The preceding discussion raises an obvious question: is it still possible to write characters and actions that have the solidity, the opacity, the grace that we have been discussing? If so, how? If not, why not?
The first point I want to make here is that the intent of this question need not be to reach back to some earlier form (epic, tragedy). It is a question about narrative in general, in fiction, in television, in film—and it is also a question about ourselves, our characters and our actions.
When I was finishing college and beginning to write in response to the world around me—when, that is, my writing ceased to consist merely of gestures at moods I aspired to and became in some sense an attempt to respond to realities—it immediately began to seem to me that the world I was coming of age into was one that did not contain stories.
This statement will either be perfectly familiar to my reader or else strike her as perfectly ridiculous; it is difficult to imagine an in-between. What I mean by it is that the people I knew and met around me (myself perhaps most of all) seemed incapable of taking the sorts of actions and making the sorts of gestures that could become the stuff of dramatic narrative. At the time, I might have explained this by saying that we were too prudent, too hesitating, too cautious; but however narrowly accurate this description may have been it was a superficial one. It is more revealing to say that we were too transparent to ourselves. We knew too much about ourselves. Or rather: we looked too closely at ourselves, and this gaze was not insightful, because it was clouded by powerful ideas about what we wanted to see and what we were afraid of seeing. But though it was not insightful, it was in some brute sense penetrating and left no room for the dark un-interrogated realms of the self from which dramatic action springs. It interrogated them out of existence.
(I am reminded of some comments by Adam Phillips from an interview in the Paris Review a couple of years ago: “What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge. And of your wish to know yourself in that coherent, narrative way. You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.”)
However peculiar this experience (of the absence of the conditions for dramatic action) may have been to a certain disposition and to a certain class milieu, what I have seen since has led me to believe that it or something similar has become quite wide-spread. I think this is one of the main reasons that all of the most popular narrative art of the past two decades— Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, etc.—is essentially escapist in nature, driven by fantastical narrative forces that come from outside the ordinary world. This is also why so much of these stories focus on children: because children, we imagine, are exempt from the self-consciousness that cripples the rest of us. And this is why so much of them are set in a (semi-mythic) past whose nostalgic appeal is inextricable from the sense that, back then, people were realer (men real men, women real women, etc.); or else in an imaginary future whose central premise is some hardship that, again, makes actions and people realer. Sometimes, within these imaginary worlds, we even find figures that stand for the vapidity of our own world. Thus, for example, in Hunger Games, the people of the capital display just the superficiality and frivolity and alienation from the world of life-and-death that Hunger Games is itself an escape from. In Harry Potter, the muggles go on tiredly with their vapid worries and prejudices, blind to the vivid magical drama on which their lives depend.
I rarely read contemporary literary fiction, but what I have read seems to be struggling with the same problem in different terms. Thus, in 10:04, for 250 pages, Ben Lerner displays his prodigious talent, but can create no story, can only take us through the obsessive, awkward puttering of his life, from which he seems always on the verge of extracting a narrative force, but that force never emerges. In The First Bad Man, on the other hand, Miranda July unfurls one dramatic event after another; at first, these are delightfully absurd, but the further the book goes, the more forced and desperate they seem, until it becomes clear that it has all been only for show, and the lurid drama of her book is only another way of trying to cope with the utter lack of drama of her world.
So the question “Can we still write characters and actions like these?” is in fact a question not merely about ourselves as writers or about the characters we write but about ourselves as characters. That is—and this is as it should be—the problems entailed in writing stories are inextricable from the problems entailed in living. If the conditions of the world change, then the conditions of narrative change.
But this suggests, in turn, that we cannot simply write our way of the problem; we must live our way out of it. But the verb live and the rhetoric it invokes in the phrases where I am using it, suggests an essentially personal project, whereas this is the opposite of what I want to suggest. If I am right that a development in how we look at ourselves, how we know ourselves, has made it difficult to tell stories that are about the world rather than escapes form it—then this development should not be understood as a purely private matter; it is a social development. To address it would require not merely a shift in our individual outlook but in our relations to others—the two, of course, are inextricably interwoven. I believe that this shift is in fact possible. More than that, I think it is one we must undertake.
Friday, August 24, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Immediacy (5 of 6)
In “The Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” the essay from Either/Or with which I began this thread, Kierkegaard writes that the innocence of Greek tragedy was possible because “in the ancient world subjectivity was not fully conscious and reflective.” For this reason, “the action itself possesses an epic feature… is just as much event as action”— event, i.e. not something done by persons according to their free will, but something which simply happens, as if without an agent.
