Dhalgren: A Book for Our Times

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren was copyrighted in 1974. A lot has changed since then, but the issues it addresses all ring relevant today, and its treatment of those issues is ahead of even our time. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think that everyone fighting their own little culture wars today would benefit from this book.

Dhalgren is about a city called Bellona where fires still burn from an unidentified catastrophe. A man who has forgotten his name enters the city and there continues life amidst the ruins and survivors. Usually described as science fiction, Dhalgren has precious little in it of what usually gets that label. Instead, it's speculative in the way it addresses social issues related to class, race, religion and sexuality. What would American urban society be like if cut off from the rest of the world and every remaining person were left to fend for her or himself?

 

 

One issue the novel addresses is rape. In a powerful scene, a discussion between an accused rapist named George and a woman named Lanya reads like something you might run across in the comments section under a feminist piece on rape culture. George is that troll who wants to somehow downplay the guilt of the crime, while Lanya is having none of it. Eventually, George gives his account of an incident that happened on the night of the city’s catastrophe, an incident that has made him a notorious rapist:

 

“We was in this alley, and there was this light flashing on and off, on and off; and people would run in, run out, and we just didn’t care! Or maybe that made it better, that there wasn’t nothing they could do, or that they wanted to do . . . And she got hit and she got punched and she got thrown around and she was yelling and screaming, ‘No, no, oh, don’t, oh please don’t.’ so I guess it was rape. Right? But when we finished—“ George nodded—“she was reaching for it. She wanted some more, awful bad.”

And it appears to be true, because the girl he's talking about, June, spends most of the novel looking for him so they can repeat that night. This is troubling. It’s easy to discount George as a sleazeball, but where does June fit into today’s narratives about rape culture? What about women and men, of all sexual orientations, who like it rough? Dhalgren is full of sexual situations--and more than one sexual marathon is described move by move--that push buttons and raise questions.

Author photograph by James Hamilton.

Delany pushes buttons with class, race and religion as well. George is a man of the streets, while June’s family tries desperately to maintain a sequestered middle-class lifestyle. George is described as a hulking and well-hung black man, while June is a timid little white girl--which maybe shouldn’t matter, but the fact is that race does matter in some way to most people. George has become a kind of deity in a new religion propagated by a woman pastor who spreads the faith through posters showing him dressed in nothing but a leather jacket, cap and boots.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, “What the hell kind of book is this?!” And that’s pretty much what I thought the whole time I was reading its nearly 800 pages of Joycean and Pynchonian tumult. Dhalgren raises a lot of issues, makes you uncomfortable, and makes you ponder what is right, but it refuses to moralize, often leaving you lost.

And that’s why it’s ahead of--or perhaps just outside--our time. Moralizing has its place, but too often today everything is sanctimonious--if not on the surface, then in the subtext. Authors, filmmakers and other creators are always presenting the right message and can be sure it will win approval in certain circles. I’m reminded of the Ellen DeGeneres joke at the Academy Awards in 2014:

It’s going to be an exciting night. Anything can happen, so many different possibilities. Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins best picture. Possibility number two: You’re all racists.

I just saw 12 Years a Slave. It’s a great film that tells uncomfortable truths, but it tells them in a way that’s actually comfortable for most--and indeed it won Best Picture. But I can’t imagine anyone that Delaney’s masterpiece wouldn’t challenge. In 12 Years a Slave, right and wrong are clear to see, but Dhalgren is trickier, forcing you to find your own answers. Much of the time, you may not know what is right with regard to the questions raised, but even when you do, it isn’t because that’s what the author said through the book, but because that’s what you said through the book.

Despite its age, Dhalgren remains troubling, and ultimately it’s beyond my grasp. These are but first thoughts upon finishing the novel, and I’m painfully aware of how uninsightful--and possibly just plain wrong--they are. But that’s part of what I want out of The Gleaming Sword--inquiry over right answers, the labyrinth over the exit.

