When Art Forms Lose Relevance

 I recently attended Robert McKee’s Story Seminar and had the good fortune to hear an additional day-long lecture from the screenwriting guru on TV writing. I was eager to hear this lecture, as I have been jumping back and forth between thinking of my novel as a novel and a TV series. Novels, particularly those of a certain length, can be challenging to adapt into a 90-120 minute movie.  TV has been the answer to many writers’ and readers’ prayers, who have wanted to see their favorite stories brought to life on screen. But TV is also, obviously, so much more than a mere adaptation-producing machine. It has transcended the novel as the ultimate vehicle for long-form storytelling, attracting the best writers working today. Naturally, anyone wanting to write a successful novel these days would wonder if it might not be better to write it as a TV series right away.

 

The exception that proves the rule

While this doesn’t mean that no one is writing good novels, it does mean that the novel has been playing second fiddle in terms of overall quality to TV for a while. This became clearer to me when I applied to Creative Writing MFAs for prose fiction. I was advised to look for the programs that produced the writers I most admired. I was discouraged to find that almost all the writers I admired who were still living had not attended an MFA program but were all working in TV and had gotten their degrees either in film, in some other completely unrelated field, or had not gotten a master’s degree at all. Not only this, but I had become disenchanted with many of the fashionable techniques that rule creative writing MFAs and contemporary novel writing in general. While at McKee’s seminar, I was sitting next to a fellow novelist.

 

We spoke about the distasteful attitudes we had encountered among novelists and teachers who preach faulty techniques to anyone aspiring to write in this medium. The attitudes my fellow novelist and I discussed brought me back to my theater days and how I had first encountered a combination of feeling fashionably misunderstood by the masses and yet doing as much as possible to make themselves inaccessible to those masses by writing deliberately dense and strange work that all but requires a college degree to understand it, and even then, rarely to get much enjoyment or insight from the practice. What satisfaction there is, lies in being in on the joke, and the joke becomes less worth getting in on the more people understand it. It is a vicious and vacuous circle that is disheartening to be near and participate in. Making good art is time-consuming, and all art tries to communicate something. While there is some good art that artists create for a niche audience, and the artists who make it seem to do so in a self-aware and generous spirit, many artists crave an audience large enough for them to make their living off of their art. Thus, at some point, you have to broaden your appeal. You must dig deeper into yourself to say something true without erring too far in the opposite direction and just pandering and telling people what they want to hear. 

 

Often, when I hear the lamentations of playwrights, novelists, or other artists whose medium’s heyday has passed, they come across like the incels, chronically commented on in the media, who, after having been rejected by women, retroactively declare to have taken themselves voluntarily off the sexual market. As with these unfortunate, bitter, and misguided young men, these aspiring artists’ claims of independence ring hollow. They strike anyone with half a brain as a defense mechanism born out of rejection. After suffering the sting of rejection, which is, unfortunately, part of trying to improve as an artist, they try to protect themselves from it by broadcasting as loudly as they can to the world that they don’t care.

 

TV, on the other hand, though still full of temperamental artists with fragile egos, at least has the sensibility to see that accessibility has always been something that great artists have striven for. Experimentation and challenging an audience are all well and good. There is, however, a crucial difference between setting an invitation down for your audience that says, “Hey, I’ve got something I want to show you. It may seem strange and unexpected, but if you bear with me, I promise it will be worth it,” and the snide leering of a pedant who says, “You probably will never understand what it is I’m trying to say, but try if you can.”

 

While this is disheartening for me as a novelist, I would much rather be honest about which medium produces the best writing. I do my best to learn from them without being resentful and still appreciate my chosen medium for what it has to offer. The unique joy of setting your imagination, which has no budget, and no need for a location scout to throw up whatever images immediately come to mind, is one that novelists can still capitalize on if we don’t get too precious about our egos and retreat into high-handed literary sleight of hand.

Moral Decision in Blue Velvet

 I’ve written at some length in several posts, including my most recent one, about the importance of weakness in a protagonist. I also wrote about screenwriting instructor John Truby’s differentiation between psychological and moral weaknesses. However, I have yet to address another of John Truby’s 22 steps that he lays out in his Anatomy of Story. It is the step in which the protagonist’s arc comes to a head. You may think this is the story’s climax or what Truby calls the battle. You would be close, but not correct. While this step usually occurs during the battle, it is an independent step that many writers execute poorly or not at all. While this is common in stories of lower quality, I was shocked that this step was not as effective in a much more critically respected film: David Lynch’s neo-noir, Blue Velvet. The step in question is the moral decision. The moral decision of Blue Velvet’s protagonist squanders a great deal of its potential, partially because the main storyline falters in setting up Jeffrey’s weakness and because Lynch complicates his story using multiple genres.

 

Let’s first address the main storyline, which uses Truby’s Detective genre form. If you’ve done the work of giving your protagonist a weakness and then confronted them repeatedly with that weakness over the course of the story, they’ve had to grow in incremental ways, often interspersed by instances in which they slip back into their weakness and try to reach whatever goal they’re pursuing in an ineffective or immoral manner. By the time they reach the battle, however, they will have to not only face their antagonist and try to attain their goal, but they will also have to make a harsh decision. Either they fall tragically back into their weakness and lose their goal, or they make a difficult change and reach the goal. In the latter case, they also receive a revelation about their true self, and how to live a more morally conscientious life.

 

Despite having a moral and an immoral pole, this decision must be believable and complex. A compelling moral choice doesn’t run along the lines of, “you can either shoot this barrelful of helpless puppies, or you can find them good homes.” It has to be a choice in which one option is immoral but justifiable, and the other option is moral but apparently out of reach, or whose beneficent consequences are uncertain. Examples of moral choices are: whether to take revenge on the men who murdered your family or to make peace, as in The Godfather. It might be whether to run away with the woman you love or to go off and fight the Nazis, as in Casablanca. It might be to insist that you were right in your initial judgment of another’s character rather than admit that you were wrong, as in Pride and Prejudice.

