Sol Yurick on Faust

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Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoff into TranscendenceAuthor(s): Sol YurickSource: Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 67-95Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466479Accessed: 05/11/2010 22:16

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Faust'sStagesof Spiritual/EconomicrowthandTakeoff nto TranscendenceSOL YURICK

IFaust 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 whatextent are we permitted to map objects from the domain of literature onto theuniverse of politics, economy, violating historical event-sequences? Shall we, goingfrom the "is-like" to the "is," compare the once-lived with the never-lived?Faust is a literaryconstruct elevated into a tutelary deity to guide and drive masspopulations of the West toward an ever-receding,evolutionary, orgiastic future;Faustis the spirit of the "west." He lives. Stalin was a particular person who lived in aparticular time. The west has hypostasized him into an evil, eternal and hauntingspirit whose constantly evoked, demonological name has all the mythic stature andimmortality of a Faust who never lived; Stalin is the spirit of the "east." He lives.Faust is supposed to belongto the freedom-loving,democratic-striving,humanistwest, not the totalitarian east. Tormented, tragic, Faustsaid he initiated his great landreclamation 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 ofendless rumination.) Stalin, on the other hand, was supposed to be a cunning, byzan-tine, irrational,bloodthirsty tyrantwho enslaved mankind, although he made similarclaims about service to mankind. Have we any indication that Stalin suffered andagonized over his hard decisions, that he had the tragic insight that has been de-manded of those who are passed into our pantheon of the elect? Yet a clevertragedianmight write a classic tragedy of a remorse-stricken,finally insightful Stalin. On theother hand, upon reading the text, we must come to the conclusion that Faust has adistinctly Stalinist, ends-justify-the-means tinge. When Faust builds his land-reclamation project-

Vainly n the daytime aboredPick andshovel,clink andstrike

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Whereat nighttheelf-lightswavered,By the dawntherestood a dike.Humanvictimsbled and fevered . .-couldn't we be talking about the building of the White Sea Canal in Stalinist Russiaor 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;The master'sword aloneimpartshis might.Up,workmen,man for man,arise anew!Seizespadeandshovel,each takeup his tool! ...One mind s 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 fromMephistopheles' clutches Goethe had God bless Faust's draconian and oppressiveenterprise,turningFaust into a Dantean comedy. Seen from a progressive,evolution-ary perspective-socialist or capitalist-can't the whole of western (now world)tragedy be organized and structured into a serialensemble, a wondrous comedy witha transcendent, happy sentimental ending?All that remains of both Faust (and what he did and why he did it and to whomhe did it), Stalin (and what he did and why he did it and to whom he did it), andHitler (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 Faustkilled.

But modernist literary practice and critical theory allows us to fragment andre-mix textual elements, quantum-leaping from discourse to discourse. After all, agood deal of historical record has been demonstrated to be state invention, disinfor-mation, cover stories, incantation, fiction to create atmospheres of belief. To supportour methodology further, doesn't modern quantum theory propose instantaneoussumultaneity of all events in time and space, allowing not only for astonishing mix-tures 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 con-structs, a universe of living spirits continues to affect us.In discussingFaust's deliberatelyallusional system, it is not possible to examineevery element as it occurs in the work. There will be branchingsoff, diversions,small*All quotes fromFaust are taken fromWalterArndt's ranslation:NortonCriticalEdition;New York,1976.

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meditations, recursions and anticipatory jumps. Our discussion begins to look some-thing like an extended, supra-human neuron network, following the path of idea-tional axons and dendrites, and the synaptic spaces in between (the other-dimensional, where we discern chasms bridged by analogical, conventional andassociational leaps). The message traffic as it occurs in, and between individuals andcollectivities of humans, both in a given time frame and transhistorically,allows us toglimpse 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." Referringto a kind of canonic storage, acentral bank of symbolic forms (but keeping in the mind the "forgotten," the unre-corded, the unremembered),we begin to sense something like a fabulous collectivebeast composed of billions of people, their stories and their memories, a sociobeast'sintelligence, a brain stretching through time and space. This is to imply historic (andliterary)continuity which, in turn, conjures up the genetic continuity of humans. Wewill come back to this.

It could be said that Goethe had three interfused sensibilities. (In a hypercriticalage when a compulsive and formal lysis of wholes is the fashion, one makes suchstatements for convenience. Who is one to oppose the traditional mass belief intrinification?)

The first Goethe was the individual man with his personal, never-to-be-repeatedexperiences.The second Goethe was a person who ingested, metabolized and deployed anincredible amount of culture and history which served him as a kind of extra-experiential knowledge, becoming so merged into his personal experience that thememory of what he lived and the memory of what he couldn't have lived-except inthe mind, but neverthelessfelt-cannot be separated. Goethe's consciousness was aconfused 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 world-political role). Modern capitalism was emerging. Great revolutionary upheavalsweretaking place. Intellectuals meditated on what this climacteric meant and where it wasall going. A new concept-linear, non-repeatable progress, ascent and evolution-was emerging.A world historical movement from the simple primitive to the complexcivilized was invented to explain the changes, give them some form and direction inorder to demonstrate how they were different than great changes in the past. Theprimitive past was called circular;it gave way to the cyclical; it became linear. But, inthe context of a rapidly changing world, elements of the past were incorporated intothis new systemic. Goethe was, of course, infected, toward the end of his life, bygrand, mystical, masonic and Saint-Simonian, eco-metaphysical dreams of develop-

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70 Sol Yurickment, transcendence, progress, permanent revolution. In this sense the canonic textsof 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'sCommunist Manifesto, or, on the other hand, to the "takeoff" from "traditionalsociety" stage in that once-marxist, W.W. Rostow's non- (or anti-) communist man-ifesto, 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 mostancient of pre-capitalist pasts.)

Formallyand ahistorically,Faust is an epic scheme (or scenario) of the movementfrom any feudalism to any modern, higher, unified stage in general, and the move-ment from European feudalism to the modern industrial and capitalist age in particu-lar. The formalism of this "development drama" allows us to compare it with manyhistorical, literary and mythic events: for example Joseph's reorganizationand trans-formation of agriculture for Pharaoh; the Oedipus cycle and the Oresteia seen aspolitical dramas celebratingthe triumph of the hegemonyof Athens; the Book of Job;the events in Darkness At Noon; the transformation of third-world societies; thepresent transition from industrial capitalism to a kind of new unified church ofsymbol-run electro-capitalism in which the limits to movement of geography slowlylose their importance and the spirits of the dead, seen as credit, are shunted aroundthe globe, disguised as electronic fund transfers.Goethe made a conscious decision to filter his past, present and future throughcertain formal pasts, seeking to impose an orderedsystem on the chaotic now, turn itprogressive and evolutionary (in the pre-Darwinian sense), giving it, as Joyce, Eliotand Pound were to do, a "higher"meaning, becoming, so to speak, a collaborator in apermanent, ongoing committee devoted to rewriting, commenting on, reinterpretingand editing the sacred canons, much like those committees that perpetually havegiven us revised, standard editions of The Bible and The Talmud.On the other hand, it might be argued that every author is such a multiplecreator. Not every writer consciously chooses to refer to a Central Bank of SymbolicForms. In fact some authors go out of their way to avoid this extra-conscious sub-stratum of artificial memories lived second hand, escape the past and look at thepresent with unfettered gaze, as the naturalists did. The tyrannous, past-obsessed,reference-huntingcritics, interventionists and colonizers of the subconscious, inven-tors of new analytic schema, ever ready to find parallels and allusions, will not allowthis to happen. They insist that every author-bound by certain inexorable laws-cannot help him or herself; he or she has to refer to one or another treasuries ofarchetypes.What, we wonder, if Joyce had decided to see Dublin without the mythic-literary-historic overlay,past which coordinates StephenDedalus and LeopoldBloom


