I listened to a podcast about the Letby case hosted by two journalists who walked their audience through the legal proceedings. The prosecution laid out their evidence. We heard testimony from former colleagues of Letby and also heard transcripts of Letby’s text message conversations with her fellow nurses as read out by actors. This was paired with court reporting on the mood and tenor of the room as the trial unfolded. Next, detail by brutal detail, we heard about the crimes themselves. How Letby was alleged to have injected air into the veins and feeding tubes of her patients. How she created air emboli in their stomachs or gave them insulin which sent them into hypoglycemic shock. We heard about the horrible rashes running across their backs and abdomens. We heard about and from the families too, all of whom were fundamentally transformed by the events described in the case and likely by the case itself. Because how could they not be?
When Letby was found guilty—I actually have some doubts as to the strength of the evidence itself and the case put on by the prosecution—I kept turning over in my mind the question that most people probably come to when they hear about something this awful: What would make a person do this?
Until this point, I have not told you about the specific nature of Lucy Letby’s crime, which I believe push her actions beyond the realm of mere crime and into the realm of evil. True, murder is usually evil. A person who serially attacked thirteen people, resulting in seven deaths and six incapacitations, is likely evil. But there is something about this set of crimes that qualifies it as a special variety of evil. Lucy Letby’s victims were all neonates. The smallest, weakest, frailest of new humans. The most innocent of creatures on earth.
I realized that in my trying to figure out a reason for her actions, by trying to follow the act back through her history and psychology to its exact origin, I was thinking like a novelist. But I kept coming up against the fact that I could not actually imagine why a person would do something like that. I can imagine reasons for a great many things. I can begin to understand how certain factors in a person’s life might make them prone to fall into a set of actions that end in something horrible. That is not difficult. But that moral configuration posits that every person is fundamentally a victim of the universe and that when we do evil acts, we have merely strayed from an innocence that is the default position of every person. This is a naïve and limited worldview, but one that is utterly indispensable in writing the kind of fiction that we write today. Because a belief in the fundamental innocence of our fellow man is what allows us to imagine ourselves into their position enough to tell a kind of individualist story about them. Otherwise, they would make a pretty poor protagonist.
But how is one to enter into the mind of someone whose acts, by any definition, are evil? How are they to portray people and events beyond what they can possibly imagine themselves sympathizing with? I suppose I would ask a different question. When did we become limited solely to the domain of what suits our natural sympathies? What we need is a different order of value.
The term worldbuilding is often used to describe the elements of a story that create the backdrop and setting against and in which the events of the narrative unfold. It is perhaps most familiar to us in the context of fantasy and science fiction or speculative fiction. But it also pertains to the realist novel tradition. Consider this early passage from Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country:
Mrs. Heeny had had such “cases” before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. . . . It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.
This passage tells us not only about the circumstances of the Spragg clan and Mrs. Heeny’s sharp read of their situation but also provides the context in which the novel will unfold. We know that New York then is a place ruled by families and that these families are arrayed into groups and tiers of interrelated clans. And that these transplants, the Spraggs, are having difficulty negotiating the city’s seemingly arcane structures. The plot begins precisely because the Spraggs have moved from one place to another for a particular set of reasons, and the new social climate of that place has complicated those plans. This is worldbuilding at its finest.
There is a different, often neglected manner of worldbuilding, too—what I have started calling moral worldbuilding. It seems to me that a great deal of contemporary novels, usually realist, take place in a society that is aridly secular by default. This arid secularity, I believe, is a breeding ground for a banal variety of moral relativism. This moral relativism, at least in America and at least among our artist class, is vaguely post-Christian humanist, and by that I mean a set of ideas built around a belief in the potential goodness in man and in the commonness of man’s needs, desires, and condition. Post-Christian because the post-Christian humanist does not pursue this aim of the commonality of man and man’s interior weather for some Christian reason or due to a belief in God’s having made man in His own image. The post-Christian humanist believes that the commonality connecting all of mankind flows from the rational fact that mankind is complete in itself, and that this life is all that there is, and that all that awaits or befalls man concerns only this plane of existence and its laws. A great deal of emphasis is placed upon the value and beauty of the individual. And because we live in the twenty-first century, the primary vexation many of our characters face is alienation or isolation.
I do understand why moral relativism flourishes in a post-Christian-Humanist-Globalist anglophone world, particularly as societies in the West have become atomized and fractionalized, and the old coherent myths of Country, God, and State have been replaced by many individual spheres of influence—not all working toward one common goal or in accord, but seemingly for themselves and their own self-fulfillment.
