READING, WRITING, AND REDEMPTION: Last month, Unqualified Offerings posted about whether/how the world of The Lord of the Rings is and isn’t Christian. There are many interesting things in his post, but I just want to riff about one of them, which he quoted from Diana Moon: “But in Christianity there is always the flickering possibility of redemption through belief in Christ. In this film, I don’t see such possibilities. And I’m not sure whether this is a perversion of Tolkien’s message or an accurate representation of it.”

In a classic example of bait-and-switch, I’m not going to talk Tolkien at all! (Sorry, Jim.) I do want to think out loud, though, about the difficulties I have as a writer in representing the more luminous and joyous aspects of my worldview. I realized, chewing over UO’s post, that I never (I had “pretty much never,” but actually I’ve given up on the one short story that would justify the “pretty much”) write about redemption in my fiction. And I’m not sure how I would. And I can’t think of many other authors I love who do it either.

What I do instead, is walk people up to the edge of redemption. I’ll show what may or may not be the beginnings of conversion. I’ll show a slight, seeping apprehension of the insufficiency of this life. (One of the current projects has the working title “Apprehension” partly for this reason. It’s about a man’s attempt to grasp some basic truths, both factual–where is his fiancee? why did she leave him?–and ethical–what should he do about it? And it’s about the huge swathes of sin and ignorance and mischance that shadow even our best attempts at truth and right action. We can’t fully attain truth or right action, but we can apprehend what they should be, and thus get a kind of prefiguration or analogical sense of what they will be when we see not through a glass darkly, but face to face.)

So I write about what comes before redemption, and when I write about happiness I tend to focus on and emphasize its shadow rather than its light. I don’t think I’m unusual in finding it difficult to concoct characters, situations, and plots that would tend toward explorations of happiness, or redemption. (Different but related categories, I know.) Here are some scattered thoughts on why so many writers, like me, find it easier to limn unhappiness than happiness, easier to write fictional treatments of what Mikhail Bulgakov called “the seventh proof of God” (the existence of the Devil) than more direct approaches to God.

First, we haven’t experienced the fullness of redemption. It’s hard to write a believable happy ending in literature because there are no fully happy endings in this life. Heaven is much beyond our ability to understand; we can say many things about it, but we’re always only talking around the subject, never giving really robust descriptions. Here’s Father Tucker of Dappled Things on what Heaven is like, and here’s me. Even the best description I can recall of an unFallen world–C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra–is mostly notable for its poignant contrast between the Fallen protagonist and the innocent woman of Perelandra. (There’s a terrific scene in which the protagonist realizes why he feels so uncomfortable and dissatisfied on Perelandra: He is more comfortable in the loneliness of sin.)

“Good people” are alien to our experience; even the best people we know tend to judge themselves very harshly, to feel deeply the suffering of others, and to view this life with rue or unslaked passion or some similarly darkened attitude. And so when one writes a basically good character, if there’s no sense of a deep darkness or lack then the character just comes off as Pollyannaish and obnoxious. (This is one of my several beefs with Ayn Rand’s description of John Galt [or is it Roark?] as having “a face that had never known pain or fear or guilt.”)

Also, there’s the question of what prompts people to write novels and to read them. Walker Percy, in his awesome book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which you should read pronto, talks about the ways in which both audience and even more so author use literature as a means of escape from the self. We tend to associate “escapism” with unrealistically sunny portrayals of life, but in this case, I wonder if the acknowledged or half-acknowledged desire for escape prompts some novels’ darkness. If you write partially to escape the self, you probably don’t have a very sunshiney notion of what that self is like. Thus the selves of your characters, if you are trying to depict the world as you see it, are also unlikely to be sunshiney. Similarly, if you read to escape the self, but you are seeking the particular frisson that comes from finding a novel that captures your own sense of the world (and I think this combination escape/mirror is what many readers are seeking, including, generally, me), you will likely be drawn to authors who reflect your less-than-sweet vision of the self. Such readers will also find it hard to credit depictions of characters whose selves are so good that one wouldn’t feel a need to escape them.

Genre novels can probably overcome some of these hurdles, since readers and authors are less likely to be seeking accurate representations of the world and more likely to be seeking “pure” escapism. The Rat pointed out, when she was first getting me hooked on Agatha Christie, that one of Christie’s appeals is that she often presents a world in which wrong is punished and right rewarded. (Classic example: Christie’s short story, “Where There’s a Will.” I really disliked this story for pretty much exactly this reason–its justice was dealt out too easily.) However, even with Christie what I really love about her is her recognition of the reality of evil and the impossibility of complete justice in this life; many of her books have a sense of lack and failure that gives believability and heft to her otherwise somewhat caricatured protagonists. (Examples include The Hollow [it’s titled that for a reason…], Death on the Nile, Murder in Retrospect a.k.a. The Five Little Pigs, The Mirror Crack’d, and Curtain.)

So I think those are some of the reasons it’s so hard to write about happiness or redemption. Any emails are more than welcome, since I’m still wrestling with this topic…