Category Archives: Books


The reader is not the message

I followed again some links from Larry’s blog to the indignant woman on a crusade.

I’m not writing this to judge, but to understand. I was analyzing my own reaction to certain claims and try to see why I perceive a difference. And so, as consequence, why I don’t often agree with her reasons and arguments.

Take this hypothetical case:
– A writer presents a book to his editor/publisher. The protagonist of this book is a black man, and the editor says the book is good and will be bought, but then asks the writer to make the protagonist white, so that the book can reach a wider public and sell more.

This case strikes me as evidently racist and would trigger a real negative response on me. I do admit that I tend to care about the illegitimate intervention on the author’s will more than the racism embedded in it. But I do notice the racism and it disgusts me.

Take this other case:
– A writer writes a book where only white people are presented, or white people in dominant roles. A reader infers the writer is racist, and so he needs to be called out for what he truly is.

In this case the reader’s reaction doesn’t seem legitimate to me. If certain extremist groups “appropriate” the work of some writer it doesn’t directly mean that what they saw in this work is what the writer truly intended, nor that he agrees with their vision. Nor, obviously, he should be prosecuted for what others read in his work, and crimes done in his name. You can’t infer a claim by its absence. One can be blamed for foreseeable consequences, but not for what he couldn’t imagine. Call him stupid or naive, but that’s all.

A work that analyzes racial problems and that gives equal importance and treatment to different races can rightly be called anti-racist. But a work that does not rise these problems can’t be called racist because it doesn’t tackles them up-front and makes its position clear of suspect.

A reader may perceive racist undertones, the writer may have unconsciously embedded racist undertones in a book, for example by deciding its hero will be white, but you can’t loudly denounce this work as “racist”, as long there isn’t an explicit, proven racist message. That is deliberate.

There are various levels and there is surely merit highlighting the predominance of certain trends that don’t promote anti-racism. And so it’s good to draw the attention and sensitize the public on these themes. As Larry said, it helps to reassess and readjust how you perceive certain things that otherwise would go unnoticed. Help you being aware of them. But not noticing doesn’t mean endorsing. In most cases I guess it’s a simple consequence: if the majority of published fiction writers were black men, then it’s probable we’d get a majority of books with black men as protagonists. A statistic, cultural fact, not an intrinsic racist one.

Tolkien’s work is evidently not particularly sensitized about racial problems and sexism. But you can’t overturn that argument by declaring Tolkien was sexist and racist. It’s an accusation only based on inference, speculation and witch-hunting (suspect).

A note on Midnight Tides reading progress

Not that anyone asked, but I’ve been “reading” Midnight Tides for MANY months and I decided to clarify a bit.

It’s not that I’m not enjoying the book and so going very slowly or making no progress at all. In part the lack of progress is due to a quirk I have. The more I “invest” my interest and expectations on something, the more I delay it. Like a pathological need to keep the best stuff last. Also meaning that I’ll likely go through lot of crap just as long I feel the very best stuff is right there waiting for me (and for better days). I’ve been systematically doing this with everything. Books, movies, games, and everything else associated with a good feeling. I’m one who finished Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure (btw, nice soundtrack) instead of the Final Fantas(ies) because these were good, and so to keep for later. So I still today have all the Final Fantasy games and a staggering PILE of other ancient but precious RPGs on my to-do list. I bought my copy of LotR when I was around fourteen and worshiped it like a holy monolith. But I couldn’t read it once I figured out that more books were connected to it, like the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, I just never settle for anything else than everything. The result was that I read LotR more than 10 years later, even if it was at the time my “favorite book I didn’t read”. Or, in general, that I can manage to read something only when I stop caring about it.

