“…in the silences between words, the tissues speak.”: An Analysis of the Film Galaxy of Terror

(This is an edited and expanded version of a paper I wrote some years ago while in grad school, hence the fealty to MLA citation conventions.)

The aesthetic of the cult film is easy to identify but difficult to define, as is often the case with modes of expression that are at once prevalent and diverse.  Salient characteristics include dubious artistic intent with correspondingly dubious artistic merits, an appeal to prurient or base interests in the viewer, minimal budgets and flimsy production values, as well as exotic, bizarre, or unconventional themes and storylines.  Critics who argue for the validity of the cult aesthetic in film tend to make much of the latter qualities.  Certainly, few would argue against the proposal that the primary appeal of the cult film is its implicitly oppositional, if not counter-cultural, stance in relation to what may be called “mainstream” and “elite” values of beauty, aesthetics, and formal verisimilitude.  The grotesque features of cult cinema are seldom a consequence of mere failure on the part of the filmmakers.  It is doubtful that anyone would propose that an inept but mainstream Hollywood blockbuster like Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever counts as a cult film as that term is usually understood, since the proper cult film is what is generally produced, consumed, interpreted, and embraced on the cultural periphery, and makes little effort to appeal to mainstream standards of classical cinematic aesthetics despite a frequent tendency to ape the more superficial qualities of mainstream movie successes.  Beginning with this understanding, the plethora of cinematic oddities directed or produced by Roger Corman would seem to have a legitimate claim to being the foremost canon of representative cult cinema.  The Corman oeuvre is a quintessential body of films that are amenable to a kind of token-to-type analysis owing to recognizable recurring formal attributes, and close critical examination is an efficient means to get a conceptual handle on the idea of the “cult film,” even though Corman’s work hardly exhausts the idea of the cult film as a cultural phenomenon.

The critic’s understanding of the cult film becomes somewhat troubled when s/he attempts to pursue an assessment of a work that goes beyond its implicitly- sometimes explicitly- oppositional stance.  As the critic Greg Taylor maintains, “In truth, cultism was never equipped to handle the complexities of aesthetic analysis, because it originally pitched itself as an alternative to this very sort of traditional discernment” (261).  The contrarian nature of the cult aesthetic and its accompanying enthusiast sub-culture inevitably produced a set of critical standards that privileged a personal, often nostalgic, and certainly idiosyncratic set of affective relations between the viewer/consumer/fan and certain cult works.  The more “institutionalized” standards of criticism often used for the assessment of mainstream or elite works of art were contrary to what the cult film stood for.  As a consequence, “standards tend… to remain vague, obscured behind the oppositional gesture itself…  Thus, attempts to delineate the strengths of cult objects in detail have been so rare simply because they are difficult to sustain given the sparseness… of the underlying criteria” (Taylor 262).  This brings critical judgments directly into the realm of the highly subjective, a result that should probably be unsurprising since the sensibility embraced by the cult aficionado is supposed to be limited to the auspices of a, well, “cult.”  “Cultism is so inextricably bound up with issues of self-definition as to make the critique of any particular cultist gesture tantamount to personal attack” (Taylor 262).

I feel, however, that it is worth the effort to develop a mode of criticism that can in some sense accommodate the cult aesthetic, for both the reason that cult films have intrinsic artistic merits that should be explored, but also because they reveal certain strange and idiosyncratic qualities of the cultures that produce them.  The cult aesthetic is worth understanding because the tensions and contradictions in the culture at large are worth understanding.  A mode of criticism and a set of critical standards that can be helpfully employed to make cult films speak their peculiar truths and place them in a larger context or body of work (even a “canon” if we are feeling generous) is both attainable and desirable, and can probably be best achieved by engaging with critical models that are pre-occupied with cultural problems not traditionally associated with aesthetics, such as narrative (not necessarily ‘literary’) and medical studies.  The critical engagement with the cult film should honor its oppositional stance first.  Because cult cinema frequently deals with the extremes of human behavior, and individual films are often saturated with lurid sex and gory violence, and generally embrace a giddily outrageous mode of representation that fetishizes depictions of human suffering (this is especially conspicuous in the horror genre), I feel critical studies of trauma, injury and/or illness should be brought to bear on considerations of specific cult films.  Illness narratives, with their emphasis on physical suffering and bodily dissolution and the resources human beings call upon to cope with them, can be seen to be ubiquitous in cult films, provided receptive audiences are willing to adjust their stock perceptions on those matters.  This may not be immediately obvious due to the eccentric nature of the artistic sensibility, where the vulnerability of the human body is not honored in such a way that does justice to the tragedy of the human condition or the human desire for a transcendence of limitations, but where the human body is often subjected to wildly bizarre and exotic modes of transformation and trauma.  My task here will be to demonstrate that the illness narrative is operating, albeit on an often near-subliminal level, in many cult films.  The critical text I will be utilizing will be Arthur Frank’s landmark study The Wounded Storyteller, a work that analyzes how the sick and wounded make sense of their condition through the act of storytelling, and how the construction of a narrative of and through the compromised body enables the process of healing.  The insight I find most useful for my purposes relates to the centrality of the body in constructing the formal qualities of narratives of illness.  Frank’s project is unabashedly moral, as he believes listening to stories of illness helps develop the capacity for empathy and thus broadens the moral strength of the community.  The film I will be assessing is the 1981 Roger Corman-produced science fiction/horror outing Galaxy of Terror (directed by Bruce D. Clark and co-written by Clark and Marc Siegler).  It is a clear homage to the Ridley Scott film Alien, and the basic premise involves an interstellar civilization of the far-future where the crew of a spaceship is sent to a distant and mysterious planet called Morganthus to rescue another ship that crash-landed there.  Upon arrival, they become stranded themselves due to an unseen force that compromises their ship’s instruments, and they find the crew of the ship that preceded them all brutally killed.   A mysterious alien structure nearby may hold the key to understanding how and why it happened, and as the characters investigate, they are killed off one-by-one by grotesque monsters that are all physical manifestations of their worst and deepest fears.  Each death functions as a mini-narrative of bodily corruption and dissolution, wherein the attacking monster serves as a metaphor for the character’s fear, and each character’s fear is in turn related back to their understanding of their body and its vulnerabilities.  The narrative type developed and proffered by Frank that most closely resembles this trajectory is the Chaos Narrative, and I will endeavor to show how it and related ideas are operating in Galaxy of Terror.  I will then explain how the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to handle this type of storytelling, and then I will relate these ideas back to the problem of the critical assessment of the cult aesthetic. 

