Tracts and Poems

Novels lean one of two ways, I think. They may tend towards the tract, or they may tend towards the poem (for, that is, a certain sense of ‘poem’). Of course most novels—not all, but most of the novels people care about—include healthy quantities of narrative and characters, usually likeable characters, such that they are rarely all-tract, or all-poem. But nonetheless. 

In my favourite genre, science fiction, the slant is rather more tract-y (as in some corners of literary and experimental fiction, it is considerably more poem-y), although it seems to me that it need not be. A thumbnail history might suggest that SF’s more overtly tractarian trend began on the political right: Heinlein was a talented framer of stories and an ingenious inventor of SFnal ideas and conceits, but he also used his books (increasingly so as he got older) to advance a number of social justice theses—for Heinlein social justice meant self-reliance, discipline, a valorisation of the military and its ethos, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ and so on. A number of Analog writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and military and disaster SF blockbusters of the 80s and 90s, carried through a similar message.

It’s of course fatuous to believe that pointing the ‘but you started it!’ finger has any merit or effectiveness. Nonetheless I’d say the rise of a (broadly) left-wing tractarian SF, the prominence of which through the noughties and teens provoked the Sad Puppies to their impotent ire, was largely in reaction to that. Speaking purely for myself, I find this version of social justice much more appealing: diversity as both beautiful in itself and socially strengthening, the recognition of and address to structural inequities of class, gender, race and sexual orientation, hospitality to otherness and a desire to close the gap between richest and poorest. But just because those are my ideological values doesn’t mean I’m any fonder of reading tracts about them. I take the force of the argument that representation matters—that a literature in which Black people or Queer people are never front-and-centre, and only appear in marginal, caricature ways, is a broken and damaging thing. But representation, though needful, is not sufficient. Casting a woman as Dr Who, or a black man as James Bond, does not on its own cure misogyny and racism. Representation is valuable, but not a substitute for action. And, if I’m honest, I now wonder whether representation is as valuable as I once believed. I suppose that diversity of representation is thought to have two benefits: one is that it makes previously marginalised people feel less excluded, which is manifestly both true and good. But two is that it familiarises the majority with the existence and worth of marginalised people and in doing so dissolves the barriers of ignorance that feed bigotry. I’m less sure of this: the notion that racists (say) are only racist because they've never seen any people of colour strikes me as jejune. Indeed, I wonder if something the reverse might be true: that racists can use ‘representation’ to reassure themselves that they’re not really racist (‘how can I be racist? I love Denzel Washington’s movies’ and so on). But perhaps I’m wrong.

And actually my point is less instrumentalist. A space opera in which a commendably diverse crew healthily inclusive of a variety of ethnicities, genders, straights and gays, cis and trans, undergoes various adventures and, in triumphing, demonstrates the viability and value of such diversity is likely to be read (or, as it might be, watched) by people who already accept its tractarian priors. Preaching, as the phrase goes, to the choir. And there’s nothing wrong with that; people are entitled to the entertainment they prefer. No: my issue is not with the pragmatics of this tract-y trend in SF, so much as with its aesthetics. It is of course only too easy for the narrative and character and style of a book to become subordinate to its (right or left) tract-y message. But my beef is less with that and more with cultural utilitarianism as such. I am describing my own tastes, and not offering prescriptions: if you believe art should be measured in terms of its utility, the good it does in the world (and conversely that art should be condemned not for aesthetic clumsiness or ugliness but for its moral delinquencies) then that’s fine. But it’s not for me.

