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The Killer Inside All of Us

Stanley Kubrick described it as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”

That is the same Kubrick who directed a film based on A Clockwork Orange. So, what book is more “chilling and believable” than that Burgess’ novel?

Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. First published in 1952 and now included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s.

Lou Ford is the sort of person you really don’t want to know. You don’t want to know him because he is a guy who primarily talks in tired clichés; he is a boring guy, a very, very boring guy. Not too bright, affable, but really, really boring and dull. We learn this in chapter 1—two pages long, and by the end of it, the reader is gripped with a terror of spending 160 pages reading cliché after cliché after cliché.

Then 5 pages later, after he has savagely beaten and had relations with the new prostitute in town, we no longer want to spend time with Lou Ford because he is, well, a rather nasty bit of work.

The whole book is like that. Lou Ford interacting with society in public is really boring. Lou Ford behind closed doors is a vicious mean guy, and as the title notes, a killer.

So who is Lou Ford? Which one is he—the affable dullard or the cold-blooded killer? The closing line of the novel reveals his true identity: “All of us.”

OK, you are not as boring as Lou Ford on the surface. You are also (I certainly hope) not a murderer behind closed doors.

But, be honest: how much is the person everyone sees like the person inside your head? How many things have you done or thought in your life which you would not want exposed to the light of day?

Which one is the real person? Is Lou Ford a boring dullard who sometimes acts like a calculating beast or is he a vile murderer who sometimes acts like a nice guy?

Interestingly, that isn’t really a hard question. You don’t even have to read the novel to know the answer. The real Lou Ford is the killer. We all know this. The external Lou Ford is an act. Why do we know this? Remember Lou Ford is you and you know this of yourself.

Eliot describes this phenomenon:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The invaluable Annotated text of The Poems of T. S. Eliot has two interesting notes:

1. Eliot’s brother’s description: “he spoke of always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people…like a man playing a part.”

2. Eliot underlined the following passage from Kant: “For the truth is, that, however far we may carry our investigations into the world of sense, we never can come into contact with aught but appearances.”

Not only are you Lou Ford, everyone you meet is also Lou Ford. You only meet the mask, the face the other prepared to meet the face you prepared to meet it. You will never see the mind of another; you always see something else.

Some people are better at preparing the face to meet the other faces; some people’s exterior appearances may be closer to their inner sense; but in every case, every single case, you will only see he face presented to the world.

The Killer Inside Me is one of those books you just want to enjoy reading and then dismiss as a noir novel about a disturbed individual. But, it won’t let you do that. All of us.

Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people.
All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnny Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us.
All of us.

You meant so good and did so bad. It’s easy to acknowledge that your inner life is not what you present to the world. It is easy to acknowledge that the same must be true of other people. It is easy to conclude that you only know the mask the other people put on to meet you.

But, here is that part that is not so easy to acknowledge. If all of this is true: do you also put on a face to meet yourself? Do you know your own self? Do you know the killer inside you? Are you sure?

Becoming Immortal

Is the desire to be immortal a universal constant? I’ve never really thought about it like this before, but a combination of a short story by Hawthorne and a volume of short stories by Doyle, has me wondering about the desire for immortality.

Hawthorne’s “The Devil in Manuscript” is a quick tale of an author who cannot find a publisher (he lived in the pre-blog era) and in despair hurls his life’s work into a fireplace. A fire roars up in the fireplace, sending flame onto the roof, setting the building on fire. Commotion ensues throughout the town. And the story ends with the author exclaiming, “Here I stand—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire! Huzza!” (Does anyone ever say “Huzza” anymore?)

It’s a nice little story that certainly captures the latent frustration of many an author. Indeed, there is no doubt that the number of frustrated authors, those who believe that their own work deserves a much wider attention from the world than it has earned, is vastly greater than the number of satisfied authors, a set which is likely to be very small indeed.

Now that I think of it—I suspect the most widely known authors may be among the most frustrated—after all, there is always more acclaim and readership possible.

At roughly the same time I read the Hawthorne story, I was finishing up Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The first thing I noticed in rereading it—despite all the claims of Holmes’ amazing deductive powers, the deductions necessary to solve his cases are amazingly small.

