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Representations of Evil in the Novels Miss Christina, the Snake and Isabel and the Devil’S Waters by Mircea Eliade

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Representations of Evil in the Novels Miss Christina, the Snake and Isabel and the Devil’S Waters by Mircea Eliade STUDIA UBB PHILOLOGIA, LXVI, 1, 2021, p. 71 - 86 (RECOMMENDED CITATION) DOI:10.24193/subbphilo.2021.1.06 REPRESENTATIONS OF EVIL IN THE NOVELS MISS CHRISTINA, THE SNAKE AND ISABEL AND THE DEVIL’S WATERS BY MIRCEA ELIADE CONSTANTIN IVANOV1 ABSTRACT. Representations of Evil in the Novels Miss Christina, The Snake and Isabel and the Devil’s Waters by Mircea Eliade. The present article analyzes some representations of evil in the novels Miss Christina, The Snake and Isabel and the Devil’s Waters by Mircea Eliade. In particular, we draw attention to the evil that directly refers to the mysterious dimension and, therefore, outlines a perception that exceeds the mundane experience of everyday life. In this sense, the emergence of unfathomable aspects and phenomena can only be explained in an imaginary approach. This type of representation of evil is perceived within the limits of a manifestation of the supernatural, in an unveiling of the evil through ill-fated, Mephistophelean characters or in the potentiation of “heresies” in the folkloric imaginary. The paper aims to examine how this evil, most often related to some almost occult experiences and fueled by local folklore, is capitalized in the fantastic prose of Mircea Eliade. Keywords: mysterious, fantastic, magical, imaginary, representation, evil, devil REZUMAT. Reprezentări ale răului în romanele Domnișoara Christina, Șarpele și Isabel și Apele diavolului de Mircea Eliade. Articolul de față analizează unele reprezentări ale răului în romanele Domnișoara Christina, Șarpele și Isabel și apele diavolului de Mircea Eliade. În mod deosebit atragem atenția asupra răului care se referă nemijlocit la dimensiunea misterioasă și se înscrie, prin urmare, într-o percepție ce depășește experiența din domeniul cotidianului. În acest sens ajungem să vorbim de aspecte și fenomene stranii care pot fi explicate doar într-o abordare imaginară. Acest tip de reprezentare a răului este perceput în limitele unei manifestări a supranaturalului, într-o dezvelire a maleficului prin intermediul unor personaje nefaste, mefistofelice sau în potențarea unor „eresuri” din imaginarul folcloric. Or, acest rău, legat de cele mai multe ori de niște experiențe aproape oculte și alimentate din folclorul autohton, este valorificat în proza fantastică a lui Mircea Eliade. Cuvinte-cheie: misterios, fantastic, magic, imaginar, reprezentare, răul, diavol 1 Constantin IVANOV is a scientific researcher at the Institute of Romanian Philology “B. P.-Hasdeu”, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. His research interests include: literary theory, comparative literature, mythology, religion and literature. Email: [email protected] CONSTANTIN IVANOV Introduction. The representation of evil as a mysterious entity in the prose of Mircea Eliade, and especially in the works mentioned in the title of this study, highlights the connection between the perception of evil in the folkloric imaginary and the capitalization of this manifestation in literary creations as an element that causes astonishment (mystery) and fear of something “incomprehensible”. We refer to that “evil” which manifests itself as an instance of the mysterious, of the magnificent. As regards the concept of mysterious, what we have in mind is the acceptation of Rudolf Otto, who considers it to be a distinct element of the manifestation of the sacred. Rudolf Otto proposes the concept of mysterium which, taken in a general sense, expresses “only a “mystery”, in the sense of something strange, incomprehensible and obscure. The mysterium itself is, in relation to our understanding of the term, only a concept which, by virtue of a certain analogy, gives us the possibility of designating the thing, but without really exhausting it” (Otto 33). By and large, according to Rudolf Otto, the term mysterium does not have a different meaning from the adjective “mysterious”, this being rather the expression of the astonishment and incomprehension in relation to the “completely different”, which in principle is something that causes fear, for instance, the demonic creature. This experience is also called a numinous experience (a form of manifestation of the sacred from which the moral dimension is drawn, a power that can be felt without being understood, namely it refers to the display of a formless power). In fact, mysterious feelings are quite prominent in Mircea Eliade’s prose works, such as Nights at Serampore (1940), The Forbidden Forest (1955) or even in Marriage in Heaven (1938), whose characters are involved in a mirage and a welter of strange events. The evil of mysterious nature is manifested in Eliade’s prose in various unnatural occurrences and in the image of the other, of the stranger who comes from a different dimension. The mystery is expressed through the other’s own way of being. What defines otherness is grasped through a process of knowledge and understanding of things and phenomena that go beyond the existential