June 4, 2009
I am seeking to define an ideal by which to measure fiction: both fiction that I read, but especially that which I write. I have essayed on this before, but so far my ideal has remained inchoate and inexplicit. This essay will be an attempt closer to that definition.
I intend this ideal as paragon: a mode of narrative fiction that might never be truly achieved, but rather a goal for which I should always strive in my own writing. By it I will also measure other writing--not in order to disparage or to vilify, but as a means for learning. I will see how other writers have succeeded and failed to approach that paragon and take those lessons into my own writing. My intention is to define Art for narrative fiction: hence I will be discussing novels exclusively (except where another genre might offer some insight on the genre of the novel). I must allow that most fiction does not strive to the goal that I will define. There seems to be a range of mode and form within the novel genre, out of which only a small part approach my ideal. I do not intend to condemn that which works to a less stringent goal: all fiction should be measured by its inherent intention (which can be distinct from the intention of the author). I may be a bit more harsh on the particular works I will discuss in this essay than they might deserve, but all criticism in this essay will be strictly in the service of seeking a definition for what I would call Art.
I will begin by defining two major modes of the novel that form a base for Art. These modes represent both stages along the way to Art as well as the building blocks of the ideal. Each mode lends its strength, blending together, and in Art they overcome their weaknesses. The first mode is the novel driven by its concept. A good example of this mode is the modern publisher’s genre of Thriller, of which Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a primary representation. The concept of the novel drives its forward pressure: in this case, the revelation of secrets (religious secrets, which gives the book an extra level of cultural interest). The momentary experience of the book is entertaining, and learning trivia and encountering puzzles gives some enjoyment, but the novel offers little else. There is no real depth to any of its characters or much care taken with the writing outside of trying to make it grammatical and slippery--in the sense that it pushes the reader from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. This is not the kind of book that a reader might take her time with and really enjoy on a deeper level.
In books like The Da Vinci Code, the course of the narrative is driven by the form of the concept (in this case the plot) irrespective of its characters--usually those characters have little depth and are no more than placeholders or mouthpieces. The intention of Dan Brown’s novel is primarily to bring together a few conspiracy theories and fun puzzles and games. He uses the form of narrative to this purpose, but it does not try to lift itself above its concept. Thrillers like Brown’s are concerned with page-turning tension, a story that seizes the reader by the progressive occurrence of one thing after another where the reader’s only question concerning the narrative is “What will happen next?” There is no real concern for character--I disagree stringently with Aristotle that character must be secondary to plot, but more on that later.
It is important, nonetheless, for Art to have an energetic plot, a story that draws the reader along so that she asks the question “What will happen next?” of every great novel, and this lesson can be taken from the genre of the Thriller. There must be edge-of-the-seat tension, or there will never be any interest in a novel’s first reading--if a reader cannot bear to force herself through the narrative at least once, why should she ever return to the book for a later, deeper study? The Thriller offers this pressing narrative as its primary form (unfortunately without the resources for a later, deeper study), and sometimes the narrative becomes a means of displaying facts or uncovering trivia. Both the mystery of what will happen next as well as what information might next be revealed becomes the false suspense that grabs the reader and presses her forward to the end: this is the concept that drives the narrative. (I call it false suspense because the withholding of important information from the reader in order to create tension is a parlor trick and ultimately it can only ever be annoying to the experience of the novel. The reader will grimace and demand of the absent author, “Why didn’t you tell us that before?” The author must be honest in all things if he wishes to keep a reader’s interest and trust, and that means sharing everything a character knows. Withholding from the reader anything that bears on the plot will only frustrate her and denigrate the effectiveness of the novel. Art must do more: it must create true suspense, which can only come from the moral dilemma of character and arises naturally out of a character’s struggle with choice.)
Within the concept-driven mode, the form of the novel and the course of the narrative are created by the concept irrespective of any characters that might act within the structure--usually those characters have little depth and are no more than placeholders or mouthpieces. The intention of Brown’s novel is primarily to bring together a few conspiracy theories and puzzles. He uses the form of narrative to this purpose, but it does not try to be much more than that.
