The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Fatted Ram, Part 3

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy never actually mentions the hedgehog and the fox, but he does talk at length about another animal made famous by an ancient Greek. About a third of the way from the end of the novel, he inserts an extended aside about Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, which allegedly proves that all motion is impossible. Tolstoy notes that calculus, “a modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small,” offers one possible solution, and he goes on to make the same argument for historical science:

In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units…Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history. To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of history lie.

Reading this section over again, I realized for the first time that I’d seen much the same language somewhere else. More than seventy years before the Foundation series, Tolstoy was talking about psychohistory, and in remarkably similar terms. For Tolstoy, the perfect historical science would be a matter of integrating all the infinitesimals of individual human behavior; for John W. Campbell, it would take the form of symbolic logic; for Isaac Asimov, it was something like the ideal gas law. (If there’s one thing we can say for sure, though, it’s that Asimov wasn’t directly influenced by Tolstoy—he says in his memoirs that he tried and repeatedly failed to finish War and Peace.) And all three men were interested in seeking what they conceived as the laws of history, which would allow it to be treated as a science with the same explanatory and predictive power as physics or chemistry. The problem, of course, is that this collides headlong with the troublesome notion of free will, as Tolstoy writes in a lengthy epilogue to his novel. The italics are mine:

In history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression for the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life…Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws as its problem…And if history has for its object the study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the narration of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.

And Tolstoy was never able to reconcile his unmatched knowledge, as a novelist, of the unique qualities of individual men and women with his desire for a calculus of history, which requires, as Isaiah Berlin observes in The Hedgehog and the Fox, that all of its infinitesimals be “reasonably uniform.”

If Tolstoy were alive today, he’d presumably be interested in the rise of data journalism, which represents an attempt to implement some of these principles in practice. In reality, it’s as vulnerable to error and wishful thinking as anything else, and much of it represents the same old punditry dressed up with a fancy new infographic. Both the qualitative and quantitative forms of political coverage suffer from a tendency that Tolstoy identified nearly a century and a half ago:

Postulating some generalization as the goal of the movement of humanity, the historians study the men of whom the greatest number of monuments have remained: kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes, and journalists, to the extent to which in their opinion these persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction. But…the connection of the people with the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary assumption that the collective will of the people is always transferred to the men whom we have noticed.

Replace “men” with “information” and you have a fairly good critique of the fundamental weakness of so much data journalism. Just because an available set of numbers is interesting, seemingly correlates with broader trends, and fits nicely into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean that it has predictive or analytical value, and equally important factors may go unremarked. And Tolstoy’s original point about the overemphasis on great men holds as well. Trump, if nothing else, is one of “the men whom we have noticed.” We can hardly help it. And this makes it hard to look past each day’s new outrage to get at anything deeper.

So where does that leave us? Tolstoy, unsurprisingly, ended by becoming cynical about intellectual claims of any kind, to the point of sounding a little like Trump himself, as Berlin writes: “Tolstoy looks on [intellectuals] as clever fools, spinners of empty subtleties, blind and deaf to the realities which simpler hearts can grasp, and from time to time he lets fly at them with the brutal violence of a grim, anarchical old peasant, avenging himself, after years of silence, on the silly, chattering, town-bred monkeys, so knowing, and full of words to explain everything, and superior, and impotent and empty.” (Tolstoy’s trust in “the untouched depths of the mass of the people” also has a slightly more sinister ring to it today.) Some degree of skepticism is obviously warranted, even if, as Berlin notes, it can all too easily turn into despair:

This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos—a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.

The paradox of psychohistory—which we see in both Tolstoy and Asimov—is that it becomes especially attractive in wartime, when our desire to predict the future feels particularly urgent, even as the events themselves make nonsense of our pretensions. That’s worth remembering now, too. And perhaps the only lesson that we can take from all of this lies in Berlin’s conclusion: “We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand…We ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.”

