the Devil’s good work

Further to my talk of art as propaganda, that is, inevitably carrying a message, here’s an excellent quotation by Victor Pelevin, on Bulgakov’s The Master & Margarita: 

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There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.

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Good books are more than just entertainment, they have a power which deserves a stricter attention. In our present, materialist age it’s common to deny the reality or worth of anything that can’t be measured by scientific instruments; but alongside the official history of the merely physical there is this other account, in which idea fights idea, image clashes with image. The reductionist account, in which everything is down to economics, is a desperate attempt to deny these other energies, to deny that the imagination is more than just day-dreaming and whimsy. i think any student of history, considering the Wagnerian spectacle of Hitler’s Germany, the 17th Century witch hunt, or the sudden rise and later fall of Communism, must begin to suspect the agency of really very different energies than the price of bread and the availability of shoes.

Bulgakov’s Woland - who seems a cross between Wotan, Satan, and the Count of Monte Cristo - appears in a society that vigorously denies any superhuman agency, whether it be the Devil or God. Probably because the Communists were denying something that actually exists, the denial was particularly strenuous. Dostoevsky - as ever the prophet of the 20th Century - foresaw just such a society of denial in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Bulgakov’s novel is an inventive variation on the theme; instead of Christ returning to be rejected by the worldly powers, the Devil visits the capital city of atheism, for seemingly no purpose but his own amusement, his own inscrutable custom. This is not a meek and long-suffering figure; Woland’s demonic energy is appropriate and undeniable: he is the negative of the bureaucratic system of official materialism, as if he focuses in his person the opposite of the State. He is of course not a nice figure; but in the capital of atheism he is a potentially benevolent force - as if the Prince of Evil himself must be preferable to a world denying both good and evil. And as Bulgakov presents the matter, it is not a case of good or evil as such; the contest here is between a nihilistic, man-made system, and a force of unstoppable, superhuman energy. And one cannot but side with Woland, even if he clearly is the Devil (in some form or another).

Although Woland is not human, his world impinges on ours; he requires that the mortal Margarita play her part in the Devil’s ball. Likewise, to deny the divine - not, shall we say, God, but gods - is to deny a part of the human. We are not gods but we are incomplete without the divine (though it is in the nature of the incomplete to be unaware he is so). Woland is a suitably ambiguous figure; he has his own purposes. That very ambiguity of character makes him a powerful foe to the official deathliness of the USSR, where everyone has a file, an official identity, where nothing is considered beyond human perception. He would be less powerful were he neatly labelled as “the Devil”. He is instead, a travelling professor who is also, evidently, non-human, and may be the Christian Devil, or then again may the the one-eyed God; that refusal to settle for any one identity is itself a weapon against a bureaucractic culture. Woland, if pressed, would i feel answer as YHVH did to Moses, “I am what I am”.

One can see why, if the divine were to send an emissary, a messenger (angelos) to such a darkened world, the Devil would be more appropriate than Christ. In our Western culture, for example, Christ would be the subject of paparazzi and talk shows, he would be just another headline, perhaps lower than Britney Spear’s latest pussy shot. But the Devil…or, better, an inscrutable power who may be Wotan or the Devil or then again some other figure, who is simply who he is, that would indeed be appropriate.

Just by his existence, Woland disproves the official version; because the official version of things - whether in the USSR or here, now, - is that there is no soul, no spirit, nothing beyond the human. If Woland preached he would instantly become a part of our world, his arguments entering the matrix of social discourse along with Dawkins’ latest book and Hitchen’s latest article. But he does not preach; he simply is. He arrives in Moscow - and behold! - there are decapitations, flying witches, a big bastard of a cat, a magic show, and general misrule and mayhem and wildness. Woland and his crew are the wildness in the world.

The book is a kind of spell; it is an ironic, unweaving spell - it has no agenda, no bullet-point doctrine - it evokes a wildness that any attentive reader must recognise - and in granting Woland his spiritual reality (that such an energy in some ways exists in the universe), the reader joins the Wild Hunt in heart. i imagine a reader - a beat-down, grubby clerk somewhere in the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy - reading a samizdat copy of The Master and Margarita; and the next day, though knowing it was a fiction, just a book, the category ‘wildness’ now exists in his soul.