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Faust'sStages of SpirituallEconomic Growth and Takeoffinto Transcendencemake 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 criticalmemorializers have allowed it to be called a great work and thus memorialized?The composition of any work of literature-whether done by individuals orgroups-is not an orderly process. The writer does not necessarily end up at the goalenvisaged at the beginning of the project. New ideas, new inspirations, new urges,associations and images arise . . . indeed, are sometimes demanded by what one haswritten, or what has been written for him or her. Conceptions change. Ideas areeliminated. Scenes that seem to work together no longer do ... but are sometimeskept nevertheless because they "feel" right. Play, forgetfulness, obsession, whim,cowardice and courage influence selection. Mere weariness can keep the writer fromdoing what he or she intended (one thinks of the great philosophical debate betweenMephistopheles and Faust that never got written). The longer the work, the moredifficulty in managing complexity and diversity.Contradictions, mistakes and anach-ronisms arise. The process seems to replicate the functioning of the brain-mind in ahalf dream state in which the units of motivation and creation become stored syn-chronously and can be summoned up or retrievedin any order by associative leaps.Faust was not composed or assembled sequentially. Goethe spent some fifty orsixty 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 addsthe bargainwith Mephistopheles in the 1780s. (A pact with the devil widens the stageand requires new meanings to be added to what might have been a simple butpoignant love story. For if the devil enters into relationships between man and wom-an, then Eden-and all it stands for, sensuality and reprises of primal sins-lurk inthe 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, forthe most part, in the 1820s. Goethe added revisions up to his death in 1832. Theworld 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 ofhormones on creativity. Towards the end of Goethe's life, the story mutated into apublic, religious and philosophical rite of passage, a transcendence drama, which, ifit was indeed about the birth of capitalism, took the story beyond such questions asmaterial production-but did not ignore them-and provided the basis for a newbelief-system, a culture.Looked at closely, Faust is a clumsy pastiche; a syncretism which, whenexamined closely, reveals great lacunae. But, when scanned rapidly, or seen from adistance, it presents a unified appearance. Who is one to challenge the work ofsomeone who has become a "great" author (or at least a "great" personality)? Dare

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Sol Yurickthe critic say that an arrangementso ambitious is in realitycrude and consign it to thegarbage heap?No, after all, it is the endless ambiguity, interpretabilityand deliberatereferentiality of its components (and the conventional force-field of institutionalizedassociations binding those components), whether they comprise an essay on thematerial universe or immaterial literary works, that keep critics in business. Thenotion of consistency, the self-contained aesthetic whole, is mostly in the minds of thecritical, tactical and strategic takers-apart and putters-together. Not content withjustifying the ways of God to Man, the critics also justify the works of poets to Manand sometimes are under the singular delusion, because they think they have disco-vered and filled in missing links, that they have invented the creator's works them-selves. To be sure, the reader,in responding, may also "create," but only in a limitedway-reactively. Aesthetics and criticism are not only marketing devices, but com-modities in their own right.

IIFaust begins with a Prelude in the theater involving a discussion among a direc-

tor, an actor and a poet. All that's missing is the financial backer's input. All threehave 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 Preluderefers to the theatre ofhis time, nothing has changed. These discussions were probably heard among themoney-grubbing, dynasty-obsessed, women-disliking, contentious, sophistical,treacherous, empire-minded Athenians of Sophocles' time. Such discussions may beheard to this day in Hollywood or on Broadway,albeit using differentwords. Thosewho apply the auteur theory to modern cinema should take heed of the contributionto aesthetic of backers,producers, distributors and actors in their critiques and factorin the semiotic of investment-gathering, tax breaks, laundered money and profitmargins. The Prelude's position implies that life is theater, and Goethe is the primedramatist. The whole is an indulgence on Goethe's part.When Goethe gets to the Faust story proper, he frames and informs the dramawith 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 inheaven will lead to a transubstantiation or apotheosis motif at the conclusion. Inparticular one should keep in mind the presence of two guiding anima, or "eternalfeminines," Beatrice and Gretchen, once alive, now dead women, purged of theirbodily substances.In all three tales, Job, Faust and The Divine Comedy, forbidden wisdom islearned, 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 allthree there is a subtheme which relates knowledge to both earthly and heavenlysexual reproduction.Goethe's strategy is to invert and explode Dante's limited universe and liberatehis ending from medieval enclosure and stasis. The idea of a perpetually repeatedascent to a post- or pre-temporalheavenof idealistic, fleshless forms and ideal knowl-edge, gives way to metaphysical history involving a progressive movement throughtime 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-gratifi-cation on earth at the expense of the collectivity (the tragic hero always ends up in apersonal or public Hell or Purgatory): the deadly sins. By peopling his domains withwell known names, Dante settled old political scores. The Divine Comedy is a clas-sification 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 theirprideful, fleshly urges on earth for a greater reward (of course what they did in reallife is a matter for debate). Faust, as we will see, is saved at the end preciselybecauseof his self-indulgence. He is a great sinner.If an author uses some past event or text to reinform the present, conversely,theuse of that referencealters the interpretationof the past. In modern capitalist society,we might still use Dante's structure, but a shifting of the classificatory designations isrequired. AfterFaust, the circles and points of "Paradiso"would be named after thedeadly sins and the virtuous would be consigned to hell. Hell, specifically,materiallyand historically, may be located on earth in the torture chambers of totalitarian orso-called authoritorian regimes in which the infliction of pain is also tied to knowl-edge ... 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, akind of devil for whom He has a task. We cannot understandFaust without realizingthat The Lord has singled out Faust for Mephistopheles, as God initiated the tormentand testing of Job by fingeringhim for The Satan.The Lord says that His servant, Faust, is erring, falling into strange ways, notfulfillingsome great task that is in the mind of God. "Though now he serveme but inclouded ways .. ." and ". . . Man all too easily grows lax and mellow,/ He soon electsrepose at any price" (stasis and stagnation, in other words); "And so I like to pairhim with a fellow/To play the deuce, to stir, and to entice. . ." God wants Mephis-topheles to tempt Faust. A little bargaining takes place: Mephistopheles agrees, butonly if God will withdraw his protection from Faust. Faust's personal torment, hisrestless searching for power and knowledge, must be harnessed; he will drive himself