These days I know this habit of mine makes no sense and I try to fight it as much I can, but it still wins often. It’s like one of those obsessive–compulsive problems, the more you fight them the more they slip through and affect your life. Maybe one day I’ll find some great psychologist that explains it to me and fixes me. But in the meantime it’s affecting my progress with Malazan since I consider Malazan a so great work that it achieves that “holy” status that makes then hard for me to actually read and enjoy. The other aspect affecting my reading progress is still partly connected. I only read when I can achieve some perfect condition. Meaning that I’ll read the book if I don’t feel tired, mind well awake and ready, active, with a hot cup of green tea to heighten the mind and awareness, desire to read and so on. It goes without saying that reaching this ideal condition is a rare thing. So I end up reading when I’m going to sleep, I’m tired and so on. So I pick up some other book instead of Malazan. I read Pynchon, for example. I absolutely can read Pynchon while I’m sleepy. I can even manage to have nightmares about it, afterwards.

That’s all to explain this problem of mine. The more I won’t do something the more it’s because I love it. That said, I’ll also have some negative or critical things to say about Midnight Tides (and, I guess Erikson’s writing in general) that I think are worth considering. That part interests me, and I’ll probably try to discuss them. Maybe that gives me enough motivation to actually break the enchantment and finish the damn book.

Crying over Lot 49 (some thoughts)

I guess I can now say that I finished a Pynchon’s novel… Or not quite:

Certainly this is the ambiance that permeates Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, that short strange book lodged between V (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in the oeuvre of this often prolix author. I suspect many readers tackle this brief novel—or in Pynchon’s enigmatic description, a work “marketed as a novel”—with the thought that something so compact, a mere 45,000 words, will make for an easy introduction to a sometimes elliptical writer. Ah, the joke is on them. A walk through a house of mirrors may be short when measured in steps, but if you keep on slamming your face into your own reflection, the effect is anything but that of a leisurely stroll.

Oh no, I’m not attempting to review this. I’ll stick to stuff I pretend to be more familiar with. But I wanted to put together some thoughts and quotes to better figure out where I stand.

I may have said here and there that Pynchon makes for an infuriating read. It has most of the “literary” pretentiousness and, so, esoterism of Wolfe. 99% of the cultural references that make the fabric of a Pynchon’s novel are completely lost on me (and something similar happens to me even with, say, Franzen). Even when I look them up and read about them they are lost too. Because Pynchon doesn’t simply reference a fact, but by referencing it he drags in the novel that “feel”. And if you aren’t a millenarian man-brain, that feel is not part of your experience; you can only feel the loss, and suck it up. The infuriating part is trying to bite thin air and never make any progress.

Another problem I had, I had it after turning the last page. This is a book that has David Forster Wallace written all over it: you see everything everywhere. Yes, it’s backwards, but it’s because I read DFW before Pynchon. The most obvious feat is the momentum building and building, the sense of impending doom/revelation, then you turn the page and the book is over before it reached the climax. Oh, so infuriating. Building a mystery without revealing it, for the whole breadth of the novel.

A couple of hours ago I was reading a review of Murakami’s 1Q84, with a fitting quote out of the book itself:

As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness.’ (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

I’m conflicted because this is what for me makes coincide my utter fascination for something not completely “settled” and solved, with my utmost RAGE (or despair) when it is not. Outright hostility to the writer for being deliberately obscure. For hiding meaning, or simply having fun baiting me out in the depth of the forest, and then leave me there without a clue or way out.

Coupled with simple self-doubt, not feeling secure of my own intelligence and ability to understand something. So the necessity of seeing it all spelled out in as many possible ways, pre-chewed and possibly even digested, as to clear all doubt, and then sighing of relief (and feel clever, for getting it).

Thankfully these days we have the internet, so I can at least go and match my own patterns with those out there to see how much of the Big Picture I miserably missed. At least to quench some superficial need of… certainty:

As in his earlier novel, V., Pynchon seems to be making a point about human beings’ need for certainty, and their need to invent conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum in places where there is no certainty.

These days I could put myself as Oedipa in the book without requiring almost any changes. My OWN paranoia. As if the whole world is conspiring and playing games around me. For example, on one hand this book brings heavily back the theme of “Entropy” used in that short story I randomly stumbled on. And Pynchon implicitly reinforces this connection, not just as a theme in common, but even a style.

