(Note: I originally wrote the bulk of this piece in 2019. It was both fairly long and incomplete, so I will be presenting it here in modified, expanded, and edited form, and in two parts. The following is Part I. For those who need a primer on Peircean semiotic and how it might relate to the analysis of works of creative expression, I recommend these two overviews from Signo-Semio. I have also written on Peirce and literature here. I will link each source that I use the first time I use it as I don’t feel like writing a proper Works Cited, my superficial loyalty to MLA notwithstanding. Part II will probably be posted sometime next week.)
In the foreword of Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith’s lurid 1980 pseudo-exposé Michelle Remembers, Pazder, a Canadian psychiatrist, positions himself as a witness. “It was my privilege to witness as she [Smith] risked the abyss, venturing far beyond her normal memory pool, her imaginings, fantasies, and dreams, to somewhere at the very core of her being… Perhaps it was what Jungians call the ‘base of the psyche,’ the meeting ground of our ancestral past and our present, the source of myth and symbol, the junction of mind and body, heart and soul” (Pazder xii). Michelle Smith has the honor of being the explorer, the party who has “grappled with the polarities of life and death, love and hate, light and dark, good and evil” (Pazder xii). Pazder then goes on to lay out some basic facts of the narrative the reader is about to imbibe- that it covers a series of therapy sessions that lasted 14 months, that these sessions addressed a frightening period in Michelle’s life, and that this period occurred around her fifth year; these memories were previously “buried” but then uncovered in the therapeutic context with a “purity that is a phenomenon in itself…”; the significance of this phenomenon is that it “provides an understanding of how a child survives,” an “achievement” that “will confront and inform many generations” (Pazder xii). This foreword is quite helpful in that it illuminates the moral, aesthetic, and thematic intentions of the text clearly and unambiguously. In fact, abolishing a measure of ambiguity that inflects both the scenario it describes and related cultural and psychological phenomena would seem to be its principle mission. Michelle Remembers is a tale of recovering a horrific moral clarity from a bubbling cauldron of uncertainty. This achievement of moral clarity has the unmistakable contours of a type trauma narrative, one which emphasizes the piercingly literal character of the (eventually) recalled, precipitating traumatic event, and one which centers a confrontation with the agent of the traumatic event. It is a narrative type infinitely amenable to a semiotic reading, as symptomology- semiotic as John Locke understood it- features prominently in its development. The Pazder half of this testimony, for all its proclamations of a non-intrusive ‘witness’ position in the affair, is perpetually observing Smith for marks of the Devil, reading the signs to craft a master sign of its own. We may give this master sign the name of ‘trauma narrative,’ and it must be understood that this is a story embedded in a rich and multifaceted gothic tradition, with a submerged (some might say chthonian) character which suits its antagonist- Satan.
Michelle Remembers is a book permanently linked in the popular imagination with the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic that occurred in North America during the 1980s and 90s. It is, in fact, seen by many scholars as a text which codified the narrative beats of a typical SRA testimony, and enabled the dissemination of SRA tropes through myriad communication and media networks which helped propagate the moral panic far and wide. The text itself has all the features of a macabre gothic melodrama, including some rather quaint moralistic flourishes which are apparently meant to add an obscuring fig leaf to its essentially exploitative character. In his foreword, quoted above, Pazder alluded to a metaphysics of inwardness that can be very easily associated with traditional Christian conceptions of ‘the soul,’ though he almost obligatorily dresses it up in a fashionable secular-scientific guise (Jung specifically is invoked for the purpose, a dated choice even in 1980). This inwardness is a storytelling conceit, of course. Gothic narratives traffic in the obscure, the buried, the submerged, and the hidden, and these qualities are just as likely to manifest in the genre’s characters’ individual psychologies as they are in narrative events. Michelle’s putative deep-diving into her psyche to recover her traumatic experiences pure and whole must have the character of a steady, inward gaze in order to be persuasive on the narrative’s own terms, but there is more than enough evidence that the tale was crafted in a more dialectical fashion, with Pazder taking the more active role in developing its satanic character.
