May 5, 2023
A deal with the devil may seem like an unexpected and peculiar topic for a newsletter, but then again maybe not. Perhaps, like me, dear reader, you are aware that the devil is doing a roaring business—which means of course that you have been looking at the news. But perhaps too, when you turn inward and examine your life, you find the devil standing there, holding a contract, though not, I hope, of the same kind. One way or the other, however, the devil is a versatile fellow and sneaks through the crack under the door, even if it is a mental door.
As I see it, the devil offers three types of deal, two of them external and morally reprehensible, the third psychological and, sad to say, irresistible. The first and simplest type of sellout is motivated by mere greed. Needless to say, its most prominent example is Donald Trump, the con artist who as businessman did not even pay his contractors; who as president has sold down the river a raft of people who did his dirty work for him, a good number of them going to prison; who sold Invermectin, his version of snake oil, as a cure for Covid—and the rubes bought it. With exquisite irony, Invermectin is an anti-parasitic drug. It is striking how these sellouts—the media’s favorite word for them is “grifters”—so often become tempting devils themselves. But there are other variants, including Supreme Court justices who accept lavish vacations from billionaires with cases before the Court, not to mention the Wall Street financial speculators who gave us the meltdown of 2008 by playing reckless games with the money of investors whom they referred to as “munchkins.”
The second type lining up to leave their bloody signature are the ideologues, the fanatics who believe that the end justifies the means—any means. At the head of the line are the Christian nationalists who believe that Trump has been sent to do
God’s work, God’s work being defined as running the country as a theocracy. If that is so, we have to credit God with a sense of humor, to send an alleged rapist and self-alleged crotch grabber to inaugurate a regime whose purpose is to prevent all those sexually promiscuous women out there from getting abortions and birth control. A very twisted sense of humor, but whatever. In one way, the QAnon conspiracy theory is so bizarre that it seems incomprehensible: in another, it is very simple. QAnon is pure projection. Its fantasy of an organized group of sexually-depraved Satan-worshippers is a mirror showing such people what they really are. But the devil can usually rely on the power of denial. A puritanical theocracy is of course not exactly what dear Donald has in mind, but he is content to act the role of instrument for the real ideologues like Steve Bannon, each thinking the other is the one being manipulated. Then of course there are the anti-woke types like Ron DeSantis, who are terrified of racial and sexual difference and attempt to legislate it out of existence, which is rather on the order of repealing the law of gravity as woke because it is radically egalitarian, pulling people down regardless of status. (Please don’t tell me some Republican legislature has already tried that. I would not be a bit surprised, although probably not, or Marjorie Taylor Greene would be praising it). But if the devil can slip under the door, so can God, so that the phobic ones find what they fear and hate within their own family, like the Montana governor whose non-binary son urged him not to sign an anti-trans law—like, for that matter, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, who has written both a lesbian novel and a novel called Bondage, about the kink that dare not speak its name. These episodes are darkly humorous only because we do not in fact live within an actual fascist regime, in which the parents would be obligated to turn their offspring over to the police.
Those who deceive others and those who deceive themselves: C.S. Lewis satirized both types effectively in The Screwtape Letters. It can be difficult to tell the two types apart. At times, when there seems to be no end to the conspiracy theories that Tucker Carlson and his ilk come up with, each more outlandish than the last, we find ourselves wondering: “Can they actually believe all this nonsense?” Amanda Marcotte of Salon.com, whose energetic, biting prose makes her one of my favorite political columnists, has argued that the MAGA crowd secretly do not believe in all that crap. They know that Trump is lying about the 2020 election and pretty much everything else, but they have the pleasure of congratulating themselves for being “in on the con.” Yet even she seems to waver a bit lately in the face of Ron DeSantis doubling down on his anti-woke aggression even though it is obviously turning potential voters off. The thought that he might be driven by genuine conviction is actually much scarier than the assumption that he is merely playing cynical politics.
However, it is the third kind of deal with the devil that I would like to talk about, not the unnecessary kind motivated by selfishness, greed, and the will to power but the kind that every one of us has to make in order to live at all. For the devil is the lord of this world, and every breath we take repeats the Fall. In one way, this sounds startling; in another, it is a commonplace, expressed in proverbs. You pays your money and you takes your choice. It is not a matter of good and bad choices but of two good choices, or at least two equal ones, and whichever one you pick, you will lose whatever you would have gained by picking the other. It is why Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” has become a classic. The speaker of that poem, confronting two divergent roads, is sorry he cannot travel both “And be one traveler.” He takes one road, but knows he shall be “telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” It is why the multiverse has become such a popular fantasy lately, for the multiverse offers not just two but many roads, along with the wish-fulfilment notion that we may get more than one choice.
