Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoff into Transcendence Author(s): Sol Yurick Source: Social Text, No.

17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 67-95 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466479 Accessed: 05/11/2010 22:16
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Faust's Growthand Stagesof Spiritual/Economic Takeoff into Transcendence

SOL YURICK

I Faust is Stalin. Can we take two wildly disparate images and yoke them together by violence? Have we gone too far in saying "Faust is Stalin" ratherthan Stalin is Faust? To what extent are we permitted to map objects from the domain of literature onto the universe of politics, economy, violating historical event-sequences? Shall we, going from the "is-like" to the "is," compare the once-lived with the never-lived? Faust is a literary construct elevated into a tutelary deity to guide and drive mass populations of the West toward an ever-receding,evolutionary, orgiastic future; Faust is the spirit of the "west." He lives. Stalin was a particular person who lived in a particular time. The west has hypostasized him into an evil, eternal and haunting spirit whose constantly evoked, demonological name has all the mythic stature and immortality of a Faust who never lived; Stalin is the spirit of the "east." He lives. Faust is supposed to belong to the freedom-loving, democratic-striving, humanist west, not the totalitarian east. Tormented, tragic, Faust said he initiated his great land reclamation project for the benefit of all mankind. (To use a word like "tragic" always implies psychic depth, remorse, sensitivity, intelligence, a deeper morality, inner torment, final illumination, and thus, to western intellectuals, worthiness of endless rumination.) Stalin, on the other hand, was supposed to be a cunning, byzantine, irrational, bloodthirsty tyrant who enslaved mankind, although he made similar claims about service to mankind. Have we any indication that Stalin suffered and agonized over his hard decisions, that he had the tragic insight that has been demanded of those who are passed into our pantheon of the elect? Yet a clevertragedian might write a classic tragedy of a remorse-stricken, finally insightful Stalin. On the other hand, upon reading the text, we must come to the conclusion that Faust has a distinctly Stalinist, ends-justify-the-means tinge. When Faust builds his landreclamation projectVainlyin the daytimelabored Pick and shovel,clink and strike
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68 Whereat night the elf-lightswavered, By the dawn therestood a dike. Humanvictimsbled and fevered ...

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-couldn't we be talking about the building of the White Sea Canal in Stalinist Russia or the Erie Canal in which thousands succumbed to work and disease? And isn't this management's dream of efficiency and domination: I hastento fulfillmy thought'sdesigning; word aloneimpartshis might. The master's Up, workmen,man for man, arise anew! Seizespadeand shovel,each take up his tool! ... One mindis amplefor a thousandhands. Goethe called Faust a tragedy but by having God send a spiritual task force, regiments of angels and an "eternal feminine" to redeem and rescue Faust from Mephistopheles' clutches Goethe had God bless Faust's draconian and oppressive enterprise, turning Faust into a Dantean comedy. Seen from a progressive, evolutionary perspective-socialist or capitalist-can't the whole of western (now world) tragedy be organized and structured into a serial ensemble, a wondrous comedy with a transcendent, happy sentimental ending? All that remains of both Faust (and what he did and why he did it and to whom he did it), Stalin (and what he did and why he did it and to whom he did it), and Hitler (and what he did and why he did it and to whom he did it) are records, texts. All those dead Kulaks and Jews are just as dead as that phantom proletariat Faust killed. But modernist literary practice and critical theory allows us to fragment and re-mix textual elements, quantum-leaping from discourse to discourse. After all, a good deal of historical record has been demonstrated to be state invention, disinformation, cover stories, incantation, fiction to create atmospheres of belief. To support our methodology further, doesn't modern quantum theory propose instantaneous sumultaneity of all events in time and space, allowing not only for astonishing mixtures of diverse domains and disciplines, but implying that since the dead never die, since they were once material facts, even if they were only thoughts or literary constructs, a universe of living spirits continues to affect us. In discussing Faust's deliberately allusional system, it is not possible to examine every element as it occurs in the work. There will be branchings off, diversions, small *All quotes fromFaust are taken from WalterArndt'stranslation: Norton CriticalEdition;
New York, 1976.

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meditations, recursions and anticipatory jumps. Our discussion begins to look something like an extended, supra-human neuron network, following the path of ideational axons and dendrites, and the synaptic spaces in between (the otherdimensional, where we discern chasms bridged by analogical, conventional and associational leaps). The message traffic as it occurs in, and between individuals and collectivities of humans, both in a given time frame and transhistorically,allows us to glimpse dysjunctive realms where the fragmented stuff of dream, myth, metaphor, hallucination, fantasy, in which a commonly received faith binds disparate elements, connecting them to other such "neurons." Referring to a kind of canonic storage, a central bank of symbolic forms (but keeping in the mind the "forgotten," the unrecorded, the unremembered), we begin to sense something like a fabulous collective beast composed of billions of people, their stories and their memories, a sociobeast's intelligence, a brain stretching through time and space. This is to imply historic (and literary) continuity which, in turn, conjures up the genetic continuity of humans. We will come back to this. It could be said that Goethe had three interfused sensibilities. (In a hypercritical when a compulsive and formal lysis of wholes is the fashion, one makes such age statements for convenience. Who is one to oppose the traditional mass belief in trinification?) The first Goethe was the individual man with his personal, never-to-be-repeated experiences. The second Goethe was a person who ingested, metabolized and deployed an incredible amount of culture and history which served him as a kind of extraexperiential knowledge, becoming so merged into his personal experience that the memory of what he lived and the memory of what he couldn't have lived-except in the mind, but nevertheless felt-cannot be separated. Goethe's consciousness was a confused compendia of references, allusions and comparisons and metaphors. The third sensibility belonged to a particular transition period of history: Goethe's historical time of accelerated social change (let us not forget his worldpolitical role). Modern capitalism was emerging. Great revolutionary upheavals were taking place. Intellectuals meditated on what this climacteric meant and where it was all going. A new concept-linear, non-repeatable progress, ascent and evolutionwas emerging. A world historical movement from the simple primitive to the complex civilized was invented to explain the changes, give them some form and direction in order to demonstrate how they were different than great changes in the past. The primitive past was called circular; it gave way to the cyclical; it became linear. But, in the context of a rapidly changing world, elements of the past were incorporated into this new systemic. Goethe was, of course, infected, toward the end of his life, by grand, mystical, masonic and Saint-Simonian, eco-metaphysical dreams of develop-

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ment, transcendence, progress, permanent revolution. In this sense the canonic texts of the past became a kind of capital, to be converted into new symbols of value. Faust was written at a time that corresponds to the period outlined in Marx's Communist Manifesto, or, on the other hand, to the "takeoff" from "traditional society" stage in that once-marxist, W.W. Rostow's non- (or anti-) communist manifesto, The Stages of Economic Growth. Stages likened the Stalinist epoch to a "takeoff"; a time of sacrifice and capital buildup. (Both capitalism and socialism/ communism seem to require a ritual theoretic of sacrifices inherited from the most ancient of pre-capitalist pasts.) Formally and ahistorically,Faust is an epic scheme (or scenario) of the movement from any feudalism to any modern, higher, unified stage in general, and the movement from European feudalism to the modern industrial and capitalist age in particular. The formalism of this "development drama" allows us to compare it with many historical, literary and mythic events: for example Joseph's reorganization and transformation of agriculture for Pharaoh; the Oedipus cycle and the Oresteia seen as political dramas celebrating the triumph of the hegemony of Athens; the Book of Job; the events in Darkness At Noon; the transformation of third-world societies; the present transition from industrial capitalism to a kind of new unified church of symbol-run electro-capitalism in which the limits to movement of geography slowly lose their importance and the spirits of the dead, seen as credit, are shunted around the globe, disguised as electronic fund transfers. Goethe made a conscious decision to filter his past, present and future through certain formal pasts, seeking to impose an ordered system on the chaotic now, turn it progressive and evolutionary (in the pre-Darwinian sense), giving it, as Joyce, Eliot and Pound were to do, a "higher" meaning, becoming, so to speak, a collaborator in a permanent, ongoing committee devoted to rewriting, commenting on, reinterpreting and editing the sacred canons, much like those committees that perpetually have given us revised, standard editions of The Bible and The Talmud. On the other hand, it might be argued that every author is such a multiple creator. Not every writer consciously chooses to refer to a Central Bank of Symbolic Forms. In fact some authors go out of their way to avoid this extra-conscious substratum of artificial memories lived second hand, escape the past and look at the present with unfettered gaze, as the naturalists did. The tyrannous, past-obsessed, reference-hunting critics, interventionists and colonizers of the subconscious, inventors of new analytic schema, ever ready to find parallels and allusions, will not allow this to happen. They insist that every author-bound by certain inexorable lawscannot help him or herself; he or she has to refer to one or another treasuries of archetypes. What, we wonder, if Joyce had decided to see Dublin without the mythicliterary-historicoverlay,past which coordinates Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom

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make their journey? For one thing his work could not have been entitled Ulysses. Would it have been less a great work of art? Would the analytical and critical memorializers have allowed it to be called a great work and thus memorialized? The composition of any work of literature-whether done by individuals or groups-is not an orderly process. The writer does not necessarily end up at the goal envisaged at the beginning of the project. New ideas, new inspirations, new urges, associations and images arise . . . indeed, are sometimes demanded by what one has written, or what has been written for him or her. Conceptions change. Ideas are eliminated. Scenes that seem to work together no longer do ... but are sometimes kept nevertheless because they "feel" right. Play, forgetfulness, obsession, whim, cowardice and courage influence selection. Mere weariness can keep the writer from doing what he or she intended (one thinks of the great philosophical debate between Mephistopheles and Faust that never got written). The longer the work, the more difficulty in managing complexity and diversity. Contradictions, mistakes and anachronisms arise. The process seems to replicate the functioning of the brain-mind in a half dream state in which the units of motivation and creation become stored synchronously and can be summoned up or retrieved in any order by associative leaps. Faust was not composed or assembled sequentially. Goethe spent some fifty or sixty years writing and rewriting Faust. The first part, written in the early 1770s, begins as a romantic tale of love, seduction, betrayal and abandonment. Goethe adds the bargain with Mephistopheles in the 1780s. (A pact with the devil widens the stage and requires new meanings to be added to what might have been a simple but poignant love story. For if the devil enters into relationships between man and woman, then Eden-and all it stands for, sensuality and reprises of primal sins-lurk in the background.) The Prelude and Prologue in Heaven were added in the late 1790s (the American and French Revolutions took place; the industrial revolution began), expanding the scope of the drama to a cosmic level. The second part was written, for the most part, in the 1820s. Goethe added revisions up to his death in 1832. The world had changed considerably since Goethe began Faust, and so, for that matter, had his own physical being as it aged, for one can never underestimate the effect of hormones on creativity. Towards the end of Goethe's life, the story mutated into a public, religious and philosophical rite of passage, a transcendence drama, which, if it was indeed about the birth of capitalism, took the story beyond such questions as material production-but did not ignore them-and provided the basis for a new belief-system, a culture. Looked at closely, Faust is a clumsy pastiche; a syncretism which, when examined closely, reveals great lacunae. But, when scanned rapidly, or seen from a distance, it presents a unified appearance. Who is one to challenge the work of someone who has become a "great" author (or at least a "great" personality)? Dare

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the critic say that an arrangementso ambitious is in reality crude and consign it to the garbage heap? No, after all, it is the endless ambiguity, interpretability and deliberate referentiality of its components (and the conventional force-field of institutionalized associations binding those components), whether they comprise an essay on the material universe or immaterial literary works, that keep critics in business. The notion of consistency, the self-contained aesthetic whole, is mostly in the minds of the critical, tactical and strategic takers-apart and putters-together. Not content with justifying the ways of God to Man, the critics also justify the works of poets to Man and sometimes are under the singular delusion, because they think they have discovered and filled in missing links, that they have invented the creator's works themselves. To be sure, the reader, in responding, may also "create," but only in a limited way-reactively. Aesthetics and criticism are not only marketing devices, but commodities in their own right. II Faust begins with a Prelude in the theater involving a discussion among a direcan actor and a poet. All that's missing is the financial backer's input. All three tor, have different agendas. The director's basic aim is to make the production successful, pleasing the audience. The actor is involved only with his part. The poet is, of course, naive and idealistic. While it may be said that Goethe's Prelude refers to the theatre of his time, nothing has changed. These discussions were probably heard among the money-grubbing, dynasty-obsessed, women-disliking, contentious, sophistical, treacherous, empire-minded Athenians of Sophocles' time. Such discussions may be heard to this day in Hollywood or on Broadway, albeit using different words. Those who apply the auteur theory to modern cinema should take heed of the contribution to aesthetic of backers, producers, distributors and actors in their critiques and factor in the semiotic of investment-gathering, tax breaks, laundered money and profit margins. The Prelude's position implies that life is theater, and Goethe is the prime dramatist. The whole is an indulgence on Goethe's part. When Goethe gets to the Faust story proper, he frames and informs the drama with two referential systems; the Book of Job at the beginning and the "Paradiso" section of The Divine Comedy at the end. An archetypal (or conspiratorial) council in heaven will lead to a transubstantiation or apotheosis motif at the conclusion. In particular one should keep in mind the presence of two guiding anima, or "eternal feminines," Beatrice and Gretchen, once alive, now dead women, purged of their bodily substances. In all three tales, Job, Faust and The Divine Comedy, forbidden wisdom is learned, which allows for a movement from the earthly to the heavenly. Knowledge, immortality, personal salvation and redemption are earned, not so much through

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psychological insight, but rather through a journey into an otherworldly realm (death) where perfect wisdom lies, outsight, and a return to earth (rebirth). In all three there is a subtheme which relates knowledge to both earthly and heavenly sexual reproduction. Goethe's strategy is to invert and explode Dante's limited universe and liberate his ending from medieval enclosure and stasis. The idea of a perpetually repeated ascent to a post- or pre-temporal heaven of idealistic, fleshless forms and ideal knowledge, gives way to metaphysical history involving a progressive movement through time with the aid of magic, science, deeds and great enterprises realized on earth, leading towards a reunification with The One. Dante's damned were placed in the Inferno because of enormities of self-gratification on earth at the expense of the collectivity (the tragic hero always ends up in a personal or public Hell or Purgatory): the deadly sins. By peopling his domains with well known names, Dante settled old political scores. The Divine Comedy is a classification structure, a memory system upon which to tack a great deal of gossip-texts. Those who were blessed by inclusion in Paradiso had presumably restrained their prideful, fleshly urges on earth for a greater reward (of course what they did in real life is a matter for debate). Faust, as we will see, is saved at the end precisely because of his self-indulgence. He is a great sinner. If an author uses some past event or text to reinform the present, conversely,the use of that reference alters the interpretation of the past. In modern capitalist society, we might still use Dante's structure, but a shifting of the classificatory designations is required. After Faust, the circles and points of "Paradiso" would be named after the deadly sins and the virtuous would be consigned to hell. Hell, specifically, materially and historically, may be located on earth in the torture chambers of totalitarian or so-called authoritorian regimes in which the infliction of pain is also tied to knowledge ... the suppression of memory and deviant thought. As in Job, Goethe's Prologue situates us in God's court. Three angels, Michael, Raphael and Gabriel sing the praises of God. God has summoned Mephistopheles, a kind of devil for whom He has a task. We cannot understand Faust without realizing that The Lord has singled out Faust for Mephistopheles, as God initiated the torment and testing of Job by fingering him for The Satan. The Lord says that His servant, Faust, is erring, falling into strange ways, not fulfilling some great task that is in the mind of God. "Though now he serve me but in clouded ways .. ." and ". . . Man all too easily grows lax and mellow,/ He soon elects repose at any price" (stasis and stagnation, in other words); "And so I like to pair him with a fellow/To play the deuce, to stir, and to entice. . ." God wants Mephistopheles to tempt Faust. A little bargaining takes place: Mephistopheles agrees, but only if God will withdraw his protection from Faust. Faust's personal torment, his restless searching for power and knowledge, must be harnessed; he will drive himself

