Interpretations of "This is the End" and "The Night Circus"

When I began writing this blog, it was originally concerned with narrative theory, and this is a topic I have returned to occasionally over the years. In today's post, I am going to discuss narrative theory again and apply my model of interpretation to the Seth Rogen film This is the End and to the novel The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I may also discuss my life again towards the end of the post. I have thought about narrative theory, or something perhaps more aptly called 'story theory', for many, many years now. I don't know if my approach is original, or if it is a kind of distillation of the types of critical analyses I read when I was twenty-two and a student of English Literature. Perhaps my readers can decide if my approach is original or not.

The key word in my theory (and yes I know I know the term 'theory' is controversial, as is the claim that it is 'mine', that others have not thought of it before) is rhetoric. Stories are a form of rhetoric.  'Rhetoric' can be defined as 'the art of persuasive speech'. The term 'rhetoric' has a long history in literature studies – in 1961, Wayne Booth published a famous book The Rhetoric of Fiction which laid the groundwork for much narrative theory formulated since. More recently, in 2007,  Richard Walsh published The Rhetoric of Fictionality, riffing on the title of Booth's book. I read both books in early 2018 when undertaking a research paper under the supervision of University of Auckland professor and resident narrative theory expert Brian Boyd, and what struck me about both books is that neither writer engages with the idea that, if fiction is rhetoric, it must be trying to persuade the reader or viewer of something, by definition. This failure, the use of the word 'rhetoric' as betokening a key idea without any use at all of the associated word 'persuasion', has seemed to me then and afterwards a profoundly stupid error made by people who are reputedly clever. In my view, stories are rhetorical in the sense that they seek to persuade the reader or viewer of a proposition about the real world, or some set of propositions about the real world. Usually these propositions are ones the story's audience already wants to believe. Stories are poultices or bromides used to sooth the internal contradictions that vex the collective psyche.

I can make this clearer with a couple of examples, examples I have used before. The 1977 film Star Wars is devoted to the proposition or thesis "Good always triumphs over evil". In order to make the case that good always triumphs over evil, the storytellers have to present evil as vastly more powerful than good, and good as the victor despite this. In the Western tradition, stories depend on conflict, and in my theory this conflict manifests as a tension between two contradictory propositions about the world. In Star Wars, the thesis is "Good always triumphs over evil" and the antithesis is "Sometimes evil triumphs over good". In Pulp Fiction, the antithesis is "It's cool to be a gangster" and the thesis is "Being a gangster gets you killed". In both Star Wars and Pulp Fiction, the thesis triumphs at the end. I need to make a few points about this theory. At its heart, any story worth being called a story is concerned with abstract ideas (Othello is concerned with jealousy and Don Quixote is concerned with chivalric ideals vs. reality) but a story very infrequently makes the abstract ideas on which it is founded explicit. Interpretation is required to bring the abstract ideas to the surface and different people interpret stories in different ways. It is difficult to prove one interpretation correct over all others. Nevertheless I believe that any good story has a correct interpretation, although it can take a lot of thought to arrive at the right destination. (For instance, I believe, now, that the interpretation of Rambo I proposed in the post Politics in Fiction was not quite right but this does not invalidate the claim that a correct interpretation is always possible). A related point is that some stories do not resolve the conflict that is at the heart of the story, but, in my view, such stories are inconclusive and leave the reader or viewer dissatisfied.

I would like to offer a more complex model for story structure. At the beginning of a film or other type of story, a problem is presented. This problem is a problem within the culture or ideology of society at large, and can be construed as a question. In Star Wars, the question is "How can good triumph over evil when evil is vastly more powerful than good?" In West Side Story, the question is "How can the different social groups that make up America come together to form a harmonious whole?". At Plot Point 1, a possible solution to the problem is presented. In Star Wars, the solution that is mooted is the Force – Obiwan Kinobe suggests, not long after we first meet him, that good can triumph over evil because it has the Force on its side. In West Side Story, the possible solution is love – the different groups that make up America can be brought together by romantic relationships. At Plot Point 2, this solution receives its strongest test. In Star Wars, the light sabre duel between Darth Vader and Obiwan Kinobe on board the Death Star marks Plot Point 2. Vader says, "Your powers are weak, old man. I shall strike you down." Obiwan replies, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Obwan is indeed "struck down". The third act involves the effort by the forces of good, the rebels, to destroy the Death Star, without Obiwan's assistance. Just before Luke fires the missile that brings about the destruction of the Death Star, he hears Obiwan in his head, saying "Use the Force, Luke!" (It is also significant that Luke has just been saved from Darth Vader by Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon – Solo's full allegiance to the side of good having been in doubt up until then.) In West Side Story, Plot Point 2 occurs when Tony kills Bernardo, and the final act moves almost inexorably towards its tragic conclusion, the death of Tony. In Star Wars, the potential solution, the Force, proves effective; in West Side Story, the potential solution, love, proves ineffective, and this is why West Side Story is a tragedy and Star Wars isn't. West Side Story acts as a clarion call for action to address conflict between different ethnic groups, whereas Star Wars leaves the audience with a somewhat complacent sense that good will inevitably prevail. 

