In the Symposium of Plato, Aristophanes tells a tale about the "fragmentation" of humanity. At first there were three sexes: male-male; female-female; and male-female. These were round in shape, with four arms and four legs, and one head with two faces. These creatures had great strength, and actually attacked the gods by climbing into heaven to make war. Zeus came up with the idea of reducing the strength-and therefore the threat-of these creatures by cutting them in half. The separated halves were no longer a threat to the gods: they wandered, weak and forlorn, each in search of its other half. Then Zeus took pity on them, and moved their reproductive organs to the fronts of their now-separated bodies, so that they might come together temporarily in their original pairings: male-male; female-female; and male-female. Aristophanes speaks of this coming together in love as a healing:

So you see how ancient is the mutual love implanted in mankind, bringing together the parts of the original body, and trying to make one out of two, and to heal the natural structure of man. (Symposium 87)

The "postmodern" condition of the individual is not spoken of merely as an experience of fragmentation or incompleteness as emphasized in the image of two separated halves of a primordial, mythical whole. It is also thought of as an experience of repression, generated and conditioned by larger cultural systems that determine subjective consciousness. Again, this is not new. The notion of repression as a reaction to the authority of "cultural systems," as well as the notion of having one's consciousness somehow determined by powerful outside forces is treated allegorically in Aristophanes' tale. In his case, the sundering is done by the gods. In our case-in an age in which we have invested the abstract notions of "society" and "culture" with near-divine omnipotence-the sundering is done by the larger culture in which the individual lives.

Wait just a minute, say the postmodernists. It isn't that simple. The concept that we in the late 20th century have of the "self" is wildly different from the concept that the Greeks and/or Romans had of "self." From a perspective of what Arthur Kroker and David Cook, in their book The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, call "Hyper-theory. . .for the end of the world" (ii):

the self is now like what the quantum physicists call a "world strip," (see note #1--notes marked in boldfaced type are at the end of this essay) across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological condition-the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are (simultaneously) predators and parasites. (iii)

What Kroker and Cook characterize as the "hyper-pessimism" of their approach, is (in their estimation) the only way to "break forever with all of the liberal compromises which seek only to save the appearances at the dying days of modernism" (iii). One of the concerns which they deride as a liberal compromise is "the desperate search now for the recuperation of the subject (in the age of the disappearing self)" (iii). The search for wholeness is a "liberal compromise." Transcendence is a bourgeois dream amidst the implosion of excremental culture:

For who can speak with confidence of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives onward economy, politics, culture, sex, and even eating is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite-the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation. (i, emphasis added)

We are the consumers and the consumed, the eaters and the eaten, the rapists and the raped. Our "civilization" is falling down around us under the weight of its corruption, greed, and inhumanity. We have become what Oswald Spengler called the "Faustian man [who] has become the slave of his creation (Decline of the West, vol 2, 504); however, the creation we are a slave to is not "the economy of the machine-industry" (504) which Spengler envisioned in 1918, but an economy of sex, consumption, and struggles (orchestrated by the powerful) between the powerless. We consume more than we produce, and ultimately, we consume ourselves:

And behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die. (Isaiah 22:13 emphasis added)

Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecendented lawlessness. Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had previously been penniless but now inherited their wealth, people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before then they used to keep dark. Thus they resolved to spend their money quickly and to spend it on pleasure, since money and life alike seemed equally ephemeral . . . . It was generally agreed upon that what was both honourable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. (Thucydides 155)

Is this condition to be regarded as historically unique? Has no culture previous to our own felt "the thrill of catastrophe"? Are the "selves" in the late 20th century unique in feeling "empty," "colonized," "seduced," or even "schizoid"? If the "thrill" of "postmodern culture" is the "ecstatic implosion . . . into excess, waste, and disaccumulation," then what is "postmodernism" except an overlong dinner at Trimalchio's?

The relatively new Western science of psychology has taken the "fragmentation of the individual subject" as a given since William James outlined his concept of the "constituents of the Self" in his 1891 book The Principles of Psychology. According to James, those constituents are four: 1) the material Self; 2) the social Self; 3) the spiritual Self; and 4) the pure Ego. The material Self is, strictly speaking, the body. James extends that Self out to such things as the clothes we wear, our immediate families, and our homes and personal property:

We all have a blind impulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babies, (2)and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may live in and "improve." (189)

The social Self is the recognition each of us gets from others. In accordance with our tendency to present different faces to different people, we have numerous social Selves:

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. . . .We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command. (189, 190)

James goes on to describe the spiritual Self in terms of faculties such as the "ability to argue and discriminate. . .moral sensibility and conscience. . .our indomitable will" (191). We may also view the spiritual Self as "either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view-both the stream and the section being concrete existences in time, and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind" (191). The pure Ego is what James calls "the bare principle of personal Unity" (191). This "personal Unity" is "a certain portion of the stream [of consciousness] abstracted from the rest. . .felt by all men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, [a] sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole" (192).

In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James speaks of the "heterogeneous personality":

There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes . . . . we find the extremes of it [the heterogeneous personality] in the psychopathic temperament. (154)

We needn't limit ourselves to the Western world in investigating the pervasiveness of the notion of fragmentation. Samkhya-Yoga describes prakritri (the domain of matter and mind, and thus of human consciousness) as an interplay of forces called gunas: Sattva -which Eliade describes as "the modality of luminosity, of purity and comprehension (Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, 20); rajas-"the motor energy that makes all physical or cognoscitive experience possible" (Yoga 21); and tamas-"inertia of matter, darkness of consciousness, the barrage of the passions" (Yoga 21). Consciousness is determined by the relative proportions of the three gunas:

When sattva predominates, consciousness is calm, clear, comprehensible, virtuous; dominated by rajas, it is agitated, uncertain, unstable; overwhelmed by tamas, it is dark, confused, passionate, bestial. (Eliade, Yoga 23)

Eknath Easwaran, in his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, describes the interplay of the gunas in much the same way that James describes the "heterogeneous personality":

All three are always present at some level of awareness, and their proportions change: their interplay is the dynamics of personality. The same individual will have times when he is bursting with energy and times when inertia descends and paralyzes his will, times when he is thoughtful and other times when he is moving so fast that he never notices those around him. (29)

Again, what is the difference between the "postmodernist" view-as represented by Arthur Kroker and David Cook-and the views expressed above? If the notions of fragmentation, of alienation, of being helpless to pull the broken pieces of a primordial, original whole together in the face of powerful determining forces (gods/culture/gunas) are not essentially new, why are we in the late 20th century trumpeting our alienation as if it were an original and profound discovery? What is the essential difference in our conception of "fragmentation"?

