It's not easy being green.

I heart Kermit.

First lights

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

So begins Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. A boy at his grandfather’s wake. The trembling, inadequate light of a single failing candle. A cold procession of silvered and silent ancestors barely intuited trailing behind. The remnant of his relation dead and unsleeping before him. No wonder he reaches out to leave his mark. In wax, however. It won’t last.

It’s silly to call McCarthy’s novels dark. To call them violent. You might get as near the mark by calling Mother Teresa nice or Jeffrey Dahmer an epicurean. The ground of McCarthy’s fictive worlds is that fuliginous and unseeing space where mountains have been torn from the page of the sky at night; they are terror, abyss, unmeaning enunciate.

Strange, then, that this novel begins with light, albeit scant and threatened. Blood Meridian, one of his most unrelentingly terrifying works, too, presents small lights in the darkness from the first paragraphs:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

These lights are threatened always with extinction. A breath would extinguish them; only breath and the memory of breath can possibly maintain them. And always, always the possibility that these lights are only dreamed to vanish when we wake to the world and its dark. The last three pages of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. A dream of light, and a waking.

Am I depressed because I read dark novels...

...or do I read dark novels because I am depressed?

A good friend at work once asked why, if I am so into nonviolence (another post), do I spend much of my time reading and thinking about incredibly violent novels.

Short answer: I don’t know.

Longer, but ultimately unsatisfactory answer: Maybe it has to do with purging. Think Aristotle, not Karen Carpenter.

The former developed the concept of purging (alternately, purification/cleansing) or, as he put it, catharsis, as the chief defense of poetry in his seminal — nay, Big-Bang-al — work of literary criticism, Poetics. That's right. Catharsis: literary bulimia.

In one of his many treatises (this one imagining the ideal republic and titled, with that inimitably imaginative flamboyance for which he wasn't renowned, The Republic), Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had outlawed poetry* because it aroused in the audience the most un-virile of virtues: pity and fear. Since virility was necessary to the Ideal State, pity and fear just wouldn't do, and so poetry was right out.

Aristotle, though, liked going to the movies. So (he argues) yes: his Doktorvater Plato was right that poetry elicits womanly pity and fear. And yes: these work at crosspurposes to the noble efforts of Our Philosopher Overlords. Nevertheless (members of the jury) what Plato didn't see was that the theater could actually serve a positive role in society by giving The Man the opportunity to indulge his pity and fear to excess. After thus binging, the theatergoer would puke his emotional guts out in his empty popcorn bag before leaving the (amphi)theater. It's a win-win, he argues. Catharsis ensures that the Leaders of the (Nominally) Free World can go on being Manly Men, and the unsung and pimply-faced heroes of the Cineplex Janitors League are guaranteed gainful employment.**

Aristotle believed, then, that seeing our fears acted out on stage permitted us to externalize and purge them from our minds. Is that why I am drawn to violent novels and, to a lesser extent, films? Do I have a deep, frustrated Need to Visit Mayhem Upon the World? Are these artworks the vicarious equivalent of murdering people?

If so, I'm the lamest potential serial killer ever. Can you imagine the trial? Prosecutor: "I will show that when reading books wasn't enough anymore, the defendant turned to R-rated movies!" [Jury gasps, recoiling.] No. While I have had cathartic experiences (usually movies), I don't think catharsis quite explains my penchant for disturbingly violent books.

My Best Guess: One of my favorite novels is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. It is easily the most violent novel I've ever read. It is also one of the most stunningly beautiful works of prose I've ever had the pleasure — the intense pleasure — to read. Once, I got to the end of an especially evocative chapter and realized that I had been holding my breath. I was so captivated by the stark and textured images, the raw power and primal immediacy of the passage that I forgot to breathe. The only other experience so potentially absorbing is sex (though unfortunately for me, the two activities don't produce the same physiological sensations).

Consensus View: I like good writing. Let me rephrase that, putting all the heft and bulk of my Powers of Eloquence behind it: I like good writing a lot. While descriptions of violence do produce pity and fear in me, when those passages are peculiarly wrought and crafted with unique precision, their effect is even more potent: it is simply and purely beautiful.

By beautiful, I do not mean attractive, pretty, desirable, or sexy. Beauty is pleasing but terrible: it commands acknowledgment, inspires awe, defies reduction to satisfaction or comprehension. Beauty is masterful, intentional, whole. Contemplation of the beautiful is its own reward; an attitude of reverence is appropriate.

Try this, then: the interstices of a text that renders beautiful in language the very impulse, intent, or expression of violence — that element of our humanity which impels us to suspend, in the interest of self, language's imperative to community — is one of the only spaces I've found where violence cannot and does not exist. Instead of being encouraged or inflamed, a reader's violent desires are subsumed to and in the integral beauty of the text. The imagination is enthralled. At least during the act of reading, violence — even violent intent unrealized — is at least postponed, at best consumed by and into the conversation of the reader's imagination with the text.

The experience of beauty — a temporary suspension of the self's solitude — is why I like reading, and especially why I like reading violent novels: they intensify beauty as darkness intensifies light. As much as I seem to thirst after darkness, I long for light.


*Poetry for the ancient Greeks included all forms of literary expression, including dramatic theater.
**Average time it takes to get chunks of Pity out of theater-seat fabric: 1.5 teenager hours (1 if they're prohibited "bathroom" breaks).