Excursus on atmosphere (7)

One natural response to this problem is to try, through writing, to see our world with fresh eyes, to instill some beauty, some vividness into it—or to try to wring those things from it.

 

I don’t read much contemporary fiction, but every once in a while a book falls open in front of me and I have no choice but to read a few pages. This happened to me a few days ago with a novel from 2014. In an opening scene, the narrator (who, one suspects, closely resembles the writer) is sitting on a plane. Interactions with a man seated next to her are interspersed with descriptions of generic airplane goings-on. In the passage below, I have excerpted the former and kept only the latter:

On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality and doom. […]

            […] Outside, the turgid summer afternoon lay stalled on the runway; little airport vehicles raced unconstrained across the flat distances, skating and turning circles like toys, and further away still was the silver thread of the morotrway that ran and glinted like a brook bounded by the monotonous fields. The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then faster, until there was the feeling of effortful, half-resistant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.

            […] In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man’s voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed.

One sees right away that this is a skillful writer. She is good with words and syntax. But she is squeezing these images too hard. The metaphor of the priest and the congregation is clearly overblown, but so is the simile of the glinting brook. Even the rasping of the nylon stockings seems gratuitous. Yes, the atmosphere of an airplane springs to mind—but why is it so gussied up? 

My point is not to throw shade on a book I haven’t actually read and which more than one person has recommended to me, but to try to bring out what I find tragic in this. The writer is doing what she must do: she is looking for poetry in her world. Only it isn’t there. What I mean is not that planes and airports are so ugly (even if they are) but that the writer is clearly desperate to make of them something beautiful, something that will hold her attention and ours, will make us feel that these passing moments have some meaning, that we are not falling through a void. If I have been able to guess what is happening in the writer’s soul, it is only because the same thing has happened many times in mine.

Atmosphere (6)

If, as I said earlier, we have lost our sense of a solid and, if not stable, at least eternal, ongoing human world within which our stories are lodged, out of which their conflicts arise, into which they resolve—then this loss is not just because we have been told that our way of life will likely become impossible sometime in the next 50 years, due to processes that we cannot directly perceive, which no one fully understands and most people don’t understand at all. It is also (I think primarily) because of perfectly tangible factors in our everyday existence.

 

The very partial list of problems in the last crumb is meant to give a sense of the sort of factors I mean, of their scope and pervasiveness.

 

Global climate change, real as it may be, has such a hold on our imaginations in part because we are already, right now, surrounded by physical things and social conditions that make us feel that the world is flimsy, ugly, and bad. It is this immediate experience, more than any environmental or political conditions, that makes it so hard to tell stories about our current world. Because one of the first things stories do, maybe their most fundamental pleasure, is to absorb us into an atmosphere, a texture, a mood, to conjure from scenery, gestures, objects, faces, a world we want to inhabit. But who wants to be absorbed into this atmosphere? What we long for is to get out of it.

A few of the problems (5)

What do I mean by “the full array” of problems? I do think we eventually need a complete list, or as complete a one as we can make, but that's a big undertaking and I don’t mean to begin it now. But I want to list a few. There are some that tend to jump to mind (depending on your political alignment): an array of ecological crises (of which climate change is only one), spiraling economic inequality, an ever-increasing accumulation of power in the hands of a tiny portion of the global population. There are others that I think get less play time in most people’s nightmares but which I think about a lot:

• Material ugliness: the things we make—buildings, furniture, everyday objects—keep getting uglier, flimsier, cheaper. Look at this image of a French school-room in the 1880s and compare it to this classroom in a recently-constructed school (where I happen to teach). Imagine spending your days in the old one. Imagine spending them in the new one. What would that do to you?
  
  
• Transience: everything is disposable, everything is knocked down, thrown away, demolished, and new, even more disposable things are put in their place. Nothing has any history. And people are the same way. They move and move until they have no roots anywhere.
  
  
• Segregation: while some kinds of segregation (e.g. by race, sexuality, religion) have lessened over the past century, segregation by age, political alignment, and socioeconomic class have gotten more and more extreme. Each is driven by different forces and with different results, but all three are bad. I’ll talk about age, because I think it’s the least obvious: as traditional communities break down, young people socialize less as families and more and more exclusively through school. The resulting age-segregated friend groups and habit of socializing only within age group persist into adulthood and create a sense of discontinuity between generations and a feeling of an eternal present that is forever severed from the past.
  
  
• Technology addiction: most of my students (high-schoolers) have no limits whatsoever placed on their screen time. During vacation, they tell me, they sometimes play videogames for twelve or fourteen hours straight. On school nights, they stay up watching movies and Netflix and YouTube. They complain about stress and workload. Many of them sleep only four or five hours a night. What they don’t realize is that their “leisure activities” do them no good, leave them as bleary-eyed and drained as doing homework.
  
  
• Over-scheduling, over-monitoring: kids (at least most of them) should not be in class eight hours a day. They should be out working in the fields or building things or repairing them, walking in the woods, taking care of animals, cleaning, cooking, reading—then maybe have classes for a few hours in the evenings. But not only do we keep them in class all day, we fill the remaining time with tutoring, piano lessons, summer programs—anything to give them "a leg up." And when they're not busy with those things, we keep them under careful watch, lest anything should happen to them. No wonder they’re bored and distracted. No wonder they need drugs to stay focused and happy. No wonder, by age 22, they’re so obnoxious. Their whole youth has been wasted.
  
  

This is hardly meant to be an exhaustive list. I present it only to give a sense of the kind of thing I mean.

Lest at this point the mouse begin to feel that these are bitter crumbs, I want to say that it is only the outer crust. The center of the loaf, I hope, is sweet.

What story is that, and how do you tell it? (4)

Isn’t there then a new kind of story to write: the story of this crisis?

But what story is that, and how do you tell it?

