Demons and Monsters in Georges Bernanos
With the upcoming centenary of Under the Sun of Satan (Sous Le Soleil de Satan) (1926) on the horizon, and with the explosions of rage, real or contrived, before us on the daily basis, the endless lies streaming through our information systems, constantly recycled as bilge, with the inversion of values, where bad is good and good now bad, and courage belittled in made-for TV, where only the spectacular is real and jeers as good—if not better—than cheers, perhaps it is time to recur to the writings of the French Catholic author, Georges Bernanos, to at least give us a sense of our bearings in our all too apocalyptic moment in which, as Yeats says in his great apocalyptic poem between the great wars, “The Second Coming,” “the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Perhaps showing where we are, and who and what we have become, will prove to be a moment of arrest in a situation that dominates us. Before we can go anywhere, we need to face the abyss that we have made and the abyss that we are, to acknowledge that we are not only self-interested but malicious, not only sanguine about the hurt done to others, but relish it, not only interested in building something different, but exultant in destruction for its own sake. Bernanos is that odd writer of fiction who routinely confesses in his stories that he hates plot, largely because plot normalizes the world we live in. Balzac and Zola are his usual piñatas. Their so-called realism is found inadequate to the nightmare world of the two great wars, as well as their build-up and aftermaths.
What needed to be grasped was that the world had become a nightmare in which normality had become an entirely utopian concept. The only way in which we might wake up from the nightmare is first to be startled with nightmare figures whose depravity does not find the kind of measure we supposed or convince us any longer that it can be contained either by institutions—especially religious institution—or accepted mores. Bernanos is the modern apocalyptic Paul who speaks in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 of the inability of the “restrainer” (katechon) to hold back the spirit of lawlessness.
An essential feature of Bernanos’s understanding of his task as a writer is the generation of a form of fiction that is the apocalyptic disclosure of the demons and monsters that the modern age has made possible and in all likelihood also made actual. In this sense, his literary precursor is Dostoevsky, whose great novels are populated with demons and monsters. Throughout this essay, I will continually recur to the monstrous figures of Dostoevsky, but perhaps here it is sufficient to make two observations. The first is that, just like Dostoevsky, Bernanos allows us into the thought process of these monstrosities who would be more than human. He explores in the manner of his great Russian predecessor the variety and hierarchy of monsters, who lie hidden, but who with the squint of a watcher can be exposed, and who are at once evil incarnate and evil as task. Description of action is entirely insufficient to grasp those who have gone beyond the measure; there has to be a shift in both the writer’s consciousness and that of the readers in order to expose the generation and ambition of malice.
The second is the exposure of the world as the scene of a battle between evil and good, represented, on the one hand, by human beings whose willed transgressions confer on them superhuman status and, on the other, by saints who, conforming themselves to Christ, are emblems of supernatural grace. Bernanos, then, essentially inherits Dostoevsky’s problematic and prosecutes it not only in a specifically French key, but also in a Catholic key, that has a particular language for demons and saints, as well as for the flawed humans who may be ionized by either good and evil. Here, however, I am focusing only on the depiction of demons and monsters, leaving to another essay to speak to Bernanos’s figurations of saints whose lived reality suggests that not all is lost and the outcome has not yet been decided.
Before, however, I turn to my main task, which is to present examples of demonic figuration in Bernanos’s novels, I should speak to two points that are crucial to setting the terms of the discussion: (1) the paradox of how a modernity that denies the reality of demons creates them; (2) the elaboration of the relation between the concepts of the demon and the monster, where each can be disclosed to be at once the cause and effect of each other.
Modernity’s Creation of Demons and Curating of Monsters
For Bernanos, the story modernity tells itself is one in which there is progress in all dimensions, whether scientific, political, social, individual, or artistic. In fact, modernity presents itself as nothing short of a banquet of bows and self-congratulatory speeches. In his self-adopted role of the writer as diagnostician of the health of his age, Bernanos sees through the façade to the corruption at its heart. Modernity is a giant cell that occludes its corruption and distracts from the fact that progress has left untold numbers behind and that technology has disclosed its essence in the munition factories and killing fields of France. Regrettably, he finds that, in significant respects, Catholicism has bought into the story and is in the process of bringing itself up to date. It wants to put forward a more pleasing Catholic product and is willing to remove its offending comments about the human proclivity for evil and speak to the broad way in which human beings can come to perfection, or better the broad way in which they can come to claim it.