The sociologist Mary de Young articulated the importance of Pazder and Smith’s potboiler- “The long-repressed memories of the pseudonymous Michelle were published in 1980… a best-seller that not only discursively links the master symbols of the decade- vulnerable children, the menacing devil and the psychological trauma model- but does so in an archetypal moral drama that so deeply resonated with cultural fears and anxieties that it incited the day care ritual abuse moral panic” (21). The archetypal quality of the moral drama is what is key. The plot, putatively true, involves a 27-year-old woman named Michelle (a pseudonym, as mentioned) who suffers from peculiar emotional disturbances relating to a recent miscarriage and a hodge-podge of unresolved family and relationship problems. She seeks the services of a British Columbia-based therapist named Lawrence Pazder; significantly, both he and Smith come from staunch Roman Catholic backgrounds. Smith had sought Pazder’s aid years prior as a university student. In the early phase of her therapy, Michelle experiences some relief and comfort for her present condition but cannot banish the feeling that a body of repressed experience is at the core of her unhappiness and needs to be unearthed. Pazder, in his capacity as a Virgil-esque guide to the dark corners of the psyche, soothingly eases Michelle into this difficult task. Soon enough (from the reader’s perspective anyway), Pazder obtains a dark revelation. After releasing a wall-piercing shriek, Michelle stammers:
It’s Malachi. What’s happening to me? I don’t know if it makes any sense… Oh! God, I hurt… I’m hurting… He’s hurting me all over, and something’s really scaring me. His eyes are scaring me. I can’t stand them. They look crazy. No! Take them away. He’s hurting my arms. Ow. Ow. He’s throwing me upside down fast. It’s hurting my arms. I want to run away… He’s grabbing me tight… I can’t get away. No! I can’t breathe… [coughing, gasping] He’s got me by the throat with one hand… Help! Somebody’s got to help me… He’s pointing at me… He says he’s pointing me… He says, ‘North… west…’ and he points me real hard. He turns me over and grabs my neck and points me. I don’t want to be all pointy. It hurts. Why is he hurting me?
…
No! No! No! Help! Mommy! Mommy!
Where’s my mommy? Why isn’t she here?
…
It was black and I could see my teddy bear… I loved the bear so much I wanted to become the bear… I wanted to crawl inside with him and be safe… I feel numb… there was nothing left of me just my head… no body… All that was left of my insides was a tiny warm spot… That’s all I was! (Italics and ellipses in original) (Pazder and Smith 15-17)
This outburst is one of the many blocks of text strewn about the pages of Michelle Remembers that are allegedly culled from tape recordings of the actual sessions Pazder conducted with Michelle Smith. This particular outpouring of confused horror appears in chapter two, and in chapter three it is molded into a more legible form by Pazder which, not accidentally, transforms the inchoate wail of distress into a concrete, and some might say confront-able, manifestation of evil. This semiotic process produces something akin to a literary symbol, or in Peircean terms, a rhematic symbolic legisign (the critic John Sheriff called it a class-8 sign for simplicity’s sake). “The representamen [sign-vehicle] of a class-8 sign is represented by its interpretant as a sign of possible objects in their character merely- hence as a sign of the feeling, the quality of immediate consciousness, of what is in the mind in the present instant” (Sheriff 78). The symbolic quality of this sign class inevitably makes it subject to convention, and therefore the mediating powers of history and culture, but the sign as it is experienced has a forceful immediacy and impressionistic quality in consciousness, akin to Firstness. Switching away from Michelle’s disorganized first-person accounts in chapter three, Pazder gives the reader a picture of satanic evil that comes to ground his narrative’s titillating aesthetic milieu, as well as its moral pretenses, rendered in a more superficially dispassionate third-person voice. We now can better envision poor Michelle’s grotesque tortures:
Some women had entered the darkened space, where the little girl was a prisoner. They walked in a single file, oblivious to the child’s presence. Clad in an oversized shirt, she watched, in fear and awe, as they went about their bizarre tasks- methodical, coldly efficient… some of them went about tacking up large black sheets on all four walls. Then the women began to set up candles… Someone draped the bureau with a round black cloth embroidered in an intricate white design. On top of the cloth were placed two silver goblets and a knife. And more candles…