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Sol Yurickin a way acceptable to God and, in the process, drive Man. The personal torment ofone man, the tragic flaw, as it were, is harnessed to a public good, which means God'shidden 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 andFaust, as God needed Lucifer,Adam and Eve in The Bible and ParadiseLost. Om-nipotent 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 Israelischolar Tur-Sinai proposes the notion that the court of God is modeled after anearthly court; he suggests the Persian royal court. If God's court is modeled on aworldly one, then perhaps political and economic dimensions lurk beneath the sur-face. Tur-Sinaietymologically likens Satan to a spy and provocateur, God's intelli-gence agent, His servant, not His enemy. He furthernotes 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 har-vesting, ingathering.Is it possible that God is not satisfied by the tithe or tax returns?Much has been written, seeking to understandGod's motives for testing and torment-ing Job. Why? To what end? After his travails, never quite knowing why he waschosen to suffer,Job gives in to God, confesses and accepts not only his ignorance ofGod's great and ultimate design, but admits that he has no need to know, ceasesdoubting and asking God embarrassing questions. Presumably the audience to thedrama, or the critical analysts, have, by participation through reading, observation,empathy, felt "pity and terror" and attained a greater wisdom. If nothing else, theyhave been given a problem to chew on for centuries.After his sufferings, Job is given a new family to replace his old destroyed oneand his wealth is doubled. Peculiar materialistic considerations. We note that Job'sfirst wife, who strangely disappears (the second is never mentioned: how, then, werethe new children reproduced?), tells Job to curse God and die. For this piece ofadvice, St. Augustine called herdiabolio adjutrix; Calvin said of her she was organumSatanae.... Is this attitude carried over in Faust?

As we shuttle back and forth in time, tracingthe course ofJob-messages, we mustconsider-along with Faust-the way Job continues to be transmitted down throughtime and how it affects the psyches of elites on the one hand, and of millions, who arepassive message-receivers, on the other hand, in different ways. Who transmits towhom and why? Who receives from whom and why? Clearly there are knowledge-hierarchies involved, those who control the process of transmission.

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Faust'sStagesof SpirituallEconomicGrowthand Takeoffnto TranscendenceJob-references originate in even more ancient Egyptian and Akkadian works inwhich 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 inEgypt, the transformation of Egyptian agriculture,the destruction of, and the drivingof the Egyptian peasantry into the cities (to say nothing of Joseph's selling of thesurplus grain on the world market during a world grain crisis)? Surely, when thepeasant lost his lands, he had reasons to complain. These messages come throughJobto Faust (each transmission changing and adding to-or subtracting from-the na-ture of the original message, in both directions) into the modern age. (We note thatduring the Soviet-Americangrain deal of '72, Fortune reminded us of parallels to theJoseph story.)

This multiplicity of Job-streams, interpreted variously, surface (along withFaust-streams) in Moby Dick. "Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook.. ." Godasks Job: "Will mongers haggle over him/Divide him among the hucksters?/Willyoufill his hide with harpoons.. ." (Quoted from The Anchor Bible "Job," New York,1973; Marvin Pope translator.)Melville, having readJob differentlythan Goethe, hasseen the dangerin the Faustian vision, convertingFaustto Ahab, who surfacesfrom areferencein Faust II.Ahab, as we know, is the Chief Executive Officerof the Pequod,gone mad. After the sinking of Ahab and the Pequod, Melville has Ishmael quoteJob's servantafter 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 AtNoon (not necessarily having been routed through Melville). Koestler applied Job tothe inception of Stalin's collectivization and industrialization period (the Rostovian"takeoff"). Darkness takes the form of a series of interrogations-alluding to God'sbrutal 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 objectof their afflictionsdoes not understandthe Grand Design; that it is secret and sacredand not to be questioned by Man. Man is to accept, have faith and suffer in silence, asRubeschev does.What was Koestler saying?That Stalin is God, or God's instrumentality?Koest-ler'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 acompilation 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 modern-ist literary theory, visions of a collective neurological unconscious, or quantumtheory? What is the true meaning of these Ur-texts?

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IIIThe bargainbetween all-powerfulGod and Mephistopheles being consummated,Goethe now switches us to Faust himself, wherein we gain some idea of why Faust isthe subject of God's interest.It is night. We come upon Faust in his study in a state of despair:Nor haveI estateor moneyedworth!Nor honoror splendour f thisearth;No dog wouldlive 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 com-plains that he has not been properlyrewarded and is poor; he wants to toil no longer.In short, he is arrogant, learned, petty, enormously ambitious, striving after mysteri-ous knowledge and higher realms. Faust is the model for the modern, power-seekingacademic 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 resorted o magic'sart ...So I perceivehe inmostforceThat bondstheveryuniverse,View all enactment'seedandspringAndquitmy 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 naturewe never learn; not only will It not do his bidding, It tells Faust that It cannot beunderstood by someone like Faust. But perhaps we now see why Faust has attractedGod's interest: in the search to control powerful forces by use of heretical, evendemoniac 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 recurrentmotif of the shaman or culturic hero. But wheredoes that knowledge lay? In other worlds? In real institutions such as intelligenceagencies, state or corporate archives?In the mind of God? Or, as various schools ofpsychoanalysis would have us believe, buried in our own consciousness, individual orcollective minds?

Whatever the case, it is necessary to enter and explore this secret and sealedsub-compartment in the west's memory bank, its brain, its artificial intelligence, itsideology, to use modern metaphors not easily accessible to all, with the aim of


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understandingthe ancient underpinningsof what appears to be a modern, rationalis-tic, scientific society.

In literary practice as in real life, whether in the academy, religious organiza-tions, secret societies, in the therapist's office or intelligence agencies, access toknowledge is institutionally organized along hard or soft bureaucratic, class-structured, "need-to-know" lines. Hierarchies of audiences get to read hierarchies ofknowledge bodies in different ways.InFaust we see that God knows more than Mephistopheles, and Mephistophelesknows more than Faust. Faust is presumably a man, but he knows more than man-kind in general. Of course Goethe knows more than all of them. And yet, beingimpelled to refer to the west's collected memory bank, as it existed up to that point intime 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 creativeabilities he cannot totally control. The collected memory acts as an artificial but-since internalized-motivational substratum which distorts perception.Poised between the secularizing present/future and the religious past, Goetheutilized the ancient myth-motif of election, initiation and training.Therewas always away for the hero to find a back-channel wisdom or sacred knowledge. (At least that'swho we learn about; we neverlearn about those who fail, or don't care. It is assumedthat there exists an endless, ever-accreting, ever-refreshed,ever-edited memory, awisdom hoard which can be stolen or scanned without permission.) The pattern runsthis way: the chosen, after undergoing certain rituals, mortifications, sufferings andpurgations, dies (a metaphor for giving up the old and limiting knowledge), ascendsinto a higher (or lower) world and returns bearing divine wisdom which may or maynot benefit people. The search for it may be dangerous, allowed only to the worthy.The institutionalized story of the shaman has been incorporatedinto modern society.But a contrary hunt-for-knowledge theme runs throughout history and mythol-ogy: the subtle motif of disinformation and counterintelligence designed to preventsacred knowledge from being too widely distributed.Furthermore,there were at leasttwo sacred-knowledge repositories, one profane and magical, the other orthodox, yetneverthelessforbidden.

Sinking further into gloom, Faust comes close to suicide. He is saved by theringing of church bells which announce the coming of Easter. Easter, Spring, ofcourse, connects us with Jesus's death and rising, a theme communicated, with end-less variations, down the ages: Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales,Zola's Germinale, Eliot's Wasteland.Easter also implies spring planting, fertilityritesand sacrifices-ritual killings and actual starvations-to insure the growth of crops. Itis a theme that surfaces in modern secular history as we follow the course of Ameri-can agriculture and its dialectical conflict with Chinese and Soviet collectivization.

