In her review of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak last books, Slate critic Laura Miller asks: If McCarthy was as hopeless as he seemed to be, why did he bother writing a novel at all?
I offered my two cents in a comment on X, quoting Margaret Atwood: “People without hope do not write novels.” Someone replied, “Yes, they do.” Fifteen people, a lot for my desultory feed, liked that reply, cosigning its despair.
The discussion was unsatisfying, even by social media standards. No one shared counter examples or cited a novel they’d written while without hope. A percentage of those who liked the comment appeared to be bots, who should be brimming with hope. Many commenters hid behind cartoon avatars. No one appeared to spend much time contemplating a clear implication of their position: They have a bleaker worldview than the woman who imagined The Handmaid’s Tale, arguably the most influential dystopia since 1984.
Interestingly, the comments stopped when I provided the remark’s context: a speech Atwood made to Amnesty International. Of course, the thread may have simply exhausted itself. Or this new context may have removed the discussion from the realm of recreational nihilism and placed it in the realm where people are imprisoned or tortured for what they say. In the context of Atwood’s remark, “people without hope do not write novels” means an essentially political hope — most optimistically, that writing a novel might produce a better world by prompting direct political change.
We know of other types of hope. Atwood elsewhere speaks of the hope embodied in the phrase, “only I have escaped to tell thee”: the sinewy, traumatized hope of the survivor. Her subsequent writing suggests a third possibility, that dark stories might help us recognize the evil within ourselves or within our worlds, the hope of the allegory.
Atwood was herself quoting Flannery O’Connor. In context, O’Connor’s quote, from her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” varies from what Atwood said in at least one crucial particular:
People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it is very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.
For Atwood, hope is political. For O’Connor, an explicitly Catholic novelist, it is spiritual. Both give voice to a familiar muscular optimism. In this way, they remind me of the women who raised me and raised my friends in the small town of Rollingstone, Minnesota.
They seemed to enjoy bleakness in ways the truly defeated do not. Their despair felt like an act of privilege. They did not appear to understand that hope could be an engine.
I now realize that I took from my upbringing an unarticulated belief in the moral necessity of hope — and the belief that the abandonment of hope is a kind of cowardice. I have carried with me the example of three women: my mother, my friend John Kendrick’s mother, and Sister Conrad, who was the principal of our village’s K-12 Catholic school.
From the evidence of their lives, these women believed that hope was a necessary response to the world. As religious women, they called it faith. This hope was not glib, and it certainly wasn’t happy talk. Hope wasn’t a denial of despair. It was a weapon to be used against it.
Hope is what my mother summoned after my father underwent 12 hip replacements in 10 years, lost the farm, incurred medical expenses that wiped out their savings, and died at 53. It is what I suspect Mrs. Kendrick called on when her husband died of cancer, leaving her with 14 children, a few barely out of diapers. Hope is whatever inspired Sister Conrad to fight to keep our school open and, when she lost that fight to the diocesan decision-makers, to run the Catholic Charities in Winona.
Despite the differences among these women, their hope was of that muscular kind that Atwood and O’Connor were invoking, the hope that your actions — whether writing a novel or carrying a fatherless family or a failing school on your back — will produce some light in a dark world.
This hope generates obligation. You have a responsibility to keep going, even if the light that propels you feels flickering or hallucinatory. At its extreme, such hope may consist of little more than humility, the sense that, although your mind is pointed ineluctably toward despair, your mind is small and fallible.
Sometimes the only hope is the hope you might be wrong. But it is often far more varied than that.
When you think about hope and the novelist this way, it becomes much more robust. In addition to Atwood’s political version and O’Connor’s Christian version, other possibilities exist: that the novelist might resolve some opacity within themselves by writing this novel; or lessen some pain by articulating it; or find beautiful sentences in a horrific situation; or expand or extend the form; or fail now so they may succeed later; or just show off a little.
I think Julie Schumacher articulated the hope that is most distinctive to the novel. “Ultimately my decision to publish Black Box came back to shame and to isolation. I had thought about the people I had met who were in pain but who were pretending that everything was fine. And I thought, this is what books can do for us. They can acknowledge our experience and take the lid off our isolation and make us feel less alone.”
The despair enthusiasts who inhabit the comments section on X couldn’t acknowledge any of these forms of hope. You get the sense they weren’t trying — that they enjoyed indulging their darker natures. I could be wrong. We know so little about those we interact with online. Those comments may have come from hurting souls. They may have been their last statements before succumbing to self-harm or even self-annihilation.
But it didn’t feel that way. Rather, they seemed to enjoy bleakness in ways the truly defeated do not. Their despair felt like an act of privilege. They did not appear to understand that hope could be an engine — perhaps because life has never forced them to understand that. I sensed that the commenters were doing a little hoping themselves: They were betting we’d mistake their glib pessimism for rigor.
At a recent reading in Minneapolis, the novelist Jesmyn Ward spoke of the hope offered by the life of the spirit. She had considered removing the spiritual aspects from Let Us Descend, her historical novel of a slave girl separated from her mother and marched over hundreds of miles to an auction. She concluded she owed them spiritual lives. To deny that “would break the characters. It would break the reader.”
As she spoke, I thought, you are very different from me. But I recognize you.
Kevin Fenton lives and writes in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Leaving Rollingstone, a memoir, and Merit Badges, a novel.