We view it as irrevocable. In addition, we are systematically "deconstructing" those (in the postmodern view, illusory) things which have long been humanity's attempts to express and heal its sense of incompleteness. Modern French-inspired linguistic philosophy denies us, in our languages, any ability to make reference to anything outside of our languages. Words refer always and only to other words, we are told. We are trapped within the prison-house of language (3). Literature is viewed increasingly in terms of political struggles: race, class, and gender are our current interpretive lenses. Through them we see individuals engaged, not in a struggle to individuate, achieve wholeness or even apotheosis, but in a struggle with other fragmented and incomplete individuals to gain power in a world of alienation and determinative cultural conditioning. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick writes that "an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance (4)to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (Epistemology of the Closet 1, emphasis added). Thus, "virtually any" aspect of our culture, indeed our existence, must be seen-if that seeing is to be undamaged in its "central substance"-through the interpretive lenses of the historical struggle of homosexuals for social justice.

French feminists such as Luce Irigaray tell us that all language-not just "literary" language-is phallocentric in its very structure. Our language privileges the masculine, and thereby marginalizes and oppresses the feminine. Language, in this view, does not merely refer to itself, but is itself a text which documents the struggle between the masculine and the feminine. Discourse-in Irigaray's reaction against Lacan this is primarily psychoanalytic discourse, which, quoting Lacan, "determines the real status of all other discourse" (This Sex Which Is Not One 104)-as far as it retains this phallocentric structure "perpetuates the subjection of woman" (104). Within this discourse, "women are 'products' used and exchanged by men. Their status is that of merchandise, 'commodities'" (84).

Sandra Gilbert begins with this assumption in her article "Life's Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy," in which she outlines her view of Silas Marner as a tale of masculine redemption which uses females and femaleness as currency, as commodities to be exchanged. This notion, loosely drawn from four pages (115-118) in Claude Levi-Strauss' The Elementary Structures of Kinship which deal with the customs of societies both patrilineal and patrilocal, is summed up by Levi-Strauss in this way: "The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange . . . " (Levi-Strauss 115). Matrilineal and matrilocal societies, in which it is men who are "exchanged" between households, are here conveniently ignored; even Levi-Strauss strains to interpret such situations in terms of an exchange between men: "Certain tribes of South-east Asia . . . provide almost a picture of the inverse situation . . . . [but] in such societies it is [not that] the women . . . exchange the men, but rather that men exchange other men by means of women" (115).

Instead of reunifying, our discourses merely reify. We see literature -and culture-in terms of conflict. At the most absurdly reductive level, we count the number of women in the Inferno, to reach conclusions about such profoundly important questions as whether or not Dante has achieved the correct balance of gender representation (5).

Michel Foucault goes further: the subject "Man" is not merely fragmented, it is disappearing altogether (perhaps the meaning behind Kroker and Cook's characterization of ours as "the age of the disappearing self"). The Foucaultian "death of Man" is perhaps best understood as a rejection of the Cartesian cogito. For Foucault, Man-who did not exist "before the end of the eighteenth century" (The Order of Things 308)-is not the disembodied thinking subject of Descartes, but a space of knowledge, a set of relations between knowledges or discursive practices. Man is a concept of the "human sciences," the space in which these sciences deploy their arguments and knowledges in an agon of representation and determination of Man as subject. The Cartesian cogito is an individual, non-fragmentary, and disembodied subject; the fragmented postmodern subject-the "modern cogito"-is that which is subjected by determining forces (what Foucault terms "practices") in a definitely embodied relation of dominance and submission. The Cartesian cogito is also an individual, non-fragmentary, and disembodied consciousness; Foucault's "human sciences" extend the categories and possibilities of knowledge far beyond those implied in the cogito ergo sum. The "I think" is no longer regarded as by itself simply and unproblematically constitutive of the "I am." The "modern cogito" includes both that which is given to consciousness and that which is Other-that which both escapes consciousness and yet determines the conditions of possibility for consciousness:

. . . transcendental reflection in its modern form . . . find[s] its fundamental necessity in the existence . . . of that not-known from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowledge. (The Order of Things 323)

Foucault asks, "How can man think what he does not think?" The "modern cogito" is not rooted exclusively in what is thought, in pure, non-fragmentary, disembodied consciousness (Foucault denies the possibility of such a consciousness); rather it is a "constantly renewed interrogation as to how thought can reside elsewhere than here, and yet so very close to itself; how it can be in the forms of non-thinking" (The Order of Things 324). Thought is inseparably linked to all that is not thought: "The modern cogito does not reduce the whole being of things to thought without ramifying the being of thought right down to the inert network of what does not think" (The Order of Things 324). The "modern cogito" is rooted both in thought and that which is not thought, in consciousness and that which is not consciousness. How can thought reside elsewhere than here? Thought-and non-thought (in the sense of that which is not consciously thought, but felt, imaged, intuited)-originated elsewhere than here. It may be only recently (in evolutionary terms) that thought has begun to reside here at all.

The Foucaultian "Man" is by definition a fragmented subject: it is a concept, or a conceptual space, determined and subjected by the discursive practices of the "human sciences"-psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, economics. Defining "Man" as both subject and object of knowledge in the wake of the decentering of a previously theocentric cosmos, these sciences put this "Man" in the now-empty center. It is this need for, and privileging of, the concept of a necessary center which postmodern thought denies. It is this concept, this construction which was placed in this "illusory" center for which Foucault predicts death. Declaring the death of Man -the fate of a pitifully fragmented subject reaching a painful discursive end-sounds wonderfully dramatic; however, it is a potentially misleading claim-misleading in direct proportion to the extent that the Foucaultian "Man" may be confused with the more common conceptions of "man" or "humanity." The death of Foucaultian "Man" is the death of a discursively constituted concept; the more basic rejection of the Cartesian cogito is a rejection of a notion of non-fragmentary, disembodied consciousness as that which is exclusively constitutive of being. It is a rejection of the claim that Cogito contains wholly within its parameters the mysterium tremendum of ergo sum. It is potentially a return to the notion that what is known is rooted in what is not known, what is thought in all that is not thought, what is present in what is absent, what is manifest in what is unmanifest.

Nietzsche characterizes Decartes' Cogito ergo sum as "a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed" (The Will to Power 268) and suggests that "the assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it it just as permissable to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general?" (The Will to Power 270).

Despite claims to the contrary, this idea of a subject that is fragmented or a "multiplicity" is not new; the world did not begin with Descartes, nor will it end with a rejection or a modification of the Cartesian subject. The decentered subject does not originate in our sense of ourselves as tragically, uniquely, and fashionably beyond "naive" notions of unity and integration. The "not-known from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowledge" is-like the poor-with us always. As the unconscious, psychoanalysis identifies this "not-known" as the deepest layer of our being; as the unmanifest, Christian theology identifies the "not-known" as both the sin, the hamartia, the "missing the mark" which separates us from, yet paradoxically compells us toward, God, and the transcendent reality-in-love of that God which draws all toward itself; in a Hindu work like the Bhagavad Gita, the "not-known" is the transcendent reality of the identity of atman-brahman, the realization that all that is manifest has its root in the unmanifest.