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Sol YurickThe sacrificial death of humans fertilizes the earth or, as the Mayans and Aztecs hadit, their blood keeps the universe running and the sun shining.

Emotionally and spiritually dead, Faust is to be resurrectedby God through hisagent, Mephistopheles. Savedby the sacred churchbell, Faustgoes out into the streetsand fields and mingles with people. He begins to feel somewhat reinvigorated andreturns to his study. He is followed by a black dog, a poodle. The poodle turns intoMephistopheles. Faust asks Mephistopheles who he is. "Part of a force whichwould/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 representsaversion of the Dialectic in images.This opposition between Devil and God, good and evil, addresses an ancientproblem whose countless variations have been played out through the centuries. IfGod is the ultimate good, omniscient and omnipotent, the one who created every-thing, then why is there evil in the world? Either evil is totally Other or it is a part ofthe One. If the Other is part of the One-Milton, Goethe, Hegel and Marx's ap-proach (in Marx, evil vanishes behind the scenes, is transformed into the dialectic ofhistorical materialism, but can be found lingering in Marx's imagery)-then is Godplaying a complex game whose outcome He already knows? But if one knows theoutcome, then why create man and woman to play with? Of God's actions in theBook of Job, we can always fall back on the traditional and solacing notion that theways of God are not revealed to us. One thing we are consoled by; it's all going tocome out all right in the end. Judeo-Christianity, and its great religious, artistic,political and economic works, rationalizes all contradictions and is fundamentallysentimental because it assures us of an eventual happy ending.If totally Other, the Manichean view, then God is not omnipotent and didn'tcreate, or put together, the entire universe. If we accept the Manichean approach tothe problem of evil, then we begin to understand the uses of the ever-recurrentmobilization of word, image, symbol, icon, picture, expressing evil throughhistory-as we shuttle back from Faust to Job and forward to that Job-inspireddocument, 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 theSoviet opposition to unleash its progressive forces to transform the west's politicaland social economy and Man. Conversely,the Soviet Union needs the west for its owntransformational trajectory.To what extent is the Cold War a transcendence theaterof magic, indeed a religion, as well as reality?Consideredthis way, we are on the waytoward an answer to the as-yet unspoken question: if Stalin is Faust, then who isMephistopheles/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, her-metic wisdom, gnosis, alchemy.... Magic may be seen as an attempt to manipulate

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Faust's Stages of SpirituallEconomic Growth and Takeoffinto Transcendence

knowledge in order to escape destiny ... a form of rebellion. As Raymond Brownputs it in his commentaries on The Gospel According to St. John, the commonpattern in gnostic thought is: "ontological dualism; intermediary beings betweenGod 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 ofknowledge 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 savingrevealer."

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 thehistory of renaissance alchemy, hermeticism, gnosis, astrology, cabala, neo-plato-nism, rosicrucianism, and the roles played in an abortiveenlightenment revolution bythe renaissance magi-Ficino, Pico Della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee,FrancisBacon, Robert Fludd and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa was attackedfor practicing black magic-although he claimed to practice white magic, com-municating with angels-always accompanied by his mysterious familiar, hisSchwarze Pudel. The Counter-reformation made Agrippa the prototype for the Ur-Faust and Dr. Faustus. We note too that Agrippa found it necessary to attack, asFaust does, all the old, medieval knowledge, clearing the memory boards for the newwisdom, a ritual forgetting, as it were, before a new age could dawn. We see the sameprocess taking place in Marx's works as he attacks received philosophical andeconomic wisdom, recognizing that the true, transformational alchemy is capital.Frances Yates, in her studies of the occult and the magical renaissance en-lightenment, proposes the theory that the magi, using Christian Cabala and hermeticwisdom, were seeking to advance into a new and golden age in which strife wouldend. They were rebels, heretics, change-agents, destroyersof the old and builders of anew order.The new orderwas in part scientific and devoted to numbermanipulation,placing great stress on measurement or charting the universe's seen and unseen di-mensions, accompanied by a revolution in classification ... an early version of mod-ern general systems theory.The basic theme is that there exists a relationship betweenthe earthly sphereof Man and the sphereof heaven. To manipulate knowledge was tomanipulate the universe: as below, so above; as within, so without. It is an ideawhose currency has not diminished and which continues to be seen in moderninformation theory and quantum mechanics.Newton's primary interests were astrological-alchemical.He had his feet in bothworlds, the world of the magi and modern science. And, through his legacy, themystical has crept into modern physics. Can we say that modern cosmology is insome sense a partial wish-system of religion/magic?The practice of magic, alchemyorastrology requiresa regularized, mappable and predictableworld in order to manipu-late 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 uni-verse.It is not clear whether or not Goethe was attackingthis 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 onekind 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, hisdesires. Faust assaults the world he lives in and cursed all its common customs andusages:

... Cursedbe the balsamof the grape!Cursed,highestprizeof lover's hrall!A curseon faith!A curseon hope!A curseon patience,above all!It is out of his bitterness and dissatisfaction that Faust is willing to destroy theworld and Goethe gives Faust'swords the status of a demigod's utterances.To whicha chorus of spirits replies:Woe!Woe!Youhavedestroyedt,Thebeautifulworld,Witha mighty ist;It crumbles cattered,By a demigodshattered..In splendourperfectedSeeit rewon,Set forthUponrebirth ..

(Note the themes of destruction, death and rebirth.)This bitter and murderous despair, this impatience with the ordinary ways ofman leads Mephistopheles to make Faust an offer. Faust rejects it; "Has ever humanmind in its high striving/Beencomprehended by the likes of you?" What this "highstriving" is we are not told at this point. Probably Goethe didn't know yet what itwas.

Goethe modifies the traditional pact with the devil into a newer form. Faust hasalready determinedthat 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," "af-fair," "event," "action."Faust is going to demolish the world and rebuild it, thus projecting the ritual ofdestruction and re-orderinginto his world.Faust says:If I be quietedwith a bed of ease ...... soothemysoul to self-sufficiency..Thenlet thatmomentbe the end of me! .If to the fleetinghourI say'Remain, o fair thou art, remain!'Thenbindme with yourfatal chain ...

