Nations, like political creeds, can be upbeat or downbeat. Along with North Korea, the United States is one of the few countries on earth in which optimism is almost a state ideology. For large sectors of the nation, to be bullish is to be patriotic, while negativity is a species of thought crime. Pessimism is thought to be vaguely subversive. Even in the most despondent of times, a collective fantasy of omnipotence and infinity continues to haunt the national unconscious. It would be almost as impossible to elect a US president who advised the nation that its best days were behind it as it would be to elect a chimpanzee, though as far as that goes there have been one or two near misses. Any such leader would be a prime target for assassination. An American historian remarked recently that “presidential inaugural speeches are always optimistic whatever the times.” The comment was not intended as a criticism. There is a compulsive cheeriness about some aspects of American culture, an I-can-do-anything-I-want rhetoric which betrays a quasi-pathological fear of failure.
In an excruciatingly styleless study entitled The Biology of Hope, the American scholar Lionel Tiger, anxious to place his country’s ideology of hope on a scientific basis, is much preoccupied with drugged monkeys, mood-altering substances, and chemical changes found in the excretion of parents grieving for their dead children. If only one could search out the physiological basis of joviality, it might be possible to eradicate political disaffection and ensure a permanently ecstatic citizenry. Hope is a politically useful stimulant. “The possibility exists,” Tiger comments, “that it is a common human obligation to augment optimism.” Stalin and Mao seem to have held much the same view. It is our moral duty to insist that all is well, even when it self-evidently isn’t.
In a similar vein, the authors of a work entitled Hope in the Age of Anxiety inform us that “hopefulness is the best medicine because it represents an adaptive middle ground between the overactivated stress response and the disengaged giving-up complex.” Hope assures us of “appropriate levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, lymphocytes, and other critical health-related substances.” A deficiency of the stuff is bad for your personal and political health. Perhaps there are already scientists in California at work on converting it into tablet form. The American philosopher William James was restive with this saccharine vision. “Is the last word sweet?” he asks. “Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn’t the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life? Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup?”
The “faith-based” rather than “reality-based” politics of the George W. Bush White House pressed a familiar American attitude to the point of lunacy. Reality is a pessimist to whose treasonable talk one must shut one’s ears. Since the truth is often enough unpleasant, it must be trumped by the unflinching will. It is a vein of optimism not easy to distinguish from mental illness. Cheerfulness of this kind is a form of psychological disavowal. For all its square-jawed vigor, it is really a moral evasion. It is the enemy of hope, which is necessary precisely because one is able to confess how grave a situation is. By contrast, the jauntiness that causes the optimist to hope also leads him to underestimate the obstacles to tackling it, and thus to end up with a fairly worthless kind of assurance. Optimism does not take despair seriously enough. The emperor Franz Joseph is reputed to have remarked that whereas in Berlin things were serious but not hopeless, in Vienna they were hopeless but not serious.
Cheeriness is one of the most banal of emotions. One associates it with cavorting around in a striped jacket and red plastic nose. The very word “happiness,” as opposed to the French bonheur or the ancient Greek eudaemonia, has chocolate-box connotations, while “contentment” has too bovine a ring. “A man of no understanding,” writes the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, “has vain and false hope.” The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel doubts that there can be any deep optimism. Perhaps it is best seen as a degenerate, incorrigibly naive form of hope. There is something intolerably brittle about it, as there can be something morbidly self-indulgent about a pessimism that feeds with thinly disguised glee off its own glumness. Like pessimism, optimism spreads a monochrome glaze over the whole world, blind to nuance and distinction. Since it is a general mind-set, all objects become blandly interchangeable, in a kind of exchange value of the spirit. The card-carrying optimist responds to everything in the same rigorously preprogrammed way, and so eliminates chance and contingency. In this deterministic world, things are destined with preternatural predictability to work out well, and for no good reason whatsoever.
It is a remarkable fact that between the appearance of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in the mid-eighteenth century and the fiction of Thomas Hardy in late Victorian England there is scarcely a tragic novel (in the sense of one with a calamitous ending) to be found. There are, to be sure, a few hair-raisingly near misses. Wuthering Heights sails close to the brink of tragedy, while Charlotte Brontë’s Villette presents the reader with alternative endings, one tragic and one comic, as though nervous of closing entirely on the former note. Maggie Tulliver, the protagonist of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, dies at the end of the narrative, but in such ecstatic union with her stiff-necked churl of a brother that the conclusion is curiously uplifting. Though Eliot’s Middlemarch ends on a muted note, it affirms its faith in the reforming spirit, however somberly qualified, in its final breath. The final words of Dickens’s Little Dorrit are fairly comfortless, but the novel, like all of its author’s works, refuses to press its disenchantment through to outright tragedy. True to this impulse, Dickens altered the ending of Great Expectations to bring its hero and heroine together. Even when it is portraying the grimmest of social realities, at least in the earlier fiction, his pyrotechnic style places them enjoyably at arm’s length. The verve and brio with which he depicts the most harrowing features of Victorian England is itself a way of surmounting them.
If Thomas Hardy scandalized some of his readers, it was less because of his atheism or enlightened sexual opinions than his unswerving tragic realism. It was his refusal of fictional as well as religious consolation, of opiates of one kind or another, that proved so disquieting to a Victorian audience sorely in need of fictional consolation. Tess Durbeyfield and Jude Fawley are fully fledged tragic protagonists, and as such strikingly unfamiliar figures in the annals of English fiction. Samuel Richardson turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the distressed gentlefolk who were anxiously following the fortunes of his heroine Clarissa that he should come to her rescue, choosing instead to press the action obdurately through to her death. If the Victorians were especially disconcerted by dejection, it was not least because gloom was felt to be socially disruptive. In an age of social turmoil, one of art’s primary purposes was to edify. The point of fiction, as Freud argues of fantasy in general, was to correct the blunders of an unsatisfying reality. The English novel lent support to the status quo not only in its respect for rank or regard or social order but also in its relentless insistence on upbeat endings.
Even in our own disenchanted days, writers of dust jacket copy regularly try to discern glimmers of hope in the darkest of fictions, presumably on the assumption that readers are likely to find excessive despondency too dispiriting. Even so, we are accustomed to our narratives ending on a cheerless or inconclusive note. When they fail to be suitably downbeat, the effect can be arresting. Such is the case with Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, at the conclusion of which a group of men and women who have inexplicably lost their eyesight have their vision just as abruptly restored. One by one, these sightless characters pass through their darkness into the light. For a contemporary piece of fiction to end on such a joyfully transformative note is almost as audacious as if Pride and Prejudice were to conclude with a massacre of the Bennet sisters.
Reprinted from Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton by permission of the University of Virginia Press.