Macbeth's Twist on Nihilism

When rereading Macbeth recently, the first thing that jumped out at me was Macbeth’s imp of the perverse (previous post). The second was Macbeth’s nihilism, which appears early in the play and increases as his doom draws near. Yet the nihilism in Macbeth is no mere dismal pronouncement of life’s meaninglessness.

Surely this celebrated soliloquy is one of the finest nihilistic statements in all of literature:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more. It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

From the Orson Welles film adaptation:

 

By this point, Macbeth’s life has completely fallen apart. Having attained the throne through murder, he finds himself a despised tyrant holed up in his castle and going mad. His wife and co-conspirator, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide and he fears his own end draws near. He has played his part, and poorly, and now the curtain falls and he asks, as we all must, “What was the point?”

But here comes the twist. No sooner has Macbeth finished speaking than he learns an army approaches. His clock is up, but instead of further bewailing the dumb machinery of fate, he rouses himself to meet this final challenge on the battlefield:

     I gin to be aweary of the sun,

     And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
     Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
     At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Macbeth’s response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to create meaning through action. This is the kind of nihilism I like, positive nihilism, nihilism which says, along with Nietzsche, “Okay fine, so the universe itself doesn’t hold meaning, then I’ll give it meaning!” This is the heroic tenor par excellence, and indeed these four lines from Macbeth ring like passages from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

     Death closes all: but something ere the end,

     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

And this:

     Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Macbeth and Ulysses, murderer and hero, may not be that dissimilar. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche from Daybreak. In characteristic fashion, the philosopher denies the conventional moralistic reading of Macbeth in favor of something bolder and more life-affirming:

He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. . . . How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does [Shakespeare’s] ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime!

This is a tempting interpretation of Macbeth, but let’s face it, it has problems. Macbeth’s pursuit of his course is very much like a rogue’s. He murders his guest and king while he sleeps. Then he hires common cutthroats to kill his dearest friend and friend’s son. I’m judging by conventional standards of morality, but if Macbeth’s behavior isn’t roguish, I don’t know what is. Although Macbeth does begin to stir earlier, it is only after all is lost that he exhibits anything I would say resembles Ulysses’ valiance.

Or rather, exhibits it again. Several lines in Macbeth make it clear that Macbeth was once a good man, a loyal servant to his king, and one hell of a fighter. According to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the historical Macbeth, who lived from 1040 to 1057, was also a better man than we see throughout most of the play. According to custom in nascent Scotland, there were legitimate reasons for rebelling against one’s king. Macbeth may have felt Duncan was too soft for protecting the land against invasion. Or Lady Macbeth may have had a blood feud with him. In Asimov’s words:

If Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, aspired to the throne, he did so in the approved Scottish fashion of the time. He raised an army and rebelled.

But this is the genius of Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s works can be read numerous ways, the thrust changing with each director, actor and viewer. Henry V has been played as pro-war and anti-war. Coriolanus is either one of Shakespeare’s best or worst. The introduction to my copy of Julius Caesar says that Shakespeare did not try to settle the debate about whether Caesar was a hero or a tyrant and his assassins heroes or villains. Shakespeare raises questions but only toys with answers.

And so it goes with Macbeth. Does the Scottish king’s nihilism reject or affirm life? I’ve provided some thoughts on the matter, but the only way you can answer that question is by engaging with the text yourself.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)

Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

 

 

Review of Clockwork Angels: The Novel by Kevin J. Anderson

As a long-time fan of Rush, I was excited when I heard that the progressive rock group’s new album, Clockwork Angels, would be a concept album. Then came word that fantasy and science-fiction author Kevin J. Anderson was writing a novel based on the album’s lyrics, which spin a steampunk odyssey conceived by Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart. I pre-ordered a copy and when it arrived, quickly read it from cover to cover.

Clockwork Angels: The Novel, tells the story of Owen Hardy, an apprentice apple farmer in the land of Albion. A ruler called the Watchmaker organizes every aspect of life in Albion with mechanical order and regularity, so that each citizen need merely follow the path laid out before him or her. This is the Stability, according to which “Everything has its place, and every place has its thing.”  Owen Hardy fully expects to settle into his predetermined course, but he also dreams of life outside his village, and upon an invitation from a mysterious stranger, he runs away, runs afoul of the Watchmaker’s law, and travels to other lands, encountering carnies, thieves, wreckers and the Watchmaker’s antithesis, the Anarchist.

