"Midnight Mass": Disturbing the comfortable

How great fiction allows us to inhabit other lives, and how the Netflix series Midnight Mass exemplifies this.

W H Auden may have thought that poetry “makes nothing happen”, and Wilde might have wanted art for its own sake, but David Foster Wallace believed (as he told Larry McCaffery in an interview in 1933) that the job of good fiction is “to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. Elaborating on the idea, Wallace said:

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader ... imaginative access to other selves. ... If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”

This idea of what art should do directly implies a role for the reader too: if art offers experiences for us to find, then we will have to seek. To be a seeker is perhaps the best practice for approaching art. It is also, not incidentally, how I approach questions of theology – eschewing dogma, suspicious of settled answers, and searching…