Catharsis: Why We Care What Happens To Frodo

Is there a point to any of this? Or was Macbeth right?

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing," (V.5.19-28)

There is no doubt that, as Kant says in the Critique of Judgment, life seems "purposive," it seems to have meaning. In the question on Divine Providence in the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas quotes Holy Scripture as evidence that the universe has meaning: "[Divine Wisdom] reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly," (Wis. 8:1).

He goes on to explain that, because all agents undertake actions for a reason, and God is the agent in the creating and sustaining of all the exists, all that exists does so for the reason he intended it to. To put it another way, when I do something, I do it for a reason. Everything that ends up happening as a result of my action (everything that's under my control), then, happened for that reason. But everything that exists, God caused to be; therefore, everything that exists exists for the reason God created it.

We can know, then, using reason alone, apart from faith, that everything has a purpose. Unfortunately, we can't know what that purpose is. Why not? Because we don't know everything. Gandalf said it right, "Even the very wise cannot see all ends," (The Fellowship of the Ring, 74). Because we can't know how everything is connected, and because we can't know how everything will end up, in our own lives or at the end of time, we can't know why things happen the way they do.

Say I built a machine that turned peanuts into peanut butter. Now say you were a sentient peanut. As you went through the machine you would be able to learn a little bit about how the machine worked, but not everything. Also, as you went through the machine, you would have no idea where you were going to end up. Only once you got turned into peanut butter would you realize what it was all about.

In the Poetics, Aristotle called Literature "cathartic," meaning that the reading of Literature (or watching of plays or movies, or listening of music, etc.) purges frustrations pent up as a result of conflict and tension in the narrative. He also says that art imitates life and reality (the Greek is mimesis, as in English "mimic"). In other words, the emotions that we live through in microcosm in works of art be they literary, musical, architectural, or what have you) are the same emotions we live through in real life.

Literature gives us the opportunity to live a second life, to put ourselves in the characters' shoes and do what they did and see what they saw. This is why, as Joseph Campbell points out, protagonists must be relatable. They must be down-to-earth and believable like Luke Skywalker or Frodo or Clark Kent. Or a peasant carpenter from Nazareth, for that matter. Either that or they must be champions, larger than life heroes that can fight on behalf of us little guys and do the things we never could, like Achilles or Superman. Or Christ, the King of the Jews and God Incarnate.

Literature is cathartic because it also allows us to see the ending, to see the meaning behind everything that happens in this second life, to learn lessons about life and reality from the people and events we encounter in art. It's like getting to regret bad decisions and glory in good ones without having to actually make them. This is not to say that the purpose of Literature is to teach us lessons; it is to say that it does, as a result of what it is, potential reality, imagined and given form by an artist.

Tale As Old As Time

All works of art, no matter what the medium, are at the same time both new and old, both novel and traditional. As William Faulkner put it in his speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, one of the artist’s primary tasks is to “[leave] no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.” All artists ever do is tell a very old story in a new way—for a new time and place. Drawing on their own particular experience of the world, artists retell “the old universal truths” insofar as they have experienced them. To use Michael Oakeshott’s term, artists “re-create” the world and the human condition according to their own experience of it, and insodoing, they give life to and delineate the eternal principles of Truth underlying all that exists.

In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot called this simultaenous perception in the artist of both the universal past and his own particular present the “historical sense.” “The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

This is the principle which Joseph Campbell picks up on in his work in comparative my-thology. All myths, all great stories are really just different cultures’ takes on the same fundamental ideas and principles. All stories have their foundation in the same basic human experiences, thoughts, and desires. More than that, they have their foundation in the same truths of the world in which we live. That is what artists do, tell very old stories with new characters and new imagery based on their own personal experience of the world. That is what they must do, for art re-creates the world, and the truth in the world never changes, it merely takes on new shapes and faces.

Take for instance one of Campbell’s own favorite myths—the heroic journey. All heroes follow the same simple pattern: Battle, Journey, Homecoming. Though the pattern expresses itself differently across different times and cultures, nevertheless the pattern remains the same. Let’s look at a few specific examples:

Odysseus cleansing his house of the suitors.

Odysseus left his home, wife Penelope, and son Telemachus in Ithaca for ten years to fight in the Trojan War. After his victory, he had to travel another ten years in order to reach home. The point of this journey was that the hero should learn how to leave the Battle behind and prepare the way for a life of peace. Upon returning home, Odysseus finds his house overrun with potential usurpers. He applies the things he learned on his journey to the cleansing of his house, setting it in order once and for all.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante must fight his way through Hell, literally. He must then journey up Mount Purgatory, being purified more and more along the way, allowing himself to be prepared for his eventual homecoming in Paradise, in which he is granted the vision of God himself.

Christ our Savior came down from Heaven to do Battle against Sin by dying on the cross, even to the point of descending into Hell. Like Odysseus, Christ waits in order that the victory he won may be perfectly applied to his Body the Church through his heroic patronage, until the time is right for him to return and set his house in order once and for all.

Like every element of art and literature, this heroic pattern contains inherant within it implications and meanings beyond a simple tale being told. This is not to say that the any work of art proposes to send an explicit message. If that were the case it would be mere propaganda. That being said, by virtue of the truth that lies in its characters and events, it can be more than just characters and events. These characters and events, insofar as they are representative of larger truths and realities, are able to signify them, stand for them, personify and incarnate them.