You could tell a story that depicts the crassness and ugliness of our world—plenty of people are telling stories like that. But what is such a story doing? What is it saying? Maybe it is saying: Ugly, ugly, ugly! But that’s just mimicry. It tells us what we all already know. It rubs our noses in it. Maybe it is saying: Things are bad but happiness is still possible, on an individual level—with more wisdom, with less self-deception. This is a nice idea (I mean that; I’m not being sarcastic), but in the background, don’t we always seem to hear the machinery grinding forward, beauty disappearing, madness spreading? The hope is at best short-term.

Or you could tell a story of radical destruction—the end of the world, a handful of survivors. Plenty of people are doing that too. Again, I want to know what such a story is doing, what it is saying. Let’s first note the obvious: this story is an allegory. The meteorite, the zombie virus, the irradiating sun beams—are metaphors for our own gradual but seemingly unstoppable dissolution. What is this metaphor saying? Clearly, it is saying: This is not something we are doing but something that is being done to us, and we have no power to stop it. And I want to ask: Is that true? Is that a useful story to keep telling ourselves?

Or we could tell the opposite kind of story: about humanity literally addressing its large-scale problems. But I don’t see anyone telling that story. For such a story to be compelling, the writer would first have to take cognizance of the full array of problems (because, as daunting as each one might be on its own, it is the whole configuration together that haunts us), and I don’t see anyone doing that either.

And one feels that, if someone did write that story, it would be unconvincing. Which is to say, we not only have no vision for the future, we feel that it is impossible to come up with one.

No need to choose (3)

(Everyone has their own idea of how the world is going bad: environmental disaster, economic inequality, technology, political fragmentation. There is no need to choose among these and many subtler problems. We’re like the blind men describing the elephant.) 

The Reason (2)

The reason we can no longer tell stories can be put simply.

 

The end of a story, whether happy or tragic, must be the resolution of the conflict. The murderer is caught, the couple united, the tragic hero dead—and the world returns to normal.

 

This “normal” is indispensable. It is not a drab uniformity but a great solid continuity. It is the whole ongoing world, which contains these struggles, joys, disasters and survives them and continues on, with its ordinary doings, its births and deaths, its endless cycles. Every emperor goes to his grave, every empire falls, every sharp edge is worn smooth with time.

 

But now we feel that the world itself is bad, its future bleak, its cycles broken. So when the story ends, there is nothing to return to. The lovers are united, the falsely accused proven innocent—but what lies ahead for them? Life in a botched civilization.

 

*

 

Things are not so bad as we sometimes imagine them. The world is still the world. Armageddon is not here, however much we dream of it. But things have gone very wrong, and we have lost our faith—in ourselves and our way of life. And, without that faith, the basic structure of a story is lost. We don’t know what to hope for.

   

Satisfying Stories (1)

This is the first in a long trail of crumbs. I will post one per day until I run out of bread. Hopefully some mice will come along and eat them.

 

*

 

It is very hard to tell a satisfying story in the contemporary world. Maybe it is impossible.

 

This is why television is the medium of our time: because its basic form is continuity not conclusion. A satisfying ending is not what it promises—or at any rate, not what it is obliged to deliver. Its tantalizing ellipses lead us ever onward. It does not tell stories so much as paint a world.

 

This is also why so many stories have specialized settings—the past, ghettoized communities, fantasy worlds—settings where, the audience imagines, stories are still possible.

Begging and Stealing

Calcutta is a charming city. I am told it is languishing, it is clinging to its past. I wish more cities would cling to their past; I wish more cities would languish. I shall be accused in the usual way: “it is easy to romanticize economic decay when you have all you need.” But are we not bored of this response by now? For how long will all judgment be held hostage to this mindless moralism. In fact, it is the wealthy who thrive in cities that “embrace the new.” The poor get more material comfort but less power and therefore less dignity than ever.

What the powerful do not wish to share is power; they are not jealous of their food, their shelter, their clothing; these they are happy to share. Neoliberals love to talk about the rising tide of wealth: to the moral dilemma of poverty they offer a solution that entails no threat to the distribution of power. All their hard-nosed materialism, their moral “realism” is really aimed at this: to deny that power, that dignity, that inequality matter (for these are, after all, in some sense spiritual matters) in the face of sheer material need. The neoliberals would like to tell me that the global poor don't care about my woo-woo spiritual concerns, that what they want is a meal, a house, a shirt; I maintain that the global poor in fact have spiritual concerns, just like me.

* * *

In Varanasi, the beggars are always trying to get the better of me. Some only want to beg, but most want something more. “No rupees—milk,” says the rail-thin young woman with the baby on her shoulder, and she leads me to a store where “milk” costs more than dinner at a tourist restaurant. Clearly, there’s some scheme afoot—the woman’s getting a kickback, probably, the store takes a cut. I feel resentful, indignant.

It is not that the sum of money demanded is difficult to part with—it amounts to five dollars. It is that I have been tricked, used. It is, I seem to feel, my money, and I have a right to do with it as I see fit. But do I? What I have, generally speaking, is the power to do with it as I see fit; what is being challenged here is that power. It does not seem a stretch to suppose that this is part of the appeal of such schemes. Presumably they are also lucrative, but equally importantly, the one who runs a scheme wrests a certain dignity from me; she challenges the asymmetry of our power relations. She refuses me the role of kind stranger, giving my money to someone in need; instead she assigns me the role of dupe. No wonder I find it so troubling.

In fact, this quality—this subtle upturning of power relations—seems to be at work all through my interactions with beggars in India. Every skinny dusty child has something up her sleeve. Even when there is no specific scheme afoot, there is an impish quality in her tone and gestures, a quality, it seems to me, of gleeful, or at least cheeky, mischief, no matter how much suffering, dirt, hunger it is mixed with. And the more I think about this, the more fitting it seems. I ought to be pleased, not resentful. Self respect persists, in the face of whatever circumstances.

