Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Dark Literature

Dark Literature

Yesterday was Friday and my port got a lot of hits. Some is attributed to my students but even so, 186 views are exceptionally high. Maybe because my blog had been deferred as I wrote the EWW reviews can account for the inflated numbers. Whatever the reason I was surprised because the views tend to run around one hundred or less.

I read some more of George Martin last night. His writing is a study in good story telling. The recent books have not been on the same par with his earlier ones but they are still good. Maybe I am becoming calloused to the dark side of his writing.

Dark writing has an elemental power. It comes from the darkness rather than the light. For example a dark writer describing a sexual liaison would not focus on the warmth and euphoria but rather on the pain, carnal aspects and medical consequences. For the dark writer joy and happiness is replaced by pain and suffering.

Socrates said that people have a natural inclination towards good and that people don’t deliberately set out to do bad. I define good as trying to make the world a better place. For the dark writer the pursuit of good is a hope, a naracotic used to get through life, an existence strangled by hopelessness and terror. Most of my readers won’t read truly dark literature, but there are examples here at WDC that show it, and adherents who are drawn to the dark vortex, that disdains happy endings and sees the life experience through the lens of “Badness”… It is a claim that doing otherwise is a delusion and those who believe it are only fooling themselves and refusing to see life for what it really is.

My experience is that life is not always such a nice place and knowing what lies beneath the façade of the fanciful and politically correct are truths we need to know, however a person should strive to keep the good inside their hearts in dominion over the darkness. That’s probably the best we can hope for.

Literature for most is an escape from an ‘oft ugly reality and if it gives relief, comfort and hope to the downtrodden it must be a good thing indeed.