59 Thoughts on Narrative and Meaning

One. The elements: metanarrative (e.g. the various world religions; capitalism; progressivism); cultural narrative (e.g., I will be happy if I become a mother; I will make a good living if I work hard and get a good education); archetypal narrative (e.g. the protagonist becomes a scapegoat, or undergoes something resembling death and resurrection); plot (a series of causally linked events in which the protagonist either suffers a terrible fate or faces and overcomes conflict). 

Two. Postmodern resistance to metanarratives, because they have been shown to be untrue – either because they made predictions that have proved false (e.g., the revolution of the proletariat), or because awareness of other cultures' metanarratives makes it impossible to both be tolerant and continue to assert the exclusive truth of your own. 

Three. We can either continue to cling to metanarratives, with an increasing sense of anxiety, since the existence of others is a threat to our beliefs; or we can do without them. A world without a metanarrative is one in which what happens is up to us. 

Four. I don't know what it's like to adhere to a religion, or to adhere religiously to a particular thinker or system of thought – Marxist, Freudian, feminist. I see spiritual traditions as depositories of wisdom, myth, ethics, symbols, metaphors, therapeutic techniques, and techniques for accessing different levels of consciousness. They combine philosophy, psychology, myth, and ritual. They can be a source of ethical energy and they can be a source of violence (they're hardly the only source of either). I don't see how any religious person can believe their tradition is right while also respecting the beliefs of others and the position of the atheist; or how they can have faith without believing that their tradition is right. The only way this could work is if you think that all religions have tried to apprehend the transcendent and the best way to do so is not through your own tradition but through all traditions. That makes sense logically but may not give believers what they are getting psychologically from believing in their tradition.

Five. When I was a teenager I liked the existentialist idea that there was no God, and therefore no objective ethics, so I could choose how to live my life based on what I, personally, valued. Later (after reading about Wittgenstein's late philosophy?) I realized that this made no sense: I can choose to live according to values that aren't the culturally dominant ones, but I can't choose what I value. There are a finite number of things that human beings are capable of valuing; many of them conflict with each other; and at any given moment, one may be in ascendance in the culture while conflicting ones appear as minor strains. So, for example, feminism (the liberation of women, the equality of women) has always been around as an idea, but until the idea of human rights became culturally ascendant, it could not affect the lives of women on a large scale.

Six. Two meanings of meaning: signification and significance (i.e., value). They come together in the idea of moral intelligibility: when bad things happen to good people, or good things happen to bad people, or the punishment outweighs the crime, we feel that the situation is morally unintelligible, and begin to wonder if our lives are meaningless. In fact it's so important to us that the world be morally intelligible that we find it almost impossible to escape from the notion that might is right.

Seven. The situation we desire is good things happening to good people. That would be a world that was intelligible, and meaningful, to human beings. Accordingly, suffering is meaningless – unintelligible and without value – unless we can find some value, and therefore meaning, in it. And after all, it's not that there is a fact of the matter: it's all interpretation. It's not quite that there's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so: true, but human beings can't make themselves think that suffering is, in itself, good. However, you can interpret an event as completely senseless (say, if you want to emphasize the human cost of a disaster, disease, or epidemic) or you can find some good that has come out of it. You can think of the latter case as God setting you an interpretive challenge. (See Donne's Devotions.)

Eight. As Northrop Frye points out, the protagonist of literature descends in status through the centuries: from gods to heroes to kings to ordinary people to ordinary people in deterministic conditions. Only once the protagonist is an ordinary person do we think that the job of literature is to represent reality, and by “reality” we mean the quotidian.

Nine. However, even during this phase, plot requires exciting events to befall the protagonist. A typical plot of the Victorian novel is a fairy tale-like wish fulfillment fantasy in which the low-born hero or heroine rises in social status through marriage or the inheritance of a fortune. Sometimes this fantasy is attached to a nightmare of guilt (e.g. Jane Eyre, Great Expectations), perhaps acknowledging the human cost of anyone rising. Sometimes it turns into a nightmare, as in the fortune hunter plot, which can be played for Gothic thrills (The Woman in White) or for realism (The Portrait of a Lady). Here, “realism” means the pleasure principle giving way to the reality principle: reality turns out to be more complicated, and more full of compromise, than the naive, optimistic protagonist, so full of belief in her own power and judgement, imagined. (This is a frequent theme of the 19^th century novel, differently realized in Middlemarch, and differently again in Pere Goriot.)

Ten. Modernism gets rid of plot because the quotidian is, by definition, uneventful. The 19^th century novel purported to represent reality, but it turns out that just meant that (to use Frye's analysis) the hero had no more or less power over the situation than the reader would.

Eleven. Literature may embody cultural narratives, or it may challenge them.

Twelve. Just because a work of literature challenges a cultural narrative doesn't mean that it doesn't have a plot. An American Tragedy challenges the American cultural narrative of equality based on social mobility, but it very much has a plot: a boy sets out to make his fortune and gets close to attaining the fortune and its erotic embodiment in the upper-class woman who goes with it; but due to contingencies, he ends up impregnating a lower-class woman who'll keep him tied to a life of poverty and low status; tragedy ensues with her murder and his execution, although technically they're both the victims of the cultural narrative. This is double realism: not only does the pleasure principle give way to the reality principle, but a false cultural narrative gives way to reality.

Thirteen. Note that plot isn't something impossible or even implausible. The plot of An American Tragedy is so effective because it's completely plausible (in contrast to, say, the plots of Great Expectations or Jane Eyre); in fact, Dreiser based it on a real criminal case. Modernism doesn't reject plot because it's implausible (although particular Modernists may have used that rationale), but because Modernism restricts itself to the quotidian. Different notions of realism: the protagonist who is typical of his society in the sense of embodying its contradictions vs. the protagonist who is a typical member of his society in that his life is uneventful.

Fourteen. The literature that we still study, especially the 19^th and early 20^th century novel, normally challenges cultural narratives; or if the wish fulfillment fantasy triumphs, as it does at the end of Pride and Prejudice, cultural narratives have at least been severely interrogated. The novel of this period is strongly engaged with reality (here meaning: the world outside the work of literature) and therefore with cultural narratives. Romance and Romanticism, in contrast, are involved respectively with the world of legend and with subjective states; Modernism is also, in its own way, more interested in subjectivity than in social reality.

Fifteen. The Gothic novel is, often, the nightmare version of the wish fulfillment fantasy of marrying up in class: instead of a poor woman happily marrying a rich man, a rich woman is victimized by a man who purports to be able to fulfill her fantasies. When played for thrills, this isn't a matter of the pleasure principle giving way to the reality principle but of pity and fear being converted into pleasure. The underlying archetype of the woman sexually menaced by monsters goes back to romance and reappears in the slasher film; the fortune hunter's female counterpart is the femme fatale, originally the sorceress of romance who distracts the hero from his quest. Both are fantasies/nightmares of sexuality destroying identity.

Sixteen. Let's hypothesize, then, that works of literature typically do not reinforce cultural narratives, but rather challenge them. Why, then, do we fear that works of literature tell us lies about reality? Why Don Quixote and Madame Bovary?

Seventeen. In Don Quixote, comedy is generated by the clash between levels of decorum: put a high mimetic hero in a low mimetic world and see what happens. The world in which Don Quixote moves is no truer-to-life than the world in which he thinks he moves, except that it has no magic in it – but only as a matter of literary decorum. But while only an insane person would take romances to be true, Emma Bovary, a reader of romances in their modern, erotic sense, is much closer to us: she has been led to believe by media focused on wish-fulfillment that she will find fulfillment in consumerism and a great love. In the first place, they're not easy to come by: she can only indulge in consumerism by going into debt, and her lovers can't live up to her expectations. And neither consumerism nor passion is fulfilling, either. As much as Clyde Griffiths, she's the victim of cultural narratives, although in her case they come to her through novels.

Eighteen. It was often thought – and we can see it especially in Don Quixote and Austen's Northanger Abbey – that novels dealing with the fantastic could make avid fans lose touch with reality. In the case of Emma Bovary, they simply set her up for disappointment. The quotidian has nothing in it that can fulfill her desire for big, exciting meaning; like Anna Karenina, she rejects Levin's solution of finding meaning in the small and daily.

Nineteen. Sheila Heti is Emma Bovary in reverse: she claims that life is much more interesting than a novel. Where might this impression come from? Novels only know how to tell a few stories: there's tragedy and “realism,” in which the reality principle triumphs; comedy and romance, in which wish fulfilment triumphs; and melodrama, in which fantasy becomes nightmare and nightmare becomes a source of pleasure. These stories speak to longstanding human longings and fears, but they don't much resemble the average reader's life. The fact that they are things that you want to happen to you or fear happening to you shows that they are not what is happening to you. Now in our late, “meta” Western culture, which has produced not only The Anatomy of Criticism but TV Tropes, we already know all of these stories. Life, in contrast, by the very contingency that makes it so precarious a source of meaning, offers surprise (as in Heti's conversations with strangers in How Should a Person Be?).

