...Boneland

"Once place is lost, you fall into history." 

Alan Ganer, Boneland

Oh, Those Magnificent Ambersons!

Two quotes from V.J. Perkin's book on The Magnificent Ambersons for the BFI Classics series. If I had to pick a favourite of Welles' films, I might well pick this, despite it's undoubted ruined state. I certainly love it more than Citizen Kane, great as the earlier film might be.

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"On paper Welles' ending looks inspired. But everything would turn on the question of tone, the balance between pain and compassion, humour and harshness, bleakness and generosity. It might - though none of the witnesses suggests this - have embraced the complacent despair that so often wins acceptance as the authentication of seriousness and Art."

[We'll never know of course, since Welle's ending was poorly substituted by RKO. It's the wider point that struck me though, since it seems to be a much more elegant formulation of what I was struggling to say in my last post about George R.R. Martin's work. On reflection, what I was really responding to was not the work itself, which as I said, I've neither read nor seen, and nor do I wish to. That part at least, is not really the best thing I've written on this blog. I was trying to respond to an element of the discourse which appears to surround the tv show. And the reason I find it so irritating is probably quite personal. I mentioned in passing the way in which the use of the term 'realism' seems to be replicating the sorts of claims which were made on behalf of the mainstream American comics which came out in the wake of the success of Watchmen and The Dark Night Returns. A typical defence of violence and 'complacent despair' was that it was more 'realistic' than the standard kind of superhero stories they were contrasted with. I worry that I've made that kind of argument myself, when I was younger, since it was in the wake of those works that I became interested in American comics (in the early 90s, around the time DC's Vertigo imprint was established). I worry that I've read work which has exactly the same failings as I imagine that a show like Game of Thrones does. The problem isn't that fictional works should depict violence or despair, or anything bleak or unpleasant, but there's a difference between a visceral presentation of violence or suffering as opposed to a relishing in it's depiction. It's precisely as Perkins says, that such representations are often used as a facile way of claiming seriousness for a work. It isn't an easy line to judge. Indeed, I'm not sure that it can always be so easily separated into the two contrasting approaches. And it's a mistake that seems particularly easy to make when you're a teenager, a mistake which I'm sure I've made on plenty of occasions. I was a very serious teenager. So there's an element of guilt now in my responses to any work which represents violence. An element that wasn't there before.

[This is also of course, related to the way in which genres such as comedy or romance get slighted, seen as something lesser. They aren't serious enough. But that's a separate argument.]

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"Accumulation has it's inconveniences but they are more tolerable than loss."

[Surely every hoarder lives with that contradictory feeling of wishing they could get rid of everything? Or is it just me?]

'Realism' in a couple of secondary world fantasies

Actually, this post was really meant to be a couple of notes I wanted to make about Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, but it's grown, and taken considerably longer to finish writing than I  had anticipated. It was reading a post about the Game of Thrones tv series a few weeks ago that catalysed these thoughts. 

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I'll admit, I've neither read any of the books, nor seen a single episode of the tv series into which it's been adapted. I read plenty of fantasy fiction as a child and teenager. I still do read fantasy, obviously, but my tastes in the genre have changed and I no longer have much interest in the kind of epic or high fantasy into which A Song of Ice and Fire fits. To be honest, Tolkien aside, I'm not sure I even read very much of it when I was younger. It's not just lack of interest on my part though. Honestly, the more I hear about the series (whether it's the books or the tv series), the more both incarnations of the story sound utterly vile.

Yes, obviously, I can be accused of not properly engaging with the thing which I'm dismissing here. So be it, but I'm not prepared to find out if I might be wrong. I simply don't have the patience or inclination to read a series of lengthy novels that I already suspect I'm not going to like. I'd happily waste 45 minutes or so on an episode of the television series, but I'm still not inclined to seek it out. In any case, it sounds as though the tv series actually magnifies the faults the series appears to possess in both incarnations.

Going on the descriptions I've come across from both enthusiasts and detractors of the series in the last few years, my strong impression is that it's a typically medievalist secondary fantasy world consumed with violence, populated with characters who all appear to be utter sociopaths, and with a really unpleasant obsession with rape.

To repeat, yes, I might be mistaken in my soundbite description there. My point though is that it isn't just an impression given by critics of the series, it's an impression I equally get from it's fans. The central term that seems to get used a lot in it's defence is the one I've put in my title: 'realism'. The horrific behaviour Martin includes in his stories is usually justified on the grounds that it is more 'realistic' than other fantasies of this type.