Holmes demonstrates vastly more deductive powers in the parlor trick of telling the person he is meeting something about said person’s activities or profession which Holmes deduced from some oddity in the person’s appearance or dress. Said person is always dutifully shocked. Watson expresses his amazement, at which point Holmes explains, allowing Watson to note with Chagrin that he (Watson) was just too daft to notice the obvious, unlike Holmes, who never misses a thing.

At any rate, as detective stories, there is surprisingly little detection in them. As parlor tricks, there is no reality there—there is no way Holmes could pull off his trick in real life.

But, then, presumably because I had just read Hawthorne, I noticed something else which is rather odd in the stories of Holmes’ exploits. Why is Watson there at all? Now I know why we need him to write the stories, but imagine it is real. Why does Holmes want Watson around? Holmes keeps claiming that Watson is useful to him, but Watson is rarely even remotely useful.

Then it dawned on me. Holmes wants Watson around not to help solve the crime, but to write about the solution afterwards. Holmes, who labors in obscurity pretending to care only about logic and deduction, wants the immortality of having his exploits sent down in print.

So, what is it about immortality that so appeals to people? What is this longing in the soul to want to live on after death?

Undoubtedly, it is a good thing—there is something hard-wired in living organisms to perpetuate the species by having offspring, and in humans that is obviously rationalized as a desire to have one’s DNA continue into the future. But, children are not really exactly like the parents and great-great-grandchildren are even less like them; children are a poor vehicle for immortality.

Then again, so are books. Consider Charles Dickens. I know about Charles Dickens. I know nothing about the kid who grew up one-quarter mile away from where Dickens lived when he was 7. Dickens has lived on in a sense that this other kid has not.

Yet, what difference does that make to Dickens now? He and that other kid are exactly the same level of dead. I suppose if both are ghosts wandering around the world, Dickens gets to go to cocktail parties of the dead and laugh at the other little kids who are totally unknown. But unless that is the picture of the afterlife, it is hard to see what benefit Dickens derives from having his books on my bookshelf.

Then back up. Why would it make an author happy to know that his books will be read over a century after his death? That it would make an author happy is undeniable. But why? Why should that matter? Why should it seem perfectly sensible that the author in Hawthorne’s story is thrilled that his work is having an effect even if the effect is undesirable?

Somewhere deep in the human heart, there is an obvious desire to live on and on and on. That desire finds its way out in curious ways. Homer’s heroes want to do acts of valor so people will still talk about them after they have traveled to Hades. Homer lives on and on by writing about those people.

So, now we know about both Achilles and Homer, but their paths to immortality were rather unalike. Would their persistence after death bring equal amounts of pleasure? Do people care why they continue to be known after death?

Is Benedict Arnold happy for being famous? Is Pilate?

Child of God

When I am asked to pick one contemporary author whose books are most likely to be called Great Books in a hundred years, the answer is easy. Cormac McCarthy.

The best thing about making predictions for 100 years from now, is that there is no chance of having to explain how I could have been so wrong.

Child of God is not McCarthy’s best novel, but it is brilliant in its laser–like precision in asking a question.

The novel is about a social outcast, a homeless guy who is loved by nobody, has no friends, no means of support, and no social capital. The novel opens when Lester (our protagonist) has his homestead sold after being taken by the county, presumably because friendless, jobless misfits have little ability to pay property taxes. Lester then wanders into the hills to live, with no means of support and few possessions of any type. Throughout the novel, he interacts with others, but never once does anyone treat him as anything much above subhuman. Yet, as McCarthy introduces Lester, we read:

To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.

Much like yourself, indeed.

When you think about people like Lester, what do you feel? Do you have an obligation to love Lester? Is it your obligation to notice Lester? Do you have an obligation to help Lester? Because, you see, nobody else loves or cares for Lester; nobody else is going to help Lester. He is a child of God, much like yourself. So, what are your obligations toward Lester?

And, by the way, Lester is a necrophiliac. Does that change anything?

Oh, and he isn’t just a passive necrophiliac. Sure, his first girl was dead when he found her, but after that, he created the corpses himself. Does that change anything?

At what point does our friendless, loveless, social outcast deserve to be a friendless, loveless, social outcast? But, before you go dismissing Lester as something beneath notice, just remember he is a child of God…much like yourself perhaps. That sentence, which occurs on the second page of the novel, haunts the entire story.