One of the women approached Michelle and picked her up. The little girl’s apprehension faded- she could not help but smile. The woman was extraordinarily beautiful, with shining dark hair. Unlike the others, who wore simple black dresses, this woman wore a black cape with a hood. It set her apart. Michelle thought: Ah! A princess! (Pazder and Smith 21-22)
Such helpful tableaus and descriptions appear between Michelle’s first-person outbursts. Both of the aforequoted passages present the reader with a treasure trove of signs for perusal and interpretations; they all function symbolically when considered in their literary context, but for the figures in the narrative- and by extension the reader- the indexical qualities of Malachi’s pointing hand and the ceremonial objects furnished by the female adherents to the cult can hardly be missed. Indexical signs “direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion… anything which focuses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index…. A fragment torn away from the object” (Peirce qtd. in Chandler 51). The semiotician Daniel Chandler succinctly summarized the matter: “Indexical relations offer the most direct connection with a referent, in strongest contrast to symbolic relations” (Chandler 51). Pazder is constantly reading symbols in Michelle’s stories and in Michelle herself, but the narrative routinely inscribes indexical significance to these symbols so that they ‘point to’ a metaphysical instantiation of evil, at first manifested in the underground cult of which Michelle was a victim, and later, climactically, by the devil himself. The figures of the black-clad devil-worshiping women were in fact foreshadowed earlier in the novel when Pazder receives Michelle into one of their preliminary sessions. He betrays an urge to read her semiotically in a rather Lockean mode (perhaps this is understandable, as Pazder is a physician), taking both her demeanor and choice of attire as indexically signifying something more than Michelle’s personal distress: “When she arrived, he received still another surprise: she was wearing black, all black- black blouse and black pants… it seemed an unmistakable sign to him that something was up. So did her demeanor. She was somber… She was like a high diver standing at the edge of the board on tiptoes… the equipoise before a swift, sure motion…” (Pazder and Smith 10) The previously timorous Michelle seems to have acquired a measure of confidence, one that mimics the mannered precision of the Satanist women the reader will encounter in later chapters, and the black clothing speaks for itself. Aside from invoking the pop-psychological trope of a victim of abuse coming to identify with her abusers, Michelle’s unconscious invocation of the female Satanists constitutes an indexical gesture to an imagined social reality- the satanic cult conspiracy. Of course, this ‘reality’ is a fabrication, one constructed in collaboration with the therapist, but it is significant that the constructed symbol of social evil, mistaken for a material reality, is predicated on a perceived indexical relationship between the behavioral and physical features of a patient and a wider social context. Considered in a more literary sense, Michelle’s presentation functions metonymically with the satanic cult conspiracy. The dimestore poetry of the metaphor Pazder chooses to close his description of the eager-to-confess Michelle speaks its own truth. Michelle’s confident manner is in service to the brute forces of gravity, and she is about to take a plunge into the abyss. Her descent into the blackened regions of her repression is undertaken as if it were of her own volition, yet the fall is inevitable and all but requires a measure of passivity. This general vision of Michele comes to serve as Pazder’s ‘ruling metaphor’ for Michelle, and so transforms her into the narrative’s symbol of innocence and strength. An observation by Chandler is apropos: “Ruling metaphors reorganize experience. They foreground ways of thinking that are consistent with them and background alternatives…” (155) With such a vision of feminine poise, clearly in distress and subject to forces almost gravitational in their power, one needs to construct a particularly dastardly antagonist, a complementary metaphor to serve as the vision’s shadow. As the satanic panic (considered as a sociological phenomenon) makes clear, such a process of construction has real consequences, as it makes reality for subjects. “Changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we see the world and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and Johnson qtd. in Chandler 155).
