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Now you may have noticed that The Book Barn loves elf and spaceship books, but there's not much really critical discussion about them. Even if these books are mere "genre", it doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve proper critical readings and analysis of their literary value. So I’m going to help with that and write proper reviews of everyone’s favourite sci-fi and fantasy (mostly fantasy, really), and not just because Hieronymus Alloy told me to make my own thread for it. This is a thread mostly for looking at why your favourite sci-fi and fantasy is bad, in other words. This is not out of simple desire to mock, but because genre fiction is overwhelmingly bad, and I'm going to review its big names through a pretentious literary lens. Feel free to contribute your own opinions on the literary qualities of genre fiction - if you dare! I'll be evaluating fancy things like prose and themes, but remember that this is all a bit of fun, so don't take it too seriously. And please don't throw in recommendations except for popular sci-fi since I don't really have a hit-list there. Joe Abercrombie, J.K. Nemisin, Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, Jim Butcher, Steven Erikson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan and all your other favourite authors will probably all have their turn (I'm not going to read all of their books, that's just crazy).  The two rules: 1. This is going to get wordy and pretentious, so don't complain about that, or about extensively discussing books in the book subforum (no joke, I've seen this complaint in the sci-fi/fantasy thread). It totally is! Contents  Character Assassin  Humanity's Groan    Lack of Culture  Lacan in the Mist      The Fantasy-Noir Stew       Real Genre Heroes    A Dream of Bottoms       The Kayvian Formula  The Hack-made Tale        Wizard's First Law: "Genre readers are stupid."  The Bad Faith of the Illuminator Other threads  Inheritance of Idiocy  Prince of Nothing Learned (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Feb 7, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2017 15:29
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Character Assassin quote:Even when groups of peasants were able to introduce their claims in the Venetian legal system, elites’ power and connections often proved more persuasive [...]. Kostas Lambrinós has located an extraordinary case from the late sixteenth century in which the complaints of the villagers of Melidoni, near Rettimo, against the impositions of their local lords Francesco and Marco de Mezzo, reached the Dieci in Venice. One of the witnesses in the case, Manoli Dafnomili, was assassinated by Francesco de Mezzo’s bastard son Pietro, illustrating the powerful pressures feudatories could bring against peasants who tried to complain about poor treatment. – Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice, first in a trilogy of trilogies, charts the early development of FitzChivalry Farseer, an unwanted child who is raised to become the pawn of his patrons. Figures high and low, singularly noble and endlessly wicked, personable and mechanical, move through the many stages of the story. You’ve heard it all before, of course. Hobb is rewriting Dickens – Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are the obvious points of comparison – through the lens of genre banality. Hobb is not a comic writer, and Assassin’s Apprentice is miserably serious. There is practically no humour in the story, and the rare comic relief characters are rather perfunctory. Remarkably, even the jester skimps on jokes. The overwhelmingly dominant tone of the novel unapologetic self-pity and navel-gazing. Assassin’s Apprentice is a fitting book for any budding young narcissist. BitchPity is a by-blow of the royal Farcrier family that rules the Six Duchies, and is dragged from obscurity to serve his family who soon decide to educate him in “the diplomacy of the knife”. In the course of the first novel, his life alternates between stables and kitchens of the royal castle, training as an assassin and spy, experimentation with ESP, and dangerous missions across the kingdom and beyond. Aside from his development, the plot is occupied by two overarching threats: the menace of piratical raiders whose methods turn out to be supernaturally sinister, and Fitz’s struggle against his scheming uncle, the laughably unsubtle Prince Regal. The narrative conceit of Assassin’s Apprentice is that BitchPity is recording his story as an adult, and the series is something of a converse of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle. Both are emotionally narcissistic works, but come from opposite ends of the spectrum. Rothfuss is devoted to his hero’s self-aggrandizement, which is the alpha and omega of the story despite a nominal insistence on his hubristic failure. Hobb in contrast is devoted to her hero’s suffering, and practically every development somehow ensures his continued woes despite BitchPity ultimately saving the day. Even something as simple as moving into his own room may be framed as a small tragedy for BitchPIty to endure: quote:I set the nightshirt down on the bed and then clambered up myself. It was early to be thinking of sleep, but my body ached and there seemed nothing else for me to do. Down in the stable room, by now Burrich would be sitting and drinking and mending harness or whatever. There would be a fire in the hearth, and the muffled sounds of horses as they shifted in their stalls below. The room would smell of leather and oil and Burrich himself, not dank stone and dust. I pulled the nightshirt over my head and nudged my clothes to the foot of the bed. I nestled into the feather bed; it was cool and my skin stood up in goose bumps. Slowly my body heat warmed it and I began to relax. It had been a full and strenuous day. Every muscle I possessed seemed to be both aching and tired. I knew I should rise once more, to put the candles out, but I could not summon the energy. Nor the willpower to blow them out and let a deeper darkness flood the chamber. So I drowsed, half-lidded eyes watching the struggling flames of the small hearth fire. I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich’s room. Fitz remains mostly a vessel of adolescent yearning and self-pity throughout the novel, and the milieu does not provide much anyhing as an engaging counterweight. Hobb’s “world-building” is as insipid as all such efforts, because any milieu is only as interesting as the prose that conveys it. Names and places – Fitz, Verity, Molly Chandler, Buckkeep, the Fool, Farrow, the Mountain Kingdom, and so on – hint at fairy-tale simplicity completely unlike Hobb’s plaintive pseudo-realism. She indulges in a few Capitalized Nouns offensive for their prolificacy in the text, principally to denote the setting’s “magic systems”: the Skill, the Wit, and the Horseshit. Words such as “magic” and “witchcraft” are simply too gauche. The magic, as it is, amounts to mutant ESP powers reminiscent of science-fiction rather than anything fantastical. Putting aside such genre clichés, an insidious aspect of Hobb’s world-building does shine through: she is afraid of topic she chose for her novel. Hobb simply does not write about feudal violence and state terror, and this dulls the edge of her story. One of the world-building homilies is devoted to explaining