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Date Posted: 10:40:04 10/27/05 Thu
Author: Ninerva
Subject: Angel/Angelus: Exploring the paradox.

SOULLESS

One of the main premises in AtS is that we can not separate Angel and Angelus any more than we can separate the 'human' from the vampire, that it is essentially a false separation. One thing which the writers do continually in AtS is place emphasis on the fact that Angel is not human. He is seen drinking blood, we see the effect that human blood over animal blood has on him, he is seen avoiding sunlight (though sometimes forgetting to), In Somnambulist we have him admitting that he found himself enjoying his dreams of murder. In short there is an emphasis on how, as Angel, the vampiric instincts are not dormant, only controlled through an act of conscious will. In BtVS we see Angelus being 'released' to the world as if he were a completely new character. For the purposes of the story being told then that was legitimate. However in AtS the same approach would not be legitimate, not after so much time and energy had been spent establishing that Angel and Angelus were one integrated character. So what approach should be taken when releasinging Angelus in AtS? The Angelus that emerges in Souless has experienced the same life as Angel, influenced his choices, he did not just watch passively from some inner cage, and will not comply passively from a physical cage. A common complaint is that this later incarnation of Angelus is 'Angelus-lite'. If you compare him with Buffy's Angelus then he must seem so, but the story has moved on and the story being told now is different. Within the context of the story being told now Angelus can not be 'pure evil and malice' because the character of Angel is so much more complex, and Angelus is a part of that. So who is Angelus in this new context?

(While I believe that Angel and Angelus can not be separated, for the purposes of clarity I will continue the tradition of refering to them as two identities.)

MOTIVELESS MALIGNANCY

And so to the play...


"Othello and Desdemona. My favorite couple."

In Soulless we see him manipulating those around him, pressing all the right buttons, destroying relationships already at breaking point. Why? He cites Othello, is he perhaps seeing himself playing the role of Iago in the drama he is seeking to create. In all of Shakespeares plays, indeed in literature in general, it's hard to find a character considered as evil as Iago. Iago has a deadly coldness, a natural egoism and an instinctive talent for twisting the truth to manipulate others behaviour to his own agenda.

The phrase "motiveless malignancy" is taken from a note Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his copy of Shakespeare, as he was preparing a series of lectures. The phrase has often been used to mean doing evil because you are evil. He was referring to Iago, and sparked a long ongoing debate on what Iago's motives were, or whether he was just plain evil. The same debate applies when discussing Angelus. Is he just plain evil, end of discussion, or is it more complicated than that? In many ways the phrase "motiveless malignancy" has been taken out of context. What Coleridge actually wrote was:

"The last Speech, the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity -- how awful! In itself fiendish -- while yet he was allowed to bear the divine image, too fiendish for his own steady View. -- A being next to Devil -- only not quite Devil!"

He is saying that Iago in this speech is hunting for motives for his own actions. The motives which are often cited are being passed over for promotion, his suspicion that Othello is having an affair with his wife, and the suspicion that Cassio is also having an affair with Emilia. Yet Coleridge does not see these as motives, simply as rationalisations. By Colridge's own definition of motive:

"It is a matter of infinite difficulty, but fortunately of comparative indifference, to determine what a man's motive may have been for this or that particular action. Rather seek to learn what his objects in general are! -- What does he habitually wish? habitually pursue? -- and thence deduce his impulses, which are commonly the true effecient causes of men's conduct; and without which the motive itself would not have become a motive."

What he is saying is that it is not enough just to look for a character's 'motive' for particular actions, that you should look for the underlying impulse and it's cause. Angelus's motive for killing his father, for instance, it would be easy to cite the father's bad treatment of Liam, and Angelus's reaction to this, as the motive, but it is more revealing to look deeper than this and 'deduce' where his impulses come from.

"Without the perception of this truth, it is impossible to understand the character of Iago, who is represented as now assigning one, and then another, and again a third, motive for his conduct, all alike the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence."

Coming back again to the premise that the Angelus that emerges in Souless has not existed as a separate entity from Angel all those years, how can we deduce the cause of his behaviour, particularly in Soulless?


"What we once were informs all that we have become. The same love will infect our hearts - even if they no longer beat. Simple death won’t change that."

