The anality of evil
Hitler’s ‘diabolic dimension’
February 15, 2007 22 comments
Written for this week’s New Statesman.
The Castle in the Forest
by Norman Mailer
A new novel attempts to trace, through bucolic family history and symbolic early traumas, the origin of absolute evil in a man whose name later becomes a byword for iniquity. I am talking about Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising, the recent potboiling prequel to the sadistic Hannibal Lecter thrillers. But in terms of theme and structure, Normal Mailer’s latest novel is weirdly similar, a kind of high-flown twin, advertising deep historical research, in which the subject is the daddy of them all: Adolf Hitler.
Is there something about the present moment that has artists so fascinated by how mass murderers get the way they are? In addition to the lurid origin myth of Hannibal, there have been George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, ploddingly transforming Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader; or the wittily nasty Showtime television series Dexter, whose hero is an ethical serial killer prodded by a murderous shadow to uncover his own childhood trauma. We await the manga comic about the difficult boyhood of Joseph Stalin; in the meantime, Mailer’s novel promises to help us comprehend history’s perhaps most notorious monster.
“The world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality,” its narrator argues at one point. “Detestation, yes, but understanding of him, no – he is, after all, the most mysterious human being of the century.” The fashion in which Mailer attempts to make him less mysterious is surprising indeed.
A prologue set in 1938 has an SS man assigned to investigate possible incest in Hitler’s family on the orders of Himmler – who, as the novel’s marvellously sardonic narrator has it, “did have the most extraordinary ideas fermenting behind his unhappy spectacles”. (To meet the phrase “unhappy spectacles” so early on instils in the reader a confidence, a relaxed trust in the prose, which is gravely tested but not, I think, broken by what follows.) Were Hitler’s parents blood relations? If so, Himmler thinks, that would make Hitler himself an “incestuary”, and would provide yet more evidence of his glorious triumph over unpromising beginnings.
Soon we are back in late 19th-century Austria to meet the novel’s main character – not Adolf himself, but his father. Alois Hiedler (later, by arbitrary orthographic fiat, Hitler) is a voluptuary not much troubled by powers of introspection, an homme sensuel whose priapism is all that lifts him above the moyen. He rises through the ranks of the Austrian finance ministry as a customs official – “His mustache was now worthy of a titled Hungarian, and his face came at you, jaw-first” – and he porks countless maids, cooks and waitresses, getting through a couple of wives (one of whom particip ates in a brilliantly catty dinner-table dialogue) along the way. Eventually he marries his niece, Klara – who also turns out to be his child, thanks to an early episode of “apocalyptic intercourse in barn straw” with one of his half-sisters. And so Adolf – or little “Adi” – is born to a man and his daughter, and the taint of “blood-scandal” is imprinted.
Alois retires to a farm in the country and pursues his dream of becoming an apiarist. There follow a great many pages on the intricacies of beekeeping. Alois lectures his son on the pitiless efficiency of the hive: “You will not find one bee in any hive who is too weak to work. That is because they get rid of cripples early. They obey one law and it sits on top of everything.” Interesting, no? Little Adi is also fascinated by the process of gassing a diseased hive, and becomes terribly excited when the local beekeeping expert, an elderly paedophile, burns alive all the bees in one of his hives after being badly stung.
If that sounds somewhat schematic, be warned that other formative episodes in little Adi’s life sound ridiculous in précis. Adi learns the pleasures of the anus through his mother’s ministrations: “She wiped him so carefully that his eyes gleamed. He discovered heaven.” (Hence, I suppose, the famous anality of evil.) ((I now note, with a pleasure that makes my eyes gleam, that the same pun was perpetrated independently by Stephen Abell for his review in this week’s TLS – which, however, incontinently conflates the novel’s narrator with Mailer himself.)) Later on, he obsessively plays war games with his friends around the local fields and hills, discovering the excitement of high command. He masturbates to the mental image of the small brush moustache worn by the assassin of Empress Elizabeth, because it reminds him of a glimpse he once had of his sister’s pubic hair; at other times, before grabbing his erection, “he would practise holding his arm in the air at a 45-degree angle for a long time”. You should understand, further, that Adi was troubled after having witnessed his father sitting on his mother’s face; and he once had a crucial met aphorical conversation with a friendly blacksmith about what might create a “will of iron”.