In the domain of religion, we increasingly see the notion of a transcendent deity as a product of patriarchy, colonialism, and elitism. The notion of a transcendent and anthropomorphically male deity has run aground on the shores of late 20th century feminism. The traditionally masculine deity of the three major monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is increasingly viewed-with some justification-as a concept which represents the male half of us while excluding the female half. However, the perception of this god's (assuming for the moment a syncretistic identity between Yahweh, God the Father, and Allah) rather too imperious maleness is-like the notions of human fragmentation discussed above-anything but new. The aggressively monotheistic Yahwist priests of pre-exilic Israel and Judea frequently butted heads with their "stiff-necked" countrymen over the urge to worship divinity also in a female form. Asherah, a Canaanite fertility goddess identified by the Ras Shamra texts as the wife of the supreme god El and the mother of the god Baal, was a special temptation for the pre-exilic Hebrews (6). Raphael Patai, the anthropologist and Biblical scholar, writes that the Hebrews of approximately 800 B.C.E. until 621 B.C.E. (the generally agreed-upon date for the "discovery" by Hilkiah of the "Book of the Law"-now thought to be the core of our present book of Deuteronomy-and the resultant decision by King Josiah to tear down the asherim and officially establish exclusive Yahwism) often conceived of Yahweh as having a feminine counterpart, much like the god-goddess pairs of the surrounding peoples of the Canaan valley:

One of the most intriguing finds that has come to light in the past decade is that of Kuntillat 'Arjud in the northeast Sinai, some forty miles south of 'Ayn al-Qudayrat. . . where two large pithoi (storage jars) were discovered. They are over three feet high, and one of them carries this inscription (in my translation): "Amaryau said to my lord. . . may you be blessed by Yahweh and his Asherah. May he bless you and keep you, and be with my lord.". . . .At Khirbet al-Qom, a site some nine miles west of Hebron, another inscription was found. It reads: "Uriah the rich has caused it to be written: Blessed be Uriah by Yahweh and by his Asherah; from his enemies he has saved him." These inscriptions show that in popular religion the Goddess Asherah was associated with Yahweh, probably as his wife, and that "Yahweh and his Asherah" were the most popular divine couple. (The Hebrew Goddess 53)

This feminine counterpart-or aspect-of the One Male God manifests itself again in the figure of Hokhmah (Sophia in Greek) or Wisdom. Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sirach) 24:1-3 describes "her":

Wisdom shall praise her own self, and shall be honoured in God, and shall glory in the midst of her people. And shall open her mouth in the churches of the most High, and shall glorify herself in the sight of his power. And in the midst of her own people she shall be exalted, and shall be admired in the holy assembly.

This feminine aspect of God is later masculinized in the concept of the Logos of John 1:1. Note the similarities between the descriptions of the Logos and that of Wisdom (Hokhmah, Sophia) in Eccliasticus 24:5-11:

I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before all creatures: I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth: I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud. I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and have walked in the waves of the sea, and have stood in all the earth: and in every people, and in every nation I have had the chief rule: and by my power I have trodden under my feet the hearts of all the high and low.

With the "masculinization" of the principle of divine wisdom in the figure of the Logos, the feminine side was once again repressed. This, in effect, fragmented (once again) the image of the divine. However, the transcendent drive towards wholeness cannot be so easily-or permanently-derailed. The figure of Mary began to take on, slowly and perhaps not entirely consciously in the minds of the faithful, the characteristics of a feminine divine aspect. In 431 C.E. Mary was proclaimed Theotokos, God-bearer, at a council in Ephesus. By 451 she was declared Aeiparthenos, Ever-Virgin, at the Council of Chalcedon. In 1854, the Church officially sanctioned Augustine's notion that Mary had been somehow exempted from human sin: it released a papal bull, Ineffabilis Deus, which declared Mary "immaculately conceived" as well as "immaculately conceiving." In 1950, Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of the Virgin, and in 1954 the Catholic Church proclaimed her "Queen of Heaven" (Baring and Cashford 550-553).

This "feminization" of monotheism's One Male God is not a phenomenon of the past, nor is it any longer exclusively focused-for the rank-and-file faithful-on the figure of Mary. The United Church of Christ, an American Protestant denomination with approximately 1.5 million members, has redone its hymnal , entitled The New Century Hymnal, so that it will eliminate gender bias. The Rev. James W. Crawford, the chairman of the United Church of Christ's hymnal advisory committee describes the question that was asked about each of these hymns and then what was done to bring them up to the new standards:

Did it serve justice? Justice is a major statement of our faith. All stigmatizing or diminishing language, all exclusive language, was eliminated. Some of those old texts were bad news. (Cathy Lynn Grossman. "Updates Strive to Cleanse Hymns of Bias." USA Today, 6/27/95, 2D)

The 1865 hymn Rejoice, You Pure in Heart has been updated so that the words "The Father, Son and Holy Ghost" have been replaced by "Praise God the Spirit, Holy Fire." The appearance given at an attempt at simple gender-neutrality is belied, however, by everyday practice. At the Peoples Congregational Church in Washington D. C., Steven Bullock, a member of the congregation, had his daughter, Sydney Brianna, baptized "in the name of God, mother of all" (Grossman 2D).

At its worst, seen in the most deliberately uncharitable light, this is another manifestation of our current political struggles: another manifestation of the race, class, and gender issues which bitterly divide us. It is another struggle between fragmented and incomplete individuals to gain power in a world of alienation and determinative cultural conditioning. It is a variation on the theme of counting the number of women in the Inferno.

However, it need not be seen this way. This could be seen as an attempt at the regeneration of a spiritual idea-a re-positing of a centering principle in the form of an image of divinity-whose traditional manifestation no longer works for the faithful. The bringing together of "masculine" and "feminine" archetypal principles, merging opposites into a transcendent whole-as in the Eros/Logos and Animus/Anima concepts in Jungian analytical psychology, the Yin-Yang of Taoism, and the Christian concept of Christ the Bridegroom joining with the Church as his Bride-has often been a mechanism for regenerating, recreating, and reestablishing an "original" unity (despite the now-familiar postmodern denial that such an original unity ever existed as more than an illusion, a totalizing impulse). Baptism in the name of "God, mother of all," is certainly theologically unorthodox, but it just may represent-rather than a simple overturning of tradition in the name of gender politics-an attempt at transcendence. If this development is being given its impetus by the desire to leave behind an image of divinity which no longer brings those who seek divinity closer to its realization, but instead pushes those seekers away, then it is a tentative step towards that which Meister Eckhart termed the hardest step of all: "Man's last and highest parting is when, for God's sake, he takes leave of God" (Armstrong 253). Admittedly, simply changing the gender of the anthropomorphic image of divinity you worship is hardly what Eckhart had in mind when he made that statement. His God was Nothing, in the sense of no thing. Beyond anthropomorphic representations (the God which must be taken leave of), which ultimately mislead the seeker of God into confining the infinite within finite categories, the God of Eckhart's famous statement (that God for whose sake the seeker leaves the God of images and anthropomorphic representations) is neither male nor female. These are finite concepts to be used-if at all-as aids to worship, not as objects of worship. If the transposition of the gender of the traditionally masculine God of monotheism aids those who would seek by helping them to "for God's sake. . .take leave of God," then this is, by definition an attempt at a healing and reunifying transcendence, an attempt by these Christians to overcome the "postmodern" condition, that well-publicized discontinuous experience of fragmentation, alienation, and repression, generated and conditioned by larger cultural systems that determine the conditions of possibility for any subjective consciousness.

