The Devil's Pleasure Palace (28 page)

       
Left him at large to his own dark designs,

       
That with reiterated crimes he might

       
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought

       
Evil to others . . .

Some successful rebel, he who cannot even move his head without God's permission. But not only does God give the fallen angel liberty to move and speak, he even frees him from his chains on the Lake of Fire, allows him to pass through the Gates of Hell and make mischief on Earth. What kind of a kingdom, then, does Satan have, except at the sufferance of God? Only a fool can howl at the moon and then, as the sun rises, congratulate himself on his fearsome prowess that can affect the heavens.

Still, to give both devils their due, there is something in our earthly imaginings of Satan that is heroic; it is what makes him at once so attractive to some and such a compelling dramatic figure to others. Satan, or his surrogate, not only appears in two of the greatest poems in the Western canon,
Paradise Lost
and
Faust
, but in a host of other works as well, both as himself and in various disguises. Devils pop up in the works of the Russians, including Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov; the satanic figure of Naptha materializes to tempt the nubile soul of Hans Castorp in Mann's
Magic Mountain
. (Naptha, the Jewish Jesuit turned Hegelian Marxist, was based on Lukács, as Mann himself admitted, and the role of the Wagnerian “pure fool,” Parsifal, is here taken by the novel's weak protagonist, Hans Castorp, with the Kirghiz-eyed Clawdia Chauchat, the hot kitten, as his Kundry.)

Operatically, the Faust legend has been brought to the stage in multiple incarnations, including by Gounod in
Faust
(which the Germans sometimes dismissively perform as
Margarete
), Arrigo Boito's
Mefistofele
, and Ferrucio Busoni's
Doktor Faust;
for many years, Gounod's was the single most-performed opera in the history of New York's Metropolitan Opera. Boito, Verdi's great librettist on
Otello
and
Falstaff
, took the demon by his horns and made him the principal character of his lone opera, a work that had to wait until 1969, in the Met's production featuring bass Norman Treigle (and, later, Samuel Ramey), before it would receive its just plaudits.

Whether Mephisto—also the subject of several Liszt waltzes for the piano, ranging from the virtuosi to the gnomic—wins his infernal bet with Faust, as he does at the end of both Marlowe's and Busoni's treatments, or loses to God, he is always a worthy antagonist. But this does not make him a hero; rather, by storytelling maxim, a hero can achieve greatness only when he goes up against a figure equal to or greater and more powerful than himself. The lowly hobbits of
The Lord of the Rings
must defeat the satanic Sauron; Siegfried must slay a fearsome dragon and then confront
Der Ring des Nibelungen
's real anti-hero, Wotan—his own grandfather.

The would-be grandfather-slayers of the Frankfurt School, malcontents to a man, felt it their sworn duty to upend the old order. Heroes in their own minds, in order to do so they needed to create the satanic doctrine of political correctness, not to slay their enemy but to preemptively disarm him. As the military-affairs writer William S. Lind wrote in an essay based on his monograph
Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology
: “Political Correctness is the use of culture as a sharp weapon to enforce new norms and to stigmatize those who dissent from the new dispensation; to stigmatize those who insist on values that will impede the new ‘PC' regime: free speech and objective intellectual inquiry.”

Having abandoned the chimera of economic Marxism, the Frankfurt School was forced to embrace the Gramsci-Lukács “long march” paradigm, which logically concluded in a necessary, but stealthy, assault on the First Amendment. Like “tolerance,” free speech was to be pleaded for only until it was no longer necessary to seek constitutional protection. Then it could be dispensed with. Satan's adoption of the form of the as-yet-uncursed Serpent, wheedling Eve in the Garden to take just one little
bite, is all of a piece with political correctness's protective coloration as protected speech, the symbolism of the ur-Narrative in action.

The mainstreaming of pornography—Reich's theories brought to vivid life—in American culture began with
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones
, two pornographic films that won crucial legal victories in the mid-'70s on free-speech grounds. Pretty soon there were porn shops and peep shows everywhere; Travis Bickle even takes the girl he's ineptly wooing to one in
Taxi Driver
. Under the steadfast pounding of Critical Theory, what had once been criminal quickly enough became, for a time, chic, and over time, so acceptable as to be unremarkable. Today, hard-core porn is freely available on the Internet, and even public nudity is legal in some places.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it liberation or libertinism? The central argument of Camille Paglia's seminal study
Sexual Personae
is that when sexuality or any other taboo is heavily repressed, it does not disappear but goes underground. Certainly, mores change from age to age. The saucy sensuality of the eighteenth century—of the Enlightenment, but also of
Tom Jones
and
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(
Fanny Hill
)
—
gave way to the rather more straitlaced dress and manners of the Victorian period (which, in accordance with Paglia's theory, also produced volumes of choice literary pornography, such as
A Man with a Maid,
and which was also the time of Jack the Ripper). This duality, so human, is neither morally good nor bad. It is simply an acknowledgement of the dark side, with which humanity is constantly flirting—with which, as I've argued throughout, it
must
flirt in order to be fully human. Of saints we have few and of sinners, many. The rest of us fall in between, living tributes that vice pays to virtue.

Where Reich and others went wrong was in thinking that repression was a bad thing per se. Why should it be? Any artist or architect knows that rules are better than no rules and that creativity comes from operating within them, not outside them. There is very little creativity in pornography, only a theme and variations; like Kansas City in
Oklahoma!
, it's gone just about as far as it can go.

