TR . . sure Gaddis is christian in perverse way (shade of gray)

[Michael Bailey]

(the following are the probably obvious reflections of a slow learner
-- so I call on the aid of Giuseppe Desa of Cupertino, the flying
friar, a patron saint of slow learners...)


didn't Gaddis start out wanting to do a parody of Faust,
and then somebody told him Faust was based on a story in the
Recognitions of Clementine, and then reading that inspired him even
more deeply?

anyway, my initial idea of a parody whether of Faust or CR is probably
too shallow, based upon what I would produce if I sat down to parodize
one of those works.
It'd be short and silly with lots of fart jokes (I'd have to work in
something about "divine afflatus" for instance...)

to parodize can be a more serious and strenuous endeavour,
though...Wikipedia includes this in its definition:

"a work created to mock, comment on, or make fun at an original work,
its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of
humorous, satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda
Hutcheon (2000: 7) puts it, "parody … is imitation, not always at the
expense of the parodied text.""

but anyway, so you sit down to parodize Faust, that's a whole
tradition including but surely not limited to Goethe's version...

a) why would you do that?  Let's say you want to comment upon the same
themes, I guess, and produce a work in the same current.
So you're basically wondering about
the individual soul
Goodness and its proponents
Evil and its proponents
unholy bargains a person can make
the rewards and punishments

if I were sitting down to do that, I'd probably start from the premise
that the game isn't worth the candle, everybody knows that your soul
is worth more...
so I wouldn't get far

but maybe Gaddis wanted to examine it less dogmatically, and look at
bargains people in the 20th century were making:
to recast the story in more prosaic terms -
the quest for money and power surely could be considered Faustian
bargains, if you look at it that way - for instance...even the desire
to excel at something

Goethe's formula allows Faust to be saved because he at last finds
happiness in the thought that he is helping others

whereas Sinisterra, cleverly as he can forge proof of his competence
at surgery, can't actually help Camilla

so maybe the distinction that Gaddis will emphasize is between the
development of power to represent oneself as something or other ---
versus the power to truly perform a helpful function for somebody in need?

so maybe he had that idea in mind, and parodizing Faust already
produced a work of imagination -- but then, intrigued by the
Clementine Recognitions, he developed the idea further and produced a
richer set of references?

Faust is a cautionary tale that's been used to dramatic effect - it
allows the titillation or wish-fulfillment of watching someone
surrender to evil, and (traditionally) imparts a moral lesson by
seeing Faust's terrible fate or (in Goethe's version) invents a
loophole to allow man to frustrate the devil by  admitting
satisfaction only after receiving from the Devil a gift that is
actually God's to give

which is neat enough.  And parodizing it could involve pointing out
some of the problems with cautionary tales (how many people have been
incited to drug use by antidrug films, for instance) and with Goethe's
twist (how about all the damage done along the way, eg) - not to
mention finding clear 20th century equivalents to the medieval
devil/God entities or their Enlightenment version, or making it clear
that such distinctions aren't always easily drawn

But even without knowing the intricacies of CR, it seems to me that
parodizing not just Faust but the entire saga, this is going to
involve more gyrations, more context, more history...and perhaps allow
him to comment upon Christianity itself