This as we have seen imparts a solidity, a grace, to both action and character. And it leads, K says, to a largeness, a surplus contained in each: “The peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed from character alone, that the action is not reflected enough in the acting subject…. Whether the chorus approaches the substantiality of epic or the exultation of lyric, it still points in a way to that extra which will not be absorbed in individuality. The monologue, for its part,… its extra is what will not be absorbed in action and situation” (pg. 142). But in modern tragedy, “the tragic element can be exhaustively represented in situation and worlds, there being nothing whatever left over of the immediate” (pg. 143).
What is this extra? What is this immediate? What does he mean not reflected enough in the acting subject? It is no use to demand definite answers from Kierkegaard. We must allow these terms simply to float. That is, we must have faith. Why should we? Because the terms, murky as they are, are terribly suggestive. It is as if, in their ancient forms, where they are not required to render full account of themselves but are allowed to retain a certain opacity, action and character contain something—some dark expanse, some irreducible solidity—that vanishes in the face of interrogation and comprehension.
I am reminded here of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater.” (In the quotations below, I have combined two translations available online, this one, and this one.) The essay describes a conversation Kleist supposedly had in the winter of 1801 with a ballet dancer friend. In the course of the conversation, von Kleist relates the following anecdote:
This as we have seen imparts a solidity, a grace, to both action and character. And it leads, K says, to a largeness, a surplus contained in each: “The peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed from character alone, that the action is not reflected enough in the acting subject…. Whether the chorus approaches the substantiality of epic or the exultation of lyric, it still points in a way to that extra which will not be absorbed in individuality. The monologue, for its part,… its extra is what will not be absorbed in action and situation” (pg. 142). But in modern tragedy, “the tragic element can be exhaustively represented in situation and worlds, there being nothing whatever left over of the immediate” (pg. 143).
What is this extra? What is this immediate? What does he mean not reflected enough in the acting subject? It is no use to demand definite answers from Kierkegaard. We must allow these terms simply to float. That is, we must have faith. Why should we? Because the terms, murky as they are, are terribly suggestive. It is as if, in their ancient forms, where they are not required to render full account of themselves but are allowed to retain a certain opacity, action and character contain something—some dark expanse, some irreducible solidity—that vanishes in the face of interrogation and comprehension.
I am reminded here of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater.” (In the quotations below, I have combined two translations available online, this one, and this one.) The essay describes a conversation Kleist supposedly had in the winter of 1801 with a ballet dancer friend. In the course of the conversation, von Kleist relates the following anecdote:
About three years ago… I was at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful. He was about fifteen, and only faintly could one see the first traces of vanity, a product of the favours shown him by women. It happened that we had recently seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you see it in most German collections. My friend looked into a tall mirror just as he was lifting his foot to a stool to dry it, and he was reminded of the statue. He smiled and told me of his discovery. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed it too, at the same moment; but whether it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to challenge his vanity, I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed. He lifted his foot a second time, to show me, but the effort was a failure, as anybody could have foreseen. He tried it again a third time, a fourth time, he must have lifted his foot ten times, but it was in vain. He was quite unable to reproduce the same movement. What can I say? The movements he made were so comical that I could hardly keep from laughing.No inhabitant of the modern world, I think, will have trouble understanding this anecdote.
From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to spend whole days before the mirror. His attractions slipped away from him, one after the other. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him. […]
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Opacity (4 of 6)
The novel and the ancient epic stand at two extremes of a process. My reading in the intervening millennia is limited, but it seems clear at least that the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare represent intermediary stages. No doubt there are many others.
Richard III and Iago and Macbeth are evil, to be sure; but their evil is different from that of the villains of novels. The most obvious difference is its unapologetic quality. The novel, at its heart (and the exceptions only prove the rule), wishes to understand its characters, to see inside them, to make them transparent, their inner workings clear. So the wicked person must justify himself in terms the reader can understand, even in some sense relate to; he must be wounded into evil, or evil through pride, through jealousy, through some moral failing that we all can recognize. What is so interesting is that this does not make him more innocent but rather guiltier, for it is as if the act of judgment has infiltrated the one to be judged. No judge is required; the moral order need not be restored, because it was never upset; the sinner was punished before he began; to sin itself is already to be punished. There is not the action and then the judgment, but the action emerges already judged. There is no possibility of innocence here—only of a suspended sentence, on the grounds that everyone is guilty, that we, in the villains shoes, could have been just as bad. By comparison, Richard III has still a great element of innocence in him, a quality of simply doing what it is his inevitable nature to do.
