Ending the World with Hope and Comfort

A friend pointed me toward Sigrid Nunez's New York Times review of Emily St. John Mandel's popular and award-winning novel Station Eleven. He said it expressed some of the reservations that caused me to stop reading the book, and it does — at the end of her piece, Nunez says exactly what I was thinking as I put the book down with, I'll confess, a certain amount of disgust:

If “Station Eleven” reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.

I don't mean this post to be about Station Eleven, because I didn't finish reading it and for all I know, if I'd finished reading it I might disagree with Nunez. I bring it up because even if, somehow, Nunez is wrong about Station Eleven, her points are important ones in this age of popular apocalypse stories.

Let me put my cards on the table. I have come to think stories that give readers hope for tolerable life after an apocalypse are not just inaccurate, but despicable.

Snowpiercer: Total Cinema

 

Press Play has now posted my new video essay with a brief accompanying text essay about the great new science fiction action movie political parable satire call to revolution Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, a filmmaker I am especially enamored of. (Memories of Murder is easily among my favorite movies of the last 15 years, and back in 2010 I defended Bong's previous film, Mother, from the criticisms of Richard Brody at the New Yorker.)

As a little bit of extra, below the fold here I'll put some thoughts on elements of the remarkable ending of the film...

Another Armed, Angry White Man

At the Daily Beast, Cliff Schechter has a piece titled "How the NRA Enables Massacres", which, despite some hyperbolic language, is worth reading for the general information, as is his piece on a visit to the recent NRA convention. Schechter isn't reporting anything new, and the pieces are superficial compared to some earlier writings on all this, but it's always worth reminding ourselves that gun massacres in the US are part of a culture that has been carefully manufactured, protected, nurtured, enflamed.

I've written a lot about guns and gun culture here over the past few years. Writing those posts from scratch now, I would change occasional wording in some of them, clarify a few points, etc. (the hazards of writing on the fly), but you could take almost anything I've written previously and apply it to the latest massacre.

The place of hegemonic masculinity in this type of event is especially clear this time, but it's been present before and is a common component to why this sort of thing happens. It's a racialized hegemonic masculinity, too, the deadly scream of the angry white man — a sense of entitlement thwarted. In the book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, Michael Kimmel writes: "As men experience it, masculinity may not be the experience of power. But it is the experience of entitlement to power" (185).

The NRA and the gun manufacturers have become experts at stoking that sense of entitlement and profiting off of it. At every possible moment, the NRA, the manufacturers, and their minions point out as many threats to power as they can imagine, and then they offer their commodities as tools for stabilizing and strengthening that power.

Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away

The good people at Tor.com asked me to contribute a post about the playwright Caryl Churchill for Dystopia Week, and I was thrilled to be able to oblige them with "Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away".

Here's a taste:

Most people don’t often think of playwrights as science fiction and fantasy writers, and SF doesn’t really exist as a genre in the theatre world in the same way it does in the world of print and cinema. Yet from its earliest incarnations, theatre has reveled in the fantastic, and many of the greatest plays of all time have eschewed pure realism. Something about the relationship between performers and audiences lends itself to fantasy.

The British playwright Caryl Churchill has written a great number of extraordinary plays, many of them enlivened by impossible events. Churchill is a staunchly political writer, a writer who seeks to challenge audiences’ complacencies about the real life of the real world, but flights of imagination give resonance to her unblinking view of reality’s horrors, using the unreal to probe the deep grammar of reality.

Continue reading...

Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Since I mentioned Alien Sex earlier this week, I thought I would continue exploring The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection with the story Gardner Dozois chose to reprint from Alien Sex: "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates" by Pat Murphy.

The writing and pacing are what distinguish "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates" rather than the central concept, which is for the most part a familiar one derived from the question, "What would you do if you were the last person on Earth?"  Science fiction writers have been working with that premise for a long time.  In this story, the narrator designs and builds robots, and because of her own interests she endows the robots with the capability and desire for sex, reproduction, and, perhaps, love.  They will, she believes, continue the evolution of the species homo.

The concept of robots reproducing themselves and replacing humankind isn't a remotely original concept, either, though Murphy uses it well as a reflection of her character's yearnings and sense of meaning.  All of the discussion of insect and bird sex in the story ties into the few glimpses of the narrator's own life that she offers, including a vision of her dead mother asking her now, at the end of her own life, "Katie, why didn't you ever fall in love?  Why didn't you ever have children?"  Katie herself has already told us,

I think perhaps I missed some narrow window of opportunity.  If, at some point along the way, I had had a friend or a lover who had made the effort to coax me from hiding, I could have been a different person.  But it never happened.  In high school, I sought the safety of my books.  In college, I studied alone on Friday nights.  By the time I reached graduate school, I was, like the pseudoscorpion, accustomed to a solitary life.

