Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse
In art and life alike, it is important not to confuse the supernatural with the preternatural.
The supernatural, what is super naturam, "above nature," refers, properly speaking, to the genuinely transcendent--that is, what it is distinguished from the natural not by a straightforward conflict or addition, but by totally superseding it, nullifying it, prefiguring it in its totality, and/or drawing it up whole into itself. The genuinely supernatural cannot be anticipated by the natural, or portrayed in terms of it: it can only, to a limited extent, be conveyed by its action on and through the natural. Hence the proper mode(s) of the Sacred Scriptures and other theological and mystical writings.
The preternatural, what is praeter naturam, "next to nature" or "outside" it, is not like this: most properly, it refers to those things that do not transcend the natural, but rather exist alongside it, adding something to it or in some way operating outside its normal bounds. It is the preternatural that is the more common purview of human art and literature.
Even here, one can distinguish two senses of the preternatural, one of which is more proper than the other. In the first place, the term preternatural is often used for entities that, while not properly supernatural, are nonetheless more spiritual or powerful or higher in some sense, and thus have greater power to act on and even against nature: demons and angels and ghosts and human persons.
In itself, though, there is nothing unnatural about these entities, which are in the most immediate sense simply one group of created natures among others. I have never seen a ghost, but I have had a few encounters with demons--and I can assure my readers that there is nothing particularly exciting or artistic about such experiences. The existence of an entity that is strong or difficult to detect or even very intelligent and who wishes to harm you may be frightening, but there is nothing intrinsically interesting about it, any more than about a cockroach or charging rhinoceros or human murderer.
Still, while these entities are not beyond nature in a strong sense, the reality is that if we examine the bulk of art about spiritual beings, indeed the bulk of art about even threatening human beings or animals, we find that it is layered with a great deal of strange, eerie "preternatural" effects. The reason for this, though, is found in the relationship between such entities and the preternatural in the proper sense.
Hence the central thesis of this essay, namely that the "preternatural" in human and artistic terms refers precisely to the interiority of human experience and action, and in particular to two troubling features of this interiority: (1) its frequent opacity, and (2) its susceptibility to being acted upon and affected.
A human person does not merely exist as an entity in the world, one object among other objects acting and being acted upon: they exist, rather, by receiving and interiorizing the world, and then communicating what they have received.
Hence the essential paradox of human life and personhood as such: every human being lives in the same objective world, yet every human being exists in a sense in their own world, which is not merely a "subjective" as opposed to "objective" world, or a false as opposed to a true world, but which is precisely the world as received and related to by themselves. As both Trinitarian theology and Christology in their several ways show, the person in its actual, particular existence and relationality is precisely what cannot be comprehended within nature, but exists "outside of" it, "alongside" it. As an intellectual entity, an entity that fundamentally is intellect--that is to say, a pure receptivity that is actualized and exists only in its receiving and relating to and even becoming what is other as other--every human being simply is the whole world received according to a particular relation.
In theory, there is nothing dangerous, nothing even false or non-objective, about this state of affairs. Each person receives the world according to their particular, truthful relation to it, characterizes that world comprehensively according to that relation, and then gives that world back as their own to other persons. In this giving and receiving of the content of the world and all things according to real and true relation, this essentially Trinitarian dynamic, is the whole glory and beauty of intellect and personhood and, in its most perfect and transcendent form, the very life of God himself.
Yet in the world as we find it, this reality of personhood can go very badly wrong. Each person lives in, lives as, a world: but these worlds are frequently constituted as much by falsehood, disconnection, privation, and malicious intention as by true and objective relation. When we encounter people, when we start to understand them, we get not so much a sense of their psychology or their identity in a straightforward sense: we get, rather, a glimpse of the world in which they exist, the world as which they exist. Without a doubt we have all had the experience of encountering someone (perhaps even ourselves) and getting a glimpse of the world in which they lived--and finding it a hellish, illusive wasteland.
At the same time, the worlds we construct or exist in are never merely our own creations, based merely on our own relations. As persons, starting from the time we are infants, we all form our senses of the world and our personalities through receiving from and relating to others. Without this, no true relationships among people are possible, and indeed we cannot really function as rational beings, cannot really live in the world or form our own sense of it. We are beings that by our very nature and inmost operation are aimed at receiving other peoples' worlds, other peoples' interiorities, and reconciling and uniting them to our own.
At its best, this process of communication is a constant ongoing process, a constant reception and correction and expansion and integration of our sense of the world that brings us deeper and deeper into relation with each other and the depths of being. At worst, though, this process of receiving our worlds from without can become the most brutal type of violence, a violence that threatens to efface our inmost selves. We have all almost certainly had the experience of being overwhelmed, deafened, deadened, perhaps even totally annihilated by someone else's hellish interiority, someone else's false sense of the world and their and our place in it.
It is here that the less proper sense of the preternatural relates directly to, and is only comprehensible in terms of, the proper sense of the term. In principle, everything in the world has some power over our interiority, some place in the worlds we form. The more something--a time, a place, an object, a melody, a work of art, a relationship--directly impacts our interiority, shapes and characterizes and constitutes it, the more we perceive that thing as somehow "beyond nature," strange, wonderful, luminous, eerie.
"Spirits" and human persons alike are not preternatural in any sense that transcends this--they are simply entities in the world with the capacity to impact our interior lives. Yet as intellectual beings with interior lives, thoughts and intentions and designs and worlds of their own, they are entities who have a great deal more power to shape and even dominate our interiorities than any other. In the final sense, indeed, only other persons, other intellectual entities, are or can be preternatural. Only they can give us our senses of the world, alter them, or destroy them.
Hence, it is quite true and even quite literal to say that for the saint the world is heaven, and that for the evil man one and the same world is hell. Indeed, the saint in a real sense is heaven; his whole existence and personality is found in the communication of the world as given and received and lived in beatitude; and as evil men grow more evil, they in a real sense become Hell, their existence consisting in little more than the communication of their own misery and damnation to others. It is this interplay and drama of personality, of the communication of whole cosmoses, that constitutes most of the actual substance of our lives in this world.
To illustrate the point, I will now turn to examining a few works of art that bear on this question, and show how they all reflect, to varying degrees, this fundamental reality of human life: and how their use of "preternatural" elements in the exterior sense is ultimately a mask and means for examining the ways in which people's interior lives are impacted, illuminated, deformed, or destroyed by the world and other persons. In these stories, ghosts and demons and other people alike are ghostly, not because they threaten us without, but because they threaten us within.
