On Silence and Judgement

 

:1:

I don't propose to enter into a detailed response, in this blogpost, to DeLillo's latest. Or to be more precise, I'm interested in my broader reaction to DeLillo's latest rather than the more detailed specifics of such reaction. 

The Silence is brief. It's padded-out in my edition with large font (in, irksomely enough, typewriter case throughout, like a typescript from 1960) to 116 pages, but the whole is well under 20,000 words. It opens inside a plane on its way from Paris to New York. One passenger, Jim, is coping with his anxiety by reading the numbers off the in-flight screen: ‘arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four’ and so on. His wife Tessa, a poet, is jotting things in her notebook. DeLillo describes her with an awkwardly egregious emphasis on pigmenation: ‘dark-skinned, Tessa Berens’; ‘Caribbean-European-Asian origins’ and the like. Then, later in the novel, when Jim and Tessa have made their way to Diane Lucas' Manhattan appartment, we get: ‘Diana thought she was beautiful, mixed-parentage’ [71]. Diane is a retired university professor and is hosting a Super Bowl party with her husband Max and a younger friend Martin (this latter one Diane's former students; he seems to be on the autism spectrum). The skin-colour of these other characters is not vouchsafed to us, but we can intuit the blanke default, alas (at one point, inside the appartment, DeLillo peers into Tessa's mind and shares what, we assume, he assumes a woman like her would be thinking: ‘she sees herself. She is different from these people. She imagines taking off her clothes nonerotically to show them who she is’ [91]. And then again, later: ‘Tessa Berens studies the backs of her hands as if confirming the color, her color’ [112]. Hmm.)

Anyway: Jim and Tessa's plane suffers engine failure and lands bumpily, leaving Jim with a wound where his head knocked against the window. In Manhattan, Diane, Max and Martin talk sport, types of bourbon, telescopes, life, the universe and Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity which Martin quotes at length from memory, in English and German, sometimes affecting an Albert Einstein voice. 

The big event of the novel happens: electricity dies, the grid has failed, all the screens go black. It's a temporary inconvenience, or it's a permanent collapse, the novel doesn't tell us. Jim and Tessa make their way to a NY hospital where Jim's head is bandaged. The two of them have sex in a toilet cubicle before walking across town to Diane's appartment. There they join the others in disposing of the time with chatty chatting chat. Max performs an imaginary commentary of what might be happening at the Super Bowl. More Einstein is quoted. Ponderings on the nature of reality alternate with banalities. The book ends by giving each of the main characters a two-page-long monologue: Diane talks about ‘staring into space’ and ‘time's arrow’; Jim recounts their emergency landing (‘I was tossed sideways into the window, someone was shouting fire, was a wing on fire’); Max recalls walking around the now darkened city; Tessa speculates on apocalypse (‘is our normal experience being stilled? Are we witnessing a deviation in nature itself?’) and finally Martin quotes some more Einsein. Bish bash and, dare I say it, bosh: the novel is done.

This is a slight piece of work, or it isn't; a five-finger exercise or a brilliant distillation. There are, I think, interesting, or potentially interesting, things going on. It's a novel about end zones, end times (like lots of DeLillo) and about words. It's about words in the sense that there's very little descriptive prose; it's almost entirely dialogue—it reads, indeed, as if DeLillo had originally conceived it as a play, and only latterly decided to novelise his material—and therefore about that John Ashbery thang of threading profundity and beauty through the quotidian murmurs and gabble of ordinary speech. But it's also about words in a more quasi-religious, lapsed-Catholic logos sense: ‘“Cryptocurrencies ... Crypto” [Diane] says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies.” Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate’ [86]. Lest we miss this, DeLillo repeatedly presses the relevant pedal:

“The painted ceilings. Rome,” she said. “The tourists looking up.”

“Standing absoluely still.”

“Saints and angels. Jesus of Nazareth.”

“The luminous figure. The Nazarene. Einstein,” he said. [53]

There's also lots in the novel to do with screens. Airborne Jim reading his screen for comfort. Everyone on their phones all the time, as everyone is nowadays. Folk gathered to watch not the Super Bowl (as DeLillo's characters gather to watch the baseball at the beginning of Underworld) but to watch a screen-mediated version of the Super Bowl. Screens, DeLillo knows, grant us only a kind of simulacrum of access to things and people, but screens also screen us from things and people, protect us. That, combined with the gestured-towards (lazily gestured-towards would be an overly judgmental way of putting it, but still) consilience of Einstein's weird physics and religious faith, is the main thrust of this book.