One part of the Reader wants to dismiss Lester as something Other, but another part of the Reader knows the Truth. Deep down, are you really any better than Lester? Are any of us really any better than Lester? And before you hastily answer that yes indeed you are different, ponder what entitles you to be considered a Child of God while Lester is not.

Stephen Crane could have provided the epigraph to this novel.

I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
And carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, “Comrade! Brother!”

Faith of the Unchurched

Is it possible to have faith in the existence of God and not know you have faith? At first glance, that question seems a bit odd. Surely you know if you have faith. Right?

Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case is a fascinating exploration of this question.

The protagonist is a world-famous Catholic architect, Querry, who shows up one day at a leper colony in the middle of the jungle in the Congo. Querry unrelentingly insists throughout the novel that he no longer has faith. Nobody believes him. The Catholic priests who run the leper colony, the atheist doctor who treats the lepers, the devout Catholic businessmen who is in awe of Querry, the journalist who tracks him down…none of them believe that Querry is anything other than the most devout Christian imaginable. Querry’s every action lends support to their faith that Querry has faith. Yet, Query says he doesn’t. Does he?

The title refers to the progress of leprosy. A patient has the disease and it runs its course, wreaking havoc with the body. After the disease has done all the damage it can do, the patient is released from the hospital as a burnt-out case; the disease has burnt itself out.

Querry is a burnt out case. Of that there is no doubt. But: what was the disease?

Is faith in God the disease and Querry has now suffered all he can from that belief and has now reached the end result which is unbelief? That is what Querry insists is true.

Or is unbelief the disease and Querry has now reached the end result which is belief, but he has not yet realized it?

It seems like it should be obvious which of those two things is the case, but the brilliance of the novel is that it is not clear at all.

The central question of this novel is of immense importance in the modern world. We see the constant lament that children who have grown up in the church have left the church. We see the rise of an entire generation which professes to have no religion. The common reaction to this state of affairs is the defensive cry asking how to bring this generation back to the church.

But, imagine for a second that many of the people in this generation who say they have no faith are wrong about their own beliefs. Imagine for a second they do have faith, they just don’t know it.

Why would this be? Imagine you grew up in a church which had entombed the message of the gospel, that the message of the church never felt alive to you. Imagine you confused your lack of attachment to the church of your youth with a lack of attachment to God. And then imagine that in your confusion, the church insisted that if you lacked attachment to the church, then you lacked attachment to God. What if you believed the church when you were told that?

If that is the case, and having talked with a large number of college students who grew up in the church, I suspect it is, then it calls for a radically new message.

The message needs to become: the church is flawed, it is full of sinners in need of the grace of Christ. If you think the church is flawed, then you are right. But, the failures of the church are not evidence of the nonexistence of God. You think you don’t believe in God, you think you don’t have faith that there is a God because the church seems so flawed, but consider for a moment that maybe, just maybe, deep down inside, you do know there is a God.

As Querry thinks, and maybe even concludes: “The King is dead, long live the King.”

Watching the World Go By

“An occasion for serious study and reflection.”

In the late 19th century, Stephen
Crane (shortly before he published The Red Badge of Courage) spent a few years writing accounts of New York City, collected by the ever-invaluable Library of America. In “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” we read this:

As we walked toward the station the stranger stopped often to observe types which interested him. He did it with an unconscious calm insolence as if the people were bugs. Once a bug threatened to beat him. “What ‘cher lookin’ at?” he asked of him. “My friend, said the stranger, “if any one displays real interest in you in this world, you should take it as an occasion for serious study and reflection. You should be supremely amazed to find that a man can be interested in anybody but himself!”

The quotation there could stand in for a summary of the whole section. One imagines Crane wandering through the town for three years simply observing and writing down what he sees. We get portraits of the lowest of the low and the wealthiest. We get snapshots of odd moments in the life of the city. All done with Crane’s eye for the telling detail.

Is such observation enough? Crane certainly observes more than most. Is he right that the objects of notice should be grateful for the simple fact of being noticed?

Consider: “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers.” In this brief sketch a man walking along with his boy falls to the ground, insensible. A crowd gathers. (The alert and perceptive reader can see from whence the title of this piece comes.) Five pages later, an ambulance has carried the man off. And what have we learned?