The rest of the story shows us Katie answering what seem to be her mother's desires -- though she cannot, herself, understand love, and has missed any opportunity for procreation, she has the godlike ability to create creatures that can care for each other and make babies.

The story is both elegiacal and optimistic in a rather typically science fictional way.  Indeed, I couldn't help thinking of some of what the narrator in "Invaders" says, because here we have a story of the lonely nerd as lone survivor and savior.  Not quite savior of humanity, because humanity seems pretty much dead, but the savior of what the narrator clearly thinks of as a kind of human evolution.

I wonder about the choice of focusing on this character amidst all that is going on in the background (the apparent death of all human civilization).  We learn nothing of the war or what has brought complete destruction -- all we know is that "Yesterday ... the bombs fell and the world ended," and then we get a story of a character coming to some self-realization through the creation of robots that will likely repopulate the world with themselves.  She creates these robots so quickly and well that I'm tempted to think it's all a delusion -- that "really" she's dying of radiation poisoning and has dreamed the robots and their progeny.  She's already admitted to seeing her dead mother, so why not a delusion about saving something of the world?  Unfortunately, the story doesn't give us much evidence that we should be skeptical of what Katie tells us, nor does it give us much to do with such an idea.

I suppose it speaks to my own prejudices as a reader that I would prefer the story if it were a more complex study of a fairly ordinary, flawed woman's last, dying delusions.  (But then it would be Wittgenstein's Mistress, one of the most interesting and affecting American novels I know.)

Molly Gloss's "Personal Silence" (also in Dozois's anthology), like "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates", takes place during a time of destructive war, but the characters here are not superheroes or exceptions.  Though the protagonist, Jay, at first seems exceptional -- he's wandering around the world, looking for a place without war -- he's not the only person on such a journey, and even though he may have been the first, he's not even the most famous.  When he meets the 12-year-old girl, Mare, and her father, they aren't especially impressed with him.  He's interesting because he relieves the monotony of their days, and he's pleasant enough to have around because he has taken a vow of silence, which makes both Mare and her father more willing to talk to him about personal things than they would be with someone who could respond with speech to what they say.  He's not particularly special, but he is useful.

Once Jay has learned of Mare's dreams and that she expects soon to die and to have her death written about in a way that will stop the war, he imagines himself as the vessel for this.  But it's clear from the story that this hope is, if not arrogant, at least not a whole lot different from previous hopes he's entertained for himself, none of which have entered reality with the force he imagined them to offer.  At the end of the story, Mare isn't dead, but Jay is in the position of wishing for her death so that he, through writing, can save the world.  He thinks he has given Mare's life great meaning and her death great power.  There is little reason to assume he is right.

"Personal Silence" is a fine companion for "Invaders" in that it offers ways for us to think about storytelling.  Though Gloss's tale is less explicit in the questions it asks about wish fulfillment, atrocity, and writing, I think those questions are equally important in the two texts.  It's not all of what either is doing, but there is a resonance between the two -- a resonance derived from questions of the silences we choose to break, and the form, thought, and hopes we attach to the noises we send out into the world.

Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson

They say the sky's the limit
But the sky's about to fall
Down come all them record books cradle and all
They say before he bit it
That the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there's a gamblin' man
With a ticket in the rain...

--The Low Anthem, "Ticket Taker"

I've been intending to read something by Robert Charles Wilson for a while now, especially after Lydia Millet told me she was a fan. I've got a great talent for intending to read things, but my follow-through isn't always great, and so Wilson's new novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, is the first of his books I've read.

What ultimately got me reading Julian Comstock was Brian Slattery's 3-part interview with Wilson at Tor.com.  I adore Slattery's work, and trust his judgment, particularly when it comes to novels about the collapse of America as we know it.  I was intrigued, too, that the cover for Wilson's novel echoed the cover of Slattery's Liberation, though I've heard this was, in fact, an accident.  Nonetheless, the books are similar in their portrayal of a world in which climate change and the end of cheap oil have had cataclysmic effects on society as we know it, and both books are adventure stories.  Their differences lie especially in the ways they are told -- the narrative voice in Liberation is baroque and musical, the points of view slip fluidly from character to character, while Julian Comstock is narrated entirely by Julian's companion, Adam Hazzard, whose enthusiasm for neo-Victorian adventure novels has influenced his idea of what "good writing" should be and do.

