On Evil in Art

On the recommendation of a friend I went to see the current film The Devils. It is about an outbreak of supposed demon possession in a convent in Loudun, France, in the seventeenth century. Before the depicted situation gets sorted out, everyone has been embroiled in political intrigue, carnal chaos, emotional havoc, inquisition, cruelty, and the most bizarre forms of voluptuous decadence imaginable.

The makers of this film chose to handle their subject matter as vividly as they could. The opening scene whisks one straight into a perfumed moral bog, with Louis XIV participating in a dionysian frolic in front of a bored and elegant Mazarin. From then until he leaves the theater, the viewer is up to his neck in blood, incense, silk, tinsel, grapes, powder, wine, and flesh.

Why speak of this to readers of a Christian journal? Isn’t this sort of thing as well ignored? Isn’t it simply more of what is to be expected from Babylon?

The answer to the latter two questions is, I should think, yes. So the first remains. The answer to that one is that the film exhibits rather vividly a matter that is worth our attention. It is a matter we encounter in one form and another again and again in our own epoch. It has to do with the zeitgeist, and with public imagination, and with the discussion and portrayal of moral issues, and, eventually, with the whole aesthetic question.

Perhaps what I am referring to ought to be cast as a question: Does there come a point at which the artistic portrayal of evil crosses a certain line and itself begins to participate in the very evil it is portraying?

All the red flags are up and aflutter as soon as anyone embarks on a line of thought like this. Censorship! Tyranny! The index! Didacticism! Inquisition! Prudery! Victoria! Mrs. Grundy! But perhaps if we back off a bit and look at what is entailed, it will not appear so outrageous.

We would have to back all the way off to the question of what art is if we were really to get the discussion on a firm footing, but what with Aristotle and the Renaissance Florentines and Elizabethans and Goethe and Shelley and a thousand others, we would never get to the matter at hand. It may be enough here to say that art, whatever else it does, represents the effort of the human imagination to get hold of its experience of life by giving some concrete shape to it all. That shape may appear in stone or syntax or oils or melody, but the whole enterprise of poetry and sculpture and drama (and hence cinema) does bespeak that effort.

Parenthetically, the question of entertainment might arise here. Isn’t all this appeal to heady aesthetic doctrine likely to dignify and elevate something that isn’t half so weighty? What about mere enjoyment? What about the books that have been written and the plays that have been produced simply to divert people for a couple of hours? Let’s not read Armageddon in every playroom scuffle, or the Beatific Vision in wallpaper.

It is not easy to find the border between “art” and “entertainment,” if indeed there is one. By its very nature, art aims at furnishing pleasure, and we are entertained by pleasure. But the word entertainment with its suggestion of diversion and lightness doesn’t serve very well when we speak of Dante or Vermeer, say, since the pleasure we get from what these artists have done seems to partake rather of sublimity than of mere diversion. Perhaps entertainment is a subdivision of pleasure—or a low rung on the ladder whose top reaches to Paradise.

It is a fact, of course, that a great deal of what we call “great art” came into being for rather utilitarian reasons—a rich man’s commission, a new cantata for next Sunday, a play for the Globe theater; and on that level it is hard to untangle the occasional from the sublime. What happens is that an occasional piece may turn out to be sublime because the man who made it is a genius. His sonnet about the Piedmont massacre or the death of the Countess, unabashedly occ̃asional, somehow participates in the sublime because he has a great and noble imagination. On the other hand, we can get planning committees together and decide to have a breathtaking spectacle and hire all the necessary professionals and work out all the logistics and blow all the trumpets—and succeed only in bringing forth appalling bathos (viz. Radio City Music Hall Christmas and Easter productions, or the cinematic biblical extravaganzas that started with The Ten Commandments).

Let us say, then, that authentic art emerges from a noble imagination whatever the occasion is that has asked for it. And, further, that if a noble imagination is at work, authentic art appears, whether the subject matter happens to be “high” or “low.” It is not very difficult, on the one hand, to see how great feats of courage, skill, or strength (as in Beowulf, Achilles, Hercules) can give rise to noble treatment. By the same token, the longings, perplexities, or doubts that beset the human mind have been fruitful sources of high utterance (for Shelley, Browning, and Wordsworth, for example). Or the soul’s experience of God often furnishes the matter for genuine poetry (Donne, Herbert, Eliot). These are easy enough to cite in connection with a theory of good art.