Twenty. Contingency: when you write, you learn to take out anything that doesn't matter to the plot, or the description of “one complete action,” as Aristotle put it. If you want to make your story more life-like, you reintroduce a little contingency.

Twenty-one. We've learned that a realist novel can challenge cultural narratives and still have a (plausible) plot. It's also possible to have a nihilistic narrative with a plot. Plot=/=meaning. Film noir shows couples who are driven by lust and greed and who still can't get ahead even after they've committed a crime for that purpose. Their failure can be read as evildoing being punished, but the tone of the genre makes it seem more like meaning can be found neither in human nobility nor in success. These are human beings in conditions of less power or freedom than the viewer, the pulp counterpart to a certain strain of Modernism (e.g. Kafka). Noir couples are enslaved by their passions and by a deterministic universe that is out to get them.

Twenty-two. One of the things I appreciated about Roberto Bolano's 2666 was that by being plotless in the sense that nothing was resolved and it wasn't clear what, if anything, the various protagonists learned from their activities, and by refraining, through this plotlessness, from even the suggestion of authorial commentary, it retained the essential mystery of its subjects: mass sexual violence; the legacy of European fascism; and the hope that we (although an increasingly small number of us) place in the figure of the writer. Anything that could be said about them, any attempt to draw meaning from them – even by pointing, with an owlish solemnity (as Frye would put it), to their lack of meaning – would be hopelessly trite.

Twenty-three. At the same time, 2666 provides the illicit thrill of runaway contingency. In literature, contingency is a daring hint of meaninglessness that also points to a fullness of meaning. If you have a character talk about things that are inessential to the plot (as Shakespeare sometimes does), on the one hand, it's meaningless: the reader or audience member's trained brain will try to find some way to relate it to the plot, and fail. On the other hand, it hints that this character is more than a plot function: he has his own life, his own subjectivity, of which we only get a glimpse. He could be the protagonist of another story. 2666 is nothing but a series of such digressions, and can only work within a context of expectation in which the reader imagines that eventually most of this, or some of it, will be tied together. That it is not suggests that the stories continue off the page, and that nothing less than a full description of every quotidian detail of every character's life and psychological quirks will adequately represent that life. (Compare the biographies of Nazi Literature in the Americas, which are compressed versions of such lives.)

Twenty-four. Life is contingent, literature is not. Normatively, in literature every event has meaning, i.e., significance. In literature, if a character brushes their teeth, there's a point to it: it's important to the plot; or it's a character point (this character is hygienic); or it's for mood (showing the character going through their daily routine before the plot gets going). In life, if you brush your teeth, the only point is to get your teeth clean.

Twenty-five. Say it's a misunderstanding of literature to think that it ought to be true-to-life, whether we think that it's more interesting or less interesting than life. What about other, apparently truth-telling narrative forms, like history or memoirs?

Twenty-six. The audience for memoir wants the story to be story-like, i.e., “a good story,” and also wants it to be true. These are contradictory demands, and lead to scandals over partly or entirely falsified memoirs, as well as “literary memoirs” and “novels from life” that purport to be part-true and part-fictional, with which is which unknown to the reader. The roman a clef has always been this, but its moral flaw was to pass itself off as fiction (when really there was no invention involved – for shame!), whereas the new memoir's moral flaw is to pass itself off as fact (when really there was invention involved – for shame!).

Twenty-seven. One sub-genre of the new memoir, the ordinary-person memoir, zeroes in on “the story you have to tell.” The idea being that even ordinary people – people who are not writers and not celebrities – have had at least one thing happen to them that makes a good story. But what makes a good story? Maybe it's inspirational (how I got off drugs; how I traveled the world and found meaning; how I traveled the world and got off drugs; how I live with an illness; how I survived abuse). Maybe it takes you inside a world that you would never come in contact with otherwise (drug addiction, mental illness, prison). Maybe it tells you about a discrete unusual experience – like what trying to get a book published is really like. “Really like” is key: the reader believes that by reading the memoir they bypass cultural narratives and fictional representations.

Twenty-eight. Obviously, then, the new memoir has sub-genres, and leads aspiring memoirists to try to squeeze their “true stories” into those sub-genres.

Twenty-nine. A favourite memoir sub-genre of writers is the loved one's death (e.g. The Year of Magical Thinking). Clearly in this case writing may serve a therapeutic purpose; and it may also be hoped that reading it will. The subject also presents a challenge to the writer: to extract maximum meaning from maximum meaninglessness. “Meaning” here means profundity, which may be achieved through focusing on the absence of meaning – on the absolute contingency of events combined with their relentless horror. It is important, here, that the writer doesn't embellish; that the writer tells us what death, one of the favourite subjects of both literature and religion, is really like.

Thirty. The writing of an autobiography often starts at a certain point in a person's life – generally, when they feel that they've reached a stable point, however temporary, at the end of a journey. The autobiography then tells the story of how they got to where they are: how the young man became an artist; how Augustine became a Christian. It is to view one's life through a particular filter, not to attempt to look at it, or recount it, without any filter.

Thirty-one. A noir protagonist also looks back, but from a point of desperation – maybe even death (as in Sunset Boulevard).

Thirty-two. Our lives have meaning, and narratives have meaning, but our lives are not narratives, and therefore do not have meaning in the same way that a narrative does. The confusion arises because we are so used to putting our lives into narrative form or applying narratives to our lives – whether metanarratives, or cultural narratives, or the stories we tell ourselves every day about why we do things and why things happen to us.

Thirty-three. Generally speaking, we feel that our lives have meaning if they're going well – which is why the ending of a comedy doesn't raise questions about meaning. There are limitations to this: if your life is going too well, you might feel spiritually empty, or guilty, or bored, or useless. For most people most of the time, though, questions of meaning – of moral intelligibility – are raised when a crisis occurs (death, illness, job loss). Or if you have suffered your whole life, you might ask questions not only about the meaning of your life but about whether life has meaning at all.

Thirty-four. The libidinous protagonist, who is after social status, money, and a wife who represents these things, or a wealthy or respectable husband, doesn't exist anymore. Romance is the genre in ascendance, at the movie theatre and among readers, but no longer as a depository of shared cultural lore – founding myths and quasi-historical heroes. Fantasy is now not even subjectivized, as in Romanticism, but individualized, and, like the cult of celebrity, provides maybe the same quality of spiritual experience that you can get from the cult of the saints. On quality TV, white male protagonists like Don Draper and Walter White grapple with their masculinity, privilege, and entitlement, and touch tragic status by creating Dad fixation in the audience.

Thirty-five. Then again, America never had the kind of comedy in which the hero or heroine sought social status through marriage. That plot appeared in the early 20^th century novel – in An American Tragedy and Alice Adams, for instance. But in the classical Hollywood romantic comedy, hero and heroine act like equals, despite their genders, and despite whatever difference in social status there may be. If they do marry above their class, which isn't that often, that wish-fulfillment isn't the point of the story; the wish-fulfillment involves their relationship's playful enactment of democratic ideals. (American film comedy, which is now largely comedian-comedy, is still the same thing, but with two men instead of a man and a woman. The romantic comedy plot has been relegated to the “chick flick,” and is about the female protagonist's relationship with romance, or sometimes shopping, not with a man.)

Thirty-six. Nor, it seems, can inequality in America today be represented by a protagonist who tries to marry above their class. Today one tries to get ahead by going into debt to get a university degree (or two, or three), which may turn out to be a different kind of tragedy, but which doesn't speak to the libido in the same way.

Thirty-seven. Tragedy and comedy have different kinds of “meaning.” Tragedy is intelligible because one can see how the protagonist caused the terrible outcome. It is mysterious and fascinating because one can debate the protagonist's responsibility, especially when, like Oedipus, he didn't understand what he was doing; or, like Cordelia, she couldn't possibly have predicted the outcome. Tragedy is somewhat intelligible: if it were completely intelligible, there would be no drama, and no mystery of human life. And that mystery is part of what we mean by the meaning of human life.

Thirty-eight. The supreme tragic hero is Adam, who is spectacularly punished, and all mankind through him, for breaking an arbitrary taboo. Hence, tragedy (including the Genesis story itself) represents the feeling of human beings that they are somehow responsible for the terrible things that befall them, because to be human is to be imperfect, but not wholly responsible, so that life and morality remain largely mysteries.

