Andrew Klavan is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking cultural critics working today. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also an excellent mystery writer. His Cameron Winter series of novels has given me hours of great enjoyment, and he’s just getting started with it.
Besides mysteries, Klavan also writes nonfiction, including the bestselling The Truth and Beauty, where he discusses how nineteenth century romantic poetry reflects eternal Truths. His latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, is subtitled Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, and he isn’t kidding when he says Literature of Darkness! He focuses on three horrific and infamous crimes, and then he describes how each one led to extraordinarily beautiful and inspirational works of art. So how can the terrible crime of murder lead to great art? As he puts it in the Introduction,
The opposite of murder is creation – creation, which is the telos of love. And because art, true art, is an act of creation, it always transforms its subject into itself, even if the subject is murder. An act of darkness is not the same thing as a work of art about an act of darkness. The murders in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are horrific, but they are a beautiful part of the play. (p. 17)
The first murder Klavan chronicles is one committed in nineteenth century Paris by Pierre Francois Lacenaire and Victor Avril. They suspected another criminal, the blackmailer and con man Jean-Francois Chardon, of hoarding a large amount of money in his apartment. They strangled and stabbed him, then they stabbed Chardon’s bedridden mother to death. It turned out there was almost no money in the apartment.
Even though it was a terrible crime, Lacenaire captured the imagination of Parisian elites – “He was handsome, sophisticated, literate. A journalist, a published poet.” (p. 29). He justified his actions by saying he was rebelling against an unjust system. (Any resemblance to the swooning reaction of many people to the murderer Luigi Mangione is purely coincidental!)
Lacenaire’s crime was so well known that the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, based one of his greatest novels on it, Crime and Punishment. In that tale, a poor student, Rodion Raskolnikov, decides to kill an old woman for the money he supposes she is hiding. When he kills her with an axe, her developmentally delayed sister runs into the room, and he kills her as well. Instead of feeling that his crime was justified, however, Raskolnikov is wracked by guilt. He comes to realize that there is a moral order that he has violated, and no amount of rationalization can assuage his anguish.
The next crime Klavan delves into is the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder. These two young men read the works of Nietszche and decided they were the ubermensch Nietszche predicted must rise up in the aftermath of the death of God. They planned what they thought was the perfect crime, and they kidnapped and brutally killed a young boy, Bobby Franks. However, while they were disposing of the body, Leopold left his glasses in the woods. The police were able to trace them to Leopold, who confessed and implicated Loeb.
Their trial was a media sensation, and through the brilliant efforts of their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, they were able to avoid capital punishment. This murder inspired the hit British play, Rope, which was adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1948.
Klavan makes the case that beginning with the Marquis de Sade, continuing with Nietszche, and culminating with Michel Foucault in the twentieth century, a denial of God and the resulting denial of any moral order inevitably leads to murder and other atrocities:
But Foucault understood – what Nietszche understood, what the Marquis de Sade understood – that without belief in God, a loving God, and essentially Christian God who appeared in the world as the least among us, moral systems, all human systems, are based on the will to power, which is the will to survival, pleasure, and life. In order to overcome Christianity’s false moral constructs and find true life, authentic life, even in some sense a truly moral life, all social constructs had to be destroyed. (p. 75)
The third crime Klavan documents are the serial murders in 1950s rural Wisconsin of Ed Gein. He was discovered to have kidnapped, tortured, and killed many women. He made furniture out of their body parts, and wore their skins as a suit. Obviously, his horrible crimes led to movies like Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Klavan makes an interesting point here: in Psycho, a psychoanalyst is used to provide a rational explanation for Norman Bates’ behavior. By the time The Silence of the Lambs is filmed, the psychoanalyst himself is the murderer!
Klavan then devotes a chapter to the archetypical murder: when Cain killed Abel. He explores five themes that this story incorporates:
- The Knowledge of Good and Evil
- Sex and Sin
- The Battle of Brothers
- Murder as Suicide
- Sacrifice
In his discussion of the knowledge of good and evil, Klavan makes a beautiful observation:
Eternity is not a long time, it is all time, and it is impossible for mortal man to imagine. In eternity, for instance, you may not be reconnected to your lost loved ones, you may find you never lost them at all. In eternity, you may not find that God makes good out of evil, you may find that it was always good, you simply did not see it complete.
Because of this, the knowledge of good and evil is a curse to man, not a gift, because he sees it in time where it makes no sense. in his ignorance, all he knows is the injustice of the moment. His only possible response is anger and bitterness and despair, and, finally, murder. (p. 140)
The last part of of the book involves Klavan’s philosophy of The Practice of Creation – what is necessary to bring forth truly great art. The final chapter is a marvelous tour of the history of Western art, beginning with the ancient Greek statuary of the Acropolis, continuing through Byzantine and Renaissance depictions of Madonna and child, to the Cubist deconstruction of the human form by Picasso, and ending with a wonderful tribute to, in Klavan’s words, “the most beautiful object that a man has ever made with his mind and hands”, Michelangelo’s Madonna Della Pieta.
The Kingdom of Cain is a unique and well thought out argument for the importance of art that reflects a higher moral order. No matter how gruesome the crime, it only serves to illustrate how lost we are without it.
FracTad's Bookshelf 