Darkness in Literature and Caldwell’s Room Little Darker
Here’s a question: why do we like dark things? Why is murder a staple of most film and TV genres? Why is the tortured (read: mentally ill, often abusive) artist a trope? Why do we like to read about drugs and crime and suicide? Why are true crime podcasts like Serial beloved? Why do some people pick up, with their shopping, magazines like the below?
I may as well say I don’t have a fully satisfying answer, one that can take in Die Hard, Anna Karenina, The Daily Mail, and Irvine Welsh. But I want to put forward as somewhat plausible a partial, restricted answer as to why, at least when it comes to literary fiction, we like dark stuff. And then I want to test it against a recent case, June Caldwell’s story collection Room Little Darker.
My answer turns on religion. The desire to produce and consume dark art, in whatever medium, arises from a sense that there’s more to humanity than darkness. People who are obsessed with the dark side of human affairs are so because they are affronted by them; because they think people, inherently, are or can be better than they are. Baudelaire lingered on the sick and poor who wandered the streets of Paris because he thought that wasn’t how one ought to be. His world was normatively structured: there was Right, and there was Wrong, Light and Dark, and to explain the Light you had to study the Dark.
Now holding any complaints you might have about the death of God for a second, let’s test this theory against some classic works of literature. Here are five, spanning centuries, which I claim are well-explained by this theory: St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Mal and — quibble with ‘classic’ here if you will — David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Each of these works are dark, full of self-hate, addiction, murder and violence. But in each of these works, the darkness serves light. Augustine was a sex addict before the concept was invented, and part of his book documents his failed attempts to rid himself of his addiction, and the self-hate it caused him, which is often vividly and stylishly described. He writes about
“quam turpis , quam distortus et sordidus, maculosus et ulcerosus [he was]. et videbam et horrebam et quo a me fugerem not erat”
(how filthy and crooky and dirty and poxy and ulcerated, and I saw this and I was horrified but couldn’t turn away from myself)
A couple of centuries later, Dante tells us about the sinners (tortured in a ton of ingenious ways, at times quite graphically: he has people wallowing in filth si graffia con unghie merdose, scratch themselves with shitty fingernails) with whom he peoples his Inferno. But the real action is in the other parts of the book, in the Purgatory and the (boring, by most accounts) Paradiso, where sins are cleaned away and then you get to chat with St Thomas about transubstantiation.
For both of these authors, the point of going through the dark side of sex addiction and sin’s torture is to get to the good stuff of conversion and heaven.
This pattern arguably continues. Dostoevsky's work is notable for murder, alcoholism, teenagers forced to sell sex to support their family, pedophiles, and mental illness (and this is just the first hundred pages of Crime and Punishment!) But Dostoevsky too is a Christian, and his novel ends, if not hugely convincingly, with something like redemption. Baudelaire, already mentioned, writes (hard to take seriously today) things like:
Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie.
N’ont pas encor brode de leurs plaisants desseins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins
C’est que notre ame, helas! n’est pas assez hardie
(if rape, poison, stabbing and arson haven’t yet embroidered the banal canvas of our destinies, it’s that our soul, alas, isn’t tough enough for them yet)
But he also writes love poems like this:
Ils marchent devant moi, ces Yeux pleins de lumières,
Qu’un Ange très savant a sans doute aimantés
Ils marchent, ces divins frères qui sont mes frères,
Secouant dans mes yeux leurs feux diamantés.Me sauvant de tout piège et de tout péché grave,
Ils conduisent mes pas dans la route du Beau
Ils sont mes serviteurs et je suis leur esclave
Tout mon être obéit à ce vivant flambeau.(they go in front of me, these eyes full of light, that an knowing Angel no doubt magnetized [i.e., I think, caused to make attractive]. They go, these divine brothers who are my brothers, shaking off their diamond light in my eyes, saving me from all traps and sins they lead me on the way to the Beautiful.)