The campaigns to permit the publication of such literary classics as Joyce's
Ulysses,
Nabokov's
Lolita
, and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
were fully justified on artistic grounds; that these books also may have appealed to prurient (but how, one wonders) interest is part of their
appeal. Many great works, including Shakespeare, have at various times been denounced by the Pecksniffs and Bowdlers as immoral or obscene. Erskine Caldwell's
God's Little Acre
was taken to court in New York City in 1933 for obscenity; the list of works banned in Boston included, at one time or another,
Leaves of Grass, Elmer Gantry, Manhattan Transfer, Lady Chatterley's Lover
, and
Naked Lunch
, among others. Whether any of these works coarsened society is debatable (they probably did), but in any case they were the creations of major authors in a way that, say, porn is not. The question for a moral society is where to draw the line; the assertion of an immoral or amoral society is that there is no line to be drawn.

Morality, however, is not law. There are many things that are immoral that are perfectly legal. In one sense, therefore, it is true that we don't legislate morality. Not that we can't; we can and do, drawing many aspects of our legal code from the Ten Commandments, such as “Thou shalt not murder,” while ignoring for legal purposes the Decalogue's moral proscriptions again covetousness. This may be hypocrisy or it may be mere accommodation to earthy realities; we live with it.

Man is a complex creature, far more so than the angels. He is the only being who combines good and evil within the same shell casing, intermixed in every possible way; there is no one without the other. We have met the enemy, and he really is us.

Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
(1918)—short, bitchy biographical sketches of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General George “Chinese” Gordon—contains a remarkable discussion of this very phenomenon in the chapter on Gordon at Khartoum. Not about Gordon, whose fervent religiosity comes in for a good deal of dismissive Strachey piss, but his bête noire, the British prime minister William Gladstone:

The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career. . . . Yet—such was the peculiar character of the man, and such the intensity of the feelings which he called forth—at this very moment, at the height of his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled animosity was gathering its forces against him. . . . “the elements” were “so mixed” in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and his
friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility, their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth?

What indeed? It is hard for us today, with the passions of the late Victorian age long since cooled, to think much of anything at all about Gladstone. He is just another dusty figure in the passing parade of statesman who once strutted upon the stage, making life-or-death decisions that have, at best, only a lingering effect today. In Gordon's case, the descendants of the Mahdi control Sudan even more surely than they did in 1885, when they finally overran Gordon's fortifications. Was his sacrifice in vain? Strachey continues:

In the physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles? . . . His very egoism was simpleminded; through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant, but in the midst there was a darkness.

This is an apt description of the problem of humanity in general. For all the bluster, for all the sound and fury, is nothing at our center but a darkness? Are we beings of almost infinite surface complexity, but with a hollowed-out core? Are the flames of our existence just an illusion, another of the Devil's jokes? Are we nothing more than black holes in the fabric of the universe?

Our faith tells us no. Our literature tells us no. Our actions tell us no. To believe in the absence of humanity at humanity's core is still to believe in a god, but in an evil and unjust God who has created Man for sport—in other words, a satanic God. Gordon himself reflected on this near the end in a letter to his sister, Augusta. He was surrounded at Khartoum, his hope in a British relief column rapidly fading, and very well aware that he had sealed his own doom by refusing to evacuate the Egyptian garrison in a timely manner and thus had condemned the people of Khartoum to certain death. In a pause in the fighting, he wrote to her:

I decline to agree that the expedition comes for my relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to accomplish. I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out and forcing their hand. . . . This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition. However, God rules all, and as He will rule to His glory and our welfare. His will be done.

To Strachey—throwing rocks at Gordon's head from the safety of his sinecure as a charter member of the Bloomsbury Group (in a sense, Britain's own, home-grown Frankfurt School of cultural sappers and spoiled children)—Gordon's sacrifice was quixotic and inconceivable.
Eminent Victorians
appeared the same year the Great War ended; cynicism about national purpose was the order of the day in the wake of the fearful slaughter in the trenches to no apparent purpose. The cream of British manhood lay dead in Flanders' fields, while those unfit for military service eventually inherited the country; soon enough, they would manage to stumble into World War II, thus finishing off the British Empire they so loathed. Seen in retrospect, Churchill was the aberration (and Thatcher the throwback), Chamberlain and Atlee and Bevan the shapes of things to come. There could be no more heroes, because there was no future left to fight for.

As Gordon lay dying, a spear through his chest, descended upon by scimitar-wielding dervishes about to hack him to pieces, what went through his mind? Had God forsaken him? Had he fulfilled his fate and function upon the earth, and if so, what was it? Would Heaven be his reward, or would he find only Gladstone's darkness awaiting him on the other side? Obviously, these are things we cannot know. But even today, in the face of recrudescent Islam and a leftist high tide, some still honor his memory and his sacrifice; his statue still stands on the Embankment in London. On some profound level, we know that honoring him is the right thing to do, and that is a sign of a healthy society.

Yet Mephisto, the head greeter at the Ministry of Love, continues to demand his due as well. The same forces who would tear down the statue of Gordon with Marxist criticisms (imperialism, hegemony, etc.) wish not to erase his memory but to transform him into an anti-hero, a kind of white devil himself, piratically seeking plunder in Countries of Color. They cannot see him any other way, and yet they still make him
an anti-hero, because their cause requires villains for anyone to take it seriously. Thus they cannot escape the central conundrum of the Battle in Heaven and its aftermath: Perhaps God simply desires an opponent. Perhaps Satan, for all his seductive power, is just another tomato can, a chump who hasn't figured out yet that he's supposed to throw the fight.