 

"Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

While Blue Velvet’s protagonist, college boy Jeffrey Beaumont, does have a compelling moral choice—whether to shoot a homicidal maniac or run away and leave him for the police—it is not as well set up as it could be. Though Jeffrey is set up as a clean-cut college boy from a wholesome family, Lynch doesn’t detail his weakness as someone who has qualms about taking a life in any detail. Nor does Lynch take the opposite tack and cast Jeffrey as harboring his dark side that he has struggled to control before the events of the story unfold. Jeffrey, to our knowledge, does not wrestle with any weakness in the story’s opening. His dark side only emerges after he gets swept up in the strange events of Frank’s criminal activities when he comes across a severed ear in a field. When we finally get to the battle where Jeffrey decides to kill his antagonist—the psychosexual sadist, Frank Booth, it doesn’t have the power it might have had if Lynch had more purposefully built these aspects of Jeffrey’s character up earlier.

 

Now let’s discuss the second genre, which Lynch uses for his subplot: the love story. Though detective and love stories are often combined, leading some to believe that they are one genre, they are two distinct story types, each with its own unique set of beats, which the writer needs to hit for the story to work its magic on the audience. The love story in Blue Velvet has many great moments, which Lynch executes very well. Jeffrey first meets his main love interest after he visits Detective Williams at his home, questioning him further about the severed ear he brought to Williams’s attention earlier. Detective Williams’s daughter, Sandy, overhears Jeffrey talking to her father and catches him outside the house to tell him details about the case she overheard her father discussing at home. Though Sandy has a boyfriend, the two strike up a flirtatious friendship and investigate the case independently.

"Honey, let me explain..."

In the early stages of this relationship, Jeffrey also begins his affair with Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer, who is the first lead, of which Sandy informs Jeffrey when they meet. Unlike Jeffrey’s relationship with Sandy, which defies even Norman Rockwell’s standards of wholesomeness in many respects, Jeffrey’s illicit affair with Dorothy is a sadomasochistic relationship in which Jeffrey taps into his violent side. Jeffrey manages to keep this affair a secret from Sandy, who eventually dumps her current boyfriend for him until Dorothy turns up naked and raving at Jeffrey’s doorstep. Jeffrey and Sandy then take Dorothy to Sandy’s house, where Dorothy reveals in front of both Sandy and Sandy’s mother that she and Jeffrey are lovers and even screams out at one point, “I love you! Love me!” which naturally sends Sandy into bouts of tears. She then slaps Jeffrey when he tries to excuse his behavior. Then, a few scenes later, she declares her love for Jeffrey over the phone, and the two are reunited in the movie's final scene. We then see an image of a happy Dorothy, now reunited with her missing son, apparently over her unhappy love for Jeffrey. At no point does Jeffrey have to sacrifice to save his relationship with Sandy, reveal his dark side to her consciously and of his own accord, or apologize to Dorothy for not disclosing his relationship with Sandy.

 

This massive part of the story is just wrapped up with a jarring and hard-to-swallow happy ending that lowers the power of the film overall. Jeffery has wrestled with the dark side of the world and himself, but he and the people around him don’t appear changed in any natural way. It’s not demonstrated that they have been forced to grow stronger by their experiences and learn to live life more deeply. Though Blue Velvet has many strengths from which writers can learn, its flawed execution of the moral decision also has a lot to teach us about how not to write fulfilling character arcs.

Do Critics Like Patriotism?

 Like many movie and TV lovers, I often turn to Rotten Tomatoes for a selection of reviews before investing time in a movie or a show. Though Rotten Tomatoes provides both a critic score and an audience score, for the first 8 years that I used the review aggregator site, I never glanced at the audience scores. I am slightly elitist when it comes to movies and TV, and am generally more prone to consult the opinion of someone who has seen many other films and shows and has been paid to make a living from assessing their quality. Recently, however, I have wearied of watching TV and movies—and the reactions to them—grow more politicized. I loathe watching something that I might otherwise enjoy only to roll my eyes because the writers and producers chose to sacrifice character complexity, compelling plot, and nuanced themes to sermonize. I naturally also loathe critical appraisals of those shows that hinge on overzealous ideologies. Regrettably, even highly educated and sophisticated critics are just as prone to these ideological spats as comparatively unsophisticated movie-goers who don’t bring as broad or deep a matrix of cultural associations to bear on any given piece of entertainment.

 

Given this unfortunate truth, I have started taking greater heed of audience scores, particularly when those scores are at great variance with critic scores. Though not every piece that critics slam and audiences adore is a misunderstood masterwork, I often find something of value that I might have missed if I only went to critical smashes. Likewise, many projects that have had oodles of critical praise have underwhelmed or disappointed me. Most recently, I sat down to watch The Terminal List, which became insanely popular with audiences, but less so with critics, The Daily Beast even referring to the show as “an unhinged right-wing revenge fantasy.” Though I would say that the critics’ reactions to The Terminal List do bear some animus to the show on ideological grounds, some of the countercriticisms towards those who dismissed The Terminal List don’t ring true either. Did the critics just bag on The Terminal List because it was patriotic and pro-military, or are there some genuine flaws in the show? If it really was only anti-American or anti-military sentiment motivating Terminal List’s negative reviews, then we have to explain the positive audience and critical reception that Top Gun: Maverick has received. Like Terminal List, Maverick features a tale of genuine heroism with the American military at its center. Why then did Maverick succeed not only with audiences but with critics as well?

Shameless Pandering or Misunderstood Masterpiece?

