what?

Over a year ago, I wrote the first of four lockdown essays for Le Monde. It’s worth returning to part of the first essay (which I will be pushing today and tomorrow) and consider my thoughts and our general communal well-being (or lack thereof) as we enter the second half of the second year of the pandemic. Will this thing ever end?

Happy reading.

 

THE AGE OF ANXIETY – Part 1

 

In that smart New York online political and cultural review, The Daily Beast, I read an article late last month on why those who suffer from anxiety or panic disorders were frequently faring psychologically better during this pandemic. A psychologist interviewed for the piece noted:

 

​“A big part of anxiety... is the anticipation of the unknown—worry about something bad that will inevitably happen”. But since COVID-19  “a lot of people are saying, ‘The terrible thing happened.’ So in a lot of ways you’re not in the anticipating state.”

 

​‘The terrible thing’ is indeed happening now. No wonder (as another psychologist quoted in the same article commented) that those who have spent much of their lives negotiating the dark labyrinth called depression are thinking: now everyone else in the non-depressed world has a taste of what my inner world is like.

 

​Anxiety is, of course, one of the cornerstones of the human condition. So too is fear; the dread we all have of individual and communal collapse... as best articulated by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in that most-cited of his poems, The Second Coming:

 

​‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

​Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

​The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

​The ceremony of innocence is drowned...’

 

​A crisis is always, on one level, a revelatory moment. All drama from the Greeks onwards is, on a certain level, rooted in Aristotlean notions of ‘catharsis’. As he noted:

 

​“The function of tragedy is to accomplish a clarification (or illumination) through catharsis of pity and fear.”

 

​Catharsis also became an essential component of Freudian psychoanalysis: the notion of a revelation emerging from all those things repressed or sidestepped in our individual psyches. But this pandemic is a global event. As such, it raises an intriguing novelistic question: how can there be any of the standard dramatic catharsis we associate with narrative storytelling when we are living in a period of such absolute, total uncertainty?

 

​For a writer, ambiguity is his or her playground. 

When, for example, I construct a character and/or a moral dilemma in one of my novels, I always try to sidestep certitudes.  Because in fiction (as in life) you cannot adopt the mentality of a B-movie western: the bad guys in black hats, the good guy sporting the white ones. As such, all writers deal with that opaque grey zone between such Manichean extremes - and therefore see cryptic nuance and complex psychological shading behind all human interactions. 

And if the greatest mystery in life is ultimately oneself then the whole dynamic of catharsis in all narrative storytelling is bound up in the notion of some sort of self-revelation emerging from a denouement of purgation or revelation. 

Othello faces his monstrous homicidal jealousy - and his manipulation at the hands of Iago - before he dies. Emma Bovary’s final depression expresses itself in a mad shopping spree; the racking up of debt in the wake of another romantic disappointment that subtexturally informs her: she will be living out her narrow little life in her narrow little village, married to her bore of a doctor husband. This catharsis leads her to reach for the arsenic...

 

​Now, even though there are very tentative signs of deconfinement the truth is: we are all still grappling with the great unknown.

 

(more tomorrow)