Pazder cut his teeth studying tropical medicine and spent a period of time in West Africa, where he allegedly encountered a range of local black magic practices that did not neatly dovetail with a staunch Catholic sensibility. This was apparently a lens by which he viewed and interpreted much of Michele’s testimony. “Michelle remembered being hung upside-down as a child and twirled in dizzying circles by a black-robed man named Malachi, and having colored sticks dipped in liquid from a silver goblet inserted in every orifice of her body while beautiful black-robed women chanted and danced around her” (de Young 22). The narrative only gets more grisly and sensational from there. The reader comes to understand that Michelle’s mother is a member of a clandestine satanic cult, and Malachi is an apparent senior member. The abuse Michelle comes to suffer at the hands of this cult escalates over the course of the narrative until it obtains an almost pornographic intensity, though its penchant for discursively combining certain master cultural symbols as a means of explaining ambiguous experience in late modernity remains consistent throughout. Michele is placed in a car with the body of a dead woman by Malachi and her mother. Malachi then pushes the car into a ravine, causing a massive explosion which necessitates Michele clawing her way out through the wreckage. Her subsequent stay in a hospital is cut short when the nurse, also a member of the cult, spirits her off to an isolated Victorian mansion where she is imprisoned in a basement. The Nurse becomes something of a central antagonist, nearly eclipsing Malachi in the pageant of Michele’s tortures. “It was the nurse who brought her to a cemetery and forced her to stand in an empty grave, tricked her into defecating on a crucifix and bible, injected her with stupefying drugs, made her consume the flesh of a dead person, and brought a statue of the devil alive by daubing it with blood from an amputated finger” (de Young 22). Satan makes an early appearance as an effigy in chapter thirteen. A white statue of Lucifer features prominently in the cult’s graveyard rituals. On one occasion, when the nurse is absent, Michele crawls inside the statue, an experience “which frighten[s] her because she [feels] she [is] in the devil” (Pazder and Smith 99). This proves to be but a prelude to one of the most grotesque incidents in the novel. During a ceremony, a ‘possessed’ woman dances above and around Michele’s reclined body while the encircling cultists chant a satanic mass. “As she danced, the chanting grew louder and louder, and she danced faster and faster until the air began to grate… and the possessed woman stood over Michele, her legs straddling the child’s petrified body. The woman’s face came closer… and her snakelike tongue worked its way into the small girl’s mouth” (Pazder and Smith 126-127). The snake imagery in this passage proves to be prophetic. Another first-person interjection from Michele (again, presumably culled from the tape recordings of the sessions) elaborates on the experience: “It was like a snake was in my mouth. And the next thing I know, I feel all funny down below… It was a snake! It was a real snake, and it seemed like it was crawling out of me… I thought it was inside and it crawled out… I think she’s put a snake all the way through me” (Pazder and Smith 127). The transmogrification of this grotesque act of child sexual abuse into a fantastical, almost baroquely surreal supernatural event is in keeping with the novel’s semiotic process. The raw material of traumatic experience, putatively unmediated and ‘literal’ as Cathy Caruth might have it (201), is here transformed into a potent, biblical symbol of wounded innocence. In the context of the narrative, the snake has an indexical relationship with the woman’s tongue, in that it is effected through her abusive act. It only gets worse from there. Malachi slices a dead baby in half and smears Michele’s stomach with blood. He then does the same to the white statue of the Devil and seals the young Michele within it. “The only way I can see out is through those eyes… they pushed all the snakes in through the eyes, so they’re all at the bottom, and they put the rest of the dead baby in there and told me that’s what I got to eat” (Pazder and Smith 129). The serpent imagery proliferates, and the symbol of wounded innocence is granted a ghastly literality in the form of both the abused child and mutilated infant. The tendency of Michele Remembers is to repeatedly compound its symbols, but simultaneously insist on their literality in the context of the traumatic experience. The dead infants and kittens, the writhing snakes and hideous acts of sexual abuse and cannibalism, always need to multiply and proliferate across