I hate writing plot summaries, so I'm going to be lazy and steal Brian Slattery's description of the novel, which I can't much improve upon:

In Julian Comstock, with the demise of oil, America has returned to preindustrial levels of technology. The nation’s calamitous fall—involving a thorough depletion of the population and the collapse of the political system as we know it—is a hazy historical memory, replaced by a larger-feeling country, more sparsely populated and more difficult to control. The much-weakened government vies for authority with the Dominion, a huge religious organization with theocratic aims, while waging a war with a European power for possession of a recently opened Northwest Passage.

Into the political, military, and religious tumult steps Julian Comstock, the nephew of the current president, Deklan Conqueror, and—inconveniently for Deklan—also the son of Deklan’s brother Bryce, the former president whom Deklan had executed in his ascent to power. Julian’s own artistic and political ambitions carry him and his best friend, Adam Hazzard, from the Midwest to Labrador to New York City, from homesteads to army barracks to the halls of power. The novel, narrated by Hazzard, is funny and sad, accessible and thought-provoking; a story of the future written in the style of the past; a light romance and a war saga; a novel of power plays and intimate friendship, where the personal is political and the political is personal.

Wilson developed Adam Hazzard's narrative voice after reading novels by Oliver Optic (William Taylor Adams) and finding the naive and good-natured perspective a useful one to set against the often-ghastly events -- like a milder, less absurd Candide.  It's an effective choice, not just because it makes the book fun to read (and it does that), but because it gives us, the readers, something to do -- it's easy enough to pick up the clues very early on that Adam's perspective is a naive one, and from that moment on we understand the book through the surface of Adam's narrative and the deeper structure of our speculations about what is "really" going on.  (One of my favorite instances of this is the information we receive about Julian's sexual orientation.  The clues are relatively subtle, but they add up to a scene at the end that is deeply moving -- as much because of what Adam doesn't say as for what he does.)

Aside from being amusing and sometimes giving us something to do, Adam's narration is also an accessible way into the world of 22nd-century America as Wilson has conceived it, because Adam has spent most of his life in a small town far from the country's governmental and religious centers, so when he travels, his observations are those of a wide-eyed neophyte, someone who needs lots of things explained to him.   The effect can also be evocative, as in this paragraph wherein Adam tries to describe his first sight of New York City:

Manhattan in a spring dawn!  I would have been in awe, if not for the dangers overhanging us.  I won't test the reader's patience by dwelling on all the wonders that passed my eye that morning; but there were brick buildings four and five stories tall, painted gaudy colors -- amazing in their height but dwarfed by the skeletal steel towers for which the city is famed, some of which leaned like tipsy giants where their foundations had been undercut by water.  There were wide canals on which freight barges and trash scows were drawn by reams of muscular canal-side horses.  There were splendid avenues where wealthy Aristos and ragged wage workers crowded together on wooden sidewalks, next to fetid alleys strewn with waste and the occasional dead animal.  There were the combined pungencies of frying food, decaying fish, and open sewers; and all of it was clad in a haze of coal smoke, made roseate by the rising sun.

This is a paragraph that could have appeared -- at least in terms of what it describes -- in a 19th century novel.  Indeed, scenes from Gangs of New York popped into my mind occasionally.  Artifacts from the days of the "Secular Ancients" are prized, but by the time the novel begins, most of the useful ones have been found, and many of them have been locked away by the Dominion, which seems to consider ignorance a vital ingredient for religious faith.

This distance from our own time and technology is another difference with Liberation, where most of the adults remember the old days of cheap oil and polar ice caps.  In some ways, the lack of much hybridity from the previous era was a disappointment to me, but I wouldn't say this is a failure on Wilson's part so much as a weakness in my own expectations -- I'm a sucker for stories of mixed and reconfigured technologies.  Wilson's presentation of the world Julian and Adam inhabit is mostly plausible and convincing, though, and also captures some of unpredictable elements of future history: in this future, for instance, the Dutch are a major foe of the American powers as everyone scrambles to control a Northwest Passage through Labrador (such a passage being much easier to navigate as the arctic seas thaw...)

