Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

  Shakespeare’s discovery of opacity led to an even more important discovery about the audience. When he stripped away the explanation, Shakespeare realized that people weren’t drawn to obvious characters. They didn’t want a predictable hero or facile villain. What they wanted was an enigma, the thrill of watching an unknowable being walk the stage.

  A Difficult God

  A few thousand years ago, a small nomadic tribe in the Middle East began writing about a being who would change the course of history. This being would become so influential that He shaped the way we conceived of the universe. Some anthropologists speculate that this new literary figure even made modern society possible, creating a shared system of norms and beliefs that allowed us to live together in large urban populations.

  The being I’m talking about, of course, is the monotheistic God. He first became famous in the writings of the Jews, who compiled their scriptures while wandering around the desert. While it’s hard to compare the Jewish God to the monotheistic deities that came before—most of these scriptures have been lost—it seems likely that He represented a radical approach to religion. For one, the itinerant nature of the Jews meant that their religious text was an amalgam of many other texts, from the Gathas of Zarathustra to the Sumerian myths of Babylon.

  These other religious stories had a profound influence on the Old Testament, and not just because they inspired many of the events it describes. (The story of Noah’s ark, for instance, is taken straight from the Epic of Gilgamesh.) Perhaps their most important influence has to do with the way they shaped the new Jewish God, giving rise to a singular divinity defined by his multitudes. This God was not a coherent character with a clear narrative arc. Rather, He was a collage of sticky oral scraps, many of which contradict one another. He was a mystery.

  The book of Genesis, for instance, begins with an account of creation in which man is formed in the image of a God who calls himself Elohim. But then, in the very next section, we get a second version of creation, this time performed by a God who calls himself Yahweh Elohim, or Lord God. While the first version gave man the entire earth, the second version restricts us to a small garden in Eden and forbids us from eating from the tree of knowledge. (In the first version, there are no rules to follow.) When we disobey God and eat the fruit, Yahweh Elohim erupts in fury, cursing His own children and giving us a starkly different description of our origins. We are no longer made in His image. Now we are made of dust.

  The Old Testament is full of these inconsistencies. As the scholar Jack Miles argues, God is the protagonist of the Bible; the text is the story of His evolving relationship to His creation. One might expect this relationship to be rather straightforward—He is, after all, omniscient and omnipotent—but it is marked by tumult and volatility. God gives us free will except when He takes it away; He is forgiving but also prone to punishing rages; He loves us like a child, but isn’t afraid to let us suffer. “Tension among these personalities makes God difficult,” writes Miles, “but it also makes him compelling, even addictive.”6

  It’s the same strategy that Shakespeare used in Hamlet. He created a “strategically opaque” prince, stripping away the reveals that would allow the audience to understand Hamlet’s actions. This opacity made the character incoherent, but it also hooked the audience: we kept trying to predict his next move. The God of the Old Testament is similarly opaque, which is why He remains so interesting.

  Consider the binding of Isaac, one of the strangest scenes in the Bible. It begins with God telling Abraham, His beloved follower, to sacrifice his son. “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love… and offer him as a burnt offering on one of the heights.” It’s a sadistic request. God is all-knowing and all-powerful, so why is He testing the faith of His most loyal follower?

  But Abraham obeys God. He lies to his wife and son, telling them they are going to the mountains to sacrifice a sheep. As Kierkegaard pointed out, the lie is the tell: Abraham cannot reveal the truth because he knows that God, a supposedly infallible being, is making a profoundly unethical demand. Not even Sarah, his dutiful wife, will understand.

  In Mimesis, the literary scholar Erich Auerbach engages in a close reading of this bizarre biblical scene.7 He observes that the Hebrew God is marked by His “heavy silence” and “obscurity.” His actions are described, but “what lies between is nonexistent… thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches.” The result is that even a plain reading of the text requires interpretation. Some rabbinical scholars have insisted that Abraham is testing God, going through the sacrificial motions to ensure that Yahweh Elohim would not insist on a murder. For others, the story is a parable about the need for obedience, even when the motives of God are unclear. But nobody knows. If there’s a moral, it’s a mystery.