For I have a legal right to my money, but I do not have a moral right to it. I got it by luck; I keep it by a system of laws that I had no part in making. It is a power I have; if someone can get it from me by whatever means, then they are only exercising another form of power. If they cause me no harm besides the loss of my money, is their method inherently less ethical than my own?

But why then is it a sin to steal? Because to do so is to undermine the stability of society? Because society depends on property? I would like to put it this way: property is not a fixed concept; it evolves with the economic conditions of a society. Not only the way that property is distributed but the very rights that the notion of property invokes—when and how and in what ways one is expected or required to give others access to one’s property (gleaning a field, hunting in a wood, borrowing a pot or an egg or a measure of flour)—changes from age to age. So the notion of theft also changes. Perhaps it is no longer a sin to steal. Perhaps the category of crime has done away with the category of sin. Of course, one may still wish to avoid being stolen from, and I am not trying to cure anyone of this wish; I too wish not to be stolen from. But this desire, and the means by which I try to pursue it, are matters of power, not justice.

What is this faith that you keep talking about?

What is this faith you keep talking about, and where did it go? All this about the transience, the cheapness, the ugliness of the contemporary world may be true, but the decline of faith began long before that. God died, man killed him— back in the 19th century, in an era to which your insatiable nostalgia still applies, when grandmother’s initials were stamped on the flatware and families lived in ancestral homes and the light of gas lamps hardly dimmed the stars.

The faith that I long for is not necessarily faith in God. I want to say that it is faith in the world, and that it outlasted faith in God. But this phrase, faith in the world, is at best vague and impressionistic. The following fanciful account may make it more precise, or at least more rich in associations.

Faith is a more fundamental concept than God. I want to say: the idea of God is a way of expressing faith. First there is the impression that the world is oozing with meaning and with spirit: the trees, the wind, the water, plants, animals, other people. For the wild animal, I suppose, this impression is so complete and untroubled that it requires no expression in anything beyond itself. But ancient man and woman must put it in different terms: there is, for them, no doubt that the world is imbued with meaning and spirit (which is why they do not speak of the concept of “faith”— for it has not yet become possible to doubt); but their faith has enough distance to begin to express itself fantastically, aesthetically. It is no longer enough simply to encounter the world oozing with meaning; they must invent stories and deities to describe and define this meaning; the void between them and reality fills up with expressions of reality.

The rise of monotheism, then, is a further crisis: a further separation has appeared; the world is no longer its own justification; it must be justified and explained and given meaning by a plan that is formulated outside of it. (The Bible, of course, contains multiple parables of this development: the fall from Eden, Cain and Abel, etc.) God is now no longer merely an expression of the meaning inherent in the world but something posited outside of and beyond the world; and his role becomes increasingly explanatory rather than merely expressive—but this does not happen right away. It seems to me wrong to understand Genesis 1 (and other ancient creation myths) as explanatory. To demand an explanation is to express doubt; an explanation is an account that stands behind the thing itself, that supports it from without, as if it could not stand up on its own. But this is not the spirit of Genesis 1, and this is precisely why it is so powerful. A person who is so troubled, so alienated from things as to ask “Why is there light? Why is the day separated from the night?” would not be satisfied with the account given in Genesis 1. We cannot understand how ancient peoples could believe in such fanciful creation myths, because we take these myths as offering explanations of the material world; and indeed, explanations is what we need, because we are in a state of separation and cannot simply accept the world on its own terms; but ancient peoples were not in this state, and their myths were not explanations but expressions of a feeling for the world.

But in the middle ages, theology becomes distinctly explanatory: that is, driven by a sense that the world on its own does not make sense, that it requires external backing. Already in late antiquity the early church fathers are engaged in theodicy: explaining how a good god could allow such an evil world; and this means that a question had already arisen as to the goodness or badness of the world. It is not that the ancients affirmed that the world is good; such an affirmation is possible only when the question has already been raised; to ask such a question is to cast doubt on the whole of reality, to say: “Why this and not a different world?”

All five of Aquinas’s proofs of God are distinctly explanatory with all the associations I attach to that word. In the “Primary Cause” argument, for example, Aquinas observes that each event has a cause, so there is a chain of causality, working backwards through time; but an event cannot be its own cause, so how can this chain begin? That is, the world on its own presents a problem; it does not make sense; it requires something external to make it all fit together. The other four proofs work in exactly the same manner.

If there is a decline here, it is not a decline in religious thought. What we see here is religion adapting as it had to to new circumstances. The world was (and is) imbued with meaning and spirit; but it was no longer sufficient simply to express that condition, for that condition was in doubt and needed justification; so religion rightly adapted to provide that. The basic perception was that the world had meaning, was filled with spirit; the action of a judging, planning, rational deity had become necessary to make sense of that condition. But the loss was considerable: explanation had come at the expense of expression; if religion now provided a reason to believe that the world was imbued with meaning and spirit, it no longer expressed that notion; it was vividly expressive, but what it expressed was its own system and not the world; in order to justify the world it had been forced to turn away from world. In this way, the separation between things and spirit was further advanced.

Humanity was then forced to choose between the world and religion; of course, it chose the world, because that was where the wellspring of spirit and meaning actually lay. Thus the flowering of humanism. But the conditions of life continued to alienate us from the world; our anxieties over its reality, meaning, justification continued to grow….

* * *

I am in no way capable of writing an account of the history of faith and religion. The above is probably wrong in a dozen ways, and I don’t know how to continue it. That is, anyhow, beside the point. My purpose was to express what I mean by “faith in the world;” I doubt very much that I have done so; I suspect I have only greatly confused the issue.

The Beast

Lest my long silence followed by such a lengthy crumb lead to any misconceptions, I have been working on other things in recent weeks; nearly all of what follows was written yesterday, on the train from Boston to Philadelphia, and the remainder added today, on the commuter rail from Philadelphia to New York. Things have changed (in me? in the world?) since last I wrote, and though my concerns remain the same, the shape of my crumbs, the crumb of my bread, will be different from what it was, in this and upcoming posts, if there are any.