One of the things I like the most is when a writer writes about his own work, giving his own opinion of it (maybe because of what I wrote above). Pynchon does this in the introduction he wrote for “Slow Learner”, the short story collection that includes “Entropy”. I’d recommend to read this introduction because it’s interesting for many, many reasons, but toward the end it also briefly examines “The Crying of Lot 49”: The next story I wrote was “The Crying of Lot 49”, in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up till then.

Since in the introduction Pynchon’s analyzes his own writing flaws, so supposedly those things he learned to improve, while also acknowledging that these flaws are kind of a constant in his work (“Most of what I dislike about my writing is present here in embryo, as well as in more advanced forms.”), then I see that remark about “Lot 49” as implicitly linked to the flaws he pointed out in “Entropy”:

The problem here is like the problem with “Entropy”: beginning with something abstract — a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook — and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise, which is what this uncomfortably resembles.

Of which I think there’s a trace in this book. Sometimes it feels like Pynchon “overwrites” Oedipa’s character. As if the reality of the fact is then coming truly alive only from the writing. An ordinary event made extraordinary by how it’s written. It’s Pynchon coming in, describing Oedipa and taking control of her stream of consciousness. In fact I wonder if I’m wrong if I say the book is effectively written in third person omniscient narrator EVEN IF it’s closely bound to Oedipa’s PoV. It’s almost never faithful to her awareness.

I identify with Oedipa’s paranoia because I’m doing outside the context of the book what Oedipa does within. Seeing patterns surface and wondering if their shape is a fantasy, or if there’s truly a lingering meaning. A kind of universal connection with a far reach. I’m reading the book and wondering if what I see into it is what the book is showing me. If the conspiracy I see is real or only my own fantasy that completes and compensates the missing parts. And in a Pynchon’s novel, where I feel I’m missing something every line, there’s plenty of compensation and filling that needs to be done.

This is how I interpret it, coming straight from a bias: the book does explain everything thoroughly, actually doing a rather meticulous work picking up and closing all the loops it opened (I wonder what others would say about the numerous “infodumps” toward the end). The climax and final revelation seem to fall off the edge only because everything was revealed a couple of pages back, so the ending is like an Epilogue where events and characters merely drift onward. The end is not shown not because the writer is cynically evil and torturing the reader, but as a hint that what follows is so irrelevant that it doesn’t need to be told. We don’t get to see what happens after not to heighten the mystery, but to heighten the truth. It’s the momentum that makes the reader carry on, eager to turn pages and find out how it ends. The missing part is necessary to redirect the attention to what’s relevant. The revelation isn’t one the reader has to make on his own, but one that needs to be properly located, turning the pages back. It needs to be re-ordered.

A problem I have with the book is that I wildly disagree with what’s written on the back cover:
“The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.”

Self-knowledge? If anything she LOST it. She’s completely, utterly destroyed by the end of the book, as I see it. It’s pretty much the way Hal ends up in Infinite Jest. It’s quite hard for me to see it in an optimistic, positive light.

DFW essentially writes the deal about The Crying of Lot 49: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

Going backwards here are some quotes to support my interpretation of the book and some of the patterns that seemed to be there:

Possibilities for paranoia become abundant. If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea who their adversary is, or how far its influence extends, then many of them must come to believe in something very like the Scurvham-ite’s blind, automatic anti-God. Whatever it is, it has the power to murder their riders, send landslides thundering across their roads, by extension bring into being new local competition and presently even state postal monopolies; disintegrate their Empire. It is their time’s ghost, out to put the Thurn and Taxis ass in a sling.

But over the next century and a half the paranoia recedes, as they come to discover the secular Tristero. Power, omniscience, implacable malice, attributes of what they’d thought to be a historical principle, a Zeitgeist, are carried over to the now human enemy.