Note, apropos of all that, the baleful presence of Jung in the novel’s appended bibliography. Yet what is surprising about the book is not how trite such episodes may seem when listed, but the extent to which Mailer gets away with them, managing in the main to quiet the reader’s titters through sheer momentum of voice. I suspect, indeed, that Mailer is ludically critiquing the adequacy of such psychoanalytical explanations even as he parades them ingenuously in front of the reader. Because, according to his novel, such stuff was not enough to create Adolf Hitler. What else was required? Why, Satan himself, who was present at the very conception.
That is the remarkable – and thrillingly unfashionable – rhetorical gamble of the novel. Indeed, the narrator, whose sly murmuring throughout is a sweetly acrid, decadent music, a sort of Weimar-cabaret song-cycle that drives the reader on through all potential absurdities, is speaking with forked tongue. For he is, literally, a devil. A senior minion of Satan (or, as he is termed here, the Maestro), he is assigned to watch over little Adi, who may in time become a “client” of great promise.
Imagine a spy novel written in Miltonic mode. The devil’s abilities of psychic surveillance are explained in the generic terms of espionage, and there is an elaborate Manichaean theodicy of the long fight between devils and angels (cudgels) and the Maestro and God – jeeringly dubbed, by the devil’s party, the Dummkopf. (Though he dutifully mocks the enemy, the narrator cannot help admiring aspects of the creation: “Even processed paper still contains an ineluc table hint of the tenderness God put into His trees.”)
Primarily, though, our imp is a witty moralist, deliciously cynical about human life. People got married because “they needed to be able to exercise one or another petty cruelty at any moment to a dependable person who would be close at hand”; and he homes in on the particular vices of egotism that provide reliable purchase for demonic activity: “Rare was the man or woman who did not possess an intense sense of the injustice done to them each day. It was our tap-root to every fault. It was a fury in every child. Our work would fall apart if humans ever came to brood as intensely upon the injustice others might be suffering.”
But this devilish dimension appears to pull in opposing directions at once. In one way, the weaknesses shared by all humans are enough to recruit someone to great wrong; but Adolf Hitler was such a special case that it was necessary for Lucifer himself to be present at his conception. How does this, the reader might justly wonder, illuminate matters? If the psychic fallout from anal obsession and incestuous-minded wanking, plus a few lessons about bee society, are not sufficient to create a Hitler, what further kind of “explanation” is furnished by an appeal to literally diabolical influence?
The novel peters out while Adi is still a teenager, hinting coyly at a possible sequel. By this time, Adi is not overtly wicked (that description better fits his elder half-brother, Alois Jr, who left home having set the remaining beehives on fire and poisoned the family dog), but he is – paradoxically, given the novel’s promise of “understanding” – disturbing to us precisely because of a continued mystery: quiet, bright, biding his time. At the centre of the novel’s sensuously textured historical reconstruction, with its sympathetic portrait of an almost ordinarily immoral family, its flights of comedy and satire and moral fury, there is an ominous blank. In the end, Mailer’s strange and haunting book may be read not as a proposed solution to the problem of evil, but as a lament for its continued opacity.
What else was required? Why, Satan himself…
I remember reading a story somewhere about Stalin. He was, of course, a student at a theological seminary in Tiflis. An old priest, his mentor at the seminary (the story goes) was a bit of an orthodox wingnut, extremely concerned about moral relativism spreading like wildfire in decadent Russian Empire at the turn of the century. Young Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) was his favorite student and soulmate. And so one day the old priest calls young Dzhugashvili and says: “Iosif, God gave me a sign, He told me that we can’t let it go on like this any longer. So, I’m sending you on a mission: go out there, go to the world, go and expose the wickedness of those godless revolutionaries, expose it even if you have to shed rivers of blood in the process. Go my son.” The rest is history.
So, you see, it doesn’t have to be Satan, God can be just as efficient.
However Stalin and the seminarian education is a much overplayed card, seeing as it didn’t amount to Stalin training for the priesthood at all. It simply amounted to gaining an education, which was the norm at the time there.
“The Tiflis Theological Seminary, although a religious institution, did not limit its instruction to Church teachings: it was also Georgia’s principle center of higher learning, drawing upper-class students from all across the region. This set the scene for much conflict between the strict Russian Orthodox priests who administered the school, and the secular, often radical Georgian student body. In the years before Stalin arrived, a number of violent incidents had erupted, including a series of student strikes and the murder of a rector. The five years that Stalin spent at the Seminary fell within a period of relative quietude, but the student body remained independent-minded: radical ideas bubbled beneath the lid of priestly authority.”
http://www.sparknotes.com/biog.....ion2.rhtml
student body remained independent-minded: radical ideas bubbled beneath the lid of priestly authority
Of course no one says it’s a true story, but this would only corroborates the fable.