His biographer, Enid Starkie, argued that this contrast was a central motivation for him:
“[Human Weakness and vice] … form part of the essence of beauty, because it can only arise out of the expression of the whole of life in which sin has its place, and because they are grown from the suffering and recoil of a sensitive nature in front of ugliness which contrasted violently with the ideal perfection of which he dreamed and to which he aspired” (Baudelaire, Enid Starkie p633)
The final author I want to consider is notably different: David Foster Wallace. Although his work doesn’t appear to be influenced by a Christian worldview (whereas Baudelaire was a sort of reluctantly lapsed Catholic), his work is dark: in his big novel Infinite Jest, primarily about drug addiction, cats are killed out of pure badness, people suffocate horribly on snot, have tongue-biting seizures on trains, overdose, and so on. But for Wallace too there is a quasi-religious other side. This is manifest in the old alcoholics who somehow managed to turn their lives around, but also in the tennis players which people the novel and his non-fiction alike, and even, in his posthumous Pale King, in the wage slave who works a boring job just to put food on the table. In such things Wallace finds and celebrates heroism and I think it’s a reasonable reading to say that the dark stuff is in service of the celebration of that heroism.
So that’s my theory: dark literature is written and consumed by those whose eyes are fixed on Light, to whom the darkness is an aberration to be studied.
Before going on to Caldwell, I’d like to note that writing dark literature is something which arguably requires justification, especially today. Because it poses an aesthetic problem which is that we are, for whatever reason, entertained by such darkness.
(Once you attend to that, you also see it poses a moral problem. Infinite Jest, for example, focuses on the former addicts attempting to rebuild their lives, and get beyond their grotesque suffering, but it has little to nothing to say about the more mundane and less eye-catching suffering of families and friends and collateral damage of the addicts, the sufferings of hospital visits and late night phone calls interrupting otherwise normal domestic lives. Arguably this is bad, morally speaking, because it makes us less attentive to such sufferings.)
Back to the aesthetic problem. It is, or at least so it seems, easy to achieve emotional effects in one’s readers by appealing to darkness. (If you need convincing, think of how bad stand up comedians resort to witless taboo busting because they know it will raise a laugh, even if that laugh is one more of shock or mock outrage than amusement.) But then given that, one might be careful as a reader and writer that one isn’t enjoying a given work just because of whatever dark part of your brain is turned on by murder and crime and the rest. And one must ask: what is the author bringing beyond the darkness? I propose to answer this question for the single case of June Caldwell, while fitting it into the theory of darkness I’ve presented above.
Recall I suggested dark literature is such because its authors are really interested in the Light that brightens the darkness. If there’s Light in Caldwell, it’s very hard to see it. I like to think of this as a line, a line of morality, which below I use all the graphic design skills at my disposal to depict:
THE MORAL LINE
<M___________B___________G>
M=Murderers and so on
B= Broccoli
G=God
Murderers I assume are morally bad, broccoli I assume is morally neutral, and God I assume is morally good. (If you disagree with any of these particular judgements, just include your own exemplars of badness, neutrality, and goodness.)
While murder doesn’t feature in Caldwell’s collection, it’s quite clear that many of her characters deserve to be to the left rather than the right of the line. At the best, some of her characters are broccoli, morally speaking.
And assessed in that way, one might think the collection misses out much of human experience, and in particular it misses out the right-of-broccoli side that seemed to motivate the writers we looked at earlier.
But there’s another diagram we can draw, another view of humankind, which I will call, mainly for its almost rhyme with the moral line, the cattle line.
THE CATTLE LINE
<C_________________H>
C=Cattle
H=Humans
This is a different sort of line. It doesn’t measure moral worth. A cow isn’t more or less moral than a murderer: a cow isn’t a moral creature at all (at least, arguably, it can’t morally wrong others). This diagram suggests a whole new understanding of humankind: as the sort of creature to whom, whatever we may think at our high points, moral categories do not apply. One might think, now that Nietzsche has told us God is dead and Darwin has told us we’re nothing but mammals, that it’s this scale that we as artists and readers should be attending to.