Essentially it comes down to one critical factor that I’ve discussed in various contexts on this blog: weakness. While Terminal List’s protagonist, James Reece, is out-manned, out-gunned, and suffers a head injury that impairs his memories, none of these characteristics qualifies as a true weakness. They are disadvantages. While stacking the odds against your hero is still an excellent storytelling technique, it doesn't meet the criteria for a weakness, which has to be characterological. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways of looking at two types of weaknesses comes from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story. In Anatomy, Truby lays out the difference between a psychological weakness and a moral weakness. A psychological weakness is a weakness that only hurts the hero. A moral weakness is a weakness that causes the hero to hurt others around him. Though James Reece has several disadvantages, he has no psychological or moral weakness. The closest thing to a weakness is his impaired memory. When it comes to Reece’s character as a person, however, this lets Reece off the hook for the times he makes mistakes, and it’s revealed early on in the series, that even though it’s easy for others to think that Reece might be crazy, his suspicions are not only correct but lead to a grander conspiracy than he had first imagined.

 

Let’s imagine for a moment, that instead of an unalloyed hero, Reece suffered from the weakness of overworking his men and ignoring the signs they exhibit of PTSD, not unlike the real-life titular hero depicted in Patton smacking a shell-shocked soldier and calling him a coward. Then, Reece finds out that his actions towards his men have actually directly contributed to a failed mission. Then Reece has to come to terms with his own weakness, as well as face enemies from the outside.

"Send him up to the front, do you hear me?!"

It is precisely this quality that Top Gun: Maverick has. Maverick is overconfident, which we already know from the previous film got his best friend killed. He also takes immoral actions against his deceased friend’s son, Rooster—whose admission into the Navy Maverick postponed; and his ex-girlfriend, whom he left out to dry. Far from making the audience shy away from Maverick, these immoral actions make him relatable and give him somewhere more meaningful to go than simply carrying out his mission. Not only that but Maverick’s success hinges in many respects on overcoming the weakness he has of always thinking that he knows best no matter what others say. For example, Maverick’s attempt to protect Rooster only succeeds in alienating his friend’s son and delaying his career, which Rooster embarks on anyway, completely sabotaging Maverick’s attempts to keep him out of danger. During the film’s climax, Maverick and Rooster are the only ones that each can count on to accomplish their mission and get home safely. The only way that Maverick can do his part in achieving this is by trusting Rooster rather than trying to protect him. Maverick is aided in this self-revelation by his old girlfriend, Penny, who gives Maverick some much-needed perspective on his actions towards Rooster after he matures, forms a committed relationship with her, and opens up about his doubts.

 

"Talk to me, Rooster!"

No one wants to see the quality of film and TV that isn’t beholden to a toxic agenda more than I. However, the greatest weapon against propaganda isn’t more propaganda. It is art, the best art that writers, directors, and producers can create. If we want to see stories and not sermons, that has to cut both ways. We can’t just call out sloppy characterization only when it is propping up an agenda that we happen to agree with. If we do that, we can write films and TV that not only score well with audiences but persuade more recalcitrant ideological opponents to consider things from outside their current paradigm.

On the Vice of Cowardice

 

A little over a year ago, I took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu, though I am far from a typical martial arts practitioner. I am skinny, unathletic, and never competed seriously in any sport, let alone a combat sport. Why then did I, at the age of 30, decide to take up something like jiu-jitsu? The short answer is that, for some time, I had been preoccupied with the idea of cowardice. This preoccupation may, on the face of it, seem silly. To call someone a coward in this day and age feels old-fashioned. It’s an insult that one Victorian gentleman might render to another in a matter of honor. The word coward may call up the same wry smile as such old-fashioned insults as “blackguard” or “ne’er-do-well.” For many years, I took for granted that this reframing of cowardice was good. It meant that we had matured as a society and weren’t beholden to outdated moral codes. We no longer judge people by silly shows of useless bravery. Instead, we’ve learned more critical values like compassion and understanding.

 Gradually, however, I have altered my perception. All too often, cowardice isn’t taken seriously as a vice the same way gluttony, greed, or maliciousness is, though it deserves to be. The consequences of cowardice can be every bit as serious as any other vice, and the only way to combat it is, to be honest about what it is and then do something about it. Rather than suffering from insufficient compassion, we are in the throes of having too much. Or perhaps we suffer from the outward shows of kindness at the expense of all other values. Too often, we don’t speak the truth because we fear it will hurt someone’s feelings. While there is genuine merit in seeing things from another’s perspective, this can’t allow us to lose everything of value that we may already hold. If someone comes to us and tells us that something we said has hurt them, it’s good form to reflect on whether we said something un-constructive. However, sometimes such self-reflection shows us that even though what we said may have been harsh, it was still the truth. We can say that the other person is free to disagree with us, but we must stand by what we say.

In addition to these general cultural concerns, my preoccupation with cowardice had manifested in my personal life. This problem first preoccupied me when, a few years back, I took the OCEAN, or the Big Five, Personality Traits test. For those unfamiliar with the test, the five traits for which the acronym OCEAN stands are: openness—the attraction to novelty and new ways of thinking, conscientiousness—one’s devotion to duty and task execution, extraversion—the measure of one’s positive emotion, agreeableness—how likely one is to care for others over themselves, and neuroticism—the measure of one’s negative emotion. While several parts of my results were no great surprise to me, I was shocked to discover that I scored in the 29^th percentile of Agreeableness, a trait I had assumed I would score highly in. After recovering from my surprise, however, this information began to make sense, especially when I considered my results on another of the Big Five traits: neuroticism. In neuroticism, I scored moderately high: the 64^th percentile. This revelation was no surprise to me, but when I considered it alongside my relatively low score in agreeableness, it got me thinking hard about my self-image.

I had always taken for granted that I preferred to avoid conflict because I saw the best in people and could see things from everyone’s point of view. While there is some truth in this, it likely comes from my high score in openness—96^th percentile—rather than from agreeableness. I am genuinely intrigued to discover new perspectives on various issues. I took many of these other aspects of my personality matter-of-factly, but for some reason, my low score in agreeableness bothered me, though there were no clear reasons why it should have.

