The Devil Notebooks

Abstract

The Devil Notebooks. By Laurence A. Rickels. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 380, introduction, references, filmography. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)This formless-seeming book, divided into twenty-six "notebooks" that often read like rough lecture notes, presents and explicates narratives relating to the folk/ popular culture theme of Satan-worship. The plots range from high fiction (Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost) to respectable popular fiction and film (Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and William Friedkin's film The Exorcist) to a wide range of frankly forgettable low budget films and pulp novels. Trained as a psychotherapist, Rickels takes a Freudian approach to this body of narrative, arguing that they embody elements of a common human fantasy. The youthful ego, he proposes, negotiates his or her mixed love and fear of one's father by projecting the grossest, most challenging transgressions onto an anti-father archetype, which represents the worst that the imagination can conceive. In so doing, the human mind seeks to "hit bottom in an underworld that precedes the creation of the world as the bottom line of worldly creation" (366). That is, once humans are able to fully comprehend the things that nauseate and repel us, we thus can begin to build the foundation for a positive life.In the notebooks, Rickels ranges through many motifs familiar to folklorists, such as the Faustian bargain with the devil (Motif G. 224.4) and the equation of excrement with gold and vice versa, discussed in several places by Alan Dundes (e.g. Dundes and Pagter 1992: 81-83). A number of works discussed, such as the notorious Michelle. Remembers (Smith and Pazder 1981), relate to recent contemporary legends alleging that gruesome murders and alleged ritualistic child abuse are the work of underground satanic cults (Victor 1993, Ellis 2000) . Rickels also observes the frequent crossover between occult themes and "slasher" images in film, likewise seen in many legends circulated by adolescents (Danielson 1979). Perceptively, he suggests that the "cutting" theme is a way of expressing the essential function of the fantasy itself, which is to excise certain ideas from the human consciousness and cast them onto evil others in the shadowland. By so doing, the mind can allow itself to be gratified by violent, sado-masochistic images while simultaneously rejecting them as the work of unredeemable human devils.The book's postmodern style and format, however, makes it difficult to use as a resource. There is no single place where Rickels previews or explains his argument to his readers, and he assumes that they have a prior familiarity with the works of Freud, to which he often alludes without much prior explanation. …