Nevertheless, a voice within us purporting to be the “reality principle” whispers repeatedly that, no, life is a catch-22. We are constantly having to choose between two ways of living that fulfil equally necessary but mutually exclusive values. It is a deal with the devil because the price of gaining this is that we sacrifice that. The devil wins no matter what choice we make. Everyone who talks with students about majoring in English, or any other humanities major, knows about the lose-lose choice involved, and so do the students. Will you major in what you love or in what will make money? We tell students, quite genuinely, that it is possible to be successful in life with a liberal arts degree—so long as they are flexible and multi-talented enough to turn their back upon the utopian environment of college, in which they have lived four years immersed in a world of intellect and imagination, and after graduation enter the world of cold capitalist practicality. I had a freshman English major in my office this semester in tears because she already realized what is going to happen to her someday. They were honest, justified tears, and I did not try too hard to argue them away, though it broke my heart.
If you attempt to remain within the liberal arts environment, usually by teaching, you may find yourself at retirement age still worrying about money, surrounded by friends and acquaintances who were already making six figures years ago. I have done what I have passionately loved for going on four decades now, and consider myself lucky. I know quite a few people who are making far more than I did when I was full time, and deservedly so, for they are gifted and hardworking—but they hate their jobs, usually not because of the job itself but because the capitalist world attracts toxic personalities who are promoted to positions of management, in which they are incompetent, malicious, or both. Even in the cases where that is not true—and it does seem to be a general rule—it comes down to a question of how much of the world do you want to gain, and how much of your soul do you want to lose? We also tell students, again quite honestly, that the world of intellect and imagination can be pursued avocationally, in the evenings and on weekends. But of course there is little time and less energy for enrichment left over after work and chores are done. It is simply not possible to live two lives: one of them must be undernourished. One reason that newsletters and podcasts have caught on, I suspect, is that they can be read and listened to in the little pockets of time that remain open during a day and evening dominated by necessities: while driving, while making dinner, and so on.
This love-or-money dilemma is not woven into the fabric of reality, only into the fabric of capitalism, and we could readily design a very possible utopia in which it was eliminated. In fact, it may be eliminated in the future without our trying, because automation and AI are going to take over so many jobs that I suspect a guaranteed minimum income is going to have to become a reality for fear of a general uprising. However, the choice to become parents brings with it a sacrifice that is woven into the fabric of reality. Caring for children is all-involving, and usually coincides in mid-life with caring for one’s aging parents at the same time. How many comedies and cartoons have we all seen in which, at the end of the day, the parents are too tired even for sex, let alone intellect and the arts? This too could be alleviated in utopia, both by reinventing the art of the nanny in a way free of race and class exploitation, and/or by reinventing communal living with shared childcare in a way that eliminates the dehumanizing conditions of the military barracks or the college dorm. But still, children will always demand a great deal of hands-on care by their parents.
Recently, I read yet another article about people who choose not to have children. Such people are condemned by many, starting with the Pope, who simply call them selfish. The article, however, cited a percentage of people who regretted the decision to have kids, suggesting that at least some of the anger and condemnation is envy in disguise. “You will be lonely in your old age, and have no one to care for you,” people will warn. But there is no guarantee that your children will be there to keep you company and care for you when you are old. They may not choose to, or they may not be able, financially or emotionally. What I see around me, rather, is an increasing number of aging parents who are still caring for adult offspring with mental health issues that keep them from being able to function independently. No one knows better than parents that life is a trade-off.
The famous literary figure who sells himself to the devil is, surprisingly enough, not a businessperson or a politician but a scholar, Dr. Faustus, who sells out not for power or wealth but for knowledge. Of the three great literary retellings of what began as a medieval German legend turned into a puppet play, in the earliest, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (c.1592-93), the knowledge Faust gains is magic, which is in fact a form of power. Yet Marlowe’s Faust is only a Trickster who mostly uses his power to play practical jokes, although he does have the savvy to ask for Helen of Troy as a trophy wife. He is like the figures in folk tales who waste their three wishes, and the one great moment in the play is Faust’s soliloquy when the devil is coming to collect. He is perhaps the model for all the celebrity bad boys—think Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt—torn between the temptation to live as media-hound celebrities and party animals and an opposite aspiration to be faithful to their gifts by taking on serious dramatic roles. The devil comes even for the famous who have everything.