I do not want to suggest that I believe this mode is entirely bad or even mediocre. There are some very good books that follow the concept-driven mode: for instance, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A lot of my disappointment in that novel stems from the characters in the story and the peculiar way in which they act. There is no foreshadowing of Winston’s fear of rats on which the final resolution is based, and I do not think Orwell really sells his character’s reaction. But in truth that does not matter: the novel is intended as a warning against totalitarianism and in that respect is entirely polemical. Winston’s climactic reaction is a feature of Orwell’s dystopia--not a discovered implication of his character. Orwell’s intentional message drives the narrative and plot, and the characters do not. Orwell’s characters might have a bit more depth than Brown’s, but in the end they do not control the story--the author does. The narrative serves as a tour through Orwell’s (and Brown’s) polemic concept.
The next mode standing as a base for Art in narrative fiction is the mimetic: fiction that mimics or represents nature or ‘real’ life. The mimetic will sometimes borrow aspects of the concept-driven mode (e.g. the progressive or revelatory plot, or even sometimes a polemic), but it is focused more on well-developed character or setting. Most good fiction falls into this mode. Where the concept-driven mode uses the narrative story as a string of events or a means to present facts and ideas, the mimetic mode uses true-to-life characters to drive a story. They are well-rounded and emotionally-realized individuals who have goals and purpose outside the immediate story. It is their interactions with each other and their conflicts with the exigencies of the story (their actions and reactions) that press the narrative forward. As I mentioned before, suspense is created by character choice: both the struggle with a decision and the ramifications and repercussions of a made choice. This is what makes for the best narrative fiction in the mimetic mode.
Caricature and archetype can fall into this category as well, though it is more likely that such characters will not be well developed--they might only exist to prove an auctorial premise, in which case the story will slip into the concept-driven mode. A character that is an archetype, inasmuch as he is well-described and mimics a real human being, can rise to the level of the mimetic. But an archetype or character that exists merely to service plot, as Jorge Borges, in a lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1949 from Other Inquisitions, said,
can produce, or tolerate, admirable stories because their brevity makes the plot more visible than the actors, but not admirable novels, where the general form (if there is one) is visible only at the end and a single badly invented character can contaminate the others with unreality. (53)
And yet a character might be a well-constructed emotional being who is also representational of an idea: this becomes a feature of what I would call Art. This kind of character elevates beyond being a mere archetype or functionary of the plot: he becomes a personification of an idea in that he mimics a person who also represents an argument. This character drives the plot with his choices, and those choices represent the exploration of that argument through the narrative. This goes to Art, which I will explore later. Within the mimetic mode, however, character does not often rise to that level. It is mere personality and often parochial in limitation. Mimetic character is not literary personification, but the mere mimic of a person.
When I say that a mimetic character mimics ‘real’ life, I do not mean that it has to fall within the realist tradition. Even a narrative in the fantastic form can be mimetic. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is built upon mimetic characters. Even though they exist within a fantastic setting (what might be considered a concept-driven setting), they are recognizable human beings with recognizable emotion and ambition. Even Martin’s setting is mimetic as I would define it: the world he describes mimics a ‘real’ world in that it has consistent rules and governing laws, even though many of them conflict with our own known reality. Martin’s fantasy is often called ‘low-magic,’ but even created worlds that are surfeited with magic can still be mimetic so long as they are regulated and consistent. Northrop Frye says, in Anatomy of Criticism,
The poet, like the pure mathematician, depends, not on descriptive truth, but on conformity to his hypothetical postulates. The appearance of a ghost in Hamlet presents the hypothesis “let there be a ghost in Hamlet.” It has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not, or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas. (76)
So what is narrative Art? Perhaps the definition of my ideal can be apprehended if I can ascertain how the two modes of mimetic and concept-driven narrative fiction fall short.
First, I should mention that there is another mode of narrative fiction in the genre of the novel that I have not described, what I would call failure. This is a story that has not reached either the concept-driven or the mimetic. Insofar as I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code while I was reading it, it was not a failure: it entertained and its plot swept me from page to page despite its copious shortcomings (in prose and character and even argument). Most novels that are failures are amateur works, or the works of apprentices as they learn the craft. It should be rare that any failure be published or see an audience outside loving family or sympathetic critics. I have myself several manuscripts in my files that are admitted failures.
