Literary Evil

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Wed, 2003-10-01 16:16

Literary Evil

I was thinking of two definitions of Evil that inform our culture.

One that comes up is the idea of Evil as the hardening of the heart. In Genesis, it is said "God hardened his [Pharoah's] heart." The idea here is that the Pharoah could no longer feel. He was only concerned with the immortality of his own culture which he found himself to be a symbol of. He would rape, kill, destroy, and enslave other cultures so that momuments of immortality to Pharoahs would be built to last forever. A person in a dominant position of authority who acts in this manner is considered evil and his punishment is that the very things that he did to others come back to him through some supernatural force.

The other idea of evil is the image of the a plant or flower in a garden that has gone wild. This idea was popularized and developed to its fullest by Shakespeare. The English love for gardening is perhaps an affect of Shakespeare's elegant and mature development of the gardening theme.

Shakespearean heros or antagonists like Macbeth, Iago, Hamlet, and others are characters who have too much of one characteristic: vanity, envy, hesitation, or greed. They let this one characteristic grow wild and kill off all the other characteristics that need nurturing and maturing. On a subjective level, they suffer from obsessions with power, guilt which produces emanations of ghosts, etc.

Of course, in characters like Nebuchadnezzar, a mighty Babylonian King who becomes a beast, both aspects of these ideas about evil come out.

I was simply wondering if anyone else found examples of "evil" which informed our decisions to go to war or to leave things be.

Wed, 2003-10-01 18:15

neil_the_auditor

That's very good, Steven, although I'm not sure Nebuchadnezzar quite fits the bill; according to Daniel (the Bible one, that is), it was his pride and self-sufficiency which caused his downfall, though it wasn't permanent; after seven years he was restored to sanity and praised God. This evil spirit of pride (as opposed to the right kind of feelings we have when, say, a child does well at school) is largely ignored in a world where independence is so highly prized. I like your assessment of Shakesperean characters; the fascination is that they are not cardboard cut-out baddies but complex and flawed people who unwittingly bring about tragedy when their flaw grows rampant and strangles the good in them. [%sig%]

Thu, 2003-10-02 01:43

Steven

I may have misinterpreted Nebuchadnezzar. I assumed that his turning into an animal and going into the wilderness meant an excess of "sexual desire," like Lillith, Adam's second wife. Just some food for thought: for Shakespeare, even excess of virtue is apprended as something that is capable of turning a good man into evil man. Perhaps he was talking about the condescending pride of virtue, cold virtue. In that way, I see Titus Andronicus as a predeccessor to Hamlet. Titus would have had no problem killing the evil Uncle who kills his own brother for the throne because he was a Roman. Hamlet is a more Christian character, and is unable to kill because he is not really sure who is the primary cause of the Claudius' evil so he ends up killing all the people whom he believes, perhaps rightly, were aware of his Uncle's plot to take over the throne. Yes, they are fully realized characters, filled with human personality. I also find Biblical characters to be portrayed intensely well in first brief passages.

Thu, 2003-10-02 01:58

Steven

Just to add, I was also thinking about Nebuchadnezzar who had such a wonderful helper ,like Daniel, that with all his hanging gardens, and other monuments to the glory of Babylon, that his heart must have hardened toward his own people, not Daniel, for he must have seen how worthless they all were, how they were waiting for him to make a fatal mistake...

Thu, 2003-10-02 15:02

Steven

To add even more (amused)... you are right. In Genesis, it is "God" who hardens the heart of the pharoah. In Daniel, human pride is seen as the force that hardens the heart. Daniel is a remarkable read, beautifully written. It reminds me of the poems of Rilke, who is, admittedly, my favorite poet.

Fri, 2003-10-03 09:08

andrew pack

You've also got the Hobbes and Rousseau ideas of evil - is evil something which is potential within us all and controlled by society and morality, or is society in fact the root of evil and without its inequalities and divisiveness we would all be 'noble savages'. From a literary point of view, my book of choice on evil is "The Lord of the Flies" - I think we can safely say that Goulding and Rousseau would have had quite a debate. In Lord of the Flies, Goulding shows that there is the potential in all of us to get swept along by circumstance, by the crowd, by the moment; but also I think that individuals can still stand out and be more than this and also less than this - without the character of Jack, the charismatic face of chaos there would have been no tempting path to follow and in Ralph, Goulding shows that even though Ralph is frightened, confused, human and even tempted there is something in certain people which still does what is right, rather than what is safe or easy. It tends to be charismatic evil which interests me - we are drawn to Tom Ripley, Patrick Bateman and Hannibal Lecter (when he's not being hammily overacted).

Sat, 2003-10-04 02:47

Steven

Hobbes' idea of evil, as you say, is that evil is a potentiality within all human beings, waiting to take root and become an actuality. So Hobbes justifies the hard, punishment-prone king who is the sum total of the will of his subjects. Hobbes would even defend a military dictator like Cromwell or someone more current like Saddam Hussein. You are completely right in connecting Hobbes with someone like William Goulding. They would have had quite a debate, but they would have agreed that our evil desire to dominate, to kill, and to rape had to be controlled in some manner. William Goulding shows the need for an internal conscience, Hobbes, the need for an external authority willing to exert punishment. Rousseau, I see as someone who is disillusioned by all the wars of the religions, and then, the wars of the nation states who were, really, secularized religious institutions anyway. Man was, in Rousseau's view, born chained by social customs and laws which he firmly believed were absolute. He saw noble savages as people who were not conditioned by such social or religious dogmas so that they were not as concerned with killing, raping, and destroying other civilizations which they considered relative, civilizations that were not fully actualized, as to say.

Wed, 2003-10-08 14:22

Philip

Didn't Hobbes intend for his sovereign to be removable if his actions ever became detrimental to the wellbeing of society? Even Machiavelli allowed for that. Cromwell is interesting. It is a little disturbing that he was potentially one of 'the nation's favourite Britons' yet for Irish people he is a kind of Heinrich Himmler figure - a mass murderer. I can't understand why some people are so willing to overlook that. I've struggled a lot with 'evil' over the years - see 'Auschwitz' and 'Richard III as Fascist Archetype' by Waldemar.

Wed, 2003-10-08 14:26

Philip

Nietzsche always argued that the definition of 'good' and 'evil' was determined by nothing more absolute than whichever group held power in society at a particular time, and that all 'morality' and 'goodness' was built up as a result of the struggle of wills (so 'evil is necessary for the establishment of good'). He is probably right, but if you take this thinking too far it tends to debase the 'good' in a very fundamental way, and in certain circumstances, like Europe in the inter-war years - it can lead to fascism and 'the end justifies the means.'

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