* * *

Everyone is panicked, but their reasons differ. For some it’s global warming. For some, Trump. For some, racism, Afro-Pessimism, or on the other hand, hysteria over identity politics. Technology, apostasy, the sexualization of popular culture. And for me, who does not affirm any of these as reasons to panic (though I affirm them all as evils), what is it that troubles me? For, though mine is not a state of panic, neither is it one of calm, much less of trust, of faith in the world.

Last night in bed, unable to sleep, it seemed to me I saw all these fears, all these evils, all these deteriorations, knitted together in one great system, which madly fed and grew and whirled all around me in the darkened room. I had glimpsed the parts before, but never had I seen them all brought together with such vast and terrible coherence.

We were atomized, our communities loose and transient, families scattered and estranged. Even if we held still, nothing held still around us. Businesses closed, were sold to large conglomerates; buildings were torn down and replaced by uglier ones; people moved away to new places and new people came who did not know the place they were moving to and did not plan to stay long and therefore did not bother to get to know it. They were not uncaring, only lost and lonely, not knowing how to begin, having forgotten what it is like to feel at home in a place. The objects we used were all disposable and correspondingly ugly; they had no history; no grandmother’s initials adorned them; very little in the way of memory or sentiment attached to them. Everything was a product and so everything was marketed and so everything became kitsch and nothing was real. Bright lights burnt all night; we did not see the stars; it was never quiet. We stared at screens; we comforted ourselves with the most miraculous passive entertainment; we clicked refresh on our gmail, hoping for a message.

Thus, for a long time, a sense of dislocation had been growing; we lacked grounding, faith, presence. We no longer seemed to live at the center of the world (c.f. Eliade, The Sacred & the Profane); the world itself was not the center of anything anymore. We had no trust in the cycles of years and generations; we neither believed that these cycles would continue in their age-old manner, nor affirmed them as good and necessary. Once we had taken solace in this cyclic continuity, once it had comforted us in the face of death and loss; our faith in the world had been a faith in its continuity; as one thing ended another began. Now we could not face death, for there was no cycle in which it could find its place; we hid from it stubbornly, like Adam hiding from God, like a child covering its eyes. We could not accept disaster; we denied its necessity; we regulated life to prevent it; but it came anyhow, and we went looking for someone to blame.

But of late, the process has reached a new stage of evolution, has taken on a new, desperate velocity.

(There is solace in the material world, in its unquenchable reality and presence. We are riding past scattered houses, trees, bogs at the edge of a town, beside the railroad tracks. The earth is covered in dead leaves, the bog now clothed in green algae, now in gray-white ice. Wiry shrubs cling to the low earth where it rises up out of the water; around the patches of earth, wreathes of ice; beyond the ice, dark water, like the dark land revealed beneath a departing fog. We pass a car lot and the sun’s reflection goes dancing across the windshields, like the glass lozenges in the church of Combray. Then cars and bog and houses give way, and there is a winter wood, bare trees and scattered pines and an old-style wooden fence beside a road where a truck drives lazily.)

Not knowing how to die, we do not know how to live (c.f. Ruskin, "The Roots of Honor"). We are in a state of perpetual anxiety. It is no longer enough simply to get and eat the daily bread, to love, to argue, to do our work and go home to bed. We are insatiable. We want to do something ever bigger, ever newer; nothing is enough.

In every profession, I saw this process at work. The baker is not content to bake good bread, to kneed the dough and make his customers happy; he wishes to expand, to hire underlings, to develop new products, to run a chain of bakeries; he wishes to rise into the bourgeoisie. This example is already very old; it is impossible now to imagine a baker who is happy simply to bake bread and feed his neighbors and get by; the idea is absurdly quaint. But such people not only did once exist; they were the only sort of baker that existed; all bakers were such quaint figures. Were they happy? I do not know what the question even means, but they were content: they did not long for more, more, more. They had faith in their world, their life, their worth. (c.f. this passage from Pasolini). Of course it is not only that such a person is now unimaginable; were such a person suddenly to spring into being today— a person capable of being satisfied simply to make bread for his neighbors and thereby to get the necessities of life—, he would discover that the world had no place for him: his neighbors get their bread at the supermarket; they do not know each other or him; nor will they remain his neighbors for long but will move away and be replaced by others. He could only open an “artisanal” bakery, become a purveyor of luxury products to wealthy strangers,. The conditions that made that old form of satisfaction possible are simply gone.

In the same way, the professor does not have time for the students she mentors, because she is busy writing the next book, which must be not merely an ordinary book but a groundbreaking book, a book that will change the field. The teacher is not content to remain a teacher. He must become a principal, and then he must start his own school. Several years ago, as part of some research I was doing at the time, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of recent school founders and headmasters. Every one of them had a ten-year plan to start five more schools. To found a school was not enough; such a vast undertaking seemed to them petty; only some few hundred children could be helped in that way. But I knew that even twenty, even a hundred schools would not satisfy them, that nothing would satisfy them, not because of their pride but because of their despair; because everything had lost its substance, had become a mere abstraction, not only for them but for me as well.

We search for some worthwhile project, but having lost the basic grounding of life, nothing is worthwhile. Our elders tell us we expect to much from a job; in fact, we expect far too little: we only pursue these materialist philanthropic ambitions; what we long for but cannot name and do not dare to believe in is far more substantial.

Thus, desperate, maddened, we wander the earth, changing jobs, selling businesses, moving apartments, purchasing furniture, throwing away furniture, renovating storefronts, gutting hotels.

