In Praise Of The Outrageous, The Untamed, And The Incorrect - Life Would Be A Thudding Bore Without Them

Lively Markham had been brought up to be a temperate, obedient, respectful, and dutiful girl, and for most of her childhood she was indeed.  A model student, prayerful churchgoer, enthusiastic volunteer, and mother's helper.  Until early adolescence when it seemed someone had flipped a switch, turned this girl of manners and rectitude into a model of intemperance, exaggeration, and downright outrageous behavior.  

 

In a short time she became the pariah of the class, a girl who wore plaid and engineer boots, décolleté, rhinestone, and lace gloves, who sat with her legs apart, trash talked and just by her presence offended.  The status quo, especially among young teenage girls, was nothing to take lightly.  

'What happened?', asked her parents who had marked early on for a career in law or medicine, a good marriage and bright, pretty blonde children.  'What did we miss?', they asked each other, but neither could come up with a reasonable answer. 

'Perhaps it is Great Uncle Harry's genes - you know, the ones that came down through your mother's side of the family', suggested Lively's father, although this line of reasoning, so often pulled out when arguments got desperate, was a dangerous one; but this time his wife didn't object, so befuddled was she over the sudden volte face of their perfect young daughter. 

In and out of trouble, called before the Principal and Monseigneur Brophy whose priests had told him, only barely hiding Lively's true identity. that the girl was inventing the most salaciously sexual arabesques in the confessional, none of which or at least only a bare fraction of which could possibly be true. One priest in particular, Father Billings, admitted he had sought pastoral counselling for the immoral and sinful thoughts elicited by the young girl.

She slouched, chewed tobacco, swore like a trooper, and worst of all espoused the most disturbing political ideas.  Hers, according to one teacher, was what he called 'the Genghis Khan' approach to history.  While he and others in the uniformly progressive school taught a more moral-based curriculum - that colonialism, European monarchy, and the rule of the Hapsburgs were unfortunate bumps in history's gradual, progressive journey to a better world - Lively was a champion of Nietzsche, Wagner,  and neo-Darwinian survivalist supremacism. 

Her views on environmentalism were especially noxious.  Whether or not the climate was warming was irrelevant, she said.  Man is an integral, irrevocable piece of the environment, done to as much as done by, a small bit of matter in a perennially changing universe.  Why fuss?

And when it came to other progressive issues, she was just as dismissive.  'A cock and bull' story, she wrote in a paper on sexual inclusivity. 'Pure nonsense.  A distortion that belies credibility.  A fantastical imagining.  An impossibility'.  Marked 'See me' by her social studies teacher, the paper suggested a troubled girl, and when in conference it was delicately asked whether the girl was questioning her own sexuality'. 

'Bullshit', Lively said as she looked around the room, festooned with rainbow flags, Venn diagrams of sexual interchangeability, and roughly sculpted head of an African prince claimed by Letitia Washington to be her Togolese ancestor.  'Bullshit', Lively repeated and got up to go. 

'Now wait just one minute, young lady', said the miffed and nonplussed Ms. Hartley who proceeded to lecture the young girl on her ideas, her language, and what was becoming a very, very offensive attitude. 'Maybe Mr. Parfry lets you off the hook, but not I'.  Charles Parfry was cut from the same cloth as the young Markham girl, a rumbling, mischievous man who had chosen the wrong profession given his wicked attitude, but who had few other places to turn given sunken costs and limited opportunities. 

'This school cannot tolerate your behavior any longer', Amanda Hartley said to Lively, her face in hers, wagging her finger in remonstrance, 'and unless some significant changes are made around here, you may well have to find other venues for your intolerance'. 

Now, Lively was a very smart girl, and the very best colleges and universities vied for her interest.  Although she was white and straight, Harvard bent the rules and jiggered the school's admission policy (just this once) to accommodate her.  

Harvard was not what she thought.  On her first day on campus there were demonstrations for the Palestinian cause.  The Palestinians??? Are you crazy, she shouted at the speaker, and followed with a stream of hateful invectives usually not heard on the uniformly progressive campus, tarring and feathering 'the saints of the desert', dismissing their cause as ill-conceived, anti-historical malarkey.  Wrestled down by the bitches of Mather House and dunned out of the Yard by a thousand hectoring, chanting students, Lively, bruised but energized got roaring drunk at the Grafton Pub, and spewed bile all over the dark Cambridge streets. 

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov appears to Ivan in a fevered dream and laughs at Ivan's pompous self-assured philosophical naivete.  I am a vaudevillian, the Devil says, and without me the world would be nothing but churchgoing and Sunday dinners, a perfectly thudding bore.  I am who stirs the pot, who adds the spice, who is responsible for miscreants, reprobates, and cheaters. I am who makes life interesting.

 

Of course Dostoevsky was right, and Shakespeare whose works have no heroes, only the most fabulous villains.  Tamora, Richard III, Goneril, Regan, Iago, and Dionyza are not just accidental foils for a principled, moral playwright.  They are the characters which make the perpetual motion Grand Mechanism, as critic Jan Kott has called it, go round.  

If one were to lay all Shakespeare's Histories down in chronological order, one might be surprised at the repetitive expressions of human nature - avarice, jealousy, ambition, hate, guile, chicanery... the list is endless.  Yet he finds a way in each and every one of these devilish characters to make the turning of the wheel endlessly fascinating. 

Lively was by no means evil.  She only admired evil men - or rather that natural human impulse that defies the artificial notions of rectitude, propriety, and civil obedience. Nietzsche had it right in one - only the expression of pure will validates the individual.  The timid, the reserved, the hesitantly moral, are the herd over which the Übermensch rides 

 

In this age of sanctimony, correctness, and invented commonality, the outrageous is in short supply.  Not only is the bombast, braggadocio, and exaggeration of outsized characters very rare indeed, it is hated by the run of the mill - the ordinary, the unremarkable claimants to a treacly utopian future. Over-reachers, says Nietzsche, are 'beyond good and evil'.  They are expected, natural expressions of the most hardwired - and indispensable - force of human nature. Try as one might, they will always pop up when least expected. 

Lively loved her life, the aggression, the contentiousness, the sheer chutzpah of in-your-face honesty.  She was one of a kind - brilliant, savagely honest, and remarkable.  She was Shakespeare's shrew but never tamed, always loud but never stupid.  A woman for all seasons.