Downright devilish

In literature it is often the baddies, as rule breakers and mischief makers, who make the most convincing and compelling characters. The ultimate baddy, the personification of pure evil in the Christian tradition, is the Devil – a word still capable of sending shivers down the spine.

A new book by a Cambridge academic focuses on how some of our greatest writers down the ages have drawn inspiration from the scary and sinister figure who tempts and connives, corrupts and destroys.

In The Devil as Muse, to be published later this month by Baylor University Press, Dr Fred Parker explores not just how the Devil is portrayed, and how this has subtly but radically changed over the centuries, but also how writers have engaged with the daemonic or diabolical as a source of their own creativity, drawing on evil for their inspiration.

Some of our greatest artists and writers, suggests Parker, need the Devil to give them the freedom to explore the full spectrum of human possibilities.

“Honest readers will admit that they enjoy the villains best – and the Devil is the most enduring villain of all. He crops up in literature throughout history – right from the Satan who afflicts Job in the Bible to the mysterious stranger in the latest Philip Pullman novel,” he says.

“The great appeal of the Devil for the writer is his disregard for morality and convention. This both attracts and repels us, challenging the dividing line between good and bad. He is the rebel, stranger, tempter, outsider - someone who liberates us from the fetters of what is acceptable.”

Parker argues that some of our greatest literature stems from a dangerous encounter with this tempter, and with the otherness that transgresses and threatens the culture we are rooted in. In particular he looks at the work of iconic writers – including John Milton, William Blake, Lord Byron, Thomas Mann and Mikhail Bulgakov – and the degree to which each, as artist, is ‘of the Devil’s party’ (as Blake said of Milton) or at least establishes some genuine and vital relation with him.

“What’s intriguing is that the Devil has a secret history all of his own. We think of him as a figure of absolute evil and the enemy of God and man. But this account comes largely from post-Biblical theology which quite literally demonised him,” he says.

“In the Bible Satan has shadowy links with the divine administration; he functions as the dark side of God. According to Genesis, there was no Devil in the Garden of Eden plotting man’s downfall, but only a very intelligent snake – a bringer of valuable if forbidden knowledge.”

Parker maintains that the Romantic poets Blake and Byron recovered this buried or forgotten characterisation. In their work, the Devil is an equivocal, charismatic figure – a powerful source of energy and insight. So risky was this portrayal that both artists were rejected by their contemporaries – Blake being seen as hopelessly eccentric, Byron as deeply wicked and corrupting.

In his extraordinary Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote warmly of the energies of Hell and the overthrow of all restraining authority. He rejected the categories of good and evil, challenging the very concept of morality. While this can be understood in terms of Blake’s sympathies for the radical politics of the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution, it also expresses darker, elemental energies that Blake thought essential to the artist.

Byron, once the darling of the middle classes, trod an even more dangerous path. Famously “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, he was seen by his contemporaries as heading “the Satanic school” in literature. In his drama Cain, Lucifer is alarmingly persuasive, and in his bawdy epic poem, Don Juan, Byron himself speaks about life with all the cynicism of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. This work scandalised his genteel readership so deeply that no woman of good character could admit to having read it.

Parker compares what Blake and Byron do as artists to what Faust did in the 16th century legend when he called up the Devil and sold his soul in exchange for limitless knowledge. “By opening themselves up so fully to dark energies, they gain great power as artists but run great risks – for the Devil in this story is not simply a liberal in fancy dress but a figure as genuinely dangerous as he is liberating,” he says.

“Thomas Mann explored the same theme in his novel Dr Faustus in which the central character, a composer, makes a pact to contract syphilis, a disease that will stimulate his creative powers while ultimately destroying him. By setting this story alongside the rise and fall of German Fascism, Mann asks searching questions about the relation of the aesthetic to the ethical.”

Literature, says Parker, is the long spoon that enables us to draw on powers that would destroy us if we came too close. “The traditional, accepted view of those powers is that they are, simply, against us, implacably hostile – ‘satanic’. But literature which opens up relations with those powers changes all that, by giving us a less binary, more holistic experience of the way things are,” he says.

The Devil as Muse gives modern readers a way of taking the Devil seriously, without theological dogma or superstition. “By seeing the Devil as the necessary adversary, the intimate enemy, we can re-think our own attitude to opposition, and come to understand Blake’s saying, ‘Opposition is true friendship’,” says Parker.

“This version of the Devil appealed particularly to the intense Romantic sense of alienation and rebellion - the brooding individual opposed to their society and to the world at large. The Devil, cast out from Heaven, is the grand prototype of such an alienated individual.

“That Romantic sense of alienation has not left us, and in modern consciousness it has been reinforced by the sense of a hostile force abroad in the world – most recently and obviously in the mutual perceptions of radical Islam and the West.”