how the (gender-progressive) nobility of the Six Duchies think of themselves as mere stewards of the land, and those who fail in their duties face the King’s stern justice, which is essentially a medieval propagandist’s vision of society (religion is a non-factor, incidentally). Hobb writes a dark, violent bildungsroman about a feudal society, but lacks either the ability or the integrity to explore its nature. Master-servant relationships are sickeningly idealized without recognition of their troubling nature, despite some token effort: quote:“Do you think this is a bad... task? Wrong?” I took a breath. “From what I’ve been told, he has not that much longer to live anyway. It might almost be a mercy, if death were to come quietly in the night, instead of—” The novel contradicts this, as all capacity for evil and injustice is shouldered onto figures of embarrassing unambiguity. This is why the token recognition falls flat, and why Hobb’s feudal fantasy is so offensive. The only glimpse of authentic realism is with Fitz’s crush Molly Chandler. She simultaneously hates and loves her abusive father, which is a rather appropriate counterpoint to Fitz’s dull relationships with his adult mentors. Realities of poverty, inequality, and elite violence go unacknowledged despite the book’s realistic approach. This is not a sign of an unreliable narrator but of an unreliable author. Practically the only admission of historical injustice comes in the form if an embarrassing replacement for witch-hunts: the persecution of ESP-wielding beast-masters, whose primary purpose in the narrative is to wring more tragedy out of Fitz. Evil primarily enters the story in two forms, one supernatural and the other natural. The supernatural threat is the Forged, a concept intriguing enough to almost survive Hobb’s writing: these are people stripped of any ability for empathy or bonds with others, intelligent but uncaring for anything beyond immediate survival and satisfaction. This is an idea with plenty of intellectual and artistic credit behind it: just recall Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature or Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment. But Hobb uses them to establish a supernatural mystery (the answer in a later volume involves dragons, I recall). And worse, they’re simply superfluous in a bildungsroman. quote:“Nothing,” I panted, jabbing to keep one from moving any closer. “I don’t have anything for you. No money, no food, nothing. I lost all my things, back down the road.” The second threat is singularly unimpressive, and already foreshadowed above: this consists of the antagonists inside the royal court who represent the dark side of the kingdom, and they are figures so single-mindedly flawed as to make John Bunyan blush. The villains of the story (Fitz's scheming uncle Prince Regal, royal ESP master Galen, and the much less prominent Queen Desire) have been ripped out of medieval morality plays and clumsily grafted into a novel that attempts probing psychological realism. Their role in the story is to act on inexhaustible, murderous spite, and are always nakedly transparent in their malice. The goodies are noble and kind, the baddies are glowering and underhanded. We forgive Dickens for this because he is a comic absurdist. A person who may only seem evil and be good, or vice versa, is a concept foreign to Hobb’s writing. quote:Regal, too, was a source of danger. He had most of his man’s growth, but did not scruple to shove me out of his path or walk casually through whatever I had found to play with. He was capable of a pettiness and vindictiveness that I never encountered in Verity. quote:The King continued his stroll past me, extolling on his theme while Regal gave me a baleful look from bloodshot eyes. quote:Regal gave his mount’s mouth a vindictive jerk and then tugged his jerkin smooth again. “What are you doing out on this road so late, bastard? Just what do you think you’re up to, sneaking away from the keep and into town at this hour?” The Bunyanian naming scheme deserves commentary: in the imaginary world of the novels, many figures are named after the virtues their parents wish them to embody. As such, prominent characters have names like Shrewd, Chivalry, Verity, and Regal. What’s offensive is how annoyingly accurate these appellations become, and thus instead of Bunyanian naivete we are dealing with idiotic literalism. King Shrewd is a cunning ruler, Verity is honest and forthright, and Regal wants the throne. The only exception is the wilful Lady Patience, whose appearances provide the closest thing the novel has to comic relief (again, the jester makes no jokes!). Assassin’s Apprentice was conceived as first part in a long series, and it’s function as a story seems to mainly consist of introductions, which is partly why it appears to be such a grab-bag of elements: bildungsroman overshadowed by looming Hobbesian apocalypse, realism matched with Bunyanism, court intrigues and ESP mutants. But these mismatches are too fundamental to be resolved by later volume. Above all else, Hobb’s book suffers from an issue endemic to genre fiction: the insistence on pseudo-realistic prose that has a banalising effect on any story being told. Where this comes from is difficult to say authoritatively, but it’s not too implausible to imagine that every contemporary author has, at one point or another, heard it said that literature should ‘feel real,’ and that many have interpreted this as a demand for a sort of exhaustive but snappy bourgeois realism. quote:Before her incredulous look, I managed a quick nod. She held up the pictures again. “Your father could not draw a curved line, save it was on a map. Did your mother draw?” Milieus must have a comprehensible, tactile complexity to them, much like the characters, who must possess psychological depth that inspires sympathy in us moderns, and action must unfold without baffling the reader. To anchor us within a character's perspective, the narration dips in and out of their internal monologue. I doubt that anyone will disagree when I say that most authors of sci-fi and fantasy strive to have some degree of realism to their works, no matter how outrageous the content is, and this realism is something that readers of genre fiction expect from and find appealing in their literature. This of course is immensely misguided, because literature is only as fantastical as its prose. Non-fantastical prose does not produce fantastical literature. The book reaches its understated nadir is when Hobb describes how Fitz first properly fulfils his duties as a royal assassin by dealing with a nameless blackguard of a nobleman: quote:And so I became accustomed to killing, and had nearly a score of deaths to my credit before I had to meet the eyes of a man, and then kill him. Ethical and psychological complexities collapse into adolescent fantasy. This is Assassin’s Apprentice in a nutshell. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2017 15:30
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Making prominent declarations about how indifferent you are does not actually make you look indifferent, Barbe Rouge. Ccs posted:It probably won't reduce my enjoyment of authors I like, such as Abercrombie, but it'll still be interesting to read. Abercrombie is a guilty pleasure of mine, so it won't be that severe if I ever get there. The trashing will be loving, dominatrix-like.