The obvious bodge, here, would be to say: ‘ah but why can’t a novel combine social and moral utility with aesthetic beauty? Why can’t it do both?’ Maybe it can, but I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is bound-up with what I mean by ‘poem’. It’s a word I deploy here in a specialised sense. There are poems which are strongly narrative, and which construe novelistic characters, of course. But that’s not what I’m gesturing towards in the second sentence of this blogpost. I’m using ‘poetry’ to mean not the whole ragbag of epics and odes, elegies and lyrics, doggerel and haiku, but something more aesthetically specific. At the risk (one of which I am, I assure you, aware) of sounding merely circular in my reasoning, I’m taking a Wallace Stevens-esque line that defines poetry as, precisely, that from which meaning cannot be straightforwardly extracted—taking poetry as, we could say, the nonutilitarian mode, and therefore the mode at the other end of the spectrum from the tract. For Stevens, poetry does mean, but not in the way that many people think: not, that is, as a string of profound thoughts to be separated from the poem and admired for their wisdom, insight or moral-ideological worth. ‘The extraction of meaning from the poem,’ he says, ‘and appraisement of it by rational standards of truth [is] due to enthusiasm for moral and religious truth’ rather than enthusiasm for poetry. The essay in which he says so is his reading of a great, if difficult-to-summarise, Marianne Moore poem, ‘He “Digesteth Harde Yron”’ [‘About One of Marianne Moore's Poems’, The Necessary Angel: Essays on the Imagination and Reality (1965), 99]. It’s a very fine poem. I’m not sure I could tell you what it’s ‘about’, though.

In a 1922 letter Stevens wrote to Poetry's assistant editor Alice Corbin Henderson that his poems were ‘not intended to be either deep, dark or mysterious’:

Whatever can be expressed can be expressed clearly. Épater les savants is as trifling as épater les bourgeois. But one cannot always say a thing clearly and retain the poetry of what one is saying.

The point, in other words, is that the truth of art is not a ‘thing’, separable and extricable from the poem in which it appears; and—a correlative—that this aspect of the nature of art does not mean that the poem is being deliberately or provokingly obscure. It is, rather, an invitation to apprehend art in a different way.

I think this a more rewarding as well as a more beautiful way, but I would say that, wouldn’t I. I’ve written elsewhere (indeed, I’ve written several times) that my understanding of science fiction treats it as a radically metaphorical literature that, for historical reasons, usually manifests in a metonymic mode—consecutive narrative in novel, film or TV. That this metaphorical heartbeat of the best genre means its images, its conceits, it best moments—the bone hurled into a blue sky that metamorphoses abruptly and superbly into an orbiting spaceship—are closer to a lyric poem than anything else. Because of this, it’s the kind of SF I write, and in turn may explain why my SF doesn’t really go over. It’s not what most SF fans are interested in. (That’s one explanation; another is that I’m just not a very good writer, but let’s stick with that first one for now, if only to spare my sobbing). Of my recent novels the one from which it’s easiest to extract a separable ‘meaning’ might be The Thing Itself, although the ‘meaning’ in that case would be a paradoxical ‘you should believe in God’. But a few weeks ago I worked through the final proofs of my new novel, Purgatory Mount, and though that’s a book ‘about’ atonement, about forgiveness and the withholding of forgiveness, about our duties of care and what happens when they are violated—these seem to me, I suppose, timely concerns—I don’t think it’s possible for me to extract moments of candid moralising from the novel. It works, if it works (of course I can’t be sure it does) as a gestalt. Now I’m finishing what I hope will be the next novel after that, a sort-of Hegelian something (my working title was ‘Hegelbook’; I’m still applying gentle pressure on my publisher to allow it to come out under the, I think, splendid title The This) and it is much more ostrich and iron-eating than I remembered in the composition.

The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
Heroism is exhausting, yet
it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare
the harmless solitaire
or great auk in its grandeur.