That the world of the novel is, indeed, so like pre-20th century America is a statement in and of itself about history and power -- the social/political structures that return include slavery and feudalism, both of which seem to be an outgrowth of numerous forces, but which fluorish because of how useful they are to the twin powers within the less-centralized United States (those powers being the Dominion and the basically monarchic-aristocratic government).  The danger for the entrenched powers within such a society is that they will be undermined if that society begins to change -- this, indeed, is Julian Comstock's own hope, and there are hints that his hope is not misguided.

One of the pleasures of Julian Comstock is the complexity of its political vision.  Wilson does not present a monolithic, omniscient totalitarian government or some other sort of simple dystopia.  The rivalry between the Dominion and the government is convincingly developed, and the country itself is also shown to have complex variations of culture, society, and politics in its various regions.  There is also religious complexity -- the Dominion, which is a sort of amalgamation of various fundamentalist tendencies, is not the only religion in the land.  Julian's mentor and guardian, Sam Godwin, is a Jew, though so little knowledge of Judaism has survived that he struggles to create a viable sense of faith and tradition for himself.  Adam's parents are members of a barely-supported sect with a peculiar devotion to snakes.  Groups of "unaffiliated" (basically illegal) churches are essential to the plot and character development in the later sections of the novel.  Wilson's ability to present the political, economic, and religious complexities of his imagined world so effectively and entertainingly is among the most impressive accomplishments of the book -- there are only a few sections where the pacing falters and the story slumps, and these are easily forgiveable.  The narration is so buoyant that I sometimes let the light touch of the telling fool me into thinking the book was shallow or superficial, but then, whenever I stopped reading, I realized just how vivid the world and the story were, just how much I knew about this imagined place, and I began to admire what Wilson had done the way I admire any difficult feat achieved with the gusto and flair that make it all seem effortless.

I must say something, too, about the songs.  Wilson nearly has Thomas Pynchon's talent for inserting song lyrics into his story -- traditional songs, religious songs, protest songs, and finally, and most amusingly, songs about Darwin and natural selection.  Julian's dream is to create a movie, an art form that has nearly disappeared completely in this world, where most old films have been lost and where the technology for creating movies barely exists.  The films that people get to see are silent, and to accommodate this they are a mix of film and live theatre.  And they usually include songs.  Thus, when Julian begins work on a movie about Charles Darwin, he needs some songs, and Adam's wife Calyxa helps him come up with them.  They aren't just songs about natural selection, though, because Julian needed to create a movie that would be popular, and so he got help from Adam's favorite writer, Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, who offers some excellent advice that Adam relates to Julian:

"He agreed that the story lacked some essential ingredients."

"Such as?"

I cleared my throat.  "Three acts -- memorable songs -- attractive women -- pirates -- a battle at sea -- a despicable villain -- a duel of honor--"

Julian eventually recognizes the value of these elements, and so adds them to the story of Charles Darwin, leading to pages where I chortled continuously as I read.

Speaking of music, while reading Julian Comstock, I discovered a perfect soundtrack for it -- a gorgeous album by The Low Anthem called Oh My God Charlie Darwin (parts of which can be heard on the band's MySpace page).  I listened to the album repeatedly throughout my reading of the second half of the book.  In particular, the first song, "Charlie Darwin" (available via the YouTube here), which, when listened to late at night while reading the last chapter before the epilogue, will make you cry.

A fine synergy -- lovely, evocative music and an amusing, thought-provoking novel.  Really, what more do you want from life?

Snacks

i know we're going to meet some day
in the crumbled financial institutions of this land
there will be tables and chairs
there'll be pony rides and dancing bears
there'll even be a band
'cause listen, after the fall there will be no more countries
no currencies at all, we're gonna live on our wits
we're gonna throw away survival kits,
trade butterfly-knives for adderal
and that's not all
ooh-ooh, there will be snacks there will
there will be snacks, there will be snacks

--Andrew Bird, Tables & Chairs"

Roving Thoughts on Apocalpyse

There's some discussion going around the blogosphere of apocalypse and related issues. A post by Joseph Kugelmass at The Valve offers all sorts of interesting ideas, and promises to be the first part of a consideration of the role of poetry and apocalypse, particularly as it derives from the question of what Frank O'Hara has to do with global warming -- or, more accurately, isn't "personal" poetry trivial in a world faced with various threats of destruction?

[Update 1/29: The second post, with reference to the movie Children of Men and to O'Hara's concept of "personism" is now available.]

