If George Pell really does go to hell (hecklers outside Victoria’s County Court forecast that he was going there, to “rot” or to “burn” or perhaps to do both) what will he find there?
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What is hell? What goes on there? What does it look, smell and taste like? Is it the same for everyone or is it individually tailored to maximise its hellishness for each person banged up there?
I own up to being rather interested in all this not only because I fear that if there is a hell I may go there (my life has not been blameless) but also because those of us who are well-read know of umpteen intellectually stimulating, excitingly contrasting depiction of hell in literature.
One of the most vivid is the very Irish, very Roman Catholic one (and so perhaps with some special resonance for a disgraced cardinal) in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.
A school preacher puts the wind up the Irish schoolboys by describing how “Hell is a dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke.”
“The prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison … O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls...
“The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench ... a huge and rotting human fungus.
“The damned howl and scream at one another … They are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance … The devils ... mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. ‘Why did you sin? Why did you not repent of your evil ways?’”
There is a sameness, a kind of McTorment about the sufferings of everyone described by Joyce’s preacher. But in Dante’s Inferno there are, to quote a deft summary of it, “nine deepening circles [of hell] in which sinners get [precisely] what they have deserved”.
“The lustful are blown forever in tormenting storms; corrupt politicians simmer in bubbling tar; professional flatterers are bathed in excrement.”
These two notions of hell are very exciting. And how attractive to be able to think that Australian politicians who plunder their “entitlements” will eventually simmer in bubbling tar, that conservative shock jocks who so toadyingly flatter their PM guests will one day be bathed in excrement. But the two visions of hell are, for me (a lapsed Anglican and now a kind of atheist) too picturesque and superstition-rich to be convincing.
For me the most plausible (and so the most alarming) depiction of hell in literature is the one Jean-Paul Sartre gives us in his play Huis Clos/No Exit, with its theme that “hell is other people”.
I first saw this play on BBC television in 1964 when I was an impressionable, sensitive, post-pubescent, and have never forgotten it. Thinking of hell in recent days (prompted by the Pell imbroglio) I have just watched the play again, using the miracle of YouTube, on which there is a variety of ripper, chilling performances of Sartre’s 90-minute nightmare. In it the characters are condemned to the hellishness of each other’s company.
Those of you who are warm and gregarious will struggle to understand how the company of others could be hellish, but then nice people like you are probably in any case destined for heaven. For those of us who are not so warm and gregarious (who perhaps vastly prefer the company of dogs to the company of people) and who find our species very difficult to love, No Exit has a challenging ring of truth about it.
The idea of hell being especially tailored for each of us is alarming for those of us who, in this life, have passionate likes and dislikes. Devils who, chortling fiendishly among themselves, got to cobble together a boutique hell for Ian Warden, would have a field day.
Their hell, designed for me, might have a Liberal government modelled (in its extreme nastiness) on the long, slow, torment of the Howard governments (1996-2007) of all those years of human fungus.
The demons’ cunningly designed hell for me might instead/as well see me stuck in an eternal Tamworth Country Music Festival with no escape from the music (Australian country music, so derivatively American, so shamefully unAustralian, so twangingly banal) that caused me such pain in my lifetime.
In this designed-just-for-Ian hell the only TV show will be Married At First Sight, the only garden will be an everlasting vulgar Floriade, the only exercise available will be (horror!) social tennis (social tennis is always a powerful confirmation of Sartre’s hypothesis that hell is other people), the only radio show will star only Alan Jones.
The only thing resembling a newspaper will be The Daily Telegraph and every possibility of this whole loathsome hell being made a better, less selfish, more progressive place will be thwarted by the human fungus of hell’s energetic NIMBYs, eerily reminiscent of the NIMBYs one suffered in life, in Canberra.
