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

Adulthood (8)

Plainly, what I have written so far on this topic is grounded in the idea that the notion of adulthood that seems to press upon us from the world at large is a confused one, and the wise thing to do with it is to take it apart. But it is necessary to take it apart precisely because it is impossible to abandon it altogether—because, contingent and historical as it is, it has at its core something deep and abiding. This is why it is a problem and not merely a nuisance. I wish to grow up, and, if I am unwilling or unable to do so in the terms that my culture asks of me, I must seek out other terms.

We may say, in some sense, that this is what went wrong in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was in this era, of course, that the rejection of bourgeois adulthood first took on a national visibility, first became a trend whose attraction was therefore necessarily in part its very trendiness. (It was also in this era, that adolescent rebellion became intermingled with a program of political resistance (the anti-war movement), and thus the two forms of rebellion became confused.)

There must have been, in 1967 and ’68, a wild sense of possibility, a feeling that everything was changing. Indeed, a number of things did change: sexual mores, clothing styles, the acceptability of drug use. But, by the 1980s, all of these changes were smoothly reincorporated, not only into the same stable class structure that had been there before, but into the whole consumerist-conformist construction of identity that lay at the heart of the sudden revulsion that had precipitated the rebellion in the first place. If anything, the liberalization of sexuality, clothing, etc. seemed to lead in the end to an even more firmly consumerist culture. Without the old taboos, identity was all the more free flowing, all the less grounded in anything but success, acquisition, choice. I am hardly the first to make this observation.

One way to explain this reincorporation—this failure of the rebellion, this victory of the existing system of class and identity—is to say that the hippies rejected the existing forms of adulthood but failed to discover any new notion of adulthood to put in its place. The standard line on the hippies is that their rebellion was essentially adolescent and when the party wound down, they grew up, got jobs, and settled down. This is not the point I’m making. If the rebellion was adolescent, this was perhaps necessary: to alter one’s life, one must begin with a movement of rejection—not a wholesale rejection but still a revulsion, a turning away, yes, in disgust, for it requires energy to dislodge things. But there is a second movement, much harder than the first, and this movement was never made. The second movement consists in going back and understanding and salvaging from the wreck those elements necessary to human life. An inevitable effect of this second movement is that one discovers how much more value there was in the things one rejected than one had realized, how cleverly that old hideous system had met the demands of human dignity and human frailty and human desire.

Pasolini wrote in 1973:

…[T]he radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they [the hippies] have pronounced against their fathers… rearing up against them an insurmountable barrier, has in the end isolated young people, blocking them from engaging in a dialectical relationship with their fathers.  Now only through this dialectical relationship—even if dramatic and extremist in character—could youths have obtained a true historical conscience of themselves and moved forward, “passing beyond” their fathers.  Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves – like a world apart, in a ghetto reserved for youth – keeps them stuck in their unbudgeable historical reality; and that inevitably implies a regression.  They have actually ended up in a position behind that of their fathers, resurrecting inside of their own souls terrors and conformisms, and in their physical appearance, conventionalities and wretchedness that seemed to have been permanently overcome.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Contra I Capelli Lughi,” Corriere della Sera, January 7, 1973)

Having written all this, I see that it is, really, only a parenthesis. It was my intention to write about something else entirely. But I got carried away. Perhaps I have only written things that were already obvious.

The Age of Bread (Adulthood 7)

Apropos of the previous crumb, I present the following excerpts from an open letter to Italo Calvino, written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1974 (the translation is not mine but also not published; the translator chooses not to identify themselves):

Maurizio Ferrara [communist intellectual] says I am nostalgic for a “golden age,” you say I am nostalgic for the “little Italy of once upon a time” [l’Italietta]: everyone says I am nostalgic for something, and they speak of this nostalgia in negative tones, so as to make it an easy target.

What I am nostalgic for (if we are going to use that word) [...] is [the] unlimited pre-State and preindustrial rural world, which survived up to just a few years ago – there is a reason why I spend as much time as possible in Third World countries [...]

The people in that universe did not live in a “golden age” [...] They lived in what Chilanti has called the “age of bread” – i.e. they were consumers of extremely necessary goods. It was this, perhaps, that rendered extremely necessary their poor and precarious lives. Whereas it is clear that superfluous goods make life superfluous [...]