Macbeth (whose play is written later) is more “full of the milk of human kindness” and precisely this makes him more guilty, more of a modern villain. The very foretelling of his future glory fills him with fear, as if he senses in himself a deadly ambition waiting to spring forth, an ambition he is already able enough to judge. But this fear and this kindness are still something quite different from the reflective self-justification that we would find in a novel. There is no psychological exposition—no hints of old resentment, overbearing parents, some suffering that he wants to avenge. Where does his violent ambition come from? We do not know and we do not ask. He hears the witches’ prophecy, fear comes over him, his wife urges him to act, and he acts. Whatever else there is to say about it must be said afterwards, later, by those who watch—not by those who, in the world of the play, committed the crimes.
Were we to meet such villains as these in a novel—whose psychology is opaque, whose sins seem unmotivated—we would find him flat, unconvincing, blatant plot devices. We would feel that the novelist had not done her job: had not filled her work with beings whom we can recognize as human— that is, recognize as in some sense like ourselves—; had not penetrated the psychological realm that is the proper domain and responsibility of her art. And yet, in these earlier works— in Shakespeare, in ancient epics—the very same opacity that, in a novel, would render characters lifeless, here on the contrary endows them with the solidity and mysterious immediacy that, in its own very different but very vivid way, brings them to life.
Richard III and Iago and Macbeth are evil, to be sure; but their evil is different from that of the villains of novels. The most obvious difference is its unapologetic quality. The novel, at its heart (and the exceptions only prove the rule), wishes to understand its characters, to see inside them, to make them transparent, their inner workings clear. So the wicked person must justify himself in terms the reader can understand, even in some sense relate to; he must be wounded into evil, or evil through pride, through jealousy, through some moral failing that we all can recognize. What is so interesting is that this does not make him more innocent but rather guiltier, for it is as if the act of judgment has infiltrated the one to be judged. No judge is required; the moral order need not be restored, because it was never upset; the sinner was punished before he began; to sin itself is already to be punished. There is not the action and then the judgment, but the action emerges already judged. There is no possibility of innocence here—only of a suspended sentence, on the grounds that everyone is guilty, that we, in the villains shoes, could have been just as bad. By comparison, Richard III has still a great element of innocence in him, a quality of simply doing what it is his inevitable nature to do.
Macbeth (whose play is written later) is more “full of the milk of human kindness” and precisely this makes him more guilty, more of a modern villain. The very foretelling of his future glory fills him with fear, as if he senses in himself a deadly ambition waiting to spring forth, an ambition he is already able enough to judge. But this fear and this kindness are still something quite different from the reflective self-justification that we would find in a novel. There is no psychological exposition—no hints of old resentment, overbearing parents, some suffering that he wants to avenge. Where does his violent ambition come from? We do not know and we do not ask. He hears the witches’ prophecy, fear comes over him, his wife urges him to act, and he acts. Whatever else there is to say about it must be said afterwards, later, by those who watch—not by those who, in the world of the play, committed the crimes.
Were we to meet such villains as these in a novel—whose psychology is opaque, whose sins seem unmotivated—we would find him flat, unconvincing, blatant plot devices. We would feel that the novelist had not done her job: had not filled her work with beings whom we can recognize as human— that is, recognize as in some sense like ourselves—; had not penetrated the psychological realm that is the proper domain and responsibility of her art. And yet, in these earlier works— in Shakespeare, in ancient epics—the very same opacity that, in a novel, would render characters lifeless, here on the contrary endows them with the solidity and mysterious immediacy that, in its own very different but very vivid way, brings them to life.
Sunday, August 19, 2018
Moral Complexity (3 of 6)
I wrote in the previous crumb that the classical world possesses “a strange moral complexity,” but maybe this phrase is wrong. Moral complexity is a feature of the novel or the high-brow film. What the classical world had is something different, something inherent to the action.
However deeply moral ambiguity may be woven into the action of a novel, it is always still in some sense an ingredient that has been added to the batter, which could as easily have been left out. However subtle, however nuanced it may be, one always feels the novelist’s outlook, like the judgment of God. Even when it is silent— when the writer does not tell us what to think— one feels this silence as a positive presence, a holding back. Another way to put this is to say that, to achieve moral complexity, the novelist must present us with complex people; moral ambiguity can occur only if the actions are themselves ambiguous. If she wishes judgment to be suspended, she must baffle it; she must lead it one way and then another and then another, until it grows tired and confused—for it will look upon her work. Moral judgment is, I think, close to the essence of the novel.