Arthur Frank’s baseline understanding of the illness narrative (from which he constructs his larger theoretical-analytical schema) is fairly intuitive.  “The mystery of illness stories is their expression of the body: in the silences between words, the tissues speak” (Preface).  To understand illness narratives, one needs to accept the centrality of the body and the imprecision of language to articulate its needs.  This is one area where the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to tell such stories; although language is (usually) utilized as a formal element in the form of dialogue, and although there is a “film grammar” that some critics have argued is roughly analogous to conventional grammar, the visual nature of the film medium enables viewers to appreciate the “silences” of which Frank speaks in the form of images.  Galaxy of Terror does not specifically depict people suffering from illness, but rather it shows scenarios in which bodily fears[i] run amok and destroy the people possessed by them.  The trajectory of bodily trauma that characterizes the deaths scenes in Galaxy bears a strong relation to the illness narrative because it shares in its recognition of the body’s mutability, vulnerability, and ephemerality.  At the very beginning of The Wounded Storyteller, Frank describes and quotes a woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome: “she ‘needed… to think differently and construct new perceptions of my relationship to the world.’  Serious illness is a loss of the ‘destination and map’ that had previously guided the ill person’s life: ill people have to learn ‘to think differently’” (1).  The basic structure of an illness narrative involves a person falling ill and coming to recognize a need to fundamentally re-structure his/her subjectivity, a nebulous entity that bears a much stronger and disturbingly dependent relation to the physical body than previously thought.  This adjustment is achieved, or not achieved, through the aegis of narrative, or story-telling.  The self is closely bound to the concept of narrative, and learning new patterns of thought is inextricably entwined with telling new stories.  The characters in Galaxy of Terror essentially face the same dilemma whenever they are confronted by one of their own, personal Monsters from the Id: they need to learn to think differently, or perish in body and mind.  Much like the person suffering from a severe or terminal illness, their subjectivity is closely bound to the body and their sense of its strengths and weaknesses, and when the mysterious alien force on Morganthus triggers their fears of physical vulnerability, very strange and very brutal body-narratives play out, but not in the medium of words.  Instead, these stories play out in the potently excessive cinematic manner of embodied metaphors, an approach that adds a sense of immediacy to a storytelling mode that often struggles when confined to words.  “The ill body is certainly not mute- it speaks eloquently in pains and symptoms- but it is inarticulate.  We must speak for the body, and such speech is quickly frustrated: speech presents itself as being about the body rather than of it” (Frank 2).  The visual immediacy of the monstrous, embodied metaphors present in Galaxy of Terror changes the nature of the “speaking.”  The stories they relate are grasped emotionally and lack clarity or conventional linear development.  But stories they are.  A noticeable difference between the illness narrative described by Frank and the events of Corman’s film is the position of the onset of “illness” on the timeline of a specific character arc.  In Galaxy of Terror, psychological anxieties become bodily traumas, a reversal of the standard illness narrative where a bodily trauma or change instigates psychological anxiety which is then engaged and hopefully alleviated by the act of storytelling.  This is because the fear of trauma, illness, and the loss of bodily integrity is always present in the film, and indeed, this fear is always present, though not necessarily consciously, in human beings everywhere at all times.  The fear that applies to all the characters of the film is the dread that they would be unable to manage bodily disruptions.  Their wounds lead them inexorably into chaos, where the very possibility of a corrective narrative- that is, a coherent sense of self- is permanently frustrated.  For the crew of the Morganthus, the psychological is closely bound to the physical body.  “The mind does not rest above the body but is diffused throughout it” (Frank 2). 

The dynamic of every death scene in Galaxy of Terror is the word being made flesh, or ideas being joined to objects and emerging as embodied metaphors.  “The speech that the body begets always imposes itself upon the body” (Frank 28).  Why do certain bodies beget certain kinds of speech, and produce different metaphors?  Frank answers this question by proposing four different body types, which are basically different methods of dealing with perennial bodily problems.  They include the disciplined body, the mirroring body, the dominating body, and the communicative body.  I believe that all four approaches to dealing with body problems- which are primarily understood by Frank to be problems of action (29) – beget different kinds of anxieties, and are represented by the characters in Galaxy of Terror to various degrees.  Frank is careful to point out: “Ideal types are puppets: theoretical constructions designed to describe some empirical tendency” (29).  As an action-oriented science fiction B-movie, Galaxy of Terror does not have much room for complex characterization, and the characters on display can be easily reduced to a set of tendencies, bodily and otherwise.  “People define themselves in terms of their body’s varying capacity for control” (29).  Each character in the film attempts to assert bodily control in a different way that I will insist roughly corresponds to the body types outlined by Frank, and this generates different sets of body-related fears that in turn beget different monstrous metaphors that then proceed to assault and maim.  By now, some examples should be in order.