Nonetheless, failures are not worthless. Storytelling is the basic human experience: our lives are dependent on the telling of stories. It drives our ability to learn and to plan, to reason and feel empathy. This is why children create stories every time they play: it is practice for a lifetime of personal storytelling. This is also why we are best able to learn and understand our world through a narrative structure--why even non-fictional works cohere to the form of the story. Any attempt at storytelling in the form of the novel is worthwhile. The most important aspect of any novel is story: no well-designed plot or argument, no perfectly realized character, no artistic prose or marvelous and inventive idea can ever make up for a lack of story. A reader’s first reading of any book must engage them, must draw them along. Rambling or wandering novels are meaningless. Despite his lyricism and his evocation, I would put Nabokov on thin ice for some of his digressions in Lolita. The novel is gorgeously written, and the plot is progressive and energetic, but sometimes his linguistic frolic gets a little out of hand. What (partially) saves it is that the novel is presented in the first person so that much of that excessiveness is a characteristic of the narrator, himself an emotional and recognizable mimetic human being.
There is real value in taking the time to care about words and linguistic and grammatical flare as Nabokov does. It is a crime that we so undervalue language in our society. Language is the mode of thought, and thought drives ideas and thus society. Much of what we hear and read, political rhetoric, corporate advertisement, and national propaganda, would be held to a higher account if we as a people were more aware of empty, meaningless language when we encounter it. Nabokov lives in language and a writer like Hemingway agonizes over a choice of word for weeks, while Dan Brown tosses off a clumsy sentence such as, “The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock.” There is only minimal literal meaning in this collection of words: the piling of two meaningless clichés upon a nearly meaningless predicate. This sentence occurs within the first few paragraphs of the novel to describe a stunned man on the floor: a man lying in the Louvre itself at the opening of a narrative that will touch on the fundamentals of Christianity, on doubt and divinity. Here is an opportunity to adumbrate the entire conflict through imagery, to foreshadow and portend by some contraposition of the curator on the floor and any number of painted subjects in the museum. I am sure that Dan Brown did research for this novel: he should have noticed some connection, some reflective painting that might suggest a deeper metaphor for this moment.
As an example of the kind of prose that approaches the ideal of Art, here is the opening section (after the forward) of Nabokov’s Lolita:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
This is one of my own favorite opening passages of any novel. There is rhythm and music in the sentences, a gliding lyricism that seizes the reader and pulls her along. The last sentence of the first paragraph, with its alliteration and meter, is both descriptive and evocative, but at the same time it mirrors its precise literal meaning: when you read aloud the words ‘a trip of three steps down the palate,’ your tongue is doing precisely that, tapping along the palate of your mouth in a steady rhythm. The line ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’ swells beyond its mere definition: it is our narrator preparing us for the narrative journey, and already we know he has no illusions. He declares himself a beautiful monster and insists that we will be drawn to him despite our revulsion. He does not say so explicitly, but couches it and obfuscates himself. Carried along by his music, we settle into his tale, wary of the murderer, though quickly we forget his initial confession. This line prepares the way for the entire novel in a way Brown never even attempts.
It is the power of prose for evocation outside its immediate imagery and not mere reportage that a novel must strive to. “Words form a chain of association,” says John Gardner in On Moral Fiction:
To say the word crate to a native English speaker is to summon up an image of a crate and, with it, the natural background of that image, which is a different background from that summoned up by casque or trunk or cube. To say that a character is built like a crate is to suggest far more than just the character’s shape: it is to hint at his personality, his station in life, even his behavior. This becomes obvious when we place the character in some setting not at all natural for a crate and then linguistically reinforce the unnaturalness: He sat at the tea table, fiddling with his spoon, as stiff and unnatural as a crate. (112)
Language is, by its very nature as a system of representational symbols, imprecise. Although as a symbol there is a measure of universality among a group of native speakers in the understanding of any single word, it is impossible through words for a human being to communicate the complete picture or feeling within his own mind to the mind of another. We generally agree on what red is, but there is too broad a set of red for anyone to know what specifically I mean when I say it. My own red is different than the red of my wife, and each of those is also different than Hemingway’s or Dan Brown’s red. Thus it is the writer’s dilemma to choose which words will translate his thoughts and impressions and emotions to another person. The chosen words are always personal to an individual writer and to his experience as well as to what he is trying to communicate. The effectiveness of that communication is what we measure when we judge prose. Effectiveness is also subjective, as every reader will bring his own experience and understanding of the world to the words on the page: it is impossible to predict how any one person will react to even broadly agreed-upon language. But finding an answer to that dilemma and discovering just the right word is what I would define as poetic Art. Mark Twain, in a letter to George Bainton, 1888, said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Certain types of words are almost universally held to be imprecise, and the most salient group of these is adverbs. (Stephen King: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”) For instance, let me examine the sentence He ran fast. Fast here is an adverb and could just as easily be quickly. One should immediately begin to see the problem with it: what is fast? Compared to what? The sense is quite meaningless, and it really creates more confusion than anything it might reveal. All we really know at the end of the sentence is that he ran, and we can dismiss fast from semantic consideration.