In this case of the heroic journey, we can draw an analogy to the general experience of Mankind. All men must fight their own Battle for the principles of Truth, Jusice, and Honor. All men must endeavor on the Journey to bring the victory home, work to restore order to their sphere of influence. And it is the Homecoming, the setting into Order of our household for which we fight, and for which we hope. By extension from this analogy, we are all called to be heroes, in our own specific times and places—we are all called to live a heroic life, especially in those mundane things which occupy everyday existence. We must fight for Truth, Justice, and Beauty, sacrifice our lives to the principles which are greater than us, and the people whom we love. More than just being true for us men, however, we have seen how this heroic journey is true universally and eternally by virtue of the Christ having lived it out himself.

It turns out, then, that his is the Truth that poets, painters, composers, and authors have been recreating over and over again throughout history, bringing it to us in new ways, for new times and new peoples. Insofar as any character (fictional or real) is heroic, then, he is Christ-like, and the title of an old film about his life seems all the more apt—The Greatest Story Ever Told.

The Dark Knight Rises Teaser Analysis or The Three Stages Of Epic Literature

I just don't know if enough has been made of the Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer which debuted before Harry Potter a few weeks ago. Maybe it helps that I saw it that very night on a digital screen in a theater with mind-blowing sound. I flipped the eff out. I think that was a warranted reaction, though.

I just came across a fantastic shot-by-shot breakdown of the amazingness that is this teaser, so you should read that, and I'll just add some stuff.

First of all, the author does a fantastic job of drawing the visual parallel between Batman and Gotham City as presented in the trailer. Batman is an Epic hero, like Achilles or Odysseus before him. Or Jesus for that matter. In Nolan's Bat-verse he follows the same pattern they all do point-for-point. The author of the article relates Nolan's Batman to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey," which is entirely valid. The majority of what Campbell did in comparative mythology is good and true.

At any rate, an Epic hero is always defined by his polis, the city from which he hails, for which he fights, and to which he hopes to return as king (if he's not already). For Odysseus it was Ithaca, for Aeneas it was Rome, for Christ it's the New Jerusalem. Not only is the hero defined by his polis and vice-versa, however, their fates are so completely intertwined that one could almost say the hero is the city, or at least an extension of it. Likewise with Batman and Gotham City.

As we hear Ra's al Ghul repeat from Batman Begins, a hero must be "more than a man." He must "devote himself to an ideal." A hero is not a man; he is a principle. As Alfred points out in The Dark Knight, he cannot be bound by the concerns of ordinary men. This was Hector's mistake in The Iliad, putting family and clan before duty, honor, justice, and his polis.

Much of the teaser consists of Gotham buildings in the process of crumbling. This is because Batman too is crumbling. He is Gotham's savior and champion. If he falls, all Gotham falls. Throughout the trailer Batman himself is portrayed as weak and ready to break.

(Interestingly, Batman and Commissioner Gordon can also be identified with one another. Their journeys parallel each other perfectly, as they do almost page-for-page in Nolan's inspiration Batman: Year One. As Gordon says in the teaser, they "were in this together." With Batman and Gotham hurting, it only makes sense that Gordon would end up in a hospital bed too.)

The Epic hero's journey can be divided into three stages: The Battle, The Journey (in which the hero descends to the Underworld), and the Homecoming, at which point he (re)founds his city and establishes the peace for which he fought. These three stages mirror the Tragic and Comedic stages, Infernal (Hell), Purgatorial (Purgatory), and Paradisal (Heaven). It is in Batman Begins that Batman must fight for his very right to exist. He struggles against all reason to accomplish his goal: to establish himself as an effective source of justice and order in Gotham. By the end of the first film he has successfully done this and won a small victory.

In The Dark Knight, Batman descends into the Underworld of the Joker's chaos, as does all of Gotham with him (even its favorite son Harvey Dent). Batman must wade through the Joker's madness before peace can be reign. Like the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, Batman's is a journey of purgatorial suffering, a journey through the valley of the shadow of death. Fittingly, Gotham will be couched in the cold death of winter for portions of The Dark Knight Rises.

Batman and Gotham have not yet emerged from this valley into which the Joker cast them. The Joker made Gotham question the validity of Batman's role as King, to the point that Batman himself questioned it. Something we know he continues to do into The Dark Knight Rises from his conversation with Gordon.

Bane is here to kick Batman, Gotham City, and Commissioner Gordon while they're down. The Joker has left them tired and weak, and Bane wants to take advantage of the situation and usurp Batman's throne, exactly as he seeks to do in the comic books. It would not be insignificant or misguided to compare Bane to the suitors which attempt to usurp Odysseys' throne in his absence. I guarantee that the climax of The Dark Knight Rises will be Batman returning to his great hall to cleanse it of Bane's evil.

By the way, it should be clear that the perfect title for this last installment would have been Gotham City, as this is when Batman must "rise up" and defeat the evil outside and within once and for all, inaugurating an (as far as we know everlasting) era of peace and order in his kingdom. Understandably, though, they wanted to reference their previous blockbuster explicitly and went with the second-best choice.