The Mirroring Body is most conspicuous in the character of Ranger (played by Robert Englund), whose hallucination involves being attacked by a malevolent doppelganger of himself.  In addition to the obvious “mirroring” taking place in this confrontation, there are many features of the Mirroring Body narrative present in Ranger’s characterization.  Frank defines the mirroring body in terms of consumption, “attempts to recreate the body in the images of other bodies: more stylish and healthier bodies.  The primary sense is visual: the body sees an image, idealizes it, and seeks to become the image of that image” (43).  The device employed by the plot of Galaxy of Terror to make the hallucinations of the characters seem relevant is to reveal a character’s fear through dialogue before isolating them in some corner of the alien game cube and subjecting them to their grisly fate.  Before Ranger experiences his hallucination, he has a confrontation with Cabren (the level-headed space veteran and protagonist) which reveals his naked envy of everything Cabren is capable of that he is not.  His idealization of Cabren’s abilities is part and parcel of his central fear as a mirroring body- the fear of disfigurement, understood broadly as the sudden inability to effectively perform as an ideal image (Frank 44).  The evil doppelganger he confronts is his morally disfigured self, an entity he is capable of defeating when he finds out that it doesn’t bleed when he cuts it.  Lacking bodily vulnerabilities, the monster suddenly ceases to be credible as a bodily fear, and Ranger is capable of banishing it from his mind. The doppelganger’s lack of bodily vulnerabilities also reveals the essential nature of the manifested fear it represents; it is all image with no tangible substance to sustain it, and Ranger’s attempts to confront it (and on some level “consume” it) only serve to harm Ranger. It is the recognition of the doppelganger’s ersatz corporeality that allows Ranger to reconfigure the logic of The Mirroring Body metanarrative that haunts him and defeat his monster- a literal mirror image of himself.      

Less fortunate is Dameia (played by Taaffe O’Connell), the ship’s technical officer and character I would argue is representative of the Communicative Body.  Frank positions the Communicative Body as being accepting of contingency and wholly associated with itself as a complete body-self unit (48).  This produces a sense of other-relatedness, or a dyadic approach to other bodies.  “The communicative body realizes the ethical ideal of existing for the other…  Communication is less a matter of content than of alignment: when bodies sense themselves in alignment with others, words make sense in the context of that alignment” (Frank 49).  Dameia is easily the most empathetic crewmember, and she extends comfort and sympathy to numerous other characters throughout the film.  When she is first introduced, she assists Ranger in securing a safe position on the ship during the reckless take-off procedure initiated by the unhinged captain.  It can be argued that the communicative body is in opposition to the Dominating Body (to be described next) in that it privileges communication over force.  Its principle fear, then, is contact without alignment, or having to experience the violent imposition of another body.  Before Dameia has her monstrous encounter, she gets into a confrontation with the belligerent team leader Baelon, and Baelon insults her with a well-placed bit of slut-shaming that reveals that Dameia has a reputation for an ambivalent and confused attitude toward sexuality.  It is revealed a little later that she is also significantly frightened of worms, non-human creatures the culture at large regards with disgust and ambivalence, and which are invariably coded as distant from the human. Dameia’s fatal vision consists of the film’s most memorably grotesque and disturbing sequence; a giant maggot attacks Dameia and rapes her to death, an encounter with a dominating body that comes wrapped in the image of a confirmed phobia.  The alien otherness of this attacking body speaks to the abject terror of non-alignment which sustains the communicative body.

As mentioned previously, the Dominating Body is represented by the character Baelon, the bellicose Rescue Team Leader who is always over-eager to indulge his temper and detects threats in every corner of the ship and insults in every gesture from his crewmates.  Dominating bodies define themselves in force and refuse to accept contingency of any kind.  It is also troublingly dyadic, responding to its dread of contingency by attempting to assert control over other bodies.  “When the body is dissociated from itself but linked with others, the body’s will turns against the other rather than toward itself” (Frank 47).  This makes the nature of its fear fairly easy to deduce: it dreads, much like the communicative body, a body that can and will effectively dominate it, but unlike the communicative body that dreads an exchange without alignment (rape instead of intimacy) the dominating body simply fears losing a fight with another dominating body.  This is precisely what happens to Baelon, who envisions an immense, reptilian monster which charges him and which he cannot fight off no matter how much firepower he hurls at it.  Eventually, the monster overwhelms and disembowels him. 

The body type that is ultimately lionized and made heroic in Galaxy of Terror is the Disciplined Body, represented by the protagonist Cabren who survives the film to the end to confront the person secretly responsible for stranding the crew on Morganthus (Ranger, the mirroring body, also survives but sustains an injury that prevents him from being an effective final combatant; he remains at a distance from the climactic battle.).  At the beginning of the film, it is shown that the character organizing the rescue mission to Morganthus is the head of the intergalactic empire in which all of the characters live, a mysterious figure called the Master whose features are obscured by a glowing red haze that surrounds his head.  Near the climax of the film, it is revealed that the ship’s cook Kore is in fact the Master in disguise and that he steered both the previous crashed ship and the current one onto Morganthus in order to test the mettle of the crew and select a successor.  It turns out that the mysterious alien structure in which most of the action takes place was constructed by a long-extinct race in order to train its young to manage fear.  In humans, it has the capacity to confer great power on anybody who “wins” the game and makes it into the central chamber (In a case of murky plotting, the exact nature of this “power” is never described in any detail, but it apparently enables the Master to govern a vast intergalactic empire.).  The Disciplined Body is ideally suited to survive such a game, as it is self-defined in actions of self-regimentation.  “Its most important action problems are those of control… to reassert predictability through therapeutic regimens… to compensate for contingencies it cannot accept” (Frank 41).  The methods it employs are strictly monadic, that is, solitary and orientated toward self-support and self-discipline.  Cabren is the very model of the disciplined body, as he is the only character who retains a cool head throughout the proceedings, trying to temper conflicts and retain control as crisis after crisis occurs and the dead bodies keep piling up.  Significantly, he is the only character who does not experience a fear-themed hallucination of any kind until he angrily confronts Kore near the film’s end, and then Kore needs to communicate the visions directly instead of allowing them to be largely self-induced as with the other characters.  Crucially, in this climactic confrontation, Cabren combats the embodied fears of all his murdered crewmates, gaining an understanding of their body-based anxieties in the process.  It is strongly implied, however, that this does nothing for Cabren’s feeling of empathy, as he needs to remain emotionally aloof in order to effectively “conquer” his own fear and the embodied fears of the others.  Cabren pursues a disciplined regimen of body-control, making him a ritualist ideally suited to perform the ceremonial transfer of power from an old Master to a new one.  He emerges victorious over Kore and becomes the Master himself.  This course of development is radically different from the ideal of the Wounded Storyteller propounded by Frank.  Frank’s project encourages the sharing of illness narratives to promote a feeling of empathy.  In Galaxy of Terror Cabren’s apprehension of the illness narratives of the other crewmembers does not enable empathy, but emotional discipline, a necessary pre-requisite for the political authority that he is entrusted with at the film’s end.  The sharing of stories enables the conquest of other bodies, an outcome not anticipated in any of Frank’s writings but explored, albeit in a crude, cult-ish manner, in an obscure Roger Corman Science Fiction B-picture. 