He is commiting himself to eternal action.With these words, and Mephistopheles' agreement, the bargain is struck. Theconceptually shattered world must be remade through deeds. But Faust doesn't seemto know what he's going to do; he has no plan, no theory.Faustplunges into constantexperience and action, gratification and consumption of experience without lastingsatisfaction, for to be satisfied is to revert to ease, stasis, which is doom, accordingtothe 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 longdenied to him, drinking, brawling and cheap tricks. Faust is taken to a witch'skitchen, 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, moralmaiden. With the help of Mephistopheles, he seduces her.She becomes pregnant. Herbrother, Valentine, seeks to defend her honor and is killed by Faust.Faust leaves Gretchen and comes to an awareness of a deeper kind of sexualomniverousness when he joins the witch revels during Walpurgisnacht.So far Faustfollows the track hewn by Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: he uses the great power granted tohim in trivial indulgences.Unable to stand society's ostracism which brands her a whore, Gretchen be-comes half crazy. She kills her baby, accuses herself of killing her mother and isindirectly responsible for the death of her brother;she is condemned to die. Faust hasleft Gretchento bear her sorrows alone. Learningthat she is imprisoned, Faust is tornby that age old male dilemma; should he stand beside her or should he desert her andmove on? After a struggle, he decides to rescue her. Too late. She's half crazy. Shedenies him because of his reliance on Mephistopheles, preferring to accept herpunishment. 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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Sol Yuricklived in a greaterand more interestingworld, a domestic relationship is too confining.Call it the Odysseus or Peer Gynt motif, still celebrated in modern songs today: themale is restless, he has to keep moving on while the female remainsstationary, boundto home, hearth and children. To linger, to find satisfaction with Gretchen is toendanger himself because of the bargain he has made with Mephistopheles. Earthlylove, fidelity,the limited domestic world of family all must be rejected;they are clearlynot 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 everintenser experiences, will end up preferringa divinekind of love in which the earthly, material woman has been leeched of her fleshlyqualities and has become a purified essence.Part I represents the period of education in a new world for Faust; the world ofthe 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 hispersonal aspect. Faustneeds a greater stage to project his ego: masses to move insteadof individuals, great projects to accomplish. But what has this tale of love andabandonment to do with Faust's great deeds and search for "the highest?" MaybeGoethe was stuck with his beginning and had to make the parts work as one, unifiedwhole.

Faust now moves into the "Great World," which, at this point in the saga is amedieval emperor'scourt. PartII begins to reflect Goethe's Saint-Simonianphase ...the religion of banking and great enterprises and transformational work.The empire is bankrupt, stagnating, and is falling apart ("is alreadyin the handsof the Jews, to whom everythingis pawned" as Goethe put it in a conversation withEckerman. Faust, with Mephistopheles' aid, invents a new dynamism, a new way ofgenerating capital, compressing the history of the movement from the exchange ofmetal tokens of value to the exchange of paper as a step out of feudalism; credit (amovement which still goes on as paper exchanges yield to electronic fund transfers):

"To whom it mayconcern, his note of handIs wortha thousandducatson demand,Thepledgewhereofandguarantees foundIn treasureburied n the Emperor's round.Theseriches,raised,are earmarked o redeemFullpayment,by authority upreme.."Faust says:

Themajorbulkof treasure o be foundThroughout ourlands,deephidden n the ground,Lies yet untouched ...

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Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoffinto Transcendence

To which Mephistopheles adds:Suchpaper-wealth,eplacing earlsor gold,Is practical: ou knowjustwhatyou hold;And with mental operations, a new set of abstractions are invented which affectsand restructures the material world, by establishing a one-to-one relationship be-tween 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 toconceptual gold. The word truly becomes the deed. These tokens are interest-bearingpromises, acts of faith, to be drawn upon future, to be redeemed in a time that maynever come. (Weshould note that Dante's Beatrice, a Portinarii,came from a family ofFlorentine bankers and her husband was a di Bardi, himself from a family of interna-tional bankers.)

(Complex relationships of sign/symbol to people/things/events/universesystemsare constantly set up and torn apart through the ages, the pieces being reorganizedinto new "language" systems, but bear old values within them. Modern systems usesuch sign-systems as money, or genetics, or semiotics, or sub-molecular particles toexpress the "all." At first the "codes" of the universe are seemingly discovered andthen the magical illusion begins to grow: one might move the world by moving thesigns that representthe world. But nevertheless,extra-human reality is not composedof signs. Signs and what they denote and connote, or signify, sign-system piled onsign-system, signs of earthly humans, things, activities, are dependent upon the pres-ence of humans to name, signify,classify, create exchangeable equalizations, compile,reveal, obfuscate, simplify and complicate, remember and induce forgetfulness.Knowledge conferssome power but it, by itself, does not move the universeto change:it is technological, economic and political prostheses that extend mind power. How-ever, it must be admitted that the manipulation of knowledge can change the percep-tion of reality, and move people to perceive in new ways, which is as far as magictakes us.)

Impressedwith Faust'smagic, the Emperorwishes to see Helen of Troy and asksFaust to summon her up. Faust asks Mephistopheles to produce Helen. He cannot; itis out of his powers. If Mephistopheles is limited, is The Lord who sent Mephis-topheles 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 ajourney into the mysterious realm of "The Mothers." The Mothers dwell in a sub-stanceless and dimensionless realm where all is greyness, perhaps Chaos. What thisdomain of The Mothers meant to Goethe we are not sure, for Faust does not tell uswhat he has seen when he returns. Perhapsthis is a substrate where pure generationtakes place.

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Sol YurickGoethe 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 ofThe Mothers.After this, a homunculus is produced with a varietyof magical powers and thereare hints of a possible future in which certain forms of spirits can be created andgiven life-a shadowy magical matrix in which the possibility of chemical, women-less reproduction is foreseen.Faust takes a trip to the classical underworld,mates with Helen, goes through anew, and perhaps higher, realm of sensuality-a rite of passage within a rite ofpassage, an initiation into a secret society, a passage through many chambers ofsymbols and sexual involvement, an alchemical wedding-indulges in a classicalWalpurgisnacht,and returns in time to earth. Curiously,Mephistopheles is uncom-fortable with these naked, classical gods ... a strangesort of puritanism for a devil.In so doing, Goethe recapitulates the renaissance's rediscovery of classicalGreece and its knowledge; this rebirth was seen as a vital step towards the future. Theclassical Helen is the woman who represents the matriarchal instrument which gavebirth to the race of Hellenes and their culture. Faust prefers a higher, more abstractform of fucking to the worldly kind.Faust now settles a dispute between two rival emperors (thus recapitulatingthecenturies-long, historic struggle between the Guelfs and the Ghibbelines over thethrone of the Holy Roman Empire) and is rewarded by a stretch of seacoast todevelop in his own way.This recalls one of the sub-themesof The Divine Comedy: anevocation of the struggles among popes, kings, emperors, dukes, city-states, etc.: achaos which Dante wanted to unify in a new, conceptual Rome ... a Rome whichbecame 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 ofterritory.And now Faust's obsession with constant change begins to focus the greatland reclamation project; wresting land from the sea, a repriseof the great struggle ofthe Dutch lowlanders against the ocean.This project is almost accomplished, but one thing stands in his way. An elderlycouple, Baucis and Philemon, a grove of linden trees and an old church with a crackedbell. Of Faust, Philemon and Baucis say:

Clevermasters'daringminionsDrainedand walled the ocean bed,Shrank he sea'sentrenched ominions,To be masters n herstead. ..Vainly n the daytime aboredPickandshovel,clink andstrike,

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Whereat nightthe elf-lightswavered,By the dawntherestood a dikeHumanvictimsbled and feveredAnguishon the night-airborne,Fiery orrentspouring eawardScoreda channelby the morn.Godless s he, he wouldsavorThisourgroveandcabin here ..Faust, hating the two, being disturbed by the sounding of the church bell (a

fascinating reversalof his responseto the church bells in PartI), wants them out of theway. He commands Mephistopheles to drive Baucis and Philemon out for him.

