Occasionally, a born-again Christian with a powerful search engine will blunder into my website. The poor fellow has typed in “Jesus,” and suddenly he’s confronted with reviews of Only Begotten Daughter. Usually he’ll leave me a message—disapproving, but hardly menacing. It goes something like this: “Well, Jim, I can see by this website that you’re very concerned with religious matters. Did you know that Jesus Christ is very concerned about your concern with religious matters? I suggest you let him into your heart, preferably before sundown, lest you roast in Hell. Have a nice day.”
Believe it or not, I sometimes wonder if my relentless railing against Christianity doesn’t go too far. At a certain point, obviously, any sort of blasphemy can become hurtful, irrelevant, or puerile. But I keep coming back to this question: who struck first, the satirist or the sacristan? And the answer is clearly, the latter.
We must be angry about Christianity’s historical complicity in war, slavery, anti-Semitism, and the subjugation of women. God knows, that’s not all we should be angry about. Secular belief systems also have much to answer for—maybe they even have more to answer for. I don’t know. But it’s my particular job to keep shouting, “Look where the theistic-salvationist worldview leads us if we’re not careful!”
FJ: You’ve described Towing Jehovah as a fantastical Lord Jim, and Blameless in Abaddon as a retelling of the “Book of Job.” What are the literary roots of The Eternal Footman?
JM: Its primary touchstone is The Epic of Gilgamesh. I’m not very subtle about this ancestry. My heroine spends part of the novel traveling with a theatre company that’s producing a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Gilgamesh in a succession of southern towns.
We hear a lot these days, especially from academic precincts, about the deterministic nature of human language and culture. There is no such thing as a universal human spirit, the postmodern intellectuals argue. All realities—moral, epistemological, psychological—are ultimately “local,” conditioned by immediate social and linguistic norms. Even science, the postmodernists say, can be profitably scrutinized through this radically relativistic lens.
And yet here’s Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving epic, speaking to us with poignancy and immediacy about the bedrock tragedy of the human condition. The theme is the inescapability of death, and the poem tells us how utterly human it is to wish that things were otherwise. If Gilgamesh is essentially “local,” then I say the hell with it.
It’s possible to map the whole Godhead Trilogy onto the Divine Comedy. Towing Jehovah corresponds to the “Purgatorio”—the characters are trapped in a gray domain defined by their moral limitations. Blameless in Abaddon is the “Inferno” in a different key. (“Abaddon” is a Hebrew word that can be translated as “hell.”) And Footman, with its glimpses of a post-theistic utopia, might be regarded as a kind of “Paradiso.” But this is all rather cerebral. Let’s drop it and go on to the next question.
FJ: You’ve lamented that, unlike nineteenth-century writers, modern novelists deal primarily with “quotidian life and its discontents.” What are the grand questions you wrestle with in this trilogy, and did you come up with any answers?
JM: No, let’s not go on to the next question. Aaarggh! I’m overwhelmed! This is a great question, Faith, but I could spend the rest of the week trying to answer it! Let me attempt an end run around the problem. Let me talk briefly about the gap between the cosmic riddles I thought I’d be confronting in the Godhead Trilogy and the riddles I really did confront.
Before I actually wrote Towing Jehovah, I’d assumed it would be a satire on the common notion that, when a society loses faith in God, it ceases to be moral. But eventually I took the theme much more seriously, and I ended up giving theism its due. Once the crew of the Carpco Valparaiso discovers that nobody is peering down from Heaven, they lose their moral compass: murders and orgies start becoming the norm.
But only temporarily. By the end of act two, the Kantian categorical imperative has taken hold, and the crew starts behaving decently again. So a novel that began life as a kind of science-fictional joke—what if God died?—ended up addressing other sorts of questions. How do we account for ethical behavior? What might a non-theistic morality look like? Do we behave decently merely because we fear divine retribution, or are we a better species than that?