Let me counterpoint that with something a bit more evocative: He ran, strides stretching to clumsiness, as if his sprint were a mad stumble, downhill, so that he struggled to keep his balance. This paints a much more vivid picture, and we know automatically that he is moving ‘fast’ and to what degree without the author having to tell us with some abstracted word. More than that, we get a sense of his physicality, of how he is moving, and even a hint at his emotion, despite it not being specifically addressed: is he frightened? Why is he running like this, in a way that might be described by a single word as headlong? It seems the kind of sprint one might see in a pursuit: is he chasing or being chased? It is in this way that strict description can suggest much more than what it immediately describes. We see the man running (I think of him more as a boy, clumsy, perhaps an adolescent uncertain of his growing legs), be we can also infer more. Evocative and suggestive prose allows a reader to look deeper into the scene and see more than merely what has been described.
In addition, the rhythm of a sentence can become suggestive: notice the repetitive S-sound in my example and the meter of the ST-SP(R) syllabic onset. This repetition, coupled with the comma-separated downhill (commas can be so much more evocative that the strictest grammar would allow) creates a cadence evocative in itself of the man’s desperate, stumbling sprint. Heavy syllables such as clum-, stum-, and (the relatively lighter) bal- reinforce the stumbling effect. The way in which any reader rolls over a sentence will always vary, but writers can work toward effects like this in their prose by using the tools of evocative language. A splendid example of this is Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil dialogue in The Lord of the Rings. Tom’s speech is singing and cadential, and Tolkien never has to describe it with any clumsy adverb: the effect exists in the text itself.
I began to speak of how character must be treated in narrative Art earlier, and I hinted above when speaking of Orwell and Brown that the concept-driven mode does not usually bring us well-made or evocative characters. Aristotle suggested this was the proper order of narrative fiction, according to Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, “the plot is, as Aristotle called it, the ‘soul’ or shaping principle, and the characters exist primarily as functions of the plot.” (xx) This seems to be the guiding principle of many works, and truly the tangle of character and plot cannot be really unwound. Which came first to Shakespeare in composition: irresolute and uncertain Hamlet, or the narrative conflict of an intermediary in the revenge plot between the Ghost and King Claudius? Could any other character enter into that plot and have it come out the same way? Did the plot demand the character, or did the character demand the plot? John Gardner offers an answer in On Becoming a Novelist:
Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him, something he can pick up and throw, if necessary, or eat, or give to his girlfriend. Plot exists so the character can discover for himself (and in the process reveal to the reader) what he, the character, is really like: plot forces the character to choice and action, transforms him from a static construct to a lifelike human being making choices and paying for them or reaping the rewards. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody: theme is elevated critical language for what the character’s main problem is. (52)
I prefer Gardner’s answer to that of Aristotle. It seems to me that a human Art should reflect humanity. It should be interested in the fundamental questions of humanity: what does it mean that we are what we are? The truest expression of humanity in fiction is character and character choice. Setting can be reflective and plot can be revealing, but the search for humanity begins and ends in human beings. It is through character in fiction that this exploration plays itself out. Thus character must find plot and direct it. This does not necessarily speak to the method of any author’s composition: ideas are malleable things, and however a novel comes to its author, its disparate innovations should always be melded together through revision. In a novel’s final form, however, character should rule.