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Fatted Ram, Part 2

Almost a year ago, on the morning of the inauguration, I wrote on this blog: “Even now, I find myself wavering between seeing it as an outcome that could have gone either way or as a development, in retrospect, that feels inevitable.” That’s true not just of this election, but of human existence in general. As Isaiah Berlin puts it in The Hedgehog and the Fox: “Practical wisdom is to a large degree knowledge of the inevitable; of what, given our world order, could not but happen; and conversely, of how things cannot be, or could not have been, done; of why some schemes must, cannot help but, end in failure, although for this no demonstrative or scientific reason can be given.” The irony, of course, is that if fifty thousand votes had gone the other way last November, we’d be drawing a starkly different set of lessons from a confluence of circumstances that were fundamentally the same. In his discussion of Tolstoy’s view of war, Berlin brilliantly skewers the fallacy of so much of this kind of political and historical analysis:

With great force [Tolstoy] argues that only those orders or decisions issued by the commanders now seem particularly crucial (and are concentrated upon by historians) which happened to coincide with what later actually occurred; whereas a great many other exactly similar, perfectly good orders and decisions, which seemed no less crucial and vital to those who were issuing them at the time, are forgotten because, having been foiled by unfavorable turns of events, they were not, because they could not be, carried out, and for this reason now seem historically unimportant.

All history, to some extent, consists of retroactively picking out explanations that happen to fit with what actually happened, and since we tend to think in terms of narratives and protagonists, perhaps the most common model of all is the myth of the great man—and the gender isn’t an accident. Tolstoy is rightfully contemptuous of this whole notion, as Berlin notes:

There is a natural law whereby the lives of all human beings no less than those of nature are determined; but…men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues and heroic vices, and called by them “great men.” What are great men? They are ordinary human beings, who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name, than recognize their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their will and ideals.

Any individuals who believe that they can somehow influence the course of events are gravely mistaken, and Tolstoy devotes much of War and Peace to the castigation of “these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing, desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid facing the bleak truths…[and] all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness.”

And it’s revealing that Tolstoy reserves his greatest scorn for the one person whom we’d be least likely to describe in such terms. His portrait of Napoleon is both hilariously unfair and not entirely inaccurate, and although any such comparison is inherently ridiculous, it’s hard not to read this description without thinking of Trump:

[Napoleon spoke] like a man who values every moment of his time and does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but is sure he will always say the right thing and say it well…It was plain that Balashëv’s personality did not interest him at all. Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will…The commencement of his speech had obviously been made with the intention of demonstrating the advantages of his position and showing that he was nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had begun talking, and the more he talked the less could he control his words. The whole purport of his remarks now was evidently to exalt himself and insult Alexander—just what he had least desired at the commencement of the interview…He evidently wanted to do all the talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so prone.

And a little while later, we read: “It was evident that he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he did it.”

There are moments when Tolstoy deliberately takes this portrait too far, as Berlin writes of the views of the historian Nikolai Kareyev: “Napoleon may not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a process which would have occurred unaltered without him; the ‘important people’ are less important than they themselves or the more foolish historians may suppose, but neither are they shadows; individuals…have social purposes, and some among them have strong wills too, and these sometimes transform the lives of communities.” This rings true of both Napoleon and Trump. But so does the following passage, in which Berlin goes beyond the hedgehog and the fox to uncover an animal that has been lurking in the background:

There is a particularly vivid simile [in War and Peace] in which the great man is likened to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter. Because the ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bellwether for the rest of the flock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the flock, and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his will. He thinks this and the flock may think it too. Nevertheless the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play, but slaughter—a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great men of history.

If Jared Kushner had actually read The Hedgehog and the Fox, I’d like to think that these lines would have given him pause, if only for a second. Tomorrow, I’ll conclude by considering what Tolstoy and Berlin have to say about the problem—which Kushner should be taking especially seriously these days—of “how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise,” and whether it’s at all possible to predict what might come next.

The great scene theory

“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” Thomas Carlyle once wrote, and although this statement was criticized almost at once, it accurately captures the way many of us continue to think about historical events, both large and small. There’s something inherently appealing about the idea that certain exceptional personalities—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon—can seize and turn the temper of their time, and we see it today in attempts to explain, say, the personal computing revolution though the life of someone like Steve Jobs. The alternate view, which was expressed forcefully by Herbert Spencer, is that history is the outcome of impersonal social and economic forces, in which a single man or woman can do little more than catalyze trends that are already there. If Napoleon had never lived, the theory goes, someone very much like him would have taken his place. It’s safe to say that any reasonable view of history has to take both theories into account: Napoleon was extraordinary in ways that can’t be fully explained by his environment, even if he was inseparably a part of it. But it’s also worth remembering that much of our fascination with such individuals arises from our craving for narrative structures, which demand a clear hero or villain. (The major exception, interestingly, is science fiction, in which the “protagonist” is often humanity as a whole. And the transition from the hard science fiction of the golden age to messianic stories like Dune, in which the great man reasserts himself with a vengeance, is a critical turning point in the genre’s development.)