the narrative space. It can be considered a resolution to an aporetic quality of the text- most of the imagined atrocities proffered by Michele have a conspicuous symbolic character that anyone in a post-Freud culture would recognize, but the traumatic narrative type embraced by the authors insists on a literality to the experience that prompts symbolic qualities to be disavowed. The solution is to ascribe the significance of the symbolism to the activities of the imagined cultists and to escalate the extremity of their actions, so that the reader may not notice the psychoanalytic clichés behind the piles of baby entrails. In an effort to transcend the symbolic, or to present their conceptions as something ‘more than’ symbolic, the authors pile up a thick layer of materiality over the symbolic surface of the text; this may make the symbol more ‘real’ and less overtly archetypal, but it paradoxically strengthens its ability to function as a symbol by making it that much more seemingly immediate (or indexical) to the unfolding psychologies of the characters. The gruesome events and revelatory images function as literary symbols that acquire meaning in the context of a narrative that unspools temporally, developing the figures in the story as characters even while the authors insist on the literal nature of the things and events described through the pulpish use of violent extremity. This tension within the text proves unresolvable, and the authors’ solution, as we shall see, is to attempt to produce an indexical gesture beyond the text itself by identifying evidence of satanic conspiracy in the ‘real world.’
The ceremony continues: “The black-robed figures formed two circles, and each circle moved in the opposite direction from the other. Suddenly, and in unison, all the celebrants swept their cloaks back and revealed what was beneath: children. A child clung to each celebrant’s leg…” (Pazder and Smith 131) Realizing that nothing good could come of this scenario, Michelle attempts to help by first making a series of guttural animal noises that at first seem to imbue the satanic effigy with life. “[T]hey thought it was the effigy come to life. They still didn’t understand that it was a person inside. Michelle wanted to burst out so badly… but it was no use; the more noise she made, the more real the effigy seemed” (Pazder and Smith 131). This is the point where the reader begins to acquire a precise idea as to what the final form of the Satan of the narrative will be, but in the moment its overt artificiality in the face of a credulous audience serves well as an accidental metaphor for Pazder and Smith’s entire project. “In her frenzy, she grabbed what was at hand- the snakes… she gathered them up in handfuls and pushed them through the effigy’s eyes” (Pazder and Smith 132). The dismembered baby parts soon follow. Strangely enough, this only seems to excite the celebrants and children as they proceed to dance ‘faster and faster.’ Michelle then spontaneously materializes outside the effigy and cuts a frantic and crazed figure. It is the feral face of wounded, abused innocence which startles the followers of the Dark One. “[T]he other children shrank from the sight of her… Everyone was standing still, shocked… They all seemed scared” (Pazder and Smith 132). The possessed woman who had previously menaced Michelle is the only one to approach her without fear. She violently throws the girl on a bed and proceeds to vomit all over her, a move which mirrors the previous scene of the effigy vomiting forth serpents and decaying human parts. Michelle then bolts, retrieving a snake from the floor and gripping it between her teeth. Her wild, frantic flailing and snarling keeps the celebrants at bay. Mary de Young reads this scene in a heroic light, as Michelle’s actions seem to scare the other children into fleeing (23). The nightmare is not over for Michelle herself, however. She notices a woman dressed in white whom she mistakes for her mother and approaches her for comfort. The result is despairing: “’No! Michelle shrieked. ‘It’s not my mom. It’s that lady!’ Michelle was utterly crushed. Slowly she turned to the effigy. She knew there was only one place she belonged- inside the white thing. She crawled back inside. There was no escape” (Pazder and Smith 133). The fact that the false mother and the false Satan share the quality of vivid whiteness is almost certainly significant. The crux of the ceremonies is the violation of purity and innocence, and the purity signified by whiteness proves to be a deception in the world of the cultists, and using it for the hue of their satanic idol a deliberate mockery. Furthermore, the womb-like embrace of the satanic effigy seems to serve as a symbolic mirror to Michelle’s embrace of the false mother.