In much the same way, I am trying "for Literature's sake to take leave of Literature"-at least in the sense that I am deliberately (Quixotically?) attempting to extricate myself from the current mainstream of postmodern literary criticism and scholarship. The striving for transcendence, rather than the trench warfare of reifying political discourses and criticisms, is the approach to literature which I am trying to formulate in this essay. This approach focuses on literary characters and their essentially psychological/existential struggles. The focus is on the characters as fictional individuals, not as fictional members of larger social classes. The conflicts these individuals face-at least those in which I am interested here-are not struggles of competition but of connection: they are the struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity. While postmodern critics contend that such integration, wholeness, and unity is illusory and impossible, I maintain that it is the struggle that is most interesting, not the ontological status of centers. Such illusions-if that is indeed what they are-are necessary illusions. These are illusions which make it possible for us to live in the world. What do critical projects which seek to remove such illusions offer in return?

The primary thing which I think critics as chronologically far removed from one another as are Plato (who has Socrates propose the banishment of poetry and poets from his Republic) and the modern "isms" critics (Marxist, Feminist, Post-Colonialist) have in common is the idea that art should follow a moral/political agenda. Granted, much art does have an overtly political agenda-but must art have such an agenda? Must we all get on a particular bandwagon and use the same prefab slogans? Must art serve the fashionable politics-of whatever stripe-of the moment? Of course, our opinions on this-as on other issues-will differ. Others may respond with an enthusiastic yes or a qualified perhaps. My response to the above questions is no. I think art should be free to have a moral/political agenda, but I also believe that it should be free not to have such an agenda. There are, and have been, critics who have claimed that all art-indeed all human actions no matter how transcendent or trivial-are inherently political, thus nothing human can be free of a moral/political agenda. This kind of argument is misleading in direct proportion to the extent that it renders us-seemingly by design-unable to make useful critical distinctions. It fails to take into account differences of degree in the public effects and/or intentions of any human act. The view that all things, including art, are inherently political is directly traceable to the 5th century (BCE) concept of the proper relationship between the polites (citizen) and the polis (city-state). The etymological relationship-polites is derived from polis-between the terms reflects the relationship between the citizen and the state: the citizen, in this view, is derived from the state-quite the reverse of our current "democratic" view. The "private" person-whose actions were not directed to the maintainence of the polis-was given the label idiotes. This is the root of our word "idiot." This view effectively denies the "individual" legitimate ontological status, and I believe that this view leads directly to that which maintains art must have a "political" agenda. Despite the fact that the "political" view of art has often been put into the service of an agenda which resists the polis rather than supporting it (as, for instance, in Feminist and Marxist art/art criticism today), the underlying ontological assumptions of modern (or "postmodern") political/moral criticism are just as disturbing to me as are those in the criticism of Plato.

However, my own bias is to favor criticism which respects the "bourgeois" concept of the individual. I freely acknowledge the fact that I am-especially in the current academic environment-laying myself open to censure on the grounds of condemning overtly political criticism while setting forth a critical system which privileges the concept of individuality-itself a political notion. My defense is first of all to acknowledge the legitimacy of the charge-from a certain point of view. More importantly, however, my response is to say that politics is not the primary lens through which I view art. I wholeheartedly agree with Harold Bloom in his characterization of such criticism as a "flight from the aesthetic":

The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism. Beneath the surfaces of academic Marxism, Feminism, and New Historicism, the ancient polemic of Platonism . . . continue[s] to course on. (The Western Canon 18)

Bloom is not alone in claiming that contemporary literary criticism has shifted toward a concern with politics. Deborah Williams Minter, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Deborah Keller-Cohen make a similar point in their October, 1995 article in College English, "Learning Literacies":

The Arnoldian emphasis on aesthetic qualities in literature and the development of taste through disciplined engagement with works identified as "the best that has been thought and said" has given way to an interest in the social contexts-replete with concerns about economics, politics, and difference-surrounding texts (669).

I cannot subscribe to such a view of literature. My own view is that literary art springs ultimately from the same source as does spirituality and/or religion. Dramatic poetry in fifth century (BCE) Athens was presented in connection with the two great city religious festivals: the Lenaea, or Festival of the Wine Press, in January/February, and the Dionysia, the March/April festival held in honor of the god Dionysus. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides featured characters who ultimately fell because of hamartia. This term, used by Aristotle in his Poetics, and variously translated as "tragic flaw," or "fatal weakness" in English translations of Aristotle, is also found in the Greek portions of the Judeo-Christian Bible, where it is often translated as "sin." A more interesting translation-and possibly more useful-is "missing the mark" (7). This suggests that the fatal flaw of the Greek tragic heroes was a failure to put themselves in accord with an often unsympathetic divinity. A more modern version of the same pattern might involve the failure of characters to connect with a larger whole: a failure to connect the Self with the Other without or within. If this reading is granted, then a major theme of literature from its inception has been our often tragically doomed attempt to transcend-through a connection to that which is Other-a state of all-too-human frailty, isolation, and overdetermination by forces beyond our understanding and control.

At a first glance, this reading seems to be no different from the sorts of political readings I just discussed. However, there is an important point which I have not yet mentioned: in readings which emphasize "the social contexts-replete with concerns about economics, politics, and difference-surrounding texts," hamartia-in the above-mentioned sense of a character's failure to put him or herself into accord with a greater whole-plays no part. There is no wholeness to be achieved, no fragmented isolation to be transcended outside the context of daily political struggle. This is not to say that political struggles, and political readings of literature, are necessarily excluded by the sort of criticism I will attempt here; however, this view of literature, in which the concerns of critics revolve primarily around issues of social justice and injustice, power and lack of power, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I cannot reconcile my experience as a reader, or as a human being, with a vision of literature as an exclusively political tool designed to highlight the injustices of a world filled with victims and victimizers, oppressors and oppressed, marginalizers and marginalized, silencers and silenced. Those readings are certainly available-in fact they seem to be in the majority at this writing-but I have neither the inclination nor the disposition to contribute to their number. When I read, I am not looking for masculine and feminine discourse, for definitions of sexuality and gender, or for the dynamics of oppression; these legitimate, yet somehow confining concerns are precisely what I am hoping to transcend in my reading. I am looking for something more, something different. I am looking for a feeling of intensity, a sense of heightened existence and connection with characters whose reality is dark and wondrous.