Anderson’s prose is uninspired but possesses a simple elegance perfect for a story that is essentially a long parable. He puts just the right amount of flesh on the lyrics to highlight the concept of free will steering a course between Order and Chaos. Summaries of the novel make it sound like the typical Bildungsroman of which the fantasy genre has way too many, but despite my low tolerance for dreamy-boy-goes-out-into-a-world-of-adventure stories, this one never struck me as cliché and I was never bored. 

In part, the conceptual work of Peart is to thank for that. More than once as I read, I caught myself thinking that I was grateful that a musician (and a drummer, no less), rather than a novelist, had created this story and its setting. Rush’s music and Peart’s lyrics have always had their own distinct taste, and that comes across in the novel. Fans of the music will recognize the philosophical motifs Peart has woven into Rush’s lyrics over the years--and many of those lyrics are sprinkled throughout the text. (On first reading, I caught quotes from as far back as 1975’s Fly by Night.)

I can’t help but relate the novel to my other recent reading. The Watchmaker’s Stability can be described as a “totally administered society,” a phrase that appears often in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. The Frankfurt School of philosophers believed that in a totally administered society, whether that of Stalinist Russia or capitalist America, there is little room for true individuality. The totally administered society has ways of keeping us in our place. 

The Anarchist of Clockwork Angels represents the exact opposite--total lawlessness--although with his wild appetite for destruction, he is more of a nihilist of the negative sort portrayed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (The Devils). While he possesses a certain evil charm at first, in the end he is no more likeable than Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the slimy catalyst for ill deeds in The Possessed. In their crusade against the strictures of society, both are perfectly willing to destroy lives, but they have nothing positive to offer in place of what they tear down.

The beauty of Clockwork Angels is that Owen Hardy chooses neither the Watchmaker nor the Anarchist. In the words of the old Rush song “Freewill,” he chooses not to decide. He chooses to make his own way through life, with all the uncertainty, mistakes, suffering, and joy, that such a messy pilgrim’s progress entails. Owen's life with the Magnusson Carnival Extravaganza is one apart from the ideologies of the Watchmaker and Anarchist, who would impose themselves upon him and use him for their own purposes.

A final word about the book itself apart from the story. Clockwork Angels: The Novel is full of perks for the bibliophile. It has numerous full-color illustrations by long-time Rush album artist Hugh Syme, and they are among the most impressive I have encountered since I was in the sixth grade poring over the illustrations by the Brothers Hildebrandt in The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. The back of the book includes the lyrics to Clockwork Angels: The Album and an afterword by Neil Peart, with photos from a hiking trip on which he and Anderson, friends even before this collaboration, brainstormed for the novel. 

I have actually never been much of a fan of Kevin J. Anderson, but this book has made me reconsider. On his website, AnderZone, he says that Neil Peart’s favorite work of his is The Saga of Seven Suns series, so I have placed the first book, Hidden Empire, on my Long List of Books to Read.

Nihilism in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons is about many things--parents and children, a fading social order and an emerging new one, romantic love--but the heart of the novel around which all else is arranged is the nihilism of the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov. Indeed, in his book Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller writes that it was Fathers and Sons more than any other work that gave the term nihilism currency.

Nihilism is generally defined as the belief that nothing has any meaning. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy says, “By definition, the nihilist believes in nothing and disdains all values.” As Weller points out, however, nihilism can take many forms. There are nihilisms--philosophical, political, social, Nietzschean, Heideggerian and so forth--and various “deployments” throughout history.

Bazarov’s nihilism in Fathers and Sons is of the destructive sort. Seeing all norms and institutions as empty, he disregards them and wishes to see them cleared away without himself desiring to replace them with anything. He doesn’t believe in social hierarchy, superstition or art. Soon after Bazarov comes to stay at Arkady Petrovitch’s house, he gets into a philosophical discussion with his friend’s family. Here is a brief exchange with Arkady’s father:

“Allow me, though,” began Nikolai Petrovitch. “You deny everything; or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must construct, too, you know.”

“That’s not our business now… The ground wants clearing first.”

