My 2011 blog posts describe how I
discovered my philosophical question,
and how I searched for and found answers to that question. But they
fail to really express those answers, to convey the essence of my
philosophy of life. My struggle over the last 4 years has been trying
to find a way to do so.
How do I explain my struggle to express
my philosophy without first expressing my philosophy? Let me try a
metaphor. My wife has finally made me watch "The Fall,"
and I highly recommend it. Most critics rave about its imagery. I
think its strong point is the touching friendship between the two
hospital patients, a stuntman and a little girl, a friendship based
around a silly fantasy story they
make up together, a story which carries so much more meaning for them
than it could possibly convey on its own, even with the best special
effects in the world. Within this fantasy story you've got manifold
symbolic elements charged with wonder and possibility. One of the
characters is a heavily stylized version of Charles Darwin, who wears
a colorful fur coat and in an emergency consults his pet monkey. He's
searching for an extremely rare butterfly called "Americanus
Exoticus" -- it is his life's dream.
When he finally
finds the butterfly, it's dead and pinned, and he grieves. It's a
silly scene, filmed comically, but it's got the essence of the
tragedy of storytelling.
Let's think about
what this butterfly must have been like when it was alive. To behold
it is to experience a kind of beauty that is impossible to fully
describe. For someone like our fictional Darwin -- who's been
chasing it his entire life, and understands how it weaves its cocoon,
how it drinks only from the purply-orange orchid "Fragilus
Exquisitus", how it lays its eggs only by the sweetest of spring
pools, how it's broadly tapered and trailing wings have unique
aerodynamic properties -- the experience of beauty multiplies with
one's scientific knowledge. On the other hand, if you were merely to
describe its diet, habits, size, color, shape in coldly quantitative
terms, the beauty is lost. Seeing it dead bears no comparison to
observing it as it flits among the jungle ferns.
If you could film
it as it flies, you might capture a good part of its aesthetic
beauty. But even if Darwin had access to a movie camera, he still
needs to somehow explain what the butterfly has taught him about
ecology, evolution, and life itself.
The philosophical
answers that I found are like Americanus Exoticus. Their significance
can't be explained by art or science alone, but only by both
together. If I were to explain myself scientifically, the meaning is
lost, it becomes too technical. Expressing beauty is very difficult. All you can do about a lovely sunset is say, "Come look!"
If you must describe it you might name the colors and talk about the
shapes of the clouds, but how do you capture the subtlety and
emotional impact?
So
I've been trying my hand at painting
the butterfly, that is, writing fiction that illustrates my
philosophy. Since reading Chretien de Troyes's medieval romance
"Perceval," I've been inspired by an alternate vision of
the Apocalypse, one where it is the darkness and struggle for
survival itself that must shape the seed of virtue for a new Golden
Age. Since late 2008 -- for 6 years in fact -- I've been attempting
to write a more romantic, more hopeful, more evolutionary kind of
apocalyptic science fiction.
I am trying to
write stories with a meaning and a message. Modern literary critics
will tell you that this is a very bad idea.
These
days, most fiction avoids having a meaning or a message, because
modern writers are terrified of being too preachy. That's why most
bestsellers are thrill rides and spectacles of sex or violence, and
why most critically-acclaimed novels are obscure, unnecessarily
complex, or hip and superficial. Whether high- or low-brow, modern
novel writers are seeking to evoke pure pleasure, because that's what
critics ask for. And critics ask for pure pleasure because they've
grown tired of resisting a publishing industry that chases profits
above all else. And
because critics themselves want their readers to agree with
everything they say, and it is much easier to
agree that, "This novel is a thrill ride, a fast-paced
page-turner that will keep you up at night," than to agree,
"This novel is a thrill ride, a fast-paced page-turner that will
keep you up at night, but ultimately promotes a set of values that
will damage the moral conscience of this nation."
Besides, it's the
first part of the quote that will be printed on the dust-jacket.