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Sep 9, 2017 20:36
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uberkeyzer posted:I enjoy these reviews but disagree with your premise that fantasy books must be written using "fantastical" language to succeed. Jemisin's latest series, for example, tells what is essentially a first person escape from bondage narrative that wouldn't be out of place in a 19th century novel. The narrator is the former slave and the goal of the book is not to world build or to immerse the reader in an alien place but to convey truths about race and prejudice in society, and how prejudice carries through generations. It would make no sense for this book to be written like "Little, Big". This is just rather non-sensical. I made the argument that Hobb's pseudo-realism was banal, and according to you it''s necessary for... "conveying truths"? Why is banality truthful? I even pointed out how Hobb contradicts her own realism with characters reminiscent of Pilgrim's Progress. Jemisin's latest trilogy is obiously a terrible example, because it's style is hysterical anxiety. That is not a particularly advantageous method for "conveying truths," (even Zadie Smith succeeds perhaps in spite of her style). BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Sep 10, 2017 |
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Sep 10, 2017 08:10
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uberkeyzer posted:How does describing a female author's style as "hysterical anxiety" work out for you, typically? How should a former slave describe her bondage? Why isn't an anxious style "advantageous" (one thinks of Quentin in The Sound and the Fury)? What the gently caress are you even talking about here? Jemisin's Fifth Season and Smith's NW in particular are rooted in the themes of anxiety and hysteria - everything seems rooted in the terror and oppression of the moment (it's why the former is written in present tense). 'Hysteric realism' in particular was a term coined for Smith's novel White Teeth, though the context is very different. NW however is balanced by its realism and naturalism that make it a genuinely good story of urban life, race, and class. As far as I know, N.K. Jemisin is not a former slave and is not describing her bondage, so I don't know why you bring that up. Fifth Season is like Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a monotonous tapestry of anxiety and terror. I tried to pick out a random passage from Fifth Season as an example, but it was that part where two characters talk about an earthquake-controlling child being raped while in a chemically-induced coma and then killed. It was too bad to even post. e: the old ceremony posted:all through high school i was working on a hundred thousand word pastoral travelling scene that i called a novel, all the adults in my life encouraged me because they were all certain i'd be published on the basis of my age alone and at least make a few novelty bucks out of it, and i hated christopher paolini with fierce, theatrical violence. i loathed that man. sometimes i would open my copy of eragon, which was given to me by my sweetest cousin who later committed suicide so i simultaneously despised the book and was driven to hold onto it like a talisman, and stare at paolini's author portrait in silent hatred. of course i never got published and now i'm almost thirty and my youthful promise has gurgled down the twin infested drains of university education and the global financial crisis. i am haunted by paolini. the toilet paper comes away from my rear end with his face smeared onto it like a jesus toast. i see him in the rainless clouds. when i catch the bus to my welfare appointments, where a tired-looking woman tries to convince me to get a certificate in aged care and spend the rest of my life scrubbing the elderly, the bus driver with his competitive hourly rate and his union membership and his loving long-service leave is christopher paolini. the welfare lady is paolini. the elderly are paolini. i look at myself in the mirror and all i see is the teenage paolini, proudly smirking. worst of all i think eragon survives as something like a perfect cultural object, a fantasy novel that was written by an actual adolescent rather than the psychosexually adolescent adults that populate the genre and this thread 
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Sep 10, 2017 |
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Sep 10, 2017 13:43
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uberkeyzer posted:I read the article you linked and it doesn't say anything like what you assert above. I quite explicitly said that the context was very different. I compared Jemisin and Zadie Smith because they are both contemporary writers who have dealt with the anxiety of race and prejudice in their works. I quite explicitly referred to their style of writing as my basis for comparison. You might try to actually talk about how they write. uberkeyzer posted:And I'm not even going to start with your insane notion that Jemisin isn't a slave herself and therefore cannot write from the perspective of a slave. Joyce wasn't an Irish housewife, and Crowley was neither a Puerto Rican woman in her twenties nor the king of the loving fairies. I was poking fun at you for seeming to equate Jemisin's character with Jemisin herself.
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Sep 10, 2017 15:04
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Lightning Lord posted:BotL can you eventually review some fantasy you like? Maybe Jack Vance or something. Just so the people who think you HATE FUN will shut up But it's true.
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Sep 11, 2017 11:52
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Harrow posted:BotL once positively reviewed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for what it's worth Nowadays I'm liable to call it just gimmicky, but my next review is ready soon and is about a good fantasy novel! The best fantasy novel! just another posted:Or take the time to explain why what you're saying is bad, is actually bad. Or explain what you think good literature is or accomplishes. Right now you're just using pejoratives and begging the question. You seem to either have not read the review, or simply decided that nothing in it counted as criticism. The mention of how striving for psychologically realistic and complex bildungsroman that includes characters that could have walked out of Pilgrim's Progress is a colossal mismatch, for example, does not count for some reason. I could also point out that Assassin's Apprentice is so loving mawkish that the protagonist has two beloved dogs die on him.
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Sep 11, 2017 17:29
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just another posted:For example, "striving for psychologically realistic and complex bildungsroman that includes characters that could have walked out of Pilgrim's Progress is a colossal mismatch" is not self-evidently true, but you don't do much to support the claim. You certainly don't allow that there might be creatively fertile ground there, or that the author is creating a deliberate juxtaposition. You simply take the least generous interpretation (ie. bad writing) and treat it as evidence of a foregone conclusion. I notice that you don't make any appeals to the qualities of the actual novel. The closest you do is an appeal to how the fictional world works as if it was documentary evidence - "this is how children are raised in the Six Duchies". I'm on the other hand speaking of literary purposes - the morality play names are used for very literal characterisation. Shrewd is intellligent, Verity is true and honest, and Regal wants the throne. This is literalism. This is not juxtaposed against the psychological realism of Fitz, it's simply presented as a given, much like how Prince Regal is really as cartoonishly evil as he appears to be. Instead of trying to prove that Assassin's Apprentice isn't idiotic, you're trying argue whether or not someone can accurately call a novel idiotic. This is a path that leads only to failure. just another posted:You wear your prejudices are on your sleeve, of course. "Hobb’s 'world-building' is as insipid as all such efforts," (emphasis mine) doesn't leave much room for debate, and your specific arguments for why the world building is "insipid" amount to arguments of personal taste. For example, "Fitz, Verity, Molly Chandler, Buckkeep, the Fool, Farrow, the Mountain Kingdom, and so on – hint at fairy-tale simplicity completely unlike Hobb’s plaintive pseudo-realism" -- Why? How so? Have you never seen a map of England (or read its history, for that matter)? Have you never seen the ludicrous naming conventions of early New England? Why is her use of "Capitalized Nouns" a bad thing? Furthermore, why are all worldbuilding efforts insipid? Here your argument just falls apart - what literary significance is there in that Assassin's Apprentice might be following the naming conventions of historical New England? "World-building" efforts are always insipid because it's a cargo-cult method of storytelling. A milieu or a setting is simply a tool for storytelling, but bad authors mistake it for a powerful magic that they must imitate to win power and wealth. Thus all the nonsense about "living, breathing worlds" with long histories and great stores of lore. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Sep 11, 2017 |
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Sep 11, 2017 22:08
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just another posted:- I'm not treating the novel like a documentary and you're not speaking about literary purpose. I know you're not speaking about literary purpose because you don't bother thinking or talking about what the naming convention might signify beyond the author's failure as a writer and storyteller. - I quite explicitly said that the morality place names were used for very literal characterisation. That is their literary purpose. - I quite explicitly said that it was presented as matter of fact (a "given") instead of being "intentionally" juxtaposed (intentions do not matter). The names are as accurate as they seem. This is compared to how a character exemplifies ridiculous, shallow ("cartoonish") morality, i.e., I was saying that the juxtaposition was not interesting. - You don't seem to even have realized that I was not criticizing names like Fitz or Molly Chandler. I was comparing their fairy tale - like simplicity to Hobb's language of self-pity. - Have you considered investing in a dictionary? e: Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't want to put words in BoL's mouth but if his argument is basically "bad prose style" I think that may need more precise examples -- like, Strunk and White style "here are all the words she could cut out," specific examples of strained metaphors, etc. I may be thinking of "bad prose" in a more specific sense than BoL is meaning it. That's fair. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 04:26
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Someone likes <thing>, and will tell you about it in a couple thousand words, but is highly resistant to explaining why <thing> is actually objectively good other than projecting motives onto the author.