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in a way acceptable to God and, in the process, drive Man. The personal torment of one man, the tragic flaw, as it were, is harnessed to a public good, which means God's hidden agenda. Who is this Faust and why has God chosen to tempt him? Why not others? Clearly a special person. We may ask: why does God need both Mephistopheles and Faust, as God needed Lucifer, Adam and Eve in The Bible and Paradise Lost. Omnipotent and omniscient or not, clearly there are reasons God needs devils and Man. How did Goethe read Job? The Prologue is an echo of, and commentary on, Job. Analyzing Job, the Israeli scholar Tur-Sinai proposes the notion that the court of God is modeled after an earthly court; he suggests the Persian royal court. If God's court is modeled on a worldly one, then perhaps political and economic dimensions lurk beneath the surface. Tur-Sinai etymologically likens Satan to a spy and provocateur, God's intelligence agent, His servant, not His enemy. He further notes that in the Biblical usage, The Satan, denotes an official title, not a name. The Satan is an officer of the court. Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles is always the great spy and provocateur, God's adversary,yet always the agent of God or a greater power. The heavenly, or courtly, assemblage in Job takes place during the time of harvesting, ingathering. Is it possible that God is not satisfied by the tithe or tax returns? Much has been written, seeking to understand God's motives for testing and tormenting Job. Why? To what end? After his travails, never quite knowing why he was chosen to suffer, Job gives in to God, confesses and accepts not only his ignorance of God's great and ultimate design, but admits that he has no need to know, ceases doubting and asking God embarrassing questions. Presumably the audience to the drama, or the critical analysts, have, by participation through reading, observation, empathy, felt "pity and terror" and attained a greater wisdom. If nothing else, they have been given a problem to chew on for centuries. After his sufferings, Job is given a new family to replace his old destroyed one and his wealth is doubled. Peculiar materialistic considerations. We note that Job's first wife, who strangely disappears (the second is never mentioned: how, then, were the new children reproduced?), tells Job to curse God and die. For this piece of advice, St. Augustine called her diabolio adjutrix; Calvin said of her she was organum Satanae.... Is this attitude carried over in Faust? As we shuttle back and forth in time, tracing the course of Job-messages, we must consider-along with Faust-the way Job continues to be transmitted down through time and how it affects the psyches of elites on the one hand, and of millions, who are passive message-receivers, on the other hand, in different ways. Who transmits to whom and why? Who receives from whom and why? Clearly there are knowledgehierarchies involved, those who control the process of transmission.

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Job-references originate in even more ancient Egyptian and Akkadian works in which the peasant complains to his lord about his oppression. Does this lead us to a diversionary reminiscence of the events that took place in the legend of Joseph in Egypt, the transformation of Egyptian agriculture, the destruction of, and the driving of the Egyptian peasantry into the cities (to say nothing of Joseph's selling of the surplus grain on the world market during a world grain crisis)? Surely, when the peasant lost his lands, he had reasons to complain. These messages come through Job to Faust (each transmission changing and adding to-or subtracting from-the nature of the original message, in both directions) into the modern age. (We note that during the Soviet-American grain deal of '72, Fortune reminded us of parallels to the Joseph story.) This multiplicity of Job-streams, interpreted variously, surface (along with Faust-streams) in Moby Dick. "Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook.. ." God asks Job: "Will mongers haggle over him/Divide him among the hucksters?/Willyou fill his hide with harpoons.. ." (Quoted from The Anchor Bible "Job," New York, 1973; Marvin Pope translator.) Melville, having readJob differently than Goethe, has seen the danger in the Faustian vision, converting Faust to Ahab, who surfaces from a reference in Faust II. Ahab, as we know, is the Chief Executive Officer of the Pequod, gone mad. After the sinking of Ahab and the Pequod, Melville has Ishmael quote Job's servant after the Satan's disasters have struck: "I alone am escaped to tell thee," and warn the world (indicating he may have missed the point of Job). The messages continue and come to rest for a moment in Koestler'sDarkness At Noon (not necessarily having been routed through Melville). Koestler applied Job to the inception of Stalin's collectivization and industrialization period (the Rostovian "takeoff"). Darkness takes the form of a series of interrogations-alluding to God's brutal catechizing of Job-a dialectical search for knowledge with a peculiar twist. Both God in Job and the interrogators in Darkness want to make sure that the object of their afflictions does not understand the Grand Design; that it is secret and sacred and not to be questioned by Man. Man is to accept, have faith and suffer in silence, as Rubeschev does. What was Koestler saying? That Stalin is God, or God's instrumentality? Koestler's attitude to this drive to modernize was ambiguous when he wrote Darkness. Later he was to be sure where he stood. Because all three writers have referred to the same Ur-text (which is itself a compilation of story elements), using different routes, are we allowed to change the "is-like" to "is"? Are we allowed to justify this methodology by reference to modernist literary theory, visions of a collective neurological unconscious, or quantum theory? What is the true meaning of these Ur-texts?

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III The bargain between all-powerful God and Mephistopheles being consummated, Goethe now switches us to Faust himself, wherein we gain some idea of why Faust is the subject of God's interest. It is night. We come upon Faust in his study in a state of despair: worth! Nor haveI estate or moneyed of this earth; Nor honoror splendour No dog would live out such wretchedpart! Although learned and revered,his life is empty. He laments, attacking the sterile knowledge which prevents feeling; he doesn't believe in what he teaches; he complains that he has not been properly rewarded and is poor; he wants to toil no longer. In short, he is arrogant, learned, petty, enormously ambitious, striving after mysterious knowledge and higher realms. Faust is the model for the modern, power-seeking academic who searches for the light of immortality, mainly in service to the State, whether in the government, academic or corporate sectors. Faust has been dabbling in magic, using old alchemical and astrological books: So I resortedto magic'sart ... So I perceive the inmost force That bondsthe veryuniverse, seed and spring View all enactment's ... And quit my verbiage-mongering (Note the agricultural-generational motif, "seed and spring," applied to the binding forces of the universe.) He summons up the Earth Spirit, whose real nature we never learn; not only will It not do his bidding, It tells Faust that It cannot be understood by someone like Faust. But perhaps we now see why Faust has attracted God's interest: in the search to control powerful forces by use of heretical, even demoniac wisdom, Faust's signals to the spirit world have been intercepted by God. Goethe sounds one of the grand themes of western literature, the hunt for secret, revelatory knowledge, the recurrent motif of the shaman or culturic hero. But where does that knowledge lay? In other worlds? In real institutions such as intelligence agencies, state or corporate archives? In the mind of God? Or, as various schools of psychoanalysis would have us believe, buried in our own consciousness, individual or collective minds? Whatever the case, it is necessary to enter and explore this secret and sealed sub-compartment in the west's memory bank, its brain, its artificial intelligence, its ideology, to use modern metaphors not easily accessible to all, with the aim of

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understanding the ancient underpinnings of what appears to be a modern, rationalistic, scientific society. In literary practice as in real life, whether in the academy, religious organizations, secret societies, in the therapist's office or intelligence agencies, access to knowledge is institutionally organized along hard or soft bureaucratic, classstructured, "need-to-know" lines. Hierarchies of audiences get to read hierarchies of knowledge bodies in different ways. In Faust we see that God knows more than Mephistopheles, and Mephistopheles knows more than Faust. Faust is presumably a man, but he knows more than mankind in general. Of course Goethe knows more than all of them. And yet, being impelled to refer to the west's collected memory bank, as it existed up to that point in time when Goethe was writing Faust, he was also in some sense controlled by motifs, forces, forms, contents, museums, treasuries, mnemo-hoards, anthologies histories, words, paintings and standardized visions whose total effect upon his own creative abilities he cannot totally control. The collected memory acts as an artificial butsince internalized-motivational substratum which distorts perception. Poised between the secularizing present/future and the religious past, Goethe utilized the ancient myth-motif of election, initiation and training. There was always a way for the hero to find a back-channel wisdom or sacred knowledge. (At least that's who we learn about; we never learn about those who fail, or don't care. It is assumed that there exists an endless, ever-accreting, ever-refreshed, ever-edited memory, a wisdom hoard which can be stolen or scanned without permission.) The pattern runs this way: the chosen, after undergoing certain rituals, mortifications, sufferings and purgations, dies (a metaphor for giving up the old and limiting knowledge), ascends into a higher (or lower) world and returns bearing divine wisdom which may or may not benefit people. The search for it may be dangerous, allowed only to the worthy. The institutionalized story of the shaman has been incorporated into modern society. But a contrary hunt-for-knowledge theme runs throughout history and mythology: the subtle motif of disinformation and counterintelligence designed to prevent sacred knowledge from being too widely distributed. Furthermore,there were at least two sacred-knowledge repositories, one profane and magical, the other orthodox, yet nevertheless forbidden. Sinking further into gloom, Faust comes close to suicide. He is saved by the ringing of church bells which announce the coming of Easter. Easter, Spring, of course, connects us with Jesus's death and rising, a theme communicated, with endless variations, down the ages: Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Zola's Germinale, Eliot's Wasteland.Easter also implies spring planting, fertility rites and sacrifices-ritual killings and actual starvations-to insure the growth of crops. It is a theme that surfaces in modern secular history as we follow the course of American agriculture and its dialectical conflict with Chinese and Soviet collectivization.