Whether I am or am not nostalgic for this rural universe is in any case my business. It doesn’t prevent me from formulating a critique of the current world as it is – if anything, this critique is only more lucid the more I am estranged from the current world, the more I accept only stoically to live within it.

Is the adult the one who has achieved middle class comfort, or the one who has never known it? Is it the one who has made choices or the one who never had them in the first place? Is it the one who knows the pain and anxiety of deciding his own fate or the sorrow and light-heartedness of submitting to a fate that was given and unchangeable? And, most importantly, is it possible to discover, by relinquishing certain types of ambition and holding fast to others, that one never really did have any choices?

Choices (Adulthood 6)

Two hundred years ago, hardly anyone had any choice of profession. They did what their parents did, which, for most people, meant farming. The opportunity to “find one’s calling” is one of the great luxuries of the modern age, or so it appears. Thus, when people like me complain about the lack of satisfying job opportunities, it seems very reasonable to see a kind of spoiled pickiness in these complaints: “Oh, so you’ve looked around and every industry seems vapid? Well, imagine if you had no choice but subsistence farming!”

This sounds very reasonable, but in fact it is mean-spirited, and the way you can tell is that it’s always said with a certain glee. (Why are we so eager to dismiss the very grounds of other peoples’ unhappiness, to deny that they have a right to be unhappy? It is a strange world where this is a common habit. Perhaps it is a world in which everyone feels that their grip on their own personal experience is terribly tenuous and goes about looking for reasons to dismiss other people’s, under the confused notion that only one experience can be valid. I think that’s just the sort of world it is.)

Shall we not say, rather, that one of the most striking characteristics of modern life in so-called “developed nations” is that one is surrounded by choices and all these choices seem rotten. If you are not inclined to dismiss the observation and the observer in one fell swoop, there are two conclusions you might draw from this: (1) that choosing something is irreducibly different from being bound to it, and one who has many choices can never know the ancient light-heartedness and sorrow that come of simply doing what one must, but is always glancing back and sideways and second guessing and thinking after all that he might try something else, and this state, once one has entered into it, is escapable only through some unforeseeable disaster; (2) that all the choices really are rotten. I say unto you, we should draw both of these conclusions.

A great deal is made the limited options available to those in poverty, the lack of access to resources and opportunities. Accordingly, new initiatives are proposed: job-training programs, free preschool programs, college-readiness programs, free universal internet access, etc. These proposals all refuse to notice what ought by now to be obvious: that more choices generally make people more unhappy; and that what we are trying (and mostly failing) to offer poor people access to is the same dystopic menu of meaningless white-color jobs that we ourselves gaze upon with bleak and bleary eyes.

This is all very gloomy and no doubt I am an incurable preacher of gloom and nostalgia, but let me end by returning to something which I mentioned parenthetically: the precarious hold that people have upon their own personal experience, as if, at any moment, this experience might be blown away by some more valid one, might be shown to be only a delusion they are suffering from. As if there were some mystical higher ground from which one could look down on the subjective world and see it for only a little world within some vast… vast… vast void, I think. It could only be a void.

More on this theme >>

The Supernatural (2)

When we speak of the supernatural, we are speaking quite simply of all that which refuses to be known in the scientific sense—all that which refuses to come out of hiding and become a fact.

The category of factual knowledge, is not ahistorical. It was brought into being in significant part by a methodology which, during the 17th and 18th centuries, began to generate and consolidate this type of knowledge, to give it the definite cumulative systematic character that it now has. That methodology, which we now call science of course, was originally called natural philosophy, because it was the philosophical study of the nature. The supernatural, then, is that which will not submit to this methodology, and therefore cannot be known on its terms.

The supernatural differs from the unknown and the unexplained, in that the latter categories contain things which may someday be known or explained, swept up in the continual progressive accumulation of knowledge, but the supernatural contains that which can never be known or explained, because it will not allow itself to be subjected to that methodology. Many people no longer believe this category exists. Or, rather, they believe this category contains nothing, that it is an empty set. They are free to believe this, but we should remember that the reasons for this belief cannot be scientific ones, because, by definition, science cannot bear on the existence or non-existence of things in this category.