  One of the central arcs of the Old Testament is toward God’s reckoning with His own opacity. (He might be omniscient, but He doesn’t always understand Himself.) It’s not until the book of Isaiah, one of the later sections of the Hebrew Bible, that God seems to accept His mysteriousness. When the Jews begin to doubt His power, after they are exiled and defeated, God empathizes with their doubt because “his understanding is unsearchable.” Later in Isaiah, He describes Himself as “a God who hidest thyself.” This makes Him a hard God to worship—His behavior is unpredictable—but it’s also the source of His lasting literary power. As St. Augustine said, “If you think you understand God, it is not God.”8

  The Most Mysterious Smile

  In the 1540s, a middle-aged architect named Giorgio Vasari began writing a book about the lives of artists. At the time, it was a radical conceit—artists were seen as mere decorators, the humble servants of lords, merchants, and priests. You wouldn’t write a biography of a plumber, would you?

  But Vasari saw the literary potential in the artistic life, the romance in their manual labor. In The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari assembled a series of short biographies of the greatest Renaissance creators, from Botticelli to Titian. By humanizing the artist, Vasari hoped to inspire others to pick up the paintbrush and chisel. “I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation,” he wrote.9

  It’s hard to overstate the influence of Vasari’s unusual book. Although error and rumor riddle the text, it has defined the way we think about art history. Vasari invented the cliché of the tortured artist—his biography of Michelangelo emphasizes the sculptor’s obsessive solitude—and the myth of the natural genius, blessed with a supernatural talent. He also helped set the canon: we worship the artists of the Tuscan Renaissance in part because Vasari canonized them.

  One of the paintings made famous by Vasari comes in his section on Leonardo da Vinci, which is overwrought even by Vasari’s purple standards. (“Sometimes, in supernatural fashion, beauty, grace, and talent are united beyond measure in one single person.… This was seen by all mankind in Leonardo da Vinci.”)10 After describing many of da Vinci’s most celebrated works, such as The Last Supper and The Adoration of the Magi, Vasari introduces an obscure portrait da Vinci did for Francesco del Giocondo, a Tuscan silk merchant. Francesco asked the artist to paint a picture of his young wife. (He married her when she was fifteen.) While Vasari usually skims over the details of the art—even The Last Supper only gets a few sentences—he lingers on the look of this portrait. He describes the “watery sheen” of the noblewoman’s eyes, and the delicacy of her eyelashes, and the intense realism of her eyebrows, “in which the hairs spring from the flesh… and curve according to the pores of the skin.”11I He praises her “beautiful nostrils,” the rosy tint of her face, and even the bend of her throat, in which, “if one gazed upon [it] intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse.” But Vasari saved his highest praise for the woman’s subtle smile, a work of artistry “more divine than human to behold.”

  By the time Vasari wrote about the p
ortrait, nearly fifty years after it was finished, the painting was already in the private collection of the king of France. Almost no one had seen the canvas; Francesco was a forgotten merchant. Nevertheless, Vasari believed that his young wife would live on, that da Vinci had created a portrait “more alive” than reality. Her name was Mona Lisa.

  Vasari was right. Five hundred years later, crowds still line up at the Louvre to get a glimpse of her face, now shielded behind bulletproof glass. (In a typical year, as many as 10 million people see the Mona Lisa.) But something about the painting’s popularity is ludicrous—it is just a portrait of a medieval Tuscan woman, painted on a poplar panel. There is no memorable action or lofty theme. Yet, as Vasari noted, the portrait is an astonishing technical achievement. Mona Lisa does feel alive. Something about the way she returns our gaze, even in a room packed full of tourists, is uncanny.