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The sacrificial death of humans fertilizes the earth or, as the Mayans and Aztecs had it, their blood keeps the universe running and the sun shining. Emotionally and spiritually dead, Faust is to be resurrected by God through his agent, Mephistopheles. Saved by the sacred church bell, Faust goes out into the streets and fields and mingles with people. He begins to feel somewhat reinvigorated and returns to his study. He is followed by a black dog, a poodle. The poodle turns into Mephistopheles. Faust asks Mephistopheles who he is. "Part of a force which would/Do ever evil and does ever good/... The spirit which eternally denies..." Although there is more than one source for Hegel's thought, Faust clearly represents a version of the Dialectic in images. This opposition between Devil and God, good and evil, addresses an ancient problem whose countless variations have been played out through the centuries. If God is the ultimate good, omniscient and omnipotent, the one who created everything, then why is there evil in the world? Either evil is totally Other or it is a part of the One. If the Other is part of the One-Milton, Goethe, Hegel and Marx's approach (in Marx, evil vanishes behind the scenes, is transformed into the dialectic of historical materialism, but can be found lingering in Marx's imagery)-then is God playing a complex game whose outcome He already knows? But if one knows the outcome, then why create man and woman to play with? Of God's actions in the Book of Job, we can always fall back on the traditional and solacing notion that the ways of God are not revealed to us. One thing we are consoled by; it's all going to come out all right in the end. Judeo-Christianity, and its great religious, artistic, political and economic works, rationalizes all contradictions and is fundamentally sentimental because it assures us of an eventual happy ending. If totally Other, the Manichean view, then God is not omnipotent and didn't create, or put together, the entire universe. If we accept the Manichean approach to the problem of evil, then we begin to understand the uses of the ever-recurrent mobilization of word, image, symbol, icon, picture, expressing evil through history-as we shuttle back from Faust to Job and forward to that Job-inspired document, Darkness At Noon-and how it surfaces in Cold War imagery. Using both approaches at the same time-contradiction only disturbs logicians, not ordinary humans in historical situations-the west sees itself as needing the Soviet opposition to unleash its progressive forces to transform the west's political and social economy and Man. Conversely,the Soviet Union needs the west for its own transformational trajectory. To what extent is the Cold War a transcendence theater of magic, indeed a religion, as well as reality? Considered this way, we are on the way toward an answer to the as-yet unspoken question: if Stalin is Faust, then who is Mephistopheles/God to Stalin's Faust? All will be revealed in due time. But there are other aspects in Goethe's decision to have Faust use magic, hermetic wisdom, gnosis, alchemy.... Magic may be seen as an attempt to manipulate

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knowledge in order to escape destiny ... a form of rebellion. As Raymond Brown puts it in his commentaries on The Gospel According to St. John, the common pattern in gnostic thought is: "ontological dualism; intermediary beings between God and Man (the bureaucracy); the agency of these beings in producing the evil, material world; the soul as a divine spark imprisoned in matter; the necessity of knowledge gained through revelation in order to free the soul and lead it to the light; the numerical limitation of those capable of receiving this revelation; the saving revealer." Mephistopheles first appears as a black poodle. Faust's first name is Heinrich. With the juxtaposition of "Black Poodle" and "Heinrich," Goethe has alluded to the history of renaissance alchemy, hermeticism, gnosis, astrology, cabala, neo-platonism, rosicrucianism, and the roles played in an abortive enlightenment revolution by the renaissance magi-Ficino, Pico Della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Francis Bacon, Robert Fludd and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa was attacked for practicing black magic-although he claimed to practice white magic, communicating with angels-always accompanied by his mysterious familiar, his Schwarze Pudel. The Counter-reformation made Agrippa the prototype for the UrFaust and Dr. Faustus. We note too that Agrippa found it necessary to attack, as Faust does, all the old, medieval knowledge, clearing the memory boards for the new wisdom, a ritual forgetting, as it were, before a new age could dawn. We see the same process taking place in Marx's works as he attacks received philosophical and economic wisdom, recognizing that the true, transformational alchemy is capital. Frances Yates, in her studies of the occult and the magical renaissance enlightenment, proposes the theory that the magi, using Christian Cabala and hermetic wisdom, were seeking to advance into a new and golden age in which strife would end. They were rebels, heretics, change-agents, destroyers of the old and builders of a new order. The new order was in part scientific and devoted to number manipulation, placing great stress on measurement or charting the universe's seen and unseen dimensions, accompanied by a revolution in classification ... an early version of modern general systems theory. The basic theme is that there exists a relationship between the earthly sphere of Man and the sphere of heaven. To manipulate knowledge was to manipulate the universe: as below, so above; as within, so without. It is an idea whose currency has not diminished and which continues to be seen in modern information theory and quantum mechanics. Newton's primary interests were astrological-alchemical. He had his feet in both worlds, the world of the magi and modern science. And, through his legacy, the mystical has crept into modern physics. Can we say that modern cosmology is in some sense a partial wish-system of religion/magic? The practice of magic, alchemy or astrology requires a regularized, mappable and predictable world in order to manipulate it. There is something mystical (and power-seeking) in the constant attempt to

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impose order, regularity and predictability on human societies, events and the universe. It is not clear whether or not Goethe was attacking this aspect of the renaissance, or taking it seriously. To acclaim magic outright was dangerous and anti-Christian. For if Goethe-who was very interested in developing science-was attacking one kind of religion, he was supporting another kind ... contaminated with the occult. These magical, order-making rites, ceremonies and manipulations were to surface again after a period of repression, in Saint-Simonian and Masonic practice. After a second meeting, Faust states his complaints and by implication, his desires. Faust assaults the world he lives in and cursed all its common customs and usages: ... Cursedbe the balsamof the grape! Cursed,highestprizeof lover'sthrall! A curseon faith! A curseon hope! A curseon patience,aboveall! It is out of his bitterness and dissatisfaction that Faust is willing to destroy the world and Goethe gives Faust's words the status of a demigod's utterances. To which a chorus of spirits replies: Woe!Woe! Youhavedestroyedit, The beautifulworld, With a mightyfist; It crumblesscattered, By a demigodshattered... In splendour perfected See it rewon, Set forth Upon rebirth... (Note the themes of destruction, death and rebirth.) This bitter and murderous despair, this impatience with the ordinary ways of man leads Mephistopheles to make Faust an offer. Faust rejects it; "Has ever human mind in its high striving/Been comprehended by the likes of you?" What this "high striving" is we are not told at this point. Probably Goethe didn't know yet what it was. Goethe modifies the traditional pact with the devil into a newer form. Faust has already determined that In The Beginning was The Deed, not The Word. In Hebrew