We are so used to thinking that science has debunked the supernatural that the point I am making will not go down easily. But it is an analytic point, it is true by definition.

The issue has gotten somewhat confused by the fact that, between the late 19th and mid 20th century, efforts were made to apply scientific methods to the study of ghosts and other “supernatural” phenomena. But had such efforts proved successful, this would not in fact have provided evidence for the supernatural; rather, it would have proved that the objects of these studies (ghosts, or whatever they were) were not in fact supernatural. If you can detect and measure a ghost—by its electromagnetic disturbance or what have you—then your ghost is part of the larger system of physical phenomena (a.k.a. “nature”). In that case your ghost is not supernatural, it’s natural.

It may appear that I am switching between two uses of the term supernatural: one, a strictly etymological one, referring to systems of knowledge and so forth; the other a folk term, referring to ghosts, demons, elves, and so forth. I am myself (as always) only feeling my way confusedly through these ideas, but my instinct is that these two definitions cannot be separated—that should ghosts (or elves, or etc.) ever become subject to scientific knowing, they would immediately cease to feel supernatural; they would lose all the qualities (charm, spookiness, etc.) that that category is meant to embody.

At this juncture several thoughts press themselves upon me, further confusing and entangling the subject:

1. The charm and spookiness that I am imputing to the category of the supernatural were clearly properties of science itself up until about half a century ago. Who could doubt, looking at the representations of science in mid- and early-20th century popular culture, that science at that time appeared mysterious, spooky, exciting? The darkness of night, daughter of chaos, with her panoply of stars in a vast untamed void—was this not the very realm of science, the mystery it set out to explore? Apparently, then, in the past fifty years, our feelings about science have undergone a radical change. I am not saying that science itself has changed—though perhaps it has—but the meaning of science in the popular imagination, the force that it exerts on our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world, has changed completely. Presumably, this change cannot be understood without reference to marketing and commercialization, but it is still a change that attaches itself to, that accumulates around, that makes use of science.
2. This category of the supernatural that I keep invoking is difficult to separate from that of the fantastical, the unreal. If the supernatural is that which refuses to be known, to be caught and trapped and domesticated by our systems of knowledge, it also seems to be that which refuses to conform to our sense of reality, which refuses to agree to the terms on which we distinguish the literal from the figurative, the actual from the imaginary. But by saying this I do not mean to “return” the supernatural to the realm of the imaginary where we are used to and comfortable finding it. What I wish to do is point out the degree to which our imagination has been annexed from reality. It seems to me very clear, from the science fiction of fifty and a hundred years ago, that people were perviously very ready to imagine that the literal world held mystery and wonder wholly commensurate with the capacity of their imaginations. One of the defining characteristics of the contemporary world, then, is the degree to which almost any act of wild imagination appears puerile and escapist.
3. I do not think it is an accident that the category of the supernatural, as we imagine it, consists almost wholly of beings with at least some degree of sentience and volition. They are all beings that act like they are alive, though in many cases, we are told, they are precisely dead. This life-like quality is essential, because anything which is passive, which stays put, which behaves according to general principles, must eventually be caught in the net of factual knowledge. Only that which generates within its own being an impulse, a cause, whose prior causes are not discernible, has any hope of escape. That which follows a pattern can be studied; so only that which has volition, which can choose forever to break its pattern can escape.
4. But the deadness of these beings is perhaps equally significant. By placing them beyond death, we place them within a realm in which, in a much more radical sense, nothing can be known. For death is the moment at which the knowable and the unknowable diverge. And death is also the event that forces us back into our individuality and back through the other end of that individuality into, well, whatever lies back there. That is, death is the fact that renders all schemes of accumulative knowledge finally irrelevant.

The Supernatural (1)

As we all know, people who live in cities tend to get more formal education than people who live in the countryside. And people who live in the countryside tend to believe in the supernatural more than people who live in cities. The usual assumption is that the causality goes like this: live in city => get education => abandon superstition. Implicit in this causal ordering is the idea that city dwellers are right in their unbelief, which is born of rationality, whereas rural people are wrong in their belief, which is born of irrationality.

