The Demonic

Literature and Experience

Ewan Fernie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415690249
• eBook ISBN: 9781136178573
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we're not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line?

Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann.

A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it's concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.

PART ONE

DEMONIC NEGATIVITY

1 DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Modern Western civilisation is intimately related to the demonic, and some of our most valuable artistic, religious and philosophical works – from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann, from Luther to Liszt, and from Hegel to Dostoevsky – repeatedly confess this. Contemporary culture blocks its ears, and who can blame it? But demonic figures such as Faust, Macbeth and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin continue to stare at us from the canonical centre of Western literature, with baleful accusation in their burnt-out eyes. Though vampires abound, we don’t much identify with the demonic. And yet, as I hope to show in this book, our current lives in fact resonate with it more than ever. From St Augustine onwards the demonic is classically understood in terms of difference, opposition and negation. And now we define individuality in just such terms. This is very much the case, as we will see below, in the most fashionable contemporary philosophy, but it is also true of much ordinary experience. Take, for instance, a teenager’s passionate revulsion from mum and dad and her familiar domestic self. Or the very prevalent (and increasingly long and moveable!) phenomenon of the ‘mid-life crisis’, where an ageing husband, say, recoils from the very self and life he himself has substantially made. It’s easy of course to laugh at adolescents and the middle aged, but theirs are our defining epochs, when our identities are first crystallising and have become most established, and there is something very resonant and instructive about their urgent sense that what we really are may be quite opposite to what we appear to be and even have become. Shakespeare (who else?) crystallises it: ‘I am not what I am’ (Othello, 1.1.66).¹ This makes personality the power to be somebody else: J’est un autre, as the French poet Rimbaud has it.² And, deep down, many and perhaps all of us cherish a sense of ourselves as different not just from the world and from others but even from our own selves and lives. Consider the shock and embarrassment you might feel at being suddenly confronted with your own obituary. Not me! Not that ! You’d drop your spoon and grab hold of the breakfast table, all the puny, recordable facts of your life impelling a panicked effort to recognise, to rescue yourself as something – anything! – other …

*

This book is called The Demonic: Literature and Experience and the last word of the subtitle has raised a few eyebrows at academic staff meetings; but for the artists and thinkers who have engaged with the demonic most impressively, it is experience above all – experience of a soul-shaking kind – which reasonable objectivity is liable to miss altogether. Here is Stevenson in a letter to J. A. Symonds on reading Crime and Punishment by perhaps the greatest novelist of the demonic, Dostoevsky:

Raskolnikoff is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it. Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified.³

This sort of profoundly vital experience is clearly foreign to objectivity. Indeed, so magnetised is he by the main character, Stevenson gets Dostoevsky’s title wrong! What the academy typically asks for and rewards is precisely objectivity in the sense of a correct or impartial appreciation. Yet an informed or balanced response may, of all things, betray passionate and vital reading experience, may betray art as what deals with and in such experience. Information is so often an evasion, an attempt to master as fact an agency – the work – which is analogous to personhood, even if the virtual personality of the work of art must be distinguished from the actual personality of the author. There are other criteria for judging criticism than balance or expertise. How interesting is any given reading? How far does it do justice to the work’s varying charisma and possibilities of meaning? Some things in even a great work are just less good than others. How fertile is it? What is its generative potential, in terms of art or life? – I’m thinking now partly of Rilke looking at the Apollo Belvedere and writing, ‘You must change your life!’⁴ But of course literature may not always change our lives for the better. Can it be owned by a living human being, at his or her most intimate and exposed, in the sudden depths of a surprising conversation, in that prone moment of consciousness before falling asleep, when engaged in the rawest and most agonising self-reflection?⁵

Of course scholars know all this, and it conditions our response to the critical work and art we most like and respond to, but, I feel, too secretly and too much in the background, to the effect that scholarship is now a professional business largely sealed off from enthusiastic reading. It is hard for contemporary academic readers to do justice to the sheer life-potential of a book. Professional identity and standing in an epoch of unprecedented professionalisation stand in the way. And if a critical orientation towards history typically proffers facts in place of the subjectivity of aesthetic encounter, theory involves abstraction from experience. A good question of any theory or philosophy is: what kind of model or image of life – realised, say, in novel form – would it express? If we cannot imagine this as anything other than hopelessly thin or facile, then it’s simply not suitable to the dense complexities of art. And political criticism also steps away from experience, being ethics at a higher level of abstraction. One reason for its righteous tendency is that politics enables a comfortable distance from the ambivalence of one’s own moral life. That of course is properly the domain of ethics. But ethical criticism has, in recent times, tended to be too pious, too liable to neglect not just the temptation to privilege oneself over ‘the Other’, but the real reasons for and desirability of doing so. It therefore degrades into ethical kitsch. Perhaps the demonic can help bring something of the complication, asperity, even agony of ethics back in.