This is where the obviousness of Mussolini becomes kind of refreshing; named after a revolutionary, stabbed a kid in high school, loved sports. Nobody seems to want to endlessly complicate his origins.
Fair nuff, abb1. I was more making a general refutation of the idea/myth of Stalin studying for the priesthood, rather than dismissing the interest of your piece. At least, that’s what I’ll say now!
Richard, I like your succinct response, and especially the “obviousness” of Mussolini – there is something “obvious” about him, but then . . . why did Mussolini stab another child? What was it about sports that so attracted Benito? Can we really be destined by name?
Steve, your review has inspired me to read this book. Freud had already articulated what people like C.S. Lewis would later despise about psychoanalysis: what is left of “evil” when you have traced monstrous acts back to early suffering and trauma? Does understanding somebody not mitigate their crimes (at least a little bit)? . . . Is Mailer trying to have it both ways here, or is he playing one (the psychoanalytic) off the other (the demonic)? Don’t feel obliged to answer – I want to read the book, and your response would be like giving away the ending.
Yes, it’s an intriguing point about Mussolini. Also, do we much wonder about how Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic came to be the way they were?
sw, I won’t give anything more away. (Well, in a sense I’ve already given the ending away, but I won’t give away the middle.) Mailer’s book has come in for a lot of lazy ridicule elsewhere, but JM Coetzee takes it seriously in his superb review for the NYRB.
[…] Mailer posts new novel – cosies up to adolescent Hitler Who knew Hitler’s mother was his father’s daughter? And that his wife, Klara, was also both his niece and his daughter? Or that he masturbated to the mental picture of a toothbrush moustache because it reminded him of his sister’s bush? And what does all this have to do with god, satan and personal choice? Good review at Unspeak and a very nice one at LAWeekly, illustrated by Mr Fish and containing the startling observation on Mailer that he was: as unlikely a person to have stabbed his wife with a steak knife as a puff pastry was to have buggered a puppy. […]
Why is great evil in one person’s psyche so hard to understand? There’s something I’m not getting since I think it is absurdly easy to understand how one person can be monstrously evil but the real puzzle is how great numbers of non-evil people collude or collaborate or cheer on their evil aims. I always think that is the greater puzzle.
Hitler is an example of successful evil and this is why he needs explaining. It’s a terrifying thought but it may be that there are hundreds or thousands born every day who would be as evil as Hitler–all failures, thank God (measured against Hitler, that is). What is remarkable about Hitler is his success, not his evilness.
#9. How is Hitler’s success remarkable? Nationalism is a very common phenomenon; its extreme militant form is all that’s needed for someone like Hitler to succeed. I don’t find it remarkable at all.
Ozma, I do disagree – not vehemently, but I do. I am not convinced that there are hundreds or thousands of Hitlers born each day (who would watch Sesame Street if that were the case?), but if there were, then one would not be surprised by the success of a Hitler: after all, he would be appealing to the hundreds of thousands of coeval Hitlers. Which also speaks to abb1’s comment, and why it is remarkable: there have in fact been relatively few Hitlers in history. Few born, and few who made it to the “top”.
But, Ozman, if it is “absurdly easy” to explain how one person could be “monstrously evil”, I’d like to hear it.
I think there is a difference between what Ozma said:
and how you, SW, paraphrase it:
Ozma said “who would be as evil” – not who are somehow “born” evil but who might later prove to be, presumably given certain circumstances; and perhaps with a further idea in mind, to which I would be sympathetic, that some people do not turn out to be Hitlers only because they have the moral luck not to find themselves in the appropriate situation.
PS, SW, as my subtitle hinted, I won’t mind if you want to bring up Lacan and Zizek again. Promise.
Ah, I think you’re quite right about the “would“.
But what is this “moral luck”? Is it that the person becomes a mildly successful watercolourist instead of a politician, and so can never do more harm than voting stupidly and making bigoted comments here and there? (And would that be their “moral luck” or ours?) What you are suggesting is, overall, an ethical development parallel with most contemporary understandings of psychological development: that there are certain vulnerabilities and risk factors which will result in psychological characteristics or psychopathologies depending upon certain circumstances along the way.