You can see a similar divide in storytelling, too. One school of thought implicitly assumes that a story is a delivery system for great scenes, with the rest of the plot serving as a scaffold to enable a handful of awesome moments. Another approach sees a narrative as a series of small, carefully chosen details designed to create an emotional effect greater than the sum of its parts. When it comes to the former strategy, it’s hard to think of a better example than Game of Thrones, a television series that often seems to be marking time between high points: it can test a viewer’s patience, but to the extent that it works, it’s because it constantly promises a big payoff around the corner, and we can expect two or three transcendent set pieces per season. Mad Men took the opposite tack: it was made up of countless tiny but riveting choices that gained power from their cumulative impact. Like the theories of history I mentioned above, neither type of storytelling is necessarily correct or complete in itself, and you’ll find plenty of exceptions, even in works that seem to fall clearly into one category or the other. It certainly doesn’t mean that one kind of story is “better” than the other. But it provides a useful way to structure our thinking, especially when we consider how subtly one theory shades into the other in practice. The director Howard Hawks famously said that a good movie consisted of three great scenes and no bad scenes, which seems like a vote for the Game of Thrones model. Yet a great scene doesn’t exist in isolation, and the closer we look at stories that work, the more important those nonexistent “bad scenes” start to become.

I got to thinking about this last week, shortly after I completed the series about my alternative movie canon. Looking back at those posts, I noticed that I singled out three of these movies—The Night of the Hunter, The Limey, and Down with Love—for the sake of one memorable scene. But these scenes also depend in tangible ways on their surrounding material. The river sequence in The Night of the Hunter comes out of nowhere, but it’s also the culmination of a language of dreams that the rest of the movie has established. Terence Stamp’s unseen revenge in The Limey works only because we’ve been prepared for it by a slow buildup that lasts for more than twenty minutes. And Renée Zellweger’s confessional speech in Down with Love is striking largely because of how different it is from the movie around it: the rest of the film is relentlessly active, colorful, and noisy, and her long, unbroken take stands out for how emphatically it presses the pause button. None of the scenes would play as well out of context, and it’s easy to imagine a version of each movie in which they didn’t work at all. We remember them, but only because of the less showy creative decisions that have already been made. And at a time when movies seem more obsessed than ever with “trailer moments” that can be spliced into a highlight reel, it’s important to honor the kind of unobtrusive craft required to make a movie with no bad scenes. (A plot that consists of nothing but high points can be exhausting, and a good story both delivers on the obvious payoffs and maintains our interest in the scenes when nothing much seems to be happening.)

Not surprisingly, writers have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues, and it’s noteworthy that one of the most instructive examples comes from Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is nothing less than an extended criticism of the great man theory of history: Tolstoy brings Napoleon onto the scene expressly to emphasize how insignificant he actually is, and the novel concludes with a lengthy epilogue in which the author lays out his objections to how history is normally understood. History, he argues, is a pattern that emerges from countless unobservable human actions, like the sum of infinitesimals in calculus, and because we can’t see the components in isolation, we have to content ourselves with figuring out the laws of their behavior in the aggregate. But of course, this also describes Tolstoy’s strategy as a writer: we remember the big set pieces in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but they emerge from the diligent, seemingly impersonal collation of thousands of tiny details, recorded with what seems like a minimum of authorial interference. (As Victor Shklovsky writes: “[Tolstoy] describes the object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time.”) And the awesome moments in his novels gain their power from the fact that they arise, as if by historical inevitability, from the details that came before them. Anna Karenina was still alive at the end of the first draft, and it took her author a long time to reconcile himself to the tragic climax toward which his story was driving him. Tolstoy had good reason to believe that great scenes, like great men, are the product of invisible forces. But it took a great writer to see this.