Bernanos is more than aware of the counter-discourses in modernity to the dream of reason, but like Goya in Caprichos thinks that reason “breeds monsters,” that is, generates its contrary. Bernanos recognizes that psychology and psychiatry, and, more particularly, psychoanalysis, indicate that all is not well regarding our adaptation to the world, despite the manifold claims of progress and enhancements. In the end, however, he judges that none of these disciplines is sufficiently insightful, or can serve as a cure for the darkness that we have come to lay bare in ourselves. They serve as mere palliatives for the rampant alienation caused by reason and, thus, are instruments buttressing reason’s latent madness and the shadow-side it creates precisely in repressing the Christian recognition of frailty and fault, pride, lust, and their intermingling.
Catholicism connives with a decadent modernity to the extent to which it downplays the construct of sin and proposes an anthropology of the natural man (l’homme honnête) pilloried by Pascal, and finds risible the notion of demons, whose reality is affirmed in the rite of Baptism, in the practice of exorcism, and repeatedly in the New Testament. The thrust of Bernanos’s unceasing invective, however, is less to underscore the rupture with the Catholic tradition than to draw attention to the massive cognitional blackout that deprives us of the means to think of malice as a fundamental disorder that destroys a human being and transforms him or her into something else, a liminal being that in its attempt to transcend the human reduces itself to a beast.
There can be no doubt that Bernanos’s analysis of the psychic landscape of modernity is aided and abetted by the high French literary tradition of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and proximally Gide. Bernanos shares their obsession with the prospect and reality of the self-assertion of personality over moral and religious codes, the willed transgression that is the cradle of the exception. While Bernanos can take advantage of their presentation of such figures, he refuses to be complicit in their valorization. The French literary tradition’s presentation and celebration of transgression is the mark of the adolescent where desire and the lust for the infinite saturate and suppurate. It is the Christian Dostoevsky who provides the appropriate lens: to see through the glamor of evil requires a kind of perceptiveness and level of attention whose perfection we find in the Christian saint. This is what the apocalyptic Christian writer aspires to; and, even if he falls short of the desirable level of perception and attentiveness to the upsurge of the spirit of lying and lawlessness that modernity makes possible, perhaps in the representation of singularities who seem to have concentrated in themselves malice and the will to destroy, he breaks through our conceptual blocks and in due course helps the scales fall from our bewildered eyes.
Undoubtedly, in modernity there exists a close relationship between demons and monsters, as these locutions are intended to speak to beings who are not so much ontologically different than human beings who have undergone such alteration that existentially and morally speaking they have ceased to be recognizably human. In Bernanos we can observe the struggle to find the language to name these terrifying and terrible exceptions. For what one person, schooled in the Catholic tradition, might denote by the word “demon” might equally be called a “monster” by another.
Still, this much is clear: what is being gauged is the liminal status of a psyche that feels itself capable of constructing a self beyond constraint and without remorse. Bernanos feels comfortable enough with this rough equivalence of “demon” and “monster,” and one can see its effect throughout his oeuvre. Yet, strictly speaking, they are not synonymous. The “demon” is the anomaly, the exceptional individual as that individual’s psyche is concentrated in the desire to transgress for its own sake. The “monster” is this same individual as this individual is characterized by tears in the psyche and a level of alienation that are outside the normal bounds of human frailty and the capacity to do harm. In a sense, “monster” is an item in a language of scale from minimum to maximum. At the maximum we encounter the demonic individual.
Bernanos’s anthropology is irreducibly Augustinian: human beings are not constituted by the different ontological realities of body and soul, but the tension between flesh and spirit as this tensional unity is essentially porous to gracious and baleful influences. Yet, more proximally, it is Pascalian. It is so, given the state of alienation and disaggregation that experience discloses to be constitutive of all human beings. Indeed, grasp of this fact is sufficient for Pascal to refer to human beings as monsters, that is, as placeholders of a plurality that secretes itself in our supposed unity. We might think of the demonic then as the asymptote of the monster or the monster contracted into the still point of will where it fuses or freezes itself into a false unity.
Bernanos’s thinking seems to be that unless our monstrosity was nurtured and grown to a significant degree, we would not turn into demons. This is what I mean by the contrast between creating and curating. Modernity creates demons and does so in and through its curating of the systemic flaws that identify us as monsters. In a sense, then, Bernanos provides us with a kind of intelligibility for the emergence of the demon in modernity by attending to its conditions, both biographical and circumstantial. Though these specify the demonic character, they do not explain him or her. It is axiomatic for Bernanos, as for Dostoevsky, that human freedom is real, human existence a spiritual battle, and that. in advance, it is never clear when alienation has passed the event horizon such as to rule out confession, repentance, and forgiveness.