But when I look at myself, I find everything backwards. I live in a city, and cannot, for the most part, bring myself to believe in the supernatural—and yet, rationally I affirm it. With my intellect, I am convinced that the supernatural is as real as the natural, but in my heart I cannot accept it. I long for it, but this longing seems fantastical, nostalgic, wishful. But it seems so not for rational reasons. As far as I can see, science has rendered no evidence against the supernatural: science is the study of the material world, so it simply cannot speak of the immaterial world, any more than the eye can smell or the ear see. And yet, when the rubber hits the road, when someone tells me they have seen a ghost, I think they're making it up. My mind wishes to believe but my gut cannot.

But when I go to visit the country, the deeper into the country I go, the farther from cities and lights and traffic and the sounds of machinery, the more plausible the supernatural seems, the more my gut begins to accept it. And then it is that my reason, frightened at the sudden possibility of what it had affirmed so abstractly and longed for so ardently, begins to assure me that there are no grounds for belief. But its assurances are quite useless, for my soul now fears and believes and watches the shadows for sudden apparitions.

The city is an environment wholly subjugated to human technology and human control. Except for vermin, no living thing persists there unless it is sanctioned by human agencies. The ground is concrete, the landscape composed of artificial structures, the air filled with mechanical sounds. Day in the city is like day anywhere, but night is not herself here. She is not night, daughter of chaos, primordial darkness, hour of witches and spirits. She is not even dark. The sky is yellow brown. The stars, which always remind us of the vastness and mystery of the world, hardly ever appear—and when they do, there are only three or four of them, looking lost and forlorn up there in the domesticated vault, criss-crossed by airplanes, outshone by helicopters. How could one believe in spirits here? How could one believe in wild things and fugitive truths?

To put the same point slightly differently: the past 200 years has seen a massive decline in belief in the supernatural. This period has also seen the rise of scientific rationalism. The standard causal inference has been that reason did away with those beliefs. This inference demands and has fostered a general view that reason is opposed to such beliefs, that they are irrational. But the opposition between these beliefs and sound reason is at best wildly overstated, so the sudden vanishing of belief demands another explanation. The past 200 years has also seen massive urbanization and domestication of the world, a phenomenon that extends well beyond cities: suburbs, small towns, even farms and forests, have become vastly less wild, vastly more controlled by human schemes. Perhaps, then, the loss of belief has been driven not by reason but by an irresistible analogy between the subjugation of nature (in the sense of plants, animals, land, water, weather) to human schemes and the subjugation of nature (in the sense of the system of the world) to human categories of knowledge.

Let me just add one other minor but I think rather telling observation in this vein: I am told that, in places like Iceland and norther Scandinavia, where cities are rare and countryside wild, but formal education levels relatively high, belief in fairies and other spirits is still fairly common.

Acknowledgements (7 of 7)

The most recent series (beginning with the crumb on St. Paul) is heavily indebted to Gabriel Josopovici’s book on the bible, The Book of God. I mentioned this at the beginning of the series, and I quoted him in the middle, but I want to go back here at (what I think is) the end and highlight some ideas that Josipovici explores that I’ve used in the past several posts:

• the emphasis on action and speech and the shortage of subjectivity in the Old Testament;
• the introduction of a more modern type of subjectivity in Paul’s epistles;
• the tendency of the OT not to tell us how we are to interpret its events;
• the variation in the Gospels with regard to how much power and vulnerability Jesus seems to have.

In addition to these specific points, my general style of reading and thinking about the bible comes from Josipovici. I think, by and large, I've found my own valences and configurations of his ideas, but if, in some places, I have done nothing more than summarize his position, that would not have been a bad use of anyone's time.

Giving Up (6 of 7)

(This is the sixth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

In the previous crumb, I wrote about the vanishing of human agency as we enter the New Testament, and the emergence of a world in which there seems to be no will but the will of God. There is something I dislike like about this movement, something deeply depressing. In a world so perfectly controlled, why bother to do anything, or even to want anything? But I also know this: like anyone, I at times want to change myself—because I keep doing something I regret, or because I feel something I wish I did not feel—and I have tried to make myself change by an act of will, and I have tried kneeling on the floor and asking for help, never mind Who might be listening; and what I have found is that the latter is usually the better approach.