As I already discussed, each grisly death in Galaxy of Terror is a mini-illness narrative, and with the exception of the cases of the story’s two survivors, each mini-illness narrative bears a striking resemblance to the theory of the Chaos Narrative, one of three types of illness narrative developed by Frank.  Its features and characteristics are myriad and complex, but the aspect that should be considered central is well-summarized as follows- “Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better.  Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order.  Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality” (97).  Each and every kill scene in Galaxy of Terror follows this hopeless and non-linear trajectory to some extent.  Monsters appear and disappear seemingly at random, violence occurs in total isolation when characters are completely separated from their fellows (the alien force governing the planet has the seemingly supernatural ability to separate the characters at will), and matter is destroyed and re-constituted and then destroyed again without any regard for the laws of causality or logic.  Crucially, these visions largely play out without words (The only sounds are the grotesque groans, growls, and slurps of the monsters and the victims’ screaming.).  “Words suggest [the wound’s] rawness, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words necessarily fail” (Frank 98).  This allows for the image to take over.  I’ve already discussed how the monsters in Corman’s film are essentially embodied metaphors, and therefore can be understood as visualized representations of a linguistic concept.  The monsters cannot be “told” by the sufferer, only experienced with a frightening immediacy.  The reflection and sense of linear temporality necessary for storytelling is absent, and the abstractions often present in stories are instead viscerally lived in the moment.  The absence of a capacity to reflect is crucial: “For a person to gain such a reflective grasp of her own life, distance is a prerequisite.  In telling the events of one’s life, events are mediated by the telling.  But in the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy.  The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment” (Frank 98).  It is impossible to really convey the chaos narrative through the medium of the written word, but the immediacy of the moving image, especially the metaphorical moving image, may be able to give a viewer an impression of lived chaos.  The solitary, gruesome deaths the characters of Galaxy of Terror experience are all about being imprisoned in the solitary, frustrated needs of the body for an indiscernible amount of time that can only terminate in death, and the dissolution of narrative and its accompanying sense of a coherent self.  There is an anti-narrative quality to all of the deaths in the film.  Causality is suspended but narrative conventions are still present in a distorted form, most saliently the staples of conflict and metaphor, both tied to the needs of the vulnerable body. 

In order to effectively conquer a chaos narrative, one must reconstruct it, and to reconstruct it, one must have the privilege of distance, psychological if not literal.  This is the imperative of every character in Galaxy of Terror, and what it really means when the Master says they must “learn to control their fears.”  They need to cultivate psychological distance by re-conceptualizing their bodies’ needs.  Only two characters manage to do this by the film’s end, and they achieve it through embracing the standards of the disciplined body.  This is significantly different from Frank’s understanding of the effective ways to banish chaos, which place a stronger emphasis on embracing the standards of the communicative body (104).

I hope that I have by now demonstrated that many of Arthur Frank’s insights are easily applicable to the storytelling conventions present in the film Galaxy of Terror.  I will now add to my earlier speculations on why the medium of film is uniquely well-suited to deal with some of these issues related to ill and suffering bodies and the many ways they tell stories about themselves and other bodies, as well as tease out some of the broader philosophical and cultural implications of the cinematic approach to these matters.  The philosopher Noel Carroll located one of the most powerful aspects of cinema in the affective power of the moving image- “…certain motion pictures can… afford us self-knowledge, by awakening feelings in us we never knew we had and enabling us to examine them… the link between the moving image and our affective life is one of its major draws” (148).  Since Frank is concerned with the welfare of the moral community and feels that the sharing of stories of illness is conducive to its development, any medium that has the power to activate the affective life should be regarded as useful to that purpose.  The feature unique to cinema is the moving image, a tool that has both the narrative draw of the written or spoken story and the sensual immediacy of the visual.  Cinema allows us to visualize the ill or suffering body and how it dwells in real time better than any other medium one can imagine.  Indeed, it is the capacity to imagine that makes storytelling so useful to the development of moral sense.  “…our capacity to respond to fictions emotionally is rooted in the capacity… of the emotion system to be aroused not only by that which we believe, but also by that which we imagine.  Motion pictures are sense—bearing vehicles that mandate viewers to imagine the states of affairs and events that they depict audiovisually” (Carroll 154).  This is closely tied with Arthur Frank’s idealized vision of the wounded storyteller and what s/he can do for the imagination of the whole human community- “The community [can] elaborate [the wounded storyteller’s] story, both within itself and beyond.  In this elaboration, the community recognizes what it has in common, and it grows.  Witness, here as elsewhere, grows…” (Frank 184). 

