Suspense as the arch-genre of the world

Suspense, or, the building of expectation, is a crucial ingredient in many works of fiction and non-fiction. The trick is to give readers a trace of what they want, a foreshadowing of something, a hook, and so on. Once the reader is hooked, the author cunningly reels them up a series of minor conflicts, ever closer to the amazing climax before heading down to the wondrous, longed-for resolution. Dogs will chase bones in much the same way. This voluntary submission to hope is arguably the essence of what I, as a writer, resist. I resist it because I have no ability to hope, or yearn; at least, not on good days when laughter, wisdom and cunning are with me. On those days, I have plans, intentions, and a happiness that cannot be suspended.

In some genres, like journalism, a mild form of suspense is created without effort on the writer’s part, as readers come out of sheer curiosity, already addicted to journalistic gossip, eager to escape from both ennui and the overwhelming question, forever hoping they will not be affected by the news, or find themselves in the news, or just the contrary.

Beyond the written word, suspense and hope are nearly omnipresent. Shopping is exciting because its faithful minions never know exactly what they’ll buy, or why they’ll buy it, and when they have it, they’re dying to see how it will improve their value in the eyes of others.

Hope is precisely what should be overcome, cast out of Pandora’s Box … and yes, out of the book, as “book” was derived from “box.”

But what would fiction look like if it were entirely stripped of suspense? How could it still be interesting? Let our hopes be directed here, towards hope’s “end.”

King Solomon’s Wisdom

Was King Suleiman (excuse my spelling) wise? If you know what being wise entails, you will know that it does not permit one to live with hundreds of wives. Such an arrangement is more suitable to a honeybee. So, to be wise, either Suleiman must neglect all his wives or fail in the pursuit and maintenance of wisdom. Yet people believe it’s possible to do both. Well, the Bible is not above testing our gullibility; indeed, the Bible may be the largest and most intricate of such tests.

Significantly, the Bible’s compilers did not include more stories about Suleiman’s wisdom, though more existed in Jewish folklore and mystical literature. For example, in extant literature Suleiman’s wisdom is tested by the Queen of Sheba in a test he passes by using his knowledge of the relationship between flowers and bees. It’s a charming story that testifies to the king’s knowledge of nature; consequently, it was excluded by the Bible’s compilers, for they took great pains to represent nature as a curse.

The Bible does include a story that has no precedent in Jewish folklore: the story of Suleiman mediating between the two women fighting for possession of a single child. Surely a man capable of “managing” 700 wives can keep two women happy? Consider his solution: he threatens to cut the child in two on the assumption that the true mother will be the first to cry out against this, as if a cunning thief would not guess his intent from the outset. Of course, according to the text, his test worked, the risk paid off, and few ask the overwhelming question.

Let us consider Suleiman’s solution and apply it to the situation in Palestine/Israel. Here we have two nations arguing for possession of the “Holy Land.” The two nations attend United Nations meetings and nothing is resolved and many, many people suffer. Well, perhaps it’s time we identified the land’s rightful owners by threatening to drop an atomic bomb on Palestine/Israel if the two nations don’t stop fighting.

The problem with this kind of “final solution” approach is that it doesn’t address the underlying problem that both land and children are seen as property, property that cannot be shared for mutual benefit because brotherhood is lacking and motherhood is still mired in animal instincts, where the family is determined by biological descent, and the spiritual notion of family is absent.

Ironically, the Bible sets a good spiritual example on this subject. It is not a pure book created by a single person and belongs to two peoples, Jews and Christians, and not only to them. In fact, the story of The True Mother was largely stolen, I mean borrowed, from a Tibetan folktale about a man who resolves a dispute over a child between two his two wives. The man gives each woman one of the child’s arms and asks them to pull, which they do even though it threatens to tear the child in two. Well, the child goes to the woman who lost courage first, and so she is assumed to be the true mother, as if it never happens that a biological mother can be cruel and abusive to her child. Thus goes the prejudice in all folklore, and the Bible, too. However, blood is no guarantee of love.

The land, or soil, is also a living thing, perhaps more like a mother than a child, and today the fight for her possession is between those who actually want to destroy her, who love her only as tourists and artists, and those who are ready to live and die with her.

Environmentalism and Sympathy in Literature

Books that take their readers into the pitiful and sordid and base and loathsome lives of the unfortunate and malicious … such books lower my energy and infect me with their negative emotions. For many readers this influence is probably all too subtle; most people only read books that agree with their emotional state or their desired emotional state.

