the juvenility of nihilism
Since I have the day off, today I read the self-published short story collection of a New York Times bestselling author. (I’m not going to say who, since I’m getting too blasted old for Internet flame wars.) I thought a third of the stories were excellent, a third were indifferent, and a third bad.
Really, really bad.
Not in a technical or storytelling sense, mind. All the stories had sharply drawn characters and interesting plots. But in a moral sense, the stories were just terrible. People did bad things, or had bad things happen to them, and were left diminished by them, and that was the point of the story. The final story of the collection, in particular, was very bad in that sense (as well as being based upon some of the worse popular myths about the Middle Ages, sort of the like taking George Washington and the cherry tree and insisting upon it as historical fact).
There seems to be this idea that really Grown-Up, Serious Adult Writing must be utterly bereft of hope and take the bleakest view of things. That it must show morality is only based upon circumstances, that in the end, people are (to quote a sitcom) “bastard-coasted bastards with a bastard filling”. Or, in other words, that people are mostly dumb animals defined by their appetites. And that this view of life is the only realistic one. It’s like that bit towards the end of CS Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” when Screwtape tells Wormwood to make the patient feel that he has at last seen the true nature of the world after viewing human remains plastered across the wall in the aftermath of a Nazi bombing raid.
The problem is that this perspective is terribly juvenile. It is the mindset of an adolescent who has not yet defined himself, and so attempts to construct an identity by criticizing everything. (I know whereof what I speak, since that was me for about thirteen years or so.) Lots of horrible, horrible things happen to people, but that’s not all that ever happens. Good things happen to people, too.
And even people who have horrible things happen to them don’t always fall apart, don’t always get continually worse. Nobody in their right mind wants to suffer, but people are not always diminished by their suffering. Sometimes people are made better by their pain.
Life sucks. No one in their right mind denies that. But life doesn’t just suck.
-JM