The Will to Live: That is the Question

I have a colleague who delights in the controversy aroused by his frequently contrarian positions: there should be no affirmative action, for example, or no special consideration for Americans with disabilities. He denies that there is such a thing as “academic freedom,” given how frequently politically incorrect expressions are hounded or outlawed on college campuses. He argues that the “women’s movement” is a hypocritical sham.

What I don’t understand is this: he arouses ire. I don’t. Yet, the literature I teach, it seems to me, often goes beyond the merely politically incorrect: it destroys the will to live.

At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow (though I haven’t taught it for a number of years) an audience sits in a Santa Monica theater blithely singing a follow-the-bouncing-ball song while a nuclear weapon heads toward them.

In Waiting for Godot, which I teach all the time, the two main characters wait endlessly for a character who will, apparently, bring them all they could ever have wanted. A reappearing messenger tantalizes them with false hope. Of the two other characters, one is an occasionally malicious, otherwise incoherent artist/intellectual treated like a slave; the other is full only of pompous self-assurance—he goes blind in the second act.

I have often taught 100 Years of Solitude, in which a town and its people live their insignificant lives, filled with sex and good humor, civil war and politics, and are then wiped from the face of the earth by a whirlwind.

I’m currently teaching Roberto Bolano’s 2666, set in a Mexican town which seems to be the image of hell: unsolvable murders, incompetent or apathetic police, characters whose loves and quests come to nothing. There are some characters who offer hope, but they are very unusual, hard to use as life models: a journalist, two self-educated people (one a seer), and a writer, the central figure of the whole book, whose World War II experiences are shattering but give him the material for a series of books that form the raison d’etre for many of the other characters.

Then there is the Iliad, a monument to rage and mayhem; when the city is razed, the warriors dead or all gone home, the cause fought so intensely leaves no trace in the sand. Or The Odyssey, in which a man finally arrives home, to find that he must slaughter a houseful of young men who have been boorishly hustling his wife and then defend himself against their fathers, who are determined to avenge their sons’ deaths until Athena calls a halt to this new slide toward chaos.

From the ancient world to the modern: violence, mayhem, people fighting their causes against formidable odds, going crazy (King Lear), being duped and committing suicide (Othello), dying in the fight against injustice (Hamlet), suffering horribly for incomprehensible reasons (Job). For most of his career Shakespeare followed the traditions of genres and partitioned joy off into comedies, isolating human misery in tragedies—the tragic-comedies are his attempt to integrate the joy and wretchedness of real life into a single literary work.

Maybe this is why humanities are having a hard time of it: the grimmest realities of the human condition are graphically exposed, and there is not often much to redeem existence. Why suffer the slings and arrows of Hemingway, Faulkner, Homer, Shakespeare, Bolano, Cortazar, et al when you can get an MBA and enjoy the good life? Who wouldn’t rather prepare for a life that leads to a vacation home and a cheerful family existence than read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or a novel by Toni Morrison, or Gunter Grass, or The Divine Comedy, two thirds of which is about punishment and suffering, and one third of which is about the blessedness awaiting a very select deserving few?

I have begun to explain to students that I ask for my classes to be scheduled in the basement because students who jump out the window can’t hurt themselves, unless they bump their heads on the casements. Suicide attempts from the third floor, on the other hand, are more likely to be successful. Bolano makes the interesting point that the grimness of reality was not fully admitted into language until the later 20th century, though it was fully present to the Greeks, who wrote about cannibalism, family murder, incest.

There is a genre that inspires hope: narratives by immigrants to America. But the hope and success are not consistent, and sometimes they seem cheesy—another version of Horatio Alger, who is firmly in one version of the "American tradition."

But what is the "American tradition” anyway? Success from hard work, the courage of pioneering, forging a new civilization based on the principles of democracy? Or destruction, humiliation, and devastation wrought upon the undeserving—like Hester Prynne—by the agents of morality. Moby Dick is often represented as one crazy man's attempt to take revenge on the evil in the world represented by "the whiteness of the whale," and its destructiveness. But looked at another way, the book could well be an extension of the Job story—in which a man is made to suffer (Ahab), tries to take revenge on the agent of his suffering (the whale), and is destroyed, along with many innocents, in the process. Ahab is Job militantly taking arms against the arational, amoral force that brought him pain. At least when his period of tribulation is finished, Job's fortunes are (to some extent--his family isn't returned to him) restored. It's important to note that he isn't "rewarded," as the more pious traditional apologists for God would have it. His fortunes are just restored. And God praises him for saying what is true. Hint: if you look at what Job has said, it's not very reassuring. His friends are always quoted by the pious, but God says they're wrong. Where does that leave the pious?

Now, back to this question of the will to live.