Thirty-nine. Comedy is not causally intelligible, but it has meaning anyway – because, as I pointed out above, we don't question meaning when things go well. In comedy, the protagonist has a libidinal goal (money and a woman: the woman may have the money, or the money may get the woman); the villain blocks him; the villain is defeated; and boy gets girl in a happy ending. Melodrama is closer to this plot than to the tragic plot. In melodrama, the villain has a libidinous goal (the heroine's virtue, or, in the less racy version, her fortune); the hero stops him; and boy gets girl in a happy ending. In comedy and melodrama, that is, disaster is averted at the last moment, and the ending, as Frye points out, is manipulated – which is to say, unbelievable. It is more unbelievable in the case of melodrama, because libido has been thwarted; whereas the ending of comedy is the uncomplicated triumph of the pleasure principle. The only reason we're willing to believe the happy ending of melodrama is that we're so relieved that the heroine has been spared.

Forty. Yet even though we know that narrative fiction is not a representation of reality, we still often consider true-to-lifeness a virtue in it. But we have different ideas about what that means. For the unsophisticated, true-to-life means having characters with goals and motives. For the sophisticated, true-to-life may mean exploring the consciousness of one character or a few characters, through whose eyes we see the world, rather than watching, from the outside, characters try to achieve their goals through their actions. In the case of the sophisticated story, the character may not seem like she has any goals that extend beyond the immediate future, or that require heroic action. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway the heroine's only goal is to get ready for her party. The sophisticated hold that the quotidian is true-to-life; all of the drama is below the surface, and has to do with choices regarding relationships, social status, and, ultimately, whether life is worth living.

Forty-one. Other Modernist or Modernist-influenced novels (Beckett's, or Bolano's) may give us characters who have no goals at all and seem to drift aimlessly through life. If you have big goals, your life has a purpose – one kind of meaning. If you have modest goals, you may start to question whether your life has meaning, but you may, like Clarissa Dalloway, be able to affirm that it does. After all, don't the majority of people have modest goals, even if that's not what they write about in the history books or in novels? If you have no goals, presumably your life has no meaning (it's absurd), but that may or may not be a concern to you. You may continue to be driven by your own obsessions, which are obscure to those around you. If you have enough characters like that, as Bolano does in his big novels, you recreate a feeling of meaning by the sheer inexhaustible and inexplicable variety of human beings.

Forty-two. The sophisticated reader may say: fringe characters, like Beckett's, understand that meaning is a lie; everyone else tells themselves lies in order to muddle through in a morally unintelligible universe that itself has no ultimate goal. It's not so much, then, that it's true that the typical human being has no goals, as that these atypical human beings are closer to the truth. This kind of Modernism, or interpretation of Modernism, takes Emma Bovary's and Anna Karenina's extreme stance of rejecting the reduction of our expectations brought about by the weakening of metanarratives and cultural narratives that was the result of, first, the blow that the scientific revolution delivered Christianity, and, second, to compound it, the blow that the two world wars delivered Enlightenment hopes.

Forty-three. Reality TV is actually much less true-to-life than realist fiction (or Modernist fiction that explores subjectivity), not just because the editing creates narratives for the people on the shows, but because those people tend to become archetypes for the viewer.

Forty-four. We work out the meaning of our lives through narrative fiction. Reality TV characters become archetypes that we use to make intelligible the desires that drive us, not as individuals but as human beings, at a deep level. Cultural narratives give our lives shape by telling us what we want and how to get it; often, they are lies. Metanarratives tell us that all of human history, and perhaps the universe, has a shape and a goal. When metanarratives are uncertain and cultural narratives are in low esteem, we have to lower our expectations; for those who can't do that because their egos are too ravenous, the idea that human life has any meaning, or adequate meaning, becomes a lie.

Forty-five. The reason we can't uncomplicatedly think of human life as having meaning is twofold: being purpose-driven, human beings want to believe that their own lives, and the universe they're in, have a purpose; and suffering makes life morally unintelligible. Freud thought that love and work brought adequate meaning to human life, but meaningful work can be hard to come by (or make a living by) and love, even when it is found, can devastate and disappoint. As metanarratives and the cultural narratives dependent upon them recede, erotic love has to bear more meaning, but due to the nature of erotic love, that can lead to disaster: to murder and suicide. And we live in a culture devoted to profit, whose cultural narrative is that consumerism will bring happiness, rather than a culture devoted to meaningful work.

Forty-six. Reality principle and pleasure principle, objectivity and subjectivity: the life we are born into has no necessary correspondence to what would make us happy.

Forty-seven. Is it ever the case that the job of the writer is to show us what life is “really like”?

Forty-eight. Yes – when you're counteracting cultural narratives.

Forty-nine. Also, perhaps, when you're pushing at the limits of what can be represented. (Joyce, Bolano.) I don't mean the formal limits, but rather the cultural ones. The novelist makes us look at what we don't want to look at, because we feel shame or horror.

Fifty. And when you're reacting against non-realist characterization. To think that Harry Potter or Bella Swan or Batman are supposed to represent real, complex human beings is to misunderstand the function of an archetypal character, but the overwhelming popularity of archetypal characters makes the realist writer, who is always reactive, want to show that human beings are more interesting than archetypes. But behind that well-meaning desire is the old puritan fear that misleading representations will put fans out of touch with reality.

Fifty-one. The writer gives us fantasies or combats fantasies. Frye and Fiedler, reacting against the WASP elevation of realism in academe, wanted to focus on the first role, because obviously, that is what is literary about literature; but this is confusing, because literature presents itself as telling the truth and takes human life as its subject.

Fifty-two. It is of the nature of the human activity we call storytelling to be confused about its relationship to reality or truth. There is never a point at which the activity of literature does not make some claim about being related to reality: myths are supposed to tell the truth about gods and legends and romance about (distant) history; while realism is supposed to give an accurate representation of actual life. Only with Romanticism do we arrive at the idea that the truth contained in the narrative is metaphorical in nature. What we won't accept is for a story to be a lie. This is why we're so on edge about memoirs and even more on edge about the Bible.

Fifty-three. The story has an inherent relationship to truth. The parable, the simplest form of story, is a way of communicating a moral truth that can't be better communicated by any other means. Literature, as Frye says, turns away from direct or factual statement – because the facts do not have an exclusive hold on truth. (Given all of this, it's no wonder Frye thinks we haven't even begun to understand what literature is.)

Fifty-four. The universe may have no purpose, but human beings have built-in values. It may be that the story of human beings will end in disaster; at the same time, we seem to have the raw moral materials to be able to turn things around. Which, interestingly, corresponds to the Christian notion of free will: sufficient to stand, but free to fall. Although of course free will vs. determinism is a debate that predates Christianity.

Fifty-five. The universe produces life, which in turn produces consciousness. You can think of the universe as having become conscious through conscious beings. If human beings turn out to be suicidal by virtue of the very mechanism that allows us to flourish, the will to dominate, then life itself has a flawed design. After all – as mystery religions such as Christianity attest – animal life requires consuming other life to live. So life may be inherently tragic for conscious beings who are able to recognize other conscious beings. And although domination and self-destruction would seem logically to be opposed tendencies, they don't seem to be so opposed psychologically in human beings (hence Freud's theorizing of the death drive).

Fifty-six. Reasons for the inadequacy of the quotidian. With the modern European novel, the European audience for literature for the first time consumes stories about people like themselves. Audiences were used to locating meaning (i.e. significance) in the realms above them, whether social or supernatural: the quotidian was precisely what it was not worth telling stories about. Stories were for commemorating and broadcasting the doings of the gods and the astonishing deeds of heroes, and misfortunes only mattered if they happened to the high-born. When, now, we read tabloids and gossip about celebrities, we follow the same impulse; we may seem to be critical, but the Greek and Roman gods were notoriously misbehaved. The public mourning for Princess Diana is another example (not only a celebrity but a princess!), or our continuing fascination with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. So the quotidian was a realm where, by definition, nothing significant could happen. Although Protestantism challenged this, increasingly locating meaning in the private realm – and especially (in keeping with its emphasis on the individual's conscience) in the interior realm of subjectivity. That, now, was where all of the exciting stuff was going to happen: e.g. the drama of judgement, and anxiety over judging correctly, that we see in Jane Austen's heroines, which becomes interpretive hypertrophy in Henry James's novels. 