A film like Galaxy of Terror demonstrates the functionality of the ideas of thinkers like Frank and Carroll without any of the idealizations or optimism.  The mechanism of the human and bodily behaviors described by Frank is depicted but not in a manner that allows for much empathy or dignity.  The cult aesthetic allows the viewer the pleasure of recognition, but its total eschewal of sentimentality and tragedy inhibits a humanistic understanding of the truths portrayed in the film.  For some, this may be the cult aesthetic’s biggest failing.  I suggest that it is its most unique quality and major strength.  It is folly to idealize the human subject for the very simple reason that s/he is a body and immune to such transcendent representations.  As the critic Jeffrey Sconce remarked in his discussion of sleaze in the cinema, “Often, sleaziness implies a circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience” (4).  Galaxy of Terror, a film that features a scene where a woman is raped by a giant maggot in graphic detail, is clearly sleazy.  The strength and possibly problematic quality of such works is that they allow viewers to view the insights of people like Frank independent of their ethical concerns.  The cult aesthetic is essentially amoral, and draws attention to the disturbing fact that the human is not only a body, but an animal. 

Works Cited

Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.  Malden, MA: Blackwell

            Publishing, 2008.  Print.

Frank, Arthur.  The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics.  Chicago:

            University of Chicago Press, 1995.  Kindle.

Sconce, Jeffrey ed. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and

            Politics.  Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.  Print.

Sconce, Jeffrey.  “Introduction.”  Sconce 1-15.

Taylor, Greg.  “Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic?  Cultism as Discernment.”  Sconce

            259-272.   

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[i] which at least in the universe of the film seem to be the only fears that people can have, although a specific fear’s relation to “the body” may not be immediately obvious

“…the world overlays and varnishes us…”: A Reading of Herman Melville’s Pierre

(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)

Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing.  The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic.  Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry.  Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns.  Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career.  Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title.  The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers.  Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity.  Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control.  Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story.   Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency.  The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well: 

“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself.  …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself.  In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.  (146)

I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre.  Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length.  The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete.  There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge.  In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years.  Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.

            The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations.  Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents.  The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals.  Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter.  In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6).  These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre.  The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:

In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious.  (6)

This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed.  Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows.  The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws. 

            The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously.  As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated…  This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226).  The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story.  Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize.  Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.

            As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face.  This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.).  It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence.  Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel.  Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind.  Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49).  Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…”  (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father.  Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters.  The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment.  This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.

            Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face.  It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age.  Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was.  In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83).  The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression.  In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art. 

            The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different.  They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world.  Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107).  Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth.  The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God.  The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable.  Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.

            The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story.  He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer.  The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre.  Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239).  It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire.  Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another.  Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane.  Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons.  He needs to earn money for his new family.  However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’  “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280).  The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.

            The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant.  They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else.  The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357).  Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father.  The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy.  The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible.  In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries.  He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity.  The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre.  The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works.  The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.    

Works Cited

Delbanco, Andrew.  Melville: His World and Work.  New York: Random House, Inc.

• Print.

Melville, Herman.  Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  New York: Penguin.  1996.  Print.

Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds.  Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,

            Or the Ambiguities.  Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.  1983.  Print.     

Brodhead, Richard.  “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.”  Higgins and

            Parker 226-236.

Emmers, Amy Puett.  “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins

            and Parker 237-240.

Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker.  “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27

Thompson, Lawrance.  Melville’s Quarrel with God.  Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

            University Press.  1952.  Print. 

“…where the little girl was a prisoner.”: A Peircean Semiotic Reading of Michelle Remembers (Part I)

(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!)

“This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds…”- Nathaniel Hawthorne as Prophet of Satanic Ritual Abuse

(Note: I originally wrote this for an academic conference I attended some years ago, and as a result I never did a proper MLA Works Cited Page [a tragedy, I know] since at the time there were no other readerly eyes set to gaze on it. For this reason, I am linking the sources for this post.)

The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804-1864) engagement with the Problem of Evil was usually too sophisticated to have much use for conventional devils.  Hawthorne’s writings are saturated in the religious traditions of Puritan New England, and he was acutely, even morbidly, aware of the burden of that tradition’s insistence on moral and spiritual purity (hence the term ‘puritan’).  The legacy of the Salem witch trials, in which his ancestor John Hathorne played a central role as a judge, haunted Hawthorne throughout his life, deeply entangling his concern with evil with the ideas of the social, the legal, and the historical.  It is not the least bit surprising that ghosts- some literal, some figurative, some in an ambiguous realm between those states- feature prominently in some of his written works.  His ambivalent and frequently oppositional stance towards his Puritan forebears impelled Hawthorne, intuitively enough, to develop a moral sensibility that was somewhat at odds with Puritan antecedents.  For the early settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the devil of the Christian tradition, made frighteningly immediate in human affairs in the wake of Early Modern witch hunts, was both a literal being and personality, as well as a constant existential threat.  Though the causes of the Salem witch trials were myriad and complex (property disputes, anxieties about marginal or recalcitrant women in the community, and dread of Native American raids all played their part), this conception of the devil- the quintessential personification of radical evil, or evil for its own sake- made the idea of subversive witches all too credible.  Hawthorne made it a point to develop an understanding of evil that was considerably more sophisticated.  Cultural historian W. Scott Poole perhaps put it best when he observed, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work returned again and again to the problem of evil, not only for the individual but for the whole social order.  Hawthorne saw evil not in the visage of a supernatural Satan but rather in his own puritan heritage of intolerance and violence… Hawthorne concluded that the problem of sin and moral guilt, conceived by puritan America as a pact with Satan, actually existed within a complex web of social conventions, ideological commitments, and national ambitions” (78).  Despite this revision of Puritan moral sensibility, one piece of doctrine that Hawthorne could not abandon was the “Calvinist conviction that sin painted the human soul with the darkest of hues” (78).  Human depravity was innate, and sin was ubiquitous in Hawthorne’s universe.  When imagining agents of evil to inhabit this realm, Hawthorne generally crafted morally tainted humans who functioned as insidious tempters to the more sympathetic characters, and who had a decidedly professional and bourgeois orientation.  More than a few of these human characters, such as Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter or Judge Pyncheon from The House of the Seven Gables, are sufficiently indebted to the traditional image of the devil and can effectively do the devil’s work, though they lack overtly supernatural attributes.  Satan himself would only make sporadic appearances in the oeuvre of nineteenth century New England’s most celebrated literary artist, but when he did, the quality of his malevolence was closely tied to Hawthorne’s understanding of sin. 