This is a description of paranoia. It is caused by what is essentially a lack of certainty, a kind of compensation. What is not understood acquires a mythical shape. A Zeitgeist, like the conspiracy theories coming out of 9/11. Growing uncertainty, growing insecurity, and so the scarcity of elements to explain what happened becomes a mythical structure where fears are projected. Only what is known can be traced, but it is too scarce, and so it comes together as a fantasy.

Now, I believe all this structure is repeated in the book on a much broader level. About entropy, about communication, and ultimately about language, the brain and the perception of consciousness (as with “entropy”, it becomes a cosmic theme). This is why it looks like paranoia to me, because it’s again all part of what I’m reading and writing on the blog these past few months. And while I was expecting this book to deal with conspiracy and other intriguing things, I didn’t expect it to go SO close to the true themes I’m looking into. I see this specifically as the key to unlock the mystery of the book at its most profound and connected level.

“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

This seems to me a call to Hillman’s psychology. The need to not lose the symbol, stick to it. Hilarious reply comes to Oedipa’s request of “dissipating the mystery”. Of explaining everything as an illusion (“hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy“). Hilarious tells her essentially that this can’t be done. Also an answer to why the book can’t have its mystery revealed. Because it’s the closed loop itself the condition of existence. As if paranoia and self-consciousness coincided. The paradox can’t be explained because it would cause losing it. The revelation IS the paradox, and to understand it you need to keep it whole.

“And part of me must have really wanted to believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?”

I see again the interplay between two levels. Here specifically between consciousness and unconscious. One a more abstract level between the real and the imagined. It’s like the whole book is simply showing dualism in various shapes. There’s always a perceived level, and a possible hidden one:

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Always two sides:

The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

It seems to me all coming down to Cartesian dualism. Or, if you prefer, coming out of it in various shapes and forms. Oedipa’s struggle to make sense of patterns she sees is the same struggle of trying to grasp reality, and being always at loss. The need to escape the loop that makes our prison, but also our identity. Could a writer solve or reveal what’s beyond? Could the mystery be explained? Or maybe the truth is right there, in describing what there is without omissions. The revelation isn’t “off the page”, or open ended. The revelation is in the description, and the description is faithful because it’s about doubts and incompleteness. Oedipa’s present state. Her increasing awareness of fragmentation and transiency. Unsolvable partiality. The writer isn’t holding the truth away from the reader because the reader already has it whole. Feeling right in the novel, in Oedipa’s (pretty) shoes.

And so back to the house of mirrors (of the first quote), because Pynchon is describing that sort of universality.

And that’s precisely the right metaphor to convey the act of reading The Crying of Lot 49, a constant circling in on reflections that may be reality, or a simulacrum of reality, or just a dead end where you will bang your head.

Trystero (3)

Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I, a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship’s master, had been last to go.

time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.

You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they are your lives too.

feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out, over the abyss.

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen.

WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE

Choose your battles

Lately there’s a kind of flamewar in this sub-sphere of Fantasy genre blogs & forums. I don’t usually take part in these because they seem to me a merry-go-round with no real valid or interesting argument, just done to have something to discuss and pass the time. It’s a kind of arguing that I can’t suffer even in real life, feels like everyone is saying the same thing but continues going on without even to seek some sort of conclusion or common ground or whatever. It’s just rhetoric and posturing and I despise that kind of stuff.

I’ll only link to the last bout. It is obvious to me that this reads as no defense of anything, even less a will to clarify one own opinion and ideas. The intent is very clearly of fueling the fire. That blog post is deliberately inflammatory. You can’t possibly go participating to a debate by calling the other side: subliterate maggot, manchild or troglodyte.

Now, especially because I care nothing for posturing and rhetoric, this also means that I’m not turning down the merit of a discussion merely because of its inflammatory tones. It seems also obvious that the tone used is deliberate. It’s an obvious bait, trolling attempt. To do what? I guess to bring the worst out of people and make them victims of their own display. But this strategy, imho, is pathetic and falls short simply because it’s another proposition of the straw man argument. She’s merely polarizing the discussion so much that every opinion is made extreme and, so, stupid. The result? As I said above, nothing relevant or meaningful is being said, but ESPECIALLY by those people who kept the fire well stoked.