(A film of ice lies on the surface of puddles; its delicate ridges glitter between tufts of meadow grass. The meadow rolls past and now comes the great shining water of some bay, and the trellis of a bridge throws its flickering shadow through the train window, and black ducks and white swans cluster by a wooden dock, and the posts where the boats are tied are like teeth, and flat flat fields of yellow-brown grass spread out over the surface of the water.)

We feel that something has gone terribly wrong, but it is hard to know what. So many evils surround us; so much has changed; so many sacred things have been violated—nature, religion, decency, civility, human rights. All these evils are real, but the loss of faith makes them more terrifying than they would be: for we have no faith that these evils, like all else, will pass. This new terrible aspect is not illusory, it is real; but it comes less from the particular evil than from the general state of mistrust in the continuity of the world. Note the irony: because the world has become impermanent and unstable, evils have come to seem permanent. This is strange but not contradictory. The affirmation that “this too shall pass” is an affirmation that the cycles of the world will continue, that a stability stands above the ephemerality of phenomena; without this stability, it becomes entirely possible that the world will change utterly and it will never regain its natural state—not through an act of god but through mere error and bad management, through mindless feedback systems set in motion by accident.

Now say that I choose one particular evil to fix on—global warming, for example. I am frightened of climate change, and with good reason, but climate change is not yet significantly affecting me, not certainly in an everyday manner. The effects I fear lie in the future. But I seem to feel the pain of it, the horror of it, now. Already, my ordinary world, with all its simple pleasures, seems to be gone. My general diffuse sense of insecurity and dissatisfaction and faithlessness has attached itself to the prospect of climate change. The danger is real, but the general sense of doom I am feeling comes not solely or even primarily from the threat of climate change. It is generated all around me by the conditions of modern life.

The more worried I and people like me become about climate change, the more we want to tell others about it. We applaud when newspaper headlines report on it. But (because of the radical segregation of friend-groups by political alignment; and the less radical segregation of newspaper subscription; and the way online content is customized for users) the only people who listen to us or read these headlines are people like us. So our efforts to inform others succeed only in immersing ourselves in a sort of house of horrors, where we can never for a moment forget our fears. This is what’s called an echo chamber: not a place where people affirm each other’s views in glib satisfaction; a place where frightened people, trying to do something with their fear, only make one another more frightened.

The longer this goes on, the more frustrated I become. At first urgent, I turn resentful, then disdainful. I feel that the world is plagued by fools who won’t see the truth. They, with their different grievances, feel that they are plagued by people like me. The world seems to be teeming with lunatics, lunatics we rarely meet but read about often. This breeds paranoia. Feeling that our very existence is threatened, we perceive threats everywhere.

(Evening is falling. Along the horizon, the factories of New Jersey breathe plumes of smoke like gray genies against the deepening sky. The land is flat, bathed in purple light, dotted with yellow lamps hung on steel spires. The bare trees are like diagrams of trees, etched onto the sky. Everything becomes a silhouette, smooth and dark and perfectly delineated. We pass cities. Buildings, tall black and featureless, fill train window. A river slides smoothly past, lined with highways and cars like Christmas lights. The light of the land overwhelms the last light of the sky.)

Without faith that there is meaning in experience—and all meaning depends on faith, for meaning cannot be “proved”—without this faith, suffering is intolerable. Suffering becomes tolerable when we can get wisdom from it, but without a ground of meaning, wisdom cannot exist, for life then is not a book full of secrets but a plain brute fact, behind which lies nothing. Without faith in meaning there is, as far as experience goes, only pleasure and pain, success and failure; and, as far as knowledge goes, only fact and fiction. Hence the discourse of trauma, which describes suffering only in terms of damage, never in terms of growth. In these conditions, all grievances become immense.

There is in fact evidence that the world contains meaning (faith is not belief without evidence, only trust without proof), but this evidence is found, in large part, in suffering. So the more we see suffering as merely bad, the less we notice what else there is inside it, the less possibility that we can rediscover faith. Thus in everything, despairing of our higher longings, we cling jealously to thin substitutes, and are worse and worse in spirit and in action.

These and many other systems of evil effects I saw flowing, circulating, like blood, within the great beast that had arisen out of, that stood upon, that organized and coordinated and gave life to human civilization (as the soul gives life to the body, as the processes of the organism give life to the chemicals that compose it), as I lay on the futon in Anna’s guest room in Somerville, MA, last night. But surely this was only one of those visions that comes in the dead of night instead of sleep.

What is a novelist?

A novelist is someone who imagines that it will be exciting and fulfilling to write a novel. He takes up pen (quill, laptop) and begins to write. If he is lucky, he soon realizes that the task is impossible and gives up. In that case, he is not a novelist, bless his soul. If he is unlucky, however— or rather, if he is proud and possessed of a strong capacity for self-delusion— he has a good run, he writes several chapters that he thinks are beautiful, or at least promising. Eventually, he gets stuck, of course, but he does not wish to abandon his promising beginning, so he keeps at it. He breaks through, has another run, then gets stuck again. Again he breaks through and again get stuck. This third time is worse. He sees now that he never really got unstuck the first time around: the problems then are the same ones that plague him now; he never really solved any of them, only slipped past them and fooled himself into thinking they were solved. He goes back, he deletes, he rewrites, he deletes again. His work changes, he cuts out the pretty nonsense that charmed him at first, smooths and focuses the story, ferrets out the linguistic tics that clutter his writing. He is amazed to find how bad his writing was, but now it is better, sharper, stronger. He is in love with his characters and the scenes he has caught them in. He sets out again, he goes further than ever before. Yet again, he gets stuck. And this time it is calamitous. He sees now that the whole projected is flawed in its very conception. He begins to suspect, in fact, that the Age of the Novel is over, that it is no longer possible to write a genuine novel. He dreams of turning back, of abandoning the whole thing, but he knows that by now it is too late. He has gone too far, written too much, devoted too much of himself to this doomed adventure. He is trapped and must see the thing through, even though, very likely, it has no end, and he will grow old and die with nothing accomplished, leaving behind thousands of pages of notes and fragments.

