The banality of righteousness

Coming late to this: but Jo Walton (that's Jo Lindsay Walton, of course; not the other one) posted a fascinating piece on Banks, in part riffing of my Reversing Through The Culture blopposts.* Smart stuff, smartly put (I especially liked the idea of Excession as an epistolary novel); rather more smart and smartly put than my posts, actually, which some might consider rude. But there you go. One of my arguments was that Banksian ethics was a touch shallow, a sort of juvenile empathy-based 'you wouldn't like it if it happened to you' morality, as opposed to (say) the more complex and demanding kind of ethics theorised by Levinas (say). Walton replies:

Perhaps an awful lot of their ethics is reducible to empathy, but perhaps that empathy itself is actually quite a tricksy and multifarious and broad concept -- at least inasmuch as it accommodates berk empathy (or bathetic empathy). That is: empathy which doesn't involve much replication of affect, much harmony of hearts but an empathy which operates through a bureaucratic crankishness sometimes mistaken for evil's prerogative exclusively. The banality of righteousness.

I'm still thinking about that (say).

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*I'm thinking of petitioning to change the word 'blogposts',with that awkward pebble-in-mouth 'gp' middle phoneme, to the easier-to-say 'blopposts'. Could catch on? No? Oh well; suit yourself.

SF, Audience Cults and Hope

I've little to add to this, but wanted to reblog it here as food for thought. It's from Jason Horsley's Reality Sandwich blog:

The phrase "audience cult" was coined by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (self-identified "religious engineer") in their 1985 book, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. An audience cult is not a religion, nor is it a formal group whose members can be identified (either by one another or by themselves). And yet they can be identified-by shared interest. People who "believe in UFOs" as part of an extraterrestrial experimentation/hybridization program, for example, belong to an audience cult. People who believe in ancient astronauts from elsewhere, or in psychedelics as a tool for self-realization, in regular meditation and a vegan diet, astrology, runes, and Tarot, communicating with the dead, the power of occult rituals, and so on, all belong to one amorphous audience cult or another. These audience cults overlap with other audience cults, and membership to one does not prohibit membership to another. They also overlap with more overtly fantasy-based audience cults such as comic book fans, sci-fi fans, or "Trekkies," yet it's worth noting that the area of overlap is not as great as might be thought. Sci-fi fans are often quite skeptical or dismissive of "true believers," and vice versa. The reason may be found in the following, from The Future of Religion: "One very general but vague compensator is communicated through all audience cults: diffuse hope. If extraordinary things are possible, then one may hope for anything and everything. Audience cults proclaim the existence of cracks in the structure of the mundane world through which any imaginable marvel might suddenly appear. . . . If each audience cult projects a narrow ray of hope, then, together, audience cults project a broad if dim spectrum of hopes combining to form a vague impression of heaven. Thus, although each cult is far from being a religion, collectively, they communicate a pale reflection of the religious. . . . [A]udience cults are connected to a state of free-floating optimism-something less than true belief in the notions of the cults-the diffuse feeling that all things are possible but that nothing is certain to be true. . . . Rather than thrusting people into a storm-tossed sea of confusion without anchor or life raft, [this feeling] may compensate for an all too rigid, mundane life."

Christopher Priest, The Adjacent (2013)

Very highly recommended indeed; one of the books of the year.

Man of Steel (dir. Zack Snyder, 2013)

An intriguing take on the biopic format. Some of the details here are deictic -- for example, the logo worn on the costume of the Trotsky-character 'General Zod' is clearly a Soviet Era sickle:

But otherwise the film chooses to tell the life-story of Iosif Vissarionovich entirely in fictionalised form, opting (influenced perhaps by Nabokov's Ada) to read Soviet history via the trope of allegorical Americana. Arriving on Earth after the destruction of 'Krypton', Iosif Vissarionovich is brought to (political) maturity by Lenin, played by Kevin Costner (who, as he ages, looks more and more like the original). His 'true' name, Kal-el, is clearly a version of his affiliation, 'Karl (Marx)'; although he takes a mundane name 'Clark Kent' to disguise his revolutionary ambitions until the time is right. For many years this Man of Steel lives in hiding, working at a number of commendably proletarian jobs; the world is not ready for him. But finally the true danger of counterrevolutionary reaction reveals itself: the fourth-internationalist threat of General Leon Zodsky, backed by the imperialist aggression of the Capitalist West, represented in this movie by a ruthless female second-in-command, several other faceless warriors, and a large amount of 'Star Wars' era advanced weaponry. In a powerful if perhaps over-long scene, the battle for the soul of the world is waged across one symbolic city. This place, the generically-named 'Metropolis', is clearly a cinematic version of Stalingrad; and as the battle rages it is turned from a gleaming urbs to a mass of rubble: towers, railway stations, industrial zones, everything is smashed and crushed. That no Western city ever suffered so comprehensive a destruction leads, inevitably, to the conclusion that this dramatizes in fictional form the clash between Operation Barbarossa and Operation Uranus. Indeed, I watched this portion of the film with increasing astonishment at the sheer level of civilian casualties such a battle must have entailed. How great the cost, in human terms, is the repelling of invaders from the Motherland! -- and the enactment of revolution that brings the Man of Steel himself to the attention of the world!

The casting was mostly good: Henry Cavil has some of the heft and physical bulk of Iosif Vissarionovich, although he plays the role without facial hair (presumably he will wear a moustache in the sequel); Russell Crowe plays Marx again without facial hair, but the opening scenes, in which he warns of the impending collapse of Capitalism and is ignored, is true to life. Amy Adams plays Rosa Luxemburg rather humourlessly: she works (as Luxemburg did herself) for the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza ("The Workers' Cause") but otherwise contributes little to the struggle against the imperialist running dogs.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time 4: At Lady Molly's (1957)

The conceit governing this short run of blogposts (that, in working through A Dance to the Music of Time I was reading a Peake-like High Fantasy novel) was always going to get tiresome, stretched across all twelve novels; and in fact At Lady Molly's strikes me as a good place to drop the gag. This is because this novel is the first in the series I've read during which I felt any kind of actual real-world connection. The effect here is less the disinterested fascination of a Gormenghastly world played out under my gaze, and something more recognisably like 20th-century Britain. Jenkins, the Powell-stand-in narrator, is working for the movies as a script writer and doctor; Hitler is in power in Germany and World War Two is brewing. Something about the way Powell treats all this shifts the timbre of the novel out of structured quasi-fabulation into something closer to life. It's a little hard to put my finger on what, mind.

I think it may have a good deal to do with the way Powell handles his roman à clef idiom. In the earlier books the fact that St John Clarke was a sour from-life portrait of John Galsworthy, or that Templar and Stringham were based on Powell's friends, did not intrude into the functioning of the novel. Because, to slip into the American vernacular, I could care less about John Galsworthy. But Erridge, Powell's portrait of George Orwell, is a different matter. This novel shows Orwell as a fool, a sort of Prince Mishkin (one character makes this comparison, actually) but without the redeeming spirituality. There's nothing remotely noble about Erridge's habit of leaving his stately home dressed as a tramp to sleep rough around the country. It's presented as eccentricity, marinaded in an uneasy guilt at his good birth and family money, iterated in practice through a preference for abstract ideals (Marxist ideals, presented by Powell as beyond ridiculous, in a not-even-wrong sort of way) over actual human interaction. Erridge is a dabbler, pottering at stiffly polemical journalism and pamphlets; ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, a dull twit. If Powell's portrait of him isn't exactly that he is actively contemptible, that's only because there's not enough substance in Erridge to merit any emotional reaction so feisty. It is certainly outwith the ability of this novel to imagine, even obliquely, that a rich man giving up his wealth could be anything other than absurd. There's nothing of Tolstoy, Gandhi, or even Wittgenstein about Erridge. And, the more I read, the more profoundly irritated I became by Powell's satirical certainty in this matter.

