Essay: The Sublime and the Evil

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.”

In The Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure. Literature and other art forms can provide us with such distance: as we read or view a horrific event, we can simulate some of the emotions of its victims, but we can also shut the book or turn off the television set to regain a sense of security.

Taking pleasure in pain is an issue that has been controversial in Holocaust studies. Holocaust-centric works of different genres have been criticized for incorporating aesthetic elements, or for eliciting unsuitable responses in their audiences. Thus, the description in Cynthia Ozick’s novella The Shawl of a Nazi throwing a Jewish infant against an electric fence has been criticized as inappropriately fantastical. “The light tapped the helmet and sparkled it into a goblet … She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine”. The 1978 TV miniseries “Holocaust” has received similar criticism: women in concentration camps were depicted with their hair intact instead of shorn, because realistic portrayal was deemed too disturbing for the show’s audiences. These criticisms of Ozick and of the miniseries were directed at their creators, and their effect on audiences was mainly hypothetical; other works have had reported unsettling effects on audiences. Paul Celan’s German poem “Todesfuge” is recited in Holocaust memorial ceremonies in German schools, and teachers have noted that its march-like rhythm and elusive imagery has resulted in pupils’ enjoyment of the poem without attention to its very solemn subject matter (“Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening/ we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night” – the rhythm of the translation closely follows the rhythm of the original).

Elizabeth Costello would probably say that these aesthetic, imaginative representations of the Holocaust are “evil”. But what does that mean, exactly? Elizabeth herself provides one example of a person committing real-life evil when she discusses the dockworker who beat her after she refused to have sex with him. Coetzee, through Elizabeth, provides no evidence that representations of evil actually serve as motivation for evil acts. The docker is ostensibly quite the opposite of intellectual; by that example, ignorance of the consequences of evil is more dangerous than sublime encounters with its representations. Ultimately Coetzee leaves the question of the moral effects of enjoyment of evil art open.

Beautiful (anti)evil.

Image by Tom Podmore