The Devil and Voltaire

During a rehearsal of Mérope, Voltaire’s famous tragedy surrounding Queen Mérope of Corinth, the actress playing the lead role was scolded by the author for failing to “rise to the height of the tragedy demanded in the fourth act.” For context, in the scene Mérope’s son is being led away for execution and as far as we can tell from the account, the actress wasn’t visibly bummed out enough about the whole thing. She apparently complained that in order to live up to the sort of passion Voltaire demanded of her she would have to have the devil in her, which ended up being an incredible set for Voltaire’s spike-like response:

Voltaire, as he often does, raises an interesting point here which I spent this morning mulling over a bit.

Let’s say for a moment that the devil is the dark parts of our own self, meaning a combination of the parts of our personality/behavior/traits/etc we wish weren’t true and the events we’ve either committed or suffered from that we wish hadn’t happened. The parts of us that have caused real harm to ourselves and others, and the parts that have grown wild with pain. Conventional wisdom, at least in the West which is the only strain I’m really familiar with, has suggested for millennia that this is something to be avoided or covered over, and most of the salvation narratives have promised something to the effect of these things being deleted or washed away instantaneously. Which is understandable. Wanting to get away from your own personal suffering is as human an inclination as there likely is, and finding a one stop shop for that sort of relief really does imply the kind of heavenly reward you’d happily give things up for.

But the truth of it is that as we heal we move further into the things we were trying to avoid, and the sort of relief we’re looking for only really comes through painful gratitude or acceptance rather than some sort of strange self-extermination. This is why Dante’s characters began by descending into hell and taking stock of the place in an Excel sheet before slowly making their way upward, and why all sorts of different religious and spiritual narratives entail the central character dying and being reborn. These stories, rather than serving as accounts of how your suffering can be outsourced overseas, end up being blueprints for how your own journey will be. They all entail something closer to personal cartography and therapeutic processing of yourself and the world as it actually is than they do packing your bags for an imminent planetary departure. And this is why our great saints across all traditions have lived on the verge of tears, not because of some hidden knowledge of an impending fiery demise but because of a brutally-acquired clarity on the resting state of suffering that humanity has normalized into an explanation of life.

I mention all of that only to say that Voltaire’s response feels both profound and didactic within that broader but admittedly very generalized context. And my analysis here isn’t intended to suggest extraordinary intentional weight from Voltaire in what was undoubtedly a passing and pretty bitchy comment, but instead to briefly detail the sort of push it gave me and perhaps could give you. Just as the devil has all sorts of different forms and portrayals across different cultures, so too does the darkness in each of us have different characteristics and depth. And Voltaire’s comment here states plainly that the only way to make it as an artist, whatever that might mean for you, is to connect as directly to that darkness in you as you possibly can and work with/from/alongside it. If you are going to scream on stage, then scream the way you wish you could have as a child, or did during the accident. You are trying to express something the way that it actually is, which we already know is deep, complex, and vivid because the context is the experience of a human being. And you aren’t going to create something that matches that level of discrete, rib-cracking reality if you’re pretending you have no idea what they’re shouting about.

Which the actress here seems to imply (one last thing I promise). She could do this scene if she did have the devil in her but she’d like us to believe she doesn’t, and this sort of affectation is why a lot of modern religious and spiritual art ends up being dorky and sterile. Large chunks of it can’t manage even a few lyrics or paragraphs without scrambling back up the hill to some sort of dreamy, co-dependent vista and it’s become a joke within a joke to even try to interact with it in a serious way. That same temptation is there on the blank or semi-blank page/canvas/screen/etc for each of us every time we sit down to do whatever we do, and Voltaire’s comment is a daily reminder that we only have one real choice. Not to develop some sort of affectation of being twisted or dark, but to give yourself completely to making something that is you.