  What’s the Mona Lisa’s secret? Why does this remain the most famous painting in the world? Vasari credited the woman’s ambivalence, the way her face blended expressions of melancholy and merriness. (According to Vasari, da Vinci hired “persons to play or sing, and jesters,” to entertain Mona Lisa during her tedious sitting sessions.) The result is a mood that matches the sfumato brushstrokes, a Renaissance technique in which the portrait is marked by a deliberate blurriness, what da Vinci described as being “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.” The mystery of Mona Lisa’s magic is that her feelings are similarly out of focus.

  While art critics have advanced countless theories to explain her enigmatic smile, it turns out to have a clear biological cause. Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard, argues that the mysteriousness of Mona Lisa’s expression is rooted in the way da Vinci confuses our visual system. He offers different interpretations to the two distinct regions of the retina that can process light. The fovea, located in the center of the retina, allows us to focus on details: it picks up bright colors and sharp edges. But we also have a peripheral area, surrounding the fovea, that can detect grays and motion.

  When we first look at Mona Lisa, we tend to focus on her eyes. Our peripheral vision notices her mouth. But here’s the thing about those peripheral photoreceptors: because they aren’t tuned for details, they mostly detect the shadows below her formidable cheekbones. These darker areas suggest a face bent in smile—she must be a happy woman.

  Our gaze then turns to Mona Lisa’s mouth. That’s when we realize she isn’t actually smiling; her lips are straight and tight. At this point, Livingstone writes, “her smile fades, like a dim star that disappears when you look directly at it.”12 When our eyes look away from her lips, the shadowy smile reappears. The result is a painting of contradictions, the riddle of a smile that flashes and vanishes depending on the viewer.

  There’s an interesting parallel here to the “gutter” of comic books, which refers to the empty space between drawn panels. “Despite the unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics,” writes the cartoonist and comic theorist Scott McCloud.13 As McCloud notes, most of the action in a comic unfolds in the gap between drawings, as our brain creates a character out of a set of still sketches. As a result, the best graphic novelists find ways to use gutters more suggestively, encouraging us to fill in the emptiness with our imagination.

  It’s an act of imagination that keeps us engaged. We can’t figure out Mona Lisa’s feelings, which is why we can’t stop looking at her face. Likewise, it’s the mystery of the gutter that gives comics their kinetic momentum. Just as Kanye and Bach made art out of the gaps in our knowledge—the musical pattern we can’t predict—so do characters come alive when we’re unable to figure them out.

  It doesn’t matter if it’s Hamlet, God, or a sixteenth-century portrait—it’s their mysteries that make them interesting. It’s what we don’t know that brings them to life.

  A Sentimental Education

  Why are we drawn to opaque characters? What makes an unknowable God so interesting? Why do we prefer paintings and plays about people we can’t understand? There’s a practical explanation, which was eloquently explored by the philosopher Richard Rorty. Toward the end of his career, Rorty became increasingly interested in the ability of literature to educate people about the inner states of others, changing the way “we treat people whom we think not worth understanding.”14 Rorty referred to this as the “sentimental education” of art.15 A good story, he said, isn’t just a pleasing entertainment—it also makes us better human beings.

  It’s an admittedly pretentious hypothesis; plenty of assholes have read the canon. But Rorty was prescient: an emerging body of evidence links the reading of literature and increased empathy. A recent study showed that people who were more familiar with literature scored much higher on a test of theory of mind, which measures how likely we are to model the thoughts and feelings of other people. (This correlation existed even after controlling for a number of possible confounding variables, such as personality traits, demographics, and choice of undergraduate major.)16 Other experiments from the same research team have shown a direct causal connection. After people read literary fiction, they scored significantly higher upon retaking the same empathic measurement as before.17

  But not every fiction is equally effective at teaching us how to read minds. E. M. Forster once distinguished between flat and round characters. Flat characters, Forster wrote, “are constructed round a single idea or quality.”18 He cites Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield, who is utterly defined by the sentence “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” As Forster notes, “She says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.” She has no inner existence outside of that trait. There is no mystery to her. She’s flat.

