Toilantrouble

    The notion of fate—variously known as destiny, predestination, divine providence and a host of other culturally based epithets—is one of humanity’s most enduring constructs. This is, in some ways, counterintuitive. In the “micro” sense—to steal a term from economics—life provides us with innumerable lessons in our ability, as human beings, to manipulate causes in order to obtain desired effects. We humans, however, are also capable of considering the bigger picture, of taking the “long view” as Scout put it in To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is in doing so that we sometimes are lured into the notion that events follow pre-ordained patterns. This tendency is often supported by religion, especially those religions that feature all-powerful deities that are thought to exert direct influence over earthly matters. Religious interpretations of the idea of fate vary greatly, however, and are subject to change over time. The moral and philosophical arguments surrounding the concept of fate also spill over into history and politics. The concept of a fixed destiny is, for example, more compatible with a feudal or autocratic society than with a democratic one. We in America are, in fact, conditioned by our political culture to value self-reliance—which implies that we have at least some control over the causes of our destinies—yet many seem, at least superficially, to accept the idea of predestination. We have only to take stock of the number of times we have heard someone say “everything happens for a reason” in order to appreciate the widespread acceptance of fate in the present day.The questions arising from this ambiguity are not unique to this country or to this century, as illustrated by Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Set in a rural corner of England, in a time increasingly dominated by the dynamism of the Industrial Revolution, Hardy’s novel is about a man beset by personal demons and whose powerful, impetuous will is unable to overcome a chain of events set in motion by an “original sin” committed at the beginning of the book.
    Hardy’s own notes tell us that he was a believer in cause and effect, not in divinely imposed predestination. He was sufficiently steeped in English moral culture, however, to have employed the motif of original sin, or at least a facsimile thereof, and to have made one of the threads of his novel the inexorability of the “wages of sin.” The main character, Henchard, is strong willed and, for the most part, well-intentioned, but is unable to reverse the flow of events he set in motion during that drunken moment when he sold his wife and child to a stranger. Thus he is caught in a structure of reality that, while not devised by vengeful gods, is equally unforgiving. Much of the damage to his life comes from faulty or rash decisions he makes in his attempts to rectify the situation he has created. In a sense, he is trying to do what Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, was wise enough to realize he could not do, which is to atone for a grievous sin while holding on to the fruits he has harvested as a result of it. There is, moreover, in Hardy’s novels, a strong strain of social criticism. People are overwhelmed or swept along by political and social forces over which whey have little control. This element, which is strong in such works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, is subtle, if present at all, in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy depicts Henchard as resistant to the newfangled methods and machines of the modernizing world, and thus as a man out of his time. His life’s arc from hay-trusser to wealthy businessman and mayor, and back to hay-trusser, may also be an indication of England’s still-rigid class structure, especially when juxtaposed with the static nature of the rest of Casterbridge society throughout the course of the novel.
    Life in 19th-Century England was not as rigidly structured as that of ancient Greece, the setting of Oedipus Rex, another work that deals with the dichotomy of fate and free will. The two opposing concepts do a somewhat different dance in Oedipus than they do in Casterbridge, although the outcomes are remarkably similar. The interesting question in Oedipus is whether—working backward from the play’s conclusion, in which everything foretold by the oracle of the gods has come to pass—that outcome would have been different if certain key decisions by the characters had not been made. If Laios and Jocasta, upon hearing the prophesy that their baby son would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, had not tried to evade it, Oedipus would not have had occasion, years later, to fulfill, unknowingly, the very prophesy has parents had tried to avoid. On the other hand, a prophesy is a prophesy, and isn’t the point, then that the thing was going to come true no matter what? What were they supposed to do, sit there and let it happen, horrible as it was? Oedipus himself hears the same prophesy as a young adult, and also tries to evade it, to no avail. It seems hopeless. The key to understanding Oedipus, however, is not to try to escape the circularity of causes and effects, but to examine the underlying spiritual problem, which is the hubris of Oedipus and his parents in thinking that they could contravene the will of the gods. It is not, of course, an attractive notion that one must passively accept the abuses of tyrannical deities. On the other hand, what if the oracle was predicting, not some cruel and arbitrary fate, but the result of a series of unwise choices brought on by the tragic flaws of the characters? This is tricky, because it may be argued that it was the prophesy that triggered the unwise decisions. Nevertheless, it was the delusion that one can evade the gods, coupled with the sins of pride and rashness, that ultimately moved things to their tragic conclusion.
    Ultimately, both Henchard and Oedipus lose everything, but gain self-knowledge, and, it may be argued, a measure of peace. For both, the peace comes from finally seeing clearly. This may seem cold comfort to some observers, but the idea that to know oneself is the only true means of obtaining moral clarity and thus happiness is essential to understanding both Casterbridge and Oedipus. A 20th-century equivalent is Meursault’s final, euphoric acceptance of the absurdity of existence, which allows him to be happy again despite his death sentence. Like Oedipus and Meursault, Hardy’s protagonist ultimately frees himself from hope. It is that act of free will that liberates him from the fate he had constructed for himself.

A certain poet was once described by a female associate as "Mad, bad and dangerous to know." The poet was, of course, the 19th-century Romantic, Lord Byron, the archetypal rebellious and ultimately self-destructive young man, the heroically alienated creative figure whose myriad incarnations include such iconic American pop culture characters as James Dean and Curt Cobain. Humanity's fascination with the dark and seemingly chaotic forces of the universe is ancient, and possibly primordial, as evidenced by the importance of chaos in the creation myths of so many human cultures. The point, ultimately, is that chaos is blended with and altered by the seed of order, but remains inherent in the fabric of the universe. In the short story “Greasy Lake,” author T. Coraghessan Boyle uses the story’s eponymous setting to evoke an impression of the squalid, libidinous recesses of the young male mind as it struggles for freedom and autonomy on the cusp of adulthood.
Boyle, who describes his own youth as that of a “sort of pampered punk,” describes his characters as rabble-rousing young college types who have abandoned “courtesy and winning ways” and who want nothing but to “snuff the rich scent of possibility in the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets.” Anything missing here in the repertoire of standard youthful vices? Nope. It’s all there: the sexually-charged squalor, the boiling hormones steeped in sinister stimulants, the “incongruous” mixing of sounds. Boyle’s short sentence, “This was nature,” at the end of the second paragraph could be taken for irony but isn’t, really. This is the nature of “reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescent juices,” human nature, ringed with sharp broken glass and the remains of campfires. The story’s violent, danger-laden plot touches upon death, destruction and the darkest of human impulses but culminates in an exhausted but oddly optimistic moment of rebirth after the destruction: “There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanishing civilization.”
The poet and essayist Annie Dillard wrote in her memoir A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that "nature loves death more than she loves you or me." What Dillard means is that destruction, dissolution and the forces of entropy, as frightening as they seem to us, are, in fact, essential components of the continuance of life. In “Greasy Lake,” Boyle acknowledges this need for chaos and violence as an intrinsic part of the maturation process, which is and always has been in various degrees “mad, bad and dangerous.”