After all, neuroticism, like any personality trait, isn’t a judgment of one’s character. People all along the spectrum of neuroticism exist for a reason. Different situations and environments pose different levels of potential danger. Someone like myself who is high in neuroticism is more likely to imagine what potential hazards a novel situation might hide. While people like us need to differentiate between testing a new environment for real dangers and avoiding a new environment due to imagined threats, we can prove very useful. People on the opposite end of the spectrum are equally predisposed to failure if they don’t exercise dispassion when implementing their temperament. They can see the opportunities in a new environment but also imagine possibilities that aren’t there and fail to see the dangers. Should they do the former, they can bring significant value to themselves and those around them. If they do the latter, they can rush headlong into a dangerous situation and suffer unexpected consequences that could have been avoided if they had observed their situation more critically.

Such sober reflection wasn’t my first reaction when I considered this fact. Perhaps I could have been too hard on myself, but when I continued to think on these unconsidered facts about myself now staring me in the face, I knew deep in my gut that something else was at play. I didn’t think of myself as someone who avoided or withdrew from conflict because it made logical sense to avoid conflict in that time or place. I first thought I didn’t like conflict because I care about other people’s feelings.

What then was going on? After trying to rationalize the issue several times, I reached an uncomfortable conclusion. There had been many instances in my life when I had succumbed to the vice of cowardice and retroactively reframed my motivation as compassion. So, I decided to confront this tendency in myself head-on. Whenever conflict reared its head and I wanted to duck out, I would ask myself why. Did I want to avoid conflict because it was honestly the right thing to do or because I was scared? Occasionally, I would find that I had a good reason to avoid unnecessary conflict.  On many other occasions, however, I feared the consequences of speaking up or speaking back. I was worried that people would lose the perception of a compassionate considerate person, which for so long had been the perception I had held of myself. Gradually, I started to tap into the less agreeable side of my personality.

If I’m honest, my initial attempts didn’t immediately yield a more commanding and authoritative personality but manifested as delayed adolescence. Previously, I had been a risk-averse rule follower. For the most part, I had never spent much time with the people my mother warned me about as one usually does in high school, but later in life, I struck up an unusual friendship. This friend possessed many qualities that I admired: he was ambitious and strong-willed, but he was also infamous among our mutual friends for getting into fights. He had even done some prison time for assault. He had once asked me to work for him. When he first asked me, I had had a comfortable restaurant job and had turned him down. Then the COVID pandemic struck, and the restaurant closed. I figured this was as good a time as any to get a new job and hang around with someone who didn’t seem to have any of the problems I had with accessing his disagreeable side. So, I called my friend and asked if he was still looking for workers. Sure enough, he was. The work was difficult, and balancing the personal side of my relationship with my friend with the professional side was often very stressful. I’m sad to say that this relationship flamed out in both the personal and professional spheres.

Despite this discouraging failure, if it hadn’t been for my time with this person, I might never have started jiu-jitsu. Before my friend and I parted ways, we took on another friend of his as a customer. This friend soon invited both of us to start training jiu-jitsu at his gym, and we accepted. The first six months, in particular, were very grueling. However, even when I spent an entire 5-minute round getting smashed by a more competent opponent, I would still feel immense satisfaction just for having voluntarily undergone something like that. Now I still go, even when I don’t feel like it. I always feel good when I decide to go because I know it’s good medicine. As much as we would like to think otherwise, we need a carrot and a stick to discipline ourselves. I look forward to working on my jiu-jitsu game and learning new submissions and sweeps, but I also go because it is a defense against a very serious vice.

Now that I take cowardice seriously as a vice, I actually look with greater objectivity at the neurotic side of my personality. In the past, I would veer between a defensive and romanticized attachment to this part of myself, soothing my ego with the self-image of an imaginative but misunderstood loner, and feelings of insecurity that there was something wrong with this side of my personality, and I would start to wish that I could change it. Now I see this side of myself with measured compassion. Now, when I avoid conflict, I don’t have to beat myself up because I know it’s just part of my temperament, but I can also control it when I see that it is genuinely time to stop being a coward.

The Idiot Versus the Antichrist

 

I’m writing this post to organize some of my thoughts on a reading project I embarked on in 2018 to better understand two of my literary idols. 7 years earlier, while a sophomore in college, I had taken a class in which I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both of these writers have since loomed large over my perception of the world. They have also been touchstones for many other artists I admire from Damon Lindelof to David Bowie. After coming across so many references to the works of each writer, I realized that I had to deepen my understanding of said work. I set myself the task of reading every Walter Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche and every Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky. As a supplement, I assigned myself Joseph Frank’s five-volume Dostoevsky biography to better understand the social context in which Dostoevsky wrote his novels. Eventually I would also read Kaufmann’s Nietzsche biography.

I undertook this endeavor, not only to read two great writers, but to read two great writers who disagreed passionately on life’s most fundamental questions. Though it is important to strive for a healthy amount of unity in one’s literary diet and not chase after contradiction for contradiction’s sake, every great talent needs a worthy challenge to unlock its full potential. This need for challenge is more obvious in the physical realm, such as in a boxing match. Part of the thrill of The Rumble in The Jungle, for example, isn’t just watching Muhammad Ali. It’s about watching him face his greatest opponent, George Foreman. Likewise, in the realm of literature, to prove a great author’s worth you pit them against another author whose ideas pose the greatest possible challenge. In the final analysis, I crowned Dostoevsky the victor, but as with two great talents like Ali and Foreman, the greatest insight comes not from admiring only the victor, but from appreciating the challenge laid down by a worthy opponent. With this frame of mind, let us take a look at the topic on which Dostoevsky and Nietzsche most clearly disagreed: that of Christianity, and its relation to nihilism.

"You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too."

Nietzsche, on the one hand, considered Christianity a major wellspring of nihilism: a condemnation of the world that sapped an individual’s ability to thrive in it. As an alternative, Nietzsche prescribed a daring brand of egoism: to fully embrace and remain true to oneself without looking to the tribe or the tribe’s gods for guidance. Dostoevsky, though he acknowledged the importance of the human ego, still thought that it was insufficient to shoulder the weight of life’s tragedies on its own. Dostoevsky claimed that, though the ideal represented by Christ can crush the human ego if adopted too literally, is still the only ideal towards which one can strive and still embrace life with all its suffering. I can remember thinking in college, when I first read Crime and Punishment, that Dostoevsky was somewhat naïve about human nature’s dark side. By comparison, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil seemed to more fully grasp these unpleasant realities and give the reader a better chance of facing them.

