Interrogations

By Kassandra

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Seven: Gustave and Dawn

'Our lives are of a mingled yarn,' Parolles remarks in All's Well That Ends Well. We want both. We want to see clearly, to understand, to get it right, to see things as they really are. We want not to be fools. We don't want to be deluded or silly or naive, we don't want to be taken in. In particular we want to be skeptical, wised up, hip, shrewd, cynical enough, rather than over-optimistic, starry-eyed, Polyanna-ish, fatuous. If we're going to be wrong we want to be wrong the other way, expecting people to be worse than they are, not better. We would rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.

But we also want to be able to hope, and to believe things could get better. That there could be peace and plenty, the leopard could lie down with the kid, and the lion could eat straw like the ox. That we could learn not to plague and torment each other, that we could design instituitons and laws that would insure well-being and harmony and fairness for everyone, that we could become wiser and kinder and more generous and imaginative and reflective over time instead of more petty and tyrannical and superstitious and bad-tempered and vindictive. It's hard to resign ourselves to the kind of world that a rationally skeptical view of human nature seems to make likely.

At least, it's hard when we're in that sort of mood. When we're feeling idealistic, progressive, improving, ambitious, reformist. But there are other moods too. There's a sort of frisson, an almost pornographic thrill, to be had from taking the other view, the unsentimental view, the grim view. We enjoy it, we enjoy being grown-up and hard-bitten and dry-eyed and cold, facing the grim truth, looking reality in the face. It's no good pretending, is it. We're not up to much. We are cousins of chimpanzees and gorillas, after all, not angels and cherubim. We are evolved creatures, programmed to survive and reproduce, not to write poetry or compose concertos. It's really not possible to look at the world around us and think we are inherently peaceable or benevolent or generous primates. So we might as well give it up and really get down into the muck.

This is the attraction of the great bleak deflaters, of Nietzsche and Freud, Hobbes and Diogenes and Juvenal and Swift and Byron. When we look at the world their way, when we nod sagely or sadly as Nietzsche tells us benevolence is really self-gratification or power, we feel as if at least we're ridding ourselves of illusions. At least we've gotten all the way to the bottom, where there aren't any more nasty surprises. We've taken in the painful truth, so we're safe on that side anyway. We don't have to dread further disillusion, because we think as badly of our species as possible. We've put a floor under us, below which we cannot sink.

But then there is a revulsion. Most of us don't really want to settle down and set up housekeeping on the bottom. We have a reforming itch. It's probably hard-wired, it's probably the same drive that makes us find the best tree to nest in, the best territory to defend, the best mates and food and water. Better better better, we have to make everything better. And if we're going to do that, we like to think it's not a futile enterprise.

Shelley's poem 'Julian and Maddalo' is about this quandary, personified in the two eponymous characters, who stand in for Shelley and Byron. Julian-Shelley tries to persuade his friend Count Maddalo-Lord Byron of how 'happy, high, majestical' humans might be if we only set our minds to it. 'You talk Utopia,' says the Count briskly, and goes on to write 'Don Juan', one of the most gloriously deflationary poems in the language.

A more oddly-matched pair, and all the more touching for that, were George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, whose duel of hope and despair can be read in their letters. Back and forth they go, Flaubert mocking, Sand seeing his point but clinging to her hopes all the same. Especially in the spring and summer of 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, Flaubert's bitterness and disgust and Sand's misery and grief rise to a crescendo. Here is Sand:

'I, who used to have such patience with my own species, and who for so long saw everything through rose-coloured spectacles, now see only darkness...I'm no good for anything at the moment. I'm consumed with anger and dying of disgust.'

Here is Flaubert:

'Why are you so sad? Mankind is displaying nothing new. Its irremediable wretchedness has embittered me ever since my youth. So I am not disillusioned now...Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own time. People have always been like this. A few years of quiet fooled us, that's all.'

It's very summer of 1871 in the world right now, and is only getting worse. The Sands among us and inside us have a very hard time countering the Flauberts. Perhaps all we can do is hunker down and hope for a time when the optimistic outlook seems a tiny bit more plausible--an infinite regression of hope.

Kassandra is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early December 2002

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?

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