Wikipedia
has sort of a list of noted atheists and agnostics characters .” in the broad category of “Fiction” who have, “either
through self-admission within canon works or through admission of the character
creator(s), been associated with a disbelief in a supreme deity or follow an
agnostic approach toward religious matters.
It's mostly a list from TV and such. For
example, Kurt
Hummel is listed from the musical comedy-drama Glee. People
like Dr. Allison Cameron on House is obviously an example of a skeptical,
free-thinking character. We might see more in pop culture as the
Nones-way-of-life proceeds.
Goldstein's protagonist is Cass Seltzer, a psychology of religion prof who gets pulled into the spotlight by the surprise success of his book called, after William James, The Varieties of Religious Illusion. Both Seltzer's fictional book and Goldstein's actual novel contain an appendix, - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. The appendix is not actually an argument in support of god, and Matthew Goldstein (aka Explicit Atheist), often a blogger here, would have a field day in shooting down the arguments. Maybe he has already. These arguments are really more conversational points and the lightness of position (reflecting the lightness of what earns popularity in today’s culture) is partly what gives the Seltzer character his path to fame and media access- an atheist with a soul. It’s a bit like former Mayor Koch and the people I discussed in by blog “Do They Contradict Themselves?”
Nobel Prize literature has some
atheist and freethinker characters. One
is in Ferit Orhan Pamuk’s (aka Orhan Pamuk) early 80s work called Silent
House. Pamik is a multi-talented
Turkish novelist/ screenwriter, and received
the Nobel Prize in Literature (2006). After winning his proze more of his work has been translated and getting reviews in English language outlets. One of this is Silent House whose main character is a bitter,
bereaving 90-year-old widow Fatma. The silence of the
book is about important issues that are not talked about directly. The story takes place somewhere in Turkey's violent summer
of 1980. The
Turkish Armed Forces were about to restored order via a coup after violence had
broken out between right-leaning nationalists and communists. This coup
was to transform Turkey from its fading economic to a more explicit secular if very military
state.
Pamuk uses a
house locale and a ritual summer visit from grandchildren to hold up a bit
of mirror about the noisy, dissipation and dissonance of Turkey in that era of
political and cultural change. As one reviewer noted Fatma's life is, “just like her house,
isn't silent. Instead, it's pensive and nearly bursting with lament, shame,
sadness, and squashed hopes.“ The widow Fatma herself is silent about the deeper
things but bemoans the outer disorder:
When
all that horrible hullabaloo lets up, when all that noise coming from the
beach, the motorboats, the wailing kids, the drunken cursing, the songs,
radios, and televisions, quiet down, and the last car goes screaming past, I
slowly get up from my bed and stand just behind my shutters listening to the
outdoors: nobody's there, they're all exhausted and have gone to sleep.
Fatma's shushing, keep-the-world and its problems out of here
is a great part of the silence, it is her deceased husband, Selahattin the local doctor
that is the atheist, intellectual voice that speaks through her. It is some of his political, rational and intellectual hopes that have
been squashed and silenced. We learn of this family patriarch
as Fatma
recalls him to us wile alone in her bedroom. Her monologues
ruminate on their joint past and we learn that Selahattin has been exiled
from Istanbul for his leftist politics. Madden the doctor doubles down on a self-and-family-destruct
course by proclaiming (Nietzsche style) that God dead. For good measure he
throws in darts about Eastern vs. Western/scientific values.
Isolated in an illiberal backwater and fortified by drink, Selahattin dedicates himself to an encyclopedic task – comprehensively rewriting the world to bring secularism and the scientific method to the Turks. It’s doomed to failure and passes on the burden to grandson Faruk, who following his grandfather (and father) in working on a manuscript whose goal is to disprove the existence of God, offer a rational if reductionist explanation of Turkey and the universe too.
Isolated in an illiberal backwater and fortified by drink, Selahattin dedicates himself to an encyclopedic task – comprehensively rewriting the world to bring secularism and the scientific method to the Turks. It’s doomed to failure and passes on the burden to grandson Faruk, who following his grandfather (and father) in working on a manuscript whose goal is to disprove the existence of God, offer a rational if reductionist explanation of Turkey and the universe too.
The
shape of the atheist doctor’s struggles is somewhat familiar from other
fiction. It is like a Russian novel
(Turgenev was apparently an influence). But his shadow casts a feeling some of
us may recognize even in the West that he idolizes a relative bit. And perhaps we see some of the doctor's questions echoed when
groups of free thinkers meet in the 21st century . We wonder why science
has yet to triumph over various hardened forms of superstition. We may wonder
why there passive acceptance of much that is wrong and be improved on. We may identify with lonely pioneers who
struggle to organize thought around them and reason things out in times when intellect
is sequestered by ignorance a conventions of hypocrisy.
For a
review of “Silent house” see Marie
Arana, in WaPO
October 08, 2012
Images
Holden
Caufield: http://familyguy.wikia.com/wiki/Holden_Caulfield
No comments:
Post a Comment