Inasmuch as a story about the absolute agency of God is an invitation to give up our sense of control over our own lives, it is powerful medicine. This loss of agency, which seems to imply imprisonment, in fact frees us. And what it frees us from is not, as logic would imply, a sense of moral responsibility but rather the compulsion to make sense of our lives, to know precisely what they mean. When a person kneels down in wild surrender, and says, “I’m a hopeless sinner!” they do not mean, “It’s not my fault,” nor do they mean, “I’m going to stop trying to do right.” What they mean is that their intentions have come unhooked from outcomes. They still intend, but no longer with an expectation of success—and yet, not without hope, but with a new kind of hope, a hope that is not burdened with practical considerations but leaps past the practical to the sublime; a desire that does not bury its fire in schemes to attain its object, but burns purely and brightly in its elemental desiring. The result of this is lightheartedness.

This is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, the recognition that one is guilty for everything, before everyone, is always accompanied by a sudden capacity to perceive the beauty of the world and by an overwhelming joy. Growing up, I used to hear so much about guilt—about Jewish guilt and Christian guilt. It was not until I read The Brothers Karamazov that I understood that guilt could be precisely the opposite of what I had thought. I had understood it always as burdensome and neurotic, a hot, constricted, teeth-gnashing state of mind (the feeling of guilt). But immediately on reading Father Zosima’s story, I saw how the acceptance of one’s endless errors (the fact of guilt) was really the means of escape from that teeth-gnashing mood: because the teeth-gnashing came not from the desire to be perfect nor from the knowledge of one’s imperfections but from the mad belief that one could, by one’s own powers, attain perfection.

When a character in The Brothers K experiences this guilt/surrender/joy, he invariably falls on the floor and begins to weep. This is appropriate, because tears, even more than laughter, are a sign of lightheartedness (perhaps I should say ‘openheartedness,’ but I’m not sure I want to draw the distinction). It is when we cannot cry that our hearts are closed and constricted, and we are unable to perceive the world properly, for, like little Kay in Hans Christien Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” we have in our eyes a shard of the evil mirror that the wicked spirit made, in which everything appears ugly. And this is why, at the end of “The Snow Queen,” it is Kay’s tears—brought on by Gerda’s tears—that wash the shard of mirror from his eye. For it is in tears that we escape from the prisons we have made ourselves.

Before the shard is washed from his eye, Kay is in a state of mind that I recognize well:

Little Kay was quite blue with cold, indeed almost black, but he did not feel it; for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy shiverings, and his heart was already a lump of ice. He dragged some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, and placed them together in all kinds of positions, as if he wished to make something out of them; just as we try to form various figures with little tablets of wood which we call “a Chinese puzzle.” Kay’s fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of glass still sticking in his eye. He composed many complete figures, forming different words, but there was one word he never could manage to form, although he wished it very much. It was the word “Eternity.” The Snow Queen had said to him, “When you can find out this, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.” But he could not accomplish it.

Is this not a beautiful description of the mood of control and painful exertion towards ends that are either unattainable or meaningless (now one, now the other) in which we so often find ourselves? Note the tremendous symbolical compression here, how the whole ambition and failure of the rationalist project is captured in a few sentences: it can form every word but the one it wishes to form, the one that matters.

Presently, Gerta arrives, sees Kay sitting there, runs to him, and, finding him cold and unyielding, begins to cry; the tears fall on his breast and melt “the lump of ice” around his heart:

Then Kay burst into tears, and he wept so that the splinter of glass swam out of his eye. Then he recognized Gerda, and said, joyfully, “Gerda, dear little Gerda, where have you been all this time, and where have I been?” And he looked all around him, and said, “How cold it is, and how large and empty it all looks,” and he clung to Gerda, and she laughed and wept for joy. It was so pleasing to see them that the pieces of ice even danced about; and when they were tired and went to lie down, they formed themselves into the letters of the word which the Snow Queen had said he must find out before he could be his own master, and have the whole world and a pair of new skates. …The Snow Queen might come home now when she pleased, for there stood his certainty of freedom, in the word she wanted, written in shining letters of ice.

This too is exactly right: when we give up our ambition to attain eternity/infinity through reason and control, then it comes back to us as gift. The year before “The Snow Queen” was first published, another Danish author wrote a very different sort of book that treats a strikingly similar theme. “Only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity,” writes Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling. What Kierkegaard speaks of here is a giving up of all hope of attaining one’s desires—and yet, he tells us, beyond this resignation lies something else (which he calls "faith"), whereby we can get back everything we have given up “by the power of the absurd.” Presumably, icicles dancing with joy, getting tired, and lying down in the shape of a word counts as “the power of the absurd.”