Environmentalism as a moral issue in literature: Writing effective environmental literature may be even more challenging than writing literature that seeks to sensitize readers to the suffering of other people. Why? Because people, whatever their culture or color, may more easily facilitate identification and empathy than monkeys, panda bears, sheep, fish, insects, and trees. Trees? Yes, we have tree-huggers, and some are motivated by pity for trees, but many more are moved by knowledge, particularly the knowledge that some forms of “animate” life, possibly their own too, depend on trees.

Literature that addresses the challenges facing the ecosphere, or nature itself, is too far removed from familiar particulars too be able to inspire feelings of empathy; the grand environmentalist must write as a scientist, providing reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour. In other words, as the Environment (i.e. everything affected by and affecting human life) becomes the predominant moral issue facing humankind, writers will cease to find much meaning by creating characters and narratives that generate emotional appeal.

(What kind of reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour can we provide? If the negative or moral emotions cannot form part of the argument, are we to persuade people with data showing the undesirability of ecological catastrophe? A question for comedians and thinkers.)

When the entire ecosphere is at stake the moral emotion of empathy is superfluous. Why? Because, with respect to the ecosphere, everyone is already in the same boat, and no imaginative leap is needed to grasp that dwindling water resources, pollution, rising ocean levels, pandemics, high tech warfare, desertification, peak oil and death are issues that together leave no one untouched.

In the end, environmental catastrophe is not a subject fit for literature or art, and wherever it is introduced into art it is ignored. Who pays any attention to the ravaged landscape behind the Mona Lisa? The environmental destruction envisioned in the Book of Revelation is positively welcomed by Christians as a sign of the imminent fulfillment of their deluded wishes. Think of Joyce’s Bloom associating a graveyard with a honeycomb…. What? Is death the candy of the promised land?

And yet—we engineers and manufacturers of death–what if it is?

The Past and Future of Moralizing in Literature

Some writers criticize our superficial culture but criticize our culture with high eloquence, pomp, artistry and le mot juste. Oh, you shameless hypocrites! Am I also guilty? For the moment. Soon he who does not care for titles, the rude, careless,  barbarian–shall be exposed.

Listen and grow weary and wary of the prophets who pronounce cultural criticisms with masterful linguistic flourishes and lexical exhibitions. Their readers cannot help but be impressed by style and wonder, Why don’t these stylish critics of the superficial write more plainly, like Becket, Hemmingway or Epictetus?

I speak of our Brontes, our Wolfes, Hemmingways, Fitzgeralds, Ibsens, Tolstoys and Harpers: let’s cut to the chase all ye prophets and expositors of foibles, all you detectives of social and psychological crimes scenes–the world has heard enough stories, enough mental theatre… Let your morals be heard plainly, as commandments and direct appeals to conscience. They gain nothing from the entertainment value of plots.

What do all our morals gain from shiny veneer? Is it the sugar that coats the bitter pill of guilt? But if we judge from certain critics, the medicine is wasted and the style and artistry alone demands attention. As if the moral engine of the book did not demand a cultural revolution—at least a cold, hard look at our possible complicity in the horrors of our culture.

I have never heard of a case in which a book of fiction influenced readers to raise their moral standards for themselves as well as others. But perhaps the influence of the world’s moralizing fiction is too subtle to be noticed, even by those who experience it. Indeed, if per capita murder rates have been decreasing for centuries, why not give literary fiction some of the credit?

Imagine if Martin Luther King had spoken in monotone and without any rhetorical and poetical talent. I suppose no one would have listened, and therefore he would not have been assassinated. But why make suppositions that can never be tested?

The value of beautifying morals may never be known, but I do know that it is self-contradictory and hypocritical. The time has come for conscientious story tellers to go on strike.

The Threefold Evolution of Literature

Beyond the toilet-paper books that pursue emotional stimulation void of moral direction and knowledge void of practicality—beyond this a spectrum exists on which “literary” novels can be plotted, with the Moral-Philosophical Novel at one end, the Comical Novel at another end, and the Aesthetical Novel at the third end. But no novel I know belongs entirely to one tendency, as even the aesthetical extremism of Finnegan’s Wake contains jokes and hints of moral tales and philosophies.