  Round characters, in contrast, have an irreducible aspect: they are alive with contradictions. It’s Hamlet pretending to be crazy, and God asking Abraham to kill Isaac, and Mona Lisa smiling with her eyes but not her lips. It’s Tony Soprano, a sociopathic mobster and devoted family man, and Walter White, a meek chemistry teacher and meth kingpin. These people are round because we can’t predict their feelings and behavior. “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way,” Forster writes. “If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. [A round character] has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.”

  Forster gives the example of Lady Bertram from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. At first glance, Lady Bertram seems like the kind of character that every other writer would turn into a flat punch line. She’s lazy and distractible, concerned more with her pugs than her children. But Austen rounds her out, adding in subtle flourishes to give her that extra dimension. After Lady Bertram learns that her two daughters have both brought shame to the family name—her oldest daughter was caught in an extramarital affair, while her younger daughter eloped with her lover—Austen uses the moment to reveal Lady Bertram’s unexpected complexity. We assume she’ll dismiss the situation, ignore the inconvenience. After all, she’s never seemed to care about her family before.

  But that’s not what happens. Instead, Austen describes how Lady Bertram thinks “justly on all important points, and she saw therefore in all its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy.” It’s a remarkable scene: the shallow Lady Bertram has been forced to reflect on the gravity of the events, and her own role in the undoing of her family. The reader is left with a haunting image of the vain matriarch, sitting on her couch, stroking her snoring pug, sick with regret and worry about what will become of her children. We are surprised by her turn, but it’s convincing in the context of her daughters. “It is a little point, and a little sentence,” Forster writes, “yet it shows us how delicately a great novelist can modulate into the round.”

  To understand better how some writers create round cha
racters, I met with Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, specializing in crime and suspense fiction. Penzler works mostly from a windowless bunker underneath the store, the door hidden behind fake crime-scene tape. (“You’re meeting Otto? Enter the crime scene, down the stairs, make a right.”) That week, Penzler had just sold another lot of his acclaimed detective-fiction collection at auction. The auction had gone well—a first edition of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock had sold for $93,750, doubling the pre-auction estimate—but Penzler seemed forlorn, like a child who had just lost his favorite toy. “I’m depressed,” Penzler told the Tribeca Citizen. “My plan was to live forever. But it occurred to me that God might not have the same plan.”19

  In 1976, Penzler coauthored the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, a reference work that helped establish detective literature as a respected literary genre. His answers are dense and authoritative, riddled with obscure references. “If you’re asking why you can reread a good detective story, but not a bad one, it all comes down to the characters,” he tells me. “If you don’t have good characters, you don’t have a good book. That’s why the best mystery writers, they really begin with the characters and work the plot from there.” Roundness is everything.

  Penzler tells me a story about Elmore Leonard, perhaps the greatest contemporary crime writer. “Dutch [that was Leonard’s nickname] was one of my best friends,” Penzler says. “When he was writing, he could not wait to talk about his books. He’d call me up and say, ‘Otto, Otto, I got a problem.’ ” Penzler imitates Leonard’s raspy smoker’s voice. “So I say, ‘What is it, Dutch? What’s wrong?’ ” Penzler slips back into character: “ ‘My hero got killed last night.’ Now I’m confused, so I say, ‘What do you mean, Dutch?’ ‘Oh, man, my character was in the bar, and all of a sudden out of nowhere this Mexican guy comes up and shoots him in the head. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m on page one hundred and thirty, and the main character in my book is dead.’ And so I said, because I’m trying to be helpful, ‘Dutch, why don’t you just rewrite that chapter?’ And he acts like I was crazy. ‘What do you mean rewrite that chapter? I told you, he was dead!’ ”