God's Will (5 of 7)

(This is the fifth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

This definitive sorting of the wheat from the chaff in the New Testament comes with a marked reduction in human agency. On the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus, the great persecutor of the Christians is suddenly enveloped in light, blinded, cast down on the ground, and told by God what he is to do. Thus Saul becomes St. Paul through no choice of his own but by the will of God. As God himself tells another of his followers in a vision three days after Paul's conversion, “he [Paul] is chosen as a vessel unto me” (Acts 9:15).

When Peter, in his weakness, denies Jesus, this is only confirmation of Jesus's supernatural power, for Jesus has already predicted it. And when Judas betrays Jesus, this too is part of the plan: “I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, he that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me” (John 13:18, emphasis mine, of course). We find ourselves, it seems, in a world where there is no will but the will of God.

Yet, here again the Gospels display a strange transitional quality. The quote I gave in the preceding paragraph is from John, the last of the Gospels. The betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane, as told by John, gives the same impression of a plan in which “every hair is numbered,” in which nothing is permitted which is not part of the workings of the plan:

Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him, went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye? They answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am he. And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them. As soon then as he had said unto them, I am he, they went backward, and fell to the ground. Then asked he them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I have told you that I am he… (John 18:3-8)

 Now here’s Luke’s version:

And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss? (Luke, 22:47-48)

And Mark’s:

And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders. And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely. And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him. And they laid their hands on him, and took him. (Mark 14:43-46)

And Matthew’s:

And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people. Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast. And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him. And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus, and took him. (Matthew, 26: 47-50)

In John, the tables are turned: the betrayal is only another opportunity for Jesus to display his power. In Luke, Jesus knows what is to come. In Mark, we do not know what Jesus knows. Only in Matthew, the first of the gospels, do we find any suggestion that Jesus is himself deceived, any hint that this betrayal might cause him pain and dismay. It is not, of course, as if the plan has gone awry in Matthew's version: Jesus must be betrayed so he can die and be resurrected. But there is a sense that the machinery is not wholly known, that it contains elements that even God does not know perfectly. There is a margin, however thin, for uncertainty. There is a circumference, however vast, to God's power.

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The Wheat and the Chaff (4 of 7)

(This is the fourth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

The clear light of the New Testament shines on the persons who inhabit it. The shadows of the Old Testament lie thick on the persons who inhabit it. Already in the gospels, this effect is visible: Herod is bad, Judas is very bad; the other eleven apostles are good. Sometimes they show weakness, as when Peter, fearing the soldiers and the mob, denies that he knows Jesus, but this does not indicate that Peter has fallen, only that, as in the garden of Gesthemane, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

A person may change in this new world: he may transform (like Judas) from good to bad or (like Paul) from bad to good—indeed, with the arrival of Paul, conversion and transformation will become central themes—but in the final tally, he must fall on one side or the other, amongst the saved or the damned.

The Old Testament is full of degrees of goodness. Moses is the greatest of the prophets, but he makes mistakes, and his life ends with the punishment for these mistakes: he must die in the wilderness, never to enter the promised land. King David is beloved of God but, at the height of his glory he schemes to have a man killed to cover up an illicit affair with the man’s wife, and for this a curse is laid on him and all his house. Saul is eaten up by murderous jealousy for David, but we see unmistakably a better nature within him and a real love for David, warring against his destructive impulses. Solomon is wise and blessed but he grows proud, is led astray, worships false gods, and as punishment for his sins, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are rent apart, never again to be united. But Solomon is not ultimately fallen or redeemed. He lives, does some good, some bad, and then he dies and “sleeps with his fathers.”

If we tend to think of Solomon as wise and forget his faults or of Saul as wicked and forget his virtues, this is because we are engaging not with the bible but with subsequent cultural-religious traditions that have resolved the inherent ambiguity of the text into a more straightforward morality.

No such misreading is required in the New Testament. The text makes clear on which side each character falls. There is a ruthlessness to this, and a terrible simplicity. There is also a great romanticism: life, under these narrative rules, becomes a dire struggle, attains a drama that perhaps was impossible when each step was only a step, each turn only a turn.

