Winning as Ideologeme

 

I’m interested in the aetiology and current ideological function of “winning” as a political shibboleth. It strikes me as the key to a lot of current politics in a way that is, maybe, obscured by some of the older, more functional political ‘aims and objectives’ gubbins that still loiter in the discourse—you know the kind of thing I mean: that the point of elections is to determine the people’s preferences, that politicians exist to achieve specific strategic goals to make our lives more fulfilling, equitable, sustainable and secure. But perhaps that gubbins is all ghost-gubbins nowadays.

Take Trump. It’s true that his 2016 electoral campaign promised he would do certain specific things if elected—build the wall, bring back coal and so on (none of which he has actually done). But his main promise was not functional. It was purely discursive. He would ‘make America great again’. Under him America and Americans would win; would indeed win so much they would get tired of winning. Such a thing is of course cannier than actual concrete promises, because it is wholly and discursively performative. Is America ‘great’ again now? Trump says so, and by saying so makes it true, because greatness is not a material category to be measured against (let’s say) increased well-being, access to medical care, housing, security from disease or anything like that. ‘Greatness’ is a state of mind enjoyed by certain Americans who believe they enjoy it. It is flawless in its circularity, and insofar Trump has persuaded many millions of his followers that it is both real and that it flows from him, their loyalty to and admiration of him is guaranteed.

Of course it has manifold downsides, in terms of practical politics. One thing that seems clear to me is that Trump believed he had delivered on his campaign’s ‘winning’ promise by winning the election—against the odds, in the teeth of the pundits who predicted his loss and so on—not by actually doing anything subsequent to that win. That he saw winning the election as an end in itself. He did not, as generations of previous politicians have done, see it as a necessary first step to facilitate this or that practical programme of governance; he saw it as the final step in the process. As far as he was concerned, all that remained, during his actual term as POTUS, was to cash-in his winnings, to bask in his winner-dom, accepting plaudits, enjoying the perks and celebrity and so on—not do anything so onerous and difficult as actually running the country. The compact he offered was: this election win proves I’m a winner; support me and a little bit of my godlike winningness will rub off on you. And conversely: oppose me and you’re a loser, the worst thing Trump’s microscopic imagination can comprehend. A lot of his outraged whining in the four years that have followed has been motivated, I think, by a kind of astonishment that people are too obtuse to see he already won, that he was a winner, and therefore deserved to be treated the way winners should be treated, with adulation and envy and so on. That’s also why it is simply inconceivable to him that he lost the 2020 election. That would make him a loser, and that cannot be.

Well, none of that is very controversial, I think. I despise and repudiate Trump’s hamstrung ethos of winning-is-all (especially since ‘winning’ has for him such chokingly narrow, materialist and alpha-male-dominance parameters) and pity him for having had his own life bent so cruelly out of shape by it. But, as commentators often note, Trump is a symptom, not a cause. And one thing he symptomizes is this new, free-floating, purely performative and discursive political category of ‘winning’.

Which brings me to Brexit. I voted remain in the referendum, considering—as I still do—Brexit a terrible mistake that will have profoundly damaging consequences for my country on many levels. What the referendum showed that that the country was, pretty much, split down the middle: half wanted Brexit and half wanted Remain, with a tiny majority for the former on the day the vote was held. I believe sincerely in democracy, but as a means (necessarily crude but better than not having it) of divining what the governed want their government to do, not as a boxing match with a winner and a KO'd loser. If a referendum is held and 90% vote for Proposition A, then the government should deliver Proposition A. If 52% vote for Proposition A and 48% vote against it, the government should deliver Proposition A in a way that acknowledges that half the country doesn’t want it—via a process of consultation and compromise (in this specific case, as a soft Brexit). That’s not, of course, what happened. The slight unbalance in this 50/50 divide was taken as an immutable ‘will of the people.’ Anyone who opposed a stiletto-hard and eviscerating Brexit was attacked as an ‘enemy of the people’, a traitor, a ‘Remoaner’ and so on. This has been awful in and of itself, never mind the damage Brexit itself is going to wreak. It was not the vote itself, so much as the way this split was handled—the way the ‘winning’ side was encouraged towards triumphalism, the way any and every attempt at dialogue from the ‘losing’ side was treated with contumely and, worse, fed back to the ‘winning’ side so as to stoke their ressentiment and outrage—that has broken my country, split as it now is into two mutually hostile tribes. This is a terrible, terrible thing, and I don’t see how it is going to be healed in the near or even the medium term.

