He who goes down to Sheol does not come up: "The Dark" by Jess Walter

For much of "The Dark" by Jess Walter, the title seems totally inappropriate, because the mood of the story is anything but. Doug Coates' dad humor is on the higher end of the spectrum, and it's matched by the characters he interacts with. This isn't the overpowering humor of a comedian essentially playing themselves in a movie, where the dialogue is impossibly sharp compared to what an actual human could come up with on the spot. It's the kind of genial, self-effacing humor that knows it's not quite succeeding as soon as it comes up with a joke, but the realization of its own failure is part of what makes it funny. 

There's so much of this breezy humor--"banter," as Doug's son Aaron calls it, a word of uncertain origin but that might be related to a term meaning to hit a ball back and forth, highlighting the play involved in the practice--that one almost forgets it's a story about a guy trying to get over the death of his wife from some kind of terminal disease. The story feels light, both in terms of weight and also in color. So why is it called "The Dark"?

Life is ultimately a comedy. That's because there's a big joke being played on all of us, which is that we work hard to make the most we can out of this life and act like the choices we make are very serious and important, but ultimately, we die and do not come back and all the things we thought were so serious don't matter much in the long run. The only way to keep treating life as a tragedy or a drama is by believing that life goes on after death and our decisions will reverberate in eternity, but that wasn't a choice for Doug and his wife Ellie. Doug was an agnostic by temperament and by training as a scientist, while Ellie came about her lack of belief by way of rejecting the faith she was raised in. For both characters, as Ellie was dying, the belief in life after death wasn't a consolation either could reach for. 

That's why it was so disconcerting for Doug when Ellie called for a pastor to come speak with her in her dying days. Doug was worried that: 1) This meant he had never really known his wife, which made him feel more alone, and 2) She knew something about the afterlife that he didn't, and she would be able to obtain it and he wouldn't.

Cosmic and common fears

There are two levels of anxiety and fear going on the "The Dark." One is the big fear that all of us have about death, the fear we mostly spend our lives trying not to think about. The other is more about all the little, daily fears we have. What will dating be like after four decades? Will this person like me? Did I look like an idiot with the joke I tried to tell? Both are fears of the unknown, but the former, the fear of "the dark" of death, is the more fundamental one, while the fear of not knowing how things are going to work out in life is a more contingent concern. 

If I have an issue with much contemporary literature, it's that it ignores the more fundamental fear and only writes about the contingent ones. It will offer an endless stream of flawless detail, told in sparkling prose, about working through trauma or the struggles of the subaltern, but it never puts their fears within the larger context of what the fuck is this whole strange eventful history even about?  Personally, the trouble I have dealing with the smaller fears has a lot to do with how out of whack I feel knowing the bigger fear is always there at the back.

It's not, of course, that the battle to overcome trauma or the realities of the subaltern are unimportant. We should strive to make the world better for people and not worse. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest," says the Bible's most nearly nihilistic book, and I agree. Modernity, though, seems to have shortened it to just the part up to "do it with thy might," without the uncomfortable reason why. Reasoning that the brevity of life and the uncertainty of death is a cause to focus more on the precious life we do get, they take that focus so far that they ignore the big questions altogether. They might even call those questions irrelevant or childish. Rather than deal with the darkness, modernity chooses to keep the lights turned up as brightly as possible, to put the music on full blast and to keep itself focused on work not because of the shortness of life, but in order to forget about it.

"The Dark" doesn't shirk from the yawning maw of death, Sheol that is never satisfied. It does, however, lead us into it softly, cushioned all along the way with what the narrator calls "polite, gentle questioning." When the pastor shows up to talk to Ellie, Doug thinks it's a mistake. Oh, no, we don't go in for that, he says, but then he finds that Ellie has, to his dismay, asked the pastor to come. This leads Doug to twin fears. They are listed out of order, perhaps. First is that if he didn't really know her, then his "temporary detour from the existential horror of being alive and alone" was mistaken. The second is that perhaps Ellie knows something about the afterlife he doesn't, that she'll get in and he won't. 

The pastor who shows up unbidden forces Doug to ask hard questions about life that he's managed to avoid through his close relationship with Ellie. But the narrative holds off telling us what Ellie actually spoke with the pastor about until nearly the end. Almost the only thing we hear that the pastor said about life after death is that it's strange that we teach our children to be afraid of the dark. They wouldn't naturally have this fear, because, after all, they come from the darkness of the womb. It's home to them, so there's no reason they would ever develop a fear if we didn't teach it to them.

Pay no attention to the faulty biological basis of this argument and the fact that our fear of the dark is very much a natural part of our evolution. This is an emotional truth, not an empirical one. As Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" puts it, "You start out from nothing, you go back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!" 

It's not an answer that gives a map of where we go when we die. It's much less dogmatic and certain than that. The pastor doesn't say she knows what happens when we die; she says that there isn't any known reason to fear it. It's a tentative but also a compassionate and gentle answer to our most fundamental fear.

Comic and tragic mindsets

We can respond to the basic, comic losing battle of life with either a comic perspective or a tragic one. Tragic approaches include rejecting the darkness (Rage against the dying of the light) or accepting it, either as part of God's plan or as a necessary limit to life necessary to make life have meaning. Comic approaches also can either acknowledge the dark (optimistic nihilism like that Monty Python song) or try to avoid thinking about it (eat, drink, and be merry). 

The unique, humane excellence of "The Dark" is that it blends these views. It accepts that as humans, we can never stop trying to make sense out of death, to hope there is some way beyond it. Nonetheless, it also understands that the dark is too dense to peer into, and so really the only consolation we can obtain is the contingent, highly bracketed consolation of love and companionship. This love and companionship, though, has a necessary end. One has to accept the comic view to handle the trauma of the dark, to enjoy our human relationships as tiny lights that hold back the dark. But it's only in acknowledging the dark that these relationships take on their full meaning and value. Without the dark, it would be impossible to even feel sad for those we have lost.

"The Dark" is full of ironies. All of Ellie's dating advice turns out wrong. Her lifelong grudge is pointless, but also, the person she held it against unintentionally hurts Doug just as she (probably) unintentionally hurt Ellie. With all this witty banter and all this irony, it's clear that "The Dark" is mostly encouraging a comedic response to the comic problem of death. But as they say, if everything is funny, then nothing is. Or maybe if nothing is sad, then nothing is funny. It's the sadness of death and the terror of the grave the underpins the humor. 

Of course, one could also say that if everything is tragic, then nothing is. Dealing with death without going utterly crazy relies on the ability to move between comic and tragic ways of looking at it. "The Dark" succeeds as much because of its light as because of its darkness.

                      This story really kept making me think of this song.