The turn towards modernism in the novel is in part about this effort to baffle judgment. In the novel of the early and middle 19th century— in Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës—good and evil stand out vividly, as if the whole story were conjured in order to reveal them. With George Eliot, judgment becomes more complex, more difficult; with James more difficult still; with Woolf almost impossible. You can see this shift at work between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the former, there are characters we can solidly despise; by the latter, this simple pleasure is denied us in favor of something which we take— which I do take— to be more true, more wise.
But if this complexity and ambiguity is a feature of reality, then it is strange that it had to be developed in the novel and was achieved not through a tearing away of pretense, but through a process of refinement and intricate construction, through a virtuosic artifice, which (as in James) wove of words a web that could hardly be disentangled to find the kernel of definite judge-able meaning swathed within; or (as in Eliot and Tolstoy) developed perspective taking and subjectivity to an immensity that overwhelmed the faculties of judgment. The world, by its nature and our own, comes before our judgments of it, is independent of them; this quality could not be carried into the novel. As substitute, the novel can offer us only the state that comes after judgment, when judgment has come and had its say and then had it again and again until it has spoken so much that it is no longer clear what it has said.
Compare this to the moral quality of the Homeric epics and classical mythology. The passions of that world and the often violent actions that they give rise to really do seem to come before judgment. It is not moral complexity or ambiguity that they possess but a quality of existing prior to morality. We are free to judge them, and judging them may even be fruitful to a point; but they have a solidness, a reality that can never be subsumed in our judgments. We may think of them what we like, but they continue on without us, more solid than our thoughts about them, possessed of some deeper and more fundamental reality. It is not that these stories are amoral; it is as if morality itself is still wrapped up inside their action and events, not yet isolated and brought under the power of rational analysis; as if they contain the whole of which morality is a shard; as if what the fruit of that forbidden tree did was not give us the knowledge of good and evil but rather separate that knowledge from the undivided whole of experience. It is this which, in Kierkegaard’s terms, gives the actions of the ancient world their innocence and their immediacy.
However deeply moral ambiguity may be woven into the action of a novel, it is always still in some sense an ingredient that has been added to the batter, which could as easily have been left out. However subtle, however nuanced it may be, one always feels the novelist’s outlook, like the judgment of God. Even when it is silent— when the writer does not tell us what to think— one feels this silence as a positive presence, a holding back. Another way to put this is to say that, to achieve moral complexity, the novelist must present us with complex people; moral ambiguity can occur only if the actions are themselves ambiguous. If she wishes judgment to be suspended, she must baffle it; she must lead it one way and then another and then another, until it grows tired and confused—for it will look upon her work. Moral judgment is, I think, close to the essence of the novel.
The turn towards modernism in the novel is in part about this effort to baffle judgment. In the novel of the early and middle 19th century— in Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës—good and evil stand out vividly, as if the whole story were conjured in order to reveal them. With George Eliot, judgment becomes more complex, more difficult; with James more difficult still; with Woolf almost impossible. You can see this shift at work between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the former, there are characters we can solidly despise; by the latter, this simple pleasure is denied us in favor of something which we take— which I do take— to be more true, more wise.
But if this complexity and ambiguity is a feature of reality, then it is strange that it had to be developed in the novel and was achieved not through a tearing away of pretense, but through a process of refinement and intricate construction, through a virtuosic artifice, which (as in James) wove of words a web that could hardly be disentangled to find the kernel of definite judge-able meaning swathed within; or (as in Eliot and Tolstoy) developed perspective taking and subjectivity to an immensity that overwhelmed the faculties of judgment. The world, by its nature and our own, comes before our judgments of it, is independent of them; this quality could not be carried into the novel. As substitute, the novel can offer us only the state that comes after judgment, when judgment has come and had its say and then had it again and again until it has spoken so much that it is no longer clear what it has said.
Compare this to the moral quality of the Homeric epics and classical mythology. The passions of that world and the often violent actions that they give rise to really do seem to come before judgment. It is not moral complexity or ambiguity that they possess but a quality of existing prior to morality. We are free to judge them, and judging them may even be fruitful to a point; but they have a solidness, a reality that can never be subsumed in our judgments. We may think of them what we like, but they continue on without us, more solid than our thoughts about them, possessed of some deeper and more fundamental reality. It is not that these stories are amoral; it is as if morality itself is still wrapped up inside their action and events, not yet isolated and brought under the power of rational analysis; as if they contain the whole of which morality is a shard; as if what the fruit of that forbidden tree did was not give us the knowledge of good and evil but rather separate that knowledge from the undivided whole of experience. It is this which, in Kierkegaard’s terms, gives the actions of the ancient world their innocence and their immediacy.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Villains (2 of 6)
The following is related in many ways to the preceding crumb, but these ways do not immediately reveal themselves.