The collaborative testimony of Pazder and Smith is obviously of a character that invites skepticism. Apparently in unspoken recognition of this fact, the novel offers a manifestation of the hidden domain of the Satanists in the world outside the psychiatrist’s office, a scene which, not coincidentally, affirms the narrative’s moral sense and provides the blueprint for the defeat of the perceived subterranean evil lying in wait in the heart of modern industrial society. It also enables a superficially plausible resolution to the tensions within the symbolic structure of the text. Unsurprisingly, a grotesque pastiche of a traditional Christian conception of evil meets its adversary in a mawkish pastiche of conventional Catholic piety. Mary de Young summarized the moment thus: “To bolster her spiritual defenses during the harrowing months of memory recovery, he brought her to be baptized by a local priest. In the corner of the church, Michelle noticed a wooden bench incised with what appeared to be satanic symbols” (23). More precisely, they are the same intricate symbols recalled by Michelle worn by the cultists. The priest is baffled and outraged as to how the bench appeared in the church, and the resolution to everyone’s anxiety over this apparent ocular evidence of satanic machinations is to douse it with holy water and set it ablaze on a bonfire. The unexamined conceit would seem to be comparable to the assumed indexical relationship between the signs of satanic activity and their hidden world. Just as the Satanists somehow manifested their presence in the form of Michelle’s black clothing near the beginning of the narrative, so our heroic figures feel they can indexically strike against Satan’s underground by destroying their heretical graffiti. There is at least some perceived evidence of success: “The photographs Pazder took of the burning seemed to the three of them to show a glowing spectral presence at the edge of the fire, a presence they took to be that of the Virgin Mary and her child, Jesus” (de Young 23). These photos serve to foreshadow the novel’s climactic confrontation between good and evil, and they possess a suggestive power that was probably lost on the authors: “The pictures were put away. It was too much to think about. They went back to their work, remembering. But the photographs were on their minds… A month later, on a visit home, Dr. Pazder showed the photos to his father, asking him if there was any way to explain these anomalies. His father said no, no way at all” (Pazder and Smith 151). The critical reader may be tempted to infer that these photos, aside from almost certainly being a case of pareidolia, will have a contaminating effect on Pazder’s remaining sessions with Michelle. In the literary sense, this anticipation of contamination serves as surprisingly effective foreshadowing.
Though there are no shortage of fantastic details in Michelle Remembers that should arouse incredulity, the fact that a literal, personal Satan makes an appearance stands out as the clincher. Of course, the novelistic character of Pazder and Smith’s enterprise scarcely makes the occurrence of the supernatural surprising. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how this gothic tale could conclude in any other way, since its pious pretenses make an Anne Radcliffe-esque return to material normality all but impossible. The Devil needs to appear to satisfy the story’s elemental, Manichean moral sense.