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Sep 12, 2017 10:06
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No you see, Barthes is the one who's dead *fart*
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Sep 12, 2017 15:08
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just another posted:Unless the author has explicitly stated what they set out to do then you can't know whether it succeeded or failed. That's why it's better to take the book on its own terms rather than worry about whether it signifies authorial success or failure.  What the gently caress is this even supposed to mean
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Sep 12, 2017 17:22
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just another posted:It means that you should read and interpret the text without writing your own fanfiction about what the text or its author set out to "do" or accomplish, which is generally unknowable, and is unnecessary to understanding or making meaning from the text. You can pretty easily tell what authors try to do with texts by the fact that they wrote them. Robin Hobb quite explicitly set out to write a bildungsroman in an imaginary medieval world, because the fact that she wrote one means that at one point she set out to do it.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:44
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just another posted:More to the point -- why do you think a tabloid interest in the author is an interesting focus of criticism or an effective way of proving "why your favourite sci-fi and fantasy is bad"? You seem to have imagined some instance of me expressing "tabloid interest" in the author.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:34
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I'm still quite amused by someone defending a Robin Hobb novel they haven't read in order to argue against judging art by values.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:53
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just another posted:did you tell him you could tell he was wroth but didn't know what all the fuss was about You're all- right.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:54
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Mel Mudkiper posted:objective has no place in literary criticism however That is in itself an objective claim.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:09
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Humanity’s Groan quote:Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image: something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the living being under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanical arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incited laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, if one considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass from the exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general. We shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained by taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the former and will bring us to this new law: we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing. - Henri Bergson, Laughter Titus Groan is the first novel in the de facto Gormenghast Trilogy, the greatest sequence of modern fantasy yet written and unlikely to be surpassed. Titus Groan introduces the crumbling glory of Gormenghast, a castle resembling a city-state, ruled by tradition and ritual rather than its Earl, and whose inhabitants have been reduced to living mechanisms of their bleakly majestic home. They do not truly know themselves or each other beyond their positions, and seemingly content to continue their life of dehumanizing duty and drudgery. Two events disturb everything: the birth of the title character, heir to the ruler of Gormenghast, and the rise of Steerpike, a malevolent and power-hungry kitchen boy who alone seems cognizant and free – more the pity. While that may sound serious, Titus Groan is really a splendid comedy. There is no attempt to justify or explain the dream-world of Gormenghast, let alone expound on its doubtful logistics. We might guess that the weight of history and ritual has reduced the castle it to mechanical solipsism, but it’s doubtful if time was ever not out of joint in Gormenghast, whose class system has a metaphysical quality. The castle is isolated in sparsely populated wilderness, with no connection to any land or culture we know. There’s a Dickensian air about things, but this is not England (even if Peake’s idiom, with its natural sliding from Anglo-Saxon to Latinate and Greek and back, could probably only come from a public school). Gormenghast is not a Tolkienic “secondary world,” but a dream or nightmare. quote:The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were built with grey slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the "Grey Scrubbers". It had been their privilege on reaching adolescence to discover that, being the sons of their fathers, their careers had been arranged for them and that stretching ahead of them lay their identical lives consisting of an unimaginative if praiseworthy duty. This was to restore, each morning, to the great grey floor and the lofty walls of the kitchen a stainless complexion. On every day of the year from three hours before daybreak until about eleven o'clock, when the scaffolding and ladders became a hindrance to the cooks, the Grey Scrubbers fulfilled their hereditary calling. Through the character of their trade, their arms had become unusually powerful, and when they let their huge hands hang loosely at their sides, there was more than an echo of the simian. Coarse as these men appeared, they were an integral part of the Great Kitchen. Without the Grey Scrubbers something very earthy, very heavy, very real would be missing to any sociologist searching in that steaming room, for the completion of a circle of temperaments, a gamut of the lower human values. Peake is a writer who delights in language for language’s sake, and anyone expecting careful composition or concise storytelling will likely be bowled over by Peake’s riotous but coolly masterful prose. The beauty of Titus Groan is in every stray detail, every neurotic repetition of its characters, every overwrought development, and every digression; in other words, every brick by which Gormenghast is built. Reading Titus Groan is somewhat like reading an endlessly unfolding picture-book in words; Peake was an accomplished illustrator as well as an author, and his visual acuity is matched by his singularly unique prose. Peake writes with a great caricaturist’s tremendously unsubtle yet scathing wit. One may quickly tire of the motifs of decay and empty ritual, if Peake's imaginative force was not inexhaustible. Genre authors seem to be very much visually-oriented writers because they to appear to mimic the pacing of movies and television. Peake’s imagination is plastic instead of audiovisual: he sketches and paints his scenes, while too many authors are wont to merely “record” them. To enjoy and appreciate Titus Groan (or any art, really) one must first understand that true beauty in art lies in its form, not merely in the content. In terms of plot, the novel is thin, and it’s not where the book’s strengths lie. Beside, Peake can accomplish much with little happening. The events of the novel consists of the trials and intrigues of the Gormenghastians, foremost among them Steerpike’s ruthless manipulations. Titus Groan is one of those rare works of literature that is truly architectural: the building of the story’s sets constitutes in itself much of its action, as ultimately insubstantial and shifting as they are. quote:The table is raised upon a dais, and from where he sits he can gaze down the length of the grey refectory. On either side and running the entire length, great pillars prop the painted ceiling where cherubs pursue each other across a waste of flaking sky. There must be about a thousand of them all