My preference for Nietzsche deepened in the early stages of my marathon, when I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Written in the style of an Old Testament life of a prophet, this philosophical novel follows the life of Nietzsche’s avatar, Zarathustra, and records many of Zarathustra’s teachings, which he formulates over alternating periods of worldly wandering to collect observations and share his wisdom, and solitude in which he reflects on all that he has seen. It is in this novel that Nietzsche puts forward some of his most memorable critiques on Christianity, and elaborates on his theme of the death of God, which he first pronounced in The Gay Science. Here Nietzsche puts his finger very clearly on the all too real faults to which many Christians fall prey. Chief among these is the false face of morality, which so many adopt merely to drain the fortitude of anyone who is stronger and more courageous than them, and the misuse of pity, which so often saps the self-respect of anyone unlucky enough to receive it. Then there is the constant abuse heaped on the physical world, and on the body, which so many Christians see as a filthy thing, and favoring instead the ephemeral promise of the hereafter. With all these insightful criticisms in mind, my favoritism for Nietzsche found a firmer foothold.

I felt the tide begin to shift, however, when I read an earlier work of Dostoevsky’s. Though his later masterpieces cast a large shadow over it, Notes from a Dead House—Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his time in a Siberian labor camp—corrected the grave misconception I held regarding Dostoevsky’s worldview, and began to solidify the tide of the debate between the two writers in Dostoevsky’s favor. Dostoevsky paints several unvarnished portraits of human beings at their most desperate and dangerous, portraits drawn from individuals with whom Dostoevsky spent four years living with in the labor camp. I also learned around this time, from Frank’s biography, that Nietzsche had greatly admired this book, for obvious reasons, and began to learn more how greatly Nietzsche actually admired Dostoevsky’s work. Dostoevsky, it turned out, was not nearly so naïve as I had thought, and much of Nietzsche’s own thought concerning the untapped wells of human potential hidden in the darkest places had actually come directly from Dostoevsky’s influence.

Given these new insights, I already held a more critical frame of mind when I read The Antichrist, Nietzsche’s most scathing critique of Christianity. Though this book stands head and shoulders above many other pieces written in the same iconoclastic vein, it was the first break I noticed in Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity. His gift for sly humor is on breathtaking display here, but it is precisely in his eagerness to take the wind from the sails of German Christians, particularly when taking them to task for anti-Semitism, that he actually gives himself away. Nietzsche argues that Christians have no cause to hate Jews because Christians only took what was implicit in Judaism to its logical endpoint in the figure of Jesus, whom he said was the ultimate Jew. Nietzsche goes on to say how much he admires the Jewish people compared to Christians. He makes plain his preference for the Old Testament, which he said could have taught the Greeks—whose tragedies he greatly admired—about the true depths of life’s horrors and the glory gained in facing them. While Nietzsche makes his point partly in jest, there is much truth in it. Nietzsche hits upon the real value of Christianity, which, as he himself says, took a great work of religious art like the Old Testament and brought it to its logical conclusion in the figure of Jesus.

Not long after this, I read the perfect counterpoint to Nietzsche’s Antichrist: Dostoevsky’s first attempt to create a “perfectly beautiful man,” who embodied the spirit of Christian love Dostoevsky believed indispensable to dispelling nihilism. The first time I read The Idiot, it only deepened my preference for Nietzsche’s view over Dostoevsky’s. The titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies Christ’s values of love and self-sacrifice so unequivocally, that he actually does irreparable harm to two women. The first is Nastasya Fillipovna, a famous beauty whose guardian sexually abuses her as a young girl and keeps her as his mistress, until he decides to pawn her off as a wife to another man. The second is Aglaya Epanchin, the spirited young daughter of a retired colonel. Nastasya inspires Myshkin’s Christian—and asexual—feelings of love, while Aglaya stirs up a more romantic and earthbound love in the hapless young man. Both women fall in love with the prince, but because he cannot decide between sacrificing his earthly nature to be with Nastasya or his divine nature to be with Aglaya, tragic ends befall them both. Another man, Rogozhin, who also loves Nastasya, murders her in a jealous rage, while Aglaya runs off with a Polish military officer, who then abandons her to social ruin. Devastated by the consequences of his inaction, Myshkin suffers a mental breakdown and retreats to a sanatorium in Switzerland to live out the rest of his days in self-imposed exile.

The first time I read this book, I took it as a confirmation that Dostoevsky could not reconcile himself to how unrealistic the Christian ideal really was. I thought that Dostoevsky had somehow blamed the world for Myshkin’s fate, and that he was calling all of his readers to impotently bemoan that fate, and follow blindly in Myshkin’s steps towards mental ruin, just as Nietzsche accuses so many Christians of doing. As I read more about Dostoevsky’s life at the time in which he wrote the novel, including some of the thoughts about it that he confided to friends and relatives in various letters, I changed my opinion on this book considerably. Dostoevsky, as it turned out, was under no delusions about the burden of reconciling one’s earthly nature with all its needs and desires, with one’s divine calling to place oneself at the service of others. It was precisely the danger of not having a certain amount of patience with one’s earthly nature that Dostoevsky unflinchingly portrayed in that novel, making it—though imperfect—a staggering achievement of artistic and moral integrity, placing Dostoevsky’s most cherished values in the most unforgiving crucible.