D.H. Lawrence described the novel as “the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered.” The work of the novel then is to draw out and reflect the “infinity of pure relations, big and little, like the stars of the sky: that makes our eternity, for each one of us, me and the timber I am sawing, the lines of force I follow; me and the dough I knead for bread, me and the very motion with which I write, me and the bit of gold I have got. This, if we knew it, is our life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumambient universe,” and it is the work of a moral fiction in particular to capture, “that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness.”
This idea of morality speaks most deeply to the writers I revere, whose own works affirm this primary virtue of beautiful art. That is to say, the artists who have been most instructive in my education and the writers who were most instructive in their own education are all working within this same general tradition of moral art, particularly literature. A great literary tradition whose core belief is that our art should speak of and toward and about the truth of human relation. That isn’t to say only the good. Indeed, never does it say only the good. But all of it. My friend Garth Greenwell often says something like, If I am to say that you are neck-deep in the shit, I must also be willing to say and acknowledge that I am also neck-deep in the shit. That’s a bad paraphrase of his brilliant idea.
This is not without its appeal to me. I was raised with a brutal and all-seeing God. One who was jealous for my love and devotion. Hungry for my passion. As a child, I knelt on my floor each night and prayed to be spared and, if I could not be spared, then at least let me rest in His arms forever. That sort of God is dangerous. Because His will is easily co-opted by those with power over you to extract from you behaviors they find convenient. Why else would my mother slap me for putting a towel on my head and pretending to have long hair, telling me that it was a sin to do so. Why was I made to fear God, who would punish me constantly, and not to fear the men my parents let stay in our house, the ones who came into my room at night. We did not call that Evil. But that I might put a towel on my head and pretend to be the beautiful Nia Long or Gabrielle Union? That was Evil.
Having endured the brutalities of a strict Evangelical religious education, I can understand how a person can long for what passes for moral relativism in our contemporary life. A freedom from all the God stuff. A freedom to choose to live according to one’s own values and priorities. I have heard many people say of museums and beautiful architecture and libraries and gorgeous paintings and vivid novels, that this is their church. And true, reading that scene in Anna Karenina when Levin drinks from the cup in the field, I too feel affirmed in a way that I never did in the pews of the tiny white church I attended as a child:
And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long string of mowers and at what was happening around in the forest and the country.
Or when Lily Bart, at the end of The House of Mirth, tells Selden that she has tried very hard, she does everything she knows how to do, and still life is so hard, so hard, I am overcome with tremendous feeling, and I think, this is what it is to be human, to be alive:
I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me. We went to the Rothko show. I was still thinking about those trees. When we arrived at a series of late gray-and-black paintings, I felt that Rothko had captured something true in my experience of the world. Amid the swirling gray field in the lower half of one of the paintings, I saw the shifting faces of those in the beyond—indistinct, but present. I do not mean that there were figurative aspects to the painting or even that the painting gestured toward the figurative at all. I also do not mean to say that there was anything in the painting that suggested I should have found some personal resonance in it. Yet, in that negative space, the painting felt extremely personal to me. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is not looking as such. But that in my looking at the subtly shifting bands of light and shadow in the abstract gray field of the Rothko paintings, I remembered very strongly how I felt when I watched my father’s cigarette smoke turn and billow or how I watched fire and smoke stream out of the burning barrels we used to dispose of trash or the shapes the wind made as it kicked up dust from the fields in late summer. What I felt then was perhaps a recognition for a prior state of looking, which belonged to a part of my life that has nothing to do with the way I live now or the person I am. The Rothko with its many shifting shades brought it all back, tumbling over me. In a moment like that, the strange and sudden overlaying of the past and the present brought on by just one painting, you can’t help but think, Yeah, art can be an ethic. Art can be a moral universe.
When an author has succeeded in their moral worldbuilding, you get a novel like Teju Cole’s Tremor. Because it is Teju Cole, the novel is hard to explain and summarize even though its facts are rather prosaic. The novel opens with a character named Tunde trying to photograph a hedge at night. He is interrupted by a security person. He moves on. The novel takes its shape from Tunde’s wandering thoughts and meditations on things like colonialism, art, the history of genocide, art markets, academia, the strangeness of immigration, class, and on and on. Truly, it is a cosmopolitan vibe novel in its truest form, for better or worse.