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thought "word" means more than the "spoken word." It also means "thing," "affair," "event," "action." Faust is going to demolish the world and rebuild it, thus projecting the ritual of destruction and re-ordering into his world. Faust says: If I be quietedwith a bed of ease ... ... soothe my soul to self-sufficiency ... Then let that momentbe the end of me! . If to the fleetinghour I say 'Remain,so fair thou art, remain!' Then bind me with your fatal chain ... He is commiting himself to eternal action. With these words, and Mephistopheles' agreement, the bargain is struck. The conceptually shattered world must be remade through deeds. But Faust doesn't seem to know what he's going to do; he has no plan, no theory. Faust plunges into constant experience and action, gratification and consumption of experience without lasting satisfaction, for to be satisfied is to revert to ease, stasis, which is doom, according to the agreement. In this sense Faust is the mythic father of modern consumerism. At first this activism takes the form of a mere sampling of experiences long denied to him, drinking, brawling and cheap tricks. Faust is taken to a witch's kitchen, made young, gazes into a magic mirror and finds an ideal to fall in love with. Recovering, as it were, his body, Faust falls in love with Gretchen, a simple, moral maiden. With the help of Mephistopheles, he seduces her. She becomes pregnant. Her brother, Valentine, seeks to defend her honor and is killed by Faust. Faust leaves Gretchen and comes to an awareness of a deeper kind of sexual omniverousness when he joins the witch revels during Walpurgisnacht. So far Faust follows the track hewn by Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: he uses the great power granted to him in trivial indulgences. Unable to stand society's ostracism which brands her a whore, Gretchen becomes half crazy. She kills her baby, accuses herself of killing her mother and is indirectly responsible for the death of her brother; she is condemned to die. Faust has left Gretchen to bear her sorrows alone. Learning that she is imprisoned, Faust is torn by that age old male dilemma; should he stand beside her or should he desert her and move on? After a struggle, he decides to rescue her. Too late. She's half crazy. She denies him because of his reliance on Mephistopheles, preferring to accept her punishment. At the last moment she is rescued by God because she is truly penitent. So far we have the classic case; the male makes the woman pregnant, but having

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lived in a greater and more interesting world, a domestic relationship is too confining. Call it the Odysseus or Peer Gynt motif, still celebrated in modern songs today: the male is restless, he has to keep moving on while the female remains stationary, bound to home, hearth and children. To linger, to find satisfaction with Gretchen is to endanger himself because of the bargain he has made with Mephistopheles. Earthly love, fidelity, the limited domestic world of family all must be rejected; they are clearly not the highest. Faust's actions have indirectly caused the killing of his own child, which, by implication, denies earthly human reproduction and serial, if not personal, immortality. Faust, seeking ever intenser experiences, will end up preferring a divine kind of love in which the earthly, material woman has been leeched of her fleshly qualities and has become a purified essence. Part I represents the period of education in a new world for Faust; the world of the senses, romantic Don Juanism, which moves him away from the world of sterile, old-fashioned knowledge: the false intellect. Up till now we have seen Faust in his personal aspect. Faust needs a greater stage to project his ego: masses to move instead of individuals, great projects to accomplish. But what has this tale of love and abandonment to do with Faust's great deeds and search for "the highest?" Maybe Goethe was stuck with his beginning and had to make the parts work as one, unified whole. Faust now moves into the "Great World," which, at this point in the saga is a medieval emperor's court. Part II begins to reflect Goethe's Saint-Simonian phase ... the religion of banking and great enterprises and transformational work. The empire is bankrupt, stagnating, and is falling apart ("is already in the hands of the Jews, to whom everything is pawned" as Goethe put it in a conversation with Eckerman. Faust, with Mephistopheles' aid, invents a new dynamism, a new way of generating capital, compressing the history of the movement from the exchange of metal tokens of value to the exchange of paper as a step out of feudalism; credit (a movement which still goes on as paper exchanges yield to electronic fund transfers): "To whom it may concern,this note of hand Is worth a thousandducatson demand, The pledgewhereofand guaranteeis found In treasureburiedin the Emperor's ground. to redeem Theseriches,raised,are earmarked Full payment,by authoritysupreme..." Faust says: The majorbulk of treasureto be found your lands,deep hiddenin the ground, Throughout
Lies yet untouched ...

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To which Mephistopheles adds: Suchpaper-wealth, replacing pearlsor gold, know what Is practical: just you hold; you And with mental operations, a new set of abstractions are invented which affects and restructures the material world, by establishing a one-to-one relationship between all-purpose signs (words) and things. To move these symbols is to move things
and people ... a new kind of magic, a new form of alchemical transmutation to

conceptual gold. The word truly becomes the deed. These tokens are interest-bearing promises, acts of faith, to be drawn upon future, to be redeemed in a time that may never come. (We should note that Dante's Beatrice, a Portinarii, came from a family of Florentine bankers and her husband was a di Bardi, himself from a family of international bankers.) (Complex relationships of sign/symbol to people/things/events/universesystems are constantly set up and torn apart through the ages, the pieces being reorganized into new "language" systems, but bear old values within them. Modern systems use such sign-systems as money, or genetics, or semiotics, or sub-molecular particles to express the "all." At first the "codes" of the universe are seemingly discovered and then the magical illusion begins to grow: one might move the world by moving the signs that represent the world. But nevertheless, extra-human reality is not composed of signs. Signs and what they denote and connote, or signify, sign-system piled on sign-system, signs of earthly humans, things, activities, are dependent upon the presence of humans to name, signify, classify, create exchangeable equalizations, compile, reveal, obfuscate, simplify and complicate, remember and induce forgetfulness. Knowledge confers some power but it, by itself, does not move the universe to change: it is technological, economic and political prostheses that extend mind power. However, it must be admitted that the manipulation of knowledge can change the perception of reality, and move people to perceive in new ways, which is as far as magic takes us.) Impressed with Faust's magic, the Emperor wishes to see Helen of Troy and asks Faust to summon her up. Faust asks Mephistopheles to produce Helen. He cannot; it is out of his powers. If Mephistopheles is limited, is The Lord who sent Mephistopheles on his mission similarly limited? Are there higher forces in the universe? Cabalistic and gnostic meditations hint at forces higher than and beyond God. Mephistopheles tells Faust that in order to produce Helen, he must make a journey into the mysterious realm of "The Mothers." The Mothers dwell in a substanceless and dimensionless realm where all is greyness, perhaps Chaos. What this domain of The Mothers meant to Goethe we are not sure, for Faust does not tell us what he has seen when he returns. Perhaps this is a substrate where pure generation takes place.

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Goethe has now proposed three conflicting sub- and/or superstrates: God's heaven; the realm where the Earth Spirit has been summoned from; and the realm of The Mothers. After this, a homunculus is produced with a variety of magical powers and there are hints of a possible future in which certain forms of spirits can be created and given life-a shadowy magical matrix in which the possibility of chemical, womenless reproduction is foreseen. Faust takes a trip to the classical underworld, mates with Helen, goes through a new, and perhaps higher, realm of sensuality-a rite of passage within a rite of passage, an initiation into a secret society, a passage through many chambers of symbols and sexual involvement, an alchemical wedding-indulges in a classical Walpurgisnacht, and returns in time to earth. Curiously, Mephistopheles is uncomfortable with these naked, classical gods ... a strange sort of puritanism for a devil. In so doing, Goethe recapitulates the renaissance's rediscovery of classical Greece and its knowledge; this rebirth was seen as a vital step towards the future. The classical Helen is the woman who represents the matriarchal instrument which gave birth to the race of Hellenes and their culture. Faust prefers a higher, more abstract form of fucking to the worldly kind. Faust now settles a dispute between two rival emperors (thus recapitulating the centuries-long, historic struggle between the Guelfs and the Ghibbelines over the throne of the Holy Roman Empire) and is rewarded by a stretch of seacoast to develop in his own way. This recalls one of the sub-themes of The Divine Comedy: an evocation of the struggles among popes, kings, emperors, dukes, city-states, etc.: a chaos which Dante wanted to unify in a new, conceptual Rome ... a Rome which became for Dante the visionary state, erected in the Comedy's Heaven. For Dante, Milton and Goethe, Unified Field Theory springs up in reaction to political chaos. Whereas Dante constructs his own terrain, the land given Faust is a concrete piece of territory. And now Faust's obsession with constant change begins to focus the great land reclamation project; wresting land from the sea, a reprise of the great struggle of the Dutch lowlanders against the ocean. This project is almost accomplished, but one thing stands in his way. An elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon, a grove of linden trees and an old church with a cracked bell. Of Faust, Philemon and Baucis say: Clevermasters'daringminions Drainedand walledthe ocean bed, Shrankthe sea'sentrenched dominions, To be mastersin her stead . .. Vainlyin the daytimelabored Pick and shovel,clink and strike,