Where is a Philosopher?

But one of the defining characteristics of the modern world is that it will not let us understand things in the simple, untroubled way that they we once understood them. Language, thought, fate, truth, ourselves—we are in doubt as to the value and meaning of everything. We are forced to “discover” the meanings of things. But once upon a time, we imagine, people did not have to “discover” the meanings of things. Those meanings came simply and naturally to them. They had not begun to question everything.

We are all now in the position of the philosopher who cannot understand things in an ordinary way and feels driven to seek a new, a perfect, a sublime way to understand them. Why perfect? Why sublime? Because the old ways failed. They were arbitrary, superstitious, biased, unjust, wrong. We can only return to that primordial sense of certainty (we imagine) if we can produce an understanding that is impervious to suspicion, that is definitely right.

And never mind if this new conviction is an absolute lack of conviction, a dogged insistence that nothing is right and nothing wrong, nothing true, nothing false—even that is acceptable if we can be sure of it. Which is to say, despair is another form of millenarian hope; millenarian hope is another form of despair. The search for perfect truth (a project in which I would include all of the social sciences, perhaps the sciences themselves) and the abandonment of all possibility of truth are both forms of the philosopher’s malady, the dream of a new kind of certainty: they both arise from the despair of ever returning to a state of trust in things as they are. This despair is not unreasonable.

“Philosophy is homesickness,” wrote the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis in 1798. But there was a time when we were at home everywhere, not because we were comfortable or safe, but because we knew where we were. (One useful way to understand Romanticism is as a certain response to the loss of the state of feeling at home.)

Is there any way back? Yes, in fact.

What is a Philosopher?

A philosopher is someone who, due to a special private deficiency, is unable to understand something that comes simply and naturally to other people; who must therefore bang his head against a wall that, to ordinary people, simply does not exist. Because he is unable to understand whatever it is in the simple untroubled way that ordinary people grasp it, he conceives the bizarre plan to understand it in an entirely different way, to understand it as an essence, a thing-in-itself, etc.. He labors tirelessly, builds a whole apparatus of infinitely subtle thought in order to grasp the secret mysterious essence of this ordinary thing— an essence that is essentially chimerical. For the thing in question does not have an essence. It is an ordinary thing, a convenient conglomeration of instances, features, parts.

But if the philosopher can become aware of his condition—if he can come to understand that the problem with which he grapples is not really a problem at all—then he may do something useful. In that case, he will not cease to struggle; the matter will not at all become simple for him; rather it will become infinitely more complex. As long as he believed he was building his great apparatus to grasp the secret essence, he was happy and could go on steadily about his business, laborious though it was, with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Now he knows that he must rid himself of this morbid obsession—but he cannot rid himself of it. He can glimpse the straightforward manner in which the thing ought to be understood, but the impulse perpetually takes hold of him to understand it differently, sublimely; to interrogate it, to make it reveal its secret nature. This impulse rises up in him like a sort of demon that must be dispelled before he can enjoy that ordinary understanding; to dispel the demon, he must appease it; it will never be appeased.

Or we might put it this way: having once begun to analyze, his only hope of being permitted to cease to analyze is to reach the end of the analysis, to prove to himself that the analysis is unnecessary. He suffers from a kind of nervous condition, in which he is compelled to begin again and again to analyze, in order to assure himself finally that there is nothing to analyze, that there is no secret essence grinning at him from the shadows between words.

Such a person will come to see Philosophy and Philosophers as his enemies. His aim will be to debunk them. If, in this, he is compassionate, it will be because he knows that he is one of them. If he is vicious and haughty, it will be because he cannot bear the fact that he is one of them.

The writing of such a person will be marked by signs of a desperate struggle, a struggle against an angel/demon, which is to say a certain kind of struggle against himself. Out of this struggle, the philosopher may wrest some special wound—a limp, say—that will forever mark him and his writing and make of it something beautiful and difficult.

(This crumb is inspired by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It is a sort of interpretation of that book—not of its substance, but of its form.)

Imperfect World (2 of 3?)

(Continuing off the end of the previous crumb.)

Are we then left with only two options: a wicked society or no society at all?

This impossible choice presents itself only because we insist on thinking in absolute terms. We want an arrangement that will guarantee us justice evermore—as if it were our responsibility to set a course for the rest of history. The Kantian fantasy has infected our thinking: we want all our political decisions to be worthy of becoming universal laws. But this is all contrary to the nature of the world, which is irremediably particular, in which all supposed universals are overthrown. Heraclitus is the medicine for the madness of Kant.

In our everyday actions, we show that we implicitly understand all this, for again and again we act inconsistently, according to innumerable considerations, in contradiction to our supposed principles. We call this is irrational; perhaps it is, in a narrow sense, but it is supremely reasonable.

It is in this spirit of sussing out each action according to its particular circumstances that we must approach the problem of community norms and the informal manner in which they are policed. At times the mob is right and at times it is wrong. A community that relies on formal apparatuses to regulate its relations, in which people call the cops or complain to management if they don't like their neighbors' behavior and have no other recourse but dirty looks when these formal apparatuses are out of reach—such a community is going to the dogs. But a community that resorts to lynching when it believes that someone has violated its strictest codes is also going to the dogs.

That sounds obvious-- and yet we do not seem to understand it, for we are, as a society, progressively dismantling all informal systems on the suspicion that they are prejudiced, tyrannical, unregulated and un-regulatable. This suspicion has achieved the status of a paranoia and is part of a collection of neuroses that forms a central feature of our culture.