But what I find most remarkable about Tremor is its moral worldbuilding. Tunde gives a lecture at a museum that speaks to the nature of plunder and art and collecting. The talk ties a depiction of a slave ship to Nazis and from Nazis to the dangers of leaving institutions like museums unexamined and the embedded elitism of Western art discourses. The lecture, reproduced in its entirety in the novel, begins with a rather meta element; Tunde acknowledges that there is a recording of the lecture. This meta-aspect is revisited later in the lecture when Tunde stops to recognize a sudden loss in his vision. The moment seems to disorient him, and the reader is disoriented by the swirling and unbearable facts Cole has been pressing upon us. It feels somehow that Tunde’s loss of vision coincides with a dark spot that has existed within our moral field of view all along. Symbol and object become one in this section. Tunde’s lecture goes on.
Later in the novel, there is a section in the form of a chorus of Nigerian voices delivering vignettes of their experiences, each a person who Tunde has encountered in some oblique or major way earlier in the book during his trip to Lagos. In this array of voices, the whole range of human behavior and endeavor is described: business owners, shop girls, slutty young men, mothers, sons, fathers, daughters—many daughters—all of them scheming and scamming and being scammed, trying to make a living, trying to have a good time, trying to do right, trying to avoid getting caught. We get the sense as we end the section that Lagos is a place where anything might happen. You might get a job or you might go to a party or you might get robbed or you might get assaulted or you might get judged playfully or you might be invited to a practice funeral or you might hear some of the most beautiful music you have ever heard—all perhaps on the same day. All of it runs continuously together. You never doubt that around every corner, there is the potential for either a true miracle or a true calamity, and so we hold our breaths sentence by sentence, waiting to see what Cole will conjure next.
But to me the greatest act of moral worldbuilding in Tremor is when Tunde’s class watches a brief documentary about the most prolific serial killer in American history, Samuel Little. Tunde is overwhelmed by the depth of Little’s crimes. He confessed to raping and killing ninety-three women, and he has been confirmed by the FBI to have been involved in sixty of those cases. Cole describes Tunde looking at Little’s face:
Little is black and elderly and has a sweet manner. The most prolific American serial killer is black? The man is not wild-eyed like Charles Manson. And though he is evidently intelligent he does not seem to have the hostile insinuating charm of a Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter. Tunde is aware of the affective pressure of the word “elderly,” a word he can hardly separate from tender and even protective feelings. Little’s face and his mien, his small twinkling eyes, his merry raconteurish manner, all of it is familiar to Tunde from numerous experiences of hearing elders talk about long-ago events.
The placid old-manness of it. The normalness of his appearance. The way his eyes light up as he tells the story of one murder he particularly enjoyed. The loving way he describes the women, with terrifying recall. And the way Tunde links portraiture to Little’s loving confessions. That Cole permitted these events into his novel without extended dips into Little’s biography, or without searching for a reason, is remarkable to me. He makes the drama of the moment about Tunde’s own self-examination of why he needed to find such a reason for Little’s actions, and his realization that ultimately, Little acted simply because he could.
I listened to the novel while I was on my way to meet Adam at the Rothko exhibit. I had Little’s crimes on my mind as I walked by those pine trees. I looked up Little. In appearance, he reminded me of one of my uncles. I think Tunde says something similar, how the victims look like people he knew or could have known. And the novel meditates for a bit on the danger of this identification as well as its power.
I find it instructive and illustrative to examine how evil finds its way into the work of writers like Cole and others. It operates by way of an icy distance, a pseudo-objectivity that does not dare to dip fully into the minds of the depraved. It is in some ways opposite to a novel like Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine, which follows a young man, Jacques Lantier, who is a train driver between Paris and Le Havre. The other main characters are a man named Roubaud, who manages the trains, and his wife, Séverine. On balance, I would say that Zola had more interest in evil than the average writer, or at least, he had a stronger stomach for it. La Bête humaine is a novel that is particularly suffused with evil. I do not mean merely evil acts. I mean evil people, which does seem like an old-fashioned idea.
