable with, and he is almost always explicitly pushed by Garak. I told my students that Garak is one of the best and most complex characters in all of Star Trek, but viewing him in isolation here, he seems more one-sidedly evil—and delighted to be able to pull Sisko down into the muck with him.

Of course, one could say that any story involving temptation and corruption is Faustian in some way, and a quick Google search indicates that I am unsurprisingly not the first person to think of the episode as a “deal with the devil” or even to cast Sisko and Garak as Faust and Mephistopheles. What makes me think the connection with Goethe may be more direct, though, is the decisive scene after Garak goes “too far” by committing a false flag assassination. Sisko is furious and even assaults his erstwhile ally. But Garak reminds him that the whole plot was Sisko’s idea, including the idea to invite Garak into the plot. Sisko knew all along what kind of man Garak was, and what kind of things he was capable of. Whether he consciously admitted it to himself at the time, Sisko knew that he needed Garak’s help to do precisely those things that he would never let himself do directly.

A closely parallel scene (which just happened to be my German reading this morning) occurs in Goethe’s play after Faust learns that Gretchen has been imprisoned. He is absolutely furious at Mephistopheles for failing to tell him of Gretchen’s plight—even if the stage directions don’t call for it, having Faust physically attack Mephistopheles as Sisko does Garak would be completely appropriate for a performance. Mephistopheles famously replies that “she is not the first,” setting off yet another enraged monologue on Faust’s part. Like Garak, though, Mephistopheles points out that Faust summoned him, not vice versa, and that the idea to seduce Gretchen’s was his alone.

I have tended to read “she is not the first” as dismissive, but drawing the connection with “In the Pale Moonlight” slightly changes my perspective. While doubtless callous and cynical, Mephistopheles’s retort implicitly asks: What did you think was going to happen? The fate of young girls from small towns who take lovers is well-known to all, and the kind of ostracization and desperation Gretchen experiences is all too common. One could say the same thing for every step of the drama. Does Faust really think he can seduce a young girl a fraction of his age without using deception, for instance? Does he think he can safely put her sickly mother to sleep with one of his potions without endangering her life? Does he think none of her male relatives will come around seeking retribution? Does he not realize what usually results from having sex, etc., etc.?

What’s striking is that Faust never talks about “doing the right thing” in the colloquial sense. Indeed, he never mentions the baby or its death, much less the possibility of marrying Gretchen. For all that he swooned over her, he really never intended to marry her and settle down—it was always a first fling, intended to open him up to a whole new realm of human experience, and he was always going to bail sooner or later. What happens to small-town girls who take up with the dashing mysterious man passing through town was therefore always going to happen to Gretchen, and some part of Faust had to be aware of that the whole time. And when Gretchen refuses to Faust’s offer to help her escape from her death sentence, he chooses to run away rather than stay with her and face the consequences of his actions—tacitly admitting to himself that he is, indeed, “that guy.”

In the same way, Sisko never really considers confessing the whole plot. He wanted to make sure that a major government would enter a war, and you don’t get that kind of certainty from a cheap holodeck simulation of the Dominion war room. The only thing guaranteed to motivate a declaration of war is death. What he feels guilty about in the end isn’t the murder as such—it’s the fact that he’s become the kind of person who can not feel guilty about a murder, who can cover it up and use it for his benefit and still continue to live his life. And unlike Faust, who is granted the gift of forgetting at the beginning of Goethe’s Part 2 (which I view as one of those sequels that threatens to retrospectively ruin the original), Sisko really does have to “live with it.”

Again, the parallels strike me as so close that I have to believe someone on the writing staff had Goethe’s version of the Faust narrative in mind—which is surely not too implausible, since it is one of the most famous works of world literature. But in any case, the comparison illuminated both works for me in a new way, so I’m going to count it as a win.