What hast thou that thou didst not receive – 1 Corinthians 4:7

I’d like to believe I’m my own man. I hope I am, but the evidence is ambivalent.

The mantra of the age is: be yourself! Be you. But who are we?

You see, deep in our characters lies an anxiety… an anxiety of influence. Harold Bloom coined this term in the 1970s to refer to the struggle poets have against their precursors (e.g., Milton’s struggle to escape Shakespeare’s influence – a task at which he failed). I’d like to extend its application. Exploring works from Oscar Wilde, Patrick Rothfuss and others, this article will explain why we shouldn’t be too sure that our identities are… well… ours, and how we should respond to this potentially inescapable determinism.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray should be thought of as the most handsome literary character ever written. Unable to bear the physical consequences of ageing, he trades his appearance for his soul. While he lives and sins, the effects are transposed to a portrait of himself. His face remains unchanged.

Early on, Lord Henry makes this remarkable observation:

‘There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.’

‘Why?’

‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.’

Dorian is desperate to escape the influence of time. He initially appears to succeed, but his wrinkles are etched permanently and irrevocably onto the painting, which he sees at the book’s conclusion – to his horror. But time is a rather bland force, all things considered, as it comes for us all. It has the air of regularity.

More pernicious are the influences we experience in time.

Kvothe and the Cthaeh

In The Wise Man’s Fear, Kvothe encounters a creature on a tree which calls itself ‘the Cthaeh’. No one knows how it got there (perhaps the author does but we wouldn’t know, seeing as it’s been 15 years since the last book was released).

The Cthaeh has preternatural foresight: it can see the future perfectly. And with that blessing comes Kvothe’s curse:

‘[Kvothe], the Cthaeh can see the future. Not in some vague, oracular way. It sees all the future. Clearly. Perfectly. Everything that can possibly come to pass, branching out endlessly from the current moment.’

Kvothe raised an eyebrow. ‘It can, can it?’

‘It can,’ Bast said gravely. ‘And it is purely, perfectly malicious. This isn’t a problem for the most part, as it can’t leave the tree. But when someone comes to visit …’

Kvothe’s eyes went distant as he nodded to himself. ‘If it knows the future perfectly,’ he said slowly, ‘then it must know exactly how a person will react to anything it says.’

Bast nodded. ‘And it is vicious.’

After some lamentations, our main character resigns himself to his fate:

Kvothe gave a wry smile. ‘So after a person meets the Cthaeh, all their choices will be the wrong ones.’

Bast shook his head, his face pale and drawn. ‘Not wrong, [Kvothe], catastrophic… In our plays, if the Cthaeh’s tree is shown in the distance in the backdrop, you know the story is going to be the worst kind of tragedy. It’s put there so the audience knows what to expect. So they know everything will go terribly wrong in the end.’

Not wrong, catastrophic. The Cthaeh uses its omniscience to create the worst possible future for anyone it interacts with, and it does this merely through dialogue. It is an influence no man or woman can escape, creating perpetual anxiety for its victims. They may rage against their fate, but are nevertheless trapped in it.

I seem to have stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently, I lie here in Hell.

– Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

Kvothe lies in Hell, and has fallen.

You may be tempted to conclude, as I did for years, that Kvothe’s future is doomed, and no recourse remains. But may this all be a matter of perspective? Before Bast informed Kvothe of the Cthaeh’s power, he was unaware he was influenced by it, and thus ostensibly lived as an autonomous agent. Are Kvothe’s hands tied by his discovery or his belief in it?

For Steinbeck, the answer is obvious.

Thou Mayest

I have been stuck on this argument for months. God rejects Cain’s gift in Genesis 4, and the young man is immediately possessed by murderous indignation. God, sensing this, provides a warning:

If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

– Genesis 4:7 (KJV)

Steinbeck, parroting obscure Hebrew tradition, arguably mistranslates this passage, rendering it ‘thou mayest rule over him’ to mean God gives Cain (and by extension, us) a choice to exercise control over our circumstances. I find this idea attractive, but do I believe it? Might that be why this portion of the article simply will not write?

In Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, Harold Bloom contrasts Yahweh and Satan:

Satan knows he has no answers to the question of his future… Yahweh says: ‘I will be [that] I will be.’ Punning on his own name… he tells Moses that as God he will be present when he wills to be present, and absent whenever it suits him. Satan knows that his presence, like his absence, lies not in his own will… [He] desperately wants to establish autonomy yet knows he cannot do it.

Satan’s future, no matter how much he might resist, will be determined by the God who expelled him from heaven. He remains eager – no, desperate to establish some sort of control, some sort of freedom, but that hope is in vain. If we construe Hamlet’s ‘to be, or not to be’ soliloquy as a contemplation of the limits of the will (i.e., if Hamlet is questioning whether he can exercise autonomy against the ‘sea of troubles’ he will inevitably face in life), Satan, reading it, would be forced to admit his own case is hopeless. His ocean of misfortunes – Yahweh – will not let the devil escape the Hell prepared for him.

In a previous article, we explained that our destinies are directed by forces we cannot control – what, for purposes of this article, we will call God. Debating free will is thus a waste of time, because whatever our conclusions are, none of us can completely shake off the life-altering effects of the tragedies we face. Declare your will is free all you like, but are you the same person after immense suffering that you were before? Most probably not. We are acted upon before we act.

This brings us back to 1 Corinthians 4:7, which I quoted at the beginning: what are we that we did not receive? The answer, of course, is nothing, for even life itself was given to us.

So what should we do? I almost said have the courage ‘never to submit or yield’, as Satan cries in Paradise Lost. But that is not the answer. That isn’t even the question. Instead ask: what will we do?

And to that we conclude: whatever God decides.