Histories of the Devil: From Marlowe to Mann and the Manichees

320 Pages·2016·12.68 MB·English

by  Jeremy Tambling (auth.)

Histories of the Devil
JeremyTambling
Histories of the Devil
From Marlowe to Mann and the Manichees
JeremyTambling
London,UnitedKingdom
ISBN978-1-137-51831-6 ISBN978-1-137-51832-3(eBook)
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-51832-3
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Inmemory ofmy brother, WilliamJonathanFrancisTambling,
1945–2015.
P A
REFACE AND CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A quite favourable recent review of a book I wrotenoted that there was
nonoticeofanysecondaryliteratureatitsstart,andnorhadIwrittenany
introduction. Obviously this will not do: it is customary to start with
explanationsratherthanhope,asItendtodo,thatthese,andtheterms
of reference will emerge and be found, rather than being predefined.
Thisparticularlyappliestoabookonthedevilwheretherecanbenoset
termsofreference.Thispresent bookcomes out ofmyuniversityteach-
ing,usingsomeofwhatIwantedtosayinlecturesorseminars,andsince
it followsthat,it referencesmy writing at the time, so I hopethe reader
will forgive the autocitations, whose associated egocentrism I regret.
(I notice in passing how my writing keeps coming back to certain
Shakespeare plays: though I hope I have not repeated myself the same
Shakespeareplaysrecurthroughoutthisbook.)Thisbookfindsthedevil
in literature, perhaps as a way of thinking what literature is: but it also
worksasa‘historyofthedevil’(titleofastudybyDefoe),andthatidea
challenges,perhapsuniquely,positivistassumptions:ahistory?Andwhy
the devil? This is not a history of ideas, nor of a concept: I accept
Nietzsche’s view that ‘only that which has no history can be defined’
(Nietzsche 1956: 212), which retroactively – since things are defined,
andthatusuallygivesthemtheirhistory–meansthatanappealtohistory
isalwaysmetaphysical:attemptingtocreatesomethingdefinitethatthere
canbeahistoryof:believinginidentity,continuity,andtheidenticaland
in either progress or cultural decline. Names endure, but that does not
guaranteeahistorywhichlinksthem.ThoughImaynotescapegeneral-
isation, I have tried to avoid potted histories of Zoroastrianism, or
vii
viii PREFACEANDACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Manicheism,orCatharism,orcombatmyths,assomanypreviousbooks
on the devil, some academic, have engaged with. I assume there is no
single thing to be said about any of these hypostatisations, and nothing
outside the text – nothing that can be discussed without close attention
tospecifictexts.Inthe‘minuteparticulars’oftextsandquestionsofhow
to read and discuss them, a universalising history may perhaps be
avoided: texts will perhaps form a constellation with each other as they
are brought into association with each other; these constellations allow
for alternative histories, ways of reading. In these problems of reading
literarytextsoraskingwhatatextmaybe,OldNicklurks,thedevilbeing
inthedetail;andmyusesofFreudandofDerrida,inparticular,willdraw
outtheinherencyofwhatDerrida(1978:61) callsthe‘demonic-hyper-
bole’ within literature.
I do not follow the argument that though Christianity may have
tended to give up on belief in a literal devil (Pope’s cleric ‘never
mentions Hell to ears polite’), it remains a useful symbol to think
about evil. Many of the book’s texts are informed by Catholicism or
Protestantism, but its subject is not the Christian devil, nor yet, quite,
the devils of other faiths. The book takes theology seriously, as a
discipline of thought, and I hope will be read by theologians; it admits
itsfascination,especiallynegativetheology,butis,finally,Ithink,anti-
theological. And it is not about ‘evil’, a term perhaps better dispensed
with, for reasons which will become apparent, but which start with the
point that the person who claims to know what evil is may not know
what he or she is talking about. Although I hope theologians and
philosophers of religion and historians will enjoy it, the book’s likely
readership will be those interested in visual images, or literature, both
Englishandcomparative,orcritical theory,orpost-Nietzscheanphilo-
sophy. Some recurrent keywords may be flagged: e.g. nothing, das
Ding, soliloquy, allegory, folly, and madness; genius and the daemon;
carnival and melancholia and abjection; différance, nihilism, poverty,
law, the double, laughter, temptation, banality, the death-drive, and
the aesthetic. In how these familiar terms are used lies a sense of what
‘thedevil’includes.Scholarlybooksarewrittenforpeoplewithspecia-
list interests, which means that readers will cut to only the bits they
want to read: quite right too, and I do it myself, but nonetheless the
book thinks of itself as having an argument persevering and interweav-
ing from end to beginning, and the best reader will forget that some
bits are not her specialism, and will read it all.
PREFACEANDACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
This Preface announces the book’s intentions, but the Introduction
plunges in with discussion of four of the book’s theoretical assumptions,
on dualism, on the implications of the soliloquy, and what is meant by
genius. It also comments on allegory, during the course of studying the
shadowy figure of Simon Magus, first mentioned in the New Testament,
andpartoftheprehistoryoftheFaustidea,astarting-pointforthisbook,
asitssubtitleindicates.ThemodernhistoryofFaustemergesinGermany
in the sixteenth century, and it is discussed here through Marlowe, in
Doctor Faustus (the substance of the first chapter), and then in later
chapters on Goethe’s two Faust plays, and in a last chapter on Bulgakov,
and Thomas Mann. Other exfoliations from Goethe in particular involve
the rewritingsof Faustin Turgenev, andDostoevsky.
A second starting point is Augustine (CE 354–430) on account of his
contestwiththeManichees.Theybelievedintwoopposingprinciples,of
light and darkness, and confronted him with the challenge to deny the
existenceofevilasapositiveandactiveforce,orprinciple.DidGodcreate
theworldfromnothing?–akeywordforusthroughout.Butnothingwill
comeofnothing.DidGodcreatetheworldfromsomething?Thensome-
thing has equal status with God, as eternal – Aristotle believed in the
eternityoftheworld–andifweaskabouttheexistenceofevil,thenthat
musteitherbeidentifiedwithGod,ifhecreatedtheworldfromnothing,
orfromasomethingwhichhecannotexclude.Augustine’sConfessionssay
thatafterhisconversion,hewrotetheSoliloquies;thelatterwasthenanew
word, which lies at the heart of this book, and is discussed in Chapter 1,
‘The Tempter or the Tempted, Who Sins Most?’ in relation to Marlowe
and Shakespeare, since soliloquy marks the speech of Marlowe’s Faustus,
or those other Marlovian or Shakespearian Lucifer-like overreaching self-
asserterswhobecomeincreasinglyawareofthemselvesasdividedsubjects,
so that to whom they speak when they soliloquise becomes ambiguous.
Soliloquyrisksthedevil.Itbringsinsomeoneelseastheinterlocutor:the
daimon,ordaemon,perhapssomethingotherthantheChristiandemon,
and the Genius. The Introduction and first Chapter trace soliloquy
through Doctor Faustus, and into Shakespeare, while Chapter 2,
‘Medieval and Early Modern Devils: Names and Images’ approaches
Shakespeare via the diabolical within Dante, and Chaucer, and medieval
drama, i.e. within earlymodern literature, defining thisas whatis written
in the vernacular. With these texts it becomes obvious that the devil
cannot be thought of in Christian terms only, or that Christianity enacts
a repression of another force which exceeds the place it gives to the
x PREFACEANDACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
diabolical, and whose instability, whether as as nature-spirit, or Folly or
Vicerunsthroughoutthetextsdiscussed.ItalsoshowsitselfinChapter3,
on folly, and on fools, in Sebastian Brant and Bosch and Bruegel. I
continue from there with Rabelais’ carnival, his folk-devils, Pantagruel
and Panurge, and with the body whose grotesquerie is threatened by
newer sixteenth-century discourses, which make folly diabolical by label-
lingitmadness.Suchnormalisingforcesexcludethepicaro,therogueand
peasantslave,likePoorTominKingLear,thelasttexttobediscussedin
this Chapter, which draws much of its language of popular devils from
thencontemporaryargumentsaboutexorcism.Butcarnival,asthesphere
of what cannot be controlled, with diabolical potential, offers a new and
revolutionarypossibilityforthemodernworld,andextensionsofcarnival-
thinkingtherefore run throughoutthe restof the book.