I might add that my personal Brexit journey has seen me change my views. Not that I think Brexit will be good for the UK (clearly it won’t), but that I’ve had to concede that the democratic dynamic has altered. The Tory win in the December 2019 election depressed me, but it certainly marked a much stronger democratic mandate actually to deliver Brexit. My sense—this is my gut, and may be incorrect—is that Johnson’s majority came from some people who were still Brexit true-believers, and from a larger group of people who just wanted Brexit to go away, who were sick of it dominating the news cycle, sick of anticipating it, and yearned to see the back of it. Either way, it took the wind from my Remainer-y sails. And now here we are: a few days away from a BNP-flavour Brexit that will have a large number of negative consequences for many people. A Brexit that will deliver on none of the specific promises made during the referendum campaign—easiest deal in history, us enjoying all the advantages of the EU and none of the disadvantages, £350 million a week more for the NHS etc—and whose ‘upsides’ are (to return to my original theme) purely discursive. It delivers ‘sovereignty’ (what was called in the referendum control) as a hermetically sealed ideologeme, something about which supporters can feel good, rather than a thing that delivers any beneficial material advantages to the man and woman in the street.

I don’t think I understood until relatively recently (a sign I daresay of my political myopia) how largely Brexit itself is now just this hermetic ideologeme, defined in terms of winning. The narrative here is seductive and toxic: you, simple Brexiteer, are the ordinary man or woman. Against you were stacked the tyrannical forces of government, the media, the liberal and metropolitan elites, foreign powers, embedded privilege, corruption—and yet you picked up your rusty sword and battered shield, took on the many-headed dragon and won. Brexit is that victory, not anything else—not improvements in material prosperity, not a better funded NHS, not fish, but just that. Here’s Kelvin MacKenzie, a man with an imagination almost as impoverished as Donald Trump’s.

I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that MacKenzie segues directly from triumphalism over ‘winning’ Brexit to a call for the return of the death penalty. What better rebus of winning could there be, in this sense, than gloating over the corpse of your enemy? Of course MacKenzie wants that.

So what do we do? I suggest we remember that discourse increasingly floats free of actuality. My prediction is that Trump will fade away during 2021, and that he won’t run again in 2024, because Trumpism is so entirely predicated upon him as a winner that, having lost first the election and then re-lost it, via his various keystone-cops attempts to overturn the vote, he is irremediably tainted with loser-ness. Brexit will be more complicated. Those who oppose it need to be consistent in presenting it not just as a terrible outcome but as a loss, a defeat, a failure. I think we can do so, and not only because I think it actually is those things; but also because once it is behind us many of the people who voted Johnson in to ‘get it done’ will be angry at the effect it has on their lives in a way that won’t be assuaged by telling them what winners they are.

Thomson and Thompson

 From Wikipedia:

The detectives were in part based on ... a picture of two mustachioed, bowler-hatted, formally dressed detectives who were featured on the cover of the Le Miroir edition of 2 March 1919. They were shown escorting Emile Cottin, who had attacked Georges Clemenceau—one detective was handcuffed to the man while the other was holding both umbrellas

I was curious about this image, and chased it up. I was not disappointed:

Formidable! For extra trivia points, Cottin the would-be assassin was known as: ‘Milou’. There's a thesis in this, I feel ...

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.