(Darla, in The Prodigal; Season One)

I don't know if 'love' was the right word here, but if you take 'love' to mean the passions which underpin our desires then the point is well made. She refers here to how Liam will influence Angelus, but taking this forward we can see how Angelus will influence Angel, and vice versa when Angelus emerges again. This is consistant with the argument that you can not separate Angel and Angelus, that they are one and the same. Going back to 'The Prodigal' Darla astutely recognises that Angelus will never now get the one thing he desires, the approval of his Father. Maybe his contempt for his victims comes from his envy of them, because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no achievable desire of his own. Maybe his anger, his hatred and his contempt comes from an absense of passion, which in turn comes from the impossibility of realising his one desire. Even back in BtVS the judge find him 'clean', in that he lacks any trace of humanity, maybe what is missing in Angelus is the passion that we see even in other vampires. As Angelus himself says...

"Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead."

Without desire, without having anything to gain in tangible terms, his actions are indeed motiveless in a sense, producing the kind of 'motiveless malignancy' which seems to be the definition of evil. Angelus had a great deal of passion when he killed his Father, but once that was done he was sat with his feet up on the table of his Father's house, not glowing from victory, but searching for it and finding it absent. As Darla said, it was acceptance that Liam/Angelus wanted, and now he would never have it, and it left him with a void, a lack of desire. As Angel he drifted for years, still without passion, remorse yes, but no desire, no motive to act, not until he saw Buffy that is. Then came THAT moment, perfect happiness as a symbol of the acceptance he had always desired, both from his Father and from Buffy. Then he lost his soul, and as Angelus he again lost that chance of acceptance from someone who he had loved, but could no longer love. All that was left was that hollow space where passion used to be.

"He has a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly."
(Iago in Othello; Act V, scene I)

I believe that Angelus, emerging as he does from the binary existence he shared with Angel, has a sense of being hollow, in that he has now a knowledge of his own emptiness and incapacity for love. If this is so then the only way of confronting his own emptiness and still value himself is to believe that everyone else is equally corrupt. His "mission" is therefore to unveil what he perceives as the shallowness of all good people and their essential hypocrisy. In fact the very existence of good people (like nuns for instance) is an affront to him and he wants to detroy them, not just kill them, destroy them. He does this by undermining the good and exploiting those emotions, those passions which might lead any of us into acting against others. On Angelus's part there is no motive in the sense that he has anything to gain, his primary satisfaction is from the infliction of suffering on others and the exercise of power. This comes from his utter contempt for his victims. His success depends on his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires. But maybe behind his contempt lies something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own. He manipulates others, but his victims learn nothing about his nature, only something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived, but not why he chose to manipulate them.

However if Angelus lacks passion then in contrast Angel has passion in abundance. If we then integrate them together we have a complete identity. Yet the greatest barrier to this integration is Angel(us) himself. Just as Angelus does not understand Angel, as evidenced when he asks Wesley "What’s the deal with Angel and the Raiders of the Lost Ark?", also Angel does not understand Angelus, what he needs to become whole. While Angel is still trying to find the kind of redemption he's been brought up to believe in he will not accept an integration, to do so is to let go of the thing he desires and risk becoming what he was before. He is trapped in a paradox, and until a solution is found he will continue in his binary existence.

REDEMPTION

According to Catholic doctrine Grace is a "supernatural gift of God to intellectual creatures (men, angels) for their eternal salvation, whether the latter be furthered and attained through salutary acts or a state of holiness." As a demon it would be impossible for Angel to acheive a 'state of holiness' and if you take on board the Catholic POV, which it's obvious that Angel does, surely then the only route for redemption open to a vampire is through 'salutary acts'. Yet redemption is styled by the "Catechism of the Council of Trent" (1, v, 15) as "complete, integral in all points, perfect and truly admirable". Can Angel ever acheive an integrated and perfect existance? Would that not mean integrating the irredeemable part of his nature and therfore make any kind of redemption impossible? St. Paul offers hope to all sinners by stating that "where sin abounded, grace did more abound" (Rom., v, 20), that is, evil as the effects of sin are, they are more than compensated by the fruits of Redemption. Here we see again how this binary existance creates within Angel both hope and frustration in his quest for redemption. In real terms, by the definitions above, the only solution to the paradox is to separate the two entities, where one can acheive redemption just as the other will never. Yet this solution is deeply unsatisfactory, you can not surely separate the two identities, or can you?


The real turn around comes in S5, when he has to face up to the loss of his son, a loss of his own making. We see the effect, the loss of passion and the effect it has on him. It almost destroys him. Yet through this he learns to understand himself as a whole, the part which is Angelus, the importance of having something to fight for. In S5 he finally let's go of his need to be accepted by others and accepts himself. Is that when an integration occurs?

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