It's perfectly possible that Eric Blair was, in life, just as ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, foolish and self-deluding as Powell presents him as being. He was, though, a genius; one of the very few actual geniuses of 20th-century English literature. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a towering novel, the sort of book that changes lives (it had a meteor-crash impact on my own early reading) on the individual but also the social level. Animal Farm is a classic; his personal accounts (The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out, the Catalonia book) are marvellous; a healthy chunk of his (wide-ranging) journalism and literary criticism is still vibrantly alive. But there is there none of this in Erridge as he appears in At Lady Molly's; and Powell's rendering of Blair as another one of his petty grotesques, like a less-comical Widmerpool, left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The point is: Powell missed something not only central and crucial but elephant-in-room-ish about Blair when he turned him into Erridge. The novel misses not only Orwell's perhaps chilly, unforgiving dignity; more to the point it misses that the century about which Powell is writing belongs much more to Orwell's vision of things than it did to Powell's own well-mannered superannuated dix-huitième siècleisme. It doesn't dispose me to trust the rest of his fictionalised autobiography. And Eric/George = 'Erridge' is lazy pseudonymising.

This is a shame, because there's a lot to praise in this book.

Brian Aldiss, Finches of Mars (2013)

My review of what is (it seems) Brian Aldiss's last novel is over on the Guardian website. Aldiss is one of the figures the reading of whom inspired me to write SF, and some of his books are staggeringly good. Not this one, though. It's pants. Mind you, not everybody thinks so: SFX loves it.

Frank Swain, How To Make A Zombie (2013)

Arcfinity has my review of Swain's pop-sci book. It's a perfectly decent example of the form, although I give voice, over on the review, to a number of more-or-less grumpy thoughts about the larger idiom of books like this.

The success of books designed to popularise science (‘Main Title Namechecking Famous Scientific Thingummy: Subtitle Framed As A Question?’) is a contemporary cultural phenomenon of great interest. Hundreds of titles have been published, and a good number have gone on to become bestsellers. This has brought a degree of understanding of science and nature to a wide audience, and that can only be a good thing. The question, I suppose, is whether such books fall foul of Pope’s Law (a little learning being a dangerous thing). Another way of putting this might be to see all such books, up to and including Swain’s, as examples of the QI-ification of contemporary knowledge. ... But a love of nuggets of trivia is not the same thing as a love of learning more generally conceived. A single datum of trivia—a trivium—gives its possessor the satisfaction of knowing specialised, non-obvious things without requiring her to invest the labour and time in actual learning. It can be traded, in a cultural context: at a dinner party, say, or down the pub with friends, a trivium can be swapped for a small increase in the esteem of one’s companions and a lightening of the collective mood. In this respect, a trivium is akin to a joke, or a piece of gossip. And that’s fine and dandy—I like jokes, and value gossip. But trivia, gossip and anecdotes do not add up to Knowledge, because Knowledge requires the effort of systematic and engaged effort. Knowing a whole bunch of anecdotal trivia will tend to make us feel cleverer, or at least better informed, than we really are. The problem with a general QI-ification of contemporary knowledge is that it dissipates knowledge as such, and corrodes the more effortful disciplines of science. Humans are grievously prone to generalise dangerously on the basis of anecdotes and decontextualized trivia; adding more decontextualized trivia isn’t the way to address this.

James Smythe, The Machine (2013)

I liked The Explorer (Smythe's previous novel) a great deal, but this is better: a very tight piece of writing indeed. You can see what I thought, at some length, here, if only you scroll down.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time 3: The Acceptance World (1955)

The titular world has two resonances. On the one hand, it's a Fantasy version of what we, in the real world, would call a Futures exchange. This, in turn, reflects a significant division in Fantasy. Much Fantasy follows Tolkien: prodigiously costly things happen (war, for instance, which is the most costly thing of all) without there being any intimation in the text how on earth it is all paid for. It just, somehow, magically, is. Some Fantasy tries to address this, although usually without getting too tangled up in it. In Martin's A Storm of Swords we discover how Littlefinger has been financing the enormous expense of royal life and the prosecution of the war ('he borrows the money'; the venerable 'two people on the desert island who eked out a precarious living taking-in each other's washing' mode of High Finance). But at least A Song of Fire and Ice is aware, textually speaking, that shit has to be paid for. In most Fantasy there's no such acknowledgement, because money is a drag, or because -- to put it more precisely -- 'economy' is a 17th-century bourgeois invention that postdates the imagined medievalism of our preferred modes of escapism. Except that it isn't. Except that kingdoms have always had to pay their way. [Insert lengthy digression cribbed from Graeber's brilliant Debt book here]. The point, though, is that Fantasy serves  eight out of ten of its most avid fans as precisely an escape from the grey account-book dullness of contemporary civilisation. A reversion to a time when warrior valour was prized rather than being seen as aggressive sociopathy; when honour mattered more than courtesy and reliability; when men were men and women were etc. You wouldn't actually want to live in that world of course; but then the wish-fulfilment is only supposed to happen inside your head.

