False Teeth and the Foreign Office

Terry Eagleton, from a review of the 50th anniversary edition of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis:

To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office. If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or her words ‘become’ the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No representation, one might say, without separation. Words are certainly as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: ‘This is realism.’ In such art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way of walking is without its idiosyncrasy, no visage without its memorable features. Realism is calculated contingency.

The idea itself is as old as the hills (how old are the hills? and which hills, exactly?), but Eagleton expresses it concisely, and his examples made me chuckle.

Worldbuilding

From three of the most interesting things I've read recently and, thus, started thinking about together...

M. John Harrison:

A world can be built in a sentence, but epic fantasy doesn’t want that. At the same time, it isn’t really baggy or capacious, like Pynchon or Gunter Grass. It has no V. It has no Dog Years. It has no David Foster Wallace. It isn’t a generous genre. The same few stolen cultures & bits of history, the same few biomes, the same few ideas about things. It’s a big bag but there isn’t much in it. With deftness, economy of line, good design, compression & use of modern materials, you could ram it full of stuff. You could really build a world. But for all the talk, that’s not what that kind of fantasy wants. It wants to get away from a world. This one.

Ian Sales on Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey:

There are some 150 million people living in the Asteroid Belt. The greatest concentration is six million in the tunnels inside the dwarf planet Ceres. There is no diversity. There is passing mention of nationalities other than the authors’ own – and a bar the characters frequent plays banghra music – but the viewpoint cast are American in outlook and presentation. Ceres itself is like some inner city no-go zone, with organised crime, drug-dealing, prostitution, under-age prostitution, endemic violence against women, subsistence-level employment… Why? It’s simply not plausible. Why would a space-based settlement resemble the worst excesses of some bad US TV crime show? The Asteroid Belt is not the Wild West, criminals and undesirables can’t simply wander in of their own accord and set up shop. Any living space must be built and maintained and carefully controlled, and everything in it must in some way contribute. A space station is much like an oil rig in the North Sea – and you don’t get brothels on oil rigs.

Further, what does all this say about gender relations in the authors’ vision of the twenty-second century? That women still are second-class citizens. One major character’s boss is a woman, and another’s executive officer is also female. But that female boss plays only a small role, and everything the XO does she does because she has the male character’s permission to do so (and it’s not even a military spaceship).

Paul Di Filippo on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany:

Given that the book achieves liftoff into SF territory halfway through, you need to know that Delany does not stint on his speculative conceits. His hand is as sure as of old. The future history he creates is genuinely insightful and innovative. But it’s always background, half-seen. Because our heroes are living in a semi-rural backwater and are self-professed “Luddites,” their mode of life is more archaic than the lifestyles of others. But the shifting world keeps bumping up against them, rather in the manner of Haldeman’s The Forever War. Eric and Shit move ahead almost in a series of discontinuous jumps, waking up at random moments like Haldeman’s returning soldiers to find the world growing stranger and less comprehensible and less welcoming around them. It’s as if they are riding a time machine whose intervals of travel are ever-increasing. By the end of the book, the two ancient lovers are relics, fossils, and the mutant children who, in a sense their actions helped birth, are golden-eyed and alien.

Delany’s focus on such humble men—both Eric and Shit proclaim their lives to have been full and happy and joyous, but ultimately inconsequential, and no other character beside Robert Kyle is a Bigtime Player, and he’s mostly offstage—is the ultimate enactment of the goals discussed in Ursula Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”. No wars, no heists, no inventions, no high drama, no bigger-than-life supermen propel this story. To pervert the title of Aaron Copland’s famous work, it’s a “Fanfare for the Common Horndog.” And yet by this very limitation, by the intensity with which Delany inhabits the simple lives of his heroes, the book assumes that majesty which all eternal and humble things acquire, when seen a-right. 

Oneiric Realism

From a recently-unearthed interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini, conducted three days before he was murdered:

Have you bid farewell to the realism of your first features for good?

I don't agree with this. After 15 years in Italy, they finally showed Accattone on TV. We realized it is not a realist film at all. It's a dream, it's an oneiric movie.

Didn't they consider it a realistic film in Italy?

Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. When I made it, I knew I was doing a very lyrical film, not oneiric as it now seems, but deeply lyrical. I used that soundtrack and shot it in a certain way for a reason. Then what happened was that the realistic world I drew inspiration from for Accattone disappeared; it is no longer there, so the film is a dream of that world.

Mamma Roma is realist…

Mamma Roma is more realistic than Accattone, maybe. I should watch it again. It is less accomplished, less beautiful and that's because it is less dream-like.

Are We Living in an Alternate Universe?

