These are some thoughts that followed musing on the recent posts by Josh Nadeau and Michael Rennier on why we are re-making classics Darker; Josh particularly defends the remake, among other things. I would like to suggest a fable about literary Dark, and what it is Really For.
Perhaps you have heard of Jordan Peterson? Jordan “Clean Up Your Room!” Peterson? One particular Peterson video reintroduced to me the survival advantage in Looking at People’s Faces*, and especially the face of the enemy. From the enemy’s face in particular you can learn the most useful things, such as where to stand and when to chuck your spear. One can even learn (the first few times, at least) from studying how various hunters take and handle other prey than you. In watching cheetahs, for example, one eventually learns that they cannot grip; that they cannot bite nearly so hard as a lion; that they rely on making their prey run fast enough to fall hard and break things when tripped. We don’t want the cheetah to take our goats, so we make sure our goats do not run from them — and we are careful not to run from them ourselves.
Indeed the fascination of the panther or the trainwreck is almost as instinctual in humans as it seems not to be in zebras and pigeons. I would even go so far as to say that the horrible** is as integral to human experience and human survival as the adorable, the delicious, and the erotic. Dan Dennet, in a TED talk*** and elsewhere sought to add the humorous to that trio, suggesting
[the sense of the Funny] is a neural system evolved to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job: “funny” is The Joy of Debugging!
his presentation is susceptible of many objections, but that idea is . . . fascinating **. And figuring out What The Enemy is up to is an even more pressing, and sometimes messier job than just figuring out What’s Gone Wrong!
The thing is, as we have turned the delicious into dessert, the adorable into pets and dolls, the humorous into farce, and . . . er . . . etc. . . ., the horrible we have turned into a whole catalog of diversions, from Tragedy to Boxing Ring to Blood-soaked Summer Blockbuster. It is an entertainment that rewards us before we even think about it, so that we can think about it. But one can use sugar, or salt, or irony so much that he looses the taste of them; and so it is with narrative villains and narrative darkness.
Anyways, there is my contention: the horrible — the villain, the predator and avalanche — are all fascinating, and viscerally so, because sometimes we have needed to know. Indeed, we are admonished by Our Lord that we must be “cunning as serpents”, at the very least to become skilled in slaying those serpents that sneak into our Gardens. Therefore, O Ye Writers, write striking villains! But write them true, write them so that we learn what we must know of them, how to protect ourselves against them, and when and how to fight them. But do not let them, like serpents, entrance and bewilder us (nor you yourselves). Let us have cream and coffee, sweet and bitter to drink; let us have light and shadow in our paintings. Show us something of the Dark, but shine Light into it.
Let me point out an example. In a comment on Josh’s “Defense,” Stephen mentions Dostoevsky’s suggestion that writing characters who are both Interesting and Good is so difficult that it seems we have to write them as just a bit ridiculous, citing don Quixote and Prince Myshkin. I should like to add to that list Chesterton’s character Father Michael from The Ball and the Cross; not because Father Michael is ridiculous or foolish (he is neither), but because we can see why Turnbull and MacIan might think him so.
Father Michael is engaging in part because he is so simple you have to keep looking to be sure there isn’t more to him; in part because he appears so seldom; and finally because his faith itself is almost visible. He is set against Professor Lucifer (Chesterton was not given to needless subtlety) who is also fascinating, for opposed reasons: he acts an awful lot, he appears an awful lot, and he is a complicated character given to complicated schemes and inventions, schemes and inventions that seem to work. And yet for all these arts his only faith is his self-confidence, and for all his scheming success he is, out of all the world, afraid most of two silly Scottsmen and a monk who doesn’t seem to do anything. A fascinating and indeed a dangerous villain, but not made greater nor more enticing than a villain should. So let your villains be!
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* I have little difficulty looking at peoples’ faces, so I don’t much think about it, you see. … I am a bit odd in person, though, in that I usually haven’t much to say.
** something akin to the Sublime, but also distinct
*** Dennet seems to delight in making fun of Creationists almost as much as I like a good chocolate cake. For myself, I do believe, as Church and Scripture tell me, that God Formed Adam of the Slime of the Earth, and since “forming” is a process, one can reasonably ask what Adam looked like when that was half-done, before God breathed Spirit into his nostrils: and that look just might have been something like an ape.
Jesse C. McKeown is a mathematician of sorts, a lover of words, and sings Gregorian Chant on Sundays.
About portraying evil, I want to tell you a little story. Once I had a Discalced Carmelite monk as a spiritual director, and I told him that I often thought to write about the destructive things that I had seen happen to people around me after the change in sexual mores took hold in our society, possibly under the title, Casualties of the Sexual Revolution. He strongly advised against it. Why? Because I would have to dwell on these things in order to write about them. He didn’t say this, although it’s also true: Anyone who read my stories would dwell on those evils too.