Demonic Plurality and Hierarchy
Across his oeuvre, Bernanos provides us with nothing less than Breughel-like tapestry of the monstrous and demonic translated into an existential and psychological key. Monsters and demons teem across the pages and each of his major works provides us with a multiple as well as a hierarchy. Though it may be true that the alienation generated by modernity leads to a reduction of human being to formless drives and thus monsters, it also creates a hierarchy, not only in that bigger monsters feed on the smaller, but also that at the top of the infernal hierarchy in all of Bernanos’s major novels is the anomaly, the disintegrated person who harnesses drive and hatred and congeals it into malice. Such an anomaly is a demon capable of saying with Milton’s Lucifer, “evil be thou my good.” The most conspicuous examples would include Mouchette in Under the Sun of Satan, Fiodor, the Russian chauffeur in Joy, Madame Alfieri in A Bad Dream, and Monsieur Ouine in the novel of the same name.
Bernanos risks the charge of misogyny when he allows that the status of the anomaly is not only not closed to women, but speaks to their peculiar capacity. Whatever the validity of the charge, it should be noted that, at least relatively speaking, Bernanos represents something of an innovation in the representation of the monstrous and the demonic in modern thought and literature. For instance, Kierkegaard seems to think that women’s natural sensuousness sets a limit to their demonic capacity. The situation in Dostoevsky is somewhat more ambiguous. While the tendency towards the Kierkegaardian view is to the fore, nonetheless, there is more than a smattering of evidence that one cannot fully rely on the metaphysical distinction between the sexes when it comes to the generation of the exception. For example, in The Brothers Karamazov Katerina evinces traces of demonic capacity in that all her harmful actions derive from wounded pride, and Lise, who seems destined to marry Alyosha, cannot seem to break the habit of capriciousness and self-assertion that may speak both the continuation of her mother’s triviality and her revolt against the true and the good that it has already damaged.
Mouchette is, undoubtedly, one of Bernanos’s most highly developed demons. Still a teenager, she kills her older lover for no other reason than that in and through the act she defines herself as the exception, as the anomaly. Her crime is not a crime of passion; it is a deliberate act taken in the teeth of dire consequences for herself (incarceration), with the aim of finding oneself on the far side of the human, frozen in the moment of revolt. It is also to cut oneself off from all connection with others and hysterically deny that the one who commits crime for crime’s sake has had a history, even if the history is the history of corruption and the pedagogy of vice.
Mouchette is a pet name that substitutes for her real name, Germaine Malothory, and disguises the prospect of the world, seeing that Germaine is indeed the offshoot of a powerful Republican family with deep roots in the Enlightenment, of whose corruption into cynicism she is in all likelihood the symptom. Her familial background and unearned social status, then, for Bernanos are not entirely incidental to who she is and what she becomes, even if they do not determine her concentration into a transgression that defines her. Thus, his argument with the realist novels of Balzac and Zola. Mouchette is Bernanos’s first draft of a monster who has climbed the mountain of alienation and arrived at the pinnacle of the demonic. Arguably, she also provides its grammar: at once garrulous and silent, having the suddenness that goes with a kind of silence that is a gathering of malice and violence, and obdurately persistent in self-assertion against offers of grace that are extended.
Though hardly as compelling a character as Mouchette, the Russian chauffeur in Joy, who is obsessed with the ecstatic Chantal de Clergerie, also is an illustration of the mutation from a life marked by lying, cold detachment, and contempt into a murder whose sole purpose is the violation of the good and the beautiful, indeed, the violation of a life that is also an exception, though in this case the exception of a sanctity that is exemplary. The debts to Dostoevsky are apparent. Not only is Fiodor the name of the great Russian author, but the historical Dostoevsky of the Gulag is recalled in that this literary Fiodor happens to have survived what amounted to an execution as the historical Dostoevsky did, even if the literary Fiodor has physical rather than psychological wounds that recall the moment. As with the demons that populate the pages of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Possessed, Fiodor constructs a persona that bears no trace of positive social interaction: with the exception of the grandmother and Chantal everyone in the de Clergerie household is classed, in a very underground man manner, as an “insect.” Perhaps even more fundamentally, Fiodor attempts to blot out his personal history, which is a history of alienation that takes time and requires repetition and curation. It is his way of saying that the crime that he performs has no antecedents.