Yet I wonder if this praise of the narrative's 'realism' isn't something of a chimera. That in fact, whether it's on tv or in the books, Martin's series isn't actually just revelling in sordid and unpleasant behaviour under the pretence that this is 'realistic' in a medieval fantasy setting.

The post I read the other morning was specifically about the tv series and it's adaptation. It received a number of responses in the comments threads which felt like fairly well reasoned attempts at defending the series. Since I've not seen any of it I can't respond to them exactly, but there was one thing that jumped out at me, which also seems to align with this claim for 'realism'. One commentator argued that most people in medieval societies, including all women, would have had very little agency. Now, I'm not a medieval historian, but then I don't imagine the poster was either.

It's true up to a point I'm, but we shouldn't generalise like that. Individual agency is a very modern concept with which to judge the past. My academic field is early modern literature, so I know something about women and gender in that period. There's a very famous essay, which I wish I could remember the author of, which argues that many women actually had less agency in during the Renaissance than they previously had in a high medieval context. It's hard to generalise of course, and the evidence is rarely wholly conclusive, but just because the dominant ideology of a society says one thing doesn't mean that everyone is going to follow it's rules to the letter. Agency surely is something which exists within a social context, then as now, and if for example there is a prevalence of conduct literature attempting to enforce norms of female behaviour, as there was in early modern England, then that might have been in part a response to the fact that women were failing to behave in accord with such social norms.

It strikes me that these arguments about George R.R. Martin's supposed 'realism' are actually profoundly ignorant about medieval society. It's constructing what is actually a very simplistic image of medievalism against which an equally simplistic vision of modernity in which supposedly we all have far greater agency and freedom is then implicitly contrasted. Now, I know that George R.R. Martin has used the Wars of the Roses as part of his inspiration, and that was hardly a very civilised period of English history. No doubt medieval societies could be incredibly violent at times, with some truly vile individuals occupying prominent positions in all medieval societies. But surely we could make a similar argument about any modern society? It's that implicit assumption that we're so much more civilised than they were in the past which seems to underlie this kind of argument. Certainly we're better in some ways, but I wouldn't feel so smug about it.

I'm certainly not suggesting that fantasy shouldn't address issues of violence or power. It isn't the presence of violence in a work which bothers me, but the way in which it's dealt with. Perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire does a better job of addressing these issues than I imagine. I'm just very suspicious when violence is justified on the basis of it's supposed 'realism'. Nor should we forget that in Medieval societies there were very strong forces opposed against such behaviour, cultural forces which attempted to moderate and control violent behaviour. Most obviously in a European context, there was the Church. Much secondary world fantasy seems to not so much neglect as fail to understand the role of religion in ordinary daily life in medieval societies. Despite his Catholic beliefs, Tolkien excluded any explicit reference to religion in his famous secondary world.

Dragons are more fun, I suppose.

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But there's more than one version of 'realism' available in fantasy of course.

As I said above, this post was only meant to be about Unseen Academicals. I'll get to it eventually. Like most people, I'm aware of the competition currently taking place in Brazil. I've plenty of friends who follow and play the game. My wife has been watching many of the matches. This isn't really based on particular dislike. I've just never been able to sustain much interest in the game, either as a participant or spectator. So reading a novel which is basically Discworld does football is my somewhat eccentric way of joining in with their enthusiasm.

It might be imagined that the comic fantasy of Terry Pratchett is profoundly opposed to any notion of 'realism' in secondary world fantasy. Certainly there's been a cartoonish feel to the Discworld since the very beginning. It's often knowingly silly, from the very notion of a world that is flat and balanced on top of four elephants and a giant turtle onwards.

Arguably 'realism' as a fictional mode originally develops out of comedy. Certainly it's an argument that can be made, and I think that's why I'm innately suspicious of a work like A Song of Ice and Fire in which the argument about the work's 'realism' is tied to it's worth. The unspoken argument is, "this isn't silly like all those other fantasies". It's an argument that is tied to anxieties about the cultural worth that is attached to modern commercial fantasy. I saw exactly the same argument occurring when I got into American comics in the early 90s. Works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and all the work which came in their wake were important because they were serious. Which I now realise is a very limited sense of what constitutes 'serious'.

In the case of the Discworld, since the very beginning of the series much of the humour has come from the knowing deflation of the tropes of fantasy. The jokes work in part because the characters and situations don't fit our expectations based on our prior knowledge of the genre. This implicitly contrasts the fantasy with a notion of 'realism' by showing how artificial the tropes of commercial fantasy are in contrast to how things really happen in the real world.

