this period of vagrant wandering to figure his spiritual condition of doubt and loneliness, so it is striking that regular occupation, when he finally obtains it, whether on land or sea, does not cure his alienation. His sea adventures, as fervently as he had longed for them, ultimately prove unsatisfying, since he discovers that “for that calling I never much affected but only as it was a means whereby I might see the world and learn the art of navigation” (39). Having made a number of voyages as an apprentice seaman and begun his mathematical self-instruction (studying during his breaks and sleeping during his shifts), he recognizes that selling his labor, not simply physical travel and distance – underwrites his alienation – a sense of lack of control over his existence, as well as lack of secure social relations – and decides that “as a master or master’s mate or as a purser or surgeon or otherwise as a passenger I would if occasion required, go to sea, but not as a sailor or for my labour” (40, emphasis mine). Gaining some attention for his mathematical studies fuels his hope of being freed from exploitation and abuse, but he does not resist them directly; instead he deploys the “weapons of the weak” (shirking, flight, and so on), while pursuing upward mobility: “I began to think that the good things that belonged unto others also belonged to me” (45).12 Even this does not assuage his alienation. He eventually determines, thus, that “a man might have all these things and yet be a most miserable man,” but unlike Augustine, who, upon coming to a similar conclusion, rejects rhetoric and his teaching career, Norwood in the end does not see any need to abandon mathematics or surveying, which, to the contrary, become the idiom in which he finds his saved self: enclosure (76).
Some of the differences in the two texts can be accounted for in the different training, habits, and talents of mind: the great, immensely learned philosopher versus the self-taught mathematician – but such contrasts do not fully account for the ways that Norwood transforms Augustine’s Confessions. What distinguishes them, rather, is subjective privatization and enclosure, an enclosure that emerges with Norwood’s sense of being, in the end, utterly alone in his struggles, especially a “very sensible annoyance of Satan” (93). While he was surveying the individual properties on Bermuda, he experiences the conversion that he describes in a figure familiar to him from his profession: “the Lord was pleased to … keep out Satan as it were with a pale or hedge from making that common inroad into my heart as he had so long used to do” (85). This “pale or hedge” around his newly enclosed “Puritan” self, however, appears to leave him just as alienated as before, albeit in different terms. When he returns to London, he finds himself beset with agonizing spiritual doubts and isolation in the metropolis and resolves “to acquaint some Christians with my condition, and to gain some Christian acquaintance … [since] my heart even thirsted as the parched ground or as one parched and singed by Satan’s temptations, to have some near communion and familiarity with some that were the children of God” (98). This turns out to be difficult to accomplish, not only because locating and introducing himself to such a community is challenging in a vast and disorienting city but especially because he feels unable to reveal the full extent of his misery even when he does find “acquaintance”:
I was very shy and sparing in declaring the worst things, supposing that never any true Christian was in that case. The fearful blasphemies and annoyances of Satan I did but lightly touch upon, concealing my greatest grievances and fears, supposing that if I should lay open all I should be rejected of Christians as a reprobate, a man forsaken of God and given over to Satan.
(101)
The autobiography concludes, in fact, with a page-long prayer that calls attention to his isolation by using a collective pronoun only once. In contrast, Augustine concludes with: “Of you we must ask, in you we must seek, at you we must knock. Thus, only shall we receive, thus shall we find, thus will it be opened to us” (Sheed, 286; O’Donnell, 205). The prayer that constitutes the entire latter part of the Confessions – several chapters – takes collective pronouns (e.g., “nos”) and verb conjugations as the norm, only very occasionally displaced with an “ego” (“I”) or a “meum” (“my”).
If the pronouns and Norwood’s meticulously documented “alienation” suggest a ambiguity in his own sense of belonging to a collective, “Satan” is identified as the agent of this isolation:
Sometimes he seemed to lean on my back or arms or shoulder, sometimes hanging on my cloak or gown. Sometimes it seemed in my feeling as if he had stricken me in sundry places, sometimes as if he were handling my heart and working withal a wonderful hardness therein, accompanied with many strange passions, affections, lusts, and blasphemies.
(93)
While this kind of thing is quite common in spiritual autobiographies in the seventeenth century, there is nothing at all like it in Augustine, who never imagines himself as engaged in a direct struggle with Satan. For Norwood, however, the fight with Satan is personal and physical: in bed, on the street, at any time or place – “almost continual” – he could be subjected thus. What is particularly striking about Norwood’s narrative of these dramatic experiences – as with the others in the genre – is the highly refined “self” consciousness that they illustrate; Norwood’s sense of the “social” when it emerges at all, seems comparatively remote, alien; he is hyper aware of his body, his anxieties, the peril of his soul. The self is assumed to be isolated, pre-social, and, except for grace, ultimately alone in its fight with “Satan.” Even Norwood’s attempts at explicit social connection are impeded by a sense of threat and isolation: walking down the street “all things seemed in their kinds to be my enemies” (99). It is not, of course, that he never describes meetings with, or comforts of, family, friends, and ministers but rather that these are always narrated at a remove from the immediate site of battle between his soul and “Satan.”
“Satan” assaults Norwood, not only rendering his body a battleground but also calling attention to its enclosure and his subjective alienation. However, “Satan,” too, as we have already seen, is a battleground in the period, a cultural sign through which personal and interpersonal relations and change are being experienced and understood, though not always in the same way. Strachey, for his part, associated “devilish disquiets” with disruption of traditional social hierarchy. The Diggers, for their part, viewed “the serpent” as a figure for the “imagination” that gives rise to private property and exploitation, and such “division” as Norwood experiences: “the serpent that deceives the man [so that] mankind falls from single simplicity to be full of division.” Norwood interprets Satan another way, as a threat to his individual self, revealing the costs of emergent capital even to someone becoming what Gramsci would later call its “organic intellectual” – an adept and theorist of one of its enabling practices. Later, in his chapters on “primitive accumulation,” Marx calls this alienating “Satan” by its social name – capitalism – to free it from the constraints of the individualizing narrative into which Norwood helps insert it – a narrative through which inequality will be justified as an effect of an earlier historical moment when the “diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite” were separated from the “lazy rascals spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.” When this “nursery tale” becomes accepted as “history,” exploitation, alienation, and the individual, all become normalized in it (873). The Diggers – with their insistence on the “common” – mounted a resistance to the conditions that later conjure up this tale, suggesting an alternative path to modernity, but they – and the radical commons – were defeated. In enclosing his “self” and land as emergent capitalism demanded, while obscuring other possibilities, Norwood helps to write the history of the victors in a global idiom, in which domestic and colonial practices are allied.
This global history insinuates itself as affirmative, or, at least, necessary, such that any ensuing symptoms at the level of the subject are assumed to be mere personal pathology. Indeed, it is easy enough to transcode Norwood’s affliction from a religious to a psychological idiom, as, for example, Meredith Skura does, but in so doing she moves from one individual-normalizing narrative to another. Michael Taussig, alternatively, has read Devil tales as social: “a stunningly apt symbol of … alienation,” in the Marxist sense of being detached from one’s proper social being by the objectification of the market (xi).