What's interesting, I think, is that even the non-Tolkien, Peakeian/Moorcockian/New-Weird traditions tend to skate past the actual business of how the money is made. Miéville is good on how wealth is distributed, and how oppression functions in societies, but there's no sense of how Bas-Lag actually makes its money. Gormenghast is the sort of thing that can only exist at the apex of a pyramid of wealth-generation, efficiently extracted by the elite, but there's no sense in Peake's novels how that process actually works. This isn't to criticize either work, of course; that's not what they're interested in. Fair enough. (An exception is Mark Ader's marvellous alt-medieval Fantasy Son of the Morning, which, inter alia, creates a world with a believable economy).

But one of the ways Powell's Dance saga differs from the Peake prototype is its awareness, incipient if not right at the centre of things, of the way the need to make money shapes individual lives and society as a whole. At any rate, that aspect comes through more strongly in this, the third instalment. Many of the characters float free from such concerns, existing as noblemen, warriors and bards. But others must make their own financial way in the world. This is still at second hand: one step removed from the actual means of production. But a sort of rudimentary 'stock market' exists in this Fantasy realm, and several of Powell's key characters get involved in it.

This brings us to the second meaning of title's 'acceptance world'. It is 'the future' more generally, conceived as an entry into a mode of living in which the world as a whole 'accepts' you, because you have matured, or at least are attempting to embrace your responsibilities. Some characters do this, some fail; but all are measuring themselves, consciously or otherwise, by a notion of 'the future', against which we all (so Powell suggests) make bets. Or 'make an investment', although that amounts to the same thing.

This theme is bolstered in The Acceptance World by the judicious use of a female seer or prophetess called 'Mrs. Erdleigh', who has access to visions of the future via her magic illustrated miniature panels, and who can talk with the dead. The narrator begins a love affair with Milady Jean Duport, whom he has long loved, but who is married to another (a man unworthy of her). The emotional thread of this narrative is: does this relationship 'have a future?' We hope it may, but the novel ends on a note that suggests it doesn't. There is also a mass cult, Marxian in nature, also predicated upon a vision of the future, although (Powell could hardly make this clearer, short of sticking his own head in his fiction and yelling it through a megaphone) a false vision. The celebrated though elderly and effectively senile bard, the sainted John, a Clerk, is shown in the novel as duped by this particular cult.

This is all fair enough, although we're now a quarter through the whole sequence and it's still pledging to a narrative future rather than cashing-in its narrative present. But OK. Onward.

Anne McCaffrey, The Masterharper of Pern (1998)

A series that multiplied with tribble-like pertinacity, McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern (1968-present) is a planetary romance in which certain special individuals (like you, trufan! and me!) have a telepathic bond with a breed of marvellous magical gigantic purring cats, sorry, fire-breathing dragons. Together, trufan and dracono-moggy defend the world of Pern against nasty 'threads' which periodically (the period being 50 years) rain down out of the sky from a nearby 'red star', threatening to devour all Pernian life. The initial  idea, according to McCaffrey's son, was for a 'technologically regressed survival planet' whose inhabitants are united against a external threat in a way that wasn't true of America during the Vietnam War. 'The dragons became the biologically renewable air force, and their riders "the few" who, like the RAF pilots in World War Two, fought against incredible odds day in, day out—and won.'

