The History of the Devil, by Vilém Flusser (review)

When, at the millennium's turn, I applied my occult exegesis to the Devil, I had a formidable hurdle of resistance to cross. The Devil is as unlikely a prince of all the occult figures I knew so well (including the vampire, the werewolf, the mummy, and the ghost) as Christianity is an ill-fitting frame for the allegorical setting of occult between-ness. And yet, as Walter Benjamin allowed in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (232), the introductory figure of allegory is Lucifer, and the melancholic half-life of allegory has been reached when the Devil returns to reclaim his origin and, by thus restoring the Christian frame of reference, extinguishes in the light of redemption the finite recording surface of remembrance.

I was able to extract a reading of the Devil as the primal or pre-Oedipal father and of the infernal contract as dealing in this provenance by its best offer of "Dad Certainty" thanks to three inspirations: the 1973 TV movie Satan's School for Girls, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and Vilem Flusser's Die Geschichte des Teufels. Flusser's reading of the infernal relation as a metabolic cycle for which the mortal sins serve as stations is now available in an English translation by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, but it is the second version Flusser wrote (or rewrote) in Portuguese, which is the source. For his second try, Flusser added a section-numbering conceit reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which the new English translation retains. Flusser included in the Portuguese version topical applications and references to contemporary tendencies in philosophy and the arts in the early 1960s and their relation to cultural and psychological developments in Brazil of the same period. This translation of the Portuguese version has, therefore, many more examples to show. The basic content, however, appears to have been carried forward intact from the German "original."

In my The Devil Notebooks, Notebooks 5 and 6 ran close commentary on the stations of Flusser's history, which I applied to the momentum of Sigmund Freud's speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Using new examples and extending my reading of the metabolic cycling between Flusser's pageant of deadly sins and Freud's presentation of the death drive unto my current work on daydreaming and wish fulfillment, my earlier reading is back and backs what follows. This time around I take as my summit for overview or summation the staging at the Berlin State Opera of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress under the direction of Krzysztof Warlikowski. Inspired by William Hogarth's cycle of paintings, Stravinsky commissioned W. H. Auden to write the libretto for the opera he had in mind (Auden brought along Chester Kallman as his collaborator). It is immediately quite an intervention to add the Devil to Hogarth's resolutely secular tableaux, which represented, like storyboards before their time, complete scenes in the narrative of a spendthrift's decline unto madness. Shadowed all the while by his abandoned but steadfast true love, he withdraws into madness, is installed at Bedlam, and doesn't go to hell. At the end of the Auden/Stravinsky version, the Devil, Nick Shadow, can't convince protagonist Tom Rakewell to kill himself. So he makes a bet, which is how Goethe's Mephistopheles bound his Faust to the terms of a compact. Tom is able to guess the cards Nick draws and the Devil withdraws directly to hell without collecting a soul. When the departing sponsor of Tom's rise and fall just the same places the curse of madness on him, the delusional system that results—in which Tom is Adonis and his abandoned beloved, Anne Trulove, his Venus—preserves the love relation he denied but which, like the Eternal Feminine in Faust II, saves him.

When the job his prospective father-in-law, Mr. Trulove, offers him isn't good enough, since he aims to be rich, not busy (and honest), Tom wishes for money, and Nick Shadow arrives...