These neuroses include our attitudes towards germs and hygiene and towards accidents, injuries, and disease, as well as towards regulation of conduct. Their ramifications include everything from our litigation system, to the insurance costs that hobble our healthcare system, to disposable coffee stirrers and plastic packaging. We might call them “the fear of contamination” or “the fear of the uncontrolled,” but I find it more revealing to think of them instead in negative terms, as an absence or a loss. Their common source is a loss of faith in the world, in its continuity, its solidity, its validity. We do not want the world with its vicissitudes, its sufferings, its calamities, its cruelties; we want the purified world of our imaginings. We want the millennium now, we want to build it ourselves.

Or rather we want it to have already arrived. We seem to believe that it ought to be here now. Hence the outrage with which people are wont to meet any imperfection however minute-- an ill-chosen phrase, an object that could under certain rare circumstances cause injury, an eating utensil not perfectly sterilized and bearing some faint mark of previous usage-- as if they did not know that the world has always been dirty and dangerous and unfair.

This faith that we lack is not necessarily a religious or a theistic one, but it is a part of what was once covered by religious faith. The prayer goes “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done”: it asks for paradise, it accepts the world. Maybe we can restore ourselves to a state of sanity with a faith in the world that makes no mention of God or Creator, but this cannot be merely a faith in the material world, inasmuch as material means measurable, verifiable. It must be a faith in qualities of the world that do not fall within our systems of knowledge. It must be truly a faith, a trust. And it must include and contain and surpass death: it must retain its meaning, its trust, even in the face of death. Otherwise, it collapses, offers us no solace, no solidity. So it may be possible to avoid the theistic element, but it will not be possible to wholly eliminate the mystical element.

With such a faith, we can be at peace and live and act within that imperfection and finitude of the world rather than formulate hopeless schemes to eliminate imperfection and to avoid finitude; we can abandon the dream of absolute judgment and settle for the partial, contingent judgment that is available to us; we can engage with realities instead of abstractions. Without such a faith, we cannot. So only by finding an apparently “mystical” faith in things as they are can we escape the blatantly fantastical dream of perfection. Again, rationalism is not reasonable.

Outsiders (1 of 3?)

My apartment in Brooklyn looks out on a side-street that ends, mid-block, at a footbridge. Two apartment buildings open onto this street, and my own opens onto the avenue around the corner. These buildings are all large and rent-stabilized and have gentrified very slowly, while the surrounding neighborhood has been uprooted, its inhabitants scattered eastward and southward as if by some strange wind that carries people instead of leaves and paper.

With no through-traffic, our side-street forms a natural gathering place. In the summer, kids sometimes play football in the middle of street. The older men play dominos at a folding table on the sidewalk. There is a van that parks in front of one of the buildings certain evenings and plays a mix of soul and dancehall at high volume until past midnight. Occasionally there are barbecues. At other times, there are screaming matches. Once or twice I’ve heard shots fired.

A couple days ago there was a block party. Late in the day, I came outside and stood talking with one of my neighbors near the end of the block, where a line of police tape had been stretched to stop cars turning off the avenue and disrupting the party. A white man in his late thirties or early forties was standing nearby spray-painting some piece of paneling from a motorcycle. He held the object up near chest level, spray-painting back and forth continuously, and in the windy air the fumes wafted over to where my neighbor and I were talking, smelling strongly and stinging her eyes. I asked her if she’d like me to go say something. She said, yes please do.

I walked over to the man and politely asked him if he could move over to the side, near the wall of the building, where the fumes would be less likely to waft towards us. I don’t remember his exact answer; it was something to the effect of: “You’re outside, deal with it.” It was delivered aggressively. I said that I’d been polite to him and there was no reason to be rude to me. He doubled down. Eventually I walked away—I was close to losing my temper.

As more people walked by and commented on the situation, it became clear that this man had been spray-painting here for some time and had been rude to others before me. I was told that this man was also in the habit of calling the cops on people on the block. At one point, several passers-by were all chiding him at once, though none very aggressively. A couple people called him a gentrifier, I said he was rude and disrespectful, I don’t think anyone so much as cussed.

It felt good to have the crowd on my side, and it was especially easy to feel righteous in this case, because I really had been polite and he really had been rude; because all the other people yelling at him were black, and most of them had lived in these buildings for many years; because this man seemed to stand against neighborhood, against community, against everything I find worth preserving in New York.

But it did not entirely escape me that I was a member of a crowd busy ostracizing someone for flouting its mores. Leaving out the racial dynamics, if this were a movie, I'd be one of the villains.

In a novel or a movie or a TV show, we know immediately that we are to side with the outsider, that he is righteous and the crowd that is railing against him is wicked. I remember first noticing this a couple years ago while reading Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” how the very fact of outsiderness in fiction automatically signals goodness. Even then it made me suspicious. Because there is a strange feeling of righteousness that we, as readers or watchers, feel in siding with the outsider against the crowd, as if we ourselves were courageously standing against a crowd; whereas in fact we are behaving in an entirely prescribed and automatic manner; we are acting with the crowd— the crowd, that is, of readers and watchers, all of whom know that the outsider is the good-guy. We are adhering to a mainstream value system.

But only if we are the audience to a work of fiction. Place us in an actual crowd whose mores are being flouted by a real individual, and most of us will, without a second thought, side with the crowd (and here too we will feel righteous). We are not always wrong to do this. When we talk of in-groups and outsiders we tend to imagine scenes of a gay teenager being picked on by homophobe classmates, but this is a carefully constructed fantasy. In most cases, the outsider is not expressing anything that we would recognize as an identity; he is merely breaking norms of civility: using a cell phone in a movie theater, taking up too many seats in a subway car, being rude, irresponsible, unneighborly. etc..

When we talk about homophobia, racism, etc., we are focusing on bad norms, and through this focus on bad norms, the very concepts of norms, of normal, of social pressure, have come under suspicion, so that by now many people see these concepts as something out of a dark past of prejudice and brutality. And it is from this vision that we come to the liberal ideal of the individual as a free actor, unconstrained by conformist social forces, peer-pressure, fear of his neighbors; the individual who is constrained only by the law, which acts to uphold the rights of man.