The Queen's Gambit (dir Scott Frank 2020)

I haven't read the Walter Tevis novel on which the Scott Frank and Allan Scott Netflix miniseries, The Queen's Gambit, is based, though I'm quite tempted to. This lavishly-mounted, well-acted and decently-written seven-part drama is enjoyable and impressive, and will surely win many awards. Young Beth Harmon, an orphan being raised in a forbidding Christian orphanage (the authorities tranquillise their charges to keep them docile, sowing the seeds for adult Beth's addictions to pills and booze) is taught chess by the janitor. It turns out she has a Bobby Fischer level of natural genius although without—a canny move by the storytellers, this—any of Fischer's noisome personality traits or paranoia. Beth is perhaps a little chilly, personality-wise, but she is always likeable, humane, relatable. Or relatable except in one regard, for, played by the striking-looking Anya Taylor-Joy dressed immaculately in haute couture, Beth is beautiful beyond all normal human possibility. But this is TV, after all, not real-life.

Teenage Beth is adopted by a childless couple, a distant father who soon leaves the family home and a talented but thwarted, alcoholic, suburban mother. The series traces Beth's rise through the world of chess, from State- to US-champion until, after losing a couple of times to the stony-faced Soviet global champion Burgov, she finally conquers her personal demons and, with the help of her various friends and ex-lovers, defeats Burgov to win the world championship [update: I'm corrected on Twitter; this final match is an international tournament in the USSR, not the world championship].

Perhaps that last paragraph makes the series' denouement sound just a little, well, sappy. I wonder. Snipy of me to say so, perhaps, but there we are. To be clear: it's most certainly not a weakness of the story that it repudiates the conventions of misery-porn and concentrates instead upon a positive uplifty narrative through-line. On the contrary it is a notable strength that it stresses the way Beth's self-reliance is augmented by her friends and lovers to enable her to prevail in the end. That's excellent, and the more so because it's relatively rare in TV drama. No: the problem, I think, is that the obstacles the drama throws in the way of Beth's rise—obstacles needful in a narrative sense, since without such friction we have no drama—get resolved in too facile a manner. Beth's alcoholism and drug-addiction are vividly portrayed, although the show's more fundamental love of the scrupulous, gorgeous recreation of 1960s interiors in all their quiddity and glossy glory rather softpedals the skeeziness of her situation. But it is, I think, a problem that Beth's addictions are, by the end of the drama, simply waved away, with a little help from her friends, and via her final big victory. That doesn't ring true.

As for the chess, the show mostly manages to tread its delicate line, keeping things just actual-chessy enough not to irk real chessheads, whilst not getting bogged down in chessular specifics to the point of alienating audience members who don't know their Nimzo-Indian from a hole in a ground. It's a little over-simplified of course: actual moves are vagued at and the tournament-play seems to consist entirely of one-off matches between great players, almost never drawn. We can chalk that up to dramatic license. Still, without specific content to the games the show has instead to peg Beth's victories or defeats to exteriorities. So, the first time she loses to Burgov is connected, dramatically, to the death of her mother (she dies of hepatitis in their shared hotel room as Beth is playing downstairs) and the second time to Beth being titanically hung-over after a night of boozy Parisian indulgence, painting the town rouge with a French friend. Which means that the third and final time she defeats Burgov, at end of the show's narrative-arc rainbow, becomes less about her gameplay and more about the support of all the characters she had met and befriended along the way.

Still, what occurred to me, having watched the finale, is that this isn't really a show about chess. Or to put it more precisely, it's a show that uses chess, and the visual codes of mimetic historical realism, to tell a superhero origin story. Beth is not a crime fighter, but then again all these superheroic crime fighters, from Superman to Batman, from X-Men to the Avengers, are actually about re-establishing order from chaos, and that is entirely Beth's gift, and the show's throughline story. Chess is Beth's superpower in the sense that her skill goes beyond Batman-style super-preparation and armature of materiel (in Bruce Wayne's case, combat-training, long hours in the gym and lots of high-tech; in Beth's case training-games with other chess masters and long hours reading chess manuals)—that her skill goes beyond this into Superman, Dr Manhattan or Wonder Woman type innateness. She plays key moves intuitively, even her international chess master friends don't understand her total grasp of position and ability to find the right move, and so on.