Still, I suppose I am out of whack, more generally. Jordan Peterson was mocked by the left not because he takes an entirely instrumentalist perspective on literature, although he certainly does—that fairy tales are there so that we can extract their morals, fight dragons, win the girl and so on—but because the morals he purports to extract from literature were considered ideologically noxious ones. The extraction is, for his critics as much as for him, the point. ‘Some of our oldest recorded stories transmit rules,’ Will Storr asserts breezily in The Science of Storytelling (Collins 2019). ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, has forgotten than status should be earned.’ Say what? ‘In its first section the gods send down a challenger, Enkidu, to humble him. King Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends. Together they bravely take on the monster in the forest, Humbaba, using superhuman effort to slay him before triumphantly returning with valuable wood to continue building Gilgamesh’s great city.’ Pretty much exactly the same story as King Lear, then. ‘By the end of the saga Enkidu has died, but King Gilgamesh is fully humbled, accepting his lot as just another mortal human. We think more of him, and thereby reward him with a bump in status.’ This strikes me as a startlingly clumsy and reductive reading of Gilgamesh, a great work whose greatness depends upon a kind of gigantic unclarity, a strangeness (a function of its fragmentariness and its distance from us in terms of mores and values) that is suggestive, a hugeness that is also an incompletion. I don’t see that reducing this work to such a trivial moral does any good at all. Nor, if I'm honest, do I find such a moral in the work, to be so extracted. When Storr steps so ingenuously from the sublime to the ridiculous—

That 4,000-year-old epic provides the same tribal function as Mr Nosey. In Roger Hargeaves’s children’s book, the protagonist’s flawed model of the world tells him he’ll only be safe if he sticks his long nose into other people’s business. But the villagers plot against him … finally humbled, Nosey mends his ways ‘and soon became friends with everybody in Tiddletown.’ For shedding his anti-social habits, Nosey is rewarded with connection and status.

—it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’re being deliberately trolled. Probably not, though. This earnest extraction of social utility from art is extremely widespread.

These are thoughts I’ve been having for a while, but they’ve been primped again by the fact that I bought myself the new Library of America two-vol Ursula K Le Guin ‘Hainish stories’ edition. A fine and a splendid thing, this has given me the excuse to re-read Le Guin. I’m now on vol 2, which starts with The Word For World Is Forest, runs through a baker’s dozen of short stories and novellas and ends with The Telling. The first of these was something I hadn’t read since the early 80s (I almost re-read it when Avatar came out and people were complaining about the obvious plagiary, but didn’t get round to it). Re-reading it now has been an interesting process. I have to say I found it a little harder to love than formerly, as a novel, because it veers really quite jerkily from tract (‘the Vietnam War is BAD! We should RESPECT THE ENVIRONMENT!’) to poem. On the one hand there’s Davidson, the psychopathic, militaristic, macho villain of the piece. The LoA volume reprints various prefaces etc, in one of which Le Guin concedes that when she wrote this novel, she was caught up in a particular political and social-protest moment ‘in the winter of 1968, during a year’s stay in London … helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Viet Nam. I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish and obstinate.’ She goes on:

I knew, because of the compulsive quality of the composition, that it [The Word For World Is Forest] was likely to become a preachment, and I struggled against this. Say not the struggle naught availeth. Neither Lyubov nor Selver [respectively the human and alien positive characters] is mere Virtue Triumphant; moral and psychological complexity is salvaged at least in those characters. But Davidson is pure: he is purely evil—

‘I don't, consciously, believe that purely evil people exist,’ she says, adding: ‘but my unconscious had other opinions.’ Well indeed. But … but on the other hand: the stuff in this novel about Selver surviving the murder of his wife and nearly being beaten to death to become, in the terms of his people, a god (bridging the dream-world and the world-world, in order to bring, precisely, death into the latter) and Davidson joining him in divinity—albeit in his case as a terrible, exiled god—has the resonance and beautiful eloquence of poetry. That’s the Le Guin I love: the many moments in Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home like that. In that same introduction to The Word for World, she says ‘the pursuit of art by artist or audience is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as “escapism”.’ She goes on that The Word For World Is Forest ‘began as a pure pursuit of freedom and the dream’ but that ‘I succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit.’ It’s a potent lure, and always worth resisting.

In sum: not despite but because it so often intersects with such positivist discourses as ‘science’ and ‘technology’, science fiction needs more negative capability. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.