Alright. But, as I said at the beginning, I'm not here to delve into all that. Rather I'm intrigued by the fact that, upon finishing the novel I could not decide whether it was any good or not. This is what I tweeted at that time:

Consider: I am a professional critic. Determining and assessing literary and aesthetic judgment is literally what I do for a living. You'd think I'd be able to thumbs-up or thumbs-down a 20,000 word novella. And yet here we are.

I don't mean to protest too much, of course. I could certainly gussy-up a reaction, if pressed (or, as it might be, paid: for instance paid to write a review of the title). That's not my point. Rather I'm intrigued by the Schrödinger's felinity of this particular novel. Aren't our aesthetic responses more intuitive and immediate than this? If I drink a slug of milk I know immediately whether it's gone off or not. If I hear a song for the first time I can, by and large, tell whether I like it, or at the very least whether I'm going to like it, as (if) I become more famliar with it. DeLillo, increasingly (which is to say with a lot of his later, post 9/11 fiction), leaves me baffled on this front. I don't mean baffled with respect to what the novel's about, what he's doing and so on. Baffled on this fundamental level of not knowing whether his novel is good or is shit. Honestly, The Silence could be either.

My milk analogy isn't entirely apropos, I know. Kant's Critique of Judgement distinguishes between four modes of aesthetic response: agreeable / disagreeable; good / bad; beautiful / ugly; sublime / contemptible. The agreeable is a simple sensory judgment (it gives immediate sensory pleasure; ‘this doughnut tastes nice’, ‘this bed is soft’ and so on). The good is a moral judgment, and so connected to Kant's idea of a fixed and absolute notion of ethical reason. The beautiful is a ‘subjective universal’ judgment, one that relies on what Kant calls the ‘free play’ of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding, and which he argues must broadly conform with the sorts of judgements (‘this is beautiful’, ‘this is ugly’) of other reasonable and cultured people, a sensus communis as to the criteria of taste by which such judgments can be made. The sublime is also a ‘subjective universal’, with the difference that it speaks not to proportion, harmony etc, but to a going-beyond the immediately comprehensible, an awe-inspiring affect of terror and wonder.

We're going beyond agreeability into quesions of taste, and taste, obviously, is taught rather than innate (judging a Haydn string quartet or a Rothko canvas is hardly an instinctual ability possessed by every newborn, after all). As a little kid I liked the bright, accessible music of Beatles but hated Bob Dylan's tuneless droning and wheezy soundworld. I later learned to love Dylan, and to see the aesthetic merit and resonance where before I heard only ugliness. Sometimes I engage with art and, as the phrase goes, bounce off it. Often I will give the art another go: for maybe the problem is me. Maybe I can learn to love it. And sometimes I do so! Often I don't. Of course I don't expect my aesthetic response to be always and everywhere instant and infallible. But ... I've been kicking around, aesthetic-judgment-wise, long enough (as per Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) for it often to be instant, and rarely wrong. In this case, though, my gut is caught, like a donkey between two equidistant and equally tempting bales of straw, who then starves to death, between good and bad as DeLillo judgments. Odd, no?

Perhaps the conclusion we should draw, here, is that DeLillo is unusually good at pitching his novels into an uncanny zone where good writing and bad writing are in weird superposition. I don't know though. I wonder, instead, whether there has been a shift in the sensus communis, in terms of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgment. Experimental art of the postwar period, especially through the 1960s and 1970s (more so I think than the earlier generation of High Modernism) foregrounded a range of artworks which invited the reaction ‘is this crap?’ (rather than, as it might be, ‘is this good according to a different set of aesthetic criteria to the ones with which I am familiar?’) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon set out to be shocking and deracinating of reaction, but in a different way to, let's say, Carl Andre's neatly rectangular arrangement of bricks, Equivalent VIII (‘120 firebricks arranged in a rectangular formation,’ say the Tate website: ‘an important Minimalist work [that] provoked uproar after a 15 February 1976 article appeared in The Sunday Times questioning both the work's artistic merit and the price paid by the Tate in acquiring the artwork’). I'm old enough to remember the furore over the Tate's ‘Bricks’, as the work became known. The thing that occurs to me is that most of this kerfuffle was socially performative. Some of it was reflex anti-intellectualism, a suspicion of ‘high culture’ tout court, ‘I don't know much about art but I know what I like’ and so on (‘Emperor's New Clothes!’ scornfulness and all that). Some of it was genuine confusion, perhaps from people who had assiduously acquired a quasi-Kantian canon of tastes in art, only now to feel they were being sneered at by artists telling them: that's all been superseded now. Some of it was partisan on the other side: ‘if it upsets the establishment and traditionalists then it is good’ etc. None of this, it seems to me, touches the fundamental reflex of response: is Equivalent VIII good art, because it embodies balance, harmony, poise etc but makes these things new within a challenging intellectual-conceptual framework? Or is it shit, because it's just a fucking stack of breeze blocks some shyster has managed to fob off on one of the world's great art galleries. Mutatis mutandis, is The Silence column A, here, or column B?