So far as that is concerned, it's the origin part of the superhero story that The Queen's Gambit gives us. Three of the ‘Origin archetypes’ listed at TV Tropes are especially relevant, I think: the ‘Lucky Accident’ (the ‘Freak Lab Accident, one-in-a-million malfunction, or what have you; e.g., Spider-Man, The Flash, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil or The Fantastic Four’); a combination of the ‘My Own Creation’ mythos and the origin-story rooted in ‘Augmentation’ (for instance ‘participating in an experiment taking a Super Serum to become a Super Soldier like Captain America’, with the augmentation, here, being the chess-board); and ‘Pure Will’. The ‘Lucky Accident’ narrative takes us back to the reason Beth is an orphan, shown repeatedly in flashback. Her mentally unstable mother deliberately crashes their car into an oncoming truck (‘close your eyes’ she tells young Beth, on the back seat, just before the collision), but Beth is miraculously thrown clear of the resulting pile-up and is discovered standing, unscratched, in the middle of the road. The other two story archetypes are obvious enough.

The point is that superheroes are often orphans, like Batman or Superman; that they are often otherwise unconsidered ‘ordinary’ people, or have unconsidered ‘ordinary’ alter-egos, whilst at the same time being at the centre of global geopolitical crises and crunch-points (Beth beating the Soviets at the height of the Cold War); that they in some sense fight chaos ‘for all of us’ (eager crowds gathering inside and outside the venues at which Beth plays, watching her every move). The point is that there is something miraculous, something touched by wonder, about Beth's chess abilities.

The question as to why ‘we’ are so obsessed with super-heroes at the moment is one future cultural-historians of the first decades of the 21st-century will chew over. I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, actually, although it seems to me a profound one, and it doesn't seem to me surprising that, after the super-saturation of DC and (especially) MCU science-fictional superheroes over the last ten years the trope is migrating to other modes of representation, as here. We may have had enough spandex, without, perhaps, satisfying our appetite for superheroes as such. A few years back I wrote a History of Science Fiction that located the origins of SF not in Hugo Gernsback, not in Wells, Verne or Poe, not even in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but much earlier: in the Protestant Reformation, during which time, from the early 1600s onwards, a new ‘materialist’ form of the fantastic budded off from that aboriginal storytelling human mode. One consequence of this origin story, I suggested, was that certain elements from the cauldron of the Reformation are still in the, as it were, DNA of science fiction. A key one of these was the debate over the nature and powers of the divine intercessor, the messiah. It certainly seems to me inarguable that SF is fascinated by messiah figures, and we can if we like refer to all such figures, from Paul Atreides to Luke Skywalker, from Doctor Who to Neo, superheroes. It has something to do, and manifestly connects with a great many people on the level of, a mixture of desire for a saviour and anxiety about the saviour's nature and capabilities. 

What Sinks "Underwater"

 

Although, actually, I rather enjoyed William Eubank's 2020 science fiction action horror movie. But it doesn't really work, and I was curious why. Spoilers follow.

It's essentially Alien underwater. A deepwater drilling platform located (improbably enough) at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is hit by what seems at first an earthquake. Kristen Stewart and other highly attractive underwater drilling technicians, as all commercial drilling technicians of course are, run around the collapsing facility in their underwear, closing bulkheads and pressing control panel buttons and so on. Some of them are killed in the chaos. The survivors clamber into diving suits and make their way across the seabed to a different part of the facility, where the escape pods are located. More of them die, this time hauled away by tentacled monsters—hitherto-unencountered lifeforms, mansized pallid motile globs of feelers and teeth. As the facility further collapses more of the cast are, as per Alien, snaffled by these nameless horrors. There is much wriggling through collapsed, flooding corridors, and plenty of shock moments, diving suit helmets suddenly filling with blood as their wearers howl and so on. 