As the series develops and the satire shifts from tropes of fantasy to satirically target the real world, elements from the world we recognise are placed within the fantastic setting, and we get a similar kind of juxtaposition between fantasy and the 'real'. It's a fantasy which is some respects highly suspicious of fantasy.

Some of those elements of fantasy that Pratchett is highly suspicious of are also those which A Song of Ice and Fire appears to take very seriously. As he pointed out in the introduction to the revised edition of The Carpet People, at the age of 17 he 'thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I'm inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings.' This notion appears to be behind what is possibly one of the most interesting changes Pratchett has wrought on the series. At least since The Truth, where 'modern' news culture was introduced to the city of Ankh-Morpork, the representation of the city has developed through a number of novels as the city has changed from an essentially medieval city state to one which is much more recognisably early modern.

Arguably the ground work for this was first laid down in the city watch books which initially charted the rise of Sam Vimes, but I doubt there was any particular intention to the way in which the city has developed. The somewhat haphazard way in which it has taken place, across a number of books actually contributes to it's sense of realism. This is how societies develop I think, mostly through trial and error. Now, in Unseen Academicals it's become something that the characters notice. The city is booming, immigrants are moving in and the city is awash with money. We're at the beginning of modernity. There's even a tyrant of the city who's partly inspired by the Medici.

Which is one of the things I find problematic about it, as I've mentioned before. Modernity is always something of a double edged sword. I think Pratchett recognises that. On the other hand, while he might use his fantasy to critique modernity, there's also a sense of acceptance: this is the world we live in now and Pratchett can't imagine an alternative. And because it stands in opposition to the medievalist cliches of traditional secondary world fantasy, he ends up tacitly endorsing many of the claims of modernity.

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'She is a cook Drumknott, not a maid. Show her in, by all means.'

The secretary looked a little resentful. Are you sure this wise, sir? I have already told the guards to throw the foodstuffs away.'

'Food cooked by a Sugarbean? You may have committed a crime against high art, Drumknott.'

So yes, Vetinari troubles me, because he's explicitly described as a tyrant who is forever seen  threatening and manipulating people in order to bend them to his will. He's a trained assassin who, we can only assume, has killed people, and presumably has no compunction about committing murder to ensure his power. He's the stereotype of a Machiavellian Prince dropped into a fantasy world. Which is problematic, because Machiavelli's The Prince, in one interpretation at least, was a satire. It's no longer very funny to me when such methods are shown to actually work.

As the series has gone on, Vetinari has also evolved into a hyper-efficient individual. Actually, he was pretty efficient to begin with, if memory serves. He appeared in the very first Discworld novel, threatening Rincewind. The cowardly, incompetent wizard hasn't headlined a novel in the series for years now. He does appear in Unseen Academicals, as part of the Unseen University staff, but gets all of half a dozen lines. The point of Rincewind's character, the obvious reason why he's so funny, is that he's an inversion of the stereotype of the all powerful wizard. Although he does eventually get to save the world in The Light Fantastic, he remains pretty much the same throughout all his appearances. He's the prototype for the typical male character who appears throughout many of the early Discworld novels, from Mort to Teppic (Pyramids) and Brutha (Small Gods). They're all character in flight from anything resembling the stereotype of traditional masculinity that you find in so much fantasy, whatever it's quality. They're physically unprepossessing, often cowardly, and somewhat inept. They probably functioned as stand-ins for many boys and young men in the audience. They fit the stereotype of the typical science fiction/fantasy fan, however unfair that stereotype might be.

In his initial appearances Ponder Stibbons appears to be a character of a similar type. A wizard who's a parody of a stereotypical geeky science student. In Unseen Academicals it's revealed that he's now effectively running Unseen University on the basis of all the positions he holds. Like Vetineri, like many of his characters, he's evolved in a hyper-efficient individual, responsible for keeping everything running. You see the same thing in characters like Granny Weatherwax (who, in fairness, never lacked for confidence) and Sam Vimes. In his first appearance, Vimes was a washed up alcoholic. The point of Guards! Guards! was to celebrate the nameless soldiers who normally get cut down indiscriminately by the hero of a typical fantasy adventure narrative. Carrot, the actual hero who in another narrative would have been the one killing the men who in the parody become his friends and colleagues, the lost King of the city, ends up as just another working stiff. Since then, Vimes has kicked the bottle and married into the aristocracy. In the process he's been revealed as a genius for managing the police of Ankh-Morpork.