The model for story structure I have just presented is deeply indebted to Syd Field's theory of screenwriting outlined in his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. The difference between my theory and his is that I am putting the emphasis on the abstract, rhetorical dimension of stories, rather than on the motivations of characters. Before moving on, I would like to draw attention to two important details related to the examples I have given. I have yet to work out a satisfactory explanation for what happens at Plot Point 2 – although Plot Point 2 occurs in most stories, is generally the lowest point for the protagonists and results in a simplification of the story, it is difficult to form a generalisation about Plot Point 2 that is true for all stories. The second detail is cautionary. Don't rely on Wikipedia for synopses of films and other stories. The Wikipedia page on West Side Story, for instance, is completely wrong – better synopses can be found elsewhere on the Net.

As promised, I will now turn my attention to the film This is the End. I first saw this film in the cinema in 2013 and caught the last part of it again on TV about a week or two ago. In writing about it, I will be relying upon my memory of it. I will assume that my readers have also seen this film and will not provide a summary of it. I want to say one thing about it before we embark on its interpretation. The title is very probably an allusion to The Doors song "The End". (This was pointed out to me by my friend Jess not long after I first saw the film, in 2013. At the time I didn't believe her.) If the title is an allusion to The Doors song, as I think it is, this is not accidental, as I shall elaborate on later.

This is the End is a story about a group of Hollywood celebrities, playing themselves, struggling to survive after the Apocalypse has occurred A good story is a rhetorical argument in favour of some abstract theme or idea which can be expressed in the form of a proposition; a satisfactory story ends with the triumph of the thesis over the antithesis; therefore, when we are seeking to determine the message or moral of a story, we should start with the finish. The climax of This is the End occurs when, having fled James Franco's house into the post-Apocalyptic wilderness of Los Angeles, the film's two main characters, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruche, are confronted by an enormous devil bearing down on them; having established that the route to heaven is selfless acts, the two try to apologise to each other for all the things they have done wrong to each other. A beam of light appears around Jay and he begins to ascend to heaven, but no similar beam appears around Seth. Seth takes Jay's hand but his weight means that Jay's ascension stalls. Seth sacrifices himself by letting go; as he falls, a beam of light appears around him as well and he and Jay both rise into the sky. The film ends with both Jay and Seth arriving in heaven. It might seem from this that the thesis of the film is "Selfless acts will get you into Heaven" but I think we can go further. The relationship between Jay and Seth is the backbone of the story – the film begins with Jay arriving to visit Seth and Seth spelling out Jay's name in marijuana joints. There is a very brief scene at the beginning of Seth and Jay pressing the soles of their feet together, a reference perhaps to the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle. The film thus begins by depicting the platonic love between Seth and Jay. As the film progresses, we find that the relationship between Seth and Jay has in fact deteriorated, that they have grown apart. The film climaxes with them restoring their relationship by confessing to each other all the mistakes they have made with respect to the other. From all this, I think it would be more credible to say that the thesis of the film is "Platonic love between men is the route to heaven".

If the thesis of the film is "Platonic love between men is the route to salvation", what is the antithesis? Platonic love between men is threatened on both sides – on the one hand, it is threatened by antagonism or hostility between men and the other hand it is threatened by homosexuality. There is quite a lot of coded references to homosexuality in This is the End. To give just one example, in the last act we find out that Danny McBride has adopted Channing Tatum as his gimp. It is not just homosexuality that threatens the relationships between men, it is sexuality in general. Early in the first act, Seth and Jay attend a housewarming party hosted by James Franco. The party is decadent, Bacchanalian, depraved. Michael Cera, who is present at the party, plays himself as a crazed sex-addict and is one of the first to die when the Apocalypse occurs. Much of the film concerns the group of men trying to weather out the storm in Franco's house. At one point, Franco and McBride get into a heated, verbal altercation about masturbation – McBride had secretly appropriated a porn magazine belonging to Franco and had ejaculated on it, much to Franco's annoyance. A little later, Emma Watson breaks into the house. Jay gets the boys together to discuss how to deal with her because he is worried that they might give off a "rapey vibe". McBride says to Jay (this is not an exact quote but it gives the gist), "When push comes to shove, you'll be the first to become the house bitch". Emma Watson overhears the conversation, gets the wrong idea and, taking their water, exits the house. At the climax of the film, it is not accidental that the enormous devil bearing down on Seth and Jay is naked and has an enormous penis – when Seth is raptured up to heaven, the beam of light around him cuts the devil in half, severing the penis. The party in heaven is at once the mirror image of the party hosted by Franco and its opposite – its opposite because it is effectively neuter.