Glenn Beck appropriates ACT UP's Silence = Death.

I went to some ACT UP meetings and protests in the mid-1990s in New York. One of them was a protest against the Pope. People who were braver and more committed than I dropped a banner out of Saks 5th Avenue that read "CONDOMS SAVE LIVES". I was with a group of about 20 folks who were allowed into a special police-created protest area in amidst what felt like a million Catholics waiting for the Pope outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember a woman coming up with her young daughter to the waist-high metal barricades that enclosed us. She threw holy water at us and told her daughter we were vampires.

Perhaps in this new alternate reality, Beck will have Larry Kramer on his show to talk about Ronald Reagan. That would be fun...

Crackpot Saturday: Common Sense, Reality, and Terminal Fools

CNN has a report on a study of 78 families where lesbian parents raised children over more than 24 years, with the results being that those children's scores on a standard test of behavior and psychological health are better than the average for children in "nonlesbian families".

Wanting to offer a skeptic's view as well as that of researchers, CNN get a few quotes from Wendy Wright, whom they identify as "president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values" (presumably they don't pick and choose the "biblical values" they support, since that would be nothing more than using your favorite Bible quotes to support what you'd believe anyway, with or without the Bible, so they're probably similar to A.J. Jacobs, except they actually believe it all).

It's good journalism to have scientific studies commented on by crackpots.  Very fair and balanced, that.

CNN notes that "Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association."  Wright pounces:

"That proves the prejudice and bias of the study," she said. "This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome -- to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household."

 Well, no.  I'm all for noting where funding comes from and looking closely at research to see if it's more designed to please funders than contribute scholarship.  But funding itself does not prove prejudice or bias.  Even if we went with the worst case scenario, though, and posited that the funders deeply influenced the study, that doesn't necessarily lead to the crackpot's conclusion.  It's entirely possible that the funders of this research really did want to know whether there was evidence that children of gay parents struggle and suffer more.  After all, if you grow up in a family that is considered by many people to be an abomination against the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some other entity, well, there might be some bad psychological side-effects that go along with that and need to be dealt with.  (I don't mean to slander the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  She told me last night that she's all for lesbians and their families.)  Lots of families face various obstacles to happiness, but that's not a reason for considering those families illegitimate and evil.  The funding organizations might want to find ways to alleviate some of the specific challenges that not-entirely-hetero families face, and to do that they'd first need to identify the challenges.

Later, we hear again from the crackpot (which is not, I know, an objective term; I do not desire to use objective terms for crackpots. William S. Burroughs once said, "Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill. Tell them firmly, 'I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal fool.'"  I might amend that slightly to "Do not listen to crazy anti-intellectual non-scientist ideologues" rather than "Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill," because I think Burroughs's choice of the word "sympathy" is unfortunate there, and I am happy to offer sympathy to the mentally ill; I just don't want to base my perception of the world on their judgments):

Wright questioned the objectivity of Gartrell's research, saying the author can "cherry pick people who are involved and the info they release."

"In essence, this study claims to purport that children do better when raised by lesbians," she said. 

Well, again, no.  I know that Biblical values people need to believe in essences, and they and I can probably agree to disagree on that one, but what's happening here is what often happens when people try to sum up somewhat complex and even perhaps a little bit nuanced studies into soundbites -- 78 people who were studied for 24 years is not exactly cherry picking, but it is definitely a small sample of the many lesbian parents out there.  (This does not, in and of itself, mean it's an unrepresentative sample, however.  To make that judgment would require way more research than I'm willing to do right now.)

Notice how the researchers themselves describe the "lessons" of the study:

The children "didn't arrive by accident," [Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study] said. "The mothers were older... they were waiting for an opportunity to have children and age brings maturity and better parenting."

This also could have occurred because "growing up in households with less power assertion and more parental involvement has been shown to be associated with healthier psychological adjustment," Gartrell wrote in the study.

This is rather different from "Lesbians make better parents!  Kill all men!" (I know I know I know -- the crackpot didn't portray the study as concluding, "Kill all men!", but in essence it's what she claims the study claims to purport.)

Continuing:

Studies have shown that children thrive having both a mother and a father, Wright said. 

Well, okay.   Citing some of those studies would be helpful, but I'll go with the Biblical value of having faith, and I'll even be generous and say that what Wright probably meant was children thrive having a mother and father who live together and are happily married and participate in their children's lives.  Sure.  That makes sense.  Children thriving in such a situation does not, though, mean that children in other situations cannot also thrive.  People who eat spinach and broccoli a lot also probably thrive, especially in comparison to people who live on Swedish Fish.  This does not mean people who eat apples and tofu do not thrive, especially in comparison to people who live on Swedish Fish.