Finally Stewart, Jessica Henwick and John Gallagher make it to the escape pod room, all the slightly less attractive cast members having been tentacled-away. Stewart manages to send Henwick and Gallagher away in their pods, but her own pod is broken, so she stays behind. And this is where the movie stages its big reveal. The human-sized undersea monsters are merely the progeny of one absolutely gigantic tentacle-and-teeth monster

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
From ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken waketh

... and it's Cthulhu! It's your actual gigantic Lovecraftian beast. Stewart gazes into the ph'nglui mglw'nafh r'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagnian horror for a while, and then presses the base's nuclear self-destruct (all mining platforms, as I understand it, are equipped with one such) immolating herself and the elder horror both at once. 

The whole movie is expensively mounted, well-made, nicely designed, earnestly acted. It is no more intrinsically silly than was Alien back in 1979. And yet it doesn't work. I wonder if the reason it doesn't work is because this Lovecraftian flourish mismatches the tenor of the movie as a whole. Underwater is, as Alien was, body-horror. Now, body horror can be very effective at spooking and upsetting us, squicking our sense of somatic integrity and safety. But Lovecraft did not write body horror. His stories do sometimes contain horrible bodies, but that's not the same thing. Lovecraft wrote topographic horror. Think how ‘The Dunwich Horror’ begins with pages and pages of eerie scene-setting off the Aylesbury turnpike in north central Massachusetts; or how ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ opens by situating itself in a particular Arkham locale (‘the old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.’) Heidegger distinguished between space and place in order to valorise the latter as the dwelling of Being. Lovecraft intuitively turned this around, and his work generates a queasy apprehension of place as the iteration of nightmarish inescapability, place as the already-dwelt-in by nameless ghastliness. There's nothing in the generic corridors and control rooms of Underwater's subsea base that can evoke that, and the scenes of the cast lolloping across the ocean bed entail no connection, or recognition, in the audience. Can't have the unheimlich without the heimlich, after all. 

Platonesi: Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi" (2020)

 
Reviews of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi have been cagey about revealing too much of the plot, as if to say even rudimentary things about the novel would be to spoil it. I don’t see this, I must say. But perhaps you want to exercise caution.

Clarke's title character, narrating in first-person via his journal entries, is the only living inhabitant of a vast mansion—so vast that he can never find a way out of it, so huge an ocean washes tidally through the lower levels, and clouds float through the upper ones. The House consists of an endless succession of rooms and corridors, adorned everywhere with marble statuary past which Piranesi wanders, feeding on seaweed and fruits de mer from the ground floor, and tending the skeletons of thirteen previous inhabitants of the place. Piranesi is an unusually ingenuous, almost a child-like narrator, and we soon realise that the only other person in the House—a twice weekly visitor called ‘The Other’, whom Piranesi considers a friend—is probably not all he pretends, no matter how much Piranesi trusts him.

This is all well-evoked, the universe of the House neither mistily sketched nor over-rigorously delineated. The worst you could say is that it's more cool conceit than rigorous narrative, more a arrangement of striking images than a framework able to furnish all the satisfactions the novel as a form. I suppose those images refract (a) Clarke herself stuck largely inside her house since 2012 with her debilitating, chronic illness, (b) a Lewisian Narnia-style allegory by which the world is God's strange mansion—Magician’s Nephew supplies the novel’s epigraph—and (c) some manner of anxiety about climate change (the lower levels are dangerously flooded!) 