The search for a sense of heightened existence, for connection, the desire for more-the desire to have more, and the desire to be more-is perhaps a human universal. Whether we live in a metropolis of millions, a small rural community, a textual technocratic society, or a farming village in a largely oral-traditional culture, we are likely to have read and/or heard stories which connect us to other lives, other times, other struggles than our own. This desire for more can, and often does, express itself as a desire for difference. The desire for a different situation, a different life, a different self, involving an intimate connection with that which is other, is an often overwhelmingly powerful motivator to action and risk. It is a desire for, and a compulsion towards, transcendence.

What exactly is transcendence? Transcendence is ultimately a turning towards the Other, the Other within or the Other without. When the Other is accepted on its own terms rather than assimilated to the will of the Ego, then a joining is possible which results in an increase of unity and a decrease of fragmentation. Transcendence is, in an odd sort of way, a kind of negative entropy (8): both in the "internal" view of Carl Jung and the "external" view of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, transcendence-or the the joining of elements in the service of a drive towards wholeness-results in an increase of harmony. This is what Teilhard de Chardin refers to as "convergence" and what Jung refers to as "the synthesis of a new unity which previously consisted of scattered particles. . .the revelation of something which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator and also its totality" (Jung, vol 11, 263). Huston Smith defines transcendence as an overcoming of "life's predicaments." Using Buddhist concepts, he defines the attempt at transcendence as an attempt to deal with:

a. Dukkha, suffering.

b. Anicca, transitoriness.

c. Anatta, no soul. Read "no personal significance." Individually we are nothing (Smith, "The Reach and the Grasp" 4).

The urge to transcendence springs from lack, from disconnection, from isolation. It is an urge to restore lost or never-achieved balance, to find the significance of an individual life in a world of lives at once breathtakingly different and deadeningly similar. Smith breaks transcendence into two categories: this-worldly transcendence and ontological transcendence. This-Worldly transcendence connects the subject with that which is other in the everyday phenomenal sphere-through love (of another person), hope (which "redeems the present and makes it significant and enduring by tying it to a meaningful future" [Smith, "The Reach and the Grasp" 7]), and/or commitment to a cause (which can often express itself negatively as "The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness" [Fromm 177,178]). Ontological transcendence holds out hope for a Reality which is beyond our normal perceptions and ways of acquiring knowledge and experience. These are the ideas which lie behind Plato's theory of Eternal Forms, the Kantian ding an sich, and the so-called Perennial Philosophy:

1. This phenomenal world of matter and the individual consciousness is only a partial reality and is the manifestation of a Divine Ground in which all partial realities have their being.

2. It is of the nature of man that not only can he have knowledge of this Divine Ground by inference, but he can also realize it by direct intuition, superior to discursive reason, in which the knower is in some way united with the known.

3. The nature of man is not a single but a dual one. He has not one but two selves, the phenomenal ego, of which he is chiefly conscious and which he tends to regard as his true self, and a non-phenomenal, eternal self, an inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within him, which is his true self. It is possible for a man, if he so desires and is prepared to make the necessary effort, to identify himself with his true self and so with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature.

4. It is the chief aim of man's earthly existence to discover and identify himself with his true self. By so doing, he will come to an intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground and so apprehend Truth as it really is, and not as to our limited human perceptions it appears to be. Not only that, he will enter into a state of being which has been given different names, eternal life, salvation, enlightenment, etc. (Happold 20)

In an act of high hubris which will certainly not be my last, I am going to differ with Huston Smith's splitting of transcendence into This-Worldly and Ontological categories, and define all transcendence as Ontological, as attempts at becoming, as changes in states of being. Love changes being. Hope changes being. Commitment to a cause changes being. Likewise, the attempt, through spirituality, through faith, through magic, through the supporting and binding powers of myth, to "identify [the] self with [the] true self and so with the Divine Ground," or to "apprehend Truth as it really is," changes being. These changes are not merely phenomenal, but bring the self to a more complete realization of its totality (9).

Transcendence in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Carl Jung

Transcendence-at least the aspect of it which I am looking at/thinking about-represents an attempt at unity, a grasping at and striving towards wholeness. It is not merely an escaping from the self, a masochistic urge to kenosis, or self-emptying, which manifests itself in the urge, not to join oneself with an(Other), but to lose oneself in the Other. This is the flip side of the urge to assimilate the Other, an essentially self-obsessed act. Transcendence of the Self is a process of leaving behind and bringing along; the old self-the separate, unconnected self-is abandoned, and yet it is precisely what is brought to the Other in any attempt at contact and joining. Jung calls this the process of individuation, in which one holds on to a sense of one's unique individuality while realizing one's connection to a larger experience of human existence. This is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls the Grand Option, "the coming together of. . .separate elements [which] does nothing to eliminate their differences. On the contrary, it exalts them"(The Future of Man 55). For de Chardin, it is of the utmost importance that this joining, or as he refers to it, this convergence, be a "conspiration informed with love" (57). Love:

links those who love in bonds that unite but do not confound, causing them to discover in their mutual contact an exaltation capable, incomparably more than any arrogance of solitude, of arousing in the heart of their being all that they possess of uniqueness and creative power. (57)

Ultimately this transcendence of the self, this convergence with that which is other, is an act of giving, not of surrendering or taking, not of masochism or sadism, but of generosity and love:

in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness, not directly in a separate consummation, but by incorporation in a higher pole of consciousness in which alone it can enter into contact with all others. By a sort of inward turn towards the Other its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration. (58)

De Chardin's central idea is that humanity will achieve a higher state of being, a higher consciousness, through what he calls "totalisation" or "collectivisation." He bases his argument on the biological notion that molecular complexity seems to, after a certain critical point, result in consciousness, and that after that critical point greater complexity leads to greater consciousness. What separates the amethyst from the amoeba from the American (10) is the complexity of their respective molecular structures. Human consciousness has reached its present state in the individual because of the vast structural complexity of the human brain; however, human evolution has not stopped. Evolution now continues in a social or collective direction. The ever-increasing number, and the concomitant increasing proximity, of human beings is leading to what de Chardin describes as a convergence:

It takes the form of the all-encompassing ascent of the masses; the constant tightening of economic bonds; the spread of financial and intellectual associations; the totalisation of political regimes; the closer physical contact of individuals as well as of nations; the increasing impossibility of being or acting or thinking alone-in short, the rise, in every form, of the Other around us. (118)

He compares this increasing social organization and complexity to the increasing scale of molecular complexity which-at a crucial point-results in consciousness:

the collectivisation of the human race, at present accelerated, is nothing other than a higher form adopted by the process of moleculisation on the surface of our planet. The first phase was the formation of proteins up to the stage of the cell. In the second phase individual cellular complexes were formed, up to and including Man. We are now at the beginning of a third phase, the formation of an organico-social super-complex. (119)