The point (it's an obvious point, I know) is that these are less textual than they are metatextual engagements; discussions less about the specifics of this one artwork and more about the parameters of art as such. Which, though perfectly valid and interesting as a debate, is not what this blogpost is about. I have no issue with the posmodern novel, or obliquity in novel-making, or evem DeLillo, many of whose novels—earlier novels, if I'm honest, but still—I hold in high regard. This blogpost, though, is about this one novel, and its shitness or otherwise. Alright?   

:2:

Samuel Johnson once said ‘No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.’ This may be the most wrongheaded thing Johnson ever said. I used to think it was, perhaps, only half-wrongheaded: that a man might, as it were, find hypocritical pleasure in Wagner in public, for the benefit of those he hoped to impress, and thereby for his own benefit, though he would still go home to his solitary domicile and his Easy Listening CDs. In other words I used to think that taste is, in large part defined by the movement from ego to Other and that it therefore necessarily encompasses both. But things are, I think, more complex than that. After all, we all of us often construe ‘pleasure’ when what we're actually experiencing is that-which-we-feel-we-ought-to-enjoy, or the pleasure of others we wish in turn to please, or perhaps to become like. We are social beings and therefore, as Freud notes in his Civilisation and Its Discontents, inexorably hypocritical. Our pleasures lie along precisely the same lines of force, even when, or perhaps especially when, we tell ourselves that they are our private business. Guilty pleasure is the horizon of pleasure of such, perhaps.

In part this reflects the fact that we can only gauge what our pleasures are by apprehending other peoples’ pleasures. The pleasure of others, for the various ways we construe that term ‘pleasure’, determines and shapes our pleasure. We sexually desire those who shape our sexual desire. We admire the art that is admirable by the standards of others (‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what others like …’). There aren’t any other standards for us to apply, after all. In the sense that we all own enjoyments that are not actually ours, we are nothing but hypocrites in our pleasures.

Johnson also said ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ Thus the drunk, the crack-addict, the lecher and the sadist are all hoping for solace in their beastly life-projects. But these passtimes are quite alien to beasts (a lecherous beast? A drunk beast? A sadistic beast?). To say this is not to assert any animal-lib moral superiority of beasts over people; quite the reverse. It’s not that beasts are incapable of selfish self-indulgence: patently, they are – there’s nothing so gluttonous as a pampered dog. Rather it is to say that to live as a beast is to inhabit their moment-to-moment immersion in mortality, and that’s precisely where the pain of being a man inheres. Beasts do not need to rid themselves of the pain of being beasts because that’s not the shape of beastly consciousness; but men who method-act beastiality can never do other than throw into horrible relief their own self-conscious humanity. If you live moment by moment then death is only ever a moment away. It's that moment-ness that narcotics and fantasy are there to obscure.

On Pastoral

:1:

We put culture on one side, bracketing with it society, architecture, religion, art and so on; and we put nature way over the other side, there. Nature doesn't make culture. Or so we think. We make culture. Of course, nature makes us first (inevitably we are, in one sense, a product of nature). But once nature has made us we go on to make another thing, which I'm here calling culture. That two-step is essential to the form of distinction being made; and its doubleness is the structure of pastoral.

Of course it's wrongheaded, as assertions go. We could put it this way: does nature have culture? Nature may manifest society, or something close to it: the pack of dogs, the beehive. But does the beehive have culture? When the bees do their little dance, is that art? We're tempted to say no because the dance of bees is functional, and because we assume bees don't reflect upon the dance as dance. That self-reflection is needful for a performance to be art, presumably. But, really, how can we possibly know? What the bee-dance says to me is that our grasp of the natural world is defined, indeed is constituted, by a kind of existential paucity. It is what we cannot apprehend as culture that is the core of nature. In The Beast in the Nursery Adam Phillips says: 'we prefer the barbarity of culture to the barbarity of nature even though we usually can't tell them apart.' He adds a rather neat after-all: 'there is nothing more cultured than our fantasies about nature' [26]. True, that.

Nature is always the resource that has always already been worked. The landscape is not 'nature'; it is what cultivation has made of the natural resource. Nature is worked, and therefore Pastoral is always reworked—practically speaking, an eclogue is always a reworking of Hughes as a reworking of Wordsworth as a reworking of Vergil as a reworking of Theocritus. Pastoral is a kind of blockchain, and in a more acute and formally self-reflexive sense than the standard 'intertextuality' argument, that insists all literature is a kind of blockchain.