Whilst its certainly admirable to want to move the concerns of fantasy away from the concerns of 'battles and kings', what actually seems to have happened is that the Discworld novels are still full of exceptional individuals who get to save the day, even if they aren't kings. You see this in the exchange between Vetinari and Drumkott about Glenda Sugarbean, Unseen Academicals' beating heart. She's not only a cook, but a Queen of cooks, one who has inherited her culinary prowess from her Grandmother. It's an 'aristocratic' dynasty relocated to a lower class. And yet again, she's a hyper-efficient individual who's running the lives of everyone around her.

Inevitably perhaps, Glenda eventually learns that you can't always run other people's lives for them, learning that she can't control the life of her beautiful friend Juliet Stollop. This growth of her character is also tied to her seeing through the illusions supposedly perpetuated by the reams of cheap romance fiction she consumes. If this plot doesn't quite work, it's because she seems so grounded from the beginning, that it's hard to believe that she'd be so taken in by such illusions. In general, Pratchett's female characters have always been strong personalities, the ones who are actually running everything. It's yet another of his inversions of the gender stereotypes found in plenty of commercial fantasy.

But to try and conclude a piece that has already become far too long, I want to come back to this term 'hyper-efficiency' I've been using to describe his characters. It's also a quality that the cultured savant (and Orc) Mr. Nutt possesses, tied to his desperate desire to acquire what he describes as 'worth'. Whilst there is something comic about the way his desire becomes a desperate need to please the people around him, his hyper-efficiency is never really challenged as ineffective. He's respected, aquires 'worth', in part because he is competent.

Why does this focus on his characters' efficiency bother me? Because I don't believe in it. For me, it's a far more pernicious fantasy than many of the tropes Pratchett has mocked elsewhere. Here in the real world it seems that every indignity, every tyranny, can be justified in the name of the desire for efficiency. It's a small part, perhaps, of the set of discourses which has served to justify the still ongoing program of the privatisation of the state's activities in Britain and the associated praise of the private sector in contrast to a beleaguered public sector. The problem really is that, somewhat counter intuitively perhaps, efficiency is such an abstract quality. It becomes an unattainable myth, because it's impossible for anyone to be as efficient as the modern world so frequently demands. I'm not trying to argue here that I want to live in a world in which everything is falling apart and inefficient. Only of course, since inefficiency so often appears to the - hopefully unintended - consequence of so much of that which is justified under the name of 'efficiency', that I can't help wondering whether it's really a quality which is actually worth chasing after.

It's also a link with the work of Charles Dickens, a writer Pratchett has been compared to by at least one of the quotes which has regularly appeared on his dust jackets. Despite the social criticism contained in his work, Dickens never seems to have wanted to challenge the underlying principals of Victorian society. He just wanted to the system to be run better, more efficiently, as though that was all that was needed to solve the problems his work highlighted. That this blind spot is shared by two writers who were and still is in the case of Pratchett, despite his illness, incredibly productive, incredibly efficient in their chosen field, is perhaps not surprising.

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To try and drag this back to the point from where I started out: probably all fictional secondary worlds are engaged with 'realism' in some way. It's not that their writers are trying to delude their audience into believing in the existence of a world which is transparently fictional, but they do seem to require some justification for their existence. Hence the focus on maps and fictional histories, even made up languages. I suppose that what I find particularly interesting with Terry Pratchett's Discworld is the way in which it's 'realism' gestures outside the text, even if I find some of the ways in which it seems to intersect with real world concerns occasionally troubling. It may even be that I'm mistaken to label this as 'realism'.

The barbarians have always been with us, it seems...

Published in 1925, and yet it could be describing the present, as we're still assailed by exactly the same forces, making the same, tired, appallingly trite excuses:

"Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to 'show results' that was undermining and vulgarising education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing 'to give the taxpayers what they wanted'." 

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

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[It's years since I last read something by Willa Cather, and the novels I read then were the early ones of American midwestern rural life. Oh, Pioneers!. My Antonia. A.S. Byatt's introduction to the Virago edition of the latter is possibly the first piece of writing I read by her as well. Which is interesting to me, because one of the things I felt about the writing of The Professor's House was that it's style seemed to have much in common with Ms. Byatt's style. There was nothing I could put my finger on exactly, but since she has clearly thought long and deeply about Willa Cather's art in her introductions to most of Virago's reissues of the novels, it's perhaps not too surprising to feel something of the influence. It's a matter of sensibility, perhaps? They both seem to combine a sensuality and asceticism in their depiction of the world and their respect for all of their characters, an awareness of the ways in which dailyness fills up our lives, and an effort to look at the world as it is exactly.]