told, interweaving among the clouds, their fat limbs for ever on the move and yet never moving, for they are imperfectly articulated. The colours, once garish, have faded and peeled away and the ceiling is now a very subtle shade of grey and lichen green, old rose and silver. For all its immediate ornateness, Titus Groan is not a challenging novel. Structurally speaking, there is little complexity to the narrative, at most a chapter devoted to sections of stream-of-consciousness. There are no experiments in chronology, save for passing mentions that some events are taking place in parallel, and by the end, the narrative has proceeded through a definite period without any fuss. The most drastic shift in location involves the adventures of Titus’ wetnurse in the indefinite country beyond the castle. Intertextually, Peake’s prose is necessarily austere by the device of the milieu: we are more likely to find allusive sentiments than direct allusions, as Gormenghast has no connection the lands we know. To acknowledge reality would perhaps undermine the effect of Gormenghast’s dream-world. There is a library in Gormenghast, but no literature we recognize. At times the narrator seems to ‘slip up,' as when Peake compares the futility of an action to attempting to “Christianize a vulture”. Even the most baroque flourishes of Peake’s prose are hardly obscure in the message they convey, yet everything in Gormenghast seems imbued with some ineffable significance no matter how simple its meaning may be. Characters, things, places, and events seem possessed of mythic or mock-mythic quality which defies easy summary. All things are simultaneously sacred and profane. Even the most bleak and shambling thing in Gormenghast seems to possess revelatory richness to it. For example, we may call a certain character melancholic, but we cannot describe this condition like Peake: quote:The many duties, which to another might have become irksome and appeared fatuous, were to his Lordship a relief and a relative escape from himself. He knew that he was past all hope a victim of chronic melancholia, and were he to have had each day to himself he would have had to resort constantly to those drugs that even now were undermining his constitution. A simile such as the “black craft” of Sepulchrave’s mind does not strike one as absurd because all of Titus Groan is absurd, even if it draws attention. His is an idiom that draws attention to itself (one needs only to read Patrick Rothfuss, he of the silence as deep and broad as autumn’s ending, to see how it might go wrong). He hardly ever seems to use a common phrase, and almost every sentence seems to have been expressed in a way only Peake could. We are conscious of his language as a thing in itself instead of merely a medium for meaning. The omniscient narrator, who we may easily read as a representation of the author, moves freely, and along with the caricatured nature of the cast, keeps us at a certain distance from the characters while divulging all there is to know about them. We are aware of them too as things. We do no truly identify with anyone of them, but we are conscious observers of a strange tribe. Much like its castle, the novel is possessed by the spectre of tradition, which we recognize in its characters (one is always tempted to declare Gormenghast itself to be the novel’s most important character, but it is too all-encompassing, too omnipresent to truly possess a character). They are unique, yet we have met them before with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, Thackeray, Dickens, O’Toole, Carroll, and others – Kafka and Beckett can certainly be glimpsed in Gormenghast too. Peake does not write realistic figures. Especially in this first novel, his characters are caricatured and driven by some nearly all-consuming and debilitating passion: Flay’s rigid propriety, Steerpike’s Satanic ambition, Fuchsia’s spirit of romance, Nanny Slagg’s desperate familial love, Sepulchrave’s melancholy, Prunesquallor’s intellectualism, etc. This makes the Gormenghast series something of a comedy of humours, but the richness of these “humours” can only summarized (again) blandly. This kind of writing is of course impossible for modern genre fiction - they'd be laughed out for being too absurd compared to wealth of flat baddies and goodies. The books cannot be simply called Shakespearean, Swiftian, or Carrollian. They can only be classified as Peake. All the various elements of Gormenghast could only come together under his style: variously architectural, darkly farcical, gothic parody, a picture-book in words, humane, existential, theatrical, a fairy-tale, a comedy of humours, and so on and so on. The humours, in particular, of the Gormenghastians seem like their desperate instincts to assert themselves in a divinely uncaring world. When characters speak, they almost never truly communicate or connect with each other, as if they vocalized for the sake of sound rather than meaning. They are seemingly hollow things inside whom emotions and thoughts float and billow like clouds, or rage like storms, or freeze like winter, or simply roll forward with the eternal certainty of waves. When describing the Gormenghast sequence as a whole, words like “stagnation” and “paralysis” may used too easily. The story and world of Titus Groan is really one of desperate motion, somewhat like the tragicomedy of a frog leg in an electric current. quote:Mrs. Slagg was so agitated at the sight of an outlandish youth in the company of her Fuchsia that it was several minutes before she had recovered sufficiently to listen to anything in the way of an explanation. Her eyes would dart to and fro from Fuchsia to the features of the intruder. She stood for so long a time, plucking nervously at her lower lip, that Fuchsia realised it was useless to continue with her explanation and was wondering what to do next when Steerpike's voice broke in. Their “humours” are what makes the demented freaks of Titus Groan such intense, sympathetic figures, even if “sympathetic” is too soft a word: Peake uses his characters to explore the will-to-live and will-to-power at the core of humanity, which is part of what makes his tragicomedy profound. Even Steerpike’s cold hatred has an attractive quality to it. This is where Lord of the Rings fails, because Tolkien’s literary imagination is sanitized. His writing is just too cosy to truly grapple with all the uncomfortable and darker sides of the human experience, even when his forebears could. The temptation of the One Ring is too sterile, and Tolkien’s antagonists are always disappointing figures who stick to the margins of the story, save for Gollum. Peake goes farther than Tolkien ever did; everyone in Gormenghast is a Gollum. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Mar 29, 2018 |
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Sep 13, 2017 17:33
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Disappointed that nobody has pointed out the hidden clevin.
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Sep 15, 2017 16:59
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I'm finishing up the next entry, and here's a little quote from the books I'm reviewing next. It's very early on from the first novel in a series:quote:“You know, even now I could almost swear that was Egratin hanging there. I can…” He shook his gaunt, bony head. “… I can hardly believe it isn’t, not until he opens his mouth, anyway. My God, these Changers are dangerous frightening things!” He turned to Balveda. She smoothed her hair at the nape of her neck and looked down at the old man. This dialogue comes from the pen of an award-winning writer. This is considered top tier sci-fi.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:39
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failing forward posted:I don't wanna be annoying but BotL what is your lit background? Just wanna know where your focus is. I learned it all from the town bookmobile. We called her that because everybody borrowed a book.