It is interesting that Stevenson is writing about a Russian masterpiece, as expressly opposed to an Anglo-American tradition. Intensity is a well-known predicate of Russian and German literature. And it may be that for English or American readers such dislocated traditions communicate all the more instantly and powerfully with raw experience, because they are from elsewhere, beyond educated familiarity, beyond mastery. Scottish authors are a bit of a special case and the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems closer than his typical English counterparts to these alternative traditions. I believe that authors such as Shakespeare should be read much more often in such contexts – and that to read Shakespeare in such a way will be to discover or rediscover a more powerful and existentially compelling Shakespeare. In these pages at least, he – and other English writers such as Marlowe and Milton – will be found in the company of Hegel, Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann.

I also believe, strange though it is to say, that another way of renewing an intensely serious intellectual and emotional engagement with art in the English critical tradition is via a new engagement with theology. Jonathan Dollimore once said to me that theology at least connects with ‘the Big Stuff’ – life, death, tragedy (the Fall being the first and perhaps the greatest of tragedies), meaning, value. And Martin Luther wrote in the same vein, in a letter of 17 March 1509, to his friend, the Eisenach priest Johannes Braun, ‘From the outset I would rather have exchanged philosophy for theology. I mean for a theology that gets at the meat of the nut, at the kernel of the corn, or the marrow of the bones’.⁶ But if theology can help repair criticism’s connection with life, we need the right kind, the sort of theology that really does connect up with the Big Stuff. Luther, remember, had to lay his life (and much else) on the line in his effort to keep it honest.

And he knew that one thing which keeps theology honest is the demonic – because the Devil is a tempter, because he is a possessor of souls, because he gets right into the bone marrow, making it plain that moral objectivity and pride are unsustainable, that life is a struggle in which we are always messily and ambivalently involved. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:

Commonly, one hears little about the demoniacal, notwithstanding that this field, particularly in our time, has a valid claim to be explored, and notwithstanding that the observer, in case he knows how to get a little rapport with the demon, can, at least occasionally, make use of almost every man for this purpose. As such an explorer Shakespeare is and constantly remains a hero. That horrible demon the most demoniacal figure Shakespeare has depicted and depicted incomparably, the Duke of Gloucester (afterwards to become Richard III) – what made him a demon? Evidently the fact that he could not bear the pity he had been subjected to since childhood. His monologue in the first act of Richard III is worth more than all the moral systems which have no inkling of the terrors of existence or of the explanation of them.⁷

I shall argue in due course that Macbeth is more demonic than Richard III, but it’s instructive that both Kierkegaard’s and Stevenson’s testimonies to literature’s vitality are inspired by great demonic works: the Macbeth -like story of an unnecessary murder that is Crime and Punishment, and Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III which Kierkegaard expressly nominates as ‘demoniacal’. Kierkegaard asserts the pertinence of the demoniacal for nearly all of us, provided we can bear to recognise it in ourselves. But he also asserts the particular pertinence of the demoniacal in our times. This might be because of secularisation, because the demonic is now the back door into spirituality and religion where the front door appears to be shut, because the demonic is the prevalent form of modern religious experience. But, given his richly inward understanding of the demonic, Kierkegaard is also on to the strange lure and temptation of a negative life, which, as I indicated at the very beginning of this book, has grown even stronger since. In all this, Shakespeare foretells demonic modernity.

But Kierkegaard’s emphasis here falls on the true-to-life challenge of such demoniacal art to theoretical abstraction: ‘moral systems which have no inkling of the terrors of existence or the explanation of them’. Unwilling to settle for his lot in life, the Crookback breaks out. He violates nature and custom, wooing women over their husbands’ corpses. If being has made him this, then he will punish and defy it. Life seems brutally, baldly and insistently to say, ‘You’re a hunchback, loser’. So he makes himself sexy, glamorous and powerful.

I am not what I am!

The lesson for us is that literature is more responsive to experience than philosophy is. But as a result criticism must not turn literature into philosophy, stepping away from what literature has to tell us, and there are implications for critical voice and form. This book will move between more familiar types of scholarly reflection and an attempt to admit, own and bring into view the demonic as a form of life, suffering and excitement. This necessarily will be subjective. But not just an indulgence. According to Stevenson and Kierkegaard, it’s the only way to do justice to the demonic at all.

*

‘I am that I am’ is what God says in the Bible (Exodus 3.14); ‘I am not what I am’ is what the Devil snaps back. And especially nowadays we too typically define ourselves by our difference – not just from each other and the wider world, but even from our own established personalities. Here identity becomes strangely one with self-destruction.

In fact, rejection of the world slides inevitably into a related rejection of the self, as we see, for instance, in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. ‘I banish you,’ says the eponymous hero, to a Rome which has banished him, and thereby confounds the very basis of his accustomed identity, leaving Shakespeare to unfold the tragic consequences (3.3.127). But if undoing one’s own being without actually physically disposing of it is tragic, it is also of course thrilling: for what remains is pure selfhood, disencumbered of all the natural and social predicates that previously made it up. This is that quick element which Coriolanus imagines standing as if ‘man were author of himself and knew no other kin’ (5.3.36–7); it is Macbeth the self-made king, the liberated thing that is Lady Macbeth unsexed, and Richard withou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on references
• Foreword
• Dedication
• Part One Demonic Negativity
• Part Two Turnabout and Dialectic
• Part Three Possession
• A. The Agony in Possessing
• B. The Possessed
• Index