Curiously, Crane’s story is much like watching the evening news. Man falls. CNN reports on it. Next story. Sometimes we continue to stare after the ambulance as it leaves the scene. “It was as if they had been cheated. Their eyes expressed discontent at this curtain which had been rung down in the midst of the drama. And this impenetrable fabric suddenly intervening between a suffering creature and their curiosity, seemed to appear to them as an injustice.”

After finishing reading this set of pieces by Crane, I am quite troubled by it all. Compare it to, say, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis’ first encyclical. Francis was desperately trying to convince the Church, Christians everywhere, and indeed the whole world, that we need to pay more attention to the poor, the disenfranchised, the weak, the lowly. And surely he is right. But, Francis is missing the bigger point being made by Crane: do we pay sufficient attention to the not-so-poor and not-so-weak? Indeed, do we pay sufficient attention to anyone, anyone at all?

Man falls. Not just the poor man, but the rich man too. Perhaps the crowd surrounding the rich man is bigger than that surrounding the poor man, but is that enough? Shouldn’t we do more than watch, shouldn’t we also help the poor man out a bit? Obviously. But, what about the rich man? Should we say that since he has wealth, it is enough to gather around when he falls?

We don’t notice people as people. We notice that they fall, and we gather when they do, but who are these nameless people? Who was that student I just saw walk past my office? Shouldn’t I care?

Crane offers no solution; this is voyeurism, pure and simple. I am not sure what to make of it. I read about people in the depths of a coal mine in the late 19^th century and I think…I have no idea what I think. I read about gawkers gathered around a fire and I think, “Here I am gawking at the gawkers. I am being exactly as helpful as they are.”

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent

The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, is marvelously fun.

Quirky beyond belief—a seemingly wild random ride that ends up all linking together in the end.

The basic plot is perfectly circular. It is the type of story that my wife, who hates looping time travel stories, would hate.

(By the way, the recent Doctor Who invention of “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” was a hysterical dodge to avoid the inherent problem of maintaining continuity in a 50 year long science fiction series in which time travel is the whole point.)

In the midst of that circular plot, there are all sorts of crazy subplots having nothing to do with anything, but amusing in their own right. (There is even a proto-“Harrison Bergeron” which was much better done in the short story than in the novel.)

There is one subplot which truly intrigued me. In the middle of the novel, a character creates a new religion: The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

The theology of the church is perfectly explained in the name of the church. In fact, once you have a theology that says
a) God Exists, and
b) He is Utterly Indifferent,
well, there really isn’t much more theology to work out.

A fascinating thought experiment, this new religion.

Compare The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent to the conclusion of Sartre’s Nausea. In both the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and in a state of total existential nihilism, there is no point to anything.

But, is it more comforting to think that world is meaningless because there is Nothing or because the God who created everything is totally and completely indifferent to the creation?

Oddly, those two worlds would be observationally equivalent—if you live in one, surely someone would think the world was actually the other. So, while at one level it would make no difference which was right, I suspect most people would rather live in one universe than the other. But, I am not sure which is more attractive.

There is no point in denying the attractiveness of a universe in which God the Utterly Indifferent exists.

If God is Indifferent, then why should any of the rest of us be otherwise? That would be comforting. I can stop caring about all the problems in this world.

But, then we’d have that problem of wondering why God was so Utterly Indifferent and that would be rather insulting. After all, I care about Me, so shouldn’t God care about Me?

So, maybe the existential crisis of Nausea is better. Though, it is hard to fathom how Nausea could be a preferred state to any other state.

It’s almost like the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe it is better if there is God the Not So Utterly Indifferent.

All of which gets me wondering why there are people who seem to hope it is a godless universe. I understand doubting the existence of God, but I am genuinely baffled by people who seem passionate about the desirability of such a thing.

Vonnegut’s human history is senseless from our standpoint. That is the whole point of The Sirens of Titan. Yet, there is a merriness in the senselessness. I do understand that. If there is no point to any of this, then why not take joy in it?

Happiness is underrated in modern philosophical circles.

Related Posts

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat’s Cradle “Does Life Have Meaning?”
Nietzsche, Friedrich Twilight of the Idols “Philosophizing With a Hammer”