The theme of the movie concerning the dangers of homosexuality is perhaps most explicitly expressed through the Jonah Hill character. Jonah has an earring in his left ear and is referred to as "Earring motherfucker" at one point by James Franco. There is some confusion on the internet about which ear means what but I think we can say that a pierced left ear is a sign of heterosexuality while a pierced right ear is a sign of homosexuality. The fact that Jonah needs to advertise his heterosexuality to the world through an ear piercing in his left ear not only indicates a tolerance for homosexuality but also suggests an uncertainty about how he presents himself and perhaps an uncertainty about his own sexuality. There is a brief scene in which Jonah is looking at James Franco, experiences an 'attraction' and reflexively grabs hold of his earring I think to reassure himself that he is straight. A storyline that runs through the first half of the film concerns Jonah's attitude towards Jay – he appears to like Jay but Jay suspects that Jonah's apparently friendly posturings are false, hypocritical. At the midpoint of the film, Jonah, while lying in bed, prays to God, saying that he hates Jay and asking God to kill Jay. A devil appears and molests Jonah. (This is not shown explicitly. Rather we see the shadow of the demon on the wall with a huge erect penis.) The next day Jonah is seemingly uncertain whether the homosexual experience was real or a dream. As a consequence of this molestation, Jonah comes to be possessed by an evil spirit, is subject to an attempted exorcism, and, after he catches fire, burns down James Franco's house.

The encounter between Jonah and the demon highlights a peculiar feature of the story. The film equates antagonism between men with homosexuality; both threaten the ideal of platonic love and result in death and damnation. Homosexuality is presented as a kind of violence. Partly this peculiar aspect of the story is because the film is playing with Fundamentalist Christian ideas. What happens to decadent Hollywood stars if the Fundamentalist evangelicals are right and the Apocalypse is just around the corner? How can liberal Hollywood justify its tolerance of homosexuality if homosexuality is a sin that sends a person to hell? This is the End is, of course, a comedy. Of the six men who shelter in James Franco's house, half are raptured up to heaven and half die and presumably go to hell. And the six are all actors playing often unsympathetic caricatures of themselves. It is worth noting, in passing, that Michael Cera's characterisation as a sex-obsessed heterosexual and Jonah Hill's as sexually confused is the reverse of the characters they played in another Seth Rogen film Superbad.

This is the End, like all well structured movies, has the question-solution structure I described earlier. The question, first posed at Franco's house warming party, is "How can decadent Hollywood, with its permissive attitudes towards drug use and sex, be saved in the Christian sense?" It is significant to the story that Jay, who is the conscience of the film, feels uncomfortable at Franco's party. When the Apocalypse occurs, only Jay guesses correctly that they are living through Armageddon; the other survivors think the rift that has opened up in the front yard and the rest of the chaos in the world around them is the result of a natural disaster such as an earthquake. It takes the whole of the second act for the other characters to realise that Jay is right. Plot Point 1 occurs after the initial devastation when the main characters take refuge in Franco's house. The question that has been posed is given the provisional answer, "Hollywood can be saved by cooperation and mutual amity among its members". This solution is shown, throughout the second act, to be seemingly unsustainable. Danny McBride, who is introduced early in the second act (he had gatecrashed the party and slept through the earthquake and rapture in the upstairs bathtub) proves a disruptive influence on the group. During the second act, McBride is evicted from the house and Jonah Hill is possessed by a malignant spirit. When the house catches fire, the remaining four survivors are driven from Franco's house. This marks Plot Point 2: it is at once the nadir of the film and the moment where the story has become simpler – all the characters now understand that they living in the End Times. Early in the third act, Craig Robinson sacrifices himself for the others. Seeking to distract a demon, he runs towards it (yelling his war-cry "Take off your panties!") – and is raptured up to heaven. The answer that had been offered tentatively at Plot Point 1, that the route to salvation is through friendship between men, has now been confirmed. And the film ends, as I described earlier, with the friendship between Seth and Jay enabling their ascension to heaven.

