Gargoyles, Part III: Modernity
This is part three of a multi-part series on gargoyles. Parts one and two can be found here and here.
Part of the mystery of gargoyles is the way in which they defy straightforward interpretation. This has become markedly true as gargoyles have endured into modernity.
The most famous gargoyle in the world is Notre Dame’s Le Stryge in Paris (pictured above). At times, he’s been interpreted allegorically, as a straightforward symbol of either sloth or lust.1 The designer of Le Stryge, though ― Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (d. 1879) ― explicitly rejected the idea that his gargoyle was an allegory.
Le Stryge was not carved in the Middle Ages, when allegorical interpretations were common, but in the nineteenth-century. Viollet-le-Duc insisted his gargoyle somehow spoke to the entire drama of the modern spirit. Indeed, Le Stryge was meant to capture what he thought of as the boredom, sadness, and anxiety of his contemporaries ― the spiritual hauntedness of modern humanity.2
Something like this was in Sigmund Freud’s mind as well. When he came to Paris in 1899, he couldn’t help but think of Notre Dame’s gargoyles (including Le Stryge) as depictions of the disturbed mental states of modern Parisians.3 This was actually a common medical and psychological point of view from the time. “It is remarkable,” the historian Michael Camille has pointed out, “how many articles on gargoyles appeared in the pages of popular medical journals [in the nineteenth century] … as doctors and medical students began looking at the sculpted stones vomiting and squirming in pain on their local churches as possible patients.”4
This is a very modern move ― rethinking gargoyles by way of psychology. Indeed, modern people often struggle to believe even in the existence of demons. We have, very often, reinterpreted them as interior psychological problems rather than beings which live among us. We talk about “inner demons,” but strain to believe in “outer demons.”
It’s fitting, as a modern, that Freud could not see external-to-us demons in Paris’s gargoyles, but only the interior struggles of his patients. It’s fitting that Viollet-le-Duc saw Le Stryge as a depiction of sadness and anxiety. Human psychological difficulties are indeed very real, and it’s to modernity’s credit that we’ve become more aware of our “inner demons.” But seeing gargoyles this way does constitute an important change.
Gargoyles represent something of a touchstone for the way modern people think about history. For many moderns, gargoyles represent a medieval past that was marked by widespread irrationality and barbarism. What better image than the gargoyle to capture this feeling?
Though this view of the Middle Ages has, by now, been somewhat thoroughly debunked, it remains nevertheless striking to compare gargoyles carved in the modern world, as a symbol of the Middle Ages, with those gargoyles that were actually carved in the Middle Ages. Indeed, medieval gargoyles were certainly disordered and unsettling, but modern gargoyles, oddly enough, are far more grotesque and absurd.5
Some commentators have pointed out something important here, namely that modern gargoyles, which are supposed to memorialize the Middle Ages, often reflect less of what the Middle Ages actually were and more of the way moderns imagine the Middle Ages to have been ― as an age of unthinking savagery. We might even say that modern gargoyles function as a way to deliberately forget what we imagine the Middle Ages to have been. Indeed, by caricaturing gargoyles, perhaps we feel that ridiculous ideas like the existence of demons are somehow safely in the past?6
One very old way to interpret gargoyles is to look for our weaknesses displayed in them. One gargoyle might represent my gluttony, another my sloth. Today, gargoyles are only rarely installed and, when they are, their outlandishness makes them into mere novelties — something we’re unable to learn anything from. More often than not, their ridiculousness prevents us from believing in demons at all.7 We are now unable to encounter them in a serious way and, as such, unable, through them, to come to know something of ourselves, of evil, or of redemption. Perhaps, in this, we see one of modernity’s weaknesses? Perhaps, in this, we see not the modern disappearance of ridiculed gargoyles, but one of their decisive victories?
See Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 208.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 201.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), 199.
Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 263.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 158.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, xi; C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperOne, 2000), 32.
This was C.S. Lewis’s point in The Screwtape Letters, 32.