Not all fiction, obviously, is attempting to supply humanity with an alternative to Christian redemption and matter-of-fact eternity. Many novelists claim to possess no higher aim than to please. But an insidious ambition may crouch behind their professed aim; for certain, any author whose end goal is to please (besides generate income) is making pleasure in his art the end, which comes down to treating art as an idol of sorts; this is true whether the author is conscious of it or not. That which is designed for no better purpose than to furnish entertainment is itself the vision. Readers and writers have testified as much. Margaret Atwood: “When I finish a book I like, no matter what the subject matter, or see a play or film, like Kurosawa’s Ran, which is swimming in blood and totally pessimistic, but so well done, I feel very good. I do feel hope. It’s the well-doneness that has that effect on me. Not the conclusion—not what is said, per se…if you have those capabilities, and you see something done very, very well, something that is true to itself, you can feel for two or three minutes that the clouds have parted and you’ve had a vision, of something of what music or art or writing can do, at its best” (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 14.) Those of us who have heard Atwood in interviews know that she is not a person seeking after truth. She wants to be pleased, not preached to. A book, to her, should be an end, not a means, at least not a means to what a conservative Christian would call good. She likes books that overturn traditions, though, or that at least run them down; those are the ones that she reads, and she writes them too. Therefore, she likes books that preach something, after all, as most readers do. If a book was ‘done very, very well’ but was optimistic and swimming in the grace of God through Jesus’ saving blood instead of ‘pessimistic’ and just ‘swimming in blood,’ would she praise it for its ‘well-doneness’? My guess is that she would object on the basis of the book being ‘preachy.’ What she is praising in Ran is a story that is pessimistic and gory but that has nothing but that for its end. The end is insular. By contrast, a redemption story that allegorizes what happened on the cross cannot be its own end because by its very character it points outside itself to a historical event. Once hope that is based in fact and history has been deemed unacceptable, pessimism is often accepted as the norm, pessimistic entertainment is often made the end, and the story is made to fit the situation outside the book: the author’s atheism. If such a work may be called beautiful in some sense, still it is like a statue that has no reference point. It stands for nothing but to be looked at. In the closed, futile world of a skeptical nihilist, something well done, and in that sense, beautiful, merely on the ground of being true to itself, might cause a sense of wellbeing—even a kind of hope. This hope does not spring, much less leap, or if it does, it jumps into the black hole of the lost society that lies outside the book.
A reader may get a feeling of hope through the recognition of beauty. But beauty by itself lacks the proposition of truth winning out, and therefore can only endow hope that will never arrive. I knew briefly an amiable man for whom Shakespeare was the bible; that is what he told me. He was a hippie with a PhD, and he wore large rings up and down his ears to signify how hip he was; hippie professors are dying out now, giving place to doctors who will not have as much as Shakespeare to look up to and depend on. How did the Shakespeare bible help that professor when he was in the hospital dying? Shakespeare was his bible, he said, and he was hoping for at least one more chapter in life. According to his wish, he did get another chapter. He attributed that grant to the bedside prayers of two Protestant Christians. He has since died, however, still believing, probably, that the Holy Bible is a book of fables. How merciful of God to show this unbelieving man the power of Christian prayer—and therefore, of God—before he died! Fancy a fabulous god answering prayer! He knew that the Creator of the World was responsible for the final chapter that he was given to live. He had to have known this; otherwise he would never have confessed to have gotten help through the prayers of Creationist Christians.
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