“At this hour of the morning, the prison was quiet…”

Note: This post is the ninth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 8. You can read the earlier installments here.)

There’s an unspoken assumption among many readers and critics that a good author should base his work entirely on personal experience, either derived from his own life or those of people he knows, and that it’s a sign of weakness to be overly dependent on research. If it’s clear that a writer has relied heavily on secondary sources to tell a story, or, worse, if the nature of those sources is readily detectable, it’s sometimes treated as a sort of lapse, even as an embarrassment. It’s generally agreed, for instance, that Tolstoy’s material on the Freemasons in War and Peace was based on his reading, not on firsthand information: he wasn’t a Mason himself, and other Masons wouldn’t be likely to share any details with him directly, so the scenes depicting Pierre’s initiation—which are believed to be fundamentally accurate—were derived from a handful of books. I’ve read critics who treat this as an objective flaw in an otherwise unimpeachable masterpiece, as if the knowledge that Tolstoy had to do a bit of research undermines our impression of him as an omniscient sage of the human world. And this flies in the face of the fact that all of War and Peace is a monumental work of research and construction, since it contains so much that Tolstoy never could have witnessed himself.

And this applies as much, if not more so, to contemporary authors. Ian McEwan, for example, based large sections of Atonement on the memoirs of Lucilla Andrews, who served as a nurse during the London blitz. McEwan wasn’t shy about giving credit to Andrews—he mentions her in his acknowledgments—but when a few readers pointed out how certain details in his novel seemed to be taken directly from her work, there was a mild outcry, with some even calling it a form of plagiarism. I doubt that anyone would have raised the issue if McEwan had conducted interviews with Andrews directly, but the revelation that parts of his story were transparently indebted to another book made some readers uncomfortable. The plagiarism charge was ridiculous, of course, as none other than Thomas Pynchon, a monster of research himself, made clear in an open letter to his publisher:

Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do.

Pynchon’s assessment of research as a kind of period of consolidation until “we can begin to make a few things of our own up” is absolutely correct, and library research is part of nearly every ambitious novelist’s bag of tricks. Research, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is less about factual accuracy than about providing the material for dreams, a gathering of “engaging details” that can furnish and feather the fictional nest we’ve created. (That last phrase is Anthony Lane’s, discussing Gustave Flaubert’s own voluminous research for Salammbo.) That’s true of literary as well as popular fiction: Saul Bellow had never been to Africa when he wrote Henderson the Rain King, but he was able to draw on travel accounts, textbooks, his own experience as a student of anthropology, and above all his own peerless imagination to create a remarkably convincing story, as even Norman Mailer admitted: “I don’t know if any other American writer has done Africa so well.” And it’s particularly indispensable for a novelist working in a field like suspense, where so much of the narrative necessarily deals with aspects of human life—murder, crime, conspiracy—that few writers have the luxury or desire to experience directly.

This was particularly true of City of Exiles, which I knew from the start would include long sequences set in the British prison system. I didn’t have any expectation of spending much time there myself, so I was forced to fall back on a handful of useful secondary sources: the memoirs of Charles Bronson, best known these days as the subject of a movie starring Tom Hardy, and especially the diaries of the suspense novelist Jeffrey Archer, who was sent to prison for perjury. We first see the result in Chapter 8, in which Powell and Wolfe pay a visit to Belmarsh to see the imprisoned gangster Vasylenko. Most of the details here, like the corridor that changes from lavender to green to blue as you enter a secure area, or the description of the interview room, walled with glass on all four sides like a fish tank, were taken from Archer’s book, and I draw on it repeatedly for all of the prison material that follows. I’m not sure if admitting this counts as a breach in the contract between an author and his readers—a suspense novelist, after all, is often expected to know something about everything—but I don’t see any harm in acknowledging my sources. Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to write this novel at all. And we’re going to be spending a lot of time behind bars…

The writing life: dealing with doubt

Every writer goes through periods of depression and discouragement. Part of this is due to the daily nature of the work itself: it’s solitary, not immediately rewarding, and needs to be pursued without visible result for years on end. It isn’t surprising, then, that alcoholism is the most common occupational hazard of being a novelist, or that so many writers and creative artists end up in therapy, only occasionally with useful artistic results. Even more disheartening are what I might call existential threats to the writer’s life—times when your everyday discouragement seems inseparable from the daunting nature of the novelistic enterprise itself, until it seems that you’d be better off giving up writing entirely. What do you do then?

The first thing to keep in mind is that for a project as massive as a novel, you’re always going to be approaching it in a range of moods. A good novel generally takes at least a year or so of daily effort, and in that time, you’re going to start writing at moments when you feel enthusiastic or exhausted, optimistic or despairing, charged with energy or bored out of your mind. It’s tempting to think that the book itself is causing these reactions, but really, it isn’t the novel that’s changed; you have. And one of the challenges of becoming a writer is to develop habits of mind that allow you to write on all kinds of days, and to separate your reactions to the novel from more incidental emotions. In the end, it’s habit, not talent, that saves you.

A second, perhaps more useful point to remember is that all good writers have an ambivalent relationship toward their early drafts. If you think that the initial version of a chapter is pretty bad, well, it probably is, at least compared to what it will ultimately become—but that doesn’t mean you should stop and fix it now. What you already have is more than enough: a rough sketch, on paper, that covers all of the essential points of the scene at hand. As such, even if it’s badly written, it’s infinitely superior to a perfect but unwritten chapter that exists only in your imagination. After all, a first draft doesn’t need to be good; its only indispensable requirement is that it exist. And every writer you admire has been where you are now. Raymond Carver, in the Paris Review, put it best:

It’s instructive, and heartening both, to look at the early drafts of great writers. I’m thinking of the photographs of galleys belonging to Tolstoy, to name one writer who loved to revise. I mean, I don’t know if he loved it or not, but he did a great deal of it. He was always revising, right down to the time of page proofs. He went through and rewrote War and Peace eight times and was still making corrections on the galleys. Things like this should hearten every writer whose first drafts are dreadful, like mine are.

The third, possibly most important reminder is that all those basic, stupid, elementary habits that you’ve developed as a writer—to write every day, to cut ten percent of every first draft, to wait until the entire book is complete before going back to revise—will eventually, if honestly pursued, work their magic. When I’m reading over a first draft and don’t like what I’m seeing, I ask myself: Can I envision a good version of this chapter? If the answer is yes, I move on, because I know that a better version will emerge after the necessary work of rereading and revision. Sometimes, though, the answer is no, which implies that the chapter itself, or even the entire novel, is misconceived. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about what to do when this happens, and when, if ever, you should scrap a project entirely.

Fanfic and the writer’s apprenticeship

Fuel Your Writing has a nice little piece this morning on whether fanfic is worth a writer’s time. I have two tidbits of my own:

1. There exists a Kung Fu Panda fanfic, “A Different Lesson,” that is 632,000 words long. (According to TV Tropes, “very little of it is filler; there’s just that much going on.”) By way of comparison, War and Peace weighs in at a mere 460,000 words. I don’t have much else to say about this, except that it’s possibly my favorite fact ever.

2. If you believe, as I do, that a writer’s apprenticeship is best served in public, then fanfic is incredibly useful. Back when pulp magazines were still thriving and a strong market existed for paperback originals, it was more than possible for a young writer to learn his craft in public, with actual readers, and even get paid for the privilege. These days, when most pulp magazines have folded and publishing is increasingly focused on a few big books, that kind of public apprenticeship is all but impossible, except for a lucky few.

Which is where fanfic comes in. Given the broad range of fanfic that exists—for every television show, most big movies, and an incredibly large number of literary sources—it isn’t hard for a writer to find a fandom that might accommodate the kind of writing he or she wants to do. And stories written in a popular fandom, if executed with even a modicum of style, will be read, for pleasure, by real people. Even novels. Even screenplays. Even radically experimental works. And the author will get feedback, much of it encouraging, from people under no obligation to read his or her work at all.

Writing this sort of fiction, of course, poses problems of its own. Among other things, a fanfic writer’s capacity for creating original characters can easily wither and die. But if approached with care, fanfic can be an extraordinary opportunity for a writer to develop craft and find a voice in front of a real audience. (Naomi Novik, among other novelists, has credited her work in fanfic with much of her development as an author.) Anyone interested in writing for a living would certainly be advised to consider it.