Fifty-seven. At the same time, the factual conception of truth was gaining ascendancy with the scientific revolution. Not only did science challenge the factual basis of Christianity; it increasingly made it seem as though factual truth were the only kind. Human beings' ravenous desire for meaning, which had been satisfied by story in the sense of myth, was not going to be satisfied by a factual quotidian world. It was possible to carry on and find meaning, but the immense psychological difficulty is dramatized in both Anna Karenina and Mrs. Dalloway, in which the author has one character choose to live and one character choose to die.

Fifty-eight. A story has meaning in that it communicates a truth, having to do with our desires and/or fears, that cannot be communicated as a direct statement. If I hear a true story, and it resonates that way with me, it's because it has a parabolic or archetypal quality. A story gives meaning if it offers an explanation of reality. Not just any explanation, though, because the laws of physics offer that, but a hopeful, redemptive, optimistic one, in which justice, peace, and happiness will eventually reign. A metanarrative not only explains the way the world is, but also renders it morally intelligible. (American capitalism would seem to be a partial exception: although propaganda has associated it with democratic freedom, its real appeal is not to social justice but to individualism. All it offers in the way of moral intelligibility is equality of opportunity and the idea of the individual's power over his or her destiny. It does not say that something is wrong that will eventually be fixed, but that, contrary to the appearance of injustice, everything is the way it should be already.)

Fifty-nine. My life has meaning because I have things that I value and I try as much as possible to build my life around them; but when a cultural narrative fails me, or when a crisis occurs, my life or life in general may become morally unintelligible to me, until I find some new source of meaning. We are not lacking for them, even if consumerism is not one of them. I don't know what it would mean to say that human life in general or the universe have a purpose, but they are both fascinating. The odyssey of human beings through religious and scientific phases, from imaginative speculation about the origins of the universe and life to evidence-based, but just as mind-blowing, speculation about them, is staggering; so is the fact that all of this co-exists with fundamentalism, McDonald's, and the brink of environmental and nuclear disaster.  

Fifty Shades of Grey, the Movie: Of Tropes, Gender Politics, Sex, and Fantasy

The cultural conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey since the movie came out seems to have two main themes: how badly-written the book is (the movie reviews are showcases for snideness on the topic) and how bad the movie is for women. I've also heard complaints from the BDSM community, or friends thereof, about the book's irresponsible depiction of such relationships – echoes of the reception of Basic Instinct by the LGBT community. The obvious response is that, while anyone is free to worry about misinformation and object to whatever they want to object to, Fifty Shades is a sexual fantasy, not a lifestyle blueprint.

Lionel Trilling famously defended Lolita, a runaway bestseller in America when it was finally published there in 1958, by arguing that Nabokov's novel restored a sense of romance to romance by reintroducing the forbidden. By the late 50s, neither adulterous longing, on which the concept of Western love was founded (see Tristan and Isolde), nor out-of-wedlock lapses carried a sufficient charge of societal disapproval, or created sufficient internal and external obstacles. In the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, it's the love interest's fetish that creates these obstacles. Do they represent what women's magazines would call a “dealbreaker” for Anastasia Steele, weighed against Christian Grey's immense wealth and the frisson that his take-charge attitude evidently gives her?

Fifty Shades of Grey knows exactly what it owes to the Western tradition of romantic love, particularly as it has been depicted and promoted by literature. Anastasia is an English lit major, and on their first date, Christian asks her whether she's an Austen girl or a Hardy girl. She surprises him by choosing Hardy. Diffident, lip-biting Miss Steele (as Christian likes to call her) may seem like one of those garden-variety Austen freaks, but she's going to swerve away from that interminable trend. Deep within her is a repressed, oppressed Victorian maiden, a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, dying to get out.

Intertexual Romance

With its basis in fan fiction, it's hardly surprising that Fifty Shades is self-conscious with its movie references, too: Anastasia dubs the woman who initiated Christian into BDSM practices when he was 16 “Mrs. Robinson.” (I guess recruiting children – Anastasia does later point out that it was child abuse – is an example of a behaviour that the BDSM community would rather not have associated with it.) The Graduate is a movie with a rather different resonance for the female audience for which it was not intended than for its male creators, and is maybe the last time an American movie about sexual desire and mores made such a huge cultural impact.

So Fifty Shades of Grey is a movie about a woman who seems to be the definition of vanilla but might have a secret dark side, and also a movie about a sexual initiation by a person who has a clear upper hand, that ends disastrously. In this case, the difference in power is a matter of money and sexual experience rather than age (I don't know if there's an age difference in the novel, but the two leads look about the same age in the movie although Jamie Dornan is in fact seven years older than Dakota Johnson).

E. L. James may not be a great or even a competent prose writer, but fan fiction requires different talents – such as the media literacy and savviness about media tropes that she does possess. As for psychological complexity, everyone knows that that can be a distraction in pornography. Anastasia and Christian are, first and foremost, types in a sort of role-playing scenario: the powerful businessman with dark appetites and the mousy, unassuming virgin. They are locked in a battle of wills, based in traditional gender roles, that (as Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel) is central to the English novel from its first great example, Richardson's Clarissa. Lovelace, as an irresponsible seducer, must get Clarissa to sleep with him before he agrees to marry her; Clarissa, as the most fastidious of virgins, must get Lovelace to marry her before she agrees to sleep with him. The Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies of the late 50s/early 60s are a comedic updating; so, in their way, are the Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner cartoons. We just want to keep telling the same story about appetite, over and over. 

In James's updating, Christian wants to get Anastasia to sign a contract that will make her his “submissive,” while Anastasia wants Christian to act more like a normal boyfriend: go on dates, sleep in the same bed with her at night, let her touch him – stuff like that. Because Christian is obsessed with Anastasia (obviously), he can't help but give in to her a bit while she contemplates the offer: they have some extra-contractual sex, although some of it involves a little light bondage; he agrees to go on a weekly date; she meets his family (who adore her – obviously). All of this giving in, of course, is used as leverage by Christian to make her give in – since, after all, he's made more concessions to her than to any other girl he's ever known.

I didn't find the sex scenes in Fifty Shades especially sexy, although that may be the point, in a way. It often happens in erotic fan fiction that the sex scenes become obligatory and perfunctory because the writer has become engrossed by the characters' relationship. And definitely that has happened here: the characters may not be either believable or especially individualized, but their psychological struggle is what interests James, not the sex. I don't mean to spread the myth that female creators and consumers of erotica are not interested in sex scenes. There's a sub-genre of erotic fan fiction called “PWP,” which stands for “porn without plot,” when you just want a shot of graphically-described, barely-characterized sex. But the truth is that, pretty often, the writer gets more interested in the characters' relationships and the sex scenes become about as much the point as the scene where Buffy fights the monster-of-the-week.

Furthermore, the climactic BDSM scene of Fifty Shades is not meant to be sexy at all. The movie heads toward the signing of the contract as the climax, but instead of that consummation, Anastasia demands that Christian show her the worst he has to offer so that she'll know what she's getting into, and we get a raw emotional scene in which, as she's beaten, we see her take in the realization of the depth of Christian's need to see her broken, vulnerable, and physically and emotionally suffering. This also parallels Clarissa, whose climactic act is the drugging and raping of Clarissa by Lovelace; the mind-bending post-feminist twist of Fifty Shades is that Anastasia is “in control” of the situation because she asks to be physically and emotionally brutalized.

After that, they're reduced to a couple of people at their most emotionally naked and have a kind of primal exchange that made me understand why the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, has referred to Persona in discussions of the movie. (You read that right, cinephiles: go ahead and have a conniption fit.) Having braved the heart of darkness of her sadist boyfriend, little Anastasia Steele has finally discovered something about boundaries, and her boundaries in particular, and learned how to say “No” in such a way that a man, however powerful, persistent, and persuasive he may be, knows that she means it. Of course she'll be back for more in future installments – though I don't think I'll be.

The Genealogy of Tropes

In From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, possibly the funniest book ever to feature “rape” in the title, feminist film critic Molly Haskell described the favourite women's fiction trope of the Gothic hero: flattering in his controlling behaviour (you definitely know he's into you), exciting in his abusiveness (he's no pansy), and yet with a secret from his past that's left him secretly wounded and vulnerable. He is the perfect hero for the puritan (or just pubescent) heroine, Haskell explains, because despite his impressive displays of “masculine” power, his “feminine” woundedness means that he's unlikely to make real sexual demands on you; instead, he ultimately appeals to one's maternal instinct.

My favourite example of Haskell's is James Mason in the unbelievably silly 1945 British film The Seventh Veil. Mason is a bachelor who becomes the guardian of the heroine when she's a young adolescent. (He seems like an uncle – V. C. Andrews's Dark Angel, from which I'm sure James stole the piano-playing scene in Fifty Shades, is in this same mode – but the movie calls him a second cousin.) He uses a cane – a symbol of his mysterious woundedness and unsubtle indication of the impotence that keeps him sexually non-threatening despite his aggressive temperament. 

Mason doesn't only hate women because he's at a physical disadvantage in the romance market, though, but also because of his relationship with his mother, who hurt him when he was just a helpless little boy. (Aw!) He can only express his attraction to the heroine by being nasty to her, controlling every aspect of her life, and flipping out when she tries to use other men to break free. And yet he has a certain hold over her, not only because she's become obsessed, Stockholm-style, with pleasing him, but because they develop a professional bond as he trains her, Whiplash-style, to become a concert pianist. That can be one of the perks of a relationship with a wounded Gothic hero: sometimes instead of making sexual demands on you, he spurs you to great heights of professional achievement by demanding sublimation. And there's nothing a puritan – which is to say, Anglo-American – woman finds sexier than sublimation.

In that movie's climactic act of displaced consummation, Mason attacks her hands with his cane while she's playing after she informs him that she's going to leave him to get married. But despite having an array of suitors to choose from (a woman's picture trope with a structural similarity to the “whodunnit,” as Haskell points out), the heroine ultimately returns to Mason, whose violent outburst seems to have cleared the air and left him more capable of expressing tender emotions.

Mason gets ready to strike while Mommy looks on

Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, often held to be the paradigm of feminist TV, features an updating of the Gothic hero in Angel, who pretty starkly represents the gynocentric view of Good (non-sexual) and Bad (sexual) Men. And in case you thought that was an accident, the show reinforces that view when Buffy later develops a sexual relationship with a Bad (sexual) Man, Spike, which she has to break off because the puritan heroine ultimately cannot have a purely sexual relationship (Spike, no matter how much he may reform through his own effort, is still only a body, no soul) without compromising the virtue that's the source of her power.

Virtue, as Nietzsche, I think it was, pointed out, originally meant “strength,” and Buffy is the direct descendent of Spenser's warrior women in The Faerie Queene, Britomart and Belphoebe, who (according to Fiedler, again) turn into Clarissa when the tropes of romance meet the bourgeois realism of the English novel. In other words, the (usually blonde) woman who fights the monsters/rapist is the exact same archetype as the (usually blonde) woman who succumbs to the monster/rapist: Buffy and Laura Palmer are two sides of the same coin. Spenser is illustrating female chastity, or virtue, by embodying it in action heroines; while Richardson's emphasis on pathos rather than action means that he can best represent virtue by showing the fate it meets in a fallen world.

As secular writers from the decades after second-wave feminism, I'm not sure if Joss Whedon or David Lynch are aware that they're representing virtue or chastity; I assume Lynch is thinking in terms of “innocence,” with which his work has a deeply complicated relationship, and Whedon probably in fully secularized, vague terms like “strength of character.” Nevertheless, you can never completely escape the genealogy of tropes, which is why Buffy – strong, liberated, independent modern woman though she may be – can't just sleep with whomever she pleases, whenever she pleases, however she pleases. It's not just that we still have double standards regarding female sexuality; of course we do. But when representing female (or male) sexuality – whether on our screens (including computer screens) or in our fantasies – we also have tropes to contend with, and their embodiment of historical norms that may still hover in our present-day “sexual unconscious.”

A Troubled Relationship to Female Agency

In Fifty Shades of Grey, we may contemplate not only with the genealogy of tropes but also with a literal genealogy that is also a cinematic one: Dakota Johnson's descent from Melanie Griffith, who is in turn the daughter of Tippi Hedren. It is a legacy of portraying iconic characters with a troubled relationship to female agency, and specific moments of Fifty Shades become rich with resonance for that reason, whether it was intentional on the filmmaker's part or not. There's the especially on-the-nose detail of the room that Christian designates for his “submissives” having a caged bird among the wallpaper designs (“Back you go in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels!”), but there are also echoes of Griffith's humiliating first encounter with Harrison Ford in Working Girl in the scene where Christian comes to the rescue of a blackout drunk Johnson.

Mitch and Melanie have a smug-off

In Working Girl, one of many ambivalent 80s depictions of working women inspired by women's mass entrance into the workforce after second-wave feminism, the creepily baby-voiced Griffith was a throwback to a Marilyn Monroe/Judy Holliday dumb blonde archetype, her full figure and gauzy manner positing an inextricable link between female sexuality and female diffidence even as her character struggled to be taken seriously in the workplace while remaining “feminine.” The movie's linkage between women's professional success, WASP hyper-rationalism and suppression of sensuality, and anorexia through Sigourney Weaver's character and her “bony ass” (as Griffith memorably calls it) is right up Camille Paglia's alley: a traditional woman, and a working-class woman, Griffith has to learn how to “perform” Weaver's WASP style.

There's even biographical resonance in the final beating scene, given what we now know about the circumstances surrounding the filming of Melanie Daniels's traumatic attack by the birds in the attic in the climactic scene of The Birds. (To wit: according to Hedren, and as dramatized in the 2012 TV movie The Girl, Hitchcock became sexually obsessed with her, and in return for rejecting him, he arranged for the scene's filming to be almost as harrowing for Hedren as the attack was for Melanie.) Like the shower scene in Psycho, the attic scene in The Birds was a substitute for rape, but by 1964, American mores had relaxed enough for Hitchcock to finally be able to put a real rape on the screen for the first (but not only) time, in Marnie, also starring Hedren.

Marnie bears a much closer relationship to Fifty Shades of Grey than The Birds. In it, a young Sean Connery plays a wealthy and powerful businessman, Mark Rutland (yep), who becomes obsessed with a compulsive thief who takes jobs as a secretary in order to steal from men like him (except older and less hot). When he catches her, he threatens to turn her over to the police if she doesn't marry him, even after he finds out that she's frigid – unless that's part of the appeal. When patience doesn't make her come around, he rapes her on their honeymoon, and realizes that she was serious when she said no one million times when he has to rescue her from her suicide attempt the following morning. The rest of the plot concerns his attempts to cure her neuroses by playing amateur psychotherapist while keeping his businessmen friends from discovering his new wife's identity and turning her over to the police.

The resemblance between the movies is in the couples' combative relationship and the way they're forced to present a facade of normalcy while hiding problems that no one could understand, but in Fifty Shades it's the man who's suffering from a mysterious childhood trauma that's affected his sex life, and the woman who's forced to play amateur psychotherapist if she has any hope of making this relationship function. And notably, if anyone's a masochist in the Mark-Marnie relationship, it's Mark – who, as Marnie points out, is obsessed with a woman who can't stand for him to touch her.

Hitchcock gives us plenty of scenes from Marnie's point of view, both with and without Mark present, but James and Taylor-Johnson don't bother to allow us inside Christian's head, either because that would make him less enigmatic or because they don't give a crap about him except insofar as he affects Anastasia. This presents Jamie Dornan with a notably tough task, as does what seems to be some pretty striking miscasting. I can see Christian Gray as a Sean Connery type or, if they were going to go with small and effete (however buff), maybe a Dirk Bogarde type. To deliver all of those Smut 101 dirty-talk lines about fucking and wanting to fuck, he's got to have an air of either authority or depravity, while Dornan has less of either than your average boy band member. If they wanted to go boy band, why didn't they get Justin Timberlake? That would have made the movie into some kind of work of genius. 

Meh

Better

Dornan doesn't project an air of much of anything, except discomfort. And it's a shame because in addition to her resonances, Johnson brings everything to the part of Anastasia that it needs, and more (from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books, anyway): brunette Everywoman prettiness (big nose, wonky teeth, breasts untouched by plastic surgeon, under-eye smudges suggestive of neurosis), charisma, and “go there” guts seldom seen outside of a David Lynch movie.

Source material be damned: there's no reason at all why Fifty Shades of Grey couldn't have been a great movie. The casting is one reason why it's not, but the more important reason is that it doesn't seem to be the director's sexual fantasy. Taylor-Johnson has a feel for the characters' battle of wills and emotional clashes, but unlike a Bunuel, Hitchcock, Polanski, or Lynch, she doesn't have a lascivious eye; one never feels that her own psychosexual fears or desires are on the line. 

Ultimately, the movie's about two things: a woman's attempt to find out the sources of the trauma that keeps her boyfriend from being sexually normal and prevents them from being together; and a man's attempt to stain an innocent woman with his dirty male sexuality. Make no mistake, in this movie's conception of sexuality, men represent sex as its most essential, which, in this movie's conception, means its dirtiest. The heroine's progress from innocence to experience involves finding out what goes on inside the male brain – and bedroom. But that's exactly what makes Anastasia such a courageous heroine, within this movie's terms. She doesn't want to remain naive, and she knows that to get out of that state she has to have such kind of decisive encounter with maleness – with maleness as absolute otherness. In this stark two-hander (as it basically is), the encounter with the man is the encounter with the world.

But What Does It All Mean?

We have lately become entranced with stories about how the genders perceive each other, or how we perceive each other through the lens of gender, and how narratives about gender, sex, and love are entangled with narratives about violence; but Fifty Shades of Grey is actually far less about female masochism than Gone Girl, the second-biggest publishing phenomenon of 2012 (after the Fifty Shades series). The heroine of Gone Girl, Amy Dunne, isn't a sexual masochist, but her roundabout method of getting revenge on men for slights big and small – physically injuring herself to make it look like she has been stabbed, beaten, or raped, and staging her disappearance – suggest internalized misogyny in combination with the cultural training that tells women to take their frustrations out of themselves. This kind of masochism is inseparable from narcissism, since the narcissist is always manipulating her image and altering her body (through exercise or surgery – which of course applies to men too, especially in the media saturated, metrosexual 21^st century) in order to change the way others react to her. In the end, concerned only with how others perceive her, she has no “real,” “inner” self.

Anastasia Steele isn't a masochist at all, which is exactly the problem. The movie isn't about a woman who enjoys being beaten or punished. The relationship is emotionally masochistic insofar as Anastasia can't get what she wants out of it: she's not as concerned about the whips as she is about the fact that Christian can't easily show her affection or accept it from her. He does not, in the parlance of women's magazines, “treat her right.”

In her thinkpiece on the series, Katie Roiphe pissed off feminists, as she does, by suggesting that its popularity is the result of professional women secretly desiring submission in the sexual arena – a thesis stolen from Paglia, who suggested back in the 90s that the burdens of boardroom power might lead to a compensatory desire for someone else to take charge in the bedroom. (Sounds reasonable. I mean, there's that scene in Wolf of Wall Street.) 

Roiphe found lots of other pop culture fodder for her thesis – including Girls, which was then in its first season. It's true that first-season Adam is some kind of Bizarro-universe, internet-porn-era version of the Gothic hero; perpetually shirtless and inarticulate except on the subject of porn-derived role-playing fantasies, Adam is Stanley Kowalski with mild Asperger's. What I see as parallel to Fifty Shades in first-season Adam and Hannah is not Hannah's curiosity about BDSM, but her debate within herself and with her friends over whether it's “okay” for Adam to just use her for sex rather than acting as a full boyfriend – as well as the fact that Adam seems, to her, excitingly, and a little dauntingly, in touch with his sexual desires, whereas she hasn't got a clue about her own. Hannah, however, unlike Anastasia, also doesn't know, initially, whether she wants Adam to be her boyfriend or not. Her concern is, rather, about whether it's degrading, from a feminist perspective, for Adam to use her for sex (is feminism about sexual liberation, or about getting men to treat you right?), and whether, from a feminist perspective, it's okay to be degraded (is feminism about the freedom to have all kinds of experiences, even unpleasant ones... or about not letting men treat you badly?).

Maya Dusenbery's pro-Fifty Shades response to Roiphe's piece on Feministing is way more interesting than Roiphe's pseudo-daring thinkpiece. (That's what you get for using a thesis that was part of a conversation going on in feminism over a decade ago.) Dusenbery suggests that the popularity of the books has to do not with any desire for submission on the part of female readers, since the sub-dom relationship that Christian wants never actually happens. Instead, Dunsenbery emphasizes the “negotiating that happens in their relationship” and the “classic damaged-boy-saved-by-a-good-woman narrative that everyone loves.” In which case the tastes of female readers in romantic fiction haven't changed much since Clarissa – except that Richardson was hellbent on ruining everyone's fun by rejecting any version of the “saved by a good woman” narrative, even though, according to what I've read, his female fans pleaded for him to get Clarissa and Lovelace together even after the rape. I'm sure they took care of that in the privately-circulated, quill-written fanfic, though.

I agree with Dusenbery that whatever the massive popularity of the Fifty Shades series means, it's not, contra Roiphe's insinuations, that “women don't actually want power/equality/liberation.” The fact that women have made an erotica series into an international phenomenon in a world that still does not cater equally to the (heterosexual) female libidinous fantasies, because women still aren't creating 50 per cent of the media we consume, has got to be something for feminism to celebrate. And it didn't happen in a day: it happened because of women on the internet – of all ages, gay and straight – writing erotic fan fiction in a gift economy for over a decade, until a tipping point was reached. 

The fact that the series depicts, in part, female masochism, or at least plays with the idea, makes that feminist triumph imperfect, or at least complicated – bringing an awareness, as it does, that traditional gender roles and our sexual fantasies remain inextricably tangled up. And our reactions to such fantasies are complicated by real events and the narratives about gender, gender roles, and abuse and violence that affect our perception of them and are, in turn, shaped by them: just like the Gone Girl movie, whose release was shadowed by the appearance and discrediting of an account of campus gang rape in the Rolling Stone, the Fifty Shades movie and the criticisms of it coming from the BDSM community, follow on the heels of the fall from grace of popular Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi for having, it seems, practiced BDSM without properly gaining consent in all cases, and for sexually harassing female co-workers.

Eros, Masochism, Genre, and Gender

A “healthy relationship” is the kind of thing most people aspire to have; it is not necessarily the stuff of romantic or erotic fantasies. As I can recall from the soap operas I watched as a child and young teenager, in the late 80s and early 90s, often women's romantic fantasies revolve around a man who is unreliable and in some ways unavailable, so that she has to chase him. (I'm thinking of Jack and Jennifer of Days of Our Lives, the ultimate good girl-redeems-damaged/bad boy story, in which the virginal girl-next-door rehabilitates a rapist.) This may be because it makes him less threatening sexually, but it's also, surely, because, just like men, women are – again, in fantasy – more interested in what they can't get. They may be so interested in it, in fact, that they're willing to withstand a lot of disappointment and heartache in order to keep pursuing it.

There's no real counterpart to this for men, since men do not have romantic fiction explicitly marketed to them. If men are consuming romantic fiction, it's “women's fiction.” In fiction marketed to men, men don't seek romantic love, they seek trophies: in one comedy after another, hot chicks who are way out of the schlubby hero's league but who are so good-natured that he eventually wins them over anyway, and who have no characteristics other than “hot” and “nice.” Dramas marketed to men tend to have women in them as little as possible.

At one time, there was a Hollywood genre that dealt with men's romantic and erotic fears and desires, which was retrospectively termed “film noir,” and if we were viewing it from the perspective of whether or not the fantasies it contains are “good for men,” we'd have to conclude that men are, as a group, perilously masochistic. We do not view narratives from that perspective, however, but – if we're feminists – from one in which if a female character is cruel to a male character, it means the work is misogynous, and if a male character is cruel to a female character, it's because the work is misogynous. This suggests that, for all the valuable insights of feminist analysis of narratives, it has its limitations.

Occasionally in satire, a male gets to totally abase himself before a gorgeous woman in a way that would be unthinkable in a gender-reversed scenario, as in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, or every movie that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. It's important to think about how our narratives socialize us, particularly if we are part of a group whose rights are often at risk, and it's understandable that representations of violence toward women by men will have more real-world associations than representations of violence toward men by women to complicate our reactions (although we might want to ask ourselves: why are we not upset by representations of violence toward men by men, which is very much a real-world problem?). But we shouldn't let the narratives that we form out of these facts make us forget that eros makes masochists of us all – at least in our imaginations.

Ibsen's Solness, John Lahr's Tennessee Williams, and Morrissey's Morrissey: The Terrible Cost of Greatness

Jonathan Demme's 2013 film of Andre Gregory's stage production of A Master Builder, starring Wallace Shawn as Solness (the elderly architect of the title), Julie Hagerty as his wife, Aline, and Lisa Joyce as Hilde Wangel, reminded me both of how great and of how awful theatre can be. Ibsen's 1892 play is the real star, retaining its fascination and black humour despite the production, the shaky-cam close-ups, the bizarre performances, the awkward dialogue of Shawn's adaptation (although it's no awkwarder than any of the other Ibsen translations I've read), and a totally unnecessary framing device that tries to contain the play's elements of heightened reality and account for its mutually contradictory perspectives by making Hilde Wangel's visit into a fantasy of Solness's dying moments.

There isn't much in the way of dramatic action in Ibsen's play, which consists of a bunch of people talking about incidents from the past that they're fixated on, and which the two people involved remember, or perceive, drastically differently. The other plot, the only thing faintly resembling conventional stage action, involves Solness trying to prevent the draughtsman who works from him from getting married and starting his own career as an architect, because Solness wants to suppress all competition, especially from youth.

Ibsen's Freakish Comedy

The first thing that threw me off (even before I saw the film, actually), was the casting of 69-year-old Wallace Shawn, who looks like he's ready to play Gollum without makeup, as Solness, whom I'd always pictured as a broad-chested, booming, blustery type. But fine, casting against type, fine: there's no reason a small, homely man can't be charismatic. (Solness is supposed to strike women as being able to control their souls.) In presence as well as physical appearance, however, the Ibsen character Shawn seems best-suited to play is Judge Brack, the sleazy blackmailer, in Hedda Gabler – or better yet, Hedda's husband Tesman, the befuddled minor historian.

It's not surprising, however, that a serious theatre artist such as Shawn would be uninterested in those parts, and his interpretation of Solness is, anyway, sensitive. The film and the interpretation of the play behind it are a labour of love: about 14 years prior to Demme's filming of the production, Shawn adapted the play after Gregory brought it to his attention, and afterwards they performed it occasionally for friends. In one of the few positive reviews of the film, in Film Comment, Jonathan Romney defends the framing device, and simultaneously, the casting of Shawn as Solness, although he doesn't explain how Solness is still able to control Kaia.

As the doubtless difficult-to-play Hilde, who is made up of sharply contradictory qualities and is part-symbol, part-unearthly apparition, Lisa Joyce is luminous and appropriately overwhelming, but spends most of the performance on the verge of tears or hysterical laughter, which is distracting. Hilde, true, is yet another proto-Manic Pixie Dream (or Nightmare) Girl, but Joyce takes the “manic” part a bit too literally. Hilde, a role I'd itched to play in my early 20s (not that I'm an actress, but you've got to be dead not to want to play Hilde Wangel in your early 20s and Hedda Gabler in your late 20s), calls for the uncanny quality of an actress like Jennifer Jones, and I also pictured her as much brasher and – except at crucial moments, where the force of her need to believe in him gets the better of her – as in control of every exchange with Solness.

The Master Builder (as the play is usually referred to in English) is, inescapably, about the attraction between a woman in her early 20s and a man who's at least in his 50s. (Apparently the relationship between Solness and Hilde was inspired by Ibsen's relationship with an 18-year-old homewrecking minx whom he met when he was 61.) This ought to be annoying for a female viewer, but one of its pleasures for me even now, at 39, is the way it depicts a comfortably equal relationship between a young woman armed with only her preternatural self-possession and a much older, powerful man. This is in part, I think, because the uncanny Hilde is removed from the social realm, unlike Solness's bookkeeper Kaia, who is completely dominated by him. But it's a sort of side-shoot of the tradition in Anglo-American literature that Harold Bloom memorably referred to as “Heroines of the Protestant Will” and that accounts for how Elizabeth Bennet can hold her own with Darcy – and even refuse his marriage proposal. (Pride and Prejudice has been popularly commemorated as the story of a woman who's desperate to get married, whereas in fact, although Elizabeth has much more pressing reasons to get married than Bridget Jones, she turns down two marriage proposals.)

Elizabeth and Darcy never talked in this much depth, though – or about these kinds of racy topics. To begin with, the film makes Hilde 12 years old when she had an encounter with Solness in which she imagined him kissing her and promising to return when she's grown to abduct her and, implicitly, ravage her. The Wikipedia entry on The Master Builder, on the other hand, makes her 14, which is very slightly more comfortable for a modern audience. I'm not sure which is true to the original, or why the Gregory production would make her younger – although of course 12-year-old girls have sexual fantasies, which is the entire reason for V. C. Andrews. It's possible that a contemporary, pre-Freudian (barely) audience would have rationalized Hilde's fantasy as innocent, whether she was 12 or 14, but I'm pretty sure Ibsen thought it was weird (Solness, after all, has to be prompted to even remember that he did such a thing – or prompted to share the fantasy).

Speaking of Andrews, later Hilde confesses to rape fantasies, couched in the language of Norse mythology – a return to the original, shared fantasy between them in which the (fully civilized and incapable of rape) Solness carries her off like a repulsive troll, or, in this version, a triumphant Viking. It's evident from the rest of the play that Hilde, who freely contemplates and (to Solness, anyway) expresses her perverse desires, identifies even more with the raptor than with his prey. One of the central questions of the play is whether modern man (or woman) has a sufficiently “robust conscience” to be able to realize and seize their desires, whatever the cost to others. Solness is suffering from two neurotic fears: on the one hand, fear of the future, or youth, of which Hilde is the half-enrapturing, half-terrifying symbol; on the other hand, fear of the events of the past, which, he believes, led him to his present position of good fortune, of great social and creative power. Yet he's unable to enjoy that good fortune for even a moment, due to his guilt over its sources and the fear of losing it that stems from that guilt. 

Another question of the play is whether he's right to feel guilty about past actions and wishes or whether what he can't bear is simply the fact of being singled out by fortune for success, and that is the reason for his guilt, paranoia, and delusions. Ibsen was a contemporary of Nietzsche and a direct anticipator of Freud (whose first major work, Studies in Hysteria, was published in 1895), and it never showed more than in this play.

By directing the actors to act, at moments (such as a scene in a kitchen between husband, wife, and Hilde), in stylized, Expressionistic ways that wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch movie, Gregory and Demme miss the opportunity to contrast the repressed, middle-class surface of the play's world with the forbidden, outlandish desires of the characters, which belong instead to an amoral world of romance, and suggests a lack of confidence in the already adequate bizarreness of the material, which would probably be best served by being presented in as direct and unshowy a manner as possible. A single, brief scene, perhaps the strangest and most devastating (and freakishly comic) of the play, between Hilde and Aline, is acted and filmed in such an unshowy way, to its advantage. 

Oddly, in interviews Shawn speaks of the “naturalism” of the performance approach, in contrast to big-stage theatre performances, which I guess goes to show you the difference between what theatre people and regular people think is “natural.” He has, however, mentioned Ibsen's humour, and his delivery of Solness's line about his marriage right after this scene shows that he has an excellent grasp of that aspect of the writer. Ibsen, like Tennessee Williams, is nothing at all without his humour.

Mad Pilgrimage of the Word

The central theme of The Master Builder, the terrible cost of doing “the impossible,” transcending human and one's own normal limits and achieving greatness, came to mind while I was listening to the most recent audio books I've purchased: Morrissey's Autobiography and John Lahr's mammoth new biography of Tennessee Williams (the hardcover edition is 736 freaking pages, apparently), Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. As the title of Lahr's biography suggests, for two major 20^th century artists who upset a lot of people with their sexuality, Williams and the famously “celibate” Morrissey could not be further apart, sexually. However, Mad Pilgrimage turns out to have extremely little to do with sex, and even less to do with the kind of ecstatic engagement in pleasure that the phrase evokes. Instead, it's a relentless, monotonous, depressing slog through the failure after failure – sometimes critical, sometimes commercial, usually both, and in one famous case (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), personal – that, as it appears, constituted the vast majority of Williams's career as a playwright.

Full disclosure: between them, Williams and Lahr all but ruined my life. Williams's reputation, and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lahr's biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (which became the basis for the Stephen Frears movie starring Gary Oldman), were the main things that made me, as a teenager, want to become a playwright. And in fact I became a playwright as a teenager, although that was no one's fault but my own, and my first play to be produced was about Orton, for which I used the only biographical material available at the time, Lahr's biography and Orton's Lahr-edited published diaries.

I say “ruined my life” because my playwriting career didn't last, and, for its brief duration (about seven years – which, even more depressingly, a playwright friend who's managed to keep going for decades later told me is about the average duration of a Canadian playwriting career), was characterized, despite considerable excitement over that first play, by agonies of self-doubt and everybody else doubting me, too. If only I'd had Lahr's biography of Williams to inform me that that's what a successful playwriting career looks like. I probably still would have given it up, but out of dread, not defeat. In fact, Williams's experience seemingly only differed from mine in its magnitude and duration (give or take some wealth and fame). Skipping almost all of his apprentice years and skimming his childhood, Lahr's volume more-or-less begins with the original Broadway productions that established Williams as the greatest American playwright of the 20^th century (which, since I haven't heard a peep out of American theatre since Kushner's angel plays at the end of that century, probably means the greatest American playwright, period), The Glass Menagerie in 1945-46, and Streetcar in 1947-49. They are dealt with swiftly, with hundreds of pages and decades of life to go and hardly a single ray of hope in any of them.

What emerges is that thanks to the one-two punch of these plays and legendary productions, Williams was permanently crowned the greatest living American playwright, only for critics, collaborators, and he himself to believe that he could never write anything comparable again. He suffered the mindfuck – the punishment doled out to any writer who has the misfortune of writing something well-liked early in their career – of being continually told that he was “great” while also being told that nothing he wrote was any good. And yet he went on writing, decade after decade. His last successful commercially successful Broadway production was in 1961 (Night of Iguana), and it seems like he only managed to keep his Broadway career going for that long by clinging to Elia Kazan, but he went on writing until his death in 1983. Lahr makes it sound like Williams was already feeling insecure and outdated a year after the production of Streetcar closed, and had already started to believe that his creative power was waning. That turns out to be Lahr's favourite note (like Williams's, possibly), and he returns to it again and again despite the fact that Williams still had decades of plays left in him, all of which Lahr treats respectfully.

So... what's the truth? Or at least: what's Lahr's position? Was Williams in fact, as contemporary critics thought, never as good again as in his early plays? Or was he hounded literally to death by homophobic, Oedipal critics while heroically producing a vast, rich body of work that still awaits reassessment, at the lifelong cost of a single moment's peace of mind? Lahr seems to want to have it both ways. (The virtues and flaws of the 12-years-in-the-making book are, obviously, not fully covered here: it has been well-received, but Sarah Churchwell, in The Guardian, gives intelligent consideration to some of its other limitations, such as a time-capsule version of Freudianism.)

Writers and Happiness

I have to wonder if Lahr's presentation of Williams's life is really unusually bleak, or whether my perspective has shifted enormously since I was a teenager devouring biographies of writers (and often turning them into plays). My most beloved biographies from that period (I have read none as an adult: one of the last I purchased, the 1997 trade paperback edition of Lyle Leverich's Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams – a sort of companion piece to Lahr's book, as explained in the Preface to the latter – sat on various bookshelves for years, barely touched), Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, Gerald Clarke's Capote, Millicent Dillon's A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, and Prick Up Your Ears, were hardly portraits of happiness.

The narratives portrayed, however, were ones in which the writers suffered because they were demon-haunted: undone, sooner or later, by an unhappy childhood, mysterious neuroses, or a self-destructive streak. That only made them seem like glamourous, romantic figures, and seemed like a small price to pay for having a great writer's power and being admired with such intensity. Although Williams has as much of a reputation for demon-hauntedness as any writer, Lahr hardly gives any attention to those demons (which led to alcoholism and drug addiction, which in turn led to increasingly erratic behaviour – all touched on by Lahr in passing), so focused is he on the unending horror of the work's reception – by agents, directors, producers, actors, critics, and the public. 

Williams comes across as a man who, despite at least one close, long-term relationship, really had no life outside of his work, and no peace within it. And not because of any psychological blocks preventing him from doing the work: Williams was no Jane Bowles or Truman Capote, and although he could have a hard time shaping his plays (like any playwright), he was prolific to the end of his life, and enjoyed the work enough to keep doing it after critics started literally telling him to shut up. His lack of peace had to do with the great desire to be successful that was probably, as much as anything, responsible for the success that he did have, and which – as in the fascinating story Lahr tells about his battles with Kazan over Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – filled him with irrational guilt, since he also wanted to be a great artist, and felt that the two desires were in conflict.

I did have one example before me as a teenager of a writer who was famous, well-regarded, prolific, long-lived, and also seemingly well-adjusted, and that was Colette, so there's no rule about writers having to be miserable. It's hard to imagine, however, that anyone could read, or listen to, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, anyway, and come away with the idea that the life of a great and famous writer is something to aspire to. But probably as a teenager I would have found a way to convince myself that it was.

Morrissey's Poison Paeons

Morrissey has also suffered the fate of critics much preferring his early work to his later. I haven't read Williams's late plays (that's a project for another year... or maybe another decade), but I have listened to all of Morrissey's albums since his 2004 comeback at least once, and my feelings about them are most generously captured by Stephen Troussé's remark in a review of the dismal 2009 B-side compilation, Swords: “For a long time now, he's been a great pop star first, a great singer second, and a lyric writer somewhere around fourth or fifth.”

Morrissey's creative power as a writer really does seem to have waned. Yet, as he has often explained, he only exists when he's performing, and he appears to be too proud, or too bored, to rest on his back catalogue, and also to still have a lot to say, even if it's no longer being said in an especially compelling way – and so the albums continue to come out, although it seems as though hardly anyone is still listening. But as the sales of Autobiography have proved, the world is still interested in Morrissey, even if it's not especially interested in Morrissey's current or recent work.

Since it was not released in a digital edition, I bought a paperback copy of Autobiography when it first came out. I think I even had to have it shipped from the States. I gave up on reading it in frustration, however, when I discovered that Morrissey, an undisciplined autodidact, constantly misused words, and that Penguin Classics had not given enough of a shit to properly edit him. Needless to say, this discovery did not reflect well on either of them.

However, in audio version, David Morrissey's vocal performance glides over mere lapses in sense and carries you along on the gist, and anyway who listens to every sentence of an audio book. As many reviewers have noted, the best part of the book is the recounting of Morrissey's formative years (which does not include any close look at his home life: I'm not even sure if he mentions his parents' divorce, or if he does it's in passing). We hear about struggles with authority figures, witness Morrissey's fascination with acts of violence by human beings (i.e. working-class men) and chance (e.g. car crashes), and come along for the ride as he discovers the salvational qualities of pop music, especially in the form of The New York Dolls, David Bowie, and Patti Smith. Morrissey is at his best as a prose writer when penning – admittedly barely comprehensible, syntactically or emotionally, so ambivalent and intense are they – poisonous paeons to the idols and influences of his youth, proving that if he had not been the best pop lyricist of his generation, as well as one of the great pop stars of all time, he would have been an excitingly original pop culture critic.

Just as Mad Pilgrimage zips past Menagerie and Streetcar, Autobiography refuses to linger on The Smiths, and what Morrissey lingers on about those years are his struggles with management and his surprising obsession with chart positions. Then we're on to the rather anti-climactic, and rather longer, rest of his life. To be sure, there's a period in the late 80s and early 90s, when his relationship with the British music press is already, but not exclusively, combative, where, if anything, his fame peaks and his relationship with his audience deepens: when he's surprised by a sudden surge of eroticism in his male fan's reactions to him at shows; when he breaks The Beatles' record for selling out the Hollywood Bowl in the shortest amount of time.

What emerges from Autobiography as a whole, however, is the picture of a gifted, unusual man who defied the odds and became a pop star to avoid the fate of being entombed upon entering adulthood as a working-class male of unspectacular academic ability, but who, in his 50s, is deeply embittered, paranoid, and possibly delusional: about the break-up of The Smiths; about the court case successfully brought against him by The Smiths' drummer, Mike Joyce; about all of the critics and journalists who, he believes, have printed lies about him and tried to destroy him; about the critics and journalists and managers and record companies whose malice and incompetence prevented The Smiths from being more successful, and prevent him, now, from being successful.

It's a personality not a lot different from the one glimpsed at moments in Mad Pilgrimage, when Lahr – in between tales of famous actresses' bad behavior, critics' viciousness, boyfriends' violence or whininess, and silly female literary executors' avarice and ignorance – lets us see what an unpleasant person Williams, too, often was to friends and collaborators. For example, when Kazan complained to Williams in a letter about Williams's repeated blaming of him in the press for the altered ending of Cat, when in fact Kazan gave him a chance to reinstate his original ending before the Broadway opening, I thought of a review of Autobiography in Rolling Stone, in which Rob Sheffield, clearly a fan, finds the sense of humour that one needs to admire the book's thorny merits while objecting that, contra Moz, of course Rolling Stone covered The Smiths in the 1980s, and helped the band a great deal in doing so. In other words, like Williams, Morrissey is a paranoid and self-exculpating fantasist, and nothing he has to say can necessarily be believed.

The change in my perspective is that whereas once I thought that being a great writer was the highest form of happiness, and that therefore, even if a particular great writer was unhappy (and even though many famous writers appeared to have a tendency to be tragically so), that unhappiness was, in the end, superficial; now it seems obvious to me, and yet somehow still shocking, that the ability to write well does not bestow happiness upon one. Perhaps it would, if one could always be in critical favour. But if you're lucky enough to write something that means a lot to a few people, or one of the extremely few who are lucky enough to write something that means a lot to an entire culture, it's human nature for critics to want you to keep writing the same thing over and over, just as it's human nature for you to change, and to want to change; and, after a while of that, it's human nature for critics to then complain that you're repeating yourself, because they see that the culture's changed, or they want new writers of your stature to emerge and see you as Oedipally blocking the way.

Until youth comes knocking at the door.