Music Philosophy Art Math Chess Programming and much more ...
April 13, 2021
I remember reading somewhere that for August Strindberg, the type of hero he found interesting was not a genius or an exceptional person, but an ordinary man, the so-called "everyman." As is well known, ideals are not as interesting as individuals experiencing internal moral or psychological conflicts. It is precisely these dilemmas or contradictions between equally important values that a person holds that are so compelling to the reader. For Strindberg, the Nietzschean "Übermensch" would indeed be uninteresting as a literary hero. Even Hamlet might be too ideal a hero for him. For me too, a hero should be someone ordinary and imperfect, because that is what the modern person is.
Examples of such heroes with whom the reader can identify, even if they differ in some way, include Goethe’s Faust, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, and more recently Frodo Baggins from J.R.R. Tolkien’s monumental work The Lord of the Rings. Among even more contemporary literary heroes, one could mention Alicia Gris from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Labyrinth of the Spirits or Elizabeth from The Queen’s Gambit. As is well known, Frodo from Tolkien’s work is an ordinary hobbit from the Shire who finds himself in a dramatic situation, much like Tolkien during World War II.
Similarly, Jan Markowicz, the hero of my novel titled Eklekyda: Demiurge ex machina, is not an ideal but a normal man. Like Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, he is an imperfect person full of internal conflicts and contradictions, wavering between realizing various conflicting values. He commits a murder that completely changes his life, marking a transgression of a certain boundary—just as I have crossed the boundary of mental health. Both Raskolnikov and I, faced with an internal and existential crisis, try to find a way out. For Raskolnikov, this act is murder; in my case, it is falling into mental illness or escaping into the internal world of personal experiences.
Isn’t such a hero—someone experiencing moral conflicts—close to us? The hero of my novel, Jan Markowicz, is a man who battles his inner demons (not only Markbet, his dark alter ego). He wishes to be an ordinary man, not an ideal or a saint. In confronting reality—both social and psychological—he tries to maintain inner balance, like the tightrope walker in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and fight for higher values; he is, in a way, a defender of humanity.
Jan Markowicz stands somewhere between the ideal Demiurge Orfello Nocturnus and the demonic anti-hero Markbet. He does not aspire to be a god or an antichrist, but simply strives to be a human being. Orfello Nocturnus is a Demiurge—a transcendent being, divine, ideal, or enlightened. In contrast, his opposite, Markbet, is like Faust’s Mephistopheles or even the antichrist ("obviously, I am the antichrist"), while Jan Markowicz is a completely ordinary person who, like anyone else, seeks his place in the world, his own path (which is probably why I didn’t become an artist like my parents, but a philosopher), the meaning of life, happiness, and liberation from his demons.
Jan Markowicz, like myself, is a philosopher, so in a sense, he represents me or is simply me in a different reality than the one I live in. Like the author of the novel, he experiences internal conflicts, is lost in the world, and searches for answers to existential questions, goes through moral dilemmas and intellectual contradictions—both in life and in philosophy.
It seems to me that my novel can be interpreted as a “journey into the self,” a self-analysis, or a metaphor for my life. The hero seeks answers to questions about the meaning of life, truth, goodness, and beauty. He longs to understand himself. To find his place in the world, to achieve inner harmony, liberation, knowledge, and happiness—in other words, to discover the eternal Mystery.
Is it possible that one day we will discover answers to the most important questions about humanity and the universe, the meaning of life, truth, and freedom? Can a human being transcend the boundaries of the world and find meaning beyond them? As Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (proposition 6.41):
"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen; in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, for if it did, it would be accidental. It must lie outside the world."
Marek Wojnicki