The plot of La Bête humaine is pretty straightforward. Roubaud is fiercely jealous, and when he discovers that his wife’s former guardian, a wealthy administrator, sexually abused her, he flies into a rage. The injustice he feels is chiefly sexual humiliation. Feeling cucked by the old man, he concocts a scheme to murder him. Séverine and Roubaud do in fact murder the man and toss him from the speeding train. The body is discovered, precipitating other events. Meanwhile, Jacques, the driver, has a monomania for killing. He is obsessed with stabbing women. At the novel’s outset, he hopes that he’s been cured of the affliction, but after playing around with an attractive female cousin, a distant relation, he sees her bare neck and is seized with a desire to stab her with a pair of scissors. Fleeing is the only thing that keeps him from succumbing:
Then, Jacques, with weary feet fell down beside the line; and, groveling on the ground, his face buried in the long grass, he burst into convulsive sobs. Great God! So this abominable complaint of which he fancied himself cured, had returned! He had wanted to murder that girl. Kill a woman, kill a woman! This had been ringing in his ears from his earliest youth. He could not deny that he had taken the scissors to stab her. And it was not because she had resisted his embrace. No; it was for the pleasure of the thing, because he had a desire to do so, such a strong desire, that if he had not clutched the grass, he would have returned there, as fast as he could, to butcher her. Her, great God! That Flore whom he had seen grow up, that wild child by whom he had just felt himself so fondly loved! His twisted fingers tore the ground, his sobs rent his throat in a horrifying rattle of despair.
Nevertheless, he did his utmost to become calm. He wanted to understand it all. When he compared himself with others, how did he differ from them? Down there at Plassans, in his youth, he had frequently asked himself the same question.
The novel is laced with Jacques’s lust for murder. At every turn, Zola describes how it seizes him like a thirst, like an appetite, like a physical ache that must be satisfied. In the end, when Jacques and Séverine become lovers, Roubaud is once more driven to a frenzy, and is murdered by Jacques, who then kills Séverine in an act of lovemaking. And then Jacques ends up fighting with his co-conductor on a train, and the pair topple over the side, plummeting to their deaths.
The novel also contains a poisoning, bribery, a suicide by train, a horrible derailment in which dozens die, and a woman who dies as a result of being sexually assaulted and whose murder is pinned on her closest male friend, who is then tried for a terrible crime and arrested.
Disasters pile up in La Bête humaine, but Zola does something that many novelists do not do, and indeed are afraid to do, which is to write the interiority of a killer. To depict their actual thoughts. Not in the trite, banal way that contemporary life would have us insist upon but rather the truly flagrant, wild leaps of imagination that someone undergoing a moral transformation into a killer might experience. There is no restraint in Zola, that is true. Some might call it melodrama—I would agree that it is kind of melodramatic. Even so, the novel achieves something that I find increasingly rare: a willingness to engage evil.
The novel opens with a scene of domestic tranquility. Roubaud is sitting around at home, waiting for Séverine to return from shopping. He is hungry, dinner is late, and he is getting cranky. When she finally returns, they begin to quarrel, as they often do, and eventually Roubaud asks her why she has refused an invitation to join her former guardian, Grandmorin, at his estate in Doinville for a couple of days. We have the sense that Roubaud needs this man’s assistance with a matter of his job security. Séverine is coy about her reasons, which enrages Roubaud, and he seizes upon her and assaults her, and it’s then that she tearfully confirms his accusations that yes, she has slept with this former guardian, but certainly not because she wanted to. This scene unfolds in Roubaud’s mind for the most part. We are with him as he gears up to do his violent act. We are privy to the pulse of his motivations. When he gets the information he is after, that Séverine slept with this man, he then turns cajoling and tender. He almost seduces her to write to Grandmorin, to convince him that they might kill the man. Together.
We know from the very beginning that this is a world highly potentiated in violence and appetite. We cannot even call it irrationality. Because Roubaud arrives at the plan so logically that you can’t really disagree that he must murder Grandmorin in order to stay alive because he is so absolutely riven with jealousy. We understand totally how this is the only remedy for his existential condition. He must kill! And all of that occurs in the first chapter. The first chapter and they’re already plotting murders.
This tells us that murder is not an impossibility. That it exists in this world. That there are places in the world of this story where people are killed and dying, sometimes violently. For all of its overheated theatrics, La Bête humaine was bracing to read because it required a sustained encounter with things I would much rather not acknowledge. It refused to look away or to create a comfortable distance from evil. The novel is not anxious about redemption. The novel has no interest in redemption. This is in part to do with the determinism at the bottom of Naturalism, which holds that the actions and circumstances of man may be understood as products of biology and social environment, and also partly to do with Zola’s broad disinterest in religion. It’s interesting that to the modern reader, a character who does something evil without redemption is sometimes perceived as a plot hole rather than an element of the moral worldbuilding of a story.