Evil and Literature: Love and Liberation

Abstract

This chapter is the third of the three chapters devoted to the subject of evil and narrative that comprise the second main section of this book. Before moving on to consider evil and the social sciences in the final section, in this chapter we reflect on the encounter with evil via narrative in ‘obscene’, pornographic and/or erotic literature. This chapter addresses the meanings of evil as represented in literature, specifically the works of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, as well as in some more popular contemporary and/or ‘instrumental’ texts. For it is in the disparate works of these writers and this stroppy tradition that many of the themes relating to evil of previous chapters converge and expand: namely subjectivity, agency, ethics, aesthetics—to name but a few—in the arena of erotic writing, commonly but not exclusively fictional. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with this tradition of writing, I will briefly review the important themes of romanticism, literature and evil and their focus on nature, creativity, the erotic, horror and the macabre. I will then proceed to discuss two major figures described variously as the metaphysician of evil, Georges Bataille, and the libertine, the Marquis de Sade, before concluding with some remarks on the phenomenal popular success of novels such as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), and the implications for the study of evil.