The Moral-Philosophical Novel begins as a description of inter-personal actions that result in either good or evil, joy or tragedy. The Bible, if I may be excused the indiscretion of including it in a category that already contains Finnegan’s Wake, is a primary example. The novel as a medium for actions that demonstrate religious morals and teachings continued beyond the Renaissance, but by the 18^th century, the Moral-Philosophical Novel provides distinctly less explanation and more emotion. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights’ muscular prose takes readers on a descent into a moral-philosophical Hell of inter-personal action. The book is crammed with moral insights into the causes of immoral behavior, and while none is particularly religious, and religion may even stand condemned by it, at least the Golden Rule is at work here—and even more than it is in the Bible. The Bible taught the Golden Rule, saying, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you or go to Hell, but this teaching fails to provide readers with the necessary emotional involvement and development, for it does not teach readers to feel for others, while in contrast the Romantic novel, by bringing readers into the emotional world of its characters, is designed just for this purpose.

After the Romantic era, the Moral-Philosophical Novel evolved new narrative conventions, culminating in stream of consciousness writing, but these developments did little or nothing to intensify the emotional impact of the novel, and were instead treated as experimental curiosities. The reasons for this may be that internal narratives reduce both thought and emotion to strings of words, grammatical conventions, formal organization and so on, and they alienate their characters from the world, strip them of action and fill them with pseudo-philosophical broodings and epiphanies. Thus, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, action is largely absent, and the tale drifts in a moral-philosophical cloud that seems to paralyse action. In The Mark on the Wall, this evolution produces a fictional-philosophical reflection on the possible meanings and origins of a mark on the wall. We are not far from Beckett here.

Where does the Moral-Philosophical Novel end? Nowhere; with nothing. In one sense, the moral teaching ends with the teaching of mortality, death, for death conveys the single, most powerful emotions. How does one teach or communicate death in a novel? Why teach it at all? History is already replete with the act of death, so perhaps authors should try to avoid being redundant and present readers with blank pages? Who knows how effective that would be?

In a way, Virginia Woolf is Stephen Daedelus—at least insofar as she represent the moral-philosophical voice that failed to express itself, failed—in her case—not because the author’s conscious decision but because she never formulated practical principles for living(and dying) and remained immersed in the flow of her emotions and musings. And so, perhaps we should take it as a fair warning that her work ended by embracing, through suicide, that which marks the terminus of the Moral-Philosophical Novel: death.

James Joyce is a rare novelist who consciously turned away from the Moral-Philosophical Novel. In Portrait of an Artist, Stephen vows to become a prophet of a new moral code, but Joyce never intended to fulfill this promise in his “sequels.” In Ulysses, Stephen is lost, overshadowed by Bloom, who is paralyzed by his Judaic morals and political powerlessness. And yet Ulysses is not only a moral-philosophical book, it is—perhaps primarily—an experiment in prose that aims to stimulate thinking, moral and amoral alike. In Finnegan’s Wake the author focuses his energies still more on turning language into a thought-stimulating device and medium; actions are faint and indistinct shadows and death is synonymous with a circular river.

I have spoken elsewhere about the evolution of comedy. I will just add a note about the injustice of the comical being excluded from serious literary discussions and categories. Many great authors have turned to the comical, or fallen for it, for the pursuit of comedy as well as the pursuit of the Aesthetical mode provides authors with a necessary elixir from the Moral-Philosophical tendency to produce tragedy, painful reflections on injustice and stultifying reflections on existential absurdity. Of course, in theory the Moral-Philosophical Mode could provide a cheery and invigorating image of the world, but since that so rarely happens among intelligent and conscientious authors, those who pursue the Moral-Philosophical mode risk the danger of becoming like the tragic and paralysed characters they depict.

So long as authors remain tempted by the pleasure of moralizing and criticizing behind the screen of fiction; and—so long as they remain overly-emotional, they will fail to pursue the Moral-Philosophical mode to its end, a Nirvana-like meditation on the ultimate challenge facing moral beings, that being death, not in its common conception but something, perhaps, resembling the death defined in my philosophy.

The other modes have their own dangers. The Aesthetical mode tempts authors with the pleasure of obscurity for the sake of avoiding comprehension, as if obscurity placed one beyond the claws of criticism, one’s own included. The pursuit of comedy can lead authors to the cruel/infantile or to the moral/satirical, of which only the latter is ever considered literature. Yet somehow, even such light works as Bridget Jones’ Diary, works that largely avoid the two pitfalls of comedy seem, for the time, destined to be excluded from literary discussion, never mind anthologies; likewise the hidden comical element in “serious” works seems destined to be overlooked until…