At this point in the post, I wish to turn to another story, a novel I read recently rather than a film, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I really enjoyed This is the End and I wish I could say the same about The Night Circus. But I can't. It seemed to me (and I admit that this judgement is somewhat un-PC) a novel for precocious thirteen year old girls. Perhaps my capacity to appreciate this work of magic and fantasy had been somewhat compromised in advance because the novel I read immediately prior to it, The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, is a true Fantasy masterpiece. I bought The Night Circus hoping  to recapture the thrill I had reading Dunsany's book but found myself disappointed. However many others have loved The Night Circus. It was a bestseller, has legions of devoted fans, and was nominated for The Guardian First Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Galaxy Book Awards. The copy I own comes complete with glowing tributes from many well respected newspapers and magazines and I wish to single out a couple of quotes because they have some bearing on the interpretation of of the novel I wish to propose. The Guardian critic says about it: "It is – a surprisingly rare thing in fiction – a strikingly beautiful world, in spite of its darkness." The Scotsman says "For all her humorous touches, Morgenstern has produced something darker than night." Red magazine says "An extraordinary blend of dream and nightmare will take you on a magical journey." These quotes suggest that many reviewers have found something dark or nightmarish about the novel – but I myself didn't find anything particularly dark about it at all. However, the fact that others did points to a possible interpretation.

Before I explore this idea further, I want to make some general points about the book. It is very readable. The chapters are short, paragraphs very short, and sentences brief. It has what my authoress godmother calls "narrative drive", in her view the supreme virtue of a well written work of fiction. Morgenstern employs a particular technique that one finds common in much fiction – she presents several protagonists separately and the reader is impelled forward by the conviction that at some point the different characters will meet and curiosity about what will happen when they do. James Joyce employs this technique in Ulysses (Stephen Daedalus is presented at the beginning and Leopold Bloom in the fourth chapter but they do not have a real conversation until more than three quarters of the way through the book) and David Foster Wallace satirised the same narrative device in Infinite Jest (the two main characters, Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, never meet although we constantly expect they will and for the story proper to start; it is perhaps unsurprising that Wallace's working title for the book was A Failed Entertainment). In The Night Circus, the three main characters are Celia Bowen, Marco Alisdair, and Bailey Clarke. Celia and Marco are rival magicians who have been bound from childhood to participate in a magical competition that eventually takes place at a kind of perfect circus; Bailey is an avid circus goer. The story is not told chronologically. Rather the storylines involving Celia and Marco start in 1873 and the storyline involving Bailey begins in 1893. Celia and Marco first meet and recognise each other as their fated rivals in 1894, about two fifths of the way through the novel, and Bailey does not meet Celia and Marco until almost the end in 1902. The story builds tension and answers the questions it asks gradually. Celia and Marco are first magically bound to the competition in the second chapter; we witness the inception and establishment of the Night Circus a little later but are only little by little made aware that the circus is the venue for the competition as the novel develops. As the novel progresses, we learn that all the displays and performances in the circus depend on the magic of either Celia or Marco. About four fifths of the way through the story, Celia learns (and the reader learns along with her) that the competition is "a test of stamina and control, not skill", that "the victor is the one left standing after the other can no longer endure" (p.381). In other words, either Celia or Marco must die. By this point in the novel, Celia and Marco are passionately in love. The novel reaches its climax when Marco, who has been manipulating the circus from outside its borders, is drawn to the circus by another magician, Tsukiko (the victor of a previous magical competition), who wants to kill him and in this way end the competition because she fears that it is endangering the circus and its members. Celia saves Marco and they both become disembodied spirits, haunting the circus. Bailey, who has found himself at this apposite moment in the circus, is offered and accepts a new role as proprietor of the circus, ensuring its survival. The competition is declared a stalemate, and both Celia and Marco persist as ghosts. (This summary of the plot is perhaps a little hamfisted– to get a better understanding of the story, I suggest the novel itself.)