Doing so, I think, makes sense of Caldwell’s work, and provides the justification for its darkness. She is presenting us a theory of humankind, and it is not that we’re broccoli hoping to edge towards God, but we’re just people who all too easily wont to lapse into cattle. The goal is not to morally progress: the goal is not to evolutionarily regress.
The most enjoyable bits of Caldwell’s book, for me, are the bits that show this. ‘Leitrim Flip’, for example, in addition to being laugh out loud funny and gifting the world with a great incidental character in the form of the inept ex-army Dom wont to cry when things don’t go his way (‘He really is a depressed moron’ is how the narrator disdainfully sums him up), shows how with a little misunderstanding (which seems, as opposed to malice or desire, to underlie the story) you can find yourself, well, in a cage in Leitrim with a butt plug with ‘fawn fur tails’ up you. How quickly one can move to that from eating meals with your somewhat lamented ex, ‘holding hands under the table, superfluity of life plans over frozen Margaritas’, planning the sort of idyllic future a bit of money and love can get you in 2018.
Another thing that stood out for me was how quickly these moments, these lurches towards one’s animal self, can change you. Again the understatedness of the narrator captures this perfectly. Reflecting on post-Leitrim-cage life, she says:
‘It’s unlikely I’ll be able to date a normal bloke after all this is over. I’ve thought about it a lot. Sitting in a heaving sports bar in Dame Street all faux giddy when Man U score a goal.’
There’s something brilliantly mundane about the cadence of the first sentence: you feel like you could replace ‘dating a normal bloke’ with ‘using a PC’ and change the denotation of ‘this’ from being held in a cage in Leitrim to using a Mac for a while.
It’s these moments, when the distance separating the middle-class Dubliner and the animal underneath are subtly presented, that the collection, in my opinion, is at its strongest.
Let me end with two more examples of the effect I mean. ‘Imp Of The Perverse’ started, for me, unpromisingly, as a tale of an infatuated student and her horndog teacher. A story we’d heard before, one filled with canine and vulpine metaphors about sex until you realise … they’re not metaphors, and the female narrator’s unborn baby’s ‘muzzle began pressing into [her], causing [her] to piss on the move in the thick of spaced-out shoppers around Grafton Street and surrounding alleyways’. Again this comparison between the life of the middle-class Dubliner and what lies beneath, the sudden lurch from familiar story to gruesome fable is well brought out by the understated tone (as, for example, the added, mundane, not-necessary-to-make-the-point coda about ‘surrounding alleyways’. This is a narrator alive both to the wolf in her belly and to the geography of Dublin city centre).
Finally ‘BoyBot™’, despite a premise that I doubted I would have any interest in, shines in a moment where the paedophile narrator, up to then a sympathetic(ish) narrator, turns on a penny and imagines himself — there is no other way to say this — throat fucking the boy sex doll used to help him in his rehabilitation. Again, we have a darker lurking self, and again, Caldwell maximises its effect by juxtaposition with the relatable narrative voice that comes before it.
I feel like some progress has been made. The question I asked at the start was why we like to produce and consume dark art. One answer was that it points upwards, setting in relief Lightness which might be literal heaven, or might just be freedom from what enslaves us, or even just tennis. The second answer is that it points backwards, towards our animal roots (and we might note here, in addition to Caldwell, writers like Irvine Welsh, in whose Filth a tapeworm narrates for a while and Marie Darrieussecq, in whose Pig Tales the protagonist becomes a pig). In each case, what is held out is explanation: an explanation for why we are what we are and do what we do. Because we’re far from God’s light or because we’re too close from our amoral animal ancestors. It’s this attempt at explanation, I’m tempted to say, that is the source of our enjoyment of dark literature. Whether that also explain our fondness for Die Hard, Serial, and Take A Break, though, is a question I must leave for another post.
