The Deadly Sins/Despair; The One Unforgivable Sin

The Deadly Sins/Despair; The One Unforgivable Sin

By Joyce Carol Oates
Published: July 25, 1993 in the New York Times

What mysterious cruelty in the human soul, to have invented despair as a sin! Like the seven deadly sins, despair is a mythical state. It has no quantifiable existence; it is merely part of an allegorical world view, yet no less lethal for that. Unlike other sins, however, despair is by tradition the sole sin that cannot be forgiven; it is the conviction that one is damned absolutely, thus a repudiation of the Christian Saviour and a challenge to God's infinite capacity for forgiveness. The sins for which one may be forgiven -- pride, anger, lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, envy -- are all firmly attached to the objects of this world, but despair seems to bleed out beyond the confines of the immediate ego-centered self and to relate to no desire, to no thing. The alleged sinner has detached himself even from the possibility of sin, and this the Catholic Church, as the self-appointed voice of God on earth, cannot allow.

Religion is organized power in the seemingly benevolent guise of the sacred, and power is, as we know, chiefly concerned with its own preservation. Its structures, its elaborate rituals and customs and Scriptures and commandments and ethics, its very nature, objectify human experience, insisting that what is out there in the world is of unquestionably greater significance than what is in here in the human spirit. Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel.

So, too, suicide, the consequence of extreme despair, has long been a mortal sin in Catholic Church theology, for it is equivalent to murder. Suicide, the most willful and the most defiantly antisocial of human acts, has an element of the forbidden, the obscene, the taboo about it. While thinkers of antiquity condoned suicide, in certain circumstances at least -- in the "Meditations" Marcus Aurelius wrote, "In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands" -- the church vigorously punished suicides in ways calculated to warn others and to confirm, posthumously, their despair. Stakes were driven through hearts, bodies were mutilated, and the dead were denied burial in consecrated soil. Ever purposeful, the Catholic Church could confiscate goods and lands belonging to suicides.

Yet how frustrating it must be, the attempt to outlaw and to punish despair! Isn't "despair" a malady with which we label people who seem to have decided that life doesn't interest them, just as "narcissism" is the charge we make against people who aren't nearly so interested in us as we'd hoped they would be?

Despair as a sin is a political phenomenon in which, in our time, it's extremely difficult to believe. As a state of intense inwardness, however, despair seems to us a spiritual and moral experience that cuts across superficial boundaries of language, culture and history. No doubt, true despair is as mute and unreflective as flesh lacking consciousness; but the poetics of despair, particularly from the pen of Emily Dickinson, has been transcendentally eloquent: The difference between Despair And Fear -- is like the One Between the instant of a Wreck -- And when the Wreck has been -- The Mind is smooth -- no Motion -- Contented as the Eye Upon the Forehead of a Bust -- That knows -- it cannot see --

This condition, this stasis of the spirit, in which life's energies are paralyzed even as life's physical processes continue, is the essence of literary despair. The world goes its own way, and the isolated consciousness of the writer splits from it, as if splitting from the body itself. This state of keenly heightened inwardness has always fascinated the writer, whose subject is after all the imaginative reconstruction of language. The ostensible subject out there is but the vehicle, or the pretext, for the discoveries to be made in here in the activity of creating.

Literary despair is best contemplated during insomniac nights, and perhaps most keenly savored during adolescence, when insomnia can have the aura of the romantic and the forbidden, when sleepless nights can signal rebellion against a placidly sleeping -- unconscious -- world. At such times, inner and outer worlds seem to merge; insights that by day would be lost define themselves like those phosphorescent minerals that are coarse and ordinary in the light but yield a mysterious glimmering beauty in the dark. Here is the "Zero at the Bone" of which Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness, wrote, with an urgency time has not blunted.

My first immersion in the literature of despair came at a time of chronic adolescent insomnia, and so the ravishing experience of reading certain writers -- most of them, apart from Dickinson and William Faulkner, associated with what was called European existentialism -- is indelibly bound up with that era in my life. Perhaps the ideal reader is an adolescent: restless, vulnerable, passionate, hungry to learn, skeptical and naive by turns, believing in the power of the imagination to change, if not life itself, one's comprehension of life. The degree to which we remain adolescents is the degree to which we remain ideal readers, for whom the act of opening a book can be a sacred one, fraught with psychic risk. For such a reader, each work of a certain magnitude means the assimilation of a new voice -- that of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man or that of Nietzsche's Zarathustra -- and the permanent altering of one's own interior world.