Thataged couplemustsurrender,I want their inden for mythrone,The unowned imber-marginlenderDespoilsfor me the worldI own.There, or the eye'suntrammeledoving,I wish a scaffold o be wovenFrombranch o branch, orvistasdeepOf my achievement'sullestsweep,Withall-embracing azeto scanThemasterpiece f sapientman,As he ordainswith thoughtfulmindNew homestead or his teemingkind ...Thatstubbornness, erverse nd vainSo blights he mostmajesticgain,That to one'sagonizeddisgustOne has to tireof beingjust.

To Faust's doubt, Mephistopheles replies:Whyshouldyou scruplehereand wince?Haveyounot colonized ongsince?Faust says, "Go, then clear them from my sight!" leaving the expulsion of Phile-mon and Baucis to Mephistopheles. The couple are destroyed by fire. Faust, not

realizing yet what Mephistopheles has done, says:But where he lindenstand s wizenedTo piteousruin,charredandstark,A look-outframewill soon haverisen

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To sweeptheworld in boundlessarc.ThenceshallI view the new plantationAssigned o shelter he old pair,Who, mindfulof benignsalvation,Willspend ife'shappyevening here.But when Mephistopheles brings news that he's destroyed the couple, Faustclaims to be shocked at what Mephistopheles has done, but a chorus, coming un-motivated from nowhere, says:That ancient ruthwe will recite:Givewayto force,for might s right;And wouldyou boldlyofferstrife,Thenriskyourhouse,estateand . . . 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, issupposed to have gained a deeper insight and wisdom that reveals the truer world offorms within .... Odd, isn't it, that the hubris-riddentragic hero has to fail before herealizes what he's been doing? Why Faust has to become old is not clear . . . whathappened to Mephistopheles' powers?) Faust has one last project; to reclaim somemarshland.

How gailyringthe spades,a songof mirth!It is myhost of toilingslaves,Thatrenders elf-contentheearth,Ordainsa border o the waves,The seawith rigidboundsenchains ..FromeverysourceFindme morehands,recruitwith vigorSpurthemwith blandishment ndrigor,Spareneitherpaynor 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 thefleeting minute:/Oh, tarry yet, thou art so fair!" In short, the eternal themes ofsocially deferred gratification and freedom.

Mephistopheles chooses to interpretFaust's statement as a violation of the origi-nal 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 onGoethe'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 wouldseem an endless progression of great deeds.Mephistopheles prepares to drag Faust's soul down to hell, but God intervenes,cheating Mephistopheles.Filched rom me is this loftyprizeunmatchedA soulpledgedmine,by writtenscrollit gave,This theyrobbed romme, adroitlysnatched.To whom shallI 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 taskaccomplished, his struggles over,telling us that it is the eternal feminine that draws usup to the highest.

IVWhy was Faust saved? He was self-involved, petty, tyrannous, self-righteous,

fickle, mean-spirited, opinionated, grandiose, hypocritical; he was a betrayer ofwomen, an exploiter of labor, a trickster, a liar, a slave-driver. But then, when wethink 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 .... Thewhole arrayof exemplary tragicheroes stored in the long collection of real and mythicfigures of western civilization are really, when one thinks about it, despicable andtreacherouspeople. It might be said, as some critics have, that Goethe was critical ofFaust. If so, the heavenly reward that Goethe gave Faustwould be an enormous joke.Maybe the critics have looked at Faust the wrong way.In real life the great malefactorrarelygets caught out by fate and goes to his gravehappy,rich, honored and unrepen-tant. Still, now and then someone must be thrown to the wolves of fate so that themasses believe that there's justice in the universe.Faust is reunited in heaven with Gretchen, a penitent in the process of beingpurified. 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, asDante and Goethe would have us believe, the flesh-purifiedanthology of a vast seriesof sexual encounters? Is it the ultimate and enduring orgasm? Perhapsthis realm oflove representsthe liberation from all the constraints of earthly societies that limit theways in which one can make love. Is Goethe hinting at alchemical weddings, purereproduction, symbols wedded to symbols, the ars combinatoria of cabalists, geneti-

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Sol Yurickcists, nuclear physicists, semioticians; weddings in which images give birth to imagesand ideas are reproduced without the contamination of bodies which corrupt purelove, freeingone from responsibilities to fleshly children,which represent supplanta-tion, a constant reminderof the limits of our existence. Earthlylove and reproductionare 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 withimperfectly transmitting oneself in time through one's descendants (WasOedipus, ifindeed he committed incest, trying to replicate himself?) and, in the process, havingone's true self diluted, scattered, mixed in with the impure elements of others broughtabout by the combinatorial roll of the genedice, where contaminated knowledge leadsto the reproduction of impure transmitters of ideas, which in turn creates diversifica-tion, a Babel of languages, political strife and eventually chaos?These reflections and retrograde speculations finds a curious echo in moderntimes. Wilson, in his seminal and information-obsessed Sociobiology tells us:

Sexualreproductions in everysensea consumingbiologicalactivity.Repro-ductiveorganstend to be elaborate n structure, ourtshipactivities engthyandenergetically xpensive, ndgenetic ex-determination echanismsinely unedandeasily disturbed.Furthermore,n organism reproducingby sex cuts its geneticinvestmentn eachgameteby one-half.If an eggdevelopspathogenically,ll of thegenesin the resulting ffspringwill be identicalwith those of theparent.Insexualreproductionnlyhalf are dentical; heorganism,notherwords,has thrownawayhalf its investment.There s no intrinsicreasonwhy gametescannotdevelop ntoorganisms arthenogeneticallynsteadof sexuallyandsaveallof the investment..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 generativestuff can be considered information) energy; that Annunciation which is both thestatement and conception at the same time (and from where, perhaps, come themodern notions that link words and desire together). Her vagina was unsullied by anypenetrating earthly penis limited to ejaculating not pure, manipulable informationbut material semen.

Having long denied, perhapson some level even hating, living women, fastidiousFaust finds his true love at last, recapturingthe sexual mystery religions, the orgasmicinitiation rites, smoothly melding Catherist heresies, courtly love, real love in real-time space, Christianity into one, by merging himself, redissolving himself into aheavenly womb, a new kind of Holy Son, a possible precursor to an ancient, long-denied dream of rebirth and self-reproduction, requiringthe capture of the mysteriesof woman's breeding apparatus, an old male fantasy. As to what this heavenly lovefelt like, who can say?