This complex is, in de Chardin's view, the evolutionary future of the human race, a future in which individuality is both transcended and "exalted." However, and this is the most important point, this convergence is not to be achieved through external force, through coercions based in well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) ideologies. It is a natural process which will take place through an increasing mutual affinity between individuals. This affinity is largely what de Chardin means by his use of the word love:

Because we love, and in order that we may love even more, we find ourselves happily and especially compelled to participate in all the endeavours, all the anxieties, all the aspirations and also all the affections of the earth-in so far as these embody a principle of ascension and synthesis. (99)

Transcendence, for de Chardin, is ultimately a collective process. The individual, here and now, can reach for transcendence through "a sort of inward turn towards the Other " in which he "embrace[s] in a spirit of togetherness and personalising union with all things" (83). The ultimate transcendence, however, is to be collective. Through the mechanism of increasing complexity, consciousness is born. Through this increasing consciousness, what de Chardin refers to as an increasing "interiorisation of matter," the human race will eventually achieve an apotheosis with what he calls "the Omega point," the "Christ who invests Himself with the whole reality of the Universe" (233):

Ahead of, or rather in the heart of, a universe prolonged along its axis of complexity, there exists a divine center of convergence. That nothing may be prejudged, and in order to stress its synthesizing and personalising function, let us call this the point Omega. Let us suppose that from this universal centre, this Omega point, there constantly emanate radiations hitherto only perceptible to those persons whom we call 'mystics'. Let us further imagine that, as the sensibility of the human race increases with planetisation [de Chardin's term for the process of convergence which he sees the human race embarking on], the awareness of Omega becomes so widespread as to warm the earth psychically while physically it is growing cold. Is it not conceivable that Mankind, at the end of its totalisation [convergence], its folding-in upon itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega point? (127)

This is heady-sounding material, likely to strike the casual reader as so much polysyllabic nonsense (even Mircea Eliade-no mere casual reader-describes de Chardin's theories as "audacious" [A History of Religious Ideas, vol 3, 54]). However, de Chardin's argument for the necessity and inevitability of transcendence combines the biological reality of the complexity of the human body, the social reality of the increasing complexity of human interaction on an increasingly crowded planet, and the theoretical equation of a critical level of molecular complexity with the dawning of consciousness, and then stirs them together with the long-familiar notion of apotheosis-the joining of humans to divinity. De Chardin merges his training as a paleontologist with his training as a Jesuit priest; this leads him to argue that the entire evolutionary process is itself a constant process of transcendence in which creation moves from simple matter to complex matter, from unconsciousness to consciousness, then finally to God: Erit in omnibus omnia Deus. For de Chardin, the wholeness, the unity which is the ultimate goal of transcendence is to be achieved in a union with divinity.

The transcendence, the climbing-beyond, of the attempt to create a state of wholeness out of a state of fragmentation is, in Jungian terms, an integration of the conscious personality-the "ego"-with the larger unconscious (11):

Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service. Since this growth of personality comes out of the unconscious, which is by definition unlimited, the extent of the personality now gradually realizing itself cannot in practice be limited either. But, unlike the Freudian superego, it is still individual. It is in fact individuality in the highest sense, and therefore theoretically limited, since no individual can possibly display every quality. (I have called this process of realization the "individuation process.") So far as the personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent. . . (Jung, vol 11, 258)

For Jung, the process of gathering together the fragments of the self-or the various selves in the Jamesian sense-is in itself the process of becoming human. This becoming human is what he means by the oft-invoked-but-seldom-understood term individuation. Individuation is not merely a process of becoming more and more individual-in the sense of growing further and further apart from one's fellows-rather, it is

an act of self-recollection [similar to the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis developed in Meno], a gathering together of what is scattered, of all the things in us that have never been properly related, and a coming to terms with oneself with a view to achieving full consciousness. (Jung, vol 11, 263)

The idea of forming unity out of a pre-existing state of fragmentation is a central part of Jung's concept of individuation. For Jung, increasing consciousness, achieved through an integration of the "ego" with the "self," or the conscious portion of the personality with the larger totality of conscious plus unconscious elements in the individual, leads to a transcendent wholeness; this wholeness is symbolized-in the alchemical writings which Jung devoted three volumes of his Collected Works to discussing-by the Christ figure (Son of Man, second Adam, teleios anthropos).

For Teilhard de Chardin, increasing consciousness-due to the increasing complexity of biological organization and the increasing complexity of social organization necessitated by an ever-denser population which results in a convergence of conscious beings and consciousness itself upon itself-ultimately leads to a wholeness acheived through a union (apotheosis) with what he calls the Omega Point. This Omega Point is itself Christ. Thus, Jung and Teilhard de Chardin each emphasize a move from fragmentation to unity: Jung's thought works primarily on the level of the individual's attempt to overcome his/her own fragmentation; Teilhard de Chardin's thought operates essentially on the extra-personal level of the attempt of the entire human race to converge upon itself and join with its source. Each pictures the state of wholeness as a form of apotheosis. Jung's teleios anthropos is an archetypal figure (one which need not be pictured exclusively in terms of the familiar Western figure of Christ-the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita is an excellent example of the archetype) present in each of us: in his system the apotheosis is one of ego with Self. Teilhard de Chardin's idea is that the human race-as a totality-is, in a Bergsonian process of creative evolution, achieving an ever-increasing level of consciousness, interdependence, and interconnection on its way to a joining with the Omega Point or God himself.

When the Other turns out to be a God-as in Arjuna's encounter with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita-the risks (and possible rewards) of transcendence are suddenly intensified. The climber, through the numinous experience of confronting the mysterium tremendum of that which is absolutely sacred and entirely other, undertakes the terrible responsibility of participating in the dismantling of an old world and the creation of a new world.

What Arjuna faces on dharma-kshetre (the field-kshetre-of dharma-duty, specifically duty to support the world-ordering principles) is a choice between whole-heartedly participating in a war which may destroy the world he has always known-and will surely result in the deaths of many whom he has loved-and refusing, initially, to fight, only to be drawn by his very nature as a kshatriya (loosely translated as "warrior") to join in the battle after it is too late to save honor, loved ones, or dharma itself. What follows Arjuna's agonizing doubts is perhaps the most staggering revelation of, and invitation to, transcendence in all of the world's literature: Arjuna's life-long friend Krishna, the once-boyish herdsman and sexual trickster, now seemingly a minor chief of the Yadava clan, reveals himself to be an avatar of the transcendent Vishnu, the sleeping god whose dream is the universe. The dialog between the warrior and the god strips away the veils of temporal appearance and lays bare the connection each individual life has to the eternal source of all things.