Pastoral as escape, means: there is a benchmark existence from which escape looks both desirable and possible. This rather simplistic explanation, though, leads us into to some surprisingly complex and relevant places. At the risk of over-simplification, we might say: start from a position when life is hard, relentless—when life is work, and life is urban, is scarcity and frustration—then fantasy becomes: ease, unobstruction, leisure, rural, abundant and satisfaction. This is the pastoral of Theocritus and Vergil and Spenser, the classic understanding of the locus amoenus. But something happens to pastoral in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries that rewires this, we can be honest, rather simplistic understanding. (What's facile about it is the way it contains its own contradiction: a life that is all holiday is no holiday at all, since there's no benchmark of tedium and stress from which to escape, and it is the release, not the merely sensual pleasure, that is the key thing). The modification of pastoral entailed a two-step: first Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1770) and Crabbe's The Village (1783) described rural life as hard, draining, frustrating and poor (as indeed it largely is) whilst insisting that once upon a time it had been golden, Arcadian. That is to say, they, and other poets from around this time doing similar things with the pastoral mode, such as John Struthers, Clare and Balfour, were engaged in relocated the nature of Arcadia from being a different place to being a different (past) time. Instead of being defined as a (good) place distinct from the (bad) city or court, it becomes a good (past) time distinct from the bad present. That in turn connects with a longer tradition of 'past Golden Age' mythology. The fit, there, is so precise that pastoral itself can become seen as an mode of nostalgia, or more precisely as the faux-nostalgia of yearning for a time you never yourself actually experienced.

That's not right, though; because, after Vergil, the most important intervention into the pastoral tradition is Wordsworth's poetic creation of 'Nature' as a ground of transcendental aesthetic and ontological value—and that flows directly from the eighteenth-century traditions of Goldsmithian or Crabbean 'anti-pastoral'. I could devote a long passage to establishing this, but this blog-post is shaping up to be long enough already, so I'm going to ask you to take it on trust. You might trust less my insistence that it is from this new thing—I mean, from Wordsworth's new version of 'Nature'—that much of the force and a surprising number of the specifics of modern-day environmentalism as ethos and aesthetic derive. It's true. I mean, I don't want to overstate the influence; although, actually, its hard to overstate the way the 19th-century's most influential English-language poet shaped a whole culture, and the ways in which the later 20th-century Green movements, in reacting against the machinism of early 20th-century Modernist and Popular cultures, inevitably reached back to something always-already Wordsworthian in their revalorisation of natural spaces.

Wordsworth is the second footprint in the 'two-step' I mentioned above. From pastoral as a pleasant Arcadian other place we stride, first, to pastoral as a pleasant Arcadian past-time, to which the anti-pastoral of contemporary rural suffering is contrasted; and second, we move to pastoral as a mode of transcendence grounded in contemporary rural suffering. Wordsworth's Michael (the hero of what the 1815 printing calls 'A Pastoral Poem') has grown very old in a life of ceaseless labour, physical restriction and hardship. But because it has always been a life in Nature, it has been an authentic existential experience of the kind unavailable equally to those to live in the town or the past:

So lived he till his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green Valleys, and the Streams and Rocks
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which like a book preserved the memory
Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honorable gains; these fields, these hills,
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself. [Wordsworth, 'Michael', 61-77]

His son Luke goes into the town, and is instantly lost. Only by staying in the country can Michael stay strong, even to his death in his late 80s. Something similar is true of all of Wordsworth's rural poor: the Leech Gatherer, Cumberland beggar, even the mad woman in 'The Thorn'. Nature homes them, in a profound ur-Heideggerian sense, and that fact reconfigures the force of pastoral itself. To cut what could become an over-lengthy excursion short, I'll sketch a line straight from Wordsworth's natural world to the late-20th-century pastoral of Hughes's Moortown poems (1979).

Not, as I say, wanting to labour the point, I'll point only to Moortown's 'Tractor' (it's one of my favourites amongst the whole capacious oeuvre of Hughes, actually) as one place where the pleasant sunny Arcadian wish-fulfillment of pastoral has come all the cold, hard way around to bite its own tail.

The tractor stands frozen—an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses—capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive—but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother—
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat—it just coughs.
It ridicules me—a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.

