Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 15 Jan 2009 at 12:21 am
3MT : Literature and the Lone Wolf
Even small things like the design of book covers shows our society’s obsession with the heroic loner. Is it all entirely healthy?
A few days off in early January profitably spent wandering around the bookshops of London. With my resolutely middlebrow tastes in fiction (I like “stories”, rather than “experiments in form and structure”) I was struck by the consistent appearance of so many paperbacks on the shelves of Hatchards. The average paperback now has a cover based upon a sepia photograph, taken in the early part of the last century, in which we see an indistinct individual isolated in the centre of the frame. In most designs the subject has his back turned, or, if facing the book’s viewer, his face is obscured. It seems that the only way to sell a book today is to show a cityscape of anonymous, unknown, and unknowable people. Examples of this fashion, at least in UK editions, can be seen in Moriarty by John Gardner, Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom, The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, and One or the Other by Phillip Kerr.
I might have dismissed this as a little publishing tick, until I spotted more evidence that it is a genuine cultural phenomenon. The theatre world is convulsed in admiration of David Tennant’s playing of Hamlet. The production is a modern dress one, but the playbill shows Tennant standing on a mountain top with rolling fog in the background: a deliberate reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). In the original painting the wanderer stands with his back to the viewer, gazing out over the wonders and desolation of the wild landscape. His face is hidden to us, and we have no idea whether he is smiling at or horrified by the view before him. All of a sudden we are surrounded by representations of the nineteenth century Romantic movement (“Romantic” with a capital “R”— something more than our culture’s perennial obsession with moon-June-spoon amorousness). We see in our popular fiction, and our theatre, depictions of the lonely hero, the exceptional person, the individual genius, submerged in the anonymity of the city. Perhaps we might find some clue for all this in the origins of the original movement of Romantic idealism? As Encyclopædia Britannica puts it:
Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality… typified [by] … the Enlightenment and … 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general.
Romanticism idolises the individual genius, standing against the drudgery and monotony tolerated by the rest of the human race. As Britannica goes on to say:
Romanticism emphasises… the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Isn’t time we left off our hero-worship and our hero-fantasies? Isn’t it time that we decided the rugged individualist, the maverick, the lone ranger, has become boring and out-moded? Wouldn’t be wonderful if our popular fiction and culture celebrated the team-player, the consensus-finder, the cop who played it by the book (and helped to improve the book as he did so)? Mightn’t it be possible to explore the strengths and wonders that come from living in community, working with others and being prepared to grow and change by the working. Is there an alternative hero to all the agonised lone wolves?
I don’t know (and I realise that this is a wild thought)… wouldn’t someone who surrounded himself with a small team of like-minded people, committed to exploring what their purpose was together… wouldn’t that be someone worth celebrating? I wonder who we could find to fit that bill?
Wide-eyed on 08 Oct 2009 at 4:58 pm #
You make a very perceptive point, but I think that tragic loners resound for a reason. As you suggest, the lone hero is usually separated from others by his perception of the world around him, and it is usually a him – still now ‘human experience’ translates to ‘man’s experience’, apparently women’s experiences of the world are too conditioned by their gender, whereas men’s are considered neutral and universal. As such, the lone hero is a paradox; he, like the poet, is the voice to which one relates, the voice which assures us that we are not alone in our cynicism and often despair at the natural and social world.
Yet significantly, he is alone in the story, in his world, in the play, the poem or novel, and that is why we relate to him: in our communication with each other, we so often fail to feel a mutual understanding, we are so often afraid to speak as candidly as does Hamlet about our own cowardice, and our curiosity about death. We find in the tragic hero the friend we are too afraid to confide in in life, and also a reflection of the sense that sometimes we really are alone, the singular objectivty of a fictional character means that they can act as subjective comfort to any individual. Speaking of art, it might be worth thinking about Vladimir and Estragon, or the three characters in The Caretaker – they are all, in their ways, contemplating existence and death, and yet the plays are so frustratingly full of miscommunication and loneliness; the characters cannot comfort each other. It is an inevitably solitary journey, and the fictional lone hero is the ghost with its hand on our shoulder, filling the position that no other human, with a subjective consciousness of their own, could ever actually fill.
It would be encouraging if community was idealised in a similar way in art and the media, but in the most uplifting tales, it is. The loner has his place in standing for the inner struggle of every individual, but his real tragedy is that he cannot interact. We follow him while we are lost in our personal battles, but we go on to build lives with each other. That is the real world to which we return and for which we fight to keep a grip on our own sanity. Shall we say that we are with Hamlet up until he kills Polonius? And then, if we’re lucky, something or someone in our lives obliges us to reconnect, and we make a life, and probably a family, like John Maclane or Harry Potter.
Alison on 07 Jan 2010 at 7:11 am #
The high Romantics were not the first to ‘invent’ the image of the lonely figure, wandering en seule through the world… as with so many things, the Ancient Greeks got there first! The Romantic figure was based on the ideal of the Philosopher in search of himself through his solitary quest for answers. Plato, as the preeminent high Romantic, inspired (directly, indirectly) so many of the poets and painters of the Romantic period. The Romantics, by and large, loved almost all of the imagery, metaphor and myth of the Platonists. Think of the ideal of Transcendence, for example, and how it permeates so much of the rhetoric of Romanticism! Truth, Beauty, Love! cries George Emerson, in E. M. Forster’s “Room With a View,” giving voice to the tenets of Romanticism Forster pokes fun at (because by the time the Modernists come along, the Romantics seem misty-eyed dreamers, wandering vaguely through the world in search of some far-off Utopian ideal they will never attain). Anyway: late night thoughts prompted by your post! I will now be following your blog, my man! Thank you for creating it.