Begging the Question

A moment ago, I was thoroughly immersed in the ghastly, fascinating fictional world of AMC's Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, S1: E4. I was happy to see this series appear on Crave, a Canadian streaming platform that grants subscribers access to all sorts of HBO Max, AMC and STARZ content. As the brief clip below will confirm, this series is excellent, largely by virtue of the fact that it is devoutly faithful to Rice's bewitching prose in a surprising number of cases; in fact, the dialogue often rehearses the manuscript verbatim:

However, there are inevitable improvisations and wholesale inventions in the script that correspond not at all to Rice's work. One of them sent me gasping to the surface of this episode, immersion in the fictional world ruined, loudly lamenting that an error has become so prevalent as to be rendered invisible. After all, we are not surprised to discover that it grows dark at night. Long experience has made this phenomenon so quotidian, so mundane, as to rob it of special significance. It's not strange. It's familiar.

Of course, part of the magic of art and literature lies in the power of such things to produce an effect that Victor Shklovsky and his fellow Russian Formalists dubbed "defamiliarization," or in the original Russian, "ostranenie," which disrupts the dull familiarity of the world and the things in it (people, places, things, ideas) and lights them up with fresh and fascinating strangeness. When a vampire describes the beating of his own heart as the sound an enormous creature might make lumbering through a dark and alien forest, as above, that trivial sound, with which we are all intimately acquainted to the point of exhausting boredom, is new again, and creepily strange. The unfamiliar way in which it is described makes it new. You can find a lucid explanation of the nature and origins of the theory of defamiliarization here:

Rice was a virtuoso in this domain, which accounts for the gigantic popularity of her works of narrative fiction and the various adaptations of them for the stage and the screen. She knew how to create immersive, strange worlds out of the dull material of our ordinary everydayness. Every adaptation has fed vampirically on the power of her prose, and most have flourished.

So, it was with considerable disappointment that I heard the character who is responsible for conducting the eponymous interview with the vampire, Daniel Molloy, played with irascible, occasionally tremulous verve by the great Eric Bogosian, misuse the phrase "begging the question" in this episode. I have noticed this error proliferating of late, and it has become clear to me that in short order, it will cease to be an error at all. In a slow and steady process that is really the antidote to defamiliarization, an ugly error will become so common as to lose its status as an error at all and become standard usage. The strange creature will become as invisibly familiar as a roll of toilet paper. Further explication of this phenomenon appears below:

In fact, it could well be the case that this is how languages have always changed. Languages may, apart from some obstinate (but grudgingly malleable) rules of grammar and syntax and punctuation, be sets of mistakes that most users of the language think are perfectly fine. Clinging to the ancient customs and habits of a bygone era can certainly leave one vulnerable to all sorts of mockery, derision and even a sort of puritanical shunning. Just look at what we have done, for good and ill, with pronouns!

Bogosian's character delivers this line at 35:57 of the episode in question:

"So, it begs the question, where were all of these diaries in 1973?"

The intended meaning of the phrase, "begs the question," in this context appears to be: some state of affairs moves me to ask this question, or raises this question, or creates conditions under which this question ought to be posed. Contemporary users of the English language misuse the phrase "begging the question" this way quite often:

If we search for a definition of begging the question, here is one we can readily find: "Begging the Question (literal translation from Latin petitio principii) is a logical fallacy where the premise on which the conclusion is based, is already assumed to be true. This allows one to make an argument without sufficient evidence. The term begging the question is first credited to Aristotle as one of the thirteen fallacies listed in De Sophisticis Elenchis, the first work to address the subject of deductive reasoning."

An example harvested from the same article, which seems especially apposite given that we are on the threshold of Trump Term II, Electric Boogaloo, is this: "The news is fake because so much of the news is fake." One of my favorites is this: "Suppose I made the following comment on your essay: 'your essay is good because of its goodness.' Would that provide you with any reason to infer that your essay is actually good, or would it simply use the conclusion that it is good as proof that it is good?"

The important thing is to recall that question begging used to refer to circular reasoning, a logical fallacy. Now, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it seems to deliver the semantic payload with which it was burdened by Bogosian's rendition of Robert Molloy, or more precisely, by Anne Rice (who shuffled off the mortal coil in 2021, but who is nevertheless credited by IMDB as one of the writers attached to the episode, which shows that powerful writing can grant one a kind of immortality--the sort of thing that would undoubtedly have made an author of stories about undead creatures smile), Eleanor Burgess and Robin Jones, who wrote the words Bogosian uttered, or some version of them upon which he improvised, while portraying Robert Molloy.

As I indicated above, this blunder woke me from the delectable trance created by the episode in question with a start, but I am probably part of a dwindling minority. Soon, in most minds, begging the question will just mean creating conditions under which a question begs to be asked, or something like that. Is that cause for the tearing of hair and the rending of garments? Probably not. It does go to show, however, that mortality is more of a gift than we ordinarily infer.

After all, many of us probably envy fictional characters, or religious or mythological figures, who are immortal, but one of the benefits of ceasing to breathe could well be just this: you can't suffer the horrible realization, with increasing frequency, that things whose meaning used to be clear and certain have a new meaning, or no meaning at all, when you are dead.

One can take occasional doses of that kind of radical alienation, i.e., the sense that one is no longer at home, or especially welcome, in the world as it is. When that becomes routine, however, one can consider the abject melancholy of the vampire from an unfamiliar perspective. It can be defamiliarized, in fact. If the wanton misuse and abuse of the phrase "begging the question" gets on my nerves in nerdy middle age, what would an avalanche of linguistic alterations do to me in a century, if I was still causing trouble with Louis and Lestat?

It may be a good thing that we usually expire before everything changes so much as to make us the strange creatures, wandering through a dark and alien forest, unknown and unknowing.