Chapter4,concentratesonBlakeandMilton,initiallyviaFreud’sessay
‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’ (1923), about the
Bavarian painter, Christoph Haizmann who believed that he had sold his
soul to the devil. It also includes discussion of the case of demon posses-
sion at Loudun in France, approaching this through Michel de Certeau,
whose writings on the heterological within history are evoked several
times, informing what is said about Bosch and Haizmann, and picking
upontheambiguityofagodwhomaybeconceptualisedasawandering
‘poor devil’. Paradise Lost is analysed alongside Blake, who also gives the
opportunity to discuss the Book of Job, since he illustrated it. Here, the
doubleness of Blake’s own thoughts about the devil emerge: as rebel,
poet,hermaphrodite, andfigure of theaccusing conscience together.
Chapter 5, ‘Masks, Doubles, and Nihilism’ concentrates on two other
writers parallel with Blake, both fascinated by the double: James Hogg in
ThePrivateMemoirsandConfessionsofaJustifiedSinner(1824),andE.T.A.
Hoffmann(1776–1822).Thelatter’swritingsonthedevil,andondouble
psychic states and music attracted the attention of Baudelaire, whose essay
on laughter takes that as a devilish going-on. Baudelaire starts the chapter
and informs its interest in comedy, which is explored especially through
Molière. Here again, carnival is central, as is masking, dissimulation, activ-
ities where the diabolical may or may not be present. Hoffmann became
aware of carnival through Goethe, in the Italian Journey, not published
until 1816–1817, but an influence on Hoffmann’s fantastic short story
Princess Brambilla (1820), a text I make central for considering relation-
shipsbetweenthecomicandthediabolic,asIdowithhisnovel,TheDevil’s
Elixirs(1815).
PREFACEANDACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
Ifmeetingwiththedouble–whichthreatensthesubject’sverysenseof
being an autonomous original – means meeting the devil, then
Mephistophelesthreatenswithnihilism,ashappensinFaust,thesubstance
of Chapter 6. Here the diabolic – whether in Faust or in Mephisto –
becomes the spirit of modernity, which is Goethe’s subject. Chapter 7
extendsthoseissuestoDostoevsky,andtohisdialogic,polyphonicnovels,
which, following Bakhtin’s arguments, rework carnival: Bakhtin is as
relevant here as he was in Chapter 3. The emphasis falls on the double,
and on feelings of devil-possession, and on suicide, taking these from A
Writer’s Diary, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Russia remains
prominentinChapter8,withTheMasterandMargarita,whileasection
on Doctor Faustus engages with Mann’s sense of German culture as
diabolical, and with music as its highest expression as much as Nazism
threatenstobeitslogic.Thequestionablenessofthisthesis,anditsasking,
likeAdorno,collaboratoronMann’stext,aboutwhatartcouldbewritten
after Auschwitz, brings the book to a close, though not before a note on
Rushdie’s SatanicVerses.
The material of this book started with a course I devised on carnival
and tragedy. During its metamorphosings, in the on-off periods when
I taught it, when I could not remember whether the title’s copula was
‘and’or‘or’or‘versus’–werecarnivalandtragedyopposites(soBakhtin)
oreventhesame?–Ibegantothinkthedevilwouldmakeagoodfootnote
to both terms. That produced a latter-day course on the devil. Thanks
to all students who listened and discussed both, or either, and especial
thanks to those who encouraged me to write the material up. Much
reading has gone on since then, though I cannot hope to have mastered
the secondary material on any, and especially on Rabelais, or Goethe, or
Dostoevsky. Parts of Chapters 3 and 5 formed lectures at the National
Taipei University of Technology, and the National Taiwan University
in November 2014; part of Chapter 1, on soliloquy, to Hang Seng
Management College in Hong Kong the same week. The E.T.A.
Hoffmann material on The Devil’s Elixir’s revises an article in Forum for
ModernLanguageStudies51(2015):379–393:IthankRobinMackenzie,
the editor for his help, and also thank him and OUP for permission to
reprint. Yet more on Hoffmann comes from a conference on opera and
textatStAndrewsin2013,whereIcomparedDonGiovanniandUndine:
thanks to Emma Sutton for her organisation! Work on Mann’s Doctor
Faustus,whichIhavebeenwantingtowriteonsinceIexcludedachapter
on it from my Opera and the Culture of Fascism (1997), appeared in