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Genres, Conflict, and Cartesian Spaces

I have been thinking hard about what I like about the books I like because, lately, I have found myself reading a lot of current books I don’t particularly care for and I wonder what is happening.

I published Fifty-Third and Dorchester earlier this year. I have been immersing myself in writing and the meta-world of the craft of writing. These days, everyone has a theory or method for writing a sure-fire hit. I read and listen to several websites and podcasts a week on writing craft. I have shelves of books on every aspect of the craft. Like me, every aspiring writer these days is flooded with advice. MFAs in creative writing abound. Compared to a decade ago, writers are much better educated on craft.

But I have to ask, why don’t I care much for the recently written books I read? My poor choices? A bad attitude? Out of step with the times? Or has political air pollution put a permanent sour taste in my mouth? Chronic dysphoria?

All of those are plausible, but I think it is something else because there are authors whose books continue to bring me pleasure. For example, I reread Dorothy Sayers first Peter Whimsey story last week and enjoyed it immensely. I saw flaws and superficialities that I did not notice the last time I read it, probably twenty years ago, but these are minor hypersensitivities that come from sweating over the imperfections in my own work. The issues highlight the many things that Ms. Sayers got right rather than detract.

My guess, which I intend to explore, is that current writers have lost sight of some sensibilities that older writers took for granted. Current literary crafters are painfully aware of a certain kind of conflict. The craft books almost all say that every scene, paragraph, and word must convey the striving of the character toward some goal or the reader will lose interest. The entire text must be plotted in a polar coordinate system that points to whatever it is that the character wants. This is robust underpinning. But has a bit of ennui slipped in? Is this the only story that can captures a reader’s fancy? Is it possible that a multidimensional cartesian space can be equally or more compelling?

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Violent Culture

This week, the senate report on “enhanced interrogation” was released. I don’t want to comment on the report or enhanced interrogation techniques. The accusations, denials, finger pointing, and bloviation will have to settle down before I’m ready. For the time being, I prefer to look at the wider context.

Citizens of the United States like violence. Look at the local news. In my neighborhood, there are four main local television stations. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, the same stations were broadcasting. Each station had a half hour of local news followed by a half hour of national news in the early evening. Another broadcast at ten or eleven, and an early morning half hour. Altogether, two hours, if that. Today, I would not care to count the number of hours of news the same stations broadcast, but it is much more than hour to two hours of fifty years ago.

And what have they filled it with? Murders, rapes, sexual abuse, beatings, robberies punctuated with an occasional lachrymose piece about recovery from adversity. Careful reporting on difficult to comprehend, and therefore boring, issues like statistical trends, financial reports, policies, planning, and the details of government—the stuff that citizens in a democracy must know—are rare.

Mayhem has become entertainment. Schadenfreude reigns. We love to see our neighbor’s houses fall over cliffs, lives ruined by scammers, families torn apart by abuse and violence, and then solace ourselves by throwing in a few bucks when the hat is passed.

I don’t blame anyone or anything, certainly not the television producers trying to make a living by giving people what they want. I am just sad. It is pointless to try to find who is responsible. It is everyone’s fault. It’s no one’s fault. Choose your favorite scapegoat. Maybe it is the aftermath of the Holocaust, or WWII. Or the pill. Maybe the hippies. Or Dr. Spock. Capital gains taxes. Or structural anthropology. The metric system. Or the new math. Maybe there is something in the water.

The consequence is violence everywhere. Folks want to buy guns so they can get in on the action and shoot each other .We watch violence on the news. We watch it in the movies. For the first time in my life, I felt a passing twinge of sympathy for the government of North Korea when I heard Sony was planning a movie in which the head of their sitting leader explodes.

The great literature of the past was violent. Read the Iliad or the Odyssey, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Bleak House. There is plenty of killing and violence. The past was violent. There is evidence that the murder rate has been decreasing for the last ten centuries. The difference I notice is fascination with the details of violence rather than the consequences of violence. In the Iliad, and Shakespeare, the violence is off stage. The motives, repercussions, ethics, and morality of violence are the subject, not the acts themselves.

There is no lack of principled conduct among the people and institutions I know, but in our cultural life, for every sincere politician, there are three murderers. For every honest and engaged citizen, a dozen grasping and greedy trolls refuse to support the common good and and only want to get rich. Why? I don’t know, but I hope it changes.

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Anatomy of Melancholy

I’ve been taking medication for bipolar disorder for over thirty years. In my case, medication has been useful. It has made it possible for me to pursue a moderately successful career and a life without too much destructive drama. Psychiatrists have prescribed for me nearly every anti-depressant and anti-manic drug available. Some have been more useful than others have and their efficacy has changed as I have aged and my circumstances have changed. What worked thirty years ago works today, but didn’t work for an intervening decade. I would never consider rejecting medication, but it also has never been the complete answer for me.

Over the years, I have collected a bag of tricks for dealing with depression and hypomania. None of them is a cure or guaranteed to work, but all of them have been helpful to me at various times. One of the strangest is a book written in the early seventeenth century Oxford don: The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is an odd book. Robert Burton, writing under the pen name Democritus Jr., undertook to describe melancholy and its cures, what we call depression today, in expansive detail. Since he was a scholastic, this included cataloging and analyzing every reference to melancholy in every fragment of preceding literature. Oxford had a large library and the Anatomy is a big book.

You might think this is a recipe for the most boring, depressing book ever written. Even Burton himself warned against reading it. I agreed until about fifteen years ago when I read an essay by Robertson Davies, the Canadian author, critic, and educator after hearing a tribute to Davies on the CBC and stumbling on a collection of his essays at Munro’s in Victoria. The essay I happened to read mentioned that Anatomy of Melancholy was a favorite of Samuel Johnson and sometimes called the greatest work of prose in the English language. That piqued my interest. I had picked up a library copy of the Anatomy long before, but could not make heads or tails of it and returned it to the shelves quickly. Now, I was ready to try again.

I ordered the New York Review of Books paperback edition. The fact that the Anatomy was among the small collection of books the NYRB published at the time hinted that the book is something special. When the book arrived, it was a brick, the equivalent of four or five typical paperbacks in a single binding, hard to open, and tricky to hold. I started reading from the beginning, but found no magic: lists of people I had never heard of, places that are no longer on maps, and words I had never seen before. But after reading for an hour or so, I felt strangely uplifted. Burton, I think, satirizes melancholy, mocks it, and renders it absurd. I say ‘I think’ because I am not sure. He uses so many words, so many allusions, it is hard for me to tell what he is talking about, but whatever it is, it can turn the black dog, as Winston Churchill called depression, into a puppy.

I carry a copy of the Anatomy with me at all times and dip into it when I notice the drab tones of depression seeping into my landscape. Sometimes it chases the black dog away, other times it only delays the dog’s arrival or blunts its tooth, but reading the Anatomy is always good for a little cheer in a dreary time.

My NYRB brick is gathering dust on the shelf because I have switched to an eBook version. The brick is too awkward and heavy to mess with, especially when you can get an electronic version free from the Gutenberg Project. The Anatomy is an example of the good qualities of eBooks—travelling with a brick is a pain and my arthritic hands cannot hold it comfortably for long but the eBook weighs nothing and it is easy to hold.

Since the Anatomy costs nothing from Project Gutenberg, does not require a prescription, and is wholly non-toxic, I suggest to anyone who is chronically depressed to try the Anatomy. Not a cure, no guarantees, but it can help.