Literary despair, as opposed to real despair, became fashionable at midcentury, when there was a flood of rich English translations of European writers of surpassing originality, boldness and genius. Misleadingly linked by so-called existentialist themes, these highly individual writers -- among them Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Mann, Sartre, Camus, Pavese, Pirandello, Beckett, Ionesco -- seemed to characterize the very mission of literature itself: not to uplift, still less to entertain, but to penetrate to the most inward and intransigent of truths.

Despair at the randomness of mankind's fate and of mankind's repeatedly demonstrated inhumanity was in a sense celebrated, as if we might transcend those terrors through the symbolic strategies of art. Then it was thought that no fate, however horrific -- and the graphically detailed execution of the faithful officer in Kafka's great story "In the Penal Colony" and the ignominious execution of Joseph K. in Kafka's "Trial" were classic examples -- could not be transmogrified by the very contemplation of the horrific fate, or redeemed, in a sense, by the artist's visionary fearlessness.

It is not just that despair is immune to the comforts of the ordinary -- despair rejects comfort. And Kafka, our exemplary artist of despair, is one of our greatest humorists as well. The bleakness of his vision is qualified by a brash, unsettling humor that flies in the face of expectation. Is it tragic that Gregor Samsa is metamorphosed into a giant cockroach, suffers, dies and is swept out with the trash? Is it tragic that the Hunger Artist starves to death, too finicky to eat the common food of humanity? No, these are ludicrous fates, meant to provoke laughter. The self-loathing at the heart of despair repudiates compassion.

I would guess that my generation, coming of age at the very start of the 60's, when the national mood was one of intense political and moral crisis, is the last American generation to so contemplate inwardness as a romantic state of being; it is the last generation of literary-minded young men and women who interiorized the elegiac comedy of Beckett's characters, the radiant madness of Dostoyevsky's self-lacerated God-haunted seekers, the subtle ironies of Camus's prose.

I doubt that contemporary adolescents can identify with Faulkner's Quentin Compson in "The Sound and the Fury," someone who moves with the fatedness of a character in a ballad toward his suicide in the Charles River. "People cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today," Quentin's alcoholic father tells him, as if urging him to his doom. Even tragedy, in Faulkner's vision of a debased 20th-century civilization, is secondhand.

That this is a profound if dismaying truth, or an outrageous libel of the human spirit, either position to be confirmed by history, seems beside the point today, in a country in which politics has become the national religion. The literature of despair may posit suicide as a triumphant act of rebellion, or a repudiation of the meanness of life, but our contemporary mood is one of compassionate horror at any display of self-destruction. We perceive it, perhaps quite accurately, as misguided politics, as a failure to link in here with out there.

For Americans, the collective belief, the moral imperative, is an unflagging optimism. We want to believe in the infinite elasticity of the future: what we can will, we can enact. Just give us time! -- and sufficient resources. Our ethos has always been hard-core pragmatism as defined by our most eminent philosopher, William James: truth is something that works. It is a vehicle empowered to carry us to our destination.

Yet there remains a persistent counterimpulse, an irresistible tug toward stasis and toward those truths that, in Melville's words, will not be comforted. At the antipode of American exuberance and optimism there is the poet's small, still, private voice, the voice of individual conscience; the voice, for instance, of Dickinson, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, mined the ideal vocabulary for investigating those shifting, penumbral states of consciousness that do, in the long run, constitute our lives. Whatever our public identities may be, whatever our official titles, our heralded or derided achievements and the statistics that accrue to us like cobwebs, this is the voice we trust. For, if despair's temptations can be resisted, surely we become more human and compassionate, more like one another in our common predicament. There is a pain -- so utter -- It swallows substance up -- Then covers the Abyss with Trance -- So Memory can step Around -- across -- upon it -- As one within a Swoon -- Goes safely -- where an open eye -- Would drop Him -- Bone by Bone.

Dickinson's poem must be one of the most terrifying ever written, yet, in the way of all great art, it so eloquently transcends its subject that it is exhilarating.

Joyce Carol Oates's most recent book is the forthcoming novel "Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang."