Your last post made me think again of Heart of Darkness. Here is a book that is monumentally depressing and nihilistic, yet it remains one of my favorite books. Over depressing books have lost their appeal to me over the years. Unless the work of art shows at least some kind of hope, or at least a playful approach to nihilism, I'm left thinking, 'What's the point?' At some point aren't we just wallowing in it? The book, Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee comes to mind. It's a well written, well plotted book, but after two rapes, a forced marriage, and a failed career it winds down with our ruined protagonist sitting waiting to die. Okay, life is crap, especially in South Africa, but writing or reading this book doesn't make it any better.
So what seperates Heart of Darkness? I think that there is actually a glimmer of light in the book. Marlow begins the book sitting in a lotus pose and is compared to the Buddha. At this point, years removed from the events of the novel, he seems to have come to peace with himself and to have removed himself from the situation he decries. Even if he cannot stop what is going on in the Belgian Congo he has reached a kind of personal freedom removed from the evil ideologies of his day. Is this morally superior? I don't know.
It also reminded me somewhat of Dune Messiah, a book I picked up from my aunt's bookshelf and read yesterday. The main idea of the book is that some evil will necessarily result from good actions. It's also filled with an interesting combination of buddhism and western linguistic philosophy. Paul Atreides, emperor of most of the known universe, is caught by his own oracular powers, swept up by a cycle of actions and misgivings about the implications of those actions. I think the idea is that if we knew the future results of our actions we would then be trapped always trying to minimize negative results, and then trying to minimize the results of those results.
Little Earl and I have discussed this before, and it's interesting to see it echoed in my random artistic encounters.
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4 comments:
Well obviously most of our favorite movies/books/albums aren't suicidally depressing, because I think the purpose of great art is to make life just a little bit better, since it's already depressing enough as it is. I also think a person can (and hell, should) be happy even though he or she might know that other people are suffering somewhere else.
But you kinda lost me with the Dune Messiah thing.
Coppola says that he deleted the footage of Kurtz's compound being blown up at the end of Apocalypse Now because he wanted the movie to end on that weird note of hope, where Willard simply walks away, grabs Lance from the crowd, and heads back up the river. He wanted to suggest that there would be the potential for peace in the future (the scene does sort of suggest that, but it comes off a bit overly-ponderous and vague - not that I have a problem with that). The point is, be it Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now, "Shit comes in waves."
Maybe every once in a while you do need that monumentally depressing movie to come along and clear the air of bullshit assumptions. After the 60's and 70's it's probably safe to say the air's been cleared for a while.
I always liked what Roger Ebert would say whenever somebody would tell him they didn't want to go see a depressing movie, no matter how good it was:
"The only really depressing movie...is a really BAD one."
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