I mentioned above that character in Art might be the personification of an argument. What I mean by this is that a character does not exist merely as a person for whom the reader should cheer, but as a guide for action or by which a reader might measure the real world. A character is a study of life and humanity, as Gardner described in On Moral Fiction:
What we learn when we look closely at the successive drafts by a writer like Tolstoy--and what one learns if one is oneself a writer who has tested each of his fictional scenes against his experience of how things seem to happen in the world--is that scrutiny of how people act and speak, why people feel precisely the things they do, how weather affects us at particular times, how we respond to some people in ways we would never respond to others, leads to knowledge, sensitivity, and compassion. In fiction we stand back, weigh things as we do not have time to do in life; and the effect of great fiction is to temper real experience, modify prejudice, humanize. (114)
It is not the mere progression of events in a narrative that addresses humanity and offers a window upon our souls: it is the way in which a recognizable human being (a mimetic character) acts and reacts against the plot that offers insight. Thus Art does not merely create believable character in the way of the mimetic mode, but suffers upon that character a series of rigorous tests. The way in which a character changes and reacts to these exigencies is what drives the plot. It is not up to the writer to decide beforehand how it will turn out: he must discover it through rigorous experiment, to see what course is ‘true’ for the characters he has created. Gardner in On Moral Fiction again:
The writer’s sole authority is his imagination. He works out in his imagination what would happen and why, acting out every part himself, making his characters say what he would say himself if he were a young second-generation Italian, then an old Irish policeman, and so on. [...] True moral fiction is a laboratory experiment too difficult and dangerous to try in the world but safe and important in the mirror image of reality in the writer’s mind. (115-116)
Characters that are merely reflections of a pre-imposed plot cannot reveal anything more than the preset intentions of the author. But true characters, given both mimetic reality and the ability to grow and reflect, to learn and change through the natural unfolding of the plot, can and will offer the kind of insight that Art should strive for. Consider for example Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The overall exploration within the narrative, the ‘theme’ if one may call it that, is the human concern for Death. Throughout the narrative, characters ruminate on their individual mortality, on what it is like to kill another person and what it might mean to them if and how they were themselves to die. There is much narrative discussion among the characters on whether or not to kill certain people and what ramifications--both for the killer and for the overall mission--that murder might have. It takes place during war, and there are many scenes of characters facing almost certain death and discovering how they react to it. The strength of this narrative arises out of the mimetic characters’ own introspection, the way each of them varies on their concern for these questions. Each is a facet on a broad lens that explores death from many different points of view throughout the story. It is because the characters are fully realized, complementary, and various that such a broad range of perspective can be explored.
There is a danger that a character that attempts to represent an argument as I have described will lose its mimetic human quality. There is also a danger that an author who has created a character that represents some argument for which the author is a proponent will hold back in his narrative testing so as to make the argument look stronger than it is. This should be easily recognizable when it occurs, but the ideal of Art demands that an author be honest in his description and representation. Honesty in authorship means that he holds nothing back, that he does not cut corners, and that he accepts and follows through any ramifications that he discovers in the course of composition, even (especially) if it is a life-altering change in opinion for the author. The fallacy of the Straw Man is a failure of this kind, as is creating a character that is evil merely for the sake of evil without reason. (True derangement is inhuman, and there is nothing to learn by its study in narrative fiction, which, as I said before, should delve into questions of humanity.) I should also mention that there does not have to be an ‘answer’ in the narrative. A study without concrete conclusion can still be instructive in other ways, and so a narrative that is merely exploratory can be valuable in what it reveals.
Setting in narrative Art should be related to character: setting should be reflective or contrapuntal to the characters that inhabit it. In its own way, setting might lend perspective on the argument personified by the characters, at least in the ways in which it drives their conflict and reaction or reflects an aspect of that argument—perhaps a common expectation (denounced in the course of the narrative), or a conceit. In some novels, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the setting is experienced as if it were a character itself. This derives from the idea that the setting provides its own voice in the narrative exploration or argument, as Middle Earth does through its description and its function within the narrative while at the same time being mimetic in the sense of mimicking a consistent world. Additionally, certain locations (Rivendell, Lothlórien) become a comment upon the characters that dwell there. They reflect certain aspects, amplify others, and offer a perspective for the reader on the potentials and consequences of a character’s choices and ambitions.