 

 

More posts on sci-fi books:

The Trials of Dune

Riverworld and the Resurrection

A Review of Clockwork Angels 

 

Heracles' Hope in the Midst of Suffering

I don’t know the extent to which the culture of ancient Greece doubted its gods, but Euripides' tragedy Heracles certainly appears to question both their worthiness and existence. And when, in the course of human history, thinkers have entertained the idea that no gods exist, they always find something to replace them.

Heracles opens with the hero away performing his labours (mostly killing stuff) while an upstart ruler has evicted Heracles’ family from their home. Destitute and homeless, they supplicate Zeus for aid even as the ruler plans to execute them. At the last minute, Heracles returns, but the situation only gets worse. Hera sends Iris and Madness to drive Heracles into a frenzy during which he slays his own wife and children. When he returns to himself, he finds he has lost all by his own hands.

This story presents the gods in the worst possible light. The backstory is that Zeus cheated on Hera, sneaking into Megara’s bed and fathering Heracles. Hera exacts her revenge on Heracles and his family, using Iris and Madness as her pawns. We hear not a peep from Zeus despite all the supplication to him. Thus it’s no wonder that the characters repeatedly question the justice of the gods. After the bloodbath, Heracles openly holds the gods in disdain:

Let the glorious wife of Zeus now dance for joy and make Olympus shake with her footsteps! She has achieved her will; she has cast down from on high the foremost man of Greece, toppling him from his very foundations! What man would utter prayers to such a goddess? 

In the face of suffering, Christians claim that everything happens according to God’s will, which is unfathomable to mere mortals, but ever since antiquity, philosophers and common folk alike have seen the existence of evil and suffering as a significant challenge to the existence of any god worth the name. Would a good and all powerful god will the suffering of innocents? (previous post)

That is a riddle all believers face--as Heracles does. My copy of the play has introductory notes by Richard Rutherford, who states the play is merciless in its complete lack of hope for the hero. Instead of the deus ex machina coming at the end of the play to solve all problems, it happens halfway through and only stirs things up. And while some traditions hold that Heracles was later worshipped as payment for his suffering, Euripides has Theseus mention this briefly only to have Heracles shut him down. Nonetheless, I can’t help but disagree with Rutherford, for Euripides does indeed hold out hope.

Only it isn’t divine.

A recurring theme throughout Heracles is friendship. As the new Theban ruler Lycus subjects Heracles’ family to humiliation and worse, no one comes to their aid. The drama isn’t very long, but repeatedly the characters mention how friends tend to disappear in hard times. Amphitryon, Megara’s husband and the man who raised Heracles, states it as follows:

As for friends, some I see are not to be relied upon, while those deserving of the name are powerless to assist. So it is when men encounter misfortune. I pray that no friend of mine, even a mere acquaintance, may have this experience; there is no surer test of friends.

If Epictetus (or what I remember of his writings anyway) is anything to judge by, the vagaries of fate and the evanescent loyalty of friends are commonplace themes in ancient Greek literature, which is exactly why they stood out to me among all the more exciting elements. When you experience hard times, many friends would prefer to keep you and your affliction at an arm’s length, but a few will be there through thick and thin. This is the hope Euripides offers in a world where the gods are dubious entities at best.

This is hard to miss in the text, for not only does it show up repeatedly, but it is the note on which Euripides ends the play. Heracles is a defeated and broken demigod when his old friend Theseus shows up and offers some manly encouragement along the lines of “Quit crying and man up.” To this, Heracles is like, “Come on, everybody hurts sometimes,” and then Theseus, proving himself an understanding friend, is like, “Very well then. You’re welcome to crash at my place.”

They exit.

The caprices of fate strike us all, and when they do, maybe you turn your eyes to the heavens, maybe you don’t, maybe you feel a supernatural power answers, maybe you don’t, but undeniably the existence and qualities of any supposed divinity are uncertain. Friendship, on the other hand, while not always firm, is one hundred percent natural and experienced by all. In the absence of constant gods, we may find solace in inconstant humanity.

 

Religion and Atheism Abound in Bollywood's PK

 

When the alien known as PK arrives on Earth, the first thing that happens is a man in the desert steals his device for phoning home, leaving him stranded. Hearing that god is the answer to all troubles, PK goes on a search for god. He encounters the people and practices of many faiths and makes friends and enemies along the way.