It seems to me that the Scriptures are clear in saying that such things should not even be spoken about among us.
Ephesians 5:3: But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not so much as be named among you, as becometh saints:
And we should not dwell on evil things. We should dwell on the good.
Philippians 4:8: For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline: think on these things.
I disagree with the idea that we need to look evil in the face in order to understand it.
I believe the Scriptures are right. We aren’t supposed to dwell on evil. We are to dwell on the good. What we dwell on we become.
What we read and see for entertainment has a strong effect on us, not only on our feelings and imagination but also on our behavior.
But at the same time, I struggle. I still want to write those stories. Following these principles would have a stifling affect on writers, I realize. As the saying goes, only evil is interesting.
Just some thoughts.
In mulling over Jesse’s and Roseanne’s remarks, I’m reminded of an analogy a friend used about exposure to evil: inoculation vs. vaccination (not guaranteed to be medically accurate). Inoculation is exposure to a small dose of a disease itself. This is maybe the underlying philosophy of those who say, hey we need to watch movies with graphic violence, etc. because that’s how the world is and we need to get used to it. Vaccination (at least in its inception: vacca = cow) was giving cowpox–a variant, less harmful version of the disease — in place of the virulent smallpox disease itself.
I have to remind myself that the Gospel of Mark features a striptease (or some sensuous dance): I don’t think Salome was tapdancing. We’re spared the details, and maybe that’s the take-away for Catholic artists: give us the reality but spare us the details. Whether it’s the offstage murders in Shakespeare or the hyphened-out cuss words in 19th century novels, I think maybe evil can be introduced at one remove so that we’re in its veiled presence without getting its actual germs on us.
Now for violence, there is the “horrors of war” argument. Is the violence in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Hacksaw Ridge” a necessary education for making an armchair American conservative like myself less naive about what war is really about? But am I really better off for having seen men with their intestines hanging out? Don’t know.
Language is also a tricky one. I have some friends who watched a version of “The Shawshank Redemption” using a censorship program to edit out the language. Prison life without foul language? Part of the hellish environment of that film for me is the language, which is what makes the climax one of the most cathartic in the history of storytelling.
Sex (and sensuality) for me is the one black and white that I feel pretty immovable on. You could argue, as my friends who watched Shawshank did, that the more language one is exposed to, the easier it is to fall into it oneself. It has been argued also that violence invites desensitization. Sexuality is the one area that can implicate one in sin *at the moment* one is watching it. One is not just watching people doing something, one can be participating. A counterargument could be one can look upon a woman with lust at anytime, even one fully clothed. In cinema, though, the camera *is* our eyes and the director can more or less (like using some slow motion shots of a woman) “force” our gaze to be an objectifying one.
Anyway, just want to keep the great dialogue going here.
Dear Roseanne, I quite agree that dwelling on any Evil is a Bad Idea, (as is too much salt, or sugar, or caffeine). There are even Mythic warnings against gazing too carelessly at a Dragon’s Eye (or Basilisk or Gorgon…); and I certainly wouldn’t ever suggest anyone try to make their living by doing so! But if one were too scrupulous in reading Paul, it would have become impossible to read Paul’s own epistle in Ephesus a second time! Indeed, much of Scripture is replete with both gory and salacious allusions. And yet, it would not follow that simply by being unable to name that sin they would be free from it, or free of its temptation. I think what’s really going on there is that Paul means that no-one should have cause to mention that particular sin: the conduct, the manners, the entire life of the Christians at Ephesus should be such that even those familiar with that particular sin (Ephesian or not, Christian or not) just don’t think of it when they consider the Church in Ephesus.
But you don’t have to put yourself in the Dragon’s mind; you only have to know where he is and how he moves, and be somewhere else (or get there first and slay him!) Or, follow Perseus’ example and look through a glass, darkly…
I suppose that when evil is represented in the form of an irredeemable creature, like a dragon, it probably isn’t a good idea to try to get inside its mind. What would be the point, other than to take on the persona of evil? The problem comes in when the evil is being perpetrated by an actual person, or something close enough (elf, talking animal, etc.) to have true moral agency. Then there really can be a value in putting oneself in the other’s mind, not in order to experience the evil and certainly not to excuse it, but to understand the chain of choices and events that brought this person to this dark place, and to see the part of him/ her that God sees, that inextinguishable spark of the Divine Image that makes him or her still genuinely valuable, still beloved, in spite of all. Within the Christian worldview, people cannot simply be written off as irredeemable villains, no matter how much evil they have done. To my way of thinking, portraying evil in literature can be a very effective way to stretch the limits of our empathy and teach us how to love our enemies – which is, after all, a greater challenge than defeating them.