From Bernanos’s point of view, this is at best a half-truth. It seems as if Bernanos wants to say in the case of Fiodor—but perhaps also with regard to all his demonic characters—that crime for crime’s sake is a mystery that is neither adequately grasped in the view of evil by birth, nor the contrary view that malice is brought into being solely by circumstance and bad habits that misshape the self. The malformation and monstrousness of character count. Yet, so also does the act that involves a metabasis eis allo genos. Murder for murder’s sake carries the murderer across the threshold that divides the monster from the demon.
It should be noted that the murder of Chantal takes not only goodness from the world, but also beauty in its manifesting particulars, the beauty of Chantal’s illuminated face, the beauty of the chirping of her voice, and the beauty of a candor of character and speech that provides the only buoyancy to the de Clergerie household that it experiences as it stews in falseness, self-concern, and base lies. The gruesome nature of the murder—half of Chantal’s face is shot off—is the sin against beauty and the annunciation of a formlessness in Fiodor that can only end in the ugliness of suicide.
A third character who deserves “demonic” ascription is Madame Alfieri, who is the central character in A Bad Dream. Though it is not evident from the beginning, over the course of the novel Madame Alfieri proves herself to belong in the special category in the catalogue of the alienated, and that in and through her crime she sheds the status of monster for that of demon. Perhaps more her case than Mouchette and Fiodor, we can see something of the instability of the distinction between monster and demon. If pointless murder is the act whereby she achieves or hopes to achieve the status of a singularity or anomaly, the actual result of the crime is the shattering and scattering of self that might suggest that the demonic human is simply the monster in a hysterical state. As is usual in his novels Bernanos allows the reader fairly unfettered access to a character mired in loneliness and self-hatred.
Nonetheless, in A Bad Dream he paints with more color and texture than usual the chronic anxiety that is both backdrop and consequence of the crime, as well as filling out the psychic phenomena of vertigo and falling that accompany the transgressive act in and through which Madame Alfieri hopes to define herself as superhuman. Her past is a jumble of insecurity and neglect, her present a tangle of both genteel poverty and drug addiction, her current occupation that of co-writer of novels for her employer Ganse who has no compunction about taking full credit for their joint work. Weighing down her already overwhelming present is her insubstantial lover, Oliver Manville, who cannot make his way in the world. The crime she believes she needs to commit, the murder of Oliver’s aged and wealthy aunt, who exercises power over him by doling out minute sums of money, is only apparently motivated. The harm perpetrated by the old miser on Oliver—another Dostoevsky allusion—is simply pretext for a crime that is its own end.
Monsieur Ouine, the main character in the novel of the same name (1940), at first does not seem to belong in the catalogue of demons and monsters. Superficially, he appears to be incoherent in a way that the characters I have discussed thus far are not. Moreover, he has escaped the anxiousness or despair that characterizes each. Throughout the bulk of the novel he comes across as an ambiguous figure with respect to whom we are meant to feel ambivalent. He fascinates while being ugly; he neither plots nor enacts evil. Painted with great restraint by Bernanos, it is only at the end of the novel that we come to realize that Ouine is the “black sun” of Bernanos’s first novel, the gravitational force that draws the alienated towards him.
He is the one in whom they deposit their misgivings and dark secrets, regarding which he has utter contempt for their mediocrity. He savors these revelations and makes them his own—indeed, to the point that he absorbs the confessors. This is indicated by his enormous size. He is an arch demon because he is marked by singular concentration that, unlike other demons in Bernanos’s works, does not need demonstration and the reassurance that comes with it. Nonetheless, he is not as unified as he seems. Indeed, he is plurality at its highest power, at the level of Satan himself. In this respect, his seemingly peculiar insistence at the end of the novel on his title of professor of languages—emphasis on the plural—is telling. He is the babble and babel of all whom he has corrupted in his steady patience of leaving others undo themselves. At the end of the novel he reveals to Philippe, the adolescent whom he has thoroughly corrupted, that he is nothing, the principle of negation of all reality and goodness, but also the refusal to grant hope for human beings who battle their own worst instincts and who have not given hope, even if the hope can no longer be vested in themselves.