(Speaking of global warming and apocalypse, as somebody points out in the comments to Kugelmass's post, Bruce Sterling has declared that the Viridian Design movement is winning.)

I fear the discussion of poetry in a world of apocalyptic climate change will devolve into the old arguments about whether writers have to be "engaged" or not, and it's a discussion I find tiresome for all sorts of different reasons, among them that it tends to lead to people advocating for writers to create propaganda, and to tedious discussions of what it means to be moral. Bleccch. On the other hand, I hope the discussion rises beyond that, because the question of how writing reflects particular realities, and how writers choose to represent their perception of the world, can be a thoughtful and valuable one.

In response to, or perhaps out of a desire for, a perceived apocalpyse of poetic expression, Kenneth Goldsmith advocates "conceptual writing" and "uncreativity". The Poetry Foundation, publishers of the venerable and generally somewhat staid Poetry magazine, made Goldsmith a blogger for a week, and the results were provocative and, I found, fascinating. I don't know if the permalink to the discussion will work later (it doesn't right now), but you can also find the posts at the front page for the blog.

I first learned of Goldsmith through Ron Silliman, and have completely mixed feelings about it all, because I'm really rather fond of the traditional old ideas of what reading is and what writing is, and yet while I ultimately reject the results of Goldsmith's ideas, I nonetheless love watching the process of coming up with them, justifying them, arguing them -- it's some of the most lively writing about writing and reading that I've encountered in quite some time. For instance, the opening paragraphs of the Thursday post at the Poetry Foundation:

I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If there were an Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal. My books are impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly. You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the general concept.

Over the past 10 years, my practice today has boiled down to simply retyping existing texts. I’ve thought about my practice in relation to Borges’s Pierre Menard, but even Menard was more original than I am: he, independent of any knowledge of Don Quixote, reinvented Cervantes’ masterpiece word for word. By contrast, I don’t invent anything. I just keep rewriting the same book.

What can you say to that? It's not so much Goldsmith's practice that I find so appealing (almost charming), but his way of explaining himself. The ideas aren't too far from Dada or even Gertrude Stein, but the puckish glee, the skirting and skating of irony, the embracing of the most contrary views available -- that's refreshing. So many other manifestos and movements have based themselves on an oppositional anger, trying to create generational and factional skuffles, and I don't see that as much in Goldsmith, which perhaps is why I like his proclamations and analyses so much: I don't feel compelled to accept them. In his Tuesday post on "Uncreative Writing", Goldsmith says:

At the start of each semester, I ask my students to simply suspend their disbelief for the duration of the class and to fully buy into uncreative writing. I tell them that one good thing that can come out of the class is that they completely reject this way of working. At least their own conservative positions becomes fortified and accountable; they are able to claim that they have spent time with these attitudes for a prolonged period of time and quite frankly, they’ve found them to be a load of crap. Another fine result is that the uncreative writing exercises become yet another tool in their writing toolbox, upon which they will draw from for the rest of their careers. Of course, the very best result--and the unlikeliest one--is that they dedicate their life to uncreative writing.

This sounds like a class I'd like to take, even though I think it's unlikely I would devote my life to uncreative writing. (I enjoy the other kind too much.) Nonetheless, I feel no hostility toward the concept of uncreative writing, and I like the idea of it as a tool in the toolbox -- I've always been attracted to collage, which is a sort of half-creative half-uncreative sort of art. I enjoy seemingly pointless, even arbitrary, allusions and structures. I like to see what happens to things ripped from their contexts and wrenched from their environments. It's not all I want in art, but it's certainly a type I enjoy.

The apocalypse of any art lies in the triumph of only one type over all the others -- the destruction of diversity. Manifestos of all sorts can be interesting because of their energy, but when they declare the death of everything other than themselves, I find them unappealing, because eclecticism is the antidote to sterility.

In a universe where Goldsmith's idea of uncreative art somehow managed to overwhelm every other type, it would turn the previous day's or week's or month's or year's uncreative art into a sort of creative art, because there would be nothing else to pillage, no other raw material -- the uncreative would be based on the uncreative, and the degrees of uncreativity would create a fractal explosion of discombobulated expression, a new language of unlimited nonsense.

Such an apocalypse is certainly not desirable, at least for a conservative like me who still enjoys the old ways of reading and writing, but I don't doubt it would be, for a few minutes at least, interesting to behold.