Of conventional scholars who do not go in for necromancy, the devil makes different demands. One is for specialization if you want to be taken seriously and not be dismissed as a dilettante. The ideal of the “Renaissance man” whose knowledge and accomplishments span many fields has not been taken seriously since, well, the Renaissance. After the German model of higher education became dominant in the 19th century, there grew up a contempt for any sort of generalist: Jack of all trades means master of none. A good deal of the negative criticism of Big Picture generalists like Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and even Northrop Frye is driven by the conviction that knowledge over a wide area is inescapably superficial, leading to big generalizations that are inevitably false. This attitude results in doctoral dissertations, and sometimes whole research careers, that are so narrowly focused as to be useless. Decades of extolling the virtues of “interdisciplinary” studies have not really changed the picture. Publication of specialist scholarship in peer-reviewed journals will get you tenure: if you want to be a generalist speaking to an intelligent general audience, you may have to do something like, oh, publishing a newsletter.
It is not even true to say that modern specialists are hedgehogs rather than foxes, for the hedgehog knows one big thing, whereas the specialist only knows one small thing. But that small thing gives specialist scholars the credentials that enable them to be hired, at least in large research universities. Yet the same narrow focus that makes them jobworthy can hamper them if they seek jobs in small schools like my own. All members of a small English department must teach outside their specialization if the undergraduate curriculum is to have any coverage at all, and part of the hiring process in such departments involves screening out brilliant candidates who are so highly specialized that they are clearly only interested in one thing, which they talk about in language suitable for the graduate seminar but not for the undergraduate classroom. They sometimes do not seem very acquainted with a wider range of literature, partly because they have been urged to read literary theory instead. I am not putting down such candidates. The system leaves everyone in a double bind, and all double binds are diabolic, i.e., no-win situations. The system itself is rather silly, but the choice of depth versus breadth is real.
Creative rather than scholarly types must choose between their creative drive and their common humanity. I have quoted elsewhere the following passage from Jung’s essay “Psychology and Literature,” but it seems to me a definitive statement of the dilemma of the artist:
His life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand the justified longing of the ordinary man for happiness, satisfaction, and security, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire. If the lives of artists are as a rule so exceedingly unsatisfactory, not to say tragic, it is not because of some sinister dispensation of fate, but because of some inferiority in their personality or an inability to adapt. A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects—ruthlessness, selfishness (“autoeroticism”), vanity, and other infantile traits. (102)
The volume of Jung’s collected works containing this essay also collects his essays on two such divine monsters of creativity, Picasso and Joyce. Edmund Wilson’s study of seven crippled geniuses, The Wound and the Bow (1941), takes its title from the story of Philoctetes, exiled because of an agonizing snakebite that left him with a stench no one could endure, but who is brought back to the Trojan War because he wields the bow of Heracles. Auden’s famous elegy on the death of Yeats is confident that time will pardon Yeats because of his gift for “writing well,” even though he was “silly like us.” Nonetheless, #MeToo and consciousness-raising in general may mark the beginning of the end of the tendency to give a free pass to geniuses despite their anti-social behavior, especially the predatory behavior of male creators formerly forgiven and supported by women in the grip of what Jung would call an animus complex. Excusing the bad behavior of creative innovators has been true in the tech world as well, from Edison to Elon Musk.
Even when the creative drive does not sap creators of their common decency, its grip may result in a workaholism that leaves no time for family and friends, let alone enjoyment. We see beginning to develop here the drive towards what Jung calls perfection, which he contrasts with an opposite value that he calls completeness. In both the arts and athletics, perfectionism takes the form of endless practice and punishing discipline. Conservatory students are told that if they are not willing to practice endless hours, no matter what the cost to their academic career and personal life, then perhaps they are not cut out for a career in musical performance or dance. Commercial music demands a debilitating schedule of performing, touring, and celebrity cultivation of fans that ruins the lives and relationships of many pop stars. In the worlds of both high and popular art, “work-life” balance is regarded as the excuse of those who just can’t cut it. The same is true of Olympic-level athletes, complete with the injuries and eating disorders so frequently the result of perfectionistic ambition. At times, the goal of perfectionism is an almost superhuman virtuosity, an error-free, high-speed technical facility. Paganini was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil for the sake of virtuosity on the violin, the Delta blues master Robert Johnson for his virtuosity on the guitar. An old blues legend, attached to other artists as well as Johnson, had it that if you went to a crossroads at dusk outside of town, the devil would show up and make a deal with you. Virtuosity, however, usually comes at the expense of expressiveness and depth. And vice versa: country music has tried to counterbalance the cult of speed for its own sake that seems to possess any number of bluegrass bands, but its formula of “three chords and the truth” risks the opposite fault of banality. There is simply no consistent way of having your cake and eating it too.