It is worthwhile bringing out a second dimension of Bernanos’s figuration of the demonic, that is, the presence of hierarchies, indeed, hierarchies far more rigid than those found in his collateral figuration throughout his work of the saints. If we consider that the monsters who exist as figures on the pages of Bernanos’s writing can be cast as demons manqué, then the demons are legion. Here I will simply speak to just two of Bernanos’s books and one much more than the other. In A Bad Dream, in Madame Alfieri’s close circle, we find characters so disaggregated that they fail to cohere into persons. While Oliver Manville, Madame Alfieri’s lover, is aware that unlike Madame Alfieri he is insufficiently resolute to perform the great deed, nonetheless, not only is he a drug addict, but the gap between who he is and where he wants to go edges towards infinity.
He is bitingly aware of his lack of name, worth ethic, and talent, as he more and more disconnects from reality that proves overwhelming and leaves him at a loss. He precisely lacks the force of will to gather the disarticulated fragments of himself into an act of self-assertion even as his continual complaints about his great aunt’s mistreatment of him galvanizes Madame Alfieri towards the murder that in the very commission forgets its prompting occasion. Instead of a murder, in his case we have a mental breakdown, though it seems clear to Bernanos, as it was to Dostoevsky, that transgression and madness are very much two sides of the same coin. Perhaps the other quality that distinguishes him from Madame Alfieri as arch demon, besides his lack of resoluteness, is that he recognizes not only this fact, but that he is shattered and scattered. Indeed, in a moment of disclosure at once awful and pathetic, he suggests that one would need the compound eye of a fly to see him whole. As he confesses this, he implicates his entire age: all young men are now like that.
Keeping him company in the rank of the disaggregated, which occupies the rung below that of arch demon, is Philippe, the nephew of Ganse, the prolific writer, on whom he depends financially and for social position, but for whom he cannot resist expressing contempt that he spares Madame Alfieri, whom he deems to be as ascetic as a saint, but whom he suspects might in fact be a saint “turned inside out.” Functionally a parasite like Oliver, he self-styles as a bon vivant of exquisite taste, capable of judging all and playacting at being radical by being a member of an anarchist group. Like Madame Alfieri, he too wants to give definition to his life, a definition that for him can only be provided by a single act that would mark him off as a singularity or an anomaly. In this sense, while overall he is pitched at the same level of the inverted demonic hierarchy as Oliver Manville, if aspiration counts, he is further along.
In Philippe’s case, however, the act of transgression that would define him is suicide. The emotive Philippe does not grasp the nettle to the contradiction that in suicide definition and its erasure are equivalent. But then, as in the case of a lower-order demon such as Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, the line between acting and playacting has been dissolved. Following the precedent provided in the figuration of the revolutionary Kirillov, would-be tragedy becomes farce when Philippe botches his first attempt at shooting himself by narrowly missing his heart. The failure leads inevitably to the second attempt, which is successful but also entirely futile in that now suicide cannot be other than the attempt to erase shame. Philippe, thereby, definitely excludes himself from the first rank of demons and definitively constitutes himself as a demonic wannabe. In the interval between attempts something becomes clear about the limit of internal relations between monsters and demons. Though it is clear from the beginning of A Bad Dream that there is no love lost between Oliver and Philippe, who are constantly bickering, Oliver’s callous reading of Philippe’s first suicide attempt as annoying and literary evinces a glaring lack of human empathy and connection, a lack voiced by Madame Alfieri near the end of the novel when she confesses that she has never loved or been moved by anyone.
Though in the strict sense, the hierarchy of demons—or better, monsters and demons—only comes into play at the level of the three characters we have spoken about, the base of the hierarchy is provided by the other loathsome characters in the text, the writer Ganse, and Lipotte, a writer for a scandal magazine, who happens to have credentials in psychiatry. As a matter of fact, were it not for the triad of monsters and demons, Ganse would be regarded as the villain of the text, and likely would be in the realist novels of Balzac and Zola. In a text of monsters and anomalies, however, Ganse is simply socially effluent, the merde, which if it does not make monsters and demons necessary, makes them possible. Such is true also in the case of Lipotte, who is Balzac-like loathsome, a parasite by definition, but also a carrier of a knowingness that stipulates that it is worthy of emulation and praise. In A Bad Dream Bernanos sees him as the modern world looking at itself in the mirror of its self-regard. What Bernanos suggests is that the other side of the mirror, in the tain of the mirror as it were, another world has hatched and it is beyond frightening, since it involves nothing less than the death of the human.