So I’ll bring some actual arguments. The first is about negative reviews. On this blog I deliberately avoid writing bad reviews. Usually because I’m not a masochist, nor anyone “assigns” me reviews to write. I pick my own books, and if I don’t like something it’s very unlikely I go far into it, even more unlikely that I have any interest writing down my opinion. I’d rather write down some comments on a forum so that I can at least discuss some things with other people, as opposed to preaching from the high tower that a blog represents.

But, overall, I believe that writing reviews that are downright negative is pointless. Even when others do it. You’re just declaring that the work you’re reviewing didn’t reach you in any way. That there’s a solid wall between you and this thing (and you’re pretending to describe what’s past the wall, that you can’t see). To me, that means you can’t say ANYTHING worthwhile about it. That’s why MOST of these kind of reviews turn into sarcastic provocations. They become a kind of posturing where the reviewer underlines his moral and intellectual superiority to the work that was submitted to him. It is a fact that from this position of superiority nothing relevant can be said, ever. You can write some sarcastic snark that make some people smirk and feel clever, but it’s really a pathetic achievement.

Before you can judge, you need to know. To know you need to be infinitely humble. Sarcasm is territory that needs to be trod over very carefully. Just yesterday I read a quote in Midnight Tides that applies to everything in its universality: “We [Letherii] are cursed enough with righteousness, without inviting yet more.”

It applies well to these type of discussions. I don’t have any problem when sarcastic reviews are written about, say, Harry Potter or Twilight, because those have already reached their public. They can take hits, even vicious, unfair ones because these blows have no consequences. But I’d really start to question the merit of these blows when they can have a consequence. That’s why I say you should pick your battles.

The other issue I have with that blog I linked is that I’m all for civil rights and fair societies in THE REAL WORLD, but going picking fights against imagined worlds is kind of silly. When you review every single book strictly from the perspective of its racist/misogynistic/homophobic display it becomes a sign of obsession. In particular it is telling that she does not recommend stuff she thinks is good. If such work “rejects heteornormativity” or “promotes the female perspective” then it must be Great. She recommends stuff that has an agenda she approves, regardless of the relative quality of said work. She has one yardstick that she uses to measure everything. She fights canons imposed by society by imposing Her Corrected Own. It’s like those religious sites that review the most disparate stuff from the sole perspective of how much it adheres and respects their belief. It’s like you care NOTHING of what a book specifically wants to say because all you care about is whether or not, or how much, it conforms to certain standards. As if automatically a book is racist if it has not an equal number of characters representing every race and ordered so no one is predominant at the expense of others. As if racism or misogyny are automatically a fact if a book avoids to make them a prominent theme.

This also reeks of revisionism when past writers are reconsidered in the context of modern society and culture, accusing them of being racist because they do not conform to today’s rules (as when accusing Lovecraft of being racist). So pick your fights. Fight for civil rights in the real world, because it’s where they matter. Leave writers pick their themes without the need to be politically correct, without adhering to a norm that you think is right.

Isn’t this desire to impose on the Fantasy genre a deliberate display of anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-homophobia also a naive wishful thinking?

If those themes are touched in a book, good, they should then be analyzed and discussed. But why a writer’s intent has to be TWISTED and forced onto themes that “the reader” pretends to be unavoidable and evokes everywhere like ghosts? If a Fantasy book has also a political theme, good, but why a Fantasy book should be FORCED to have one? Or be blamed if it didn’t explicitly pick a side? By doing this you’re only imposing chains on what could and should be done, when instead the goal should be of expanding the limits of expression. Of bringing in diversity instead of savagely fighting sameness. Choose your agenda.

Reading a book that brings up racism, misogyny, homophobia and everything related is good and laudable. But imposing that now every book HAS to put them on display is an act of extremism, of the desire to root out diversity instead of promoting it. Even if this model is an