The delightful Edith Hamilton (author of The Greek Way and other books) once wrote a very insightful analysis of William Faulkner, called “Faulkner: Sorcerer or Slave?” and reprinted on her anthology The Ever-Present Past. You can read most of it here. And what she says of Faulkner is surprisingly applicable to the writers of Battlestar Galactica as well.
Mr. Faulkner’s novels are about ugly people in an ugly land. There is no beauty anywhere. Whether he deliberately excludes it or does not perceive it, no one can say, but at least he says himself that a blossoming pear tree in the moonlight looks like hair streaming up from the head of a drowned woman…. The people, thus doomed, are like the land that dooms them. It is part of the fate that molds them….
She points out that Faulkner’s writing is actually steeped in Puritan asceticism and disdain for the moral pretensions of people—and is thus a betrayal of his famous Nobel prize speech in which he claimed to believe that man will not merely survive but prevail. This, too, fits with BSG’s writers; Louis Menand has observed that the Luddite left born in the 1960s—and the ideological grounding of Battlestar Galactica—is in fact a form of Puritanism. Writes Hamilton,
[G]ifted as he was, Mr. Faulkner worked his way through this maze of confused instincts and feelings and thoughts. He did it by a logic of his own. People were predestined; that part was true. They did not act of themselves; they were driven. “A volitionless servant of fatality,” he calls one of his characters. His own peculiar twist was that they were always predestined to hell. Heaven was non-existent…. Back of the extremely bleak view he takes of all things here below stands the conviction, older than Puritanism, as old as antiquity, present in all ages, among all nations and races, that there is an inseparable trinity: the world and all that is therein, the flesh and all that are born therefrom, and the devil. There is violence, indeed, and cruelty and all manner of sexual doings, but they merge into the general scene, dimmed like everything else. They are an ugly, insignificant part of what is ugly and without significance…. There is the same heavy gray atmosphere, the same undiversified country, the same inconsequent little human beings making the same futile gestures, the writer’s art is not to heighten and magnify, but to dull and diminish.
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