Fifth Global Conference

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Session 15: Damaged People & the Creative Identification with Evil
Chair: Ted Turnau

Damage: A Logic of Evil
Wayne Cristado
Centre for European Studies, University of Adelaide, Australia

I commence with an observation about the widespread emergence of damage as a term to describe a condition of the soul which often resorts to evil in order to ‘liberate itself.' Drawing primarily upon Josephine Hart's Damage a novel, which was also made into a film by Lous Malle, and the biography of Gary Gilmore and his family by his brother Mikal Gilmore, A Shot in the Heart, I investigate the ‘logic' of damage. On the surface both works would seem to be very different: one is a fiction about a love affair between a woman and her lover's (then fiancée's) father and its devastating consequence; the other, a story of a family and the one member of it who having ‘senselessly' killed two young men was caught and, having been sentenced to death, demanded that the State of Utah carry out its conviction. In both works we see how the damaged person creates a ‘theatre of evil,' in part to release the evil that has afflicted them, and, in part, to ‘demonstrate', or wake people up to the evil-in-the world. The ‘logic' of damage involves a strategy of ‘negative redemption.' That is it mimics, yet inverts, the pattern of sacrifice at the heart of the redemptive mythos: it recognizes the truth of sacrifice as essential to life's reproduction, and it deploys sacrifice as a mode of healing, yet it is unable to accept or offer the consolation of surrender that is at the heart of genuine martyrdom and redemption. As I do this I draw attention to the fact that the ‘expressivist' representation of this ‘logic' as used in popular music, film, novels and biographies and diaries has been widely felt and known to be true, yet its truth has by and large been missed by the more reflexive representations deployed by philosophers and social theorists.

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Doubles, Evil and the Subjectivity of the Other
Dara Downey
English Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Primarily, though not exclusively, through an examination of the use of Henry James's dream set in the Gallerie d'Apollon in his novella The Turn of the Screw and short story “The Jolly Corner”, I shall explore the issue of the infectiousness of evil, in particular the demonisation in literature of those whose job it is to seek out and punish evil in another human being.
The greater part of my paper will be taken up by a discussion of the figure of the Governess in The Turn of the Screw . She is figured, both by the text and by critics, as both ghost and ghost-hunter, and the interchangeable nature of these two roles never permits her to be anything other than evil and threatening. I hope to demonstrate that, while many texts consider the evil other to be nothing more than a repressed or undesirable aspect of the main character's psyche, James's work posits this other as a fully conscious subject, for whom the ghost-hunter is as much a figure of fear and evil, as that ghost has originally been to the main character. In this way, I would like to emphasise James's status as a Gothic writer, and, moreover, one who is intimately concerned with giving expression - even a voice - to the darker side of human experience and the human psyche.

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The Evil of Creation: The Destructive Aesthetic in the Figure of the Romantic Artist
Elizabeth McCarthy
Dublin, Ireland

This paper's intention is to argue for an understanding of violence not as a destructive, anti-social force, separate from, and opposed to, productive humanist discourses, but as an implicit part of such discourses; as a primary element in the ideological construction of creational myths, and of creative impulses and their expression. The paper's focus will be a literary one, and it will take the Romantic Movement as its starting point. I have chosen this particular movement in literary history because of its concentrated interest in conceptualising the figure of the artist and his role in society, and because of its prolific theorisation of art and artistic creativity. Equally important, in this regard, is the tremendous amount of ideological and theoretical influence the Romantic era still exacts on present day concepts of art as an inspiring force which leads to a fundamentally personal (sometimes mystical) revelation, and/or expression, of the self.
As in the creational myths of various religions and the positivistic interpretation of warfare, the Romantic period's implicit understanding of creation and destruction is not one which sees the two forces in opposition to one another but rather as in a cyclical union. However, in this instance, the creative and destructive forces are very much individualised and placed within the figure of the solitary artist. There is very little need to delve into Romanticism's so-called darker side (i.e. the Gothic) to examine the potentially negative and destructive impulses of artistic creation during the period; as such, this paper will give its particular attention to some of Romanticism's most critically respected poets, from Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Shelly and Byron, it will also consider Romanticism's influence on later writers, from Poe to Browning.
The paper will look at how these artists continually configure themselves as individuals set apart from their society and at odds with its values and concerns, be they economic, intellectual or ethical. From this isolated position, the Romantic artist is conceived as a figure in possession of an intense (occasionally mystical or even god-like) insight, surpassing that of common humanity. This profound differentiation between the artist and society, which is always understood as a naturally occurring phenomena rather than a carefully cultivated one, is, in turn, often represented as a great burden, requiring huge personal sacrifices, on the part of the artist. Although presented as a form of self-sacrifice, this sacrificial element in the Romantic artist's work, more often, takes the form of the wilful symbolic sacrifice of others, most particularly, it is the figure of the female beloved, propagating the Romantic artist's writing, who is sacrificed. As an inspiration, and yet a rival, to the Romantic poet's own ego, the creation and subsequent destruction of this figure of the beloved becomes a primary trope for the Romantic poet, serving, initially, as a necessary, yet ultimately, as an expendable aid in the creative act.
The paper will connect this interpretation of the Romantic artist with the formation of certain aesthetic principles prevalent during the period; principles such as disinterestedness, sensibility, and the sublime, all of which help consolidate the artist's intense subjectivity, in opposition to a more pragmatic consideration of varying view points. The ultimate conclusion drawn from these readings of Romantic theories on art and the artist is that, through carefully developed and aesthetically justified processes, the literature of the Romantic period and preceding literary movements under its influence, have propagated a concept of artistic creativity as an a-social and transcendent activity which promotes the devaluation, negation, and often the destruction, of all that is seen as an obstacle to, or in competition with the creative impulse. And that, concomitant with the creative imperative to explore intensely subjective states of experience comes an equally strong imperative to objectify all that is seen as outside of the self.