We Can Be Heroes

You grow old enough until everything gets to be taken away from you, piece by piece. Your body, your loved ones, and eventually your mind too. And that’s if you win the genetic lottery and manage to avoid random accidents. To spice things up along the way, destiny sprinkles heartbreak, disappointment, and broken dreams on top of the rest. You’ll bear witness to unspeakable tragedies destroying countless good people, and you’ll see monsters among us laughing all the way to the bank. It takes a 10^th degree black belt in self-delusion to avoid seeing that life is indeed full of horror.

It’s precisely because I am more familiar with the darkness of it all than I’d like to be that I’m allergic to much of the literature that critics praise as ‘serious and profound.’ Some of the most celebrated names in modern American literature do little but describe the horror. If you are lucky, they describe it with beautiful prose. They offer page after page of stylistically-brilliant accounts of suffering, but no joy, no vision beyond despair, no glimpses to inspire anyone to find a way out. Just mountains of cynicism and a self-indulgent wallowing in bleakness and brutality. As Tom Robbins wrote, “Most fiction today seems to emerge neither from the higher mind nor the warmer heart, but rather from the writer’s personal neurosis. Rarely, if ever, transcending the anger, despair and self-pity that keeps the neurotic personality traumatized and paralyzed, it vacillates between the violently brutal and the boringly bland.”

If taken to its logical conclusion, the dour view of life prevalent in so much literature should lead some writers to shoot themselves, since all of existence is, according to them, just terrible and ugly anyway. Instead, they somehow dodge the Hamletic question and stick around in this world collecting checks earned by peddling misery. And this tendency is everywhere: from novels to TV shows, I see an endless supply of well-crafted products focusing on the struggles of despicable people.

But if I want to be exposed to everything that is wrong in the world, I can study history, or read the news. Incidentally, I do both, since I like understanding the reality of what’s around me. But to me, the whole point of fiction is something else. Acknowledging the apparent hopelessness of existential conditions should be the starting point, not the destination.

Of course, life can be cruel and feel meaningless. I’m not arguing with that. And that’s precisely why stories matter. Once we stare horror in the face, we have a choice. Option A is to put an end to the ugliness of it all and check out of this life. Option B is we decide to live. I don’t take this choice for granted. But if we decide to live, it shouldn’t be because of inertia, laziness or cowardice, but with intent. Choosing to live means finding a reason to get up in the morning and act with integrity in what can be a brutally harsh existence. Finding joy in the midst of suffering is far from easy. So is finding beauty even in a world that is full of pain, or kindness in a context that seems to reward the worst in humanity. And yet, what’s the alternative? There’s a certain degree of stubborn defiance in choosing to live—to truly live. It takes resilience and strength.

In case you are wondering what this has to do with fiction, my answer is that literature should not merely record suffering, but should help us cultivate the qualities necessary to face an uncaring universe unflinchingly. I love fiction that feeds the soul instead of just documenting pathology. Great storytelling can be a torch to help us find a way through the darkness.

I believe this is what William Faulkner was talking about in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when he said, “I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice, which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice needs not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

This is it. I want stories capable of awakening all the strength, courage and kindness that may lie untapped within me. I am not arguing that literature should become simplistic fantasy populated by flawless heroes triumphing over cartoon evil. The most interesting heroes are often wounded, conflicted, and sometimes even morally compromised. But they are still heroes, because it takes heroism to grapple with the tragedies that surround us. And that’s what I crave in fiction: all the great tales I love are those that make me feel like life is worth living, in spite of it all. The only literature that speaks to me is the literature that heeds Nietzsche’s advice, “Do not throw away the hero in your soul! Keep sacred your highest hope!”