The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (review)

The Faust Myth contains an astonishing thesis, which Hawkes presents with astonishing boldness. While the "original Faust's belief that signs are efficacious constitutes his deal with the devil," later treatments of the myth provide an ongoing "ethical critique of the growing power of performative representation," whose moral significance "suggests that belief in the autonomous power of signs destroys the human subject, or soul." This myth retains its relevance for postmodern society, where "the autonomous self is often dismissed as an idealist illusion, and in which the world is ruled by the power of financial signs" (inside front cover). The book is, more than any other academic book I have encountered, a sensation. Therefore the advertising blurbs rightly assert that it is "an intellectual thrill ride" and "a must-read for all students." In fact, students of varying ideological commitments and persuasions should provide the book with an active and controversial reception.

Hawkes's critique of the "rhetorical (for it is not logical) association of the performative with liberation" (4) constitutes a radical challenge to a whole host of postmodern thinkers, critics, and philosophers. His main purpose "is to find some reasons for the demise of the soul as an intellectual concept, and also as an object of everyday experience, by showing how the Faust myth connects the performative power of representation to the soul's alienation" (7). Yet what emerges in Hawkes's essentialist Marxist, anti-Nietzschean approach is a moral position as fervent and unwavering as a fundamentalist religious position it in some ways uncannily parallels. Not that Hawkes is critically inflexible: the persuasive application of his thesis to an extraordinary range of philosophical and (international) literary texts spanning several centuries is a testament to his erudition, and his critical virtuosity and brilliance. But the almost monomaniacal power of this treatment also may cause uneasiness: even those readers (myself included) deeply sympathetic with his critique of postmodern performativity may pause uncomfortably over readings that apparently return us to an excessively strict and limiting orthodoxy, such as when Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is said to simply depict "the absurdity of this creature's revolt against his Creator" (54), or when Hawkes asserts that the "paradigmatic heretical belief . . . that Satan's power is independent of God's . . . is precisely the error that Milton's Satan commits" (82). Here the most interesting recent developments in Milton criticism, emphasizing the necessity of Satanic agency and the political tyranny of Milton's God, are elided, and the "Romantic sympathy for the devil" dismissed as "anachronistic" (111).

While the idolatrous fetishization of money is probably easy for most readers to view as a Satanic tendency, it may be less easy for many scholars to dismiss crucial thinkers such as William Blake as "antinomian eccentrics" (172), or to categorically reject "such pseudo-scientific notions as projection and the unconscious" (180). Others with more expertise in economic theory may problematize the immorality implicit in "the Western attempt to deny the demonic nature of capital" (215), even though Hawkes's reading of neoimperialist exploitation of third-world nations is undeniably powerful and disturbing. Nevertheless, I am intrigued by the possibility that Hawkes's striking critique of the magical power of signs is, in the final analysis, perhaps too pervasively applied, in the sense that it ultimately demonizes the power of the human imagination, on reflection a rather surprising critical move on the part of a literary scholar. The efficacy of literature as a moral influence would seem to depend on our ability to acknowledge, on some level, the power of its signs, as a necessary parallel, or adjunct, to our own (not merely performative) creative self-fashioning. Hawkes claims that "the Western world . . . is ruled by icons, charms, and fetishes. Its inhabitants are frequently confused as to the boundaries between fantasy and reality, their leisure time is spent in the contemplation of images" (214). And yet "the contemplation of images" is, in a...