So goes the plot of the 2014 Bollywood hit film PK, which turns out to be--at least on one level--a surprising statement of atheism from an industry known for strict conventions and from a country known for religious conservatism.

 

(Sorry, this trailer is in Hindi, but you can find a trailer and the movie in English on iTunes.)

 

The plot hearkens back to any number of stories in which an extraterrestrial comes to Earth and, baffled by our curious Earthling ways, teaches us about ourselves and reveals new ways of being. I think of Robert Heinlein’s most influential novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which Valentine Michael Smith, a human being raised by Martians, encounters terrestrial estrangement and teaches us to grok love. And consider David Bowie’s classic album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), in which a rock-and-roller serves as the conduit for messages from alien beings to humanity five years before the world is to end due to human excess.

With its critique of religion, PK is more in the vein of Heinlein. The titular alien’s encounters with con men as well as believers rarely end well, for the religious always seem to be concerned with decidedly unholy concerns: power, money and exceptionalism. Their methods are also questionable: blind faith, trickery and violence. These aspects of religion are familiar to all of us, whether through reports of Islamist terror in the daily news or through passing the collection plate each Sunday in church. In PK’s words:

“The god you made up is just like you: petty, takes bribes, makes false promises, readily meets the rich, keeps the poor waiting, thrives on flattery, makes you live in fear [. . .] The god you believe in, abolish him.“

On the surface, PK’s message is that old distinction between religion versus spirituality. Its proponents assert the superiority of vague spirituality and decry stuffy religious dogma while almost always subscribing to the traditional superstitions that make up the latter. This position sounds genial, open-minded and subversive, which is why people like it, but actually it subverts nothing, which is, I suspect, why the makers of PK chose it as the superficial message of their film. They could appear to criticize organized religion and avoid offending the masses while on another level also advancing . . .

. . . atheism.

The film makes several arguments against religion that are regularly employed by atheists in debates against Christian apologists--such as how the truth claims of competing religions contradict each other--but the key argument in the film appears during a standoff on national television between PK and the guru Tapasvi. The guru adopts a typical apology for religion:

“What do you want, huh? A world without God? Do you have any clue how people suffer? No food to eat, no place to live, no friend to talk to . . .  People kill themselves, slit their wrists, jump off buildings . . .  Why? Because they have no hope. If bowing before God, smearing holy ash, and wearing amulets gives them hope to live, then who are you to snatch away that hope? And if you snatch away their God, how will you fill that void?”

PK’s answer is oddly indirect--and even endorses Enlightenment-style Deism--but viewers are sure to think of a more direct response to the guru’s challenge. Throughout the film, we have watched PK suffer, and it was real people, often strangers, who gave him food and shelter and became his friends. He himself at one point gives the only money he has to a poor man who needs it to pay for a meal on his wife’s birthday. The film is bursting with religion, but not once does it depict any supernatural event large or small--not so much as a holy glow or miraculous chance turn of events. Instead, what it shows is human goodness without the need for gods or their self-proclaimed mediators on Earth.

In other words, secular humanism.

This is one answer to which many like myself have turned in response to the death of God. As a life stance, it has the benefit of being an observable practice with tangible results. People can help people, and indeed they often do--no god necessary. Why is it that the religious must do good in the name of God instead of just doing good?

I’ve watched very little Bollywood and I only watched PK because most of the other offerings on board a long flight didn’t look interesting, but it turned out to be laugh-out-loud funny, romantic and thought-provoking. PK criticizes religion and shows that real acts of human kindness can fill the void left by an imaginary god’s disappearance.

 

 

Oh, the Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!

The Gleaming Sword has been going for roughly four years now, and the last couple years have been particularly productive, but I’ve decided it’s time for a break, or at least a significant slowdown, so I can focus on other projects. Nonetheless, I’ve had a number of ideas on the back burners for months now, and rather than leave them unvoiced, I thought I’d present them all together here in abbreviated form. They’re still only halfway thought out, researched and fact-checked, but here they are nonetheless.

