What is Dark?

[Transitoria]

My novel, MAN OF THE HOUSE, is dark. It's a story of a dark time (the Bosnian War) and the people who populate it. Their acts (for the most part) are dark, violent and oftentimes, disturbing because their actions are based on events that did happen. No thing, no where is darker or more violent than the human being who declares he is fighting for a religious cause. That said, if the entire novel were dark without pinholes of hope, the reader would become desensitized to even the cruelest of actions and become bored. Yes, bored. And a bored reader is one who puts down your book in favor of another that will hold his attention. Death without life, destruction without renewal, and despair without hope becomes passé. Darkness without light to provide contrast becomes nothing more than shades of gray, but the darkness that follows a glimmer of light is truly the pitchest of black.

[polymath]

Is there a more hardboiled cynical expression than more evil has been perpetrated in the name of religion than in the name of evil? Dark, truly dark by any definition.

[siebendach]

Hmm . . . funny, that's about the least cynical thing I can think of.

[Watcher55]

Except that evil doesn't call itself that and wears many masks. Even when a mask is torn away, evil seldom surrenders the arsenal of moral outrage and its cache of seeds which can be sown into the fields of the enemy.

[siebendach]

Absolutely. And if the world were truly "dark", moral outrage would be too weak a concept to function as a worthwhile mask. . . in a completely "dark" world, a "mask" of moral outrage couldn't be exploited for anything. No one but the powerless would feel any moral outrage.

The most cynical thing I can think of is a state of being based on an Orwellian sort of doublethink Torquemada would engage in. From that point of view, the tormentor has little need of "masks" --- things simply are the way he says they are. There is a metaphysical order directing the universe, and it's on his side.

To me, that situation seems the exact opposite of what polymath posted . . . but again, that's just my own opinion. Definitions of "dark" and "light" are subjective enough that they can sort of feed back on themselves.

[polymath]

The most cynical thing I can think of is a state of being based on an Orwellian sort of doublethink Torquemada would engage in. From that point of view, the tormentor has little need of "masks" --- things simply are the way he says they are. There is a metaphysical order directing the universe, and it's on his side.

To me, that situation seems the exact opposite of what polymath posted . . . but again, that's just my own opinion. Definitions of "dark" and "light" are subjective enough that they can sort of feed back on themselves.

I see that situation as precisely what I'm talking about. A tormenter who believes his way is the way things are and is taken as given by a society is a bleak setting situation at least, and a hardboiled cynical perspective, if indifferent, toward others' perspectives. My meta's way or the auto-da-fe highway.