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Whereat night the elf-lightswavered, By the dawn therestood a dike Humanvictimsbled and fevered Anguishon the night-airborne, Fierytorrentspouringseaward Scoreda channelby the morn. Godlessis he, he would savor This our groveand cabin here ... Faust, hating the two, being disturbed by the sounding of the church bell (a fascinating reversalof his response to the church bells in Part I), wants them out of the way. He commands Mephistopheles to drive Baucis and Philemon out for him. That aged couplemust surrender, I want theirlindenfor my throne, The unownedtimber-margin slender Despoilsfor me the worldI own. There,for the eye'suntrammeled roving, I wish a scaffoldto be woven Frombranchto branch,for vistas deep fullestsweep, Of my achievement's With all-embracing gaze to scan of sapientman, The masterpiece As he ordainswith thoughtfulmind New homesteadfor his teemingkind ... and vain That stubbornness, perverse most So blightsthe majesticgain, That to one's agonizeddisgust One has to tire of beingjust. To Faust's doubt, Mephistopheles replies: Why shouldyou scruplehereand wince? Haveyou not colonizedlong since? Faust says, "Go, then clear them from my sight!" leaving the expulsion of Philemon and Baucis to Mephistopheles. The couple are destroyed by fire. Faust, not realizing yet what Mephistopheles has done, says: Butwherethe lindenstandis wizened To piteousruin, charredand stark, A look-outframewill soon haverisen

86 To sweepthe worldin boundlessarc. Thenceshall I view the new plantation Assignedto shelterthe old pair, Who, mindfulof benignsalvation, Will spendlife'shappyeveningthere.

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But when Mephistopheles brings news that he's destroyed the couple, Faust claims to be shocked at what Mephistopheles has done, but a chorus, coming unmotivated from nowhere, says: That ancienttruthwe will recite: Giveway to force,for mightis right; And would you boldlyofferstrife, Then risk yourhouse, estate and . . . life. Faust is old now, dying, blind (that boring, ironic, tired old Tiresias and Oedipus motif, in which the blind seer, his vision unobstructed by the world around him, is supposed to have gained a deeper insight and wisdom that reveals the truer world of forms within .... Odd, isn't it, that the hubris-ridden tragic hero has to fail before he realizes what he's been doing? Why Faust has to become old is not clear . . . what happened to Mephistopheles' powers?) Faust has one last project; to reclaim some marshland. How gaily ring the spades,a song of mirth! It is my host of toiling slaves, the earth, That rendersself-content Ordainsa borderto the waves, The sea with rigidboundsenchains... Fromeverysource Findme morehands, recruitwith vigor and rigor, Spurthemwith blandishment Spareneitherpay nor lure nor force! Faust envisions how it will look and says once this project is accomplished, he might rest content: "On acres free among free people stand/I might entreat the fleeting minute:/Oh, tarry yet, thou art so fair!" In short, the eternal themes of socially deferred gratification and freedom. Mephistopheles chooses to interpret Faust's statement as a violation of the original contract. What Faust seemed to say was that if this project were accomplished, then he could rest content. A peculiar evasion and a piece of cheap trickery on Goethe's part for such a noble, high-flown poem, but thoroughly consistent with

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business practice. Maybe it was Goethe's way of getting Faust out of what would seem an endless progression of great deeds. Mephistopheles prepares to drag Faust's soul down to hell, but God intervenes, cheating Mephistopheles. Filchedfrom me is this lofty prizeunmatched A soul pledgedmine, by writtenscroll it gave, This they robbedfrom me, adroitlysnatched. To whom shall I carrymy complaint? Mounting a spectacular religious, Marian apparatus to combat the legions of hell, God takes Faust up into the realms of the empyrean, there to be reborn, his task accomplished, his struggles over, telling us that it is the eternal feminine that draws us up to the highest.

IV Why was Faust saved? He was self-involved, petty, tyrannous, self-righteous, fickle, mean-spirited, opinionated, grandiose, hypocritical; he was a betrayer of women, an exploiter of labor, a trickster, a liar, a slave-driver. But then, when we
think about it, isn't this the way every tragic hero has been since . . . when? In short, Faust is like Oedipus, Tamerlane, Richard III, Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler .... The

whole arrayof exemplary tragic heroes stored in the long collection of real and mythic figures of western civilization are really, when one thinks about it, despicable and treacherous people. It might be said, as some critics have, that Goethe was critical of Faust. If so, the heavenly reward that Goethe gave Faust would be an enormous joke. Maybe the critics have looked at Faust the wrong way. In real life the great malefactor rarely gets caught out by fate and goes to his grave happy, rich, honored and unrepentant. Still, now and then someone must be thrown to the wolves of fate so that the masses believe that there's justice in the universe. Faust is reunited in heaven with Gretchen, a penitent in the process of being purified. She's become part of the eternal feminine, a sort of cosmic, immortal, hypersexual being, a creature of pure love. What is it, this eternal feminine which draws us upward? Is heavenly love, as Dante and Goethe would have us believe, the flesh-purified anthology of a vast series of sexual encounters? Is it the ultimate and enduring orgasm? Perhaps this realm of love represents the liberation from all the constraints of earthly societies that limit the ways in which one can make love. Is Goethe hinting at alchemical weddings, pure reproduction, symbols wedded to symbols, the ars combinatoria of cabalists, geneti-

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cists, nuclear physicists, semioticians; weddings in which images give birth to images and ideas are reproduced without the contamination of bodies which corrupt pure love, freeing one from responsibilities to fleshly children, which represent supplantation, a constant reminderof the limits of our existence. Earthly love and reproduction are poor and corrupted copies of the "real thing." Immortality is no longer serial, historic, a property of groups, which is the death of the individual, bound up with imperfectly transmitting oneself in time through one's descendants (Was Oedipus, if indeed he committed incest, trying to replicate himself?) and, in the process, having one's true self diluted, scattered, mixed in with the impure elements of others brought about by the combinatorial roll of the genedice, where contaminated knowledge leads to the reproduction of impure transmitters of ideas, which in turn creates diversification, a Babel of languages, political strife and eventually chaos? These reflections and retrograde speculations finds a curious echo in modern times. Wilson, in his seminal and information-obsessed Sociobiology tells us: is in everysense a consuming Sexual reproduction biologicalactivity.Reproductiveorgans tend to be elaboratein structure,courtshipactivitieslengthyand andgeneticsex-determination mechanisms finelytunedand energetically expensive, an organism reproducing by sex cuts its genetic easily disturbed.Furthermore, in each gameteby one-half.If an egg develops all of the investment pathogenically, in will be identicalwith those of the parent.In sexual the genes resulting offspring in otherwords,has thrownaway only half areidentical;the organism, reproduction Thereis no intrinsicreasonwhy gametescannot developinto half its investment. insteadof sexuallyandsaveall of the investment ... organisms parthenogenetically Of heavenly,fleshless intercourse, one thinks of course of Mary, being, as it were, raped by a pure bolt of God's semenless, informational (in the sense that generative stuff can be considered information) energy; that Annunciation which is both the statement and conception at the same time (and from where, perhaps, come the modern notions that link words and desire together). Her vagina was unsullied by any penetrating earthly penis limited to ejaculating not pure, manipulable information but material semen. Having long denied, perhaps on some level even hating, living women, fastidious Faust finds his true love at last, recapturing the sexual mystery religions, the orgasmic initiation rites, smoothly melding Catherist heresies, courtly love, real love in realtime space, Christianity into one, by merging himself, redissolving himself into a heavenly womb, a new kind of Holy Son, a possible precursor to an ancient, longdenied dream of rebirth and self-reproduction, requiring the capture of the mysteries of woman's breeding apparatus, an old male fantasy. As to what this heavenly love felt like, who can say?

