New Kinds of Evil

In my Shakespeare class this summer, many of the plays that we're reading are scraping the bottom of the Stratfordian barrel, more or less. Some are speculated to be unfinished, or collaborative efforts. Some are early plays and betray a lack of authorial assurance, or major character problems. With the help of our tutor and mutual discussion, however, we typically find much more to even these least read, least regarded plays. One theme that has recurrently come up in our discussions is the preservation of some good (purity, honesty, faithfulness) in the face of often very strong evil. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for instance, Julia's sworn betrothed Proteus abandons her for another woman on first sight, then angles to get his own best friend banished in order to have a crack at his new love. In spite of all this treachery and callousness, however, Julia remains stubbornly faithful. This kind of enduring goodness pops up all over Shakespeare.

It is fascinating to trace, study, and ponder these themes that so much creative work across so many cultures shares. It's also interesting to look at works of art that play around with these themes, maybe not denying them but challenging them. No Country For Old Men is a fairly good example. There is not much "redemptive" about the story, as folks like to say. The good characters, those that survive, are bewildered and helpless before the immensely powerful evil characters, who come off with even more destruction and less liability than the Dark Knight's almost unstoppable Joker. The main villain isn't immolated or shot by a hero rising from the mud for the last time--his worst injury, in fact, comes from a freak car accident, which has more in common with the random violence that he unleashes than with the Sheriff's old-fashioned sense of morality and justice.

The result is a rather depressing novel, but a thought-provoking one. It doesn't deny the good, and in fact the good does survive, though it's kind of cowering under the table by the end. What emerges as a key question is good's power to prevail against a "new" kind of evil. It's really, again, not far removed from some of the themes raised in the Dark Knight--anarchic depravity that doesn't fight like a gentleman. I suspect it is too early to really analyze such things, but many people like to point to this as an evidence of new questions coming to light after the Twin Towers terrorist attacks and the Iraq War. Terrorism is dirty fighting, and it doesn't fit in smoothly with even World War II standards of combat. Millions of private citizens died in the Second World War, but most of these deaths were either organized genocide, collateral damage from bombing and shelling, or post-conquest violence (as in the siege of Berlin). Terrorism, where a small band outside normal government boundaries intentionally targets civilians in order to create fear and satisfy vendettas or religious imperatives, is relatively new, at least to the experience of the average American.

It is not very surprising, then, that many people are pondering the implications of how people can or should adjust to a different manifestation of violence and evil. Nor is it surprising that some people question the ability of goodness to actually survive evil, though men have been doing that since long before September 11, 2001. Many works of art where the end is depressing do not necessarily indicate an author who firmly believes in the ultimate triumph of evil--evil does win many battles, and it would be a poor imitation of reality to perpetually invent fictional scenarios where everything turns out exactly as hoped, and all live happily ever after (not a bad thing of itself, necessarily, but sometimes a hallmark of poor writing or film-making, when forced upon the plot).

I suspect that there are some people, however, who do have a depressing outlook on the war between good and evil. (There are even those who deny its existence, which is absurd.) The answer to this sort of worldview can be found in yet another theme of Shakespeare's which our tutor has mentioned several times: the relevance and vital importance of the afterlife. It is easy to look upon the success of evil with dismay if one does not recognize anything beyond life on earth. It is not only easy, in fact, but logically it is inescapable. If self-sacrifice, courage, and purity carry nothing over after death, then tragedy on earth becomes permanent tragedy. Nothing will make it right again, and the book that leaves you with a host of characters dead at the end (Hamlet, say) leaves you hopeless.

We need not fear each new manifestation of evil if our eyes have been opened to look beyond this life. If one limited his scope to merely earthly concerns, certainly things would look bleak. What does Darfur mean, what do the 9/11 attacks mean, if each casualty simply molders in the grave without a shred of consciousness that lives on? But if we understand that any stand against evil, even the most cruelly unsuccessful of stands, has transcendent meaning, then we have grasped a very wonderful truth. Though the times for mourning may sometimes seem to brutally outnumber the times for rejoicing, they do not give us cause for despair.

Art should absolutely tackle evil. It is an integral part of life until the Second Coming and a confusing, terrible, but somehow necessary part of God's redemptive plan, and to ignore it would be to ignore what makes story Story: conflict. Nevertheless, art which embraces hopelessness is also ignoring a huge part of reality, to its peril. Weeping endures for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.