A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
To blog or not to blog? That is the question that plagued me throughout 2006 and 2007. The cause of my procrastination was not complex. I simply felt obligated to focus my creative energies on fiction writing. I did not blog for the same reason that most NFL players do not play chess on the night before a game.
But now my policy has changed. My natural Darwinian instinct for self promotion tells me that the Morrow family might have more groceries to eat were I to resurrect The Passionate Rationalist. What’s more, several fans have written lamenting the demise of this particular Grand Fenwick of cyberspace. They particularly enjoyed the postings back in 2005 concerning IDIOT: Intelligent Design Implicit Onto-Theology.
It also occurs to me that I can use this blog to focus my thinking on various works-in-progress, with welcome kibitzing from interested readers. At the moment, four pieces of inchoate Morrow fiction loom on the horizon: a novel concerning the life and times of Charles Darwin, a novella about the true relationship between Godzilla and Hiroshima, a short story featuring Jack the Ripper, and a short-short narrating the further adventures of the Good Samaritan. Details will emerge in forthcoming installments.
ILLUSIONLESS MONSTERS
On March 11, William Morrow will publish The Philosopher’s Apprentice, my ninth novel. At one level, this existential extravaganza is my homage to Frankenstein, by which I mean not only Mary Shelly’s original novel but also the various cinematic adaptations from Universal and Hammer. Indeed, at one point during the composition process, I spent a gloriously decadent weekend screening every major Frankenflick on our equally decadent 65” rear-projection television.
About midway through the composition of The Philosopher’s Apprentice, it occurred to me that I was working within an established literary tradition — just as, while writing Blameless in Abaddon, I suddenly realized that the project had antecedents in the dozen or so modern-dress retellings of the Book of Job that, over the years, have flowed from the pens of writers as diverse as Franz Kafka, Robert Heinlein, Robert Frost, and Archibald MacLeish.
The Philosopher’s Apprentice is about a moral monster. Londa Sabacthani’s conscience has swelled to grotesque proportions. At first, my heroine’s hypertropic superego inspires her to perform benevolent acts, including the establishment of a utopian community dedicated to improving the welfare of women. Later, her skewed moral compass leads her to a dark place, and he ends up hijacking a luxury liner with the aim of rehabilitating its plutocratic passengers.
What most intrigued me about Londa is her refusal — or is it her inability? — to filter out the moral implications of her behavior. When she takes the side of the angels, she knows exactly what she’s doing, and later, when her soul begins to rot, she still enjoys an impressive, if chilling, perspective on herself. In short, Londa is not only a moral monster, she's a self-aware moral monster, and I would bracket her with such fictive predecessors as Humbert Humbert, the Marquis de Sade, and Sweeney Todd.
MORROW AT THE MOVIES
As a film aficionado, I must note that the three self-aware moral monsters cited above have all been the subjects of recent feature films. The critics were generally unimpressed by Adrian Lyne’s 1998 adaptation of Lolita, but I would urge all you passionate rationalists to give it a second chance. Scene by scene, Stephen Schiff’s script is far more faithful to the novel than the earlier, equally worthy version by Stanley Kubrick (ostensibly written by Nabokov himself, though a brief survey of the film’s ragged history reveals that the credit is misleading), and, moreover, most of the self-aware monster’s crucial lines emerge intact. I don’t recall the exact phrasing employed by Schiff, but we certainly get Jeremy Irons delivering a version of Humbert’s pathological apologia, “Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.”
An equally satisfying foray into this fecund theme is Philip Kaufman’s 2000 adaptation of Doug Wright’s play about the Marquis de Sade, Quills. The essential idea is not exactly subtle — to find the real monster among us, we must look beyond affected pornographers like De Sade and instead attend ostensibly virtuous physicians like Royer-Collard — but that hardly detracts from the brilliant performances and hypnotic directorial flourishes. As you might imagine, it’s hard for James Morrow not to love a movie in which Geoffrey Rush’s De Sade flourishes a Bible and says to Joaquin Phoenix’s curate Coulmier, “This monstrous God of yours — he strung up his own son like a side of veal: I shudder to imagine what he would do to me.”
Concerning Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, I’m persuaded that many of your will find much to admire in this dark Victorian melodrama. Yes, it was a miserable miscalculation to delete “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from the score, and, yes, the decision to use cataracts of blood as an expressionist design motif — welcome to The Abattoir of Dr. Caligari — was dubious at best. But Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, and Stephen Sondheim have collaborated to give us the quintessential illusionless monster, leavening their pessimistic potpourri with a bracing measure of Dickensian outrage over social injustice. Sweeney Todd was the most moral movie of 2007.
OBLIVIOUS MONSTERS
Counterpointing the Humberts, Sades, and Todds is the oblivious monster, a creature that invariably does the world far more harm than his illusionless brethren. It’s interesting that plays and novels about self-aware monsters generally give us oblivious monsters as important secondary characters: Clare Quilty in Lolita, Dr. Royer-Collard in Quills, Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd.
The late Reverend William Sloan Coffin, God rest his soul, was astute in recognizing that George Bush and his coterie of thugs belong to this particular terratoid species. But it was Tolstoy, in War and Peace, who gave us the definitive portrait of the oblivious monster. Here he is writing of Napoleon at Borodino:
“Our fire is mowing them down in rows, but they still want more,” said the adjutant.
“They want more,” said Napoleon huskily.
“Sire?” said the adjutant, who had not caught the words.
“They want more,” Napoleon repeated in a hoarse voice. “Give it to them!”
Even without this order, which was given only because he thought it was expected of him, his wish was being carried out. And he relapsed into that artificial world of fantasies of greatness, and again (as a horse on a treadmill may imagine it is doing something of its own accord), he submissively undertook to fulfill the cruel, grievous, harsh, and inhuman role that was predestined for him.
And not only on that day and hour were the mind and conscience darkened in that man on whom the burden of what was happening weighed more heavily than on anyone else, but always, to the end of his life, he was incapable of understanding goodness, beauty, truth, or the significance of his own actions, which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human for him to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, lauded as they were by half the world, and so he was obligated to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
Last night, George Bush delivered a State of the Union message. I did not have the heart to watch.
THE LATEST LINKS
I’m particularly proud of the collaboration between my wife and I that Tor Books published last June. The SFWA European Hall of Fame is an anthology of sixteen stories by contemporary European science fiction stories, each in English translation. Sales have been much slower than we would like, especially to libraries. Tell your local librarian that you’d like to see this idealistic omnibus on the shelf.
http://www.amazon.com
A recent conversation between Darrell Schweitzer and James Morrow has been posted on Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com
Among the many favorable reviews received by The Last Witchfinder, the observations of Janet Maslin in the New York Times stuck me as particularly valuable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/books/30masl.html?fta=y
FUTURE TOPICS
In subsequent issues, I hope to report on a remarkable conference I attended last spring in Crystal City, Virginia. The topic was atheism and the guest line-up was astonishing: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens -- all of whom, as you know, have written best-sellers celebrating the secular-humanist way of being in the world.
Could it be that the Enlightenment is coming back?
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