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Sep 25, 2017 04:36
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Lack of Culturequote:He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the Grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual world’ within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea―the worldly friends touch on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters The first three novels in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series – Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, and Use of Weapons – serve as an introduction to his sci-fi universe revolving around the Culture, a supremely advanced and anarchistic utopian civilization that seeks to improve interstellar societies. Consider Phlebas follows the trials of a shapeshifting enemy of the Culture stumbling through a vital mission in the middle of an interstellar war in a quasi-picaresque manner. The Player of Games is centred around a decadent and cruelly violent empire ruled by a game in which a citizen of the Culture must compete as part of a plot to undermine it. Use of Weapons, the most accomplished of the first three novels, features a mercenary doomed to always fight in the Culture’s most ignominious causes on an incomprehensible quest for a purpose. It seems to be a common notion that the Culture is a communistic entity. In truth, the Culture is a liberal utopia – affluent, open, cosmopolitan, hedonistic, concealed in its paternalism. Their fantastical technology allows them practically anything, from crafting vast interstellar habitats to changing sex on a whim, and social hierarchy and division of resources are obsolete things. It is not a society that has overcome capitalism, but a capitalistic society without capital. It’s a naïve solution: instead of liberating labour, the Culture has removed the need for labour, which is the essence of post-scarcity fantasy (it takes until the fourth novel, Excession, for Banks to even mention how Culture’s post-scarcity “capitalism without capital” may leave it unprepared for a genuine test). Even their foreign policy of incremental improvements of primitives suggests liberal-centrist leanings. The Culture’s technology renders it effectively omnipotent within its immediate reach, and on occasion Banks has conflicts arise from the distance of the characters to the Culture, which is a trivializing entity. This is most explicit in Consider Phlebas, whose anti-hero recognises accurately that the Culture effectively seeks to homogenize the entire universe into a sterile civilizational dead-end, and fights for fundamentalist imperialism simply because it represents a struggle for real principles and values, no matter how heinous they are (somewhat in the vein of the fascist in Borges’s Deutsches Requiem). As exciting as that may sound, it is quite banal, as one may observe when met by its dreadful sci-fi exposition: Consider Phlebas posted:“You know, even now I could almost swear that was Egratin hanging there. I can…” He shook his gaunt, bony head. “… I can hardly believe it isn’t, not until he opens his mouth, anyway. My God, these Changers are dangerous frightening things!” He turned to Balveda. She smoothed her hair at the nape of her neck and looked down at the old man. For all their immediate inventiveness, the Culture novels are in form and content quite conventional. They feature a grand cosmic setting, but operate on the easily comprehensible level of an adventure novel. The philosophical dimension of the novels is presented as a sarcastic running commentary, and most dialogue is ultimately exposition. The world is abound with oddities, but for Banks this means a penchant for sci-fi gadgetry, weapons, and vehicles that is geeky rather than surreal or fantastical (just see how long it takes for a fan to bring up “knife-missiles”). A defining characteristic of the Culture is its acceptance of artificial intelligences and robots as citizens, from petulant drones to its omnibenevolent computer masterminds. They are never alien in their machine nature, but personable, making them gadgets with attitude. Use of Weapons is the most experimental of the first three novels, as the main narrative is paralleled by a chronologically backwards-going series of vignettes from the protagonist’s adventures gone wrong. While the novels do not follow formula, Banks has a common point of interest in them, which for a lack of better word is the perverse. Practically every important scene in a Culture novel is guaranteed to be somehow grotesque – Consider Phlebas begins with its anti-hero undergoing an execution by excrement. It must be mentioned that the Culture novels feature extreme violence of almost every stripe, from the most mundane to the baroque. Banks inserts various scenes of violent action ito Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons that emphasise their genre status. There are exchanges of gunfire and punches, but never anything truly outrageous. The Player of Games is the least violent of the three novels only by virtue of featuring violence more as an institutional force rather than as a necessity of action scenes. Use of Weapons posted:“Hello,” said Mollen’s voice box as it clattered onto the road surface. Player of Games posted:[...] “I can tell you that each of those steel strings has strangled a man. You see that white pipe at the back, played by the male?” The Player of Games is the most morally and philosophically serious of the three novels, but this amounts to humourless moralising. Azad, a monstrously cruel imperial state ruled by a magnificently complex game of the same name, is too complete and multifaceted in its evil to seriously stand for anything, as evidenced by the excess of the bone instruments. The effect is tawdry and exploitative. It’s a far cry from the intellectualism of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. Even Banks seems to express how implausible it is, which reveals some of the limits of imagination in his semi-bourgeois prose: Player of Games posted:“The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.” quote:“Azad is not the sort of place it’s easy to think about coldly, Jernau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A program of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilization, area starvation, mass deportation and racially based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same color and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—” The various civilizations of the universe are always presented with the assumption that they’re somehow inferior or at best parochial compared to the Culture. Fundamentalism and chauvinism are the common foes. Communities and civilizations from primitive tribes to mercenary gangs to great empires are all ignorant, their ideals transitory, and their achievements meaningless. The two great driving sentiments of the Culture novels is morbid flippancy and moralising. These may first seem mutually incompatible, but it is invisibly common in our liberal, cosmopolitan experience. Perhaps nothing sums this up better than a people whose vessels are named along the lines of No More Mr. Nice Guy lecturing on ethics and politics. The most interesting statement ever offered in the novels is the parallelism between the hedonism of a Culture star-ship crew and the upper-crust decadents of a developed “barbarian” society, probably examples of Banks at his most Vancian: Use of Weapons posted:“Heddo.” The young man waved at the drone. He took a small piece of cloth from one sleeve and dabbed at his leaky eyes and nose. quote:As on the floor above, people walked around with either drug bowls or, for the especially daring, drink glasses. Everybody was either badly injured or actually mutilated. These scenes also inspire some degree of contempt in the reader: they will tut-tut at the utopian citizens who, ignorant of any real horror, decide to catch a disease for a lark, and they will sneer at the gauche, macabre excess of the crass rich libertines. We understand both to be hedonists, but the difference is that the Culture is banal, while enemies and outsiders are perverse. This is a unifying thread in the series, and that the Culture is a trivializing entity makes it also a banalizing entity. The Culture’s aim is to transform the universe's perversity into mere eccentricity. Moreover, the reader considers both with contempt: our knowledge of the grotesque horrors outside of the Culture makes us feel more knowledgeable compared to their utopian contentment, while our identification with their liberal openness and humanism inspire feelings of superiority to the “primitives” that the Culture seeks to improve. This loop of moral satisfaction is probably Banks’s most important innovation alongside the fantasy of a practically omnipotent left-liberal utopia. Much like how the novels' inventiveness is mostly limited to violence and gadgetry, their transgressive nature is paired with bourgeois self-satisfaction. The great irony of the Culture novels is how the values and ideals the Culture represents seem to be omnipresent yet absent in practice. The universe of the novels is hyperviolent, militarized, and elitistic. Democracy and diplomacy are at most marginal elements in the text, and practically all conflicts in the stories are based on the application of violence and power. The Culture engages in diplomacy, but for Banks it is of no real interest: the main narrative of Use of Weapons hinges on the protagonist persuading a retired statesman to helm peace negotiations, which are then entirely elided save for their immediate results. There is a satirical component to this, but also something revealing: in a vast universe where anything is possible, very little can truly be realized, for our choices are between the liberal-capitalist utopia of the Culture or the parochialism and barbarism outside of it. Banks has produced novels that are in effect neo-colonialist texts. For all the concerns over the burden and history one finds in the novels, there seems to be little progress since Achebe. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2017 18:53
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The criticism of the Culture that Banks offers strikes me as Operation Margarine -like. Like I said, he presents an infinite sci-fi universe where practically anything is possible, but the only real choice is between liberal banality as represented by Culture, some form of barbarism/parochialism, and an inscrutable ancient power. That's in itself a questionable ideological statement.