Another artistic dilemma born of perfectionism is that of either pleasing the audience or retaining one’s artistic integrity. The risk of popular art is pandering. The risk of “high” art is a puritanical elitism. Some novelists, film directors, and composers, not to mention any number of critics, feel that if the audience finds a work accessible and derives pleasure from it, the artist has sold out. In Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Dr. Faustus, the Faust figure is a composer named Adrian Leverkühn, said to be partly modeled on Arnold Schoenberg. The narrator is an old-fashioned humanist who believes in art for humanity’s sake, and who struggles to understand a kind of artist who believes, like Nietzsche, on whom Leverkühn is also partly modeled, that humanity is something to be overcome.
Jungian psychology is based on the premise that all life is based on conflicting opposites, and that “wholeness” is impossible, except as an occasional miraculous gift of grace. For the most part, “the imperfect is our paradise,” in the words of Wallace Stevens. What is true in work is also true in love, and in more than one way. Ideal romantic love, often at a distance, is in conflict with day-by-day companionate love, as expressed by old saws about the honeymoon eventually being over. In addition, at the other end of the spectrum from ideal love is a darker kind. It is not that affection and tenderness are not real—only that sometimes “you want it darker,” in the words of Leonard Cohen, who knew a thing or two about the dark but necessary side of love. The author of sweet “Suzanne” also wrote a novel called Beautiful Losers (1966), which resides in the same devil’s playground as the “Circe” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (not to mention the uninhibitedly pornographic letters Joyce wrote to his wife Nora), and more recent works by Thomas Pynchon and Samuel R. Delany. Joyce correctly identified the literary archetype of dark love: in the Odyssey, Odysseus truly loves Penelope, enough to give up immortality for the sake of life with her, but on his way home he lingers for a time with Circe, who turns men into pigs. There is a remarkable scene in which Circe turns the pigs back into men—whereupon they weep for the loss of the unself-conscious sensuality and instinctuality in which they had wallowed. Porn infuriates some people because it is a reminder of those forbidden desires that are not “nice.” Affairs, open marriages, and polyamorous relationships are also ways of satisfying the taste for “forbidden fruit,” the gift of the serpent. It would again be possible to imagine a utopia that did not turn the demands of socialization and the wanderings of desire into such a cruel either-or as they are in our society, but there will always be renunciations and hard choices to be made. Eventually, Odysseus moved on and went home.
Jung developed his theory of psychic opposites out of the greatest of all renditions of the Faust legend. A great deal of Jungian psychology comes right out of Goethe’s Faust. The problem with this version of Faust is that he is a dried-up academic who has developed his intellect at the expense of everything else and has never lived, to the point where he is now suicidal. Mephistopheles does him the favor of throwing him out the door into life—whereupon he begins to make all the naïve mistakes of an immature young man, including getting a girl pregnant and then abandoning her. He keeps making mistakes all the way up to his death the age of 100, and all you can say is that he learns to make some of his mistakes on a higher level, graduating from the common girl Gretchen to Helen of Troy. He is redeemed at the end—the only version of Faust who is redeemed—because he keeps trying, which can seem outrageously unfair to the people around him, from Gretchen to the old couple Philemon and Baucis, who have been destroyed by his, oops, little errors. He meant well, you see. We are perhaps in an age less willing to indulge such blundering adventurers. And yet Shakespeare follows the same pattern, in play after play, granting forgiveness to characters who are not worth it: Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and the whole court of Milan in The Tempest. Some of them are remorseful and some are not, but that does not seem to be the point. What is?