I went into Blameless in Abaddon knowing that the plot would revolve around God’s long overdue trial for crimes against humanity. But until I began investigating theodicy in depth, I had no idea that the case for the defense could be so rich and complex. Christian theologians have been explaining God’s ostensible complicity in human suffering for nearly 2,000 years, and they’ve accomplished a lot—so much, in fact, that I decided to have the World Court judges return a “not guilty” verdict. And here I thought a single case of childhood cancer would make the prosecution’s case!
But there’s a problem, of course. Because after you’ve hammered together your beautiful little theodicy—whether you’re Saint Augustine or C. S. Lewis—you’re still stuck with that suffering child. So while the World Court was ultimately willing to let God off the hook, you can be sure that James Morrow was not.
On the drawing board, The Eternal Footman was supposed to address the following theme: “No matter what the clerics tell us, death means nothing but oblivion, and it’s also the primary source from which the world’s religions draw their energy.” But during the composition process, I realized that death is a more ambiguous phenomenon than my original notes allowed. I still have no use for it in my personal life, but I can see how—from the broadest evolutionary and historical perspective—the case for death’s necessity is probably even better than the case for God’s goodness.
As for the notion that death-denial lies at the heart of most religions, I have one of the characters in Footman say this very explicitly. But I’m no longer prepared to reduce religion to that formula. Like Towing Jehovah, The Eternal Footman got me speculating about the genesis of ethical behavior, and I concluded that religiously-rooted narratives like the Good Samaritan certainly have their part to play.
FJ: Your stories are always fantastical yet grounded in the real world. What kinds of research do you do to keep the “science” in science fiction?
JM: Ever since This Is the Way the World Ends I’ve attempted to work simultaneously in two very different—perhaps even incompatible—idioms: the utterly fanciful and the utterly mundane. I’m intrigued by the artistic possibilities that unfold in that kind of literary no-man’s-land. One finds a similar landscape in Kafka’s stories, though without the strain of scientific rationality that runs through my work.
World Ends turns on a wholly supernatural premise—a temporary reprieve for the “unadmitted” victims of human extinction—but the disaster itself is treated realistically. I read dozens of books on the effects of nuclear blasts (short-term and long-term), the perverse logic of so-called “strategic doctrine,” and the Nuremberg precedent whereby the “unadmitted” put their murderers on trial. The situation is impossible, but the suffering is real.
The argument I make to myself goes something like this: if I do enough research, augmenting the premise of the moment with lots of gritty particulars, then at a certain point I will start to believe that premise, no matter how ridiculous. And if I believe it, then maybe the reader will believe it as well.
FJ: I’ve always admired your quirky complicated characters—people just on the edge of mainstream, neighbors with a twist.
JM: This issue of characterization dovetails neatly into the research question you asked earlier. It’s the other side of the coin: how might a writer invest his characters with enough humanity that we care about them even if they’re living through impossible events?
A common criticism of SF is that it settles for far too simplistic an understanding of the human psyche. In the words of Thomas Disch, the genre lacks “a decent sense of despair.” It’s a fair complaint, I feel. There’s certainly no evidence that, as our species becomes increasingly dependent on technology and our world becomes increasingly science-fictional, we’re losing our psychological complexity. Indeed, most people would argue that inner turmoil and ineffable existential dread have increased in the post-industrial age.
Nobody in a feudal fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or Dune experiences anxiety attacks of unknown origin. Nobody has to cope with migraines or hemorrhoids or suicidal depression. Maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe that kind of realism would destroy the very conventions that permit such novels to delight us. But I do worry when an author places a caste system at the center of a novel and then fails to ask searching questions about it.
Having said all this, let me hasten to confess I’ve always found characterization to be the hardest aspect of novel-writing. I conceive of my stories in terms of themes and situations first, human psychology second. If I were completely honest, I’d have to admit that the main reason I give my characters vivid occupations—Murray Katz processing snapshots, George Paxton carving tombstones, Nora Burkhart delivering flowers, Gerard Korty sculpting the Divine Comedy—is that it simplifies the characterization problem. This strategy affords me lots of “objective correlatives” for my character’s mental states, including their self-doubts and neuroses. That’s better than the stupid conceit of a worry-free Sardaukar, but it’s certainly not the highest variety of psychological fiction. I’m not Dostoyevsky.