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Faust'sStagesof SpirituallEconomicGrowthand Takeoffnto TranscendenceBut what of God? God is clearly masculine and yet, it was the eternal femininethat 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 rememberthe good things of his life and forget the badthings (the initiation motif of forgetting, clearing the mind-collective or indi-vidual-for the higher wisdom). Dante is passed on from his first guide, Virgil (thatpoet of state history, hired by Augustus to invent the propagandistic myth of Rome'sfounding (The Aeneid), that links it-altering history, in a kind of metagenetic-historic sequence-to Troy), to a new guide, Beatrice.In Paradiso,Beatrice guides Dante to heaven before turning him over to a higherguide. The inmost circle of Heaven is a rapidly revolvingpoint of burning light, theintelligences, a bureaucracyof angelic orders, God, His Son and Mary, whose rota-tion quickens the movement of the inmost circle of Paradiso,and whose motion drivesthe rest of the universe. The blinding point of light is everywhere and everywhen,modern quantum theory,so to speak, spoken of anotherway (unless, of course, on theother hand, modern quantum theory is a realization of ancient mysticism ... or awishful dream-projection).The ideal of space, time, motion, light, love and knowledge are all fused; heavenis a simultaneity,the ultimate memory bank, the ideal generative/reproductiveprinci-ple whose shape, wisdom, love and motion are imperfectly reproduced on earth.Dante has reached, returned to, that neo-platonic, gnostic/cabalistic world, re-turning 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 ofastrophysics, or the Big Bangs to be found in gnostic and cabalistic lore in manyreligions: Paradise,so to speak, at the Beginning and at the End. All possible texts arefolded together here, the ultimate, formal meta-matrix of language, where all con-ceivable utterances, all possible scripts and stories and chronicles reside and aregenerated. The primal explosion created diversification, disunity, contentiousness,perpetual struggle and introduced one-directional time into the universe, and thusdeath. All of history then, as foreseen in the minds of Milton, Dante and Goethe'sGod, is a journey toward re-unificationwith the One, for which the preconditions arethe 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 platonistsand neo-platonists tell us, earth is a poor copy of the heavenly-but copy neverthe-less-then surely there must be some secret knowledge-coffers in heaven where the

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Sol Yurickideal forms of such debased suffering reside. Surely even Faust's God must haveknown that Faust would cause suffering.If there is such a thing as an ultimate knowledge-bank in a heaven that existsperpetually, such that all earthly forms and stories are taken from it, albeit in dis-torted fashion, then we are justified in such concepts as the quasi-mystical, alchemi-cal, Jungian, collective unconscious, or the notion that the universe is composed ofinformation, signals, irrespective of humans. If, on the other hand, one adopts ahistorical-evolutionary perspective, then the notion of the a priori "eternal" or"ideal" is preposterous. The ultimate knowledge-bank is built up by humans whocreate, revise and fight over its contents, gradually accreting and subtractingfrom itsto-be-ideal contents throughout history. We can say that the collective conscious andunconscious are collected.

If the ultimate knowledge-bank is built up overtime, language and consciousness(among other things) become linked to the reproductive faculties of humans. Giventhis, we discern a drive on the part of some humans to idealize, evolutionize, tele-ologize and rationalize all human biological sex and link it to knowledge, indeedcalling the genes knowledge or information; a metagenetics. The metagenetic projectfor 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 ofknowledge is linked to unearthly love and desire on the one hand and earthly love onthe other.

The Bible and Paradise Lost imply that God cannot reproduce. He needs thereproductive power of humans. Deeds on earth by successive generationsof Man andWoman are needed to sustain his immaterial, reproductionless realm of perfect wis-dom and power. God's promise to humans is that in some future time, once they haveredeemed their sin through suffering, He will replace the fallen angels, the Luciferianminions with humans. Knowledge for the worthy, however,once they have gotten ridof their contaminating mortal parts, is immortality,as we see in Faust or The DivineComedy.Generations of populations reproduce-with variations-ideas, things, energyand capital . . . value which is frozen, stored, abstracted energy-as-knowledge-that-generates-and-moves-energy.This growth-bank in turn expands our vision of theuniverse-the effects of knowledge on the perception of space, time and matter:quantum physics as well as earthly projects-and allows us continually to restructureHeaven as an ideal unity of all things. Heaven is a collected beckoning fantasy fromwhich (or through which) most humans (the unelect) are impelled to contribute to itsbuildup and create a succession of provisional perfect universes until some futuretime when we attain that perfect knowledge which is "everywhereand everywhen."

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Quantum physics, one of those provisional knowledge storages, becomes instantane-ous allstory which would have us believe that any event, no matter how small, andespecially our own Heisenbergian interventions, affects every other event in the uni-verse instantaneously, no matter how far apart. This is suspiciously like a telepathictheory of magic. It follows from these para-Jungian, psychobiological, modernist-literary and quantum views that the activity of the brain (dreams, fantasies, wishesand words, or conscious ratio-logical statements), being a series of material bio-physical events, should instantaneously and materially affect the universe. This modelis synchronous and idealistic, counter-historical, but justifies our linking Faust andStalin, indeed permits us to say that Stalin affected the creation of Goethe'sFaust. Butwhat is this buildup?

Might we bring in the notion now of the accumulation of surplus value, forwasn't that what Faust and Stalin were doing? Humans creating knowledge whichwas used to alter material conditions to generate more knowledge, sorting out theuniverse, creating chronological and achronological arrangements of their environ-ment . . . memory. But transindividual memories require memorializers, generationsof humans, which brings us back to genetics for the knowledge-generators must begenerated.Marx interlarded his language with symbolic, transfigurational, meta-morphosal, reproductive imagery and added much to theories of transubstantiationwith his notion of surplus labor value time, an accumulation of stored human energy(requiringthe taming of energy, space to traverse in buildup, and time) which, sus-tained by faith, becomes a realm of timelessness, containing and preserving thetransformed spirits of the dead (and those who are being killed slowly as well asrapidly). A sort of value heaven being built up in contradistinction to pre-existentplatonic heavens.It may be objected that stored, valued, quantified, surplus labor-timeis a marxistmetonymy, 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 ascen-dant, material progress (Rostow called it compound interest ... drawn from thefuture). It's a problem in teleological accountancy. The struggle over which mode ofreckoning, which interpretation is correct is an ideological fight. Indeed one mightsay that the storehouse of accumulatedsurplus labor value and time (since time is alsocomposed of stories) is the ultimate abstraction, for without this buildup, semiotics,modernist theory, quantum meditations, the passage of genes through time (depend-ing on conditions supportive of life), are all unperceivableand unconceptualizable.What Goethe was talking about was an immortality project, whether mysticallydefined or concretized as a set of scientific operations, to confer immortality by thesolution of nature's mysteries ... one requiring an enormous expenditure and ac-cumulation of energy and power ... capital. At whose expense?

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Sol YurickV

Seen from the perspectiveof the organization of tales and stories into a progres-sive, ascendant, time-event series, the west's mainstream history incorporates Faust,indeed all tragedy, as episodes in a materialist transcendence and developmentdrama. Each tragic episode becomes a temporary,but exemplary stumbling block, asmall event inside a greater epic, which constitutes the epic of all epics whose pathculminates in the higher end. In fact, can't we view this collection of horrendousevents, literary, mythological, historic-starting with the ancient classicaldramatists-in the west as an enormous and happy,sentimental cosmic developmentcomedy?

It is in this context that one may ask: what if, as in Faust, ParadiseLost, theJoseph and Job stories of the Old Testament, Stalin was also fulfilling a divineagenda?Indeed, aren't these dramas equally applicableelements of developmental, orStalinist, dramas? Isn't it possible for revisionists and mythologizing historians, in-ventors of gods, angels, heroes, missing historical links, spinners of tales of greatdeeds, spirits-of-the-ages inventors, fabricators of collective urges, laws-of-history-structuralists, both east and west, to redeem Stalin at the end of history?And if we rememberthat the Stalinist collectivization period was modeled afterdevelopment in the industrialized countries and the United States in particular, canwe say that modern development in the west is Stalinism in slow motion? The manypast and present interconnectionsof Soviet to American agriculture (and their under-lying political, economic and mythic themes) shuttles us backwards and forwardsthrough those transformational periods of American history when the Americanfarmerwas/is/will be pushed first forward to develop the land and then, beset by bothnatural and artificial disasters, off the land. Given this new great leap forward intothe information age, we have reached one of Rostow's horrendous stages of develop-ment, a period of draconian transformation.