The appearance of the real devil is preceded by the destruction of the false one. The white effigy, after a particularly gory round of child sacrifices, is cast into the flames of a bonfire (of course, this is the shadow of the real-world ceremony conducted earlier by Pazder, Smith, and the priest). “On top of the bulging cloth was set the child’s head. Nearby stood the effigy, once white but now completely reddened with blood; it had been placed at the center of a red circle that had been painted on the floor. Michelle was taken and put in the circle too… Michelle saw the figures closing their circle upon the effigy… In a double rank they bore it toward the fire and… heaved the grotesque red image into the flames” (Pazder and Smith 171). The dismembered child’s body is tossed on the fire as well. This sacrifice of a facsimile of Satan is the necessary precondition for a more literal manifestation of Satan. The effigy, in conjunction with the satanic celebrants, served to mediate Satan’s presence on earth. With its ritualized destruction, the cult can experience a more primeval, unmediated manifestation of Satan. When Satan makes his appearance, he is maddeningly indistinct and not immediately amenable to easy representation: “In one session Michelle drew pictures for Dr. Pazder as she emerged from the depths of memory. She tried to show him some of the forms Satan was taking. But she found her drawings too definite and distinct; Satan was vaporous and constantly changing” (Pazder and Smith, unpaginated pictorial insert). In Peircean terms, the effigy was Thirdness, and Satan himself Firstness. Thirdness should be understood as mediation, or that which brings a First and Second into relation. “Now Thirdness is nothing but the character of an object which embodies Betweenness or Mediation in its simplest and most rudimentary form; and I use it as the name of that element of the phenomenon which is predominant wherever Mediation is predominant, and which reaches its fullness in Representation” (Peirce qtd. in Kalaga 49). Representation robs evil of a measure of its immediate power, which is to say it makes a conception of metaphysical evil seem somewhat less plausible. The destruction of the effigy enables the devil to switch between the modalities of ontological Thirdness and Firstness; we shall not be distracted by the irony that this process is instantiated in the form of a literary symbol. “Firstness refers to the mode of mere being without reference to anything else. Examples are unreflected feeling, a mere sensation of color and form; possibility or quality” (Aghaei 25). Presenting evil in this sense grants it a primeval and constitutive power that only a similarly positioned principle of ontological goodness could hope to defeat. If this Manichean sensibility did not in itself seem the substance of a certain brand of ‘closed’ literary text, then the popular drama of ratiocination that forms the bulk of the narrative- here transpiring largely on the psychiatrist’s couch instead of within the more familiar detective-fronted criminal investigation- should further give the reader the distinct sensation of pulp-horror. Even the moral and religious pretenses dovetail neatly with then-recent popular cinematic offerings like Carrie (1976) and The Exorcist (1973). Furthermore, it should not be surprising that the aforementioned Peircean modalities of firstness, secondness, and thirdness possess an explanatory power for the psychological significance ascribed to events and are transferable to a literary medium. “In consciousness, feelings are Firstness; reaction-sensations or disturbances of feelings are Secondness; and general conceptions are Thirdness…” (Sherriff 66) Michele’s character arc can, in many respects, be read as a psychological manifestation of the processual movement from Firstness to Thirdness; vague feelings of unease become physical disturbances that are then organized by an explanatory narrative. There is significance in the fact that a sort of regression between the third and first modalities occurs in relation to the figure of Satan when he transforms from symbolic, inert (and iconic) idol to his ‘true’ form. This shift betrays the essentially literary character of Michele Remembers. “Without denying that we cannot escape from language, from Thirdness, Peirce shows us that Thirdness (linguistic, symbolic signs) can symbolically represent Firstness… literary art is language (Rhematic symbol) used to show, picture, symbolize the quality of immediate consciousness that can never be immediate to consciousness” (Sherrif 89). Pazder and Smith are under the impression that they can say something about the Satan they hold with potent immediacy in consciousness, in Firstness, couched as he is in their conception of traumatic experience, but the story they end up telling places the Evil One perpetually in Thirdness. The reader will not miss that Satan is a symbol, no matter what, and no account of an idol becoming ‘real’ is likely to change that.