spheres, belonging to a sphere of the phenomenal and the supernatural. If a thing is perceived as having special value, then the immediate reality begins to have other valences. As Mircea Eliade puts it in Le sacré et le profane, “Pour ceux auxquels une pierre se rèvèle sacrée, sa réalité immédiate se transmue au contraire en réalité surnaturelle” (18). Because the longing is represented in a supernatural reality, evil (the devil) can be perceived as an expression of God’s otherness, while existentially, the devil manifests itself as an unfortunate accident. To imagine what is impossible to imagine, that is, what transcends the limits of understanding the ordinary world, becomes essentially either a purely playful activity of thought focused on metaphysical meanings, or a probing into mystical or even occult abysses, as, for example, in the novels of J. K. Huysmans, The Damned (1891) 72 REPRESENTATIONS OF EVIL IN THE NOVELS MISS CHRISTINA, THE SNAKE AND ISABEL AND THE DEVIL’S WATERS … and Against the Grain (1884). In Huysmans’s novel The Damned – in fact, a deeply occult approach to the topic, submerged in the swirl of black magic and hedonism – the image of the devil is very close to that of the Middle Ages. In this perception, evil corrupts the human being by destroying spiritual balance. Thus, the soul no longer relates directly to the divinity by seeking fundamental answers as to its own discomposure, but resorts to a negative authority. Man seeks answers for his discomposure, exclusively in an illusory dimension offered by an entity of evil that manifests itself in demonic images, as is very well illustrated in Faust (1808, the first part of the tragedy, followed later by the second part in 1831) by J. W. Goethe – a mythical image of man’s temptation to accede to the metaphysical world, of the aspiration to know the hidden and mysterious essence of the universe at any cost. The encounter with the demonic instance impels the human being to assimilate some mysteries, which are, for that matter, part of a taboo and camouflaged area of knowledge. Thus, evil is represented by an equivocal paradigm in which the fascination with and the fear of the mysterious prevail over rational logic and take the form of strange appearances largely perceived by exacerbated artistic sensibility. In what follows, I aim to undertake an exegesis of some of Eliade’s novels, highlighting the images and representations of evil, as well as their correlation with the Romanian folkloric imaginary, by analyzing primarily the characters with typically evil characteristics. We take the term “exegesis” to mean a methodological approach that emphasizes interpretation, in our case the interpretation of some novels from the oeuvre of Mircea Eliade. We do not intend to focus particularly on the interpretation (hermeneia) of the literary text proper, in its entirety, but only on the exegesis of some representations of evil in Eliade’s novels. Exegesis is also called by Adrian Marino “applied hermeneutics”, about which he says the following: “The original meaning is the same: hermeneutics is an exegesis (communication, explanation of meanings, texts, etc.). Practice has introduced, ever since the Middle Ages, a dissociation, which is preserved to this day: hermeneutics refers to the principles and rules of interpretation, it is the science and the methodology of interpretation, while exegesis is the practical application of hermeneutic rules, the actual, real interpretation applied to texts. Hermeneutics is the theory of exegesis; exegesis – applied hermeneutics” (Marino 39). Our approach also largely resorts to the methodological tools specific to imaginary research in the sense proposed by Gilbert Durand. This allows us to make a comparative analysis of the novels Miss Christina, The Snake and Isabel and the Devil’s Waters. This methodological approach will enable us to identify the mythological substratum, thus achieving an interpretation that can refer to the religious factor, philosophy, anthropology or “other spheres of human expression” (Remak 31). Of course, there is a series of very well-known exegeses that come with unique approaches to Mircea Eliade’s prose, such as: 73 CONSTANTIN IVANOV Mircea Eliade – un spirit al amplitudinii by Eugen Simion, Traversarea cercului. Centralitate, inițiere, mit în opera lui Mircea Eliade by Grațiela Benga, Mircea Eliade. Poetica fantasticului și morfologia romanului existențial by Gheorghe Glodeanu, Eliade prin Eliade by Sabina Fânaru, Eros și thanatos. Eseu despre Mircea Eliade by Liliana Bahnă and others. For the most part, the rhetoric of these exegetes focuses on mythical expressions and the symbolic load of some key images that allow the reception of Eliade’s prose in a broader framework than that of criticism or literary history, highlighting, at the same time, some of Mircea Eliade’s insights as a mythologist and historian of religions. A substantial contribution to the interpretation of symbols that encode latent meanings in Mircea Eliade’s prose is that of Doina Ruști, Dicționar de simboluri din opera lui Mircea Eliade, which tactically addresses the mythical substratum, as well as the relationship of some themes or motifs with the religious factor.
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