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Sep 25, 2017 20:29
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I think that's a bit of an over-simplification. The series as a whole presents a bunch of different alternatives to the Culture - the Gzilt, the Morthanveld, the Chelgrians - all are doing their own thing while being neither barbaric nor bourgeois. This I find is pretty indicative of the book's failure. Like I pointed out, this universe is infinite and it's still impossible to imagine a genuine and successful leftist utopia, no doubt because of political cynicism like this. The people in this charge are inevitably going to be corrupt, a polity meddling elsewhere is naturally colonialist and monstrous. There's no possibility of non-colonialist intervention in order to improve the universe. So even in an universe where anything is possible, justice, peace, and utopia are still unimaginable, and we default to perverse violence. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 04:39
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As pointed out, Banks offers an ideologically biased and dishonest choice: either liberal paternalism or barbarism. The novels disclose the possibility of true justice or peace. Even read satirically, most of the text is rather pointless for a satirical purpose. Banks has absolutely no imagination, only endless cynicism that produced a series of mostly redundant and sleazily exploitative adventure fiction novels.
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 09:48
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If you dare!
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Sep 29, 2017 06:04
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Well sometimes the truth is as plain as that.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:13
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LotR isn't Christian, it's pagan.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:26
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ehh, sortof. Zizek says it the best: quote:In today’s proliferation of new forms of spirituality, it is often difficult to recognize the authentic traces of a Christianity which remains faithful to its own theologico-political core. A hint was provided by G.K. Chesterton, who turned around the standard (mis)perception according to which the ancient pagan attitude is one of the joyful assertion of life, while Christianity imposes a somber order of guilt and renunciation. It is, on the contrary, the pagan stance which is deeply melancholic: even if it preaches a pleasurable life, it is in the mode of “enjoy it while it lasts, because, in the end, there is always death and decay.” The message of Christianity is, on the contrary, one of an infinite joy beneath the deceptive surface of guilt and renunciation: “The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.” [Orthodoxy, p.164]
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Oct 2, 2017 18:59
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Lame and I am glad I never read magicians nephew because I am with HA that poo poo like a random 19th century lamp post What do you have against me.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:36
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Speaking of X-Men, I have to get around to reviewing Fifth Season at some point. And I have to agree with what someone in a webcomic thread said when we were discussing asinine monsters-as-minorities comics: X-Men has ruined a generation by convincing people that being a superpowered weirdo is a great metaphor for the minority experience.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:49
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My god, I'm reading Demon Princes and Jack Vance is predicting "If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories" with his futuristic Amsterdam. Truly a remarkable writer.
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Oct 4, 2017 21:42
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I am a prune doctor
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Oct 6, 2017 09:36
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Turns out Jack Vance wrote me as a character into one of his novels:quote:Navarth had become obsessed. He roved the garden, morose, dissatisfied, looking this way and that. He took no joy in the beauty of the garden and went so far as to sneer at Viole Falushe’s arrangements. “There is no novelty here; the pleasures are banal. There are no exhilarations, no staggering insights, no sublime sweep of mind. All is either gross or maudlin—the gratification of gut and gland.” (Palace of Love)
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Oct 7, 2017 19:00
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The only thing I don't like about Vance is that his style can get really repetitive -- it's not always easy to tell one of his protagonists from another, everyone's using Vancian Diction etc. Thinking this over, and you're totally wrong because Cugel is an obnoxious idiot who gets owned all the time. just like [poster you don't like]
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Oct 12, 2017 11:39
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On a re-read?
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Oct 12, 2017 19:48
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Good choice, that was something I'd figuratively earmaked for the eventual review. Still writing about another book though.
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Oct 12, 2017 20:46
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Lacan in the Mistquote:As libidinal beings, we test reality in order to refind something. However, this reality is entirely symbolic while the object to be refound is real. This is why we will never find the sought-after “thing,” according to Lacan, but only a number of “coordinates” (signifiers) that point in its direction. The “thing” in itself we search for has always slipped away from us. For this reason, we are invariably gnawed by a degree of unrest and dissatisfaction [...] - Marc de Kessel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII quote:[...] Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments, a sort of lute ending in the carving of a cock's head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, "Let's see if this old fellow has a croak left in him!" plucked roughly at its strings. - Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist Many genre authors have tried to write Hope MIrrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist, and the novel is so persuasive in how it explores the relationship of reality, the supernatural, and truth that it has pre-emptively rendered their efforts redundant – Neil Gaiman’s entire literary career, for instance. The novel is set in the imaginary land of Dorimare, and its capital Lud, which is ruled by a self-satisfied bourgeoisie. Dorimare’s physical borders meet with those of fairyland, but its rulers have long since banished Faerie from their world along with their monarchs. They treat all thought and mention of the otherworld and its inhabitants with contempt and horror, when they acknowledge them at all. But Faerie inevitably slips through the cracks, and the events of the novel begin as the son of Dorimare’s chief executive falls under enchantment. The conceit of Lud-in-the-Mist is that the reader is, figuratively, listening to a literary persona of Mirrlees narrate this story in the voice of cultured, sardonic modernity. This keeps Lud-in-the-Mist apart from post-Tolkienic “world-building” efforts whose authors value a misguided sense of immersion and verisimilitude, as opposed to the insight and awareness that the great fantasias of English literature have cultivated. Still, Mirrlees keeps the reader at a distance at one hand and beckons with the other. Her faux-naïve fairy-tale prose has a charming aspect of it, even if still betrays certain bourgeois sentiments, as we shall see. Her deftness is perhaps best apprehended clear in her strangely bold choice of protagonist. The hero is not the unfortunate child of Lud’s leader, his sister, or a dear friend, but his unspeakably bourgeois