Lana Del Rey: In Praise of No Context

This post was nearing completion when I decided to apply the brakes to my blogging.  The post was to discuss how encountering Lana Del Rey’s music without knowing anything about her personal life and how she is perceived by others enhanced my appreciation for her art. I was particularly excited about making a connection to the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go (2005) and the character Kathy’s deeply subjective enjoyment of a cassette she purchases at school.

From the post that never was:

“Most people have probably had a similar experience: certain lyrics in a song will jump out, taking on a meaning for the listener that the artist never intended or one that is different from what others experience, but what criteria exist for calling wrong someone else’s innermost experience of  a work of art? The experience of art is a meeting of subject and object that is often better without third parties.”

The context-free experience of art is rapidly becoming scarce as we are constantly bombarded with minutiae about every topic imaginable, reading reviews on iTunes before downloading an album, looking up movies on IMDb even as we live-tweet them. Today, we come to art and entertainment through a haze of chatter, a cacophony of others’ voices, but we might be much happier tuning it out.

From Ultraviolence: 

 

 

Cecil the Lion and the Will to Power

I also intended to crank out a piece about the reaction to the news that a dentist from Minnesota had hunted and shot Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, but that was nixed early in inception. I found it interesting how every side of the issue illustrated Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. Killing big game, raging against big-game hunters, pointing out the piety of those who decry big-game hunters, and blogging analysis of the debate (as I’m doing here) all serve to make the self feel superior to others. In Freudian terms, they all feed the ego.

So what could one say that wouldn’t be an expression of the will to power? Probably nothing. As I understand it from my days of heavy Nietzsche reading, the will to power underlies all, or nearly all, human behavior. Taking a clue from a maxim by La Rochefoucauld (previous post), Nietzsche pointed out that even saying “Thank you” is a way of raising oneself above the person who has done you a good turn.

From Daybreak:

“Even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.”

Why Reverse Racism Does Exist

The most potentially controversial of my plans was a post arguing that reverse racism does indeed exist, an opinion very unpopular in certain circles. The argument usually starts with redefinitions of words like racism and discrimination (usually to include power) that conveniently lead, through simple logic, to the conclusion that reverse racism does not even make sense, cannot exist, or is just a misnomer for what is in reality plain old racism. It's a bit of sleight-of-hand the likes of which is increasingly common among the perpetually outraged but which never fools their opponents.

My argument was to be philosophical. In the 20th Century, philosophers began to spend a great deal of time examining language, and one of their favorite preoccupations was regular, everyday speech, which functions in a staggering variety of ways. The reality is that people use the words “reverse racism” to point to behaviors and attitudes based on race that are perpetuated by members of a group that is usually seen as the oppressed against members of the group that is usually seen as the oppressor, and everyone who hears these words knows that. By that right, the phrase is legit and what it describes does happen.

You may find the existence of what is called “reverse discrimination” uncomfortable, you may find it to be negligible compared to the atrocities committed by the usual suspects, you may not like the phrase, you may hate the way it is used to combat any efforts calling for attention to race problems, and you may find it more economical to just call it “racism,” but you can’t just wish it away.

 

How an Atheist Can Enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah

I refused to watch Ridley Scott’s Exodus, because as an atheist (previous post) I see a return of big-budget Biblical epics as exactly the kind of religion-stroking the world is better off without, but I was intrigued enough by Darren Aronofsky’s past films like The Fountain and Black Swan to check out Noah (2014), and I’m glad I did. I loved fantasy elements like the Watchers, savored the way it toyed with orthodoxy, admired Emma Watson’s performance, was moved by the human relationships, and was gripped by the plot. Scenes like the one in which Noah tries to kill Ila’s twins always used to leave me unmoved--I sensed screenwriters trying too hard to get a response from their audience--but now that I’m a father, I was like, “Oh no you don’t, motherfo!”

This is how we interact with stories. Aronofsky said he never intended Noah to be a traditional Biblical epic espousing an exclusively Judeo-Christian worldview, and his film did turn out to have much to offer aside from whatever lessons the religious may find in it. No doubt some atheists would adopt a harder stance, but many atheists such as myself remain open to inspiration--strictly humanist--from religious art.

