Enduring the Unendurable

All philosophy, it has often been observed, is really just a collection of mental strategies for coming to terms with the grim reality of life. What does this have to do with writing fiction? Don't worry, I'll get there.

The idea that the universe is cold, random, meaningless, unfair, sometimes unspeakably cruel and often utterly indifferent to human existence is too upsetting for most of us to take raw, so we find ways to cook it.

Thus are born a panoply of worldviews, some religious, some not. But all of them are, in one form or another, Ways to Cope.

"It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and still carry a tune."
— Woody Allen

How does one Endure the Unendurable? The notion of Death with a capital D, oblivion, the extinction of the Self, is so uncomfortable that nearly everybody in the world has some sort of cerebral defense against it. This can take the form of belief in an afterlife, or it can take the form of a philosophy that makes it possible to gracefully and peacefully accept the inevitable.

And what about the intrinsic injustice of life while it's still going on? Success and prosperity finds the undeserving as the talented and the hardworking languish in the murky gloom of poverty and obscurity. The virtuous suffer and the evil thrive. How do we deal with this? We can deny it, we can tell ourselves it's part of a Larger Plan (this is where a Being or Beings, Entity or Entities, Force or Forces may be invoked), or we can succumb to rage and despair.

In the Victoria da Vinci novels, various characters exhibit an array of psychological coping/defense mechanisms that are fun to write because they bring the characters into a kind of unspoken metaphysical conflict.

Victoria is a kind of techno-Utopianist; she deeply believes (that is to say, has convinced herself) that she can save the world with her inventions, or at least that the world can be saved. This certainly contributes to her messianic complex and her indefatigable ambition.

Prycie and Mistral are absurdists; they recognize the nonsensical nature of human existence and the futility of attempting to assert your will against it. So they seem to have made a conscious choice to celebrate the silly and the ridiculous, to let themselves be liberated from both logic and social convention. (As artists, they can get away with this.) People think they're crazy, but we always get the impression that their "insanity" is calculated.

Constance/May is innocent . . . at least up until the end of the first book. With maturity comes cynicism, and with growing intellectual freedom comes growing skepticism and mistrust. She was sheltered in a middle-class environment for most of her life, and her worst enemy was boredom. In the second book, she confronts some of the horrors of the real world for the first time.

Greta, being a sociopath, is unburdened by guilt. Her philosophy is more political than spiritual, and essentially depends upon the subjugation of the weak. Perhaps ironically, she is less troubled by self-doubt than any other character, never questioning the rightness of her opinions. She unrepentantly seeks power and wealth for its own sake, and takes sadistic pleasure in the annihilation of her enemies.

Righty is an interesting contradiction; on one hand, she has a carefree, happy-go-lucky attitude. On the other hand, however, she is a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-it-done type. She has lived through great personal hardship, and would rather enjoy life in the present moment than spend a lot of time contemplating the past or the future. When it comes to the big questions of what it's all about, she doesn't know and she doesn't care that she doesn't know.

Fiona is a nihilist, and in our time she would probably be diagnosed as clinically depressed. She has no hope, no faith, no reason to believe any good will ever come of anything, and reserves a disdainful contempt for anyone dumb enough to be starry-eyed and optimistic in this awful world.

Those who are already in a strong and secure position — people like Hautious Sugging and Josiah Blumfield — are primarily motivated by their intense fear of change (in other words, fear of losing their privileged status). They rationalize this fear by seeing themselves as guardians of the nation, protecting it from the forces of immorality and chaos that swirl around it like an army of barbarians. (Greta, meanwhile, is more than happy to exploit this fear and twist it to her own ends.)

One of the really enjoyable things about being an author is being able to bring together these highly divergent points of view and see how they bounce off each other when characters compete and cooperate. Writing a novel is like having a long, strange, multi-sided argument in your head, an argument in which you neither fully agree nor fully disagree with any of the perspectives involved. It would probably make an interesting case study for a cognitive neuroscientist — "Creative Dissonance: The Fractured Brain of a Fiction Writer."