About book The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner (1999)
The dark side of PredestinationtI first discovered this book when I was perusing the shelf of a friend of mine from university and the title literally jumped out at me. The first thought that went through my mind was 'wow, this seems to be a good, whole hearted, Christian book' and asked her if I could borrow it. She kindly lent it to me, but I never go to finish it because after a week she asked for it back (having assumed that I have finished reading it, which I hadn't). Anyway, that was the last I saw of that book until I was wondering around a number of second-hand bookstalls in Melbourne's Federation Square and once again it jumped out at me, so I immediately purchased it with the intention of finishing it this time.tI note that when I first saw it my thoughts were that it was a Christian Book. Well, it's not, at least not in the traditional sense of what you would consider a Christian book. Actually, it seems to be part gothic horror, part satire, and an early incarnation of a crime novel. What Hogg is exploring in this book is the idea of predestination as it is understood by Calvinists, and that is that one is predestined to be saved from birth, and if you are predestined as such, then there is nothing that can take away your salvation. So, the question that is raised is: if you are one of the elect, and if nothing can take your salvation away from you, then does that mean that you have a license to basically do whatever you want?tWell, the Biblical answer to that question is no, and I suspect that most Calvinists would suggest that if you were one of the elect then your actions would be severely restrained by your character, which means that you could not actually go and do what the anti-hero of this book went and did. However, that is not really the question that Hogg is exploring here, because the anti-hero was raised by a strict Calvinist preacher, and had this teaching poured into his mind since he was a child. As such he came to believe that due to him being one of the elect nothing that he did could effect that salvation. This belief was compounded when he meets Gil-Martin, a rather strange character that is generally recognised as Satan. What Gil-Martin does is that he feeds on this belief that the anti-hero has and encourages him to go around and start murdering people because, well, they are all sinners and deserve to die.tThis is where the interesting part of the novel arises. Note that it was written in 1824, around the same time as Frankenstein. As I have written in my commentary of Frankenstein, what we have during this period is a shift away from demons and angels to a more scientific approach to viewing the world. I would suggest that this book is no different. Since most of it is told from the point of view of the anti-hero, we really don't know whether Gil-Martin is real, or merely a figment of his imagination. However, it does not matter whether he is, or he isn't, because he is still incredibly dangerous because this figment of his imagination (if that is what he is) is justifying his actions in committing various crimes (such as murder). While I am religious myself, and believe that religion has done a lot of good to the world, it can also be a very destructive force, as Hogg is indicating, especially if you are dealing with children. Our anti-hero was fed an extreme form of Calvinism from a very young age, and as such had a lot of difficulty being able to differentiate reality from fantasy. What is scary is that there are still a lot of children, even today, being fed such dogma and being denied the ability to be able to work things out for themselves.tOne final thought is that when this book was originally released it wasn't all that well received (probably because it upset the Calvinists, and it ended up being rewritten to placate them) and it was not really picked up until modern times. Mind you, I probably wouldn't call this a classic, not in the same level as Frankenstein and the like, but it is still interesting to see how relatively obscure books can come out of the shadows and start to enthral people years after it was written. It makes me wonder what other obscure, and relatively unpopular books, are lying around today that are going to become the fad a hundred years from now (maybe my blog sarkology.net).
I felt as one round whose body a deadly snake is twisted, which continues to hold him in its fangs, without injuring him, farther than in moving its scaly infernal folds with exulting delight, to let its victim feel to whose power he has subjected himself ….Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of those works that was experimental at the time it was published, and still reads as pretty experimental almost two hundered years on (it was published in 1824). This is late-Gothic at its most modern and psychological. Hokey devilish overtones aside, it’s a powerful examination of identity at its most fraying and fissiparous, as well as a sly and scathing indictment of the psychology of self-conscious “righteousness” and its consequences. Hogg’s target is the Calvinist doctrine of election, but his point has much more general application.I had read this book before, years ago, and retained sufficiently fond memories of it to have even attempted another of Hogg’s novels, the endearingly batty The Three Perils of Man. I’m not sure I would recommend Three Perils to anyone other than a specialist in nineteenth-century Scottish literature, but Confessions certainly more than stood up to a rereading. What struck me in particular, returning to this novel, was the peculiarly intimate, quasi-erotic character of the relationship between the “justified sinner”, Robert Wringham, and his real or imagined nemesis, Gil-Martin. Setting aside the novel’s theological theme, this surely has to be some kind of strange love story, exploiting the element of narcissism implicit in double-identity narratives and the dark erotics of tales of demonic and vampiric possession. Eve Sedgwick has a nice reading of this novel in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, bringing out particularly the parallels between Robert Wringham’s toxic blood-brothership with Gil-Martin and his curious, succubus-like relationship with his own brother (or half-brother) George, whose “normality” serves as a foil to the “sinister, feminized, uncanny” Robert. Hogg’s life story is fascinating. He was a shepherd and a farmhand in his youth and had no formal education whatever (for lovers of literary trivia, he is also a collateral ancestor of the Canadian writer Alice Munro). I found myself wondering as I read this novel whether Hogg’s outsider background factored into his sympathetic treatment of the outsiders within the novel: not only Robert himself, whom we first encounter lurking like a rancorous, black-clad beetle on the sidelines of golden George’s careless, aristocratic Edinburgh life—and who, curiously, ends up masquerading as a shepherd at one point (more doubling?)—but also the fascinating, though undeveloped, character of the prostitute Arabella Calvert, who teams up with George’s father’s mistress at one point as an unlikely team of middle-aged female detectives. Some advice for anyone reading Confessions for the first time: don’t give up if you find it slow to get into. The novel has a complex structure, revisiting the same narrative from different perspectives (something that has led to it being hailed as an antecedent of the postmodernist novel). Some of the most compelling material comes relatively late in the book.
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Satan leads a man to blasphemy and murder by preaching an extreme version of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation by grace. That being the following: good people, regardless of what they do, are guaranteed salvation.Things of note: * It was ignored for a century until Gide wrote of it, “It is long since I can remember being so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented by any book.” * It focuses on the consequences of perverting Christian theology. * It’s primarily satirical, and quite humorous as such, unlike the wrought seriousness of Wieland. * It uses a lot more literary pyrotechnics than does Wieland: e.g., an unreliable narrator, multiple versions of events, and a structure consisting of a “found” diary within a framing narrative within a framing narrative (i.e., levels of ambiguity at least two deep, a text within a text within a text, an everyday man getting a glimpse of a possible glimpse of something possibly beyond the world of the everyday). * It offers a grueling portrait of a man ruined by his self-involvement, proud disdain, misogyny, and misbegotten ideals (and Satan), and thence slowly sinking into the utmost depths of desperation.
—Adam
An interesting book in its way, mostly because the religious beliefs of the main character was something I hadn't heard about before. The biggest letdown about it was that the devil was supposed to be real (that's the way I read it anyway).The book is about a chain of events that happened in Scotland in the early 1700s, and is presented by the author as things that he has found out from official records and folk memory, to support a document he has found that contains the memoirs, called by the
—Asa
Added it to my list. I read Marilynne Robinson's "The Death of Adam" about five years ago, and one of the essays was an interesting defense of John Calvin (or Cauvin, as she prefers). Might make a interesting side-read if you have time.
—Marieke