 

Joseph Conrad’s Use of Irony in Heart of Darkness to Critique Colonialism

The meatiest of my planned projects, one which ill health derailed last spring, was a series of posts focusing on Joseph Conrad’s use of irony in Heart of Darkness (1899) to criticize colonialism. While Heart of Darkness is devoid of sermonizing, I noticed that Conrad often uses officious and grandiloquent language when describing functionaries of the British Empire, precisely when he means to scorn them. And his portrayal of the effects of colonialism on the colonialized is damning--whether the colonialization is military, commercial or in the name of civilization.

And is American imperialism any different? I don’t have a simple answer for that, but I intended to address the question via a look at Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which sets Conrad’s novel against the Vietnam War, and also to examine colonialism as a racist endeavor. My primary text for this last topic would be a chapter from Darkwater (1920) by W.E.B. Du Bois. In  “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois presents a condemnation of white supremacy that I highly recommend reading:

“How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe, which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.”

Possibly Fruitless Pursuits

A few other ideas were on burners even further back. I was hoping to continue exploring my idea of the thin graphite line, a conception of artists, writers and thinkers as a bulwark against barbarism, in light of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Another idea that may not have panned out was investigating des choses in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) as examples of das Ding in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. A lighter post was to be a look at the variety of pop styles exhibited by Kylie Minogue’s discography from Light Years (2000) to Kiss Me Once (2014).

Alas, these posts will never come to full fruition. However, while The Gleaming Sword is slowing, I am still here. I welcome comments at the bottom of the page or through Twitter (my profile). Now I leave you--only temporarily!--with some music:

 

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Spider-Woman (4)

(continued from “Really Living”)

The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are known for their lifelike portrayal of models rather than representations of ideal human beauty. John Everett Millais’s model for Ophelia was fellow artist Elizabeth Siddal and it is hard when looking at the painting not to see a woman who actually existed rather than the character from Hamlet.

 

This corporealness, this earthiness, this this-worldliness pervades even the holiest of subject matters. According to the exhibit text, this was scandalous to Victorian England. Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s Mary in Ecce Ancilla Domini is--with her flushed lips and placement in bed--erotic.

 

Which reminds me of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev’s 2009-2010 Spider-Woman series. The covers had an eye-catching style, and as I read, I was struck by how lifelike Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman was. She looked like someone I had seen standing in line at Safeway, jogging by the waterside or reading in the park. Or at least like someone I might see doing those things.

 

 

It was no surprise then when I noticed the comics credited actress Jolynn Carpenter as Maleev’s model. She has stunning looks, but they are a real person’s looks--which is to say they are imperfect and unique--and the effect on a medium dominated by cookie-cutter features is an artistic statement. Emotionally, it makes the character more human and easier to identify with. Physically, it emphasizes the flesh of the real woman behind the image, which is both enticing and unsettling.

Using a model for a superhero may not appear to have much to do with religion, but the Victorians must have experienced an analogous frisson when seeing the Virgin Mary painted with such earthly candor as in Ecce Ancilla Domini. As with Maleev’s Spider-Woman, the Pre-Raphaelite painters idealized the real instead of denigrating the real as a poor copy of the ideal, and their art benefitted from it.

The women in the Pre-Raphaelites’ works occasionally have their eyes turned toward Heaven, but the painters themselves had their eyes fixed on earth and its inhabitants. I am not sure to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites were Christians, but I think the controversial turn in their work serves as a good indication of where we should focus our attention. Enough looking for the divine in the otherworld. Seek the numinous in this one.

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Really Living (3)

(continued from “Human Drama”)

What began with a quote about how the Pre-Raphaelites viewed the Bible as a source of human drama soon became a theme when I saw the following depiction of the story of Noah’s ark, titled The Eve of the Deluge and painted by William Bell Scott:

 

We see Noah and his crew in the lower right-hand corner boarding the ark while a prince at his leisure gazes on and a storm brews in the distance. The typical interpretation of this story is one of smug, sometimes also sad, condemnation of the worldly for their wicked ways, followed by triumphant declaration of their impending doom.