What then of the novel's supposedly dark and nightmarish qualities? One aspect of the story is that, as the story progresses, we find out that all the members of the circus and those associated with it are seemingly immune to the effects of time, but don't know why. Tara Burgess, one of those involved in the devising of the circus, says to another co-founder, Ethan Harris, "I feel...not trapped but something like it [..] I am finding it difficult to discern between asleep and awake [...] I do not like being left in the dark. I am not particularly fond of impossible things." (p. 190). Ethan suggests she talk to the man in grey, who, unbeknownst to both Tara and Ethan, is Marco's guardian, is privy to the secret that the circus is the venue for a magical competition and is in fact one of the competition's originators. When Tara meets him,  "she tries her best to explain her concerns. That there is more going on with the circus than most people are privy to. That there are elements she can find no reasonable explanations for. [...] The concern of not being able to be certain if anything is real. How disconcerting it is to look in a mirror and see the same face, unchanged for years." When pressed for an explanation, the man in grey says, "The circus is simply a circus [...] An impressive exhibition, but no more than that." (p. 223) Very shortly after, Tara, while waiting at a train platform, sees the man in grey arguing with the competition's other instigator, Celia's father Prospero the Magician, steps forward onto the tracks, and is hit by a train. Morgenstern does not make this explicit but the suggestion is that Tara has been magically killed because she has come too close to discovering the circus's secret. Tara is not the only character to feel the disturbing effects of magic. The enchantment over those involved in the circus has its most profound effect on the circus's principal founder and proprietor Chandresh Lefevre. Chandresh not only does not age, but has defects of memory and is unable to move on from the circus to other projects, as a result of sorcery by Marco. At Plot Point 2, Isobel (who is Marco's official girlfriend for much of the novel) lifts a spell she had cast to keep the two competing forces in the circus in balance. That same night, Halloween, Chandresh visits the circus, sees the man in grey talking with the circus's preeminent fan Friedrick Thiessen, and, feeling obscurely that the man in grey is responsible for the curse he is under, throws a knife at him. The man in grey dodges the blade and it kills Thiessen. There are thus two deaths in the story (prior to the end when Marco and Celia dematerialise). These two deaths do not seem to me sufficient justification to say that the story is dark and nightmarish. To explain why many reviewers found something dark and disturbing in the novel, we need to go deeper. We need to consider the deeply buried subtext of the story. In addition to the storylines involving Marco, Celia, and the other characters, there is a recurring narrative, written in the second person, that depicts what the reader might experience when visiting the circus. This narrative runs from the very beginning until the very end. The circus is presented as something exciting, enthralling, mysterious, and marvellous. But it is also potentially dangerous – dangerous because it is a place where the rules of the ordinary world do not apply. There is a tension between the allure of the circus and its peril. It is significant that, at Plot Point 2, it is the circus's most prominent fan, a man who stands as a metonym for all the patrons who love the circus and visit it obsessively, who is killed while visiting it.

I turn now to perhaps the most important two features of the story. The first is that it presents, from the beginning, a world in which magic is real but thought to be unreal by almost all normal people. The reality of magic is evident from the very beginning when Celia, then a child, at her first encounter with Prospero, telekinetically destroys a teacup (which Prospero telekinetically reassembles). In the early part of the novel, we are presented with two different ways magic can operate in the world. Marco's guardian, the unnamed man in grey, prefers to remain inconspicuous, while Prospero displays his magic to the world as a stage magician. He outperforms his stage magician rivals because he employs real magic; he is able to get away with this because his audiences assume that his magic is trickery, devices, deception, and legerdemain. Several chapters into the novel, Chandresh arranges with a number of collaborators to establish the Night Circus. From its inception, it is conceived as a place that seems as maximally magical as possible but is in fact founded on rational principles. Thiessen, for instance, is commissioned to manufacture the circus clock; the clock he constructs seems quite magical but is purely a piece of extraordinarily sophisticated engineering. When the reader is presented with the circus's opening night, he feels (or I felt, at any rate) that the marvels of the circus are theatrics, illusions. As the novel progresses, as I said earlier in the essay, the reader comes to realise gradually the extent to which real magic informs and underlies all the varied shows in the circus, until by the end he has realised that everything in the circus is to some degree magical, is implicated in the competition. The second important feature of the novel is the love story between Celia and Marco. Because most readers are familiar with the conventions of fiction, we expect, as soon as we realise that the oppositely gendered protagonists have been forced into a rivalrous competition, that they will fall in love. The love story seemed to me pure Mills and Boon, and reminded me of another critically and commercially successful but subpar novel, Normal People. (Both novels make a point of presenting their female protagonists as orgasmic.) Although this reader found the love story unconvincing, the romance in the novel obviously explains to a large degree why The Night Circus was such a critical and commercial hit. Because Marco and Celia are rivals, they are always equals, and so the novel permits a Feminist reading. There are therefore three tensions or conflicts within the story. The first is that real magic exists but is repudiated by most ordinary people. The second is that the circus presents itself as an entertainment, a spectacle, but is in reality the arena for a magical competition. The third is that Marco and Celia are rivals, forced into a competition in which one must either symbolically or literally destroy the other (something the reader has intuited long before it is confirmed) but have fallen in love. The end of the novel resolves all three conflicts.

Earlier in this essay, I said that we can work out the thesis of a story from its conclusion. The climax of The Night Circus occurs when Marco and Celia are torn from the real world to become incorporeal shades tied to the circus. This climax had been foreshadowed at the midpoint of the novel when a young circus dweller, Widget, relates to his sister Poppet the legend telling of how Merlin was trapped in a huge oak tree because he has shared his magical secrets with a young woman. The Night Circus then resolves itself when Bailey agrees to take over the job of proprietor from Chandresh. Bailey's role in the narrative makes him a kind of deus ex machina: it is precisely because of his importance to the resolution of the story that he has had a storyline of his own throughout the novel. It is significant that, when Bailey agrees to take on the role of circus caretaker, he does so of his own free will, knowing that the circus is founded on magic unlike Chandresh. Bailey is also a surrogate for the reader and for the ordinary circus visitor. In this way, the novel resolves the first of its three tensions: the truth that real magic exists has got out to the rest of the world. The second of the three tensions resolves when the competition is declared a stalemate: the circus is now truly a genuine entertainment or spectacle, rather than the venue for a magical competition pretending to be a spectacle. Finally, the love story resolves. Marco and Celia can be together for eternity. The novel ends by suggesting that the Night Circus still exists and is operating in the present, with Bailey still as its proprietor.