And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization—
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks—

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing. [16 February 1975]

What's particularly nice about this is the way Hughes's uses a machine as a means of focusing the existential authenticity of post-Wordwsorthian pastoral. It's the right machine, of course; since modern farming could hardly happen without tractors. But still, there's a near-miraculous metamorphosis in the poem, in which an artefact of culture becomes, without slipping into any foolish pathetic fallacy, nature itself. Becomes, we might say, the objective correlative of Michael's persistence, strength and labour. Out of hardship is generated beauty (for surely we can agree this is a very beautiful poem).

I don't know if there's a larger context here, which tracks the increasing pleasantness of general human existence (the case that Pinker makes, and which I suppose persuades me) against an increasing valorisation of hardship as such. If one's life is actually hard, one is less likely to enjoy the artistic re-presentation of that hardship back upon yourself. The starving human finds no pleasure in contemplating going on a diet. If your life is basically comfortable, and your sufferings inward rather than outward, then hardship acquires greater appeal. I don't know: there may be a parallel with politics. When real life is living with an empty belly four days out of every seven, is being cold day after day and dying in your thirties, you'll follow the leader who promises to make your life easy. When seven days are defined by fourteen square meals, and your home is heated and you're staring down the barrel of 70-years-plus, the apparent perversity of valorising hardship makes more sense, and you follow the leader who says he has nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. I don't know.

:2:

This leads me to think again about Empson, the critic, whose writing on pastoral strikes me as some of the best there's ever been. Indeed, some Empsonian ideas, for example that the mere representation of rural pleasure is boring, elaborated at length in Some Versions of Pastoral are actually already present in Seven Types of Amibguity:

It is this (in some sense conscious) clash between different modes of feeling which is the normal source of pleasure in pastoral; or, at any rate, in so far as pastorals fail to produce it, one may agree with Johnson and call them a bore.

Thou shalt eat crudded cream
All the year lasting,
And drink the crystal stream
Pleasant in tasting;
Whig and whey whilst thou lust
And brambleberries,
Pie-lids and pastry-crust,
Pears, plums, and cherries. (ANON., Oxford Book.)

The delicacy of versification here (alliteration, balance of rhythm, and so forth) suggests both the scholar's trained apprehension and the courtier's experience of luxury; but it is of the brambleberry that he is an epicure; the subject forces into contact with these the direct gusto of a "swain." That all these good qualities should be brought together is a normal part of a good poem; indeed, it is a main part of the value of a poem, because they are so hard to bring together in life. But such a case as this is peculiar, because one is made to think of the different people separately; one cannot pretend to oneself that the author is the rustic he is impersonating; there is an element of wit in the first conception of the style. (Seven Types, 114-15)

This formal relation between 'simple' and 'complex' ('putting the complex in the simple', the closest thing in Some Types of Pastoral to a nutshell-definition of pastoral itself, is actually a slogan for all art, as Empson himself knows) stitches form to social relations. Pastoral not only represents but also embodies and therefore enables, a coming-together of poor-simples and rich-sophisticateds.

The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language .... The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in. This was not a process that you could explain in the course of writing pastoral; it was already shown by the clash between style and theme, and to make the clash work in the right way (not become funny) the writer must keep up a firm pretense that he was unconscious of it. [Some Versions, 11-12]

According to George Watson [The Literary Critics (Hogarth 1986), 184] 'Empson later insisted that his Marxism in the thirties and after—at least until the Communist revolution in China in 1949, which he witnessed—was more serious than his writings reveal, and Some Versions assumed the class analysis of society and the ideal status of the "proletariat".' This is not untrue, although the point for Empson, at least in this book, is always to bring the potential for social harmony back into the orientations of individual subjectivity. René Wellek [A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950: V English Criticism 1900-1950 (Yale 1986), 280] puts forward a slightly more reductive reading.

[The book's] subject is the collapse of the pastoral relation between the swain-hero and the sheep people. It is again the theme of the loss of community, of the presumed original unity which underlies Eliot's concept of history. Pastoral is used in a very wide sense: thus the first chapter discusses proletarian literature which Empson considers a covert pastoral. But even proletarian literature is used in a much wider sense than the usual one ... Proletarian art is pastoral. The old pastoral implied "a beautiful relation between rich and poor" [11] but this relation has broken down, and the old pastoral had been replaced by the mock pastoral, the comic variety at first. Both versions, straight and comic, are based on a double attitude of the artist to the worker ("I am in one way better, in another not so good"), and this may well recognize a permanent truth about the aesthetic situation. "To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public." [15]

Wellek might have added, though he doesn't, that this is a peculiarly Romantic version of 'the artist', which itself problematises the case being made (something of which Empson himself was aware: 'Mob thought may kill us all before our time, but the scientist's view of it should not be warped by horror, and the writer who isolates himself from all feeling for his audience acquires the faults of romanticism without its virtues.'). Actually, the implied individualism of all this is central to what Empson is arguing: not that the poet is alienated from society, but precisely that the (simple) poet holds within him/herself the (complex) of society. Here's Paul Alpers:

Marvell and Milton represent for Empson a withdrawal-to quote the verses that prompt the essay on "The Garden"-of the mind into its own happiness. The strengths of the "old pastoral" are most fully manifest in Elizabethan works, particularly the dramas, which are discussed in the chapter on "Double Plots." The Elizabethan double plot is a version of pastoral, because it is a convention-the strongest and most capacious, it would seem, in all our literature-for the stable presentation of conflicts and contradictions and for putting the complexities of life into the "simple" effects of art. [112]

To quote the man himself: 'in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one, and a suggestion that one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited, is easily put into the trick though not necessary to its power' [Some Versions of Pastoral, 114]. The element that's missing here is the way that paucity, and poverty, can become precisely the focus for strength in this reading of Nature. After all, Nature is so much bigger than we are. The really Arcadian thing in the natural world is that we have survived this far, at all. To switch back to Hughes it's the superbly insouciant potency of Crow's 'Me, evidently', from the close of 'Examination at the Womb-Door', another key late 20th-century pastoral work:

Who owns those scrawny little feet?      Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?     Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs?       Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles?       Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts?       Death.
Who owns these questionable brains?       Death.
All this messy blood?       Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes?       Death.
This wicked little tongue?       Death.
This occasional wakefulness?       Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?       Death.
Who owns all of space?       Death.

Who is stronger than hope?        Death.
Who is stronger than the will?         Death.
Stronger than love?       Death.
Stronger than life?        Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

It probably speaks to a continuing adolescence in my aesthetic sense, but by thunder I love that poem.

Burke: thoughts from Berkshire

 Conservatism is broken. Obviously, as a lefty, my words here may strike you as mere partisan sniping, but I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully. Indeed I think there are many conservatives who would agree with me that the political traditions of moderate Burkean conservatism—respectful of tradition, convinced that human flourishing happens best in certain, mostly smaller-scale structures of family and community (churches, schools, universities, friendship groups and so on), anti-authoritarian and small-g governmental, engaged both with civics and individual civility—has been eclipsed over the last four decades or so. 

This has happened, after the manner of a slow-motion car crash, in two stages: first with aggressive free-marketeers for whom all those Burkean values have a price, actually, and for whom they are all conditional, existing on the sufferance of the Market, conceived as the arbiter of everything. Then, more recently, with a group of nativist, racist and populist ‘conservative’ authoritarians: the Berlusconis and Trumps and Orbans and Brexit-barons of today. I would argue that the former led directly to the latter, in part by the scorched-earth deracination of social life that their asset-stripping, coked-up Capitalism entailed; but perhaps I’m wrong about that. But I’m not wrong, I think, in suggesting that what used to be called ‘conservatism’ is in practical disarray today. 

Plenty of people who think of themselves as ‘conservatives’, and who cleave still to those principles Burke so eloquently articulated, have either broken with contemporary political conservatism, or else have gone along with this newer, overwritten version of it for mess-of-pottage reasons (because they, for instance, hoped for more conservative judges, or because, though they disliked Trump, the prospect of a left wing government scared them more) to the present-day regret of some of them. Still, here we are. The recent events in the USA have been alarming indeed, and amongst other things they speak to precisely this kind of fracture. On social media I see some people outraged and disgusted by Ted Cruz’s (disingenuous, we can be sure) mouthing of the ‘stop the steal’ slogan, his continued toadying support for Trump. But it’s easy to see why he’s doing this. He has his eyes on the 2024 election and has made the calculation that Conservatism in the US is now three distinct and inimical groups: traditional moderate conservatives, Evangelicals and Trump's crazy base. The only path to power lies in somehow coalescing these together. That's his play: he figures he can rely on the Evangelicals and that moderate conservatives would vote for him over Kamala Harris, but he knows he can't get over the finish line if he alienates the Trumpists. Hence his lickspittleosity with respect to the Big Baboon.

I’m no expert, and have, I must say, a poor track record when it comes to making political predictions, but I really don’t see Cruz’s strategy working. Trump accrued his base, in the first instance, by saying the things—all those racist and nativist and tub-thumping things he said—no respectable politician would utter. His lucky break was that the Evangelicals decided to overlook his lying, his sexual incontinence, his immodesty and bullying and narcissism, and pitch him their support, something he cannily cemented by choosing Pence as his VP. But that still left a lot of traditional conservatives wavering. The long-story-short history of this period may shake-down into something as simple as: in 2016 enough of these voters disliked Hillary Clinton enough, and/or were prepared to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, to inch him, just, over the line. By 2020 no doubts remain to benefice so far as Trump’s instability and incompetence are concerned, and Biden didn’t alienate old-school conservative voters the way Clinton had done. That leaves US Conservatism humpty-dumptied. I don’t see how Cruz, or anyone else, can glue those three constituencies together again. The Trumpists who stormed the Capitol were chanting hang Mike Pence, after all; and they wouldn't recognise Burke if he boiked them on their bonce with his beak.