In theological terms, that God which is absolutely sacred and entirely other is itself transcendent in the sense of being beyond the physical universe, not contained within the material substance of Creation. Thus transcendence may be contrasted with the concept of immanence [immanere: in-within + manere-to dwell, remain], the idea that divinity dwells within nature and is contained therein. These terms are often thought of as conceptual opposites (in a simplistic and somewhat venomous manner, transcendence is sometimes referred to as patriarchal-with all of the resentful political baggage that unfortunate word now carries, while immanence is referred to as matriarchal-these concepts are seen in current academic discourse as mutually exclusive and irreconcilably opposed to one another); however, they may be more accurately seen as conceptual complements. In sacred literature, and secular literature which has some ontologically revelatory aspect, transcendence represents an attempt to achieve-or return to-a state of immanent unity with that which is Other. This is the essential meaning behind the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of countless belief systems. In this etiological project, masculine and feminine principles are brought together in a ritual renewal, reconstruction, recreation, re-experiencing, of a cosmogonic unity which existed-to use Mircea Eliade's term-in illo tempore. Thus, the climbing beyond is an attempt to return to a dwelling within.

This idea is by no means new. Chin-Tai Kim, Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University, expresses the unity of transcendence and immanence, saying that:

The ideas of transcendence and immanence are not mutually exclusive but mutually determinative. All theologies and metaphysical systems that posit an ultimate reality must show its double aspect as both transcendent and immanent, though some emphasize its transcendence, and others its immanence. (537)

Transcendence needn't always be a grandly metaphysical project involving gods and devils, heavens and hells, war and peace, bliss and chaos. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde each of the title characters has the opportunity for transcendence, not through heroism in war (despite the ever-present backdrop of the Trojan War) or through contact with a god (despite the role of an unnamed god of love in the plot), but through love and concern for the other. The famous, or infamous, failure of this couple to bridge the chasm between them is largely the fault of Troilus-whose name, "Little Troy," in the context of the siege of Troy, should give any new Chaucer reader a clue not only as to Troilus' ultimate fate, but also to his character.

The unity of transcendence and immanence, the "climbing beyond" and the "dwelling within," is illustrated in Nietzsche's discussion of "self-overcoming" in On the Genealogy of Morals. In a discussion of that justice which transcends itself as mercy, Nietzsche says:

it ends, as does every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself (Sich selbst aufhebend). This self-overcoming (Selbstaufhebung) of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself-mercy. (73)

Aufheben contains within itself the ideas of "raising up," "abolishing or canceling," and "keeping or preserving." The refrain which runs throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra -Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll (Man is something that must be overcome)-suggests the necessity for a transcendence which "raises up" the condition of der Mensch to that of der Übermensch; the ordinary human condition is "abolished" in that transcendence, while it is "preserved" or "kept" in the state reached through Selbstaufhebung-self-overcoming, or more strictly, self-canceling/self-keeping/self-raising. In Goethe's Faust, what is doing the raising up-Zieht uns hinan-is the individual (archetypally Masculine) compulsion towards reunion with the source: the Eternal-Feminine, the conceptual counterpart of the Greek zoe and the Upanishadic brahman. The title character strives throughout his life to reconcile the opposites within him:

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,              Two souls live, alas, in my breast,

Die eine will sich von der andern trennen:               The one wants to separate itself from the other:

Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust,                            The one holds, solidly in life's pleasure,

Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;           Itself to the World with grasping Body;

Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dunst              The other lifts itself forcibly from the vapor

Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.                                  To higher ancestral fields.

(1112-1117)

Ultimately Faust transcends this opposition through a return to das Ewig-Weibliche-the Eternal Feminine.

In Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Haze Motes seeks-though he denies it through his preaching of The Church Without Christ-the Jesus who moved "from tree to tree in the back of his mind" (16). Through transgression, a deliberate strategy of "sin" and violence which, paradoxically, looses him from the world and binds him to the "wild ragged figure" of Jesus, and a self-emptying which strips away the false layers of "the old man"-tn palain nqrwpon-and facilitates putting on "the new man"-tn kainn nqrwpon, Haze reaches internally for a transcendent connection to that "wild ragged figure" of the Other.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that transcendence can be dangerous. Arjuna faces the obliteration of everything he has ever known-including his self-as he bows before his life-long friend now revealed to him as "time, the destroyer of all" who has "come to consume the world"; Faust gambles his soul that Mephistopheles can never satisfy him, can never sate him so thoroughly with knowledge and experience of the world that Faust gives in to the moment, saying "Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!", thus giving the Devil the right to his soul forever.

In the world outside of literature, the desire of individuals for transcendence often expresses itself in the form of mass movements. This desire for self-transcendence often takes the form of the self-renunciation, the Schopenhauerian "denial of the will-to-live" which appears with "the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them" (The World as Will and Representation, vol 2, 433,434).

Eric Hoffer, in his book The True Believer, describes those individuals who have reached a less philosophical variety of this psychological state:

The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life-a rebirth-or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. (12, 13)

This negative side of the urge to transcendence is eloquently elucidated by Erich Fromm, in his Escape from Freedom:

The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness are only one side of the masochistic strivings. The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion. By becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong, eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and glory. One surrenders one's own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one's integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. . . .He is also saved from the doubt of what the meaning of life is or who "he" is. These questions are answered by the relationship to the power to which he has attached himself. (177, 178)

The urge to transcendence is at its most dangerous when it takes this form of self-renunciation, self-abnegation, and even self-annihilation. The importance of Nietzsche's phrase, Selbstaufhebung, translated by Kaufmann as "self-overcoming," lies in its dual sense of leaving behind and preserving. Sich selbst aufheben; "Man is something that must be overcome"; those are the formulas which express the union of transcendence and immanence which is both self- and other-affirming.

Transcendence, in and out of literature, is a convergence of diverse elements into a kind of unity which-paradoxically-maintains, and even enhances, individuality. This sort of unity is not primal, or unconscious in any way; rather it represents an enhancement and further development-an evolution, if you will-of consciousness. This sort of unity involves a turn toward the Other which in no way abnegates either the Self or the Other: all individuality is preserved, and the ties between Self and Other are mutually agreeable and beneficial. I think that this is the core of the seeming conflict between the drives toward the enhancement of the individual and individual experience, and the equally strong drive toward unity. It is a careful balancing act, in which the development of each supports that of the other; an imbalance in favor of disconnected individualism-as in Byron's Manfred-or a self-abnegating return to primal unity found before the advent of the principium individuationis-as in Schopenhauer's Denial of the Will to Live-throws the evolutionary equation out of whack, and stunts progress toward both unity and enhanced individuality.

In what follows, I try to trace the attempts of characters in the Bhagavad Gita, Troilus and Crysede, Faust, and Wise Blood to transcend fragmentation-that hamartia from which individuals, "fictional" or not, have long suffered, no matter what the era. I contend emphatically that the "postmodern" condition is nothing of the kind; our concerns, our problems, may seem unique-but they are not unique. Our problems have become more grave then ever they were before-we have had for decades now the ability to destroy ourselves in a nuclear Armageddon-but they have not changed in character. The success or failure of individuals to connect with a larger whole, the success or failure to connect the Self with the Other without or within, these have been perennial problems in literature-and in life. Our literatures have portrayed our attempts, and have been our attempts, to transcend-through a connection to that which is Other-our differing states of fragmentation, isolation, and overdetermination by forces beyond our understanding and control.