So, what is the thesis of The Night Circus? I would propose that its central proposition is, "Magic exists and is something marvellous to be celebrated". The antithesis is, "Magic exists and is something fearful to be repudiated". The novel equates magic with romantic love – the victory of the thesis over the antithesis is also the victory of love over fate (although perhaps there is some ambiguity about the ending). If we apply the problem-solution model advanced earlier, we can interpret the structure of The Night Circus in the following way. At the beginning it poses a question, "What place does real magic have in the world?" At Plot Point 1, when the Night Circus opens, a provisional answer is put forward, "The place for magic is some kind of perfect circus." At Plot Point 2, this solution is put to its strongest test, when Isobel lifts her spell and Thiessen is killed. It seems that magic is indeed something to be feared and rejected. It is significant that Plot Point 2 connects with the novel's love story – Isobel undoes the spell she had cast because Marco has finally broken up with her. The novel finishes, however, by reaffirming the solution it had put forward tentatively at Plot Point 1. The place for real magic is indeed the Night Circus.

Over the years, I have argued quite consistently in favour of this particular model for describing successful fictional narratives. However, thinking about This is the End and The Night Circus compels me to make an important point. A story is indeed an argument in favour of some proposition or some set of propositions – but these propositions do not have to be true, don't even have to be believed by the story's writer or writers. This is the End appears to have the moral, "Platonic love between men is the route to heaven while homosexuality or hostility between men is the route to hell" – but I think it highly unlikely that Seth Rogen or his collaborator Evan Goldberg believe in either heaven or hell. In fact, a later Seth Rogen film, Sausage Party, has a quite explicitly anti-religious message. Likewise, I doubt that Morgenstern herself believes in magic. I would go so far as to suggest that, although many people in Western countries identify as Jedi on national censuses, George Lucas himself probably doesn't believe literally in the Force. Both This is the End and The Night Circus depend on hypothetical scenarios, on conditionals. "If heaven and hell existed, how could ensure we go to the former rather than the later?" "If magic existed, what would be its place in the world?" A particular story has its own peculiar logic, is based on its own assumptions that may not apply to reality. This idea, that the the underlying conceit of a fiction may also be a fiction, is important and something I may discuss in greater depth in future posts.

Earlier in the essay, I suggested that the title of This is the End is an allusion to The Doors song "The End" and said that I would elaborate on this idea later. I would like to finish the essay by tying up this loose thread. The subtext of This is the End is, as I have said, largely concerned with sexuality, and this explains The Doors allusion. For many men, Jim Morison is an iconic exemplar of heterosexuality. In popular culture, in subterranean byways of the collective psyche almost inaccessible to analysis, the idea persists that heterosexuality involves a successful resolution of  the Oedipal complex, and the Oedipal complex is directly referenced at the climax of "The End". The persistence of the idea that sexuality is bound up with one's relations with one's parents can ultimate be blamed on Freud. I have been thinking about the connections between sexuality and the Oedipal complex, as it is evinced in "The End" and in the Star Wars trilogy, recently, but have yet to form any solid conclusions. Again, this might be a subject for later posts.

Nature vs. Nurture

 A highly charged topic has, in the last few years, become very prominent among the interests of the laity who like to think about such matters. The topic is intelligence. Is intelligence hereditary or, to use another word for the same idea, genetic? Do different populations possess different IQs or g factors? I saw an interview with Douglas Murray in which he said that people would often come up to him after talks he'd given asking about intelligence, a question that made him uncomfortable – this suggests that the idea that people possess intrinsically different g factors has seized hold of the collective imagination. I suspect that the reason intelligence has become such a salient issue in many people's minds has a lot to do with an interview Sam Harris conducted with Charles Murray in 2017, viewable on Youtube under the title "Forbidden Knowledge". Murray had co-authored a book on intelligence variations between different populations, published in 1994; Harris has long felt that he has been been unfairly maligned (Ben Affleck called him a racist on Real Time with Bill Maher and Harris has never recovered from this) and justified his decision to interview Murray on the grounds that perhaps Murray had also been unfairly maligned. The interview is often cited by those who argue that different groups possess different intelligences. Another sign of how supposedly intrinsic intellectual differences have become a key concern among many people today is the success of the book The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. Markovits argues that meritocratic systems inevitably promote inequality. I haven't actually read this book but, on my superficial understanding of it, its only possible conclusion runs as follows: either we fight inequality by abandoning the meritocratic ideal we have upheld for decades or we accept inequality as an inevitable byproduct of meritocracy. The first possible solution is embraced by factions of the Woke left while the alternative is espoused by the reactionary, bigoted right. The current internecine war being fought in the campuses and streets of America arises partly out of the tacit acceptance by both sides of the idea that intelligence is inborn and unalterable. It arises out of the current victory of 'nature' over 'nurture' as the governing idea behind human personality.