Don't
get me wrong. I want people to take pleasure in my stories. It's
essential. But the craft of writing must enhance the meaning of a
work, not obscure it. If you look at the classics that have stood the
test of time, they all speak with a clear voice and a solid meaning
that is powerfully there but cannot be easily or fully explained
without telling the story. You can say this about Greek tragedy,
Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Jane Austen, H.G. Wells -- and almost
any writer famous for more than 50 years. If all James Joyce had
written was Finnegan's Wake
or even Ulysses, no
one today would know who he was. It's the clear, philosophical prose
of Dubliners and
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
that makes Joyce worth knowing.
If you look at
bestseller lists from more than 50 years ago, you'll see that instant
popularity does not ensure any kind of lasting value. Here are the
U.S. bestselling novels according to Publisher's Weekly from 1932:
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
- The Fountain by Charles Langbridge Morgan
- Sons by Pearl S. Buck
- Magnolia Street by Louis Golding
- The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow
- Old Wine and New by Warwick Deeping
- Mary's Neck by Booth Tarkington
- Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C. Douglas
- Inheritance by Phyllis Bentley
- Three Loves by A. J. Cronin
Do you recognize
any of those? Let's look at the number 1 bestseller for each year in
the 1920s:
1920: The Man of
the Forest by Zane Grey
1921: Main
Street by Sinclair Lewis
1922: If Winter
Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson
1923: Black Oxen
by Gertrude Atherton
1924: So Big by
Edna Ferber
1925: Soundings
by A. Hamilton Gibbs
1926: The
Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine
1927: Elmer
Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
1928: The Bridge
of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1929: All Quiet
on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
We all know "All
Quiet on the Western Front," not because many of us have read
it, but because we've all at least heard of the movie. If you
recognize any others, you're probably in a university literature
department. I'm guessing that even your best read literature
professor will know nothing of these in another hundred years.
Neither
critical acclaim nor bestselling status will guarantee immortality.
Nor both together! Sinclair Lewis's 1922 "Babbit" was the
9th bestselling novel in 1922 and perhaps his most critically
acclaimed work. You'll notice that Sinclair Lewis wrote two #1
bestsellers during the 20s, and he also won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1930. From this data alone you might conclude he was
the most important novelist of the 1920s. But most people today have
never read any of his books. I remember picking up Babbit
at the library five or six years
ago -- it failed to hold my interest.
For a
novel to be great it must explore timeless values. Sinclair Lewis was
too hip. Most of his novels were satires of the middle-class American
life. But middle-class America of the 1920s was full of
superficialities that are rare in any other time and place. In Main
Street he wrote about a woman
who was "too educated" and "too liberal." He
didn't realize that feminism was a trend that would grow immeasurably
in our culture. And, on the other hand, it's a trend that's been
special to Western culture and is not as common in other places and
times.
F.
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby satirizes
the same time and place as much of Lewis's work. But because it
develops more eternal themes -- obsession, love, materialism --
Fitzgerald's work has lasted.
It
is worth noting that The Great Gatsby,
published in 1925, received mixed reviews, and that Fitzgerald was
deeply disappointed by its meager sales. One of the most famous
critics, H.L. Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore," called it
"no
more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that."
Of the bestselling Babbitt,
the same critic wrote, “I
know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real
America."
Not
to conclude that genius is always misunderstood, either! Upton
Sinclair's The
Jungle (1906)
was critically acclaimed, the #6 bestseller, and has been famous now
for over 100 years. It's possible to speak both to the present and to
the future, though it is very rare.
My
point is, novels like The
Jungle or
The
Great Gatsby that
have clear allegorical meaning, meaning that could not easily be
expressed in nonfiction, meaning that touches on our eternal values:
these are the novels that become a lasting part of a culture and make
it what it is.
We
need to stop being afraid of "having a message."
(Next
week, I'll talk science fiction and tell how I came to write my
novel-in-progress: The
First King of Montana.)
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