This lengthy prolegomenon, though, is not my main point. My main point is the adjective, so often deployed by old-school moderate Conservatives: ‘Burkean.’ It so happens I’ve been re-reading Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—indeed, say rather I’ve been reading it properly, since I last read it as a gawky and much more doctrinally narrow-minded lefty youth, in my undergraduate days. Now that I’m middle aged my response to the book is, I think, rather more nuanced. Not, I should add, that I’m swinging to the right in my 50s. My core political orientation remains what it has been for a long time now. Of course everyone believes they have good reasons for their political affiliation, and it’s possible mine are mere bias, residual attachment to my upbringing, a congeries of Trillingian irritable mental gestures and so on. But obviously I’d hope not. Indeed, if asked, I’d say that my political beliefs have been bedded-down by my fairly in-depth study of the 18th- and 19th-centuries, undertaken over the last three and a half decades.

As a leftie what I sometimes hear is: ‘Communism is a fine idea in principle; but we tried it, in practice, and it doesn't work.’ The thing is, and speaking ex cathedra as a Professor of 19th-century Literature and Culture, I can say: we also tried full capitalism and it absolutely does not work. We tried it in the UK from the middle of the 1700s (and especially from the New Poor Laws of the 1830s) through to the Liberal government’s introduction of welfare reforms in the early 1900s. It made a tiny fraction prodigiously wealthy and it impoverished or starved the majority. In the 20th-century we (in the west, and elsewhere) experimented with finding the balance between social security and permitting capitalist wealth-seeking. But the hardcore, Brexiter, right-wing dream now is to abolish the social security part altogether. This is a deeply, deeply bad idea. There’s a reason that whole period, from the late 18th-century to the early 20th-, was in essence The Age of Violent Revolutions. When a system disenfranchises, oppresses and starves a majority of its population bloody revolution becomes not only likely but inevitable. I'd suggest we not go back to that. Even Thatcher understood that her ideology required a balance between capitalism and social security. Me, I'd suggest her idea of the balance was weighted too far to the former, but it was still a balance. The Johnsonian-Farageist future doesn't want the balance at all. The most irksome thing is people of my and my parents' generations who enjoyed the manifold benefits of the capitalism/social-security balance & who've convinced themselves that their present-day prosperity is entirely self-authored. I'm-Alright-Jackism of the most toxic kind.

Still, not to rant. The point is: I do find I’ve more time now for Burke’s elegantly expressed insights these days, and more sympathy with Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s volte face (‘Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced/By specious wonders’ etc; Prelude Book 7 etc) from youthful radicalism to middle-aged caution. Though I find problems in the book as well.

Written right at the end of Burke's life, the main thesis of Reflections is that the French Revolution is a bad idea. Though he was a lifelong Whig, it could be argued that this book marks a late shift to a more Tory Burke (he wasn't exactly happy about the American Revolution of 1776, but he did think we should establish friendly relations with the new United States; not so France). The book has certainly been praised for its prescience—writing in the immediate aftermath of 1789 Burke predicts that the Revolution will lead both to the Terror and eventually to a military dictatorship in France. Nonetheless, it’s in some ways a slippery book. Burke doesn’t want to argue that all Revolutions are wrong, since it’s a matter of great political and patriotic importance to him that the 1688 Glorious Revolution be affirmed as a Good Thing. Since many of the grounds of Burkean criticism of France could, without much distortion, be teleported back to 1688 and applied there, this involves a certain fluidity of approach.

One main plank of Burke’s argument is that it is both wrong and dangerous to treat ‘liberty’ as an abstract. Everything, he says, is embodied, everything is situated in particular social contexts. Abstraction is a chimera (‘what is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor’). Political questions must be framed in terms of what he calls ‘circumstances’ rather than as ‘metaphysics’:

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government, (for she then had a government,) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?