But what about evil—real evil—as subject matter? How do we work this in?

Dante, for instance, writes about hell, which is as low as you can get. And he writes explicitly and at great length. Here are all the damned, pictured vividly, with discussions of what it was that landed them there and of what their particular torment is. There are explicit notations of sin—lechery, gluttony, wrath, avarice, sloth, and so on.

Or take Shakespeare. What, after all, is Macbeth about? Foul murder. We watch Lady Macbeth turning herself into a monster. Or what about Chaucer? One of his most mature poems, the Troilus and Criseyda, is about illicit love. Then there is one of the most towering figures in all of English poetry—Milton’s Satan.

It will be obvious here that a distinction needs to be made between “good and evil” on the one hand, and “high and low” on the other. Clearly, great evil can furnish “high” subject matter (as in Dante and Milton). The Inferno and Satan are “low” only on some cosmic hierarchical accounting. They are “high” in the sense that they embody the biggest issues conceivable by the human imagination.

Similarly, really “low” stuff can afford the matter for genuine art. Take Fielding, with his tumble of hilarious but scurrilous situations in eighteenth-century England, or Evelyn Waugh’s brilliantly funny novels about upper-class decadence in early twentieth-century England (or, for that matter, Faulkner’s wholly serious handling of American decadence).

What seems to emerge from this line of observation is that it is entirely the treatment that decides the worth (and hence the goodness or badness) of a piece of art. There can be good art about bad things, and bad art about good things (a discussion of this last would embarrass us all, alas).

Which brings us back to the question about The Devils. It is, to use the favorite word of blurbs and critics now, “frank.” Isn’t that a point in its favor? It treats demonism (or bogus demonism—that is never really decided), and all the carnality and terror and horror that follow in its wake, colorfully and explicitly. What’s wrong with this? Can’t we be bold? Can’t we call a spade a spade? Haven’t we done well to shake off our nineteenth-century humbug and timorousness (and by this time, we all know we can be talking about only one possible topic—sex)?

No. We have not done well. In its frenetic disavowal of sexual reticence, the twentieth century has torn the veil and blundered into the Holy of Holies, as it were—and you can’t do that with impunity. It is in the nature of the case that the Ark be secluded: you can’t use it for a sawhorse. It is in the nature of the case that the shewbread be reserved—David didn’t eat it for lunch every day. And by the same token, it is in the nature of the case that human sexuality be shrouded. It is not a public matter. (Someone will bring up the Canticles here: that is a great poem of carnal love; perhaps it is not a public poem?) Not only is nothing gained by the louder, shriller, more frequent and explicit discussion and portrayal of sexuality, but there is every reason to suppose that something is being lost—something good, along with the humbug and prudery.

And this is not necessarily to take a huggermugger or sanctimonious view of sexuality. Anyone who misses the fun—even the funny—in sex is missing part of it. But, like a tiresome three-year-old’s pun, the humor cloys when it is insisted upon too loud and long.

But sex isn’t really the center of the matter. The guilt of The Devils (and of a hundred novels, plays, revues, and films one could trot out) is broader than that. It is that it fails to preserve distance. It not only points to the stew. It stirs it. It jumps in.

To isolate and articulate the difference between Dante’s handling of hell and this film’s handling of Loudun is difficult. Perhaps it has to do with a leer. If anything is leering from Dante’s pit, it is leering at the poet as well as the reader, whereas you get the uneasy feeling in The Devils that not only Louis XIV leers at you from the screen but the filmmaker as well.

We cannot say, of course, that all filmmakers (and novelists and poets) whose work fails because of this failure of distance are leering. That would be to pass a dangerous judgment on a great many people. Perhaps there is a prior fault in the era that the artists, because they live and work in the era, can escape only with difficulty. The fault would have something to do with the erosion in the modern world of such categories as absolute truth, and glory, and the holy, and thence of such responses as awe, humility, and reticence.

Finally, one has the unhappy feeling that in a great deal of contemporary art, literature, and cinema, inadequate imaginations are attempting very high summits. Script-writers, directors, producers, agents, and the rest, whose interest must be, above all, commercial, are addressing themselves quite blithely to imponderables that would give pause to the most sublime imaginations of history. The result is a proliferation of peepshows in Vanity Fair.

Thomas Howard is assistant professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has the M.A. from the University of Illinois and the Ph.D. from New York University. He is author of “Christ the Tiger.”

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