Nietzsche too would turn a critical eye on some of his most cherished views in what became my favorite of his books: On the Genealogy of Morals. Where in Antichrist, Nietzsche’s concessions to Christianity’s potential value slipped in despite his best efforts, in Genealogy, he actually turns his gift for sly criticism upon himself. Though Nietzsche never loses his sharpness or his impatience for hypocrisy, he spends a great deal of time on one of his favorite themes: that of amor fati: the conviction that everything that happens, both to oneself, and in the broad tapestry of history, should be embraced, that we should never dwell on what should have happened in the past, but stoke our courage for present action. As he follows this train of thought to its logical endpoint, Nietzsche muses that, according to his own logic, even Christianity falls under the all-redeeming umbrella of amor fati. Yes, even the religion Nietzsche poked full of holes still had some claim to respect. Nietzsche at one other point acknowledges that many of the values and disciplines he himself valued most highly such as asceticism and introspection, would, at one point in time have been considered an indulgence, favored only by the weak, which was how he viewed many Christians. Part of what makes this book my favorite is that he actually admits the limitations of his thought, and invites the reader to draw their own conclusions about the topics on which he expounds.

It was also about this time that I started dipping into the work of Carl Jung, who commented quite explicitly on Nietzsche’s philosophy and on his mental breakdown. For many of Nietzsche’s admirers, Nietzsche’s insanity casts no shadow over his philosophy at all. They contend that it was simply physiological, brought on by a case of syphilis he most likely contracted from a brothel in Zurich. Jung, however, thought Nietzsche’s rejection of the divine left a void in his psyche that eventually swallowed him whole. Perhaps it’s just my own personal prejudice, but I always found it disheartening that a man who placed thriving in the world, and embracing life at the forefront at his thought would end his life so pitifully, and harbored suspicions that it was some fracture in his psyche beyond the physiological that led to his mental collapse. Jung also contended that there was far more hunger after the admiration of the rabble that Nietzsche so often dismissed than he was willing to admit. Another of Jung’s hobbyhorses that stuck vividly in my mind was the phenomenon of enantiodramia: the phenomenon by which one thing, when taken to its extreme, turns into its opposite. Obsession with strength can turn into weakness, while the most unassuming and forbearing soul can conceal untold wells of resilience. I therefore found Jung’s theory compelling, but still sat on the fence regarding it until I reached the final two books on my list: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.

Some may say comparing these two books is unfair, given that many consider The Brothers Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, while Will to Power is a collection of previously unpublished notes that serve only as extracurricular reading for those familiar with Nietzsche’s completed works. Though this claim bears consideration, I couldn’t help but read Will to Power as a slow-motion replay in which I saw every break in Nietzsche’s defenses where Dostoevsky’s ultimately superior vision triumphed. Nietzsche’s misstep that sticks most vividly in my mind was a passage in which he claims it is actually the strong, unique types like Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte, who need protection from the lesser types who serve them. While I understand that Will to Power contains many half-fleshed out ideas, not meant to stand as Nietzsche’s final word, this example does perfectly embody the breaking point of Nietzsche’s thought. Stretching his case for worldly ambition to the degree he does here marks the point at which Nietzsche steps into enantiodramia.

I can perhaps think of no particular topic on which Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s visions dovetail, however than in the manner in which they each choose to deal with one’s enemies. Nietzsche has many fascinating things to say on the subject. One that sticks most firmly in my mind if from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche advises his readers to seek out enemies that one hates, but not enemies that one despises. In other words, choose to do battle with an enemy you disagree with passionately, but not one that you think is beneath you, and that poses no challenge to you. To seek out conflict with the former is to take up one’s great task in life. To even associate with the former is merely to debase oneself. Yet, given Nietzsche’s comments about the challenge that even ordinary people can pose to great figures like Napoleon or Caesar, perhaps they are more worthy of hate and less worthy of condescension than Nietzsche thought. Elsewhere in Zarathustra he criticizes Christianity for causing people to merely will themselves into nothingness, to degrade oneself out of existence. Nietzsche, for all his insistence on harsh standards and great challenges, also preached a certain version of self-acceptance. He said that you should by all means prune oneself, and do away with self-destructive habits, but one should also embrace the various parts of one’s nature, however loathsome they may appear. It is perhaps the particular traits that Nietzsche decides are worth embracing and what traits most require pruning that separates Nietzsche from Dostoevsky. In his zeal to correct the excesses that Christianity often inspires, he occasionally overcorrects himself. Dostoevsky, conversely, upheld a more all-encompassing standard for what one ought to embrace, both in oneself and in one’s fellow man. Just as in The Idiot, he illustrated the dangers of failing to take one’s mortal nature into account when following the example set by Jesus, in his work as a whole, and most spectacularly in his magnum opus, The Brothers Karamazov, he shows the price of abandoning one’s responsibility to one’s fellow man. Nietzsche also said that part of what a strong nature seeks out is ever greater and greater challenges. What greater challenge could there be than to make oneself the caretaker for those less powerful than oneself? Dostoevsky understood that you need to see people where they are at, and to respect whenever someone is operating at the limits of their abilities, however great or small those abilities might be.

I can think of no greater contrast between these two men than the manner in which they died. Nietzsche, who on the one hand preached love of the world and accused Christianity of defaming the world, lived in seclusion, and died alone and crazy. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, who, though he preached belief in things unseen, still held up the world and life as worth living in, and lived a life associating with everyone from hardened criminals to fellow literary celebrities and even royalty, died, as one mourner at his funeral noted with an expression of absolute peace on his face. Yes, I can honestly say that I learned a great deal about the weaknesses of Christianity and those who sometimes hide behind it to conceal their own weaknesses, but Dostoevsky did so much to reveal the real strength that lies when one actually lives by the creed of Christian love and forgiveness, rather than merely professing to believe it.

Seven Books You Should Read Instead of Waiting for Winds of Winter

 

Is it really worth it?

I shared my opinion on the ending of Game of Thrones, but now I hear occasional remarks about how Martin’s vision for the books will surpass the show and fix all the mistakes that left so many of the fans disappointed. I am not so convinced. While A Song of Ice and Fire has its good points, on the whole, there are much better books that offer all of the things that Martin’s bloated saga claims to have. So, I thought it would be appropriate to list 7 books that one could read instead of waiting for Martin to complete his 7-volume fantasy series.