father, Nathaniel Chanticleer. The story begins with great and entertaining ambiguity. On one hand, the gentlemen and gentlewomen of Lud are presented us in savage satire that belies Mirrlees’s conversational prose. On the other, Faerie is enchanting, but Mirrlees isn’t naïve enough for a proto-New Age lesson about a return to Arcadian innocence: Faerie is synonymous with Death, and its every illusion will easily turn into a Dionysiac nightmare. As the novel progresses and the menace of the Faerie grows more acute, the bourgeoisie of Lud become more sympathetic and Chanticleer himself assumes a genuinely heroic aspect, and this development culminates in a journey on which he leaves behind everything familiar and safe. But even then the story has trod strange paths: social satire, cultural history, political process, detective story, and legal drama. Mirrlees’s satire is all the more pointed for her convincing psychological astuteness. She will on occasion and without warning offer what a reader may find to be a morbidly candid and startling observation that at times parallels Freud and foreshadows Lacan. Probably the most striking of these instances begins the novel with the introduction of Nathaniel Chanticleer and his encounter with the Real: quote:But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands. This if of course a double-edged blade as a tool of satire, and it is hard not to ultimately sympathise with Nathaniel Chanticleer and his lot. The characters of the novel are mostly sketches, albeit vivid ones, and mainly present to express some fitting and characteristic passion. Nathaniel Chanticleer on the other hand is perhaps the most incisive figure to ever star in a work of fantasy. Mirrlees characterises him so that we see him both as a unique individual and as being of a very certain type, with both of these aspects inseparably intertwined – a pathetic bourgeois gentleman, a deeply sympathetic but foolish spiritual nobody gnawed away at by secret fears and pathetic yearnings. There is never quite complete transference between the reader and Nathaniel Chanticleer, save for the more sentimental final chapters. The great flaw of the novel is that Mirrlees never lives up to the radical potential of the beginning, and these chapters are where the problem becomes apparent. But as much as the reader may sympathise with him, they will still be conscious of the distance between them. Thus instead of mere empathy, the reader experiences true insight. Genre fantasy will not produce another Nathaniel Chanticleer. Few, if any, authors in the field would dare to write such a figure. Audiences have been subjected to such a number of dark, subversive anti-heroes who challenge morality and common decency that Chanticleer’s bourgeois respectability now seems more audacious than, for example, the trashy nihilism of Joe Abercrombie or Mark Lawrence. Of course one will find counterparts outside of genre: Chanticleer is an Old World, fairy-tale equivalent to the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, the dissatisfied, striving middle-class conformist. Lewis posted:He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. Mirrlees posted:"There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars, After investigations, trials, and a journey into Faerie, the ending is quite happy: instead of a revolution, the reader is treated to a restoration of harmony. As mentioned above, the final chapters are almost unforgivably sentimental after the biting satire that characterises the first half of the novel. One must beware of over-crediting Mirrlees for her psychological insight, as she still provides it in a very idealised and pleasant format. It is too clean, to put it simply. What keeps Lud-in-the-Mist from being truly great is its ultimate conformity: for all her mockery of bourgeois conventionality and sentiments, Mirrlees can never quite escape them. Lud-in the-Mist is a poignant yet gently mocking study of human yearning, but poignancy does not make art great. It is at its greatest when Mirrlees questions and scrutinizes sentiment, when she refuses to naively say that the Faerie is superior to the Law, and instead that the truth exists beyond them. It is at its worst when this critical scrutiny is forgotten. At the book’s climax, the narrative ventures into the heart of fairyland. Here Mirrlees’s makes her most poignant and sinister statement on the nature of fantasy. Faerie at its gentlest and most pleasing reveals itself to be a black void: quote:[...] the uplands became bathed in a gentle light and proved to be fair and fertile - the perpetual seat of Spring; for there were vivid green patches of young corn, and pillars of pink and white smoke, which were fruit trees in blossom, and pillars of blue blossom, which was the smoke of distant hamlets, and a vast meadow of cornflowers and daisies, which was the great inland sea of Faerie. And everything ships, spires, houses - was small and bright and delicate, yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or rather, the transfigured Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. And as he gazed he knew that in that land no winds ever howled at night, and that everything within its borders had the serenity and stability of trees, the unchanging peace of pictures. When we return from that abyss and are met with a restored, more wholesome order of things, Mirrlees has retreated to the realm of the comfortable and the pleasant. This doubtful reconciliation is a betrayal of the novel’s early promise, and seems related to the strange libidinal/erotic absence at the centre of the book. This is not to say that the novel is worse for the lack of sex or sexuality, for it can be glimpsed warped or sublimated in the novel: in the satyr-like deposed monarch who haunts Dorimare, for example, or in the enchantment of the Chanticleer children, which hints at painful sexual and queer awakening. But the character of Nathaniel Chanticleer is strangely pre-sexual, and even anti-libidinal, in his fear of the Note. Babbitt’s yearning for his dream-nymph in contrast perfectly expresses how an adult’s personal and political dissatisfaction intersect in a libidinal manner. Thus for all his nuance, Chanticleer is somehow incomplete, too much of a friendly and harmless buffoon. quote:In her own way she was fond of him. But her attitude was not unlike that of an indulgent mistress to a shaggy, uncertain-tempered, performing dog. Of course, this in part endears him to the audience, but success is not necessarily synonymous with quality. He is so central to the narrative that it reflects on the novel as a whole, leading it back to safe conventionality. As a further contrast we must (finally) discuss the antagonist of the novel, Doctor Endymion Leer, who appears perverse in the bourgeois world of Lud: Bohemian, seductive, intellectual, a quasi-Iago whose past hides affair and murder. He is also a psychoanalyst driven to “agitate the sleep of mankind” as Freud was. He is most charismatic and psychically complete person in the novel, and Mirrlees evidently struggled with the character, for it is somewhat incomprehensible why he had to be the villain of the story in the first place. Mirrlees presents nearly the same question in the text, and cannot offer a satisfying answer: the conclusion is that Nathaniel Chanticleer is comfortable whereas Leer is not – familiar as opposed to the Other. These types of limitations are what keep Lud-in-the-Mist a merely pleasant diversion rather than a work of art. In the end it is just a story of wealthy men and women growing more comfortable with something strange and foreign. At the beginning and at the end of the novel Mirrlees warns that happy promises of fantasy are not to be trusted, and this is perhaps the most valuable lesson any fantasist can impart on their audience. We, too, should distrust this fantasy to fully appreciate it. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2017 16:04
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 12:18 |
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Genre fantasy developed years afterwards.
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Nov 14, 2017 05:52
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