Writing the Unknown

by Joshua Fagan

If I had to articulate one quality above all that modern media tends to lack, it is a sense of mystery. Not mystery in the “whodunnit” sense, where there is an answer to be discovered, but mystery in the more profound and inescapable sense of that term: enigma, opacity, fragmentation, the sense that the world is stranger and more inscrutable than human reason can penetrate. The intellect peers into the sublime depth of things and is found wanting. Great literature understands that the world is not merely data and measurable quantities, that it instead contains something else, something ineffable, the fractured and indefinable swirl of impressions and repressed desires and half-formed ideas tossed and whirled by an uncertain world.

If there is one thing that distinguishes literature genuinely written for adults, it is not profanity or sex or blood, and it is certainly not an excess of these things, which is in fact the most adolescent lapse imaginable. Rather, it is that sense of mystery, that feeling that being a smart person with good values is not enough to make the world clear and intelligible. There is distressingly little genuinely adult literature being written in the Anglophone world. The likes of Colleen Hoover or romantasy hacks are easy to dismiss, but even Sally Rooney or R.F. Kuang or Brandon Sanderson do not write about that mystery, that lingering unease. These are not bad writers, but they largely write reassuring and comforting fiction where there are clear answers and clear outcomes, fiction that reaffirms the existing convictions, ideological and otherwise, of the people likely to read their work.

Emerson, in “Circles,” declares that what “I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world” but “a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.” This is a sentiment genuinely mature and subtle, a sense of that sublime mystery. Percy Shelley phrases it nobly when he writes of his skylark “Yet if we could scorn / Hate, and pride, and fear/ If we were things born / Not to shed a tear / I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.” What Shelley and Emerson mean is not simply that the world can be confusing and wild; everyone knows that. Rather, they mean that even when life is favorable, even when the world is as clear and coherent as it is ever going to be, something remains missing. The human mind remains fallible and imperfect, capable of genius in one regard and dreadful ignorance on another. Experience remains less explicable than we would like, and our great successes are inevitably mixed with petty annoyances. Certain evils and specific problems can be cured, but those that are innate to humanity will remain: we will fall in love foolishly, we will have great aspirations that we will never fulfill, we will succumb to laziness and superficial thinking, we will not be as courageous or loyal as we would like to be.

Perhaps the best example is Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. By the conclusion of the novel, he has recommitted to his marriage and regained his faith and his optimism about humanity. All of this is presented as a triumph, a relief from the malaise and disappointment that has clouded his mind. Still, he does not arrive at perfect, unalloyed happiness; he is not immune from the trivial, selfish impulses that mar the experience of everyday life. George Eliot crafts a similar conclusion in Middlemarch, in its own way as much of a national epic as Tolstoy’s work. The two main characters, Dorothea Brooke and the doctor Tertius Lydgate, are more or less contented by the conclusion of the novel, but theirs is a more restrained and measured happiness, one that acknowledges their failed ambitions and longings. They will not be influential or overtly heroic; their lives must swim in the same middling stream as those of others, bound by the same limitations and afflicted with the same uncertainties, and yet this ending is not portrayed as dark or pessimistic. Rather, there is for Eliot a latent nobility in the flawed, constrained lives of decent but ordinary people. As she declares, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and she viewed that anti-idealizing, anti-reductive tendency as one that she wanted to replicate in her own work. In To the Lighthouse, she bases one of the characters, Mr. Ramsay, on her own father, the Victorian intellectual Leslie Stephen. This Ramsay is a sullen philosopher, equal parts brilliant and ridiculous, selfless and needy. He desires to be a great intellectual, the kind whose name survives generations and is spared from the ravages that time brings, but after the ten-year time gap that spans the book’s first and final sections, he accepts that this will never happen. Only when he comes to this acceptance, ironically, does he gain a degree of self-confidence and commitment that can really be called respectable and praiseworthy. Abandoning his neediness, he leads an expedition to a lighthouse, and he “rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world.” The protagonist of the book, Woolf analogue Lily Briscoe, similarly yearns to banish her personal demons through creating a transcendent work of art. Yet she eventually understands that the “great revelation perhaps never did come,” and instead, “there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Only when she abandons the hope attaining some immense perfection does she summon the resolve to finish her painting.

Novels should be able to tell stories like this. Indeed, the novel as it exists today was born to tell stories like this, born from a kind of anti-idealistic tendency to abandon easy, absolutist sentiment and instead tell stories about the fragmentation and disaffection of real ordinary life. That tendency is what separates the likes of Northanger Abbey or Don Quixote from the prose romances they incisively satirize. Good and evil still exist in the land of great novels, but they are not as easily signified nor as easily separated as they are in more melodramatic forms of storytelling. Good does not have a sacred choir and halo around its head, and it can be found mixed even with foolishness, irritability, arrogance, and other venial imperfections; evil, accordingly, does not have a nefarious moustache and cackling laugh, and it can be mixed with genuine yearning, love, and idealism.

Speculative fiction, for all its reputation for being less subtle than realist novels, is more than capable of reaching those same levels of deep disquiet. The works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ray Bradbury, for instance, are examples of science fiction that exists not simply to explore interesting philosophical ideas but to use those ideas to thoughtfully articulate the mysterious and often opaque questions innate to existing in our impermanent, protean world.

Fantasy is just as adapt at these questions. The Lord of the Rings, for instance, is not simply a story about a plucky hero triumphing over a force of ontological evil but rather a story about that same hero, though genuinely triumphant, returning to a home that has been devastated by war and realizing that he has been too psychologically damaged by his experiences to return to ordinary life. This is a story certainly influenced by Tolkien’s biography, as he was a veteran of the First World War, but it also expresses something much older than Tolkien: the sense that loss is to a certain extent inescapable, that there is rarely joy unalloyed by sorrow, that the awe-inspiring powers of human will and human reason are nonetheless partial.

There is no need for all writers to address these ideas as explicitly as a Tolstoy or a Woolf, though literature would be in a better place if more did. Authors simply need to consider how they view the actual world, as art almost inevitably reflects the assumptions of the artist. Is that world a place that becomes clear with the right ideological or philosophical framework, a place where using the right tools will tell you who the bad guys really are; or is it instead a place where all are, to some extent, flawed and guilty, grasping for knowledge and truth in a changing and inscrutable world? What they believe inevitably affects how they write.

Joshua Fagan is a writer and academic currently residing in Seattle. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature and science, particularly the interpretation of evolutionary thinking in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on Anglophone writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.