For several years, I've been working on a series of genre novels. It doesn’t matter what genre. It seems to me that all genres (except perhaps romance) have this in common: the plot revolves around a struggle between protagonists and antagonists. I would almost say that what distinguishes the “literary” novel from other genres is that it lacks this struggle. A literary novel may have antagonistic characters (the step-mother in Jane Eyre, Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, Helene and Anatole in War and Peace), but the plot does not turn on the struggle against them; it turns, rather, on struggles amongst and within the protagonists. The question is what Jane and Mr. Rochester will do with their affection for each other; whether Mr. Darcy will stop being a prig and Elizabeth will allow her understanding of him to change; how Natasha will go on after her disgrace; etc. The antagonists are merely catalysts or side-acts to the real action.
This is, in fact, how real life works. We make an enemy, for a time that enemy may be a significant figure in our lives (though usually this is only because they are also our lover, our parent, the object of our desire, etc.); then we part ways or we make peace. Our lives are about other things, in which our enemy may have played a role, but hardly the central one. And this non-centrality of our enemy allows us to see them as human and finite. With time, often, we forgive them; or we forget them; at the very worst, we go on seeing them as a crazy asshole; but even this finally, with enough distance, turns to pity.
But it is not possible to take such a view of the antagonist of a genre narrative, the antagonist who is not merely an enemy but an adversary, whose aims (be they murderous or merely dishonorable) are so threatening that it becomes the whole focus of the story we are in to stop him. Of such an antagonist, we must have a different view. He is not a finite human being, but something infinite, because his significance, for us, for our story, is absolute. Whether he is a serial killer in a thriller or an evil wizard or a high-school bully, he is a version of Satan.
What I mean is that such a narrative, which depends on such a figure, always refers to a Manichaean morality of supernatural proportions.
Attempts are often made, e.g. in more “high-brow” Hollywood thrillers, to “humanize” these characters, to give them a backstory, passions and affections of their own, but such efforts always dissolve in the end, because the narrative structure is fundamentally opposed to it. Thus, to take a silly example, in The Dark Knight Rises, the villain Bane is provided with a great deal of personal majesty, a compellingly dark ethical worldview, and immense personal suffering through which he seems to have earned all this; and yet, in the final action, all of his moral and psychological complexity must vanish, because the struggle against him drowns all moral nuance, all psychological reality; and all his majesty must vanish too, because all his well-laid plans must be overthrown and he must be soundly defeated.
For all its faults, this story-structure is preternaturally compelling. As Hollywood discovered at the end of the 1970s and has never since forgotten, it holds a power to enthrall beyond all other story-structures. But why? What is this vision of life that it presents us with, where struggle is always clearly defined, where courage consists only in making the decision that is clearly right, so that courage is no different from strength? Why do we find such patent fiction so appealing? It seems too easy to say that, in a world of relentless moral ambiguity, we long for simple choices. Or that in a world where nothing seems definitely worth doing, we long for a project whose urgency rises to supernatural definiteness. Clearly, the function of such stories is to pacify, to lull; and clearly this— passivity, lulling— is just what our civilization wants from its stories. And yet, I think there is something more complicated going on here.
Over and over, in the course of writing these novels, the figure of a pure, anointed evil seems to call to me from the shadows of my unformed thoughts, as if I thought it were the secret way to recapture some solid significant feeling that I long for but cannot put a name to. It seems to glitter there in the shadows— that darkness, that ancient evil… and yet, if ever I open the door, if ever I invite it out of the shadows into the narrative, it shows itself a dull, false, empty thing, the very opposite of the feeling I was dreaming of.
It’s as if, in the struggle against an adversary, we seek a return to the epic mode, to a realm in which self-reflection can finally cease and action and speech take on the immediacy that Kierkegaard and others have suggested that it possessed in the ancient world. But the means are invalid, the project fails. It is not that self-reflection returns unbidden; it is that, in its absence, something far more dishonest and stupid appears. What emerges is not the light-heartedness and vividness of the classical world, nor its strange moral complexity, nor its unconstrained and yet utterly unsentimental emotionality, its access to tears without a drop of schmaltz, nor yet its grasp of simple human passion—all of which, I think, are what we unwittingly are seeking—only an addictive pageantry of a lurid pose-striking and meaningless excitement.