As Josipovici has pointed out, sin and redemption in the Old Testament are not definitive and final. They refer to individual actions, they do not define entire lives: “If you sin, then, like David, you may repent, or, like Ahab, you may not. Even if you do you may, like Jonah, sin again. … When someone’s eyes are opened in the Hebrew bible it is not so that they may suddenly understand the falsity of their whole past life but only the immediate error under which they have been laboring… But for Paul, the important act is not repentance but awakening, an act of faith which totally transforms life” (Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God, pg. 242).

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Poetry and Narrative (3 of 7)

Everything I said yesterday about the uncertainty and openness of meaning in the Old Testament refers specifically to the narrative sections of that document. The so called "Books of Poetic Wisdom," especially Psalms and Proverbs, usually make their meaning much plainer and more definite.

This runs counter to our modern notions about poetry, but it makes sense from another angle: in narrative, we are in the realm of events, a realm where first things happen, then we try to understand them. But in lyric poetry (the mode of Psalms) and wisdom poetry (the mode of Proverbs) we are in a realm of emotional interpretation and judgment: here, interpretation comes first and other things follow. If there are events, they come out of emotion and recollection (in lyric) or in the service of a particular lesson (in wisdom poetry). In these forms, then, details emerge under the aegis of a guiding thought; they are born already under the light of a reason that does not fit them into a pattern after they emerge, but rather draws them up out of darkness in the very process of pattern-making.

It is interesting to remember that narrative has this inherent capacity: not to interpret the world but to give us the world prior to interpretation.

But, of course, a narrative is also inevitably a pattern.

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Acts (2 of 7)

In my eagerness to write about St. Paul, I skipped over Acts. In its own way, Acts evinces a radical break with the mindset of the Old Testament, but the break is more hidden. There is, in this book, no personal narrator and little of the internal or the subjective. And there is still a sparseness to the storytelling, a shortage of detail. Yet this sparseness does not produce the openness, the ambiguity, the strangeness that characterizes the Old Testament.

Reading the OT, we may understand the physical events but we rarely can be sure what they mean. Samson takes a liking to a Philistine woman, and he goes down to a place called Timnath to see her:

…and, behold, a young lion roared against him. And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but he told not his father or his mother what he had done. And he went down, and talked with the woman; and she pleased Samson well. And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion. And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat: but he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.
(Judges 14:5-9)

What on earth is going on here? Why was there honey in the lion's carcass? Did Samson do wrong in eating it and giving it to his parents? Why didn’t he tell them where he got it? Did all of this have something to do with Samson's intention to wed a non-Israelite? The text never answers these questions. We are left to make our own meaning, a meaning which can only appear definite if we insist on burying the ambiguity inherent in the text beneath a rigid religious program.

I have picked one out of hundreds of examples. Nearly all the narrative sections of the OT, and even some of the legalistic sections, have this opacity, this refusal to reveal any clear, fixed system of meaning. Even God’s will often does not supply a fixed point. Sometimes, in a passion, he purposes destruction, only to be talked out of it by a mortal. Often he claims to be on the point of abandoning his previous plans. After the flood, he strikes what sounds very much like a note of regret. 

In the OT, we find a vast sequence of events from which we must make our own meaning, and this meaning therefore comes after the events: first they occur, then we look at them and interpret.(*) In this context, sparseness—the absence of interstitial details, of interior thoughts, of mood, of atmosphere—constitutes a shortage of clues, an openness to many different readings. The text is like a skeleton without flesh or ligaments: it can bend into all sorts of shapes.

But in Acts, the events seem to come already embedded in a definite system of meaning. For a new plan has entered the world, a plan that sweeps up everything and determines in advance the pattern of events and the significance of each one; a plan in which there is not room for negotiation or revision. So the sparseness of Acts becomes not ambiguity but simply brevity.

Here again we find that the gospels do not fit nicely into either category. The four evangelists seem to know the meaning of their story and to present it in order to send a particular message; yet at the heart of that story is a character who refuses to conform his words or his actions to any straightforward system of meaning.

