I. B. Singer’s short story ‘The Last Demon’ appears on the surface to be exactly what it says it is: a (very) short story about a demon that is the last of his kind dealing with the quandary concerning what demons should do and why there even should be demons when ‘man himself is a demon.’ Much the same way as Adorno once deemed it, if not as often claimed but later rebuked or nuanced impossible, as ‘barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,’ to which Primo Levi chimed in and said, ‘After Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poetry except about Auschwitz.’
But it can also be read otherwise, in more ways than that. The depicted demon pondering whether it is meaningful or even possible to ‘persuade to evil someone who is already convinced’ after humanity has reached a point ‘where people want to sin beyond their capacities’ or if it is just a waste of time, equal to preaching to the choir, could as well be the writer of the story pondering whether is meaningful or even possible to write in a language almost extinguished – through first assimilation, then annihilation, then assimilation again – for an audience nearly as sparse as the ones still believing in demons, ‘The women don’t pour out water any longer on the night of the winter solstice. They don’t avoid giving things in even numbers. They no longer knock at dawn at the antechamber of the synagogue. They don’t warn us before emptying the slops.’
Singer’s novels and short stories are, almost invariably, set in either a ‘not yet’ or a ‘not any longer’; they take place either before or after the Destruction (of the world as we know it) but very rarely during it; they play out either in an almost magic-realistically depicted past and ends well before the Destruction starts, or in a more modernistic-realistic depicted more or less contemporary aftermath of the Destruction, and this short story is no exception. It is not only ‘not any longer,’ but the very end appears to be coming – the Rabbi is martyred, the community slaughtered, the holy books burned, and the cemetery desecrated – or has already come – ‘The Book of Creation has been returned to the Creator.’ As it says in John 1, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ but can the same (kind of) word(s) that triggered the creation of the world as we know it also serve(s) to chronicle the destruction of the world as we used to know it?
To reconnect to the parallels between the demon and the writer, the longer into the short story one reads, the more one starts to wonder whether the demon in the story and the writer of the story overlap: if they are not only the last ones of their respective kind (the demon the last survivor of the town of Tishevitz, where all human inhabitants have been killed by in Holocaust; the writer one of the last proponents for and offspring from a literary and cultural tradition that has been almost extinguished) but also two of the same kind, two who both aim to entice and enchant a disenchanted audience in a disenchanted world: The demon says, ‘… as long as a single volume remains, I have something to sustain me,’ and clings to the last words of the old storybook, ‘When the last letter is gone / The last of the demons is done,’ much as the writer himself party clung to the ancient Hasidic world and its mores and morals, and entirely to the old Yiddish language and its parables and figures of speech. The demon sucks ‘on the letters’ and feeds himself; he ‘counts the words, makes rhymes, and tortuously interprets and reinterprets each dot,’ but what writer does not (at least aspire to) do the same?
The assumption that the demon and the writer, or rather demons and writers, are not only alike but the same, is underlined by the following quote from the demon narrating the story, ‘Satan has cooked up a new dish of kasha. The Jews have now developed writers. Yiddish ones, Hebrew ones, and they have taken over our trade.’
One can, of course, also reinterpret the italicized quote above to mean that ‘As long as the last letter is still there / The last demon (writer) is still here,’ thus implying that maybe the bygone world is not totally gone as long as we have words to remember and reimagine and recreate it? Perhaps the words can, after all, not only serve to chronicle the destructed world but also to hold the destruction of (the memory of) the world at bay. Perhaps that is the mission of both the demon in the story and the writer of the story; maybe that is the central quandary facing them both – how to be able to remember and reimagine and recreate, not to say revive and resuscitate, what they both need enough of to destroy to justify their respective existence.
The demon’s dilemma is what to do if there is ‘no longer an Angel of God or an Angel of Evil’ and if there are ‘no sins and no more temptations;’ to what use is a demon when there are no saints left to lure into sin since people already have maxed out their capacities to sin. The writer’s dilemma is similar but somehow different. In a way, it may not be separate dilemmas as much as a common paradox: both the demon and the writer have to build up, to rebuild, what they, in their different ways, strive to undermine and tear down. The former needs to holify the sinners to be able to lead them astray; the latter needs to fortify and solidify a vanishing world to be able to destabilize and undermine it.
This dilemma can also, as Adam Kirsch did in his article ‘I. B. Singer, the Last Demon’, be summarized as follows: both the demon and the writer ‘are living on a language, after the people who spoke the language are gone’ and therefore left with the absurd task of being the (last) ones commemorating and preserving it; in a way keeping it alive in order to keep themselves alive. The irony is that Singer ended up preserving in literature the world he once took great pains to leave behind him in order move to, as a Hasidic Jew, first to Warsaw and then to New York and become a world-known writer whose fiction is rebellious, irreverent, ‘mocking, disputatious, despairing, perverse.’ To quote the article above, ‘the civilization against which Singer’s rebellion was directed was itself disrupted and torn down, rendering any kind of modernist impiety not just unnecessary but almost blasphemous.’ (All quotes in this paragraph are from Adam Kirsch, ‘I. B. Singer, the Last Demon’, Tablet Magazine, 18th April 2012.)
On the other hand, this mocking and disputing can be viewed as a labor of love, ‘For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.’ (Hebrews 12:6)
With that said and to conclude, the short story can, in a way, through being written and the way it is written, be described as trying to both raise and answer the same question, namely, if there is ‘no further need for demons’ any longer, is there any further need for writers (and perhaps readers), i.e., is it still possible to write (and maybe) read after the Destruction, or in other words are there still words at – and to describe – (the known) World’s end, and beyond?
Öyvind Vågen