            One of the most famous short stories Hawthorne ever wrote also features what may be the most potent depiction of the traditional Christian devil in American literature.  “Young Goodman Brown,” a tale describing a young puritan man named Goodman Brown residing in 17^th century Salem who experiences a hellish vision wherein he is invited, along with his wife Faith and the whole of his community, to attend a witches’ sabbath in the woods late at night, offers an evocative portrayal of spectral evidence merging with historical consciousness to depict the psychological toll of spiritual guilt.  As the critic David Levin observed, “[Brown] lets the Devil’s true statements about the mistreatment of Indians and Quakers prepare him to accept counterfeit evidence…”; that is, the reader should know better than Brown does to accept uncritically the visions of his community’s indulgence in satanic ritual, even if the Devil himself may possess an ontological reality and the specific crimes alleged in the community are all too credible.   However, the reality or unreality of this event is never definitively determined, with Hawthorne wisely choosing to shroud Goodman Brown’s vision in dream-like, ghostly ambiguity, but the experience is enough to poison the remainder of Brown’s life, as he comes to permanently reside in a state of guilt and moral doubt, suspicious of everyone and himself. 

            The specter of the Salem witch hunts haunts the proceedings of “Young Goodman Brown” quite conspicuously, though Hawthorne’s understanding of Puritan hypocrisy casts the reputed witchcraft and devil-worship in a substantially different light than the prosecutors of the witch-trials would have had it.  Hawthorne is more inventive in this respect than Arthur Miller would be about a century later.  Instead of casting terror of witches and the devil as a social delusion, Hawthorne invokes the symbolic order of the psychological and brings the supernatural fantasy to the forefront of his imaginative conception.  The devil- the actual devil- finds work in the puritan community but his method of temptation is at odds with the Puritan understanding of demonic temptation, which emphasized the isolated individual being drawn away from true faith and the Christian community.  The person in league with the devil was invariably at the margins of the community.  From the beginning it looks as though “Young Goodman Brown” will follow this model of temptation, with the title character moving away from his community and his “faith” into the wilderness (naturally, strongly associated with ‘heathen’ Native American tribes) to commune- in total isolation- with Satan.  It is a moral test, to be made in solitude, and one Brown is fairly confident he will pass owing to the Faith (both the abstract quality and his literal wife) he has in his home.  However, matters become increasingly complicated when Brown comes to perceive that the entire puritan community is attending the ceremony in the woods.  All of the people Brown esteemed as holy and upright are hypocritically allied with Satan, a revelation which can be taken as an unveiling of Brown’s own insecure faith if one reads it as a satanic deception.   If the vision is real, then the matter of evil is not peripheral to the community, nor is it an alien force assaulting from without (The devil’s calm and ingratiating style would seem to indicate that he seldom has to twist anyone’s arm to persuade them to do his work, though there is room for discussion concerning how much we should accept the manner in which he presents himself).  Evil is within, originating in the weakness of humankind’s fallen state, and it is pervasive, and even Brown’s ‘Faith’- both his wife and the concept[i] she symbolizes- is ripe for incorporation into this faithless and demonic order.  Near the close of the ceremony Brown attends with the whole of Salem looking on, Satan himself solemnly intones, “There… are all whom ye have reverenced from youth.  Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward.  Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly” (Hawthorne 72).  Brown’s terror is perfectly understandable, and derived from a sensibility which places one’s sense of moral certainty and security on the example of the prevailing social order.  When one acquires the perception that the social order is rotten, one’s previously stable social identity is likely to falter and possibly collapse into an abyss of fear and doubt.  But what is the precise nature of the ‘rotten-ness’ that Brown perceives?  Is the devil a potent enough symbol to persuade Brown of his community’s wickedness?  The devil goes on: “This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow’s weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels- blush not, sweet ones- have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral” (Hawthorne 73-74).  The devil who is speaking may very well be a figment of Brown’s imagination.  The crimes he is describing, however, are very real.  The reality of sin, the hypocrisy of sin, and its place in the social order- central, and not peripheral or minor- destroys Brown’s faith completely.  “Young Goodman Brown” derives a significant portion of its power from the ambiguous reality of its Satan.  An awareness of common, distressingly everyday crimes and cruelties would be disillusioning enough for Brown, but the figure of the Devil grants the reality of human evil a unifying power by conceptualizing them all under a unitary category, one which then speaks eloquently of its own centrality to the community on which the protagonist is so intensely dependent.  Before his vision, Brown could have believed that sin was the consequence of being led astray from the community, but he cannot hold that conviction afterward.  Furthermore, human beings may not merely sin, but meet at witches’ Sabbaths to revel in their sin, and come to regard it as their key to transcendence.  Evil is frightening enough, but ritualized evil, done under the auspices of a charismatic, demonic leader, is truly horrifying, and only assailable if imputed to a hostile other; there is less to be done if it is nestled in the bosom of hearth and home.  Brown’s post-vision ambivalence does not just reflect a lack of confidence concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but a perception of two kinds of evil- the solitary, putatively aberrant transgressive act, and the organized and systemic dysfunctional activities commonly associated with injustice.  The Devil serves, at least in Brown’s mind, as the organizational principle of systemic evils, and the ambiguity concerning his reality mirrors Brown’s ambivalence concerning how to comprehend the nature of human sin. 