I have spent the amount of time I have on A Bad Dream not because it is superior to Bernanos’s other novels or even on the same level, but rather because of its relative simplicity. Great novels such as Joy and Under the Sun of Satan are less novels about monsters and demons than about the spiritual battle between the demonic constellation and the saints who are the answer to what Bernanos regards as an emptying of hell. A Bad Dream is solely about monsters and demons and what in modernity has made them possible. Still, it would be good to provide one other example of demonic constellation and hierarchy. Joy provides a clear example, though Monsieur Ouine is certainly a candidate. Sticking with Joy, however, it might be said that Fiodor is not the only figure of the demonic, even if he is the only character who unequivocally enjoys demon status. Chantal’s grandmother keeps the demon Fiodor company. In a long life she has essentially purged Chantal’s mother, emotionally maimed her son, Chantal’s father, and has terrorized the household for generations by whim and rule. When we meet her in the novel, she is blind. Though there is little or no interaction between her and Fiodor, she is recognized by the Russian nihilist as a fellow traveler.
What makes her different from her son, Monsieur de Clergerie, the so-called master of the house, who wallows in his illnesses, imagined or otherwise, and is paralyzed by indecision and impotence, is will. In her will is adamantine. She belongs in the league of the extraordinary, the anomalous. Her son, in contrast, may not quite reach the level of the demon of second class, that is, the level of a monster of alienation. Rather, together with spiritually deformed “friends” such as Perouse, who is a materialist in the vein of Hevetius and d’Holbach and perhaps proximally Charcoat, and Cenabre, a prolific historian of Christianity who has lost his faith, and is descending into madness, he orbits around his mother who reaches towards the demonic and his saintly daughter, Chantal, whose purity, innocence, and sanctity make her an object of curiosity, speculation, and hatred.
In different ways Perouse and Cenabre are showmen, Perouse sententiously opining that morality is a function of glands, and Cenabre finding himself incapable of thinking of Chantal’s lay exemplification of Thérèse’s “little way” as anything other than an interesting specimen of spirituality rather than what it truly is, that is, God’s champion in a spiritual battle with the forces of evil, an emblem of grace and sacrificial love. Appropriately, both Perouse and Cenabre have studied contempt for de Clergerie while they hate each other. With the object of their contempt they signal the general decay of modern society that makes monsters and demons possible, though it could be the case that the grandmother is the indigenous demon, the one who has been with us throughout history and quite literally bedeviled all our social and familial arrangements.
Conclusion
Bernanos’s novels are Catholic not only with regard to ethos and subject matter, but with regard to their spiritual depth and theological acumen. It is the last two qualities that allow him to condemn Catholicism for being all too eager to compromise its spiritual and theological traditions and to distrust its unique perception of human existence as the drama of sin and redemption. He understands a fundamental aspect of his literary mission to be a form of apocalyptic unveiling of a new type of individual that, disaggregated, does not cohere into a self. These are the many from which the few will emerge that will attempt self-definition in and through a monumental act of transgression. It is this perspective on the extremity of his time that leads to his impatience with his fellow travelers such as Claudel and Maritain, whom he upbraids from time to time as making compromises with secular modernity.
His portrayal of the monstrousness and demonic capacity of human beings surpasses what can be found in the French tradition of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Gide, indeed, to the point that one could argue that his apocalyptic unveiling and its intense emotional charge rivals that of Dostoevsky. Yet, equally one could think of his slender novels as providing both an aesthetic and moral measure for French novelists preoccupied with evil who succeed him, for example, Sartre, Bataille, and Genet, who happen to hug much more closely to the nineteenth-century French literature of evil that celebrates transgressing.
When it came to the figuration of evil, Bernanos took risks that only Dostoevsky took. This is indicated in his attempt to imagine Satan as the principle in the modern world that makes monsters and demons possible and even necessary. In his terrifying and terrible apocalypse of the appearance of Satan in Under the Sun of Satan, Satan is both a discrete figure and the system of production of spiritual harm in the world. Satan is malice and the sludge of lies, narcissism that depends on human disaggregation and accelerates it and encourages the illusion of self-appropriation through the escalation of transgression. If back in 1926 Bernanos was the watchman announcing that rumors of Satan’s demise are greatly exaggerated, since he can see into the engine of the production of monsters and demons, perhaps he is the prophet also of our very, very chaotic moment marked by lawlessness, the ruin of language, the destruction of common bonds, betrayal, and cruelty. Perhaps cruelty, above all.