Extrapolating, expanding and concretizing, we see historical cycles in these fewpoetic 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, thereproduction of populations, capital, property,the trend toward economic concentra-tion, bank failures, the relationship of the agricultural to the industrial sector. Con-versely,can we say these events fall into a pattern similar in their repetitious cycles insuch a way that they can be re-abstractedfrom one kind of formalism to another kindof formalism, that of myths, motifs, archetypes, into what takes place in Faust. Suchconcrete, historical events can be seen through a Joseph-Job-Faust-Darknessmatrixand, reflexively,the literary-religious-mythicdimensions are viewed through the lensof production, capital intensivity, modernization and concentration. We can theninclude the gradual destruction of the small farmerin the west, and the peasant in the

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Faust'sStagesof SpirituallEconomicGrowthand Takeoffnto Transcendence

underdevelopedworld, the driving of masses off the land and into the cities (or totheir death) seeing them as a compilation of thousands of little Job-and-Josephstories, and, further, include the Soviet collectivization period as another tale ofthousands of little Jobs. The victims of this transformation weren't allowed to under-stand 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 EconomicGrowth.... Together,with other works, they constitute a matrix through which tosee a triumph or a tragedy.... We see our purely literary and religious worksbeginning to burst through their disciplinary boundariesas we discern the base in thesuperstructureand the superstructurein the base. Capitalism is more than a mereeconomic system; it is a culture that needs these supportive tales.Now we may begin to glimpse who, or what, played God and sent Mephis-topheles to Russia, to Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. Progressive-mindedMarx, thatpraiser of early, transformational capitalism, was their Mephistopheles; the progres-sive accretion of capitalism, particularly the American version, was God and set theagenda. Marx attacked the west's economic system but he stopped short of attackingits cultural capital, for he had been infected with an inverteddivine vision, drinkinginFaust, the Greeks and the rest of Judeo-Christianity in his education. The fundamen-tal formal agendas of west and east were thus the same.

VIBut how does a literary work become a component of a social body's mental

apparatus? Language-manipulatingseers, word-magicians think they have discoveredand identified an amorphous social energy, a mass-obsessive drive, a trend. Theycrystallize 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 insome way familiar and in some ways new. But what then? Mere excellence does notexplain how a concept, a thought, an arranged collection of images, makes its wayinto a public's consciousness, achieving the status of an impelling myth-drive.Before they can be propagated to electrify, shape and reorganize the socialenergy of populations, ideas must be transmitted. That not only requiresa technologyof transmission (word of mouth, theater, books, radio, television, cinema, etc.), butpoets, mythmakers, image replicators, explicators and critics, designated dreamersand seers, psych6logists and analysts, advertisers, remembrancers to broadcast andrepeat the ideas and images. On the receiving end are the listeners, the audience whomust be tooled, trained or programmed in receptivity. In short, marketing the prod-

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Sol Yurickuct. These apparaticonstitute the neuronal network, the limited and perhapsdiseasedbrain of bodies of people.

Whether corporate oligarchs, international bankersor government planners areaware 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 ofliquifying a nation's steel industry and moving it abroad, destroy the last of the smallfarmers, peasants, or primitive societies, create thousands of toxic dumps, or intro-duce the use of computers into every aspect of life, their rational calculations aremediated through a whole host of inherited social and psychic meta-reckonings. Forinstance, selected portions of The Bible, anthologies of folklore and great literatureshape the way humans use numerical prophecy (or risk analysis, if you like it better).These recycled artifacts of the past-tragedy, for instance-become methodologicalguidelines.

Faust, while appearing relegated to literature courses for deconstructive vivi-section, literary psychoanalysis, structuralist model building, hermeneutic delving,assaults by newer new critics, and semiotic layering,in fact sits in the corporate boardrooms, on government task forces, or on central planning committees. His spirit isstill actively conjured up in certain arenas of everyday life, just as Faust himself onceconjured up spirits to wake, inspire and drive dormant, smug masses who wanted toremain in their old rut. Faust is a key word, a sort of file-name standing for animposed collective urge, a drive, an obsession, a guiding myth for rulers, a sacredtext, a frontier-bustingexhortation-sickness that hovers in the unconscious of certainelites. How strange that Freud never discovered the Faust Complex.Old Faust is used to generate new transformational hymns to accompany theforced social transition towards post-industrialism in our own day.Its music promisesthat "the word" (computers, communications, information, numerical control ofmachine production; "Mind" runningthe material universethrough a fantasy-mix oflanguage, logic, symbols, signs, promises, a realization of ancient dreams of magi-cians and shamans) will replace people, physical activity and things-which areimperfect copies of ideal forms-and free us all at last from labor ... those of us wholive through the transition. To paraphrase Axel's Castle; as for living, let our servo-mechanisms do that for us.

Impelled onward by this myth, which organizes and directs inchoate energy andurges, 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 asthey move, constantly changing their styles, their costumes, their languages, leavingthe ground barren and littered as they pass. Even capital-intensive fucking in themetropolis (modeled afterFaust) of western elites sucks off energywhich reflectsitselfas a monetary drought in Brazil.Faust is about deferredgratification for the many inexchange for false and unredeemablepromises offered by the few. But, to paraphrase

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, the orgiastic future constantly recedes into the darkness andeludes us.The third world becomes transformed. New cities (and their surroundingslums,as ancient in their duration as the pyramids) spring up; pools, seas, oceans of unre-deemable loans arise, Amazon Basin projects, TVA's, Green Revolutions, Suez andPanama Canals, Iranian modernizations, Aswan Dams, Manhattan Projects, Valleysof 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 actionsconducted in the first world are felt as: Here comes the Peace Corps. We can trace themyth's effect by monitoring the disbursement-flow of the WorldBank, or AID money.

Like some climacteric shift, these changes become felt by those who have beenkept from God's court and don't know what was planned for them, felt almost as avast and natural change. To quote Guy Hunter, who accepts the Rostovian model ofdevelopment in Modernizing Peasant Societies:

It is not our businesshereto commenton thesegiganticventures.From he smallfarmer'spoint of view they could be regardedalmost as part of the naturalenvironment-the sun'sheat or monsoonrains-underwhichorganic ifemustfindits way. Nationallyand internationally,heir costs and the comparativebenefitswhichmighthavecomeby spendinghe resourcesn otherwaysarelargelybeyonddefinitive alculation;herearetoo many egitimate ariables nd different ssump-tions,eachcombination f whichwouldgivea different nswer.Perhapswe shouldindeed ake the farmer's iew(Job's)andregard hemas an upheaval f thenaturalorder from which the international gencies, actingas Olympiansrather han aseconomists, oreseebenefit or the race of men below for centuries o come. Letushopethat theseOlympiansarewise.

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Sol Yurick on Faust