            “Young Goodman Brown” is one of the most powerful stories exploring the nature of individual and social evil through the aegis of the dream-like, spectral symbolic, but it is hardly the only occurrence in the American cultural imagination where symbols, dreams, and the problem of evil coalesced.  In fact, the phenomenon is hardly confined to the literary.  More than a century after Hawthorne composed his short story, one of the most curious moral panics to ever occur in the United States began working in earnest on the public imagination.  It was broadly known as the “Satanic Panic” and it had its heyday throughout the 1980s through to the early 1990s.  W. Scott Poole offers a useful summary of the panic’s more salient characteristics: “[It] had three interrelated and mutually reinforcing expressions.  First… the widespread belief that a network of satanic covens existed throughout the country and that these groups were responsible for everything from animal mutilation to the kidnapping of children” (169). These Satanists were disguised, in the faintly paranoid Hawthorne-ian tradition, as upstanding members of the community and frequently practiced the “ritual abuse” of children and animals.  Compounding the menace, satanic influences had also apparently infiltrated the media, and were endeavoring to corrupt the young through such insidious pop-cultural phenomena as heavy metal music and fantasy role-playing games. These folk beliefs (they can scarcely be called anything else, despite the influence of modern mass media) eventually crystalized into a crisis around so-called Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) when a number of strange reports were made by concerned parents regarding the abuse of children at daycare centers.  The most infamous of these cases was the one concerning McMartin preschool, an investigation that would go on for over five years and eventually become the most expense criminal trial in American history.  The majority of the crimes alleged to have occurred at the McMartin preschool were nothing short of fantastic.  The mentally unstable parent who led the accusations would eventually allege that “goats had been sacrificed at the center, a baby had been murdered and its brains set on fire, and even that a lion had been introduced into the recurrent episodes of satanic torture” (Poole 170).  Eventually, most of the daycare staff were acquitted of all charges, with the trial of one other resulting in a hung jury.  The received wisdom regarding that case, and several others that were roughly contemporaneous, is that it was nothing less than a modern-day witch hunt, involving parents, psychologists, social workers, law enforcement, and community leaders repeatedly interrogating children with leading questions and refusing to relent until they expressed the cultural anxieties they wanted to hear articulated (from the mouths of babes, as it were).  The notion that the staff of McMartin were members of a Satan-worshiping cult is now a marginal opinion to say the least.

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            How could belief in such a bizarre series of events such as those alleged at the McMartin preschool ever gain traction with large swaths of the American public, or anyone else for that matter (Fear of Satanic cults and ritual abuse would eventually spread to other countries.)?  A possible answer suggests itself when one remembers that these child-abusing rituals were supposedly occuring at pre-schools.  Demonology tends to get a fresh lease on life during periods of perceived moral declension, or societal decline.  Whenever there is a seismic shift in social relations, demons can come to serve as popular and powerful metaphors for the inevitable accompanying anxieties.  As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker wrote, “Deep within the culture, the demonology prevails in times of crisis.  When it is promoted by powerful social institutions and mixed with subversion myth, scapegoats are persecuted…” (33)  The so-called second wave of the feminist movement resulted in widespread changes regarding gender roles, with one of the more salient consequences being the increasing number of women who worked outside of the domestic sphere.  A consequence of this development was the increasing need to partially ‘outsource’ traditional women’s duties, and child-rearing, for intuitive reasons, came to be seen as the most potentially challenging task to pass onto some employee.  The need and demand for daycare increased significantly by the 1980s, and some parents inevitably became concerned about the sort of people they were trusting to care for their children. In the minds of many conservative (and even not-so-conservative) Americans, it appeared that the familiar maternal domesticity that seemed so essential to the raising of healthy children was being placed- at least some of the time- in the hands of potentially untrustworthy strangers.  This condition may have made parents and law enforcement credulous regarding imputations of abuse, but it does not fully explain the Satanism angle.

            Political scientist Malcolm McGrath has had quite a bit to say on the matter.  He observes that the SRA panic was closely associated, allied even, with what has come to be called the recovered memory movement.  The phenomenon of “recovered memories” was and is controversial among psychologists, neuroscientists, and health care professionals generally.  The basic unifying theory of the recovered memory movement pertained to a certain understanding of traumatic experience.  McGrath articulates it thusly: “The model holds that traumatic events can become etched in the brain like crystal-clear photographs, but also that the brain has a special defense mechanism.  When an event is too traumatic for a person to deal with, the brain has the capacity to break off the memory and hide it from conscious awareness” (114).  This, of course, is called repression.  The process of recovered memory therapy is supposed to lift the veil of repression, expose the traumatic experience, and compel the healing process.  There is no ambiguity regarding the course of representation with this particular therapy model.  Representation was supposed to achieve purity in the crucible of traumatic knowledge. Specifically, the method of recovering repressed memories came to be thought of as an effective way of confronting the traumatic experience of sexual abuse or assault.  This particular psychological model soon developed the reputation amongst many a concerned moral entrepreneur as an effective means to expose and confront a grievous social evil.  McGrath writes: “As the recovered memory movement gathered steam in the late 1980’s it began to form the basis of a coalition, taking in such unlikely bedfellows as radical feminists and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.  Radical feminists saw the incest survivor movement and recovered memory therapy as advances in the war of the sexes…  Advocates of recovered memory therapy and MPD specialists teamed up to defend the model of the human mind they had in common, and right-wing Christian fundamentalists saw recovered memory therapy as finally offering proof of the dangers that Satan and his followers posed to American society” (131).  The concept of recovered memory would later come in for severe criticism, and an oppositional model concerning the perceived unreliability or malleability of memory, the False Memory Movement if you will, came into being.  Presently, the memory wars are far from being resolved, though it is now generally accepted that traumatic memories can be repressed, though they are not usually, and that memory is distortable enough that false memories can sometimes be implanted, especially in children, though it would be erroneous to assume a significant portion of abuse claims are derived from false or implanted memories.      