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But what of God? God is clearly masculine and yet, it was the eternal feminine that drew Faust upward. Maybe God is androgynous. But what is heaven? We must take our cue from Dante, as Goethe did: Reaching the Earthly Paradise on the top of Purgatorio, Dante drinks of sacred waters, which allows him to remember the good things of his life and forget the bad things (the initiation motif of forgetting, clearing the mind-collective or individual-for the higher wisdom). Dante is passed on from his first guide, Virgil (that poet of state history, hired by Augustus to invent the propagandistic myth of Rome's founding (The Aeneid), that links it-altering history, in a kind of metagenetichistoric sequence-to Troy), to a new guide, Beatrice. In Paradiso, Beatrice guides Dante to heaven before turning him over to a higher guide. The inmost circle of Heaven is a rapidly revolving point of burning light, the intelligences, a bureaucracy of angelic orders, God, His Son and Mary, whose rotation quickens the movement of the inmost circle of Paradiso, and whose motion drives the rest of the universe. The blinding point of light is everywhere and everywhen, modern quantum theory, so to speak, spoken of another way (unless, of course, on the other hand, modern quantum theory is a realization of ancient mysticism ... or a wishful dream-projection). The ideal of space, time, motion, light, love and knowledge are all fused; heaven is a simultaneity, the ultimate memory bank, the ideal generative/reproductiveprinciple whose shape, wisdom, love and motion are imperfectly reproduced on earth. Dante has reached, returned to, that neo-platonic, gnostic/cabalistic world, returning from "In The Beginning was the Flesh and the flesh was made word. . ." to "In the Beginning was The Word and the word was made flesh. . ." Dante's vision of Paradiso is a vision of what existed before the Big Bang of astrophysics, or the Big Bangs to be found in gnostic and cabalistic lore in many religions: Paradise, so to speak, at the Beginning and at the End. All possible texts are folded together here, the ultimate, formal meta-matrix of language, where all conceivable utterances, all possible scripts and stories and chronicles reside and are generated. The primal explosion created diversification, disunity, contentiousness, perpetual struggle and introduced one-directional time into the universe, and thus death. All of history then, as foreseen in the minds of Milton, Dante and Goethe's God, is a journey toward re-unification with the One, for which the preconditions are the works on earth that concentrate enormous power in the hands of the chosen. But what relationship does this Heaven have to earthly fuckings, births, deaths, populations, land reclamations, Fausts, Stalins, production, social classes, economics, agriculture, factories, politics, exploitation? If, as Dante, the platonists and neo-platonists tell us, earth is a poor copy of the heavenly-but copy nevertheless-then surely there must be some secret knowledge-coffers in heaven where the

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ideal forms of such debased suffering reside. Surely even Faust's God must have known that Faust would cause suffering. If there is such a thing as an ultimate knowledge-bank in a heaven that exists perpetually, such that all earthly forms and stories are taken from it, albeit in distorted fashion, then we are justified in such concepts as the quasi-mystical, alchemical, Jungian, collective unconscious, or the notion that the universe is composed of information, signals, irrespective of humans. If, on the other hand, one adopts a historical-evolutionary perspective, then the notion of the a priori "eternal" or "ideal" is preposterous. The ultimate knowledge-bank is built up by humans who create, revise and fight over its contents, gradually accreting and subtracting from its to-be-ideal contents throughout history. We can say that the collective conscious and unconscious are collected. If the ultimate knowledge-bank is built up over time, language and consciousness (among other things) become linked to the reproductive faculties of humans. Given this, we discern a drive on the part of some humans to idealize, evolutionize, teleologize and rationalize all human biological sex and link it to knowledge, indeed calling the genes knowledge or information; a metagenetics. The metagenetic project for perfecting Man, or turning him into a higher form, is carried out through work, sex and desire-the genetic eternal biological feminine-a vast series of matings, which when organized for teleological purposes, beckons, drives us (some of us) ever
"upward" toward this eternal feminine.... We begin to grasp how the accretion of

knowledge is linked to unearthly love and desire on the one hand and earthly love on the other. The Bible and Paradise Lost imply that God cannot reproduce. He needs the reproductive power of humans. Deeds on earth by successive generations of Man and Woman are needed to sustain his immaterial, reproductionless realm of perfect wisdom and power. God's promise to humans is that in some future time, once they have redeemed their sin through suffering, He will replace the fallen angels, the Luciferian minions with humans. Knowledge for the worthy, however, once they have gotten rid of their contaminating mortal parts, is immortality, as we see in Faust or The Divine Comedy. Generations of populations reproduce-with variations-ideas, things, energy
and capital . . . value which is frozen, stored, abstracted energy-as-knowledge-that-

generates-and-moves-energy. This growth-bank in turn expands our vision of the universe-the effects of knowledge on the perception of space, time and matter: quantum physics as well as earthly projects-and allows us continually to restructure Heaven as an ideal unity of all things. Heaven is a collected beckoning fantasy from which (or through which) most humans (the unelect) are impelled to contribute to its buildup and create a succession of provisional perfect universes until some future time when we attain that perfect knowledge which is "everywhere and everywhen."

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Quantum physics, one of those provisional knowledge storages, becomes instantaneous allstory which would have us believe that any event, no matter how small, and especially our own Heisenbergian interventions, affects every other event in the universe instantaneously, no matter how far apart. This is suspiciously like a telepathic theory of magic. It follows from these para-Jungian, psychobiological, modernistliterary and quantum views that the activity of the brain (dreams, fantasies, wishes and words, or conscious ratio-logical statements), being a series of material biophysical events, should instantaneously and materially affect the universe. This model is synchronous and idealistic, counter-historical, but justifies our linking Faust and Stalin, indeed permits us to say that Stalin affected the creation of Goethe's Faust. But what is this buildup? Might we bring in the notion now of the accumulation of surplus value, for wasn't that what Faust and Stalin were doing? Humans creating knowledge which was used to alter material conditions to generate more knowledge, sorting out the universe, creating chronological and achronological arrangements of their environment . . . memory. But transindividual memories require memorializers, generations of humans, which brings us back to genetics for the knowledge-generators must be generated. Marx interlarded his language with symbolic, transfigurational, metamorphosal, reproductive imagery and added much to theories of transubstantiation with his notion of surplus labor value time, an accumulation of stored human energy (requiring the taming of energy, space to traverse in buildup, and time) which, sustained by faith, becomes a realm of timelessness, containing and preserving the transformed spirits of the dead (and those who are being killed slowly as well as rapidly). A sort of value heaven being built up in contradistinction to pre-existent platonic heavens. It may be objected that stored, valued, quantified, surplus labor-time is a marxist metonymy, but then so too is the reckoning of corporate or national or global profits, upon which W.W. Rostow bases his para-faustian ruminations and claims of ascendant, material progress (Rostow called it compound interest ... drawn from the future). It's a problem in teleological accountancy. The struggle over which mode of reckoning, which interpretation is correct is an ideological fight. Indeed one might say that the storehouse of accumulated surplus labor value and time (since time is also composed of stories) is the ultimate abstraction, for without this buildup, semiotics, modernist theory, quantum meditations, the passage of genes through time (depending on conditions supportive of life), are all unperceivable and unconceptualizable. What Goethe was talking about was an immortality project, whether mystically defined or concretized as a set of scientific operations, to confer immortality by the solution of nature's mysteries ... one requiring an enormous expenditure and accumulation of energy and power ... capital. At whose expense?