As you can see from the cover, up there, this instalment in the series is 'The Story of Pern's Greatest Harpo', Robinton by name. Like all great Harpos, Robinton plays the harp. He also plays the flute, the 'gitar' (an instrument exactly like a 'guitar' although, obviously, without the 'u') and lots of other instruments too. He is, the novel tells us over and over again, a musical genius. He is, in point of fact, Amadeus:

He began to make a copy of the sonata ... he looked back over the score, to be sure he had annotated it properly. He paced back and forth, paused to pour himself a glass of wine, and then went back to the table and proceeded to copy out his Kasia songs. He finished those, drinking as he worked, and rolled up the music with a neat ribbon tying the packet. He had a final glass of wine, realizing dawn was not far away. [260]

You may be thinking: this doesn't sound much like the Tolkien-plus-a-few-ancient-technological-artefacts worldbuilding idiom familiar from other Pern novels. And you would be right so to think. Robinton is sometimes presented as in effect a scop, scald or rhapsode, going from castle to castle, hall to hall, literally singing for his supper. But when it suits the novel's fancy he is a eighteenth-century genius composer, writing staves fluently upon an endless supply of animal hides, composing melodies that make people weep instantly. We have to take this latter much-repeated fact on trust, since no actual music is included. I assume Robinton composes in D-minor which is, as is well known, the saddest of all keys. His musical ability also gives him a special bond with the giant telepathic feline dragons, because everything that happens in these novels must relate to the dragons, because, you know. Duh. What else are the novels for?

The Masterharper of Pern tells Robinton's life story from his birth; his distant, disapproving father; his music training; his falling in love with beautiful green-eyed Kasia; their marriage; a disastrous boat trip after which Kasia catches a chill of which she subsequently dies. Robinton is made sad by this, although he's soon engaging in no-strings-attached shagging with slinky Silvana. Then, in an odd move, he has a brain-damaged son with Silvana. Then things heat up, fight-wise, as we near the end.  Most of the fixtures and fittings are castles, potions, bejewelled daggers, swords, bows, arrows and the like; although McCaffrey also says things like 'the main Hall had excellent acoustics' [353], which isn't the sort of line you tend to find in Chaucer; and  her characters wear 'heavy woollen socks' [276], items of clothing which aren't anachronistic yet somehow sound as if they should be. Plus her people are forever drinking cups of tea coffee, here called 'klah'. Sometimes on its own. Sometimes with Canderel ('"You are related to MasterSinger Merelan?" Silvina asked as she poured klah and passed around the sweetener', 335)

The novel itself is 400-pages of meh, lifted a little from time to time by a few less-feeble-than-the-rest set-pieces (Robinton and Kasia in the boat on the storm isn't bad; and some of the fighting near the end is readable). Mostly the problem is one of style. From time to time, McCaffrey remembers that she's writing a cod-medieval dragon-packed planetary adventure and wrenches her style into inelegances of the 'many of the capping slabs were athwart the expanse' [294] or 'he asked for conveyance a-dragonback' [336] kind. But the bulk of the novel is written in a could-not-be-blander grey contemporary prose, stitched together almost entirely out of cliché. Cliché is everything in this novel: the characters, the settings, the events, nothing is here to make you see things freshly or to startle you out of your comfortable familiarity. Hardly a page goes by when the author does not fall back, consciously or otherwise, on an inert, clogging, conventionalised phrase. This character finds himself 'between a rock and a hard place' [51]; that other has 'a vice-like grip' [91]. If there is a silence it must be 'a stunned silence' [109], or indeed 'an awful, stunned silence' [345]. Characters 'rue the day' [172], 'stifle a laugh' [195], promise to 'show him the error of his ways' [222]. Men have 'rugged good looks' [231] and everybody 'cocks their head' at things. Actually, people in this novel are forever cocking their heads ('he cocked his head at Robinton, a sly grin on his rugged, weathered face' 236; 'cocking her head', 256; 'Nip cocked his head', 357; 'Tick cocked his head hopefully', 375). Rather than leave, people 'steal away' [272]; storms have exactly the properties you would expect them to have ('in the teeth of the gale ... driving rain' 273); coughs are 'hacking coughs' [304] and people 'refuse to dignify that question with an answer' [287]. Martin Amis once declared that the primary business of a writer was to wage war on cliché. Stylistically speaking, McCaffrey evidently preferred, as far as that went, to give peace a chance. A slack, underwhelming novel.

Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time Vol 2: A Buyer's Market (1952)

The Proustolkienian Fantasy continues, and although nothing very much happens in the second instalment of the saga there's no denying the slowly accumulating heft and richness to its intricately imagined world. Like the first canto, A Buyer's Market is divided into four long sections, and concentrates on the young lordlings from canto one, adding a few new ones: an elderly peace-mage and artist called Deacon, his young apprentice Barnby and a gipsy wench called Gypsy Jones most prominently. Again the emphasis is on the intersubjectivities of Powell's characters rather than on explicit quests, wars or the like; although several hints are dropped that a war is coming, and higher status princes move through the background of the story planning, manoeuvring and the like. There is an emphasis in this volume on bards, saga-tellers, painters and sculptors; the artistic and artisanal crafts that supply so much of the fixtures and fittings of Standard Heroic Fantasy Worlds without ever, it seems, actually appearing in the stories. The narrator, having completed his education, has become a scop or rhapsode of sorts, telling stories (including our story). He believes himself in love with beautiful young Lady Barbara, but falls out of love with her at a gathering of the clan--a kind of Moot, or Festival, at which there is feasting, quaffing and dancing, along with some strange rituals.

Among the residue stood an enormous sugar castor topped with a heavy silver nozzle. ... Barbara now tipped the castor so that it was poised vertically over Widmerpool's head, holding it there lilke the sword of Damocles over the tyrant. RThe massive silver apex of the castor dropped from its base, as if severed by the slash of some invisible machinery, and crashed heavily to the floor: the sugar pouring out on to Widmerpool's head in a dense and overwhelming cascade. [304]

This ritual does not rebound to the honour of the comically priggish Widmerpool (we remember him from volume one), a character who aims for nobility and status without, quite, possessing the inner virtue to deserve it, according to the exacting, rococo requirements of this imagined society.

The first two sections are slow, uneventful and not especially engaging. The third takes place in the castle of one of the land's aristocrats:

[We] passed under the portcullis, and across a cobbled quadrangle. Beyond this open space, reached by another archway, was a courtyard of even larger dimensions, in the centre of which a sunken lawn had been laid out, with a fountain at the centre, and carved stone flower-pots shaped like urns, at each of the four corners. [419]

Here lords and ladies mingle, obscure but intricately involving (for the reader) social rituals enacted. Characteristic of Powell's narrative strategy, though, is this encounter with -- again -- Widmerpool. The narrator is descending a stairwell towards the castle dungeon.

The way was dark and the steps cut deep, so that I had slowed up by the time I came, only a short way below, to a kind of landing. Beyond this stage the stairs continued again. I had passed this stage, and had just begun on the second flight, when a voice—proceeding apparently from out of the walls of the castle—suddenly spoke my name. ... I have to admit I was at that moment quite startled by the sound ... A second later I became aware of its place of origin. Just level with my head—as I returned a step or more up the stair—was a narrow barred window, or squint, through the iron grill of which, his face barely distinguishable in the shadows, peered Widmerpool. [437-8]

The narrator assumes at once that the local Thane, known as 'The Chief', has incacerated Widmerpool for some reason. In fact this vision ('Widmerpool, imprisoned in an underground cell, from which only a small grating gave access to ... the gloom of the spiral staircase') is only a trompe-l'œil: 'Widmerpool was merely speaking from an outer passage of the castle, constructed on a lower level than the floor from which, a short time earlier, we had approached the head of the spiral stair. He had, in fact, evidently arrived from the back entrance, or, familiar with the ground plan of the building, had come by some short cut straight to this window.' This little vignette neatly captures Powell's larger approach. He gives us the sort of plot-twist we might expect from a conventional pot-boiler Heroic Fantasy, and then deflates its pomposity by showing how much of the heroism, and the fantasy, is a kind of trick of perspective. Clever.

In the fourth section the narrator attends Deacon's funeral; has a brief sexual connection with the gipsy wench, and attends a rather pinched banquet hosted by Widmerpool and his mother. There is a sense of slowly gathering but inexorable larger narrative momentum; but such developments as the plot may disclose will have to wait until volume 3.