            The fact that Satan would emerge from this psychological domain and as the progenitor of grave social turmoil should not be surprising.  The problem of evil apparently becomes more manageable through the aegis of convenient personification.  The historian Elaine Pagels, in fact, has argued that the origin of Satan in the Christian tradition grew out of an imperative to demonize heretics and perceived enemies of the young faith, and that Satan is in large part derived from stories of fallen angels, in opposition to Yahweh, that first made appearances in the context of Hellenistic Judaism.  Satan, though appropriately protean over the centuries, as any good symbol must be, has always been the leader of one’s human enemies, and is in the final analysis the orchestrator of human evils that allows those who believe in his existence to more effectively demonize the Other, and draw boundaries around the human community. 

            This close bond between the social and mythological should hardly be revelatory, but it takes on a special resonance, and perhaps significance, in my view, when we apply such sociocultural phenomena as the SRA panic to what cultural historian and theorist Ruth Leys calls the crisis of representation.  In a critical reading of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, who embrace a model of trauma that precludes representation per se because traumatic experience is putatively registered by the brain in a literal fashion, Leys posits a challenge.  Caruth argues that the linear path of traumatic experience and its unmediated nature result in a break or gap in meaning, which has profound implications for the narration of history itself, both personal and social.  Leys herself postulates in her own historical overview of the idea of trauma two different, and often competing poles: the mimetic and the anti-memetic.  The mimetic model of trauma involves a kind of mesmeric conception of the experience which involves an identification or imitation of the traumatic event.  This model makes room for the unreliability of accounts of the traumatic event since it asserts that trauma is incorporated into ordinary, and potentially fallible, memory.  The anti-mimetic model, on the other hand, while retaining the notion of imitation, holds that the subject remains aloof from the traumatic event, and can effectively become a spectator who perceives beyond representation, and can thus recount the trauma with near-eidetic precision.  The business of recovered memory very much planted its figurative flag in the anti-mimetic camp.  Its eschewal of mimesis and repudiation of the intrinsic hazards of representation allowed for the acceptance of distortions and illusions of a decidedly modern-mythical flavor.  These illusions were brought to bear on very real social problems- the tragic reality of child sexual abuse became the absurdity of satanic ritual abuse. 

            What is quite remarkable is that Hawthorne seemed to apprehend the essence of the American manifestation of this social psycho-drama a good century and a half before it panned out in a post-psychoanalytic cultural landscape saturated in modern audiovisual media.  Or perhaps it is not so remarkable, given Hawthorne’s well-documented preoccupation with the Salem witch trials orchestrated by his ancestors, a series of events that also depended on suspiciously spectral testimony, derived from visions revealing the work of Satan.  The dogmatic certainty of a moral crusade perhaps does not require a unifying demonic symbol that can serve as the putative primary mover of an enemy’s foul acts, but certainly such a symbol helps matters considerably.  Hawthorne’s instinctive awareness of this resulted in one of the more brilliant subversions of this human rhetorical and psychological device in literature.  In “Young Goodman Brown”, the figure of the devil does not sharpen moral certainty regarding the nature of sin or the quality of sinful human beings.  Quite the contrary, his actual appearance, though bequeathing sin with an appropriately social significance, in fact diminishes the protagonist’s moral confidence.  The key similarity between Hawthorne’s vision of the devil and the one that would manifest in the SRA panic was that they both featured a Satan who presided over and directed the secret, hidden crimes of the culture, or one who was intimately familiar with the ‘deep mystery of sin’ as it crept through the privately social and into every human heart, belying the outward public expression of the community.  The obvious difference between them was that Hawthorne’s devil was a symbol, whereas the one of most SRA narratives was personal and (usually) literal, and very much in line with the devil’s traditional social function of demonizing the Other.  Except with the standard SRA narrative, the Other was closely, intimately on hand in the manner of friends, neighbors, and family members; it was like Hawthorne’s devil had been made real in the minds of large swaths of the American public.  This could only be indicative of a general crisis in social trust: a shift from a belief in the goodness of one’s fellow citizens into a paranoid terror of them (or at least some of them). One could easily characterize this as the fate of Goodman Brown writ large, and it is apparently, when regarded as a sociological calamity, the raw psychological material for the witch hunt. The critic Michael Colacurcio wrote about the character of Goodman Brown: “The most significant fact about Brown’s naïve acceptance of the appearance of sanctity in his fellow saints is the swiftness with which it disappears.  Based on the normal, approved, social, presumably real manifestations of goodness, it is destroyed by extraordinary, private spectral intimations of badness.”  Ultimately, the effect of this is tragic for Brown because of the presumption and unwarranted moral certainty he exhibited at the outset of his liaison with the evil one.  The devil is very much the unifying agent of the spectral quality of Brown’s vision of sin, and it is an aspect which resonates throughout Hawthorne’s personal and historical consciousness.  Hawthorne recognized the intrinsic ambiguity of the experience and the pivotal role of representation, as well as the danger of denying the ambiguity and mistaking the representative or figurative for the literal act of evil. Many Americans would not be nearly as astute with their cultural symbols by the late twentieth century.                                                                                                                                        

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[i] It might be more accurate to say that the concept Faith symbolizes is ripe for re-direction of focus (towards evil as opposed to Christian love and mercy) whereas the literal character is amenable to incorporation, but I’m not about to clutter this essay with too many asides and caveats.