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Works Cited List

Notes

1) The authors apparently cannot be bothered to prove, demonstrate, or in any way argue for the idea that the "self" is "now like what the quantum physicists call a 'world strip,"; they seem content merely to make the assertion. Nor do they make any effort to explain what is meant by the term "world strip," evidently trusting either that their largely humanities-oriented audience will be up on recent attempts by theoretical physicists to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, or that the casual, calculatedly careless manner in which the spectre of quantum physics (an abstruse and difficult discipline of the sort which reminds me of my own intellectual limits) is raised will intimidate, perhaps leading us as properly compliant readers to the suspicion that the authors are ever so much smarter than we are. The authors are humanities professors-specializing in political science and political theory-and their expertise in matters of physics is therefore especially curious. Stephen Hawking-an undisputed expert in matters of physics-describes the "world strip," or "world sheet" as a postulate of a relatively recent development in physics known as "string theories":

In these theories the basic objects are not particles, which occupy a single point of space, but things that have a length but no other dimension, like an infinitely thin piece of string. These strings may have ends (the so-called open strings) or they may be joined up with themselves in closed loops (closed strings). A particle occupies one point of space at each instant of time. Thus its history can be represented by a line in space-time (the "world line"). A string, on the other hand, occupies a line in space at each moment of time. So its history in space-time is a two dimensional surface called the world-sheet. (Any point on such a world-sheet can be described by two numbers: one specifying the time and the other the position of the point on the string.) The world-sheet of an open string is a strip: its edges represent the paths through space-time of the ends of the string. The world-sheet of a closed string is a cylinder or tube; a slice through the tube is a circle, which represents the position of the string at one particular time. (A Brief History of Time 159)

So what has this to do with the price of sushi in San Diego? Why and how is the self like a "world strip"? Are we to assume, as readers of Kroker and Cook, that the self "occupies a line in space at each moment of time"? Are we to assume that the edges of the self which is "like" ("Like" in what way? What quality of likeness, similarity, or correspondence is being asserted?) a "world strip" represent the "paths through space-time of the ends" of the self? What would such assumptions imply? If such assumptions as we are seemingly being asked to make in fact represent some kind of new and more clearly understood take on the phenomenal universe and our subjective experience of that universe then this is a potentially staggering claim. However, there is nothing here but the claim, quickly made, never supported, and never explained. What is achieved here is not intellectual weight and sophistication but the appearance of weight and sophistication. Back to main text

2) A personal note: To "deconstruct" some of the obvious (and in my own pig-headed view, innocuous) "isms" of the above statement would be an intellectual feat both so transparent and so decrepit as to be shameworthy. Back to main text

3) Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972). Back to main text

4) Note that Sedgewick, arguably postmodern in her critical orientation, posits and privileges the notion of a critical "center" by her choice of words. It seems that while postmodernists argue that there can be no necessary, or ontologically legitimate, "center," that metaphors of centrality, of unity, and of wholeness are items we are unable-or unwilling-to do without. Back to main text

5) This "count(ing) the number of women in the Inferno" was a performance one of my collegues offered as analysis in a graduate seminar in the fall of 1994. It was a performance-despite its absurdly reductive quality-not without precedent in current literary "scholarship." Back to main text

6)Mention is made of her worship in several places in the Bible (Exodus 34:31; Deuteronomy 12:3; 16:21; Judges 2:13; 3:7; 6:25,26; 1 Kings 14:22,23; 18:19; 2 Kings 17:10; 18:4; 21:7; 23:4-7; 2 Chronicles 15:16; 33:11-13, 15, 21-23; 34:7). The word asherah (plural-asherim) may be used to refer either to the image of the goddess Asherah or to the "sacred pole(s)" often used in her worship. Some English translations of the Bible-such as the Jerusalem Bible-render the word as "sacred pole" when the reference is apparently to the image while transliterating the word when the reference is apparently to the goddess. Back to main text

7) The terms translated as "sin" in the Bible are hhat-ta'th' (Hebrew) and ha-mar-ti'a (Greek). The verb forms in each language (Hebrew-hha-ta'; Greek-ha-mar-ta'no) mean "to miss," in the sense of missing-or not reaching-a goal, mark, or target. See Judges 20:16 for an example of the use of hha-ta' to describe Benjamites who "could sling a stone at a hair, and not miss." These words are also used in the symbolic sense of failing to reach moral and spiritual goals. Proverbs 8: 35, 36 says "whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor with the LORD; but those who miss (hha-ta') me injure themselves." "Sin" (hhat-ta'th' /ha-mar-ti'a) in this context is anything not in accord with the will of God. James 4:17 makes this point: "Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, committs sin "(ha-mar-ti'a). Back to main text

8) Entropy is the measure of the degree of (constantly increasing) disorder of an isolated system; it also is a measure of unavailable energy in a system (energy which cannot be converted to mechanical work). Back to main text

9) It will be apparent by now to the reader that my assumptions are essentially modernist rather than posmodernist. I have no qualms about positing a center. A center is a useful thing. Back to main text

10) Some might suggest-with some justification-that the amoeba should be the last, and therefore most "advanced," item in this sequence. Amoebas, after all, neither watch prime-time television nor read literary criticism. Back to main text

11) In the event that a reader is unfamiliar with the basic outlines of Jung's concept of the unconscious, he or she will find the most cogent descriptions of his concept in: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works, vol 7, pars. 202-295, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works, vol. 8, pars. 263-342, and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, vol 9.i., pars. 1-147 and 489-524. Grossly reduced to the barest essentials, Jung divides the unconscious into two categories, the personal and the collective. The personal unconscious is the level of experiences which are repressed as incompatible with the activities and attitudes of the conscious ego, or are "forgotten" because they seemed unimportant at the time of the experiences in question. These experiences, memories, sensations, thoughts, feelings may be described as those which definitely occur on the individual level but which are too weak to remain long at the level of the conscious ego. These experiences may tend to group together in clusters which Jung refers to as complexes (Jung, not Freud, is the source of this now-familiar term). Jung originally thought, following Freud, that these complexes were the results of childhood trauma. Later he began to suspect that these formations may originate out of, or be influenced by, something much deeper than the individual experiences of childhood. From this starting point he came eventually to the concept of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is, according to Jung, the repository of the primal experience of the species. The primordial images of the human experience and imagination (Jung's original term was Urbilden, original or primordial pictures or images, which he later changed to the now-familiar term archetypes-Jung explains the origin of this term in his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, par. 5) are stored here from humanity's ancestral past. This concept has come in for its share of criticism, from psychologists with a non-Jungian orientation as well as from biologists. The concept of individuation, which will be dealt with later in this chapter, involves a synthesis of conscious and unconscious contents; it is important to note, however, that the unconscious contents in question are those of the personal unconscious. Back to main text

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Works Cited List