“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” [German title: “Der Zauberlehrling”] is a poem of Goethe’s written in 1797.
Goethe had by then already written his Urfaust, published as Faust, A Fragment in 1790, though a full version of Faust, Part One would have to wait until 1808.
The poem is based on a folk tale, and can be characterized as a ballad consisting of 14 stanzas. It provides the basis for the Disney film Fantasia (1940).
Victor Frankenstein bears some resemblance both to Faust and to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The poem begins with the apprentice rejoicing at the departure of his master. “The sorcerer, old necromancer / At last has gone, he’s out of haunt!” proclaims the apprentice. Toiling long in the master’s shadow, he readies now to make the master’s powers his own. Roles reversed and spells in hand, the servant takes command.
“Now come, ye gnarl’d broomstick old,” he declares, hailing the tool as if it were a person, “Adorn thyself with patchwork shawl! / To the role of servant hold: / Fain meetest thou my every call!”
Broomstick, through magic granted a kind of animacy, proceeds to fill the sanctum’s washbasin with water drawn by cauldron from a nearby river. The apprentice succeeds in outsourcing his work to his tool. Before long, however, the magic of automation comes to threaten the automator. Broomsticks beget broomsticks; theosis turns sour. Water floods the sanctum, as the tool develops a will of its own.
With epithets anticipating those cast by Victor upon his Creature, the apprentice curses his creation. “Thou hellish spawn! Thou child of doom!” he shouts. “Willst thou the cottage rightly drown? / Over every threshold loom / Laughing floods, swirling ‘round. / The broom’s a heart of stone, the knave, / Who will not heed my plangent call! / Halt, thou sullen stubborn slave, / Let magic free and broomstick fall!”
These curses, however, fail to stem the tide. As the deluge threatens to drown him, the apprentice begs, finally, for his Master to return and give voice and save him. As indeed the Master does, using the power of His Holy Word to set right what was wrong. The poem’s prophecy of automation gone awry thus ends via recourse to a kind of deus ex machina.
Despite its vast influence, Goethe’s poem is but one iteration of a story that appears in other forms and by other names throughout history.
The earliest known example of the tale can be found in Philopseudes [English translation: Lover of Lies], a narrative by the ancient Greek author Lucian, written c. 150 AD. In Lucian’s telling, however, the sorcerer is an Egyptian mystic: a priest of Isis called Pancrates. And the apprentice character, Eucrates, is in Lucian’s telling not an apprentice, but a companion who eavesdrops on Pancrates while the latter casts a spell. When Pancrates departs, Eucrates tries to imitate the spell, to an effect similar to that of Goethe’s apprentice.
Disney’s 1940 animated anthology film Fantasia continues this process of reiteration and retelling, this shuttling of meaning, this recursion of myth. Fantasia’s innovation is that it casts Mickey Mouse as the one manning the spell.
Already, though, the poem had passed through prior meaning-accruing translations, its most compelling interpreters those who read it in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.
Alongside Shelley, for instance, who echoes the poem in Frankenstein, we also have Marx and Engels. These latter thinkers liken capitalism to Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto.
“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange,” they write, “is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (The Communist Manifesto, p. 340).
Marx reads capitalism as a ghost story. What is the dancing table in his account of the fetishism of the commodity, if not a version of the apprentice’s broomstick?
And indeed, there are ways to read today’s artificial intelligences, themselves a kind of offspring of capitalism, in much the same light. This is essentially what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat does in his 2023 opinion piece, “The Return of the Magicians.” Douthat describes the development of LLMs as “a complex incantation, a calling of spirits.”
“Such a summoning is most feared by A.I. alarmists, at present,” he writes, “because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination. But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.”
Marx wrote presciently about capitalism’s Faustian inclinations. He quotes a line from Goethe’s Faust, Part One in the section of his Grundrisse known as the “Fragment on Machines.” “The appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form,” writes Marx. “Capital absorbs labour into itself—‘as though,’” here quoting Goethe, “‘its body were by love possessed’” (Grundrisse, p. 704).
“Fragment on Machines” appears in the Grundrisse, a collection of seven notebooks on capital and money written by Marx during the winter of 1857-1858. Marx himself felt in retrospect that these notebooks contained the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism. The manuscript, however, was lost for many years; it didn’t receive publication until 1953, first in the German original, and then afterwards in English.
Because Marx’s masterwork Capital was itself unfinished, with Marx only ever completing Volume 1 and partial drafts of Volumes 2 & 3 during his lifetime, the Grundrisse stands as the only outline of Marx’s full political-economic project. While the work is by its very nature fragmentary, written chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, it nevertheless provides invaluable descriptions of Marx’s philosophy, including novel explorations of topics like alienation, automation, and other dangers of capitalist society that can’t be found elsewhere in Marx’s oeuvre.
“Fragment on Machines” is unique, for instance, among Marx’s treatments of the relationship between workers and machines under capitalism. If, he argues, in prior modes of production, workers retained some control over instruments employed in labor, under capitalism, workers become appendages of machines.
“It is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker,” writes Marx. The machine “is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil, etc., just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion” (693).
For Marx, this subordination of workers to machines reaches its highest expression with automation, or (as Marx himself puts it) production systems based on “an automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages” (Grundrisse, p. 692).
While this account of the relationship between workers and machines foresees an initial future of ever-increasing misery for workers, Marx imagines on the far side of this misery a radically different — and indeed, far more hopeful — outcome.
At a certain point, Marx predicts, capital’s drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that “the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed” than on “the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production” (Grundrisse, pp. 704-705).
This application of science to production bears fruit as what Marx calls “the General Intellect.”
Marx writes here as would a prophet. His prophecy is that the development of machinery by capitalism leads eventually to capitalism’s supersession — creates the conditions, in other words, for capitalism’s demise.
At the core of this liberation from capitalism is a pact with ghosts.
Trance-Scripts 