It's hardly a novel observation where Burke is concerned to note that he has his own abstractions which he insists deserve reverence. And I’d say there’s more than mere political pragmatics at play here:

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure – but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born

The argument in this paragraph is that some ‘circumstances’, whilst necessary contexts for existence (how we ensure we have enough to eat and so on), are inferior to others because they are material, pertaining only to ‘gross animal existence.’ Standing over those are higher, purer ‘circumstances’: science, art, virtue and perfection. If we apply Burke’s earlier criteria to these—that is to say, if we treat them like ‘government’ and ‘liberty’—we might say: they surely depend, in a discursively radical way, on whether we’re talking about good science or fake-science of the Lysenko or healing crystals sort; whether we’re talking about good or bad art; whether our virtues are oriented towards kindness or (as it might be) military daring and ruthlessness. They depend upon whatever ‘perfection’ could possibly mean. I have to say, bruiting ‘perfection’ as any kind of political ideal chills me much more than liberty, fraternity or equality as slogans—it has a hideous Pol Pot final-solution remorselessness to it. But I don’t mean to turn Burke’s argument on its head: he would of course reply that he is arguing for a politics that accounts for the messy and imperfect realities of human social existence and against those Robespierres who desire to force human beings into the procrustean bed of inhuman ideals, the very opposite of the Pol Pot approach. So I'll leave that.

Why should we defer to ‘the past’? There are two arguments advanced for this, I think. One is: ‘we should defer to tradition because tradition represents the culmination of long stretches of trial and error that have finally determined what works, in terms of social cohesion, human flourishing, stability and so on.’ This strikes me as wrong, actually, and quite easily demonstrably so. If your ‘it works’ is elastic enough to include the creation both of a self-sustaining crony elite and a huge, immiserated underclass who die sooner, live denuded lives and are starved of opportunity then I don’t think you and I are going to agree on what ‘works’ means, as a word.

Two, though, is closer to the Burkean spirit: that the past is hallowed—that there is something holy about it. I’m also not sure that’s true, as it goes. More, I think that believing so bends an otherwise clever and supple mind into some weird distorting shapes.

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

This is more like the caricature ‘conservative’, hostile to innovation not on a case-by-case basis, but on principle, that principle being, in sum: ‘what should I put myself out for the unborn generations? What have they ever done for me?’ It is also, I would say, simply false: the biggest differences between most people in 2020 and most people in 1820 are the advantages innovation has bestowed: better technologies and agricultural knowledge so we're all better and more cheaply clothed and better (more nutritously) and more cheaply fed; better medical knowledge and technology; and a panoply of labour-saving devices and machines have freed us—the last type of innovation has disproportionately freed women, a group in whom Burke seems, simply, uninterested—from gruelling and sometimes deadly bondage. Of course Burke here is talking about social innovation, but I’d still argue that democracy has been improved—votes for women, adulthood suffrage and so on—in manifest ways.

Burke might argue that the difference between reverencing the past and reverencing some notional, innovative future is that the past is real and the future a mere fiction of possibilities. But it’s hardly some kind of sophisticated Derridean point (it is, on the contrary, common sense) to note that ‘the past’ is not real in the kick-a-stone sense. It's a set of ideas and assumptions people have in their heads, a mere fiction of eventualities. We all know that a large part of what professional historians do is to set more evidenced and nuanced versions of the past against the popular misconceptions and patriotic distortions many people hold in their heads. The argument ‘we must reverence 1688 because it has already happened, but deplore 1789 because it is setting up things to happen in the future’ is not only specious, it includes its own locked-in sell-by date. Because now that the contemporary republic of France valorises the revolution as its foundational moment, and celebrates every 14th juillet with collective joy, 1789 has become the past that must be hallowed.

But perhaps Burke's being cleverer than I'm allowing. By repudiating abstracts, he evades the need to define his terms; and by saying (as he did in An Appeal From The New to the Old Whigs, 1791) ‘every revolution contains in it something of evil’ he gives himself the leeway to argue whatever he likes about any given revolution. 1688? Good, because it called for ‘a small and a temporary deviation’ in response to ‘a grave and over-ruling necessity’ [Reflections, 25] 1789? Bad. Why? Because I say so, alright?

In a sense it's this (we could almost say) proto-Schmittian approach that is the really remarkable aspect of Burke's argument. It seems counter-intuitive to bracket Burke with Schmitt I know, but there you go. To put the last line of the preceding paragraph in less childish terms, we could quote Carl Schmitt on how soverignty resides in the exception (‘All law is “situational law.” The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision’; Political Theology, ch. 1). W L Renwick is perhaps being a little snide when he observed that the heart of the Reflections was a concept of unity that ‘could allow for only one contract: that made by the Whig nobles in 1688. Between whom it was made, for what purpose and with what degree of rigidity, was never clear and was sufficiently disputed, but for Burke it was absolute.’ But perhaps this snideness misses the point. Perhaps that's the real genius of Burke.

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.