There are many reasons why the idea of intelligence as a fixed, measurable attribute of human minds has come to dominate political and social discussions. Perhaps the most important is the ascension of evolutionary psychology as the most popular paradigm within the social sciences. When I was first a university student, some twenty years ago, the dominant paradigm was postmodernism; when I returned to study at the University of Auckland English Department over the summer of 2017 and 2018, I was put with a supervisor, Brian Boyd, who had leapt aboard the evolutionary psychology bandwagon and had sought to explain narratives in terms of a kind of evolved, adaptive play. The shift from postmodernism to evolutionary biology can be traced to the influence of Richard Dawkins and to works like The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a book that contrary to its title is concerned with 'nature' over 'nurture' and which was first published in 2002. Many people are put into a paradoxical position with respect to intelligence. On the one hand, if intelligence is genetic and if Darwinism is true, different populations must have different intelligences because otherwise there is no variation on which natural selection can act: if intelligence evolved, different groups must have had different IQs. On the other hand, good liberals wish devoutly to deny that different groups have different g factors. In an interview with Coleman Hughes, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein tries to defend this self-contradictory position, declaring both views at once. (It can be found under the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtOtJFmwpq4.) It seems to me that Weinstein is displaying bad faith. Even as he seeks to argue that variations between groups are somehow unimportant when it comes to intelligence, he presents the view that differences in athletic ability are indeed genetic and do indeed vary between groups. It can't be racist to say that black people are born predisposed to be better at basketball than white people, or that Kenyans and Ethiopians are born genetically superior at marathon running! But of course it is. There is, in truth, no significant average difference between the heights and athletic abilities of blacks and whites – rather, for cultural reasons, black people feel encouraged to pursue careers in basketball more than white people, and this accounts for the apparent difference in participation between the two groups. Instead of presenting a hopelessly muddled attempt to marry evolutionary theory with good liberalism when it comes to intelligence, Weinstein should simply admit that intelligence isn't genetic.

The question of whether intelligence is the result of nature or nurture can be explored with respect to myopia. According to the Wikipedia article on the g factor, a high g score is positively correlated with short-sightedness. If we were to be strict evolutionary biologists, we would be forced then to suppose that the genes that influence intelligence are on the same chromosome and near the genes that cause myopia. But the idea that myopia is genetic is nonsense. Yes, it is true that the Wikipedia article on myopia attributes short-sightedness to a "combination of genetic and environmental factors" (the articles on homosexuality and schizophrenia say the same thing) but a fair reading of the article strongly suggests that myopia is wholly caused by environmental determinates. Consider the alternative. Myopia affects roughly fifteen per cent of the world's human population: if it were genetic, it would have evolved hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of eyeglasses even though it has no adaptive value, in fact would be deleterious to survival in hunter-gatherer times. As with homosexuality, it makes no evolutionary sense to see myopia as some kind of adaption. Rather, the truth is that myopia is a result of children ruining their eyesight by reading too much and spending too much time inside in front of TV and computer screens – it is a consequence of nurture rather than nature. If there is a correlation between g and myopia, it is simply that intelligent people read a lot when they were young. This raises another question. Are intelligent children more likely to read a lot, or does reading a lot when young make a person intelligent? Which came first – the smarts or the books? I believe the latter came first, that intelligence is the result of a lively curiosity combined with the opportunity to feed that curiosity. Interestingly, Bret Weinstein's wife Heather Heying, in one of the Dark Horse podcasts, comes close to saying the same thing.

And now we come to a second important point. How do we measure g? If g is innate and unalterable, differences in g should be evident in childhood. I would like to tell a couple of stories from my own childhood that indicate indirectly the problem with the idea that g can be accurately assessed. I remember, when I was five, a trainee teacher trying to teach a group of us that half of ten was five. I argued emphatically, at the time, that half of ten was five and a half. My logic was impeccable – 5 1/2 is exactly halfway between 1 and 10. The flaw in my logic was that you need to start with 0.  5 is exactly halfway between 0 and 10. But the poor trainee teacher was completely incapable of spotting the flaw in my logic and pointing this out to me. When I was eleven, my class sat a kind of mathematics test. The test was divided into six levels of difficulty: if you passed levels 1 through 3 and failed levels 4 through 6, you were awarded a 3. A day or so after we did the test, my teacher laughingly informed the whole class that I had passed levels 2 though 6 and failed level 1.

The truth is that there are many different types of cognitive task and that we can improve our performance in a particular task through learning, through teaching ourselves, that domain specific intelligence is neither fixed nor unchangeable. For close to twenty years, I have been doing the daily cryptic crossword in the Herald. When I first attempted the crossword some twenty years ago, I would struggle to fill in a couple of answers. Today I can usually complete it in about twenty minutes. Consider driving. Driving is a skill we acquire through lessons and practice. If we accept the "massive modularity hypothesis" of evolutionary psychology, we might suppose that there is a 'car-driving module" in the mind or brain. But this would be absurd. Driving has only been common for the last hundred years, far too short a period of time for evolution to have had any effect. And it does not seem to me that there is any evolutionary pressure selecting for better drivers over worse ones. The ability to drive well is acquired through practice. Not only is the brain plastic enough to continually learn new skills, the skills we have can be continually improved through learning. The more IQ tests we do, the better we get at IQ tests. Today I was thinking about birds. If we accept the tenets of evolutionary psychology, we might suppose that there is a 'flying module' in the mind or brain of a bird, that flying is an instinct, but in fact it is quite possible that we are wrong. It might be that birds, finding themselves with wings in the world, teach themselves to fly.

So far in this post I have been focussing on intelligence, arguing for nurture over nature. At this point I would like to turn to a topic I discussed in the previous post, the causes of schizophrenia. In that previous post, I stated that the cause of schizophrenia is different for every person to whom the label has been applied, and I would like to elaborate on this. For a number of years, I have talked to many men and women diagnosed schizophrenic; all of them have some theory as to the cause of their specific 'illness'. One woman,  Clare, attributed her illness to 'adverse experiences' when she was young. She did not spell it out, but I speculate that she might have been sexually abused. Another patient, Robert, told me that he believed the cause of his illness was 'hormonal changes' when he was a teenager. Yet another, Seamus, strongly believes that his illness was caused by illegal drugs, methamphetamine and magic mushrooms. A fourth, Madeleine, told me that the cause of her illness was her mother, who she believed to be a narcissist (in its clinical definition). I have only met one patient who attributed his illness, in his case bipolar disorder, to a neurotransmitter imbalance; this patient, Jeremy, was a student of microbiology and genetics. In passing one day, he talked about his birth-parents and I asked him, "Are you adopted?" He said he was and went on to say, after I asked him about it, that he had always known he was adopted. He did not seem to connect his bi-polar disorder with the fact of his adoption. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me, if not to Jeremy himself, that the root cause of his illness is low self-esteem resulting from his knowledge that he is genetically unrelated to the people who had raised him. (In support of this hypothesis, I direct the reader to the story "Good Ol' Neon" by David Foster Wallace.) In my case, I had incurred a vulnerability to psychosis as a consequence of my parents' divorce when I was seven and had become psychotic, to put it perhaps too simplistically, in 2007 because a rumour had got around some of the people I knew that I was gay when I'm not. 

Every person has a different story to explain his or her own life. However, if you talk to many people who work in the Mental Health System and even many ordinary people, you find that the true stories people tell about why they have become ill tend to go unacknowledged, ignored. The cause of mental illness is usually attributed to bad genes or to a combination of environment and bad genes. This raises a serious problem. If the root cause of serious mental illness is genetic, if we suppose DNA outweighs experience as a causal factor, there is no way to treat these conditions, they can only be compared to type-1 diabetes.  If we suppose, by contrast, that life-experiences and situations trigger episodes of mental illness, conditions like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder can instead be construed as temporary deviations away from a healthy norm – treatment (in the form of talk therapy rather than medication) and perhaps full recovery become real possibilities. A sufferer needs to identify and articulate the particular, idiosyncratic causes of his or her illness and he or she needs to be understood by those treating him or her before any kind of help can be given. In the song 'Albertine', Brooke Frasier sings the Catholic credo from James 2:24 "Faith without deeds is dead" – I feel that, analogously, compassion without understanding is dead. One can't have real compassion for a person if one fails to understand that person. It is partly because of the situation I have been trapped in for so long, treated by people who think recovery is impossible, that I so strongly favour nurture over nature.

In this post, I have criticised evolutionary psychology and the idea that faculties and behaviours are congenital, genetic, rather than acquired. I have been thinking about evolutionary biology for years now, and the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to the conclusion that it is bullshit. For instance, I believe that the Darwinian motto "Survival of the Fittest" could and perhaps should be replaced with the motto "Survival of the Luckiest". But this is an idea I will have to explore more full in a later post. In the meantime, stay well and be good.