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Seen from the perspective of the organization of tales and stories into a progressive, ascendant, time-event series, the west's mainstream history incorporates Faust, indeed all tragedy, as episodes in a materialist transcendence and development drama. Each tragic episode becomes a temporary, but exemplary stumbling block, a small event inside a greater epic, which constitutes the epic of all epics whose path culminates in the higher end. In fact, can't we view this collection of horrendous events, literary, mythological, historic-starting with the ancient classical dramatists-in the west as an enormous and happy, sentimental cosmic development comedy? It is in this context that one may ask: what if, as in Faust, Paradise Lost, the Joseph and Job stories of the Old Testament, Stalin was also fulfilling a divine agenda? Indeed, aren't these dramas equally applicable elements of developmental, or Stalinist, dramas? Isn't it possible for revisionists and mythologizing historians, inventors of gods, angels, heroes, missing historical links, spinners of tales of great deeds, spirits-of-the-ages inventors, fabricators of collective urges, laws-of-historystructuralists, both east and west, to redeem Stalin at the end of history? And if we remember that the Stalinist collectivization period was modeled after development in the industrialized countries and the United States in particular, can we say that modern development in the west is Stalinism in slow motion? The many past and present interconnections of Soviet to American agriculture (and their underlying political, economic and mythic themes) shuttles us backwards and forwards through those transformational periods of American history when the American farmer was/is/will be pushed first forward to develop the land and then, beset by both natural and artificial disasters, off the land. Given this new great leap forward into the information age, we have reached one of Rostow's horrendous stages of development, a period of draconian transformation. Extrapolating, expanding and concretizing, we see historical cycles in these few poetic and allegorical clues in such a way as to include now the rise of the railroads, economic cycles, erratic price rises and plunges, under- and over-production, the reproduction of populations, capital, property, the trend toward economic concentration, bank failures, the relationship of the agricultural to the industrial sector. Conversely, can we say these events fall into a pattern similar in their repetitious cycles in such a way that they can be re-abstractedfrom one kind of formalism to another kind of formalism, that of myths, motifs, archetypes, into what takes place in Faust. Such concrete, historical events can be seen through a Joseph-Job-Faust-Darkness matrix and, reflexively, the literary-religious-mythic dimensions are viewed through the lens of production, capital intensivity, modernization and concentration. We can then include the gradual destruction of the small farmer in the west, and the peasant in the

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underdeveloped world, the driving of masses off the land and into the cities (or to their death) seeing them as a compilation of thousands of little Job-and-Joseph stories, and, further, include the Soviet collectivization period as another tale of thousands of little Jobs. The victims of this transformation weren't allowed to understand or foresee the Great Design, the Design whose unfolding never ends. Thus we have a number of works, or streams, literary, political and economic, which resonate and interfuse: Paradise Lost, "Joseph in Egypt," The Book of Job, The Divine Comedy, Faust, Moby Dick, Darkness At Noon, Stages of Economic Growth.... Together, with other works, they constitute a matrix through which to We see our purely literary and religious works see a triumph or a tragedy.... beginning to burst through their disciplinary boundaries as we discern the base in the superstructure and the superstructure in the base. Capitalism is more than a mere economic system; it is a culture that needs these supportive tales. Now we may begin to glimpse who, or what, played God and sent Mephistopheles to Russia, to Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. Progressive-minded Marx, that praiser of early, transformational capitalism, was their Mephistopheles; the progressive accretion of capitalism, particularly the American version, was God and set the agenda. Marx attacked the west's economic system but he stopped short of attacking its cultural capital, for he had been infected with an inverted divine vision, drinking in Faust, the Greeks and the rest of Judeo-Christianity in his education. The fundamental formal agendas of west and east were thus the same.

VI But how does a literary work become a component of a social body's mental apparatus? Language-manipulating seers, word-magicians think they have discovered and identified an amorphous social energy, a mass-obsessive drive, a trend. They crystallize it dramatically and give it a catchy concept-name. That's the poet's art. Once named it must be made to resonate with the contents of other psyches, be in some way familiar and in some ways new. But what then? Mere excellence does not explain how a concept, a thought, an arranged collection of images, makes its way into a public's consciousness, achieving the status of an impelling myth-drive. Before they can be propagated to electrify, shape and reorganize the social energy of populations, ideas must be transmitted. That not only requires a technology of transmission (word of mouth, theater, books, radio, television, cinema, etc.), but poets, mythmakers, image replicators, explicators and critics, designated dreamers and seers, psych6logists and analysts, advertisers, remembrancers to broadcast and repeat the ideas and images. On the receiving end are the listeners, the audience who must be tooled, trained or programmed in receptivity. In short, marketing the prod-

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uct. These apparati constitute the neuronal network, the limited and perhaps diseased brain of bodies of people. Whether corporate oligarchs, international bankers or government planners are aware of it or not, when they sit down and plan to introduce some vast, new, polity-altering budget program and calculate debits balanced against assets, think of liquifying a nation's steel industry and moving it abroad, destroy the last of the small farmers, peasants, or primitive societies, create thousands of toxic dumps, or introduce the use of computers into every aspect of life, their rational calculations are mediated through a whole host of inherited social and psychic meta-reckonings. For instance, selected portions of The Bible, anthologies of folklore and great literature shape the way humans use numerical prophecy (or risk analysis, if you like it better). These recycled artifacts of the past-tragedy, for instance-become methodological guidelines. Faust, while appearing relegated to literature courses for deconstructive vivisection, literary psychoanalysis, structuralist model building, hermeneutic delving, assaults by newer new critics, and semiotic layering, in fact sits in the corporate board rooms, on government task forces, or on central planning committees. His spirit is still actively conjured up in certain arenas of everyday life, just as Faust himself once conjured up spirits to wake, inspire and drive dormant, smug masses who wanted to remain in their old rut. Faust is a key word, a sort of file-name standing for an imposed collective urge, a drive, an obsession, a guiding myth for rulers, a sacred text, a frontier-bustingexhortation-sickness that hovers in the unconscious of certain elites. How strange that Freud never discovered the Faust Complex. Old Faust is used to generate new transformational hymns to accompany the forced social transition towards post-industrialism in our own day. Its music promises that "the word" (computers, communications, information, numerical control of machine production; "Mind" running the material universe through a fantasy-mix of language, logic, symbols, signs, promises, a realization of ancient dreams of magicians and shamans) will replace people, physical activity and things-which are imperfect copies of ideal forms-and free us all at last from labor ... those of us who live through the transition. To paraphrase Axel's Castle; as for living, let our servomechanisms do that for us. Impelled onward by this myth, which organizes and directs inchoate energy and urges, we can see the effects of this drive by looking at new legions of the displaced, unemployed and homeless; see it manifested in the ever-restlessEast Village hordes as they move, constantly changing their styles, their costumes, their languages, leaving the ground barren and littered as they pass. Even capital-intensive fucking in the metropolis (modeled after Faust) of western elites sucks off energy which reflects itself as a monetary drought in Brazil. Faust is about deferred gratification for the many in exchange for false and unredeemable promises offered by the few. But, to paraphrase

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, the orgiastic future constantly recedes into the darkness and eludes us. The third world becomes transformed. New cities (and their surrounding slums, as ancient in their duration as the pyramids) spring up; pools, seas, oceans of unredeemable loans arise, Amazon Basin projects, TVA's, Green Revolutions, Suez and Panama Canals, Iranian modernizations, Aswan Dams, Manhattan Projects, Valleys of Kings and Pyramids, Great Leaps Forwards, vast land-reforms proliferate ... and populations are destroyed. For ordinary people living in the third world, Faustian deliberations and actions conducted in the first world are felt as: Here comes the Peace Corps. We can trace the myth's effect by monitoring the disbursement-flow of the World Bank, or AID money. Like some climacteric shift, these changes become felt by those who have been kept from God's court and don't know what was planned for them, felt almost as a vast and natural change. To quote Guy Hunter, who accepts the Rostovian model of development in Modernizing Peasant Societies: It is not our businesshereto commenton these giganticventures.Fromthe small farmer'spoint of view they could be regardedalmost as part of the natural environment-thesun'sheat or monsoonrains-under which organiclife mustfind its way. Nationally and internationally, their costs and the comparativebenefits which mighthavecome by spendingthe resources in otherwaysare largelybeyond definitive therearetoo manylegitimate variables and different calculation; assumpof which wouldgive a different answer.Perhaps we should tions, each combination indeedtake the farmer's view (Job's)and regardthemas an upheaval of the natural order from which the international agencies,actingas Olympiansratherthan as economists,foreseebenefitfor the raceof men below for centuriesto come. Let us hope that these Olympiansare wise.