As I gazed on this work, however, I found that I was more sympathetic toward the prince and his hangers-on and even found something admirable and noble in them. If the purpose of existence is not simply living on but really living, then I would rather be up with the heathens, where there are creaturely comforts and time for reverie.

By contrast, Noah and his family are an indistinct crowd slogging through a cloud of dust to board the ark for what is sure to be one long, miserable hiatus from the world. Their wretchedness, their suffering, puts me in mind of the dying masses who reap death as the deserts of sin in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, as well as of those whose portion the Book of Revelation says is “in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.” (Revelation 21:8, ESV)

 

In this light--the light of some freewheeling associations--the heathens in The Eve of the Deluge represent a higher type, those who refuse to grovel in religious terror. For me, the wicked have become the godly while the righteous are now the iniquitous.

How’s that for a neat series of moral inversions?

 

Philip Jose Farmer Makes Nonsense of the Bodily Resurrection by Making It Happen

One of my reading projects the past year has been Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, which begins with every human being who ever lived awaking after death on the banks of a massive river. As it deals with an afterlife of sorts, there is a great deal of religion in Riverworld and a great deal of skepticism about religion, but what struck me most was how Farmer has portrayed a bodily resurrection, and in doing so has highlighted what is ridiculous about the very idea.

Every time I heard about this series prior to reading it, I thought it sounded stupid, especially since book covers and promotional material for the books and related media tend to highlight the jumble of people from different places and times who find themselves together after rebirth: Medieval kings, modern day stockbrokers, African tribesmen, ancient Greeks, and so on. The whole thing sounded random and farcical, but after running across the first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, in a used bookstore for only $1.95, I decided to give it a try and found myself engrossed from start to finish.

In the book, every human being who has ever lived from 99,000 B.C. to 1983--that’s approximately 35 billion souls--wakes up along the banks of The River, which is roughly ten million miles long and winds around the entire surface of an alien planet. Everyone wakes up at once, nude, hairless, in perfect health, and with a body about 26 years old and immune to further aging. Grasslands and forests run along the river, bounded on both sides by nearly impenetrable mountains. The resurrected human race--including common folk such as you and me, as well as historical personages such as Richard Francis Burton, Cyrano de Bergerac, Samuel Clemens and Hermann Goering--must first learn to survive. Then, some embark on a journey to the head of the river to confront the mysterious beings known as Ethicals who have resurrected the human race.

As I read the mechanics of this science-fiction account of life after death, I realized that Farmer had to answer a question that religion avoids: What kind of bodies will we have in the afterlife? While Farmer is simply writing an interesting tale, he can fill in the details as he wishes, but the problem for the religious belief in a bodily resurrection--and the idea of Heaven in general, something along the lines of the vision at the end of Terrence Malick's beautiful film The Tree of Life--is that no answer to the question makes sense or satisfies the criteria of Heaven.

 

 

I doubt Malick intended for the above to be a literal representation of Heaven, but it is a lot like what many people think the afterlife will be like.

Consider the common conception of Heaven as a reunion: I can imagine myself reunited with my loved ones in their bodies from life, but does that mean my grandparents, for example, will be the elderly people I have so many fond memories of? They would probably prefer a younger, fitter body as in Farmer’s Riverworld, but then, while they would technically be my grandparents, with so much different about them than I remember, they would hardly be the people I knew. But isn’t that a great deal of the point, being reunited with those we once knew?

It does not solve the problem to say we will have new bodies, because new bodies would also make everyone something different, unrecognizable. That’s no reunion, either. Besides, a body, any body, is still a body, one that needs to eat, drink, sleep, couple and crap. Think about it a little, and you’ll see Heaven as traditionally defined has no place for hunger, thirst, lust and feces. With bodies, Heaven would soon be a lot like Earth, a lot like Riverworld, actually--just another struggle for food, shelter, power, sex.

This is why religion is better off sticking with spiritual resurrection. Then, at least, all the details can remain vague, backed up by assurances that the power of God pulls it off somehow. As an atheist, that doesn’t impress me much either, but that’s a different argument.

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.