The Devil appears as a voice in the therapist’s office before he makes his pseudophysical entrance in Michelle’s recovered memory. It intrudes upon Michelle’s typically childlike aspect, and soon enough the reader is treated to a duel between Michelle’s past child self and the possessive power of Lucifer. It is clearly a depiction of something that resembles Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), which in turn can be thought of as a secular-scientific update of the concept of possession, phenomena that can be subsumed into the broader category of trance. “Until the emergence of the alternate consciousness paradigm [MPD] the only category to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was that of possession, intrusion from the outside” (Crabtree qtd. in Hacking 149). MPD would later be superseded by the category of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) among mental health professionals, but MPD is more relevant for a discussion of the condition depicted in Michelle Remembers. Ian Hacking is helpful for establishing the relevance of the condition for Michelle’s case: “The most distinctive symptoms become fully evident only in the course of treatment. Hence the published descriptions of multiples best fit patients in therapy” (21-22). This provides a hint as to the dialogical quality of the specific manifestations of symptoms present in accounts of MPD and cases of recovered memory. The therapeutic context, setting aside the matter of whether or not it creates the symptoms in question, certainly molds perceptions of their emergence and constituent features. The dynamic between therapist and patient eventually takes on the form of an investigation not at all removed in spirit from a detective story or supernatural thriller. Pazder operates in the capacity of the lead detective while Smith serves as both his capable assistant and site of the crime, and by extension the principle body of evidence. Abductive reasoning, of a sort, proves crucial to this unfolding semiotic process. It functions much like the interpretation of a literary text, and involves an agent encountering a phenomenon which initially seems surprising, counterintuitive, or otherwise contrary to prior experience, and “he looks over its features and notices some remarkable character or relation among them, which he at once recognizes as being characteristic of some conception with which his mind is already stored, so that a theory is suggested which would explain (that is, render necessary) that which is surprising in the phenomena” (Peirce qtd. in de Waal 63). It is in effect reasoning towards a hypothesis. In Peirce’s account, it is acknowledged that prior conceptions will inevitably influence hypothesis-formation. This is pertinent to any reading of Michelle Remembers as it adequately accounts for how the discursive and culturally-historically-conditioned symbols of the devil and the familiar iconography of satanism and the occult came to inform Pazder and Smith’s understanding of the ambiguous symptoms experienced by Michelle. Abductive reasoning, which is far more uncertain than the inductive and deductive varieties, can only serve as a starting point for inquiry. “Some surprising fact B is observed. If A were true, B would be explicable as a matter of course. Therefor there is reason to suspect A is true” (de Waal 64). The intrepid and pious investigators of Michelle Remembers avail themselves of this mode of inquiry but tragically do not pause to question their underlying assumptions or test their hypotheses in a sufficiently rigorous manner. Nevertheless, there is an internal logic to the manner in which Pazder and his associates make inferences from the more chaotic happenings of Michelle’s story.
[I]t was possible to deduce the design behind the seemingly chaotic events Michelle recounted that autumn- the eighty-one day ceremony that lasted from September 7, 1955, until November 27, the final day of the Christian Church’s liturgical year. Satan, they suggested, was beginning a Black Mass called the Feast of the Beast, a rite that takes place only once every twenty-seven years. It employs many of the same elements as the Christian Mass, but uses them in precise opposition to that service, and it obeys a strict plan… The plan is based on the Horns of Death, the Satanic emblem used on the altar cloths and the backs of cloaks. Just as the Christian Mass moves in the form of a cross, the Satanic worshippers trod the form of the Horns of Death, its shape that of the face of a horned pig. (Pazder and Smith 211)
The iconicity of the ritual is what is key. Pazder and Smith believe that Satan must inscribe himself through his iconography to prompt the construction of the world he wants his worshippers to perceive, and this requires a little exegesis for the attentive reader to truly comprehend. As the critic Christina Ljungberg would put it, “[I]conicity is generated by the readers as they decipher the signs, in their activity of making meaning – much like a detective trying to solve a murder case which, even though clues are indexical signs, involves evoking possible scenarios by calling up images, structuring these by putting them in context, and then picturing potential motifs and lines of development by comparing these to similar cases… Reading experientially is thus the performance of actively taking part in the dialogue with the text, the performative generation of a fictional world, a mental space in which we are able to move…” (275) Pazder and Smith are functionally doing literary criticism in their hunt for real-world satanic activity, but they believe they are doing detective work proper: iconicity masquerading as indexicality.
(Part II coming soon!)
High Pressure Days 