 

1.     Lyonesse by Jack Vance

I figured I’d start with the obvious and recommend a fantasy series. I’m cheating a little bit here, since this is actually a trilogy of novels, but I read the single volume that contains all three books, and since this entire trilogy is about the length of a single volume from SOIAF, I’m counting it as one. The Lord of the Rings, is the first fantasy series that comes to everyone’s mind when comparing Martin’s epic to its inspirations, but, though this series is less commented on, its author, Jack Vance, was another huge inspiration for Martin. Reading this trilogy, you can definitely see what Martin was trying to do. Unfortunately for Martin, Vance is able to write a story that, not only isn’t as ethically cut and dry as typical fantasy fare, but that is also much more economical, and still leads to a satisfying but believable conclusion.

 

2.     A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century by Barbara Tuchmann

Next, we have a history book. Alison Weir’s The Wars of the Roses is known to have inspired Martin, and I must confess I have not read that book. I have, however, read the excellent Distant Mirror, which uses the life of French knight Enguerrand de Coucy as a focal point from which to detail everything from The Hundred Years War to the Black Plague to the Crusades. It’s an invaluable portrait of life in the Middle Ages, and one just as full of violence and intrigue as Martin’s novels.

 

3.     War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Now we’re going to bridge the gap between the last two entries with a work of historical fiction. This is the most daunting of the books on this list, clocking in at around 1,200 pages, but if you’re intimidated by the book’s length, consider this: The five volumes of Martin’s still uncompleted series add up to over 5,000 pages! Why wait for about 2,000 more, only to be disappointed yet again, when you could read a story set in the middle of one of the most infamous military campaigns in history—Napoleon’s misguided Russian invasion—and end with some of the most insightful passages on the nature of war and of the lives that get caught up in it that have ever been written?

 

4.     The War of Dreams by Angela Carter

Now we return to the fantasy genre, but this time to a much more idiosyncratic example of it. The War of Dreams—or The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, is a picaresque novel that follows the sexual misadventures of a young man named Desiderio while in pursuit of his lady love, Albertina. So much of the allure surrounding SOIAF is its supposedly mature and unflinching portrayal of sex. Compared to War of Dreams, Martin’s novels come across as both tame and juvenile by comparison. Carter doesn’t flinch, not only from the violent but from the bizarre as well. Though it is shocking to read, the payoff in the end is immense. It’s an incredible book, not just about sex for sex’s sake, but about how it has the ability to manipulate our perceptions of ourselves, of other people, and the world at large.

 

5.     King Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

Let’s return to the realm of historical fiction, this time from the pen of another of the all-time greats. If War and Peace’s 1,200 pages seems a little daunting, then why not breeze through some Elizabethan verse instead? Believe it or not, this was the equivalent of a prestige blockbuster back in the day. This is the work that introduced one of Shakespeare’s most popular character’s: the drunken knight, Falstaff, whom Shakespeare brought back for a sequel and a spin-off! This is a play that has it all. In addition to Falstaff’s comedic misadventures, there is also the drama and intrigue of young prince Hal, who is the real hero of the story, for all that the play is actually named for his father, King Henry. This is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have ever read, and under-read by many in comparison to Shakespeare’s more widely-known plays.

 

6.     Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

This is the last fantasy novel on this list, and also my personal favorite of the three. The magic in this book is so delightfully mysterious and off-kilter. I’ve never read a writer who juxtaposes the dry, occasionally pedantic manner of a historian with the fantastical content of their story so well. I’ve recommended a few other lengthy books on this list, but of them all, these are the pages that always seem to pass the quickest. I always read this book looking forward to the next time I get to revisit the delightful characters in this novel.

 

7.     The Oresteia by Aeschylus

Compared to the other books on this list, this one is a very quick read, but it still manages to say so much. I mentioned Aeschylus’s masterpiece in my last blog post on the subject of Game of Thrones, so it only made sense to bring it back here. The battle of good and evil that takes place in every human heart has rarely been so elegantly told. These plays are perfect, and you can well understand after having read them why Aeschylus was considered such a titan in his own lifetime.

Why We Love Love Stories

 There are few scenes that epitomize all we love and hate about love stories than the iconic reconciliation between the two leads in Jerry Maguire. The male lead, Jerry, comes back to his love interest, Dorothy, and tells her, with tears in his eyes, “You complete me,” to which she replies, “You had me at hello.” I’ve lost track of the number of people who tell me about how much they love love stories like Jerry Maguire, but then disparage their regard, not just for love stories, but for romantic love itself. To a degree, I can relate to the sentiment that love stories have sold us an unfulfillable fantasy. However, love stories have a spectrum of quality with some being sentimental trash, and others providing valuable insight into the bonds two people can form. Jerry Maguire falls somewhere in the middle, with some surprisingly sincere moments interspersed with schmaltz like the iconic scene mentioned above. Naturally, people who approach a relationship hoping that the other person will complete them usually walk away feeling embittered and disappointed. No person can actually bear the weight of being another person’s sole reason for living. However, the sensation, that a fully-formed person feels when falling in love with a partner does resemble the feelings Jerry shamelessly displays, albeit with some realistic preconditions. When it comes to the more well-written love stories, there’s often something more powerful at work than mere wish fulfilment. If we take a closer look at how these bonds form in real life, and how stories distill that real phenomenon into its most dramatic representation, we can actually delineate between what is toxic illusion and what is genuine insight into the nature of romance.

One of the best commentaries I’ve heard on the hard facts of romantic love—or pair-bonding for the scientifically inclined—is a video posted by evolutionary biologist, Bret Weinstein, called “Marriage as an Evolutionary Phenomenon.” In it, Weinstein likens the feeling of falling into true and lasting love as a broadening of the sense of self, first to include a partner, and often, to eventually include children. Of course, one of the first milestones that one has to pass before broadening one’s identity in this way is to come fully to grips with one’s own, individual sense of self. It is the failure to meet this first step that so often stymies people who want to bring love into their life. This is also the step that is missing from lower-quality love stories. More sophisticated love stories, on the other hand, often handle this part of human development as well. In order, to show how love stories actually reveal the truth about love, we first have to say a few words about how stories in general reveal the truth.