But the law is never enough. We need mores, we need the soft pressure of social relations to enforce all those small niceties of behavior that make it possible to live side-by-side in anything but a state of simmering mutual hatred. We need this even more in the city, where we are packed together, than in the small town.

And yet there is no way to ensure that these social forces will always behave justly. Indeed they are more or less guaranteed to turn tyrannical.

(This discussion is continued in the next crumb.)

Adult Purchase

It's as if the world read my crumb and wanted to bring it to life:

These are your options, oh children of this present age: you can embrace the bourgeois dreams that have long waited for you, smiling quietly as you abused them, knowing in the end you would come round; or you can rebel. And what is rebellion? Booze and sneakers! Could any satirist have put it so precisely and succinctly? Nor should we be surprised if, after gobbling up the great majority of creative minds of a generation, it is the advertising industry that, in its strange way, shows us ourselves most vividly.

The Conditions of Narrative (6 of 6)

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.

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:

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.

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. […]

No inhabitant of the modern world, I think, will have trouble understanding this anecdote.

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.

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.

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.

"The Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in the Modern" (1 of 6)

Either/Or, I find, is a difficult book. In many places, I cannot tell what Kierkegaard is playing at. There is one essay, however, that I read over and over. It’s called “The Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern.”

K's central point in this essay is that tragedy depends on a certain degree of innocence on the part of the hero. The hero falls due to his own actions, but those actions are not wholly free. They are constrained (in ancient tragedy, at least) by “the substantial categories of family, state, and destiny”¹ in which the hero is bound. So, watching the hero fall, we (the audience) feel not only pain but sorrow. The more the hero is responsible for his actions, the more we feel pain; the more he is innocent, the more we feel sorrow. (K does not define these two emotions, and the words “pain” and “sorrow” are of course translations of Danish words that I don’t know, but the distinction is evocative enough.)

The tragic, K claims, depends on this mixture, this “collision,” of innocence and responsibility, of pain and sorrow. The person destroyed by forces entirely outside of him is not a tragic hero, only a sufferer. The person who falls by his own choices alone is not a tragic hero, only a screw-up.

But this, Kierkegaard claims, is precisely what the modern age insists on: that the hero “stands and falls on his own deeds,” that the individual is "responsible for his own life, without further ado. So if he goes to the dogs it isn’t tragic but bad.”

Central to all of this is a distinction between ethical and aesthetic categories. To the extent that a person is responsible for his action; to the extent, that is, that a person’s life is his own doing; he must be judged ethically: he is either good or bad. But to the extent that his action is constrained, to the extent that his life is a sequence of events that take place and cannot be otherwise, the ethical is suspended. And because the ethical is partly suspended—because we cannot entirely judge—we can relate to such actions and such lives aesthetically: we can find them tragic. If there is only innocence, presumably (K does not spell this out), then we can react only with pity; the aesthetic collapses into the sentimental and maudlin. The tragic becomes possible in the interaction of aesthetic and ethical categories, when the warm flesh of the one finds form on the bones of the other.

The absolute freedom that the modern age imputes on its people is not real, says K. “[This insistence on individual responsibility] leads you to think this must be a kingdom of gods, this generation in which I too have the honor to live. However this is by no means the case; the energy, the courage which would thus be the creator of its own fortune, yes, the creator of itself, is an illusion and in losing the tragic the age gains despair.”

Gabriel Josipovici, in an otherwise excellent overview of “The Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” interprets this despair as overwhelming guilt: “Now [i.e. in the modern world] man, feeling fully responsible for what happens to him, is riven by feelings of guilt at not having acted otherwise than he has."² This interpretation is consistent with the logic of the essay (innocence=>sorrow/guilt=>pain), but the reason K’s work is so resistant to summary and to incorporation into any "philosophical movement” is that his ideas always seem to run beyond his logic, his thought always seems to contain something more that cannot be subsumed in his argument—and, it seems to me, that the “despair” in the line quoted above suggests something other than overwhelming guilt. Maybe it is K’s snarkiness in the preceding sentence (“this kingdom of gods, in which I too have the honor to live”), maybe it is what I know of his view of his own epoch from other writings, but I feel that overwhelming guilt is too dignified a calamity; that by "despair" K means something more degraded. Or maybe I'm just projecting. But consider:

In losing the tragic, the age has gained despair. It is not the tragic hero nor the audience of the play nor theater itself but the age which has gained despair. It is we who have gained despair. For, in losing our sense of our lives as a sequence of events in which we are caught, a story within which we have a mixture of innocence and responsibility, of suffering and guilt, we have lost the capacity to relate aesthetically to ourselves, to find the tragic beauty in our own failures. We are forced to judge ourselves constantly, absolutely on ethical grounds—as failures or successes; as having made the right choices or the wrong; as “lost” or as “on-track.” Even the categories of happy and unhappy take on a gloomy moral weight, because they are now only proxies for success and failure.

This renders us not only intolerably cruel in our self-judgments, but, correspondingly, insufferably self-justifying, desperate as we are to escape the judgment that is in store for us if we are ever forced to admit to misfortune. And like all judgments, we apply this attitude to those around us as readily as to ourselves: hence the relentless affirmations that we shower on our friends; hence the breathtaking nastiness with which we dismiss those we dislike; hence, ironically, the disintegration of anything that might properly be called ethics in favor of self-affirmation and group solidarity.

In losing our capacity to relate aesthetically to our lives, we have lost everything, even the category of the ethical to which our aesthetic relation was sacrificed.

---

1 This and all subsequent quotes (except where indicated) are from the Penguin Classics Either/Or, translated by Alastair Hannay, edited by Victor Eremita; all of the lines I have quoted are from pages 142-144

2 Gabriel Josipovici, On Trust, Yale University Press, p. 28