Under these particular circumstances, I hesitate to draw on Lacan, and particularly Zizek; I would imagine that in most circles, Zizek’s pronouncements on Hitler’s development would be taken more seriously than Mailer’s. This might be unfortunate. Zizek and Mailer are rather similar in some ways: both have an enthusiastic arrogance, a recklessness, and a bullish energy in their writing; and both have these strains of unreformed masculinity uneasily but flirtatiously walking arm in arm with their own liberalism. But is Zizek’s readily-available disavowal (the sarcastic aside, the winking paradox) going to protect him from getting too close to the core and the kernel of evil, which Mailer dares to cultivate? Obversely, is Zizek’s refusal to name The Holocaust (see our previous thread on Zizek) an acceptance of the unutterability of evil, and Mailer’s preciously bawdy and bodily excavations the clumsy work of a diletantte? The follow up question: do those who refuse to put evil on a spectrum (where we are all “moderately” evil, but they are extremist evil, or radical evil) and who cannot name these exemplars of the other/Other’s evil, say more about the possibility of evil, than those who elaborate on the difference that they say causes evil? In other words: it is not diabolic to look to psychological causes for evil, it is diabolic to read those psychological causes as excess and other, as peculiar and even uncanny. Therefore, would you revise:
Is Mailer ludically critiquing the adequacy of such psychoanalytic explanations? Or is the Devil already undermining those explanations in order to justify himself as the necessary requirement, the excess to psychology, the necessary addition?
So, my point is: is it only possible to discuss evil by not naming or trying to know Hitler, who is already marked by the diabolic excess?
Headline on Yahoo this morning:
How much more compassionate could we be expected to be? None. None more compassionate. Perhaps this is the source of evil?
I was using “moral luck” in the sense of Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness.
Grosso modo, yes. (It would be mainly the person’s moral luck, in the sense in which Nussbaum means it, but of course it would be lucky for everyone else too.) It would also be moral luck if those who followed and helped Hitler had been born in a different time and place and so never had the opportunity to exercise their darkest potential.
I wouldn’t revise that passage in the review, but the question you pose is an interesting one for the novel, and I wouldn’t like to give any more away before you read it.
Although, I should add, really there is no necessary conflict between the alternatives you propose. Mailer could be ludically critiquing the adequacy of the explanations through the device of the devil. (I think that, among other things, is what is happening.) Indeed the devil quite often deadpans that we shouldn’t read too much into certain lurid scenes.
A propos of which it’s interesting to see Mailer’s own theory of what he was doing, in the LA Weekly piece to which Graham linked:
The first two paragraphs are bizarre as intellectual history, but it’s true that many critics have indeed misread, in my and Mailer’s views at least, the novel as offering the psychoanalytic stuff as uncomplicated explanation. But one might also ask why, if it is really so much less about the “incestuous buffoonerey and domestic violence”, there is still so much of it in the novel. (Also, God’s party certainly is not given as substantial a third role as the other two.)
The enlightenment angle of this has been thoroughly analyzed by a guy named John Ralston Saul. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.
Ah, thanks to “bling”, I noticed that you had added something to your post.
Of course, it also is quite possible that Mailer is critiquing the theological perspective that submits psychoanalysis to its own deadpan outrage. And on.
Anybody who offers psychoanalytic stuff as uncomplicated explanation should be challenged on it – however, most people don’t offer psychoanalytic stuff as uncomplicated explanation (least of all analysts and the novelists who are fascinated by them), but it is easiest to deride any psychoanalytic interpretation by lazily scoffing at it and saying, “They’re just offering their psychoanalytic stuff as uncomplicated explanation.” Any psychoanalytic interpretation or explanation that isn’t offered with humble trepidation and a list of thirty caveats runs the risk of being taken as presumptious, uncomplicated and expansive; perhaps this is why psychoanalysis will always be – in the Zizekian sense – obscene.
Oh yes, no doubt he is also critiquing the critique of the theological perspective, etc.
Well, critics do prefer an easy life. And I say that with the greatest sympathy.
PS you wouldn’t miss comments if you used the comments feed.
What is a “comments feed”? Would it go straight into the microchip implanted in my brain? Or do I have to submerge myself into a bath of glowing blue goo and psychically envision unspeak.net scrolling in the ether as I nourish myself with comments feed? It sounds terrifying.
It is terrifying.
Well, if we are going to delve into what made Hitler become who he became and the whole phenomenon of the Nazis, then whether it disturbs our rational sensibilities or not, we have to start seriously investigating the nature of their ties to the occult through societies such as Thule. This was a willing immersion in very deep waters.