The foremost point to bear in mind when thinking about stories—and their distinction from everyday life—is that stories are heightened forms of reality. On the one hand, they are dangerous to confuse with everyday life, but they are equally dangerous to dismiss as simply untrue. They are meta-realities in which everything is supercharged with meaning, in a way that the often dreary details of everyday life are not. For one thing, every story’s hero must have a desire. This desire has to be clear-cut, so that we know whether or not the hero has reached it by the end of the story. In real life, people often strenuously avoid chasing their desires, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Even if they do pursue their desires, the pursuit is full of dull, repetitive work. If one were to take up boxing, for example, you’d have to put in lots of long hours at the gym, working a heavy bag, learning combinations, and sparring with a comparably skilled partner. If one were to film every single day spent learning to box, there would be several days’ worth of material of someone making barely perceptible, incremental progress at the same exact thing, over and over again. When you watch a movie like Rocky, on the other hand, you watch Sylvester Stallone do all of these things with noticeable progress each time, with stirring music in the background. Then, within two minutes the montage is over, and he’s ready to step into the ring with Apollo Creed. This isn’t because the movie is lying to us. It’s only because it shows just enough of the struggle involved in a rigorous training regimen to get the point across to a general audience. In the same way that a map does not include every blade of grass or crack in the pavement in a landscape, a story cuts out the superfluous details of life, and focuses on those events that have the most impact on pursuing a valiant goal.

After desire, the next important element that art distills from life is opposition, not only from without, but from within. Well-written characters have some serious flaw that they must uncover and then change in order to reach their desire. To use the previous example of Rocky, Rocky’s flaw is that he has let his talent as a boxer go to waste, making a living as a loan-shark’s collector. Over the course of the film, we see Rocky not only go through grueling physical training, but wrestle with his self-doubt, until he finally faces Apollo Creed in the ring and gives his opponent the fight of his life. While real life is full of people who successfully avoid thinking about their weaknesses, there are others who, when confronted with a lofty ambition, do take stock of the personal weaknesses holding them back from fulfilling that ambition. Stories are virtually always about the second sort of people. Stories are elitist in this sense, and, in order for a story to hold our attention, and stick with us after we’ve finished watching it or reading it, the hero has to pursue a goal that is difficult, and they have to do some painful soul-searching in order to reach it.

Now, how do these artistic principles play out in a love story? Some of the best insights I’ve gained on what goes into a high-quality love-story have come from one of the genre audio classes taught by John Truby, a screenwriting instructor, whose seminars have gained him international recognition. Truby points out several requirements for a love story that complicate the already intense battle between weakness and desire in other, simpler stories. For one thing, good love stories have, not one, but two heroes: the two lovers. In less developed love stories, this dynamic is often left out and it focuses exclusively on the arc of one lover—often a man—at the expense of the beloved—often a woman. However, the most discerning audiences want to see a love story between two well-drawn characters. This means that both characters have to have clearly defined weaknesses—such as cynicism, bitterness, low self-esteem, or superficiality—that stand in the way of their desire, which is to love and be loved by the other.

Next, we come up against the problem that we mentioned earlier that so often stands in the way of love, which is some insufficiency, not in our relationship to others, but in our relationship to ourselves. In order to truly love and be loved by another person, we have to love ourself. In story terms, this throws another complication into the mix. To track the progress of each lover’s journey to self-discovery in addition to their journey to mutual love, we have to create a subplot. Truby refers to this as the success subplot: each lover yearns for success in some sphere of their life that has nothing to do with the other lover. In Jerry Maguire, Jerry wants to get his client a better contract. In Sideways, Miles wants to publish his novel. In Emma, Emma wants to find a suitable match for her protégé, Harriet.

We have already spoken about how art distills all the superfluous details out of everyday life when showing how a character overcomes some deep weakness in order to achieve a difficult desire. We have now doubled, not just the number of heroes, but the number of desires for each of those heroes! Consequently, we double the amount of meaningful details that, on the one hand, delivers us the most relevant details of life, but also the superfluous details of life that we cut out. In life, a person can go for years, coming to grips with their own sense of self without once thinking of love, and then suddenly find themselves bringing another person into an already fulfilling life. Other people meet someone when they are young and untested, and coexist blissfully for several years before encountering some undeveloped part of themselves that they need to address. Despite the distance that can separate the journey to self-realization and the journey to a loving relationship, the two are still interdependent. Learning to realize one’s full potential beforehand is great training for realizing the full potential of a relationship, and having a valuable relationship can serve as heady motivation for reaching that full potential. A love story’s purpose is not to remain true to pedantic details of how far apart these things seem, but to dramatize how intimately interwoven they truly are, and to do so in the most dramatic way possible. So, we meet two lovers, who are struggling in life in some way. They meet, and then have to grapple with the weaknesses that keep them from both their personal ambitions and from each other all at the same time in an intense counterpoint.

While we are right to beware of pandering, simplistic cliches, we would do ourselves incredible harm to give up the truth that these cliches often strain to capture. By all means deride a poorly-told love story, but never throw away a true love story, and certainly never stoop to disparaging love full stop. If we can do that, then we can take the lessons from great pieces of narrative art and learn to live life not just realistically, but with love as well. No person can ever “complete” us in the sense that they can be a substitute for coming to grips with our true selves, but they can startlingly expand that same sense of self—once attained—in such a way that often makes us feel as if even that grueling work of self-realization was only the halfway point to something greater. If we make the first step of separating the hyper-meaningful world of art from the more prosaic one of life, we can actually have our cake and eat it to. There is much that occurs in life and love that stories simply cannot show us, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still worthwhile maps to take along the journey.