     --(Fathers and Children, translated by Constance Garnett)

Bazarov’s philosophy is different from what Weller calls programmatic nihilism, which seeks to remake the world. In fact, for all his contempt of the status quo, he has no belief in progress either.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism as the sense that nothing has any meaning is the result of that which we considered the highest value turning out to be of no value at all. The central crisis of modernity, one which society as a whole became unable to deny in the 19th Century, is the death of God, and it poses a question we are all familiar with today: If there is no God, what gives life meaning?

Western civilization’s highest good, the monotheistic God, turned out to be nothing more than the product of the smoke and mirrors of our own consciousness. In the modern world, we are all faced with this nihilism, the absence of what was for so long taken to be the objective ground of all values, but nonetheless some, unable or unwilling to face it, turn away to veneration of the smoke and mirrors in their head.

Nietzsche, unlike Bazarov, saw nihilism as a force to aid as well as overcome. If nihilism is destruction, then the solution is creation. If what we have valued has passed away, then we need new values. The artist, through his work, brings forth new values, his or her values, and imposes them on the world through force of will, places them against the nothingness, like a painter portraying his subject against negative space, or a musician invoking music out of silence.

My own beliefs have traced the path of nihilism outlined by Nietzsche. In the years after my infatuation with religion, I realized that I could no longer maintain my intellectual integrity and still believe in God, whether that of the mild Methodism of my upbringing, that of the fundamentalist Baptists who courted me, or that of the sophisticated Christianity of my professors in college and the theologians we studied. As a seeker for truth, I could hardly accept the notion of a being for which there is not only no proof, but for which not even a single compelling argument that can withstand scrutiny or even a single piece of solid evidence exists.

At that point, my highest value had been devalued. This was never a cause of utter despair for me, for I was convinced that anything that wasn’t true shouldn’t be believed, but nonetheless, as the years passed, my thoughts sometimes strayed into nihilistic territory. If there is no God, no moral order imposed on the universe, then on the grand scale of the universe, what do the worst atrocities matter?

It has taken some time to find new values and bases for them, but I have and continue to do so. There may not be a divinity to impose order on the world, but I do, through the force of my will, even determined as it may be by natural causes. My values are those of secular humanism and they can do much good in the world--some would say more good than those of fantastical superstitious systems.

I was never in any danger of falling into the blackest, most destructive of nihilisms anyway, because such nihilism is, for basically decent and mentally sound folks, impossible to uphold. Along our mental journeys, we may rationally reach a point where we declare that nothing has any meaning, but we cannot stop life from having meaning for us--it just does whether or not we like it, understand it, or think it should.

Nihilism is the impossible philosophy, and this is something the characters in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons demonstrate.

Like many great novels, Fathers and Sons is populated with a wide variety characters and we see that for each of them, life has meaning in different ways. For the fathers and mothers, the meaning lies principally in the well-being of their children, although they do have other values as well, like Nikolai Petrovitch with his music, reading and desire to modernize his farm, and Pavel Petrovich with his aristocratic dignity and foppish Anglophilia.

Life has meaning for the novel’s nihilists as well. It is plain from the earliest pages that Arkady’s heart isn’t into it--that he harbors sympathy for the backwards ways of his family, their stuffy customs and foolish superstitions--and he eventually falls madly in love with Katya, marries, and presumably settles down to a conventional existence with kids and all the rest.

Bazarov mocks Arkady for becoming a “jackdaw” (“a most respectable family bird”), but even he, the novel’s most strident nihilist, falls prey to love, becoming infatuated with Anna Odintsova. It comes to nothing, and even on his deathbed, he remains defiant, declaring:

“I said I should rebel,” he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; “and I rebel, I rebel!”

While his spirit is admirable, we have seen its limits in more than love. He participated in his father’s medical practice, with care, almost as if...it meant something to him. And this should come as no surprise, for throughout the book his passion for learning about the natural world was evident, and in the end, it was this passion that led to his contracting typhus.

The experiences of the characters in Fathers and Sons are much like our own. We construct personae for ourselves, worry over things, dedicate ourselves to causes, and fall in various kinds of love. We might ask as Bazarov does on occasion, “What good is it?”, and in the long run, on a cosmological scale, perhaps none of it is any good at all. The universe will someday undergo heat death or some other demise, long before then the sun will turn into a red giant and scorch the earth, and in not so long at all, each one of us will die, but until then, we cannot help life having meaning. It simply does.