The fair and balanced reporter of CNN (Madison Park, who I'm assuming is an individual, though may, with such a name, be a corporate entity, something with trees and benches and plenty of targeted advertising) ends the article by giving the crackpot the final words:

"You have to be a little suspicious of any study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father," she said. "It just defies common sense and reality."

Well, no.  And, by the way, Madison Park, this is not good journalism -- this is hooey.  Endings matter.  Endings create emphasis.  They are a method of implication.  The implication here is that the research is nonsensical and unreal.

The crackpot doesn't even get the basics of the research right.  It's not a "study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father" but rather a study that compares the responses to a basic measurement by the children of 78 lesbian couples over 24 years to the responses of what is probably a much larger general sample of "children of nonlesbian families".

Common sense and reality can be different things.  It is, for instance, common sense that the sun moves around the Earth.  This is not, however, reality.

The reality of the study is that the children of 78 families raised over 24 years scored, on the whole, better than the average on a basic and common measurement of psychological health and adjustment.  The reality of the study suggests that good parenting is less a matter of the parents' sex than a matter of how prepared they were to be parents and how involved they are in their children's lives.

If that's not at least somewhere in the vicinity of your common sense, then, well, you are a terminal fool.

In Which I Exhort You to Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody.  It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story. 

I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world.  I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face.  Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again for my desire for fantasy!"), but the effect of Who Fears Death is very different, despite the many horrific events experienced or observed by the characters, because its view of fantasy is more generous -- the world is, it seems to say, made up of stories.  They're how we understand things.  So be careful in the stories you tell and the stories you listen to, but don't give up on myth and legend and fantasy.  (In that, it's more Barry Lopez than M. John Harrison, really.)

Though the review I just sent off is 1,500 words, I felt like I could have gone on at twice that length, and I fear what I wrote is too general.  I didn't even find a way to write about the epigraph from Patrice Lumumba that opens the book ("Dear friends, are you afraid of death?") -- one of the fascinating things about the novel is how it uses fantasy in a kind of dialogic approach to reality, thus illuminating both.  For instance, part of the story uses a quest structure with echoes of Lord of the Rings (including a giant eye of evil) to critique both the good/evil dichotomy of so much epic fantasy and the good/evil thinking that fuels massacres and genocide in our own world.  The stories we tell ourselves are not innocent -- they affect how we behave toward each other, and Who Fears Death shows that vividly.  It's also about other types of fantasy -- for instance, the common one that the Harry Potter books so effectively exploited wherein nerdy or awkward folks become the saviors of the universe.  Typically, once they've saved the universe, those characters go on to have great lives in the epilogues of their books.  It doesn't really give too much away to say that Who Fears Death is smarter than that about what heroism and fate can demand, while also recognizing that stories, to be useful, may need to answer some of the ambiguities more common to life than fiction.  Just because there are lots of lies in legends and myths doesn't mean we don't need them or that they don't tell truths about life; we just need to be careful in how and why we choose to keep telling them.

The method of the novel's telling will probably not obsess ordinary readers the way it did me, because I'm always obsessed with the Barthian question, "Who speaks?"   There are a variety of levels of narration in the book, and it seemed to me to be a kind of fictionalized fiction: Onyesonwu, the protagonist, may be the narrator for most of the novel, but her narration is not "realistic", but rather novelistic -- not only is it full of dialogue in a way it probably would not be were it the transcription it is presented as, but both the dialogue and narration are shaped and intentional in a way off-the-cuff storytelling is not.  Everything exists for expository purposes, and there's none of the noise we get in even a very stylized novel like JR, nor the delight in the rhythm and stagi-ness of scripted dialogue that is David Mamet's calling card -- instead, we get fluent, deliberate, written conversation that moves the story along ... just like most novels that aren't posited as told tales give us.  I don't know if this was intentional on Okorafor's part or not, but it doesn't matter, because the effect is marvelous, suggesting multiple levels of distance from the actual (in a diegetic sense) telling of the tale.  What we are reading, then, is a novelized legend that wants to pass itself off as a transcribed autobiography, and this conceit fits wonderfully with so much of what else is in the book.  And then the final chapters add complexity to it all.

Anyway, the novel is wonderful in all sorts of different ways, and I'll be writing more about it, I expect, probably in my next Strange Horizons column, because I happened to read it while I was also reading Timmi Duchamp's fascinating anthology of essays Narrative Power and David Shields's provocative Reality Hunger, and the three books really had an awful lot to say to each other, at least in my mind.  More on all that later, though...