But the question remains how to tell a story.
For several years, I've been working on a series of genre novels. It doesn’t matter what genre. It seems to me that all genres (except perhaps romance) have this in common: the plot revolves around a struggle between protagonists and antagonists. I would almost say that what distinguishes the “literary” novel from other genres is that it lacks this struggle. A literary novel may have antagonistic characters (the step-mother in Jane Eyre, Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, Helene and Anatole in War and Peace), but the plot does not turn on the struggle against them; it turns, rather, on struggles amongst and within the protagonists. The question is what Jane and Mr. Rochester will do with their affection for each other; whether Mr. Darcy will stop being a prig and Elizabeth will allow her understanding of him to change; how Natasha will go on after her disgrace; etc. The antagonists are merely catalysts or side-acts to the real action.
This is, in fact, how real life works. We make an enemy, for a time that enemy may be a significant figure in our lives (though usually this is only because they are also our lover, our parent, the object of our desire, etc.); then we part ways or we make peace. Our lives are about other things, in which our enemy may have played a role, but hardly the central one. And this non-centrality of our enemy allows us to see them as human and finite. With time, often, we forgive them; or we forget them; at the very worst, we go on seeing them as a crazy asshole; but even this finally, with enough distance, turns to pity.
But it is not possible to take such a view of the antagonist of a genre narrative, the antagonist who is not merely an enemy but an adversary, whose aims (be they murderous or merely dishonorable) are so threatening that it becomes the whole focus of the story we are in to stop him. Of such an antagonist, we must have a different view. He is not a finite human being, but something infinite, because his significance, for us, for our story, is absolute. Whether he is a serial killer in a thriller or an evil wizard or a high-school bully, he is a version of Satan.
What I mean is that such a narrative, which depends on such a figure, always refers to a Manichaean morality of supernatural proportions.
Attempts are often made, e.g. in more “high-brow” Hollywood thrillers, to “humanize” these characters, to give them a backstory, passions and affections of their own, but such efforts always dissolve in the end, because the narrative structure is fundamentally opposed to it. Thus, to take a silly example, in The Dark Knight Rises, the villain Bane is provided with a great deal of personal majesty, a compellingly dark ethical worldview, and immense personal suffering through which he seems to have earned all this; and yet, in the final action, all of his moral and psychological complexity must vanish, because the struggle against him drowns all moral nuance, all psychological reality; and all his majesty must vanish too, because all his well-laid plans must be overthrown and he must be soundly defeated.
For all its faults, this story-structure is preternaturally compelling. As Hollywood discovered at the end of the 1970s and has never since forgotten, it holds a power to enthrall beyond all other story-structures. But why? What is this vision of life that it presents us with, where struggle is always clearly defined, where courage consists only in making the decision that is clearly right, so that courage is no different from strength? Why do we find such patent fiction so appealing? It seems too easy to say that, in a world of relentless moral ambiguity, we long for simple choices. Or that in a world where nothing seems definitely worth doing, we long for a project whose urgency rises to supernatural definiteness. Clearly, the function of such stories is to pacify, to lull; and clearly this— passivity, lulling— is just what our civilization wants from its stories. And yet, I think there is something more complicated going on here.
Over and over, in the course of writing these novels, the figure of a pure, anointed evil seems to call to me from the shadows of my unformed thoughts, as if I thought it were the secret way to recapture some solid significant feeling that I long for but cannot put a name to. It seems to glitter there in the shadows— that darkness, that ancient evil… and yet, if ever I open the door, if ever I invite it out of the shadows into the narrative, it shows itself a dull, false, empty thing, the very opposite of the feeling I was dreaming of.
It’s as if, in the struggle against an adversary, we seek a return to the epic mode, to a realm in which self-reflection can finally cease and action and speech take on the immediacy that Kierkegaard and others have suggested that it possessed in the ancient world. But the means are invalid, the project fails. It is not that self-reflection returns unbidden; it is that, in its absence, something far more dishonest and stupid appears. What emerges is not the light-heartedness and vividness of the classical world, nor its strange moral complexity, nor its unconstrained and yet utterly unsentimental emotionality, its access to tears without a drop of schmaltz, nor yet its grasp of simple human passion—all of which, I think, are what we unwittingly are seeking—only an addictive pageantry of a lurid pose-striking and meaningless excitement.
But the question remains how to tell a story.
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