Last week I wrote a
book-themed blogpost looking at the things I’m reading at present. I noted that I’m not reading any fiction at present, and haven’t read any for some time. The other day it struck me that this may be causing me to miss useful insights about the world.
A useful way of seeing the world is as tragedy. Now, tragedy doesn’t just mean “bad things happening”, or even “
really bad things happening”. What it describes is two (or more) people who are subject to forces or drives or motivations they cannot control. These forces lead them to destroy each other, even against their own wishes. Tragedy gets its power from how characters pursue what they believe right, and how they endure the resulting pain.
In the last Tuesday Bookday post I said that a work of fiction I’ve read recently is J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Silmarillion. This book is a tragedy bound up with the jewels of that name. Melkor (a.k.a. Morgoth) “lusted for the Silmarils, and the very memory of their radiance was a gnawing fire in his heart” (1). After Melkor steals the jewels, Fëanor and his family swear oath to recover them at any cost:
They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name even of Ilúvatar, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them if they kept it not; and Manwë they named in witness, and Varda, and the hallowed mountain of Taniquetil, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the World Vala, Demon, Elf or Man as yet unborn, or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession. (2)
Almost all of the action in the book flows from the consequences of that oath. The story is tragic because these forces are equally (il)legitimate: Melkor/Morgoth is wrong, but also acting consistently with his nature; Fëanor is right, but desires the jewels beyond all reason (3). Neither is angelic; both are heroic.
I thought about this because I was pondering the American Civil War. Now, I’m a foreigner, and my daughters live in Louisiana. My heart is predictably with the Confederacy
(wrong but romantic!) rather than the Union
(right but dreary!). What gives me pause is that I have many African-American friends who I think would be understandably disgusted by this. Even impeccably conservative historians accept that the war was fundamentally about the preservation (or otherwise) of slavery (4). How can I both honour my own instincts and not seem to scorn my friends? Only by considering the Civil War as the tragedy it was: Southern slaveholders could legitimately claim that slavery (while wrongful) was sanctioned by law; Northern abolitionists (while morally right) were willing to break that law (5). Seeing the War as a tragedy makes sympathy and honour for either side proper. Tragedy highlights their willingness to fight for what they believed right, and to endure the pain this entailed.
What about you? Have you read a novel or play that has helped you make sense of
the world we live in, or that gave you an insight you could not get anywhere else?
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(1) J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Silmarillion (1979) at 79.
(2)
Id. at 97-8.
(3) A line I have shamelessly knocked off from Albert Camus, ‘On the Future of Tragedy’, transl. E.C. Kennedy in P. Thody (ed.),
Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968) at 301.
(4) L. Schweikart and M. Allen,
A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004) at 294.
(5)
Id. at 289; Arthur Rizer, ‘Abraham Lincoln: Slavery Hunter’ (2015) 19(2)
The Young Lawyer 17.
