Bloom’s Major Literary Characters:  Satan, edited by Harold Bloom

This book was one that pleased me a great deal for a variety of reasons.  For one, the book itself consists of various essays that discuss what some literary critical writers have said about Satan, and that is something that would generally pique my interest (more on that shortly).  Satan, of course, is a fascinating character when one deals with him in literature, and as someone who has a greater interest than most in the subject of demonology, this is clearly a book I would find enjoyable on those grounds alone, even if there weren’t any other grounds to enjoy a book like this.  But when the book is made up of essays including some particularly interesting analyses of Satan in scripture as well as literature and including C.S. Lewis’ own thoughts about Satan as the villain of Paradise lost, there is a great more to enjoy than simply the subject matter.  There is a lot to enjoy here concerning the high quality of literary criticism that is on offer here, and the appreciation of fine textual criticism either can encourage the reader of this book to seek out other writing by those same people or to seek out more volumes of Bloom’s major literary characters, because the author wisely gets out of the way of the critics he includes here, at least most of the time.

This book is about 250 pages and it begins with an essay by the editor on the analysis of character as well as a note and introduction to the work as a whole that seeks to frame how Satan has appeared throughout Western literature.  After that there is a broad selection of essays about Satan, including one on the devils of Hawthorne’s Faust myth by William Bysshe Stein, a discussion of Satan in Milton’s epics by C.S. Lewis, a look at Mark Twain’s masks of Satan by Stanley Brodwin, the Satanic pattern by Frank S. Kastor, the Devil by J.W. Smeed, an essay on Satan as epic hero by STella Purce Revard, Lucifer in high medieval art and literature by Jeffrey Burton Russell, who also contributes an essay on the Romantic devil, a discussion of the social history of Satan in the Hebrew Bible, apocryphal literature, and the Gospels by Elaine Pagels, and Satan and the Papacy in Paradise Regained by Laura Lunger Knoppers.  After this there is a character profile, a discussion of contributors, bibliography, acknowledgements, and an index.

This particular volume is an excellent look at Satan as he has appeared in the great writings of the Western tradition from biblical times to the writings of Mark Twain, including discussions of the Faust stories as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and in Dante’s Inferno.  Reading a book like this is not only a good way to see what other people think about the portrayal of Satan in literature, as well as the advantages that the mobile and tempting Satan has over the portrayal of static good characters in writings, but is also an encouragement to read the great literature and scripture where Satan appears.  It is a great deal safer to learn about how Satan is portrayed in writing than to have an unhealthy interest in such matters as the spirit world as is all too common, but it is worthwhile also to notice the way that our portrayals of Satan as the enemy of humanity say a lot about our own views of ourselves and the evils and problems of our own time.  For all of these reasons this book, and others like it, certainly present worthy material to read and to think about.