Jung felt that Christianity has encouraged Western culture to exalt a desire for ideal perfection over an opposite goal that he called “completeness.” In Matthew 5:48, Jesus counsels his disciples, “Be ye therefore perfect.” However, Jung is not the only one to dispute the traditional translation of the Greek teleios as “perfect.” The only way to achieve perfection is to develop one aspect of your personality at the expense of all others—but Jung’s theory of psychological types is founded on the premise that every psychic function has its opposite, and that, moreover, that the opposites are equally valuable and in fact indispensable. To the extent that I have developed my introversion, I have failed to develop or even repressed my extraversion. But living a full life demands both introversion and extraversion. The same is true of the subordinate functions: to the extent that I favor my intuition, or sense of possibility, I lose touch with my sensation function, which enables me to cope with actuality, and I pay some kind of price for it (this happens, I assure you, at least several times a day). I develop feeling, or a sense of value, at the expense of thinking. The sole way of achieving perfection is to develop one aspect of our personalities and deny or devalue all the others.
Perfectionism seeks unity, the One, over variety and difference. There is only one perfect example of everything—variations are departures from the “pure” form. In literary criticism this results in an elitism that seeks “the best that has been thought and said,” winnowing out all that is lesser and inferior, in a kind of literary Platonism. The perfect work is a “classic.” Criticism becomes value judgment, seeking a body of works that have been “canonized,” like saints, while imperfect works are cast into the darkness and gnashing of teeth. The social implications of perfectionism are chilling. There is one perfect race, and then there are all the “lesser races.” There is one perfect or “standard” English, and all the dialects are lazy or ignorant deviations from the norm. There is one perfect body type, the beautiful, and everyone else is classed according to degrees of ugliness. The 1% clearly believe, like the old aristocracy, that they are qualitatively superior to the masses.
Jung meant by “completeness” a humble acceptance not only of our own imperfection but of the imperfectability of the human condition. It is only such forgiveness that can allow itself to relax, to cease striving for an impossible and superhuman condition, renouncing the impulse to torment both ourselves and others for falling short of a condition only possible for a god. This makes it sound easy, but Jung has no intention of making life easier for us. In a difficult but impressive passage in a difficult but impressive late work called Aion, Jung insists that “to strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with its strongest roots” (69). And yet he immediately adds, “Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way of another, the archetype [of the Self] fulfills itself in completeness….The individual may strive after perfection…but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness” (69). We strive for perfection, but the unconscious compensates for our inevitable failure by stressing the opposite ideal of completeness.
There are extreme situations in which we may, and in fact we must, refuse to capitulate to the devil. When what is asked of us is a compromise that violates our integrity, such as saving our own lives by betraying others’, we may have to draw a line in the sand and refuse, come what may. In Milton’s Paradise Regained, Christ in the wilderness refuses, not a measly three Satanic temptations but a complete spectrum of all the desires, dreams, and ambitions by which humanity can be tempted. He refuses them all, and is thus brought to the final temptation, to stand upon the pinnacle of the Temple, which would represent putting his trust in his own power rather than trusting God. He renounces his power and trusts God—and is sustained. He could, however, have fallen to his death, and he knows it. He tells Satan that, if it is God’s plan that he pay the final price, he is content. Any number of people in this world, including Samson in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, are driven to pay that price. But it is the exception that proves the rule. The only way to avoid a deal with the devil is to sacrifice living in this world altogether. That is also the theme of The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis, as well as the film version by Martin Scorsese (1955 and 1988 respectively). The last temptation of Christ is to renounce his quest for perfection by giving up his spiritual mission and settling down to a life of comfortable completeness in marriage to Mary Magdalen. But by doing so, he would be sacrificing the redemption of the whole human race for the sake of his own happiness.
A final word of caution, however, and rest assured that at this point I am preaching to myself, whoever might find it useful to overhear. It is possible, human perversity being what it is, to erect completeness into a new kind of perfectionism. Women, for example, who were formerly expected to be perfect wives and mothers, are now expected to “have it all,” which in practice means to do it all, to be mothers, professional achievers, and marital partners—and risk burning out with exhaustion. To say, “I won’t be one of those one-sided people. I will be an artist, a critic, and a teacher, and learn to play guitar properly, and treat my relationship well, and also keep up a large semi-rural property” is only to make six deals with the devil at once. And, of course, to fail at all of them. Teleosis is a paradoxical word—it means both perfection and completeness. Somehow. But, to use the exact phrase, I’ll be damned if I know how.
References
Jung. C.G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 9, Part II, of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton/Bollingen. Second edition, 1968.
Jung. C.G. “Psychology and Literature.” In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 15 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton/Bollingen, 1966. 84-108.