The Werthers among us
I have just finished reading the “Sorrows of Young Werther” which documents the trials and tribulations of an idle minded 18th century German aristocrat. It was Goethe’s first novel, which was really a novella (112 pages) and was remarkable for it’s clarity and concision. The current state of our cultural affairs is absolutely drenched with a ubiquitous magical realism. The cream of the crop of your Airport bookstore will likely be in the vein of Haruki Murakami, or the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. These are both good authors for our times, and have merits, but spend much of their time in the realm of the symbolic or semiotic. These symbols are powerful because the images tap into the collective unconscious and provide nodes or anchors to hold the interest of readers that commonly trade in such ubiquitous metaphors. But, at the heart of 1Q84, which runs at a little over 900 pages, is a meditation on the beauty of rather vanilla missionary-style coitus. All the references to other great works of Western Civilization, including directly lifting entire pages from Chekhov, do not add much than to educate the reader to the greatness of Jung, Proust, etc. Reading about people reading other books is dreadfully boring, but is considered the apex of current literature.
Contrast this to Young Werther. An epistolary novel, the lead character Werther (the similarity of his name to “whither” is highlighted ) is naive and barely more than a child, and the letters to his friend Walhelm come across at first as saccharine and bucolic. There is very little symbolism and the story is one of the oldest plots ever. Young Werther loves a woman trothed to another man. Thus, his sorrows begin. To empathize with young Werther you must understand and know his position. Young Werther was, let’s call a spade a spade here, a clingy beta-orbiter. A beta male is of a lower social status whether due to a lack of initiative or as a function of being next to a higher functioning Alpha. Mitt Romney is an alpha male in most rooms in the world, until he had dinner with Donald Trump. There are many factors determining one’s social standing, but what matters most is your standing in the eyes of the woman you are courting. If you are aware of your lower status, and you shower attention on a woman nonetheless, you are orbiting, providing the milk (that sweet blessed male attention) for free.
Werther likely suffered from low testosterone and a high enough IQ to make him a danger mostly to himself. Goethe drew from his own experiences and was wise enough at 24 to recognize his own immaturity and exorcise these demons through his writing. Sorrows offered a kind of anti-bildungsroman, a careful set of guideposts of how not to act among women, especially beautiful women you think you really love a lot at 19. Twitter and the PUA community has a lot of great advice on missing the pitfalls of dating, i.e. don’t suffer from “one-itis”, be cool and approach a lot of women, lift weights, get wingmen to help with your approach, which can be good for young men that can filter out the overt sexism and bedpost-notching mentality that unfortunately comes with such advice. But this reality wasn’t available to Young Men in the late 1700s, and “The Sorrows of Young Werther” serve as a great cautionary tale for the sensitive young male, even to this day.
I want to pivot here from the tragic fate of young Werther to the fate of young white males of America. Drug overdose, and especially suicide, is a problem that white males have, and that white people in general need to address. Here also the epistolary nature of Sorrows rang so true to me. I had at one point kept in touch with an old acquaintance, lets call him Mark, not really someone I spent a lot of time with during college, on Facebook. He used his FB to broadcast his rather sad lot in life, and I engaged him over the years to discuss his situation in private, eventually talking on the phone. After toiling away on the academic content farm, for far too long, he bounced around several menial jobs while applying for thousands of jobs suitable to his research-oriented skill set. He toiled for three years in what I know to be utter despair. Fortunately Mark did find a job that pays him enough to keep him independent.
Our correspondence thankfully continues and my recent, delicious purging of FB resulted in renewed communication with vigor. Mark recently brought to my attention the recent story of death and despair from news outlets, namely NPR. He admitted a bit of schadenfreude and smugness having grown up with a lot of uneducated rednecks he had no sympathy for people who waste their time doing drugs. I responded by telling a few anecdotes about the men, extended family members, who died young throughout my life. We didn’t have opiates but there was enough Jack Daniels and Miller Lites to ruin many lives. Men dying of diabetic shock at 40, cirrhosis at 49, that kind of thing. My friend is very sensitive, and I tried to rebut in as kind a way as possible, I will share an excerpt from that here:
March 27, 2017 Mark,
In families that don’t have wealth it can be pretty despairing to see that no opportunities are available in rural culture. You need 1000 acres of land to grow enough to support a family, you can’t trap animals anymore, manufacturing is gone and many places that relied on industries like coal have been evaporated. Free trade has brought wealth, but that has many been distributed to Silicon Valley immigrants, illegal immigrants, or those with the capital to make investments. Average joes like you and me are making the same salary our parents did in the 80s when accounting for inflation. So, it can be easy to turn to pills or the bottle, especially pills once you get started on them. I took pain pills for my kidney stone, percocets, and let me tell you, I GET IT.
To be honest I thought you may have more sympathy, given that for all your education you still had to wander the desert a bit stocking the Amazon warehouse and doing bullshit jobs or being jobless for so long…
I think you get the picture here. I don’t want to pick on my anon friend any more except to point out that the absence of in-group associations seems to be predominantly a problem amongst whites in America, as opposed to minorities. Blacks and hispanics tend to stick together and would not admit to feeling schadenfreude over the deaths of young black men, certainly you would not hear that from upwardly mobile professionals. Imagine Ta-Nehisi Coates writing smugly about how young black men deserve to be shot by other black men. Coates and company serve to protect and boost their own against whites, and that’s well and good but who writes about these problems in white communities with Coates’ perch? Not David Frum, Frank Rich, David Brooks or Kevin Williamson, that’s for sure.
More recently, someone I knew did get hooked on opiates and had to spend time in the hospital and rehab to get back on his feet. I visited him and told him the story of these family members, these men that died far too young and fell victim to addiction. His wife stayed by his side the entire time, and soon they had three kids together. I am convinced that she saved his life. Once men have a truly caring wife and heirs, they no longer need to face the abyss.
And thus, a note on why the form, that gripping realism of Werther is so crucial today in Weimerica, and by comparison the ubiquitous magic realism is only empty escapism. There is no deus ex machina to save these lost men. Further, all the clever symbolism and cross referencing often only serves to obfuscate or dilute, to keep us from looking in the eye of those suffering in the lives of the Werthers among us. Good fiction is best when it is efficient and direct.