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St. Paul (1 of 7)

A couple years ago, I went looking for secondary sources on the bible. I tried Jewish, Christian and secular commentaries but found them all thoroughly unilluminating. Sometime later, a woman (with whom I subsequently made plans to conduct a certain ritual under a canopy), gave me a book by one Gabriel Josipovici called The Book of God. The first thing this book did was show me that I had been looking for the wrong sort of help from secondary sources; the second thing it did was teach me to read better; the third was to lay out a web of thoughts about biblical narrative, its treatment of character, its relation to other kinds of narrative, and the implications of all this for our relationship to our lives and ourselves.

Anything I now say about the bible is grounded in Josipovici’s ideas. What follows, especially the point regarding Paul’s subjectivity, owes a great deal to him.

*   *   *

The vividness and distinctiveness of the language of the King James Bible, which I imagine must have left its mark on all subsequent translations, exerts a powerful unifying force.*  The various books of the bible may vary in content, authorship, and genre, but they are all unmistakably biblical sounding. Because the bible is such an opaque document, because we are so often hard-pressed to make sense of what is being said, style rises to the surface. For modern, secular people, encountering this text largely in disconnected fragments—a line quoted here or there, taken from disparate books—our sense of the bible is primarily our sense of a certain linguistic style. As we all know, that linguistic style is not in fact native to the text.

[* Since writing this crumb, I've read parts of Tyndale's bible and discovered that the King James follows it very closely, so it seems the KJ is not the originator of the linguistic style I'm describing. - 7/2/2023]

Beneath this unity of prose style, one finds a radical divide— in mentality, in content, in narrative form— between the Old and New Testaments. The bridge between them is the Gospels. The Gospels still retain much of the narrative style of the Old Testament: its sparseness, its tendency to leave things unsaid, its emphasis on action and speech, its shortage of internality. But the story of the Jesus's life feels very different form the stories of the OT. The nature of God, the relationship between God and his creations, the conception of human history—all have undergone a transformation when we turn the final page of the OT and find ourselves in the opening chapter of Matthew.

With the epistles of Saint Paul (the great early organizer of Christian churches whose letters make up 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament), we enter a new realm entirely. Gone is the sparseness and opacity that forced us to surmise, to guess, to interpret, that left us, sometimes, utterly at a loss. Paul wants to make his meaning crystal clear. He has none of Jesus’s penchant for ambiguous parables nor the OT’s penchant for reporting bizarre events without explanation. Paul has a message of burning import, and he wishes to tell it. Here at last we have a first-person narrator of the kind we moderns are familiar with: a narrator who tells us what he thinks and feels, who reports his emotions, who speaks of his own hopes and faults. Paul exhorts from a point of view that we can recognize as personal in a modern sense.

The OT narrators are very different. They report what was said and done, but they never tell us how they felt. We do not know whether Daniel was afraid in the lion’s den. Indeed, the narrative does not stay with Daniel amongst the lions but follows the King who has imprisoned him there to his royal chambers and, with the King, discovers Daniel alive the next morning. Even in Jonah, the angstiest of the prophets, we never hear directly about Jonah’s emotions. In the belly of the whale, it is only in the words of Jonah's prayer that we learn anything of his feelings. When I think of Jonah's story, I think of how he feared to take up the burden of prophecy, how, like Moses, he doubted his ability, but when I turn to the text, I discover that I have inferred these emotions; in the text there is only action:

Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.
(Jonah 1:1-3, KJV)

The books of the Old Testament prophets move with strange fluidity between first and third person. The book of Daniel, for example, is entirely third person for the first six chapters. In chapter 7, we get first person, but only in quotation: “Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold…” (Daniel 7:2). His vision goes on and on, the first person persisting. We seem to be in an extended quotation (the bible does not use quotation marks), but gradually we become unsure. Chapter 8 begins “In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel…” (8:1). The third person has vanished—and it will not reappear. Daniel’s speech has become the book.

When we do find the first person in the prophets, it is sometimes unclear whether the “I” refers to the prophet or to God, whose words he is repeating. It seems to slip back and forth without anything to mark the change. There is something strangely unfixed about the identities of these writers. As characters in their own stories, they are clear, but as narrators, as speakers, they blur and dissolve into a perspective beyond the individual. They do not emerge as individual subjects, as speakers, as personal narrators.

Paul is the first such narrator in the bible.

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