The form of the novel (whether it is a comedy or tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, or another form, or has no form--itself a deliberate construction) should not bear on whether the novel is Art except in the manner in which the narrative fits into its form. If the hero of the story comes to tragic end through the exploration of argument as discussed earlier, then the form of tragedy will be appropriate. Form should be a discovery through honest exploration, and only through revision should that form be strengthened. An author who intends to explore the idea of unrequited love should not assume that the ending will be tragic (or comic): he should discover the characters that personify his argument and discover the ways in which they will interact with each other and come to his form in that way. Revision is key here: an unrevised novel will be nebulous and uncertain, without cogent structure. Through revision an author should discover what is important to the arc of the narrative (how his scenes fit upon a form, if any), and then revise and edit to strengthen every aspect against that model.
I do not want to suggest that there is a specific way in which every author must approach art, a strictly delimited process--I am actually trying to define Art as a final outcome. When I say that the form should be ‘discovered’, that does not mean that an author’s creative spark, his inspiration for any novel, cannot be glimpsed from another angle. Perhaps Shakespeare saw in a flicker of lightning a scene of Juliet having awoken seeing Romeo dead, and he knew immediately he would be writing a tragedy, but did not yet know how he would get there. His method may have been to work out backward in his mind what kind of relationship the two characters must have in order to bring about that result and therefore work out who the individual characters must be, and then to fill in the pieces around it. Or he may have gone forward from the idea of the children of rival houses falling in love and sought out its implications from there. However he came upon the form, however he discovered the story in total, there would have to have been a time when he went back over his early drafts and fixed every aspect to fit against that totality.
I should take a moment to address theme, specifically regarding what I said before about ‘fundamental questions of humanity.’ I have read many reviews and heard people talk about literature who speak of ‘theme’ as something like the ideas that are used to construct a story. For instance, when one analyzes Nineteen Eighty-four, it is likely that the identified themes of that novel will include Censorship or Totalitarianism, either of which might be better described by what I earlier defined as ‘concept.’ However, if we accept these driving ideas behind the narrative as its theme, I must point out that neither of them speaks to the ‘fundamental questions of humanity.’ Obviously there is nothing wrong with these ideas as themes (or constructional concepts), as they are quite important explorations, and indeed Orwell’s emphasis in the novel is looking at the human interaction with these ideas.
My ideal of Art, however, strives to greater themes, more fundamental to the common experience of all humanity. I will turn away from a novel as example to the television series Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 edition) to illustrate this idea. My own watching of the series excited me because it seemed that the writers had done exactly what only speculative fiction can do: they redefined the rules of humanity as a means of reflecting on them--by this I mean that the Cylon characters, through their ability to resurrect (and their consequent fearlessness of death and indeed the utility of death itself as a tactic) gave the writers space to explore the human experience of death as a theme. Human beings are horrified by death, but it turns out they are horrified by deathlessness as well (at least as the writers imagined it). There is a terrifying scene where one character kills herself so that through her rebirth she would be able to rescue her daughter. (Only in speculative fiction could this kind of scenario ever come about.) This dichotomy of deathless and mortal was fertile ground in which to explore the notions of death and life as they relate to who we (the audience) are as human beings. This is the kind of thing that I mean by ‘fundamental questions of humanity.’ However, nothing that I have read about Battlestar Galactica has ever mentioned Death as a theme. Articles will cite such topics as Terrorism or Insurgency or other such parochial thoughts as the major themes of the series without ever looking for something more grand, more fundamental.
I want Art to be broader in scope. I want it to seek where nothing else can or will. I want it to be timeless (so far as it can be outside each individual author’s limited cultural bias). I would prefer to create something that will last forever, or at best to strive to that goal. Obviously I could never be the ultimate judge of my own work--only time is effective in that kind of judgment. But if I can write something that will be read again and again, twenty, fifty, a hundred, thousand, or more years after I have died, then I will consider myself to have succeeded in creating Art.