In all it is a good though not, I think, a great novel. I'm not sure it has the unexpectedness or baffling eloquence of particular image that defines the best surrealism (your mileage may, of course vary). Certainly it would be hard to claim it as on a par with Strange and Norrell, undeniably a major work of 21st-century fiction. But I enjoyed it very much, and its core idea has lingered with me since I finished it a couple of weeks ago. It’s an upholstered short-story rather than a novel, but that’s OK.

On the topic of spoilers, I’m a little puzzled by the reviewerish pussy-footing. Aspects of the way Clarke unfolds her story seem to me readily guessable, even from the basic summary of the premise I give here. Things go broadly how any reader who thought about the matter for five minutes would anticipate them to go. Piranesi wandering his strange megadomus would hardly fill two hundred and fifty pages, so of course there are complications. But perhaps you would prefer to stop reading now, if you haven’t yet picked up Clarke's novel, lest I taint your enjoyment. I mean, perhaps you never started reading this blogpost, in which case you obviously have no problem.

My point is that before I'd even cracked the covers of the novel, and just going on the reviews I'd read, I asssumed that Clarke was going to set her drafty, universe of oceanwashed inward marble halls against our world (after all, the epigraph is from the Magician’s stuffing Nephew) and that when I started reading it seemed obvious that the Other would prove to have come from the latter. And so it transpires: not just him but various others including, we soon discover, Piranesi himself. That P. cannot remember the other world is a function of the strange, memory-effacing effect the House has upon those who live within it for any length of time. The Other relies upon this amnesia (he ‘tests’ Piranesi by dropping words like ‘Battersea’ into conversation, to check that they strike him as meaningless). 

So, yes: the story brings in new characters from our world, and takes Piranesi on a path towards an understanding of his actual condition. This includes him encountering other texts and manuscripts, including ones he had himself earlier written but which he now has forgotten. In parallel with Piranesi's burgeoning awareness we, as readers, piece together an our-world-set story about an Aleister Crowley-type magus, called Laurence Arne-Sayles, who gathered a group of acolytes around him with promises that he could access miraculous dimensions, and who used his power over these people to indulge his various sadistic caprices. The twist is that where Crowley was a fraud, Arne-Sayles actually could do what he claimed. He had devised a ritual to open a portal from our world to Piranesi's House.

Arne-Sayles stranded Piranesi (we learn his ‘real’, our-world name about halfway through) in the House. The amnesiac quality of the place has meant he has forgotten this, and all his prior life as well. The story of the novel is really the story of him recuperating that lost knowledge.

That's not the main thing that interests me about this novel. Rather I'm struck by the extent to which Clarke's novel is Platonic. Very Platonic. Much Plato.   

In particular I'm interested in what it says about the state of contemporary Fantasy. Because what Clarke’s novel does is dramatize Plantonism—it takes Platonism, or Neoplatonism, seriously, just as Lewis does in his Narnia books. The final pages of The Last Battle are perfectly up-front about this: both Narnia and our world are revealed as inferior imitations of the Realm of the Forms, Lewis’s God, into which the Pevensies and other good Narnians (but not Lewis’s meshuggener dwarfs, nor his we-can-be-honest Muslim-caricature ‘Calormen’) are granted access. It's all in Plato, we're explicitly told. Lewis, steeped in medievalism, felt at home with a Neoplatonic folding together of the Realm of the Forms and the Christian God and I suspect Clarke does too. If there’s a twist at the end of this novel it is—unless I have misunderstood things—that the House is our world, Plato’s cave of deprivation and forgetfulness, and ‘our world’ figures in Clarke’s conception as the sunlit outside, which is quite a neat reversal. 

I don’t know how common it is to ‘believe’, genuinely, in Plato nowadays. Perhaps lots of folk do, though if so I’m not among their number (I've heard it said that mathematicians are more liable to be Platonists than other kinds of people). But I am interested in the way there seems to have been a little cluster of strictly ‘Platonic’ fantasy novels lately: Stephenson’s Anathem for one, Jo Walton’s Socratic trilogy for another. If I’m right that Clarke is styling the House as a version of Plato’s Cave, with statues and fragmentary graffiti rather than shadows, then the pervasive sea-swell, the scent of salt, the dangerous rising tides, the albatrosses and other oceanic fauna, become an interesting addendum to the parable as originally told in The Republic. Or perhaps not, for according to Marie-Élise Zovko when Plato wrote of a cave it was a sea-cave that he most likely had in mind:

Plato’s Sicilian voyages may have influenced his formulation of the central analogies which form the axis of the Republic, in particular the Analogy of the Cave. The characteristics of Plato’s cave are reminiscent of caves inhabited or in regular use from prehistoric times to Classical antiquity, which lie along the ancient seafaring routes across the Adriatic. A great concentration of these caves are located on the islands and coastline of central and southern Dalmatia in present-day Croatia, as well as in Apulia … Both shores were inhabited by Illyrian tribes in the period when the Mycenaean Greeks first colonized the region, and the Illyrians continued to be a significant presence after the establishment of the Greek colonies of the Eastern Adriatic and Southern Italy. Syncretistic ritual practices of which there is evidence in the caves of Southern and Central Dalmatia appear to have had their roots in a mixture of older Illyrian rituals and Greek mysteries or hero worship. [Marie-Élise Zovko, ‘Of Caves, Lines, and Sea Travels: Plato’s Syracusan Voyages and the Central Analogies of the Republic’, in Heather L. Reid, Davide Tanasi and Susi Kimbell (eds) Politics and Performance in Western Greece Book Subtitle: Essays on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy Book (Parnassos Press 2017)]

I suppose Clarke’s cave is filled with neoclassical statuary because, taking inspiration from the artist whose name supplies the novel's title, she conceives not an Ancient Greek house but a later, Renaissance or Early Modern one. And, because Neoplatonism exists in the shadow of its Platonic origins. And I suppose her protagonist lives in the House alone because one of the ways the Early Modern era ‘read’ its duties towards this more perfect form of the divine was in terms of seclusion: eremites, anchorites, hermits living in their cells and so on.

One thing that particularly fascinates me in this novel is the way, as I see it, it styles apocalypse in architectural terms. It’s not just that Piranesi is, as it were, living in the ruins after the cosmic catastrophe, or that the ruins are the world, its that the ruins are interiorised architectural spaces. I’m not sure I can think of another work that figures apocalypse this way—though there are, of course, a great many verbally-rendered apocalypses, from John of Patmos’s Biblical vision through ten thousand religious or science-fictional ends-of-the-world; and we’ve seen an increasing shift in the centre of gravity in the apocalyptic imagination from words to images, from John Martin’s enormous canvases in the nineteenth-century to the plethora of big-screen cinematic renderings of world-ending disaster of modern times. But this move to architecture is interesting, more so (I think) than the story Clarke is actually telling. I wonder if this is also Neoplatonic, or at least inflected by Clarke’s Lewisian interest in older modes of thinking or apprehending the world:

Neoplatonic thought has no concept of the ‘sign’, in which words denote things by representing or standing for them, and in which the sign and its referent are distinct registers. This absence enables us to comprehend the intellectual centrality of the key Neoplatonic doctrine of the interpenetration and respective mirroring of microcosm and macrocosm. That doctrine was ‘influential’ beyond identifiably Neoplatonic thinkers. In this episteme the entire universe, from its smallest to its largest parts, from the humblest animal to God, consists in a series of resemblances, similarities and sympathies. There can be no concept of an arbitrary relation in which one thing, a sign, stands for and represents another. All relations are real relations, and all connections between aspects of existence reflect their respective natures. Hence symbolic relations both have significance and are real relations, or connections in nature. There is no space for the ‘classical’ gap between signs and existence. Renaissance thought is hyperrealist. The world presented to knowledge consists of emblems, traces, signatures and resemblances. These are the marks of that network of spiritual-real interconnections whereby the whole tissue of existence is held together.

I’m quoting here from an essay by Paul Hirst, who moves from this to a meditation on what we might call the ‘architectural Imaginary’:

For Renaissance thought a central question is how to present those traces of harmony and cosmic order—not to represent them but to make them immediately present to human subjects. In such presentation geometry has a privileged position as the fundamental mirroring of the natural order, since it is both an elaborated science of ordered forms and the present and manifest form of the order of the world. The figures of geometry correspond to the constitutive proportions of the world. The two fundamental proportional relations accessible to experience are those of the human body and those of the harmonic scale. Such devices provide traces and resemblances whereby man can be put into immediate contact with the divine. Hence the familiar Vitruvian figure has a philosophical significance belying the fact that it is a commonplace. Such figures and proportions are supra-intentional: they present the cosmic order, even if those who draw them do so merely from convention. For the Neoplatonic architectural theorist the order of the world could best be revealed through conscious purpose, through the rationally planned design of the architect-adept. This systematizes experience, putting it at the service of intellect and the superior perception of cosmic order. Hence the philosophical and practical significance of an architecture that links science, art and spiritual concerns. Proportions in structures are the visible resemblances of the order of man and the universe. [Paul Hirst ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files 26 (Autumn 1993), 54]

I wonder if something along these lines is going on with Clarke’s vision in this novel? And, having started down this line of thought, I'm wondering if there is something similar going on not only in the original engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi himself, in all their proliferating ur-fractal architectural splendour and terror—but also in the tendency of my beloved genre to render its worldbuilding in quasi-architectural terms: vast cathedral-like spaceships, floating cities, whole planets smothered with buildings. There's a lot to think about, here.

Enola Holmes (dir. Harry Bradbeer 2020)

 

Enola Holmes is OK: handsomely mounted, with a charming, energetic performance from Millie Bobby Brown as the would-be consulting detective girl scion of the Holmes family and decent support from ‘toss a coin to your Sherlock’ Henry Cavill and Sam ‘Oswald Mycroft’ Claflin. The plot is bobbins and the mystery and its resolution nonsensical, but that hardly matters: everything bounces along nicely. Nonetheless I found myself disliking it quite strongly. I’ll tell you why. 

At the heart of this story is an idea: that girls can be as clever as boys and should be allowed to choose how they live their lives. Our heroine embodies this idea; stacked against her are the various baddies who believe girls are inferior to boys and should be disciplined into submission and readied for one thing only, marriage. This idea—that girls are not intrinsically inferior to boys—is manifestly true. But it is dramatically inert. I mean, who in 2020 could possibly disagree with it? Of course it’s true. A drama predicated on it might have had bite a hundred years ago, but now it feels like it's fighting an antique battle. 

To be clear, I'm arguing that the problem lies not in this idea's social or ethical truth but rather its dramatic vapidity. Enola is likeable and her antagonists are vile. There’s no nuance here. “Girls are as clever as boys” is not a story, it’s a default.  Compare Enola’s asides to camera—sprightly and well-delivered though they are—with Fleabag’s same (slightly unfair to compare a YA adventure spritz to an adult comedy-drama, but still). Fleabag has the courage to make its protagonist charming, compelling, insightful and broken, needy, often unlikeable. Friction in her drama is provided not by gurning moral-monsters but actual people, some understandably alienated by Fleabag, others caught up in their own lives, selfish and real. The original Sherlock Holmes characterisation is similar, if sketchier; brilliant and obnoxious, compelling and distant. As a result these characters and their stories acquire dramatic heft and audience commitment and belief.

It’s not that there’s no depth to Enola Holmes (there isn’t—but this is popcorn fun not Sophocles, which is fine) it’s that there’s no real tension, that the film can’t squeeze actual excitement or peril or thrills from its adventure conventions. Drama is more than lots of things happening one after the other against a background of Edwardian props and settings.