Leaving Tomorrow, David Bergen (Toronto: HarperCollins), 2014.
I am a proposer of projects aimed at answering arcane questions but, because of their arcaneness (arcanicity?) and because they would require more time of me than I have lifetimes to give, most of my projects go unprojected. One such project is to conduct a novel census. Create a database of all the millions of novels ever written, interrogating their major characters using the questions one finds on a typical census form: age, gender, ethnicity, place of birth, occupation, marital status, hobbies, etc. Then use that database to see what we can learn of broad trends within novel writing. One of the trends I would investigate is the matter of character profile. Do authors demonstrate a bias in the demographic profile of characters they create?
We’ve heard a lot about this in the film industry with allegations that movie producers lean towards the virile male lead. It’s a rare script that includes a substantial role for an older woman. Even roles for young women tend to be unchallenging, typically restricted to “horizontal adjunct to virile male lead.” And if you’re wondering about roles for older Black or Asian women … Don’t even ask. When is the last time you ever saw a Hollywood film that included a substantial role for an older Black or Asian woman?
I think we should be asking the same question of the novels we read. If we take seriously the literary justification that claims we read in order to foster a sense of empathy, then we have to ask the parallel question: empathy for what? I don’t need to read any more moody-alienated-white-boy-coming-of-age novels in the spirit of Holden Caulfield; I was a moody alienated white boy. The suggestion in high school that The Catcher In The Rye would help me develop a sense of empathy is patently absurd. The empathy justification only works if I as reader encounter characters who are nothing like me.
To give my project an air of credibility, I would dress it up in a quasi scientific methodology, starting with a hypothesis. I’m going to use my project to test the hypothesis that the character profile of a broad sampling of novels matches the character profile of Hollywood movies. It is dominated by virile male leads, especially white virile male leads, fewer substantial female leads, dwindling to negligible numbers as we track characters along the axes of age and race.
In terms of character profiles, David Bergen is anomalous, a man willing to try his hand at creating a woman, as he did in The Age of Hope with a character who, by the end of the novel, is a senior citizen. In addition, we have younger women as substantial characters in The Time In Between and The Case of Lena S. So it comes as a surprise to find a later novel which, on its face, presents something more in line with our expectations for a white male writer—a teenaged boy coming of age, leaving his home on a ranch in rural Alberta, teaching English in Paris for a year, gaining a taste of love, trying to figure out who he is, returning home and discovering that he’s more of a man than when he left. The first blurb on the inside cover, courtesy of the Globe & Mail, is more explicit in characterizing the novel: it’s a Bildungsroman. Except that it’s not. The Globe & Mail got it wrong. It only looks like a Bildungsroman.
Bergen’s decision to use a young male character is not the lazy default of a tired male author, but a necessary choice. At the heart of the novel is an archetypal conflict and it is that archetype that determines the choice of characters and, to a certain extent, their psychology. I’m speaking about the conflict between brothers—Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, with their New Testament echo in the parable of the prodigal son. I think it’s safe to assume that Bergen, who grew up within the Brethren tradition, would be intimately familiar with these stories and would have internalized them as moral touchstones. Bergen reworks the paradigmatic conflict to expose a difficult question that the traditional stories leave buried. The fact that the novel ends up resembling a Bildungsroman is incidental.
At the heart of the novel is an incident that drives a wedge between brothers. Arthur, the younger sensitive bookish boy goes out one evening with his older brother, Bev, who has recently returned from the Vietnam war and is struggling to keep things together, probably suffering from PTSD with a helping of other mental health issues on the side. The brothers stop at a bar and, because Arthur is underage, he waits in the pickup truck for his older brother. By the time Bev returns, it’s started to rain. Even though he’s had too much to drink, Bev drives and hits a man who was trying to flag them down in the rain. Bev is at a loss what to do, so Arthur takes charge and covers for him. He lays the man out in the back seat and drives an hour to the nearest hospital. The man dies en route so, when Arthur gives his statement to police, he says that he was driving when the man stepped out in front of their pickup truck.
It turns out the deceased is a neighbouring rancher, so when enough time has elapsed, Arthur approaches the widow and offers to help out after school. This is where the difficult question arises. It’s all well and good to cover for his brother. And it’s not as if, in doing this, Arthur has somehow orchestrated a reversal of roles. Everybody knows Arthur is the responsible brother and Bev struggles; everybody merely thinks it was Arthur who had the misfortune to be at the wheel when a man stepped in front of his car. But when Arthur continues to pose as the guilty party with his offer to help the widow, he denies his brother the opportunity to give proper expression to his own guilt and to atone for his conduct. As Arthur confesses at the end of the novel, he believes his decision to cover for his brother, although perhaps motivated by a sense of loyalty, was in fact a betrayal.
Although Bergen does not expand this question beyond the context of the novel, we readers are free to do with it whatever we please. In particular, I see it taking us to the very heart of a traditional Christian theology, namely the notion of substitutionary atonement. On a conservative reading of the Jesus story, Jesus sacrifices himself on the cross for the sake of our sins, assuming that burden for himself so we no longer have to bear it. Critics of this reading suggest that it infantilizes the relationship between those who commit misdeeds and their victims or that it turns personal responsibility into a caricature of mature moral development. Turning to Bergen, we could go one further and suggest that a theology of substitutionary atonement casts Jesus in the role of betrayer insofar as his sacrifice denies us the opportunity to do what we must to enter into right relation with those around us.
I don’t want to make too much of a theological interpretation, because Bergen certainly doesn’t. But even if we restrict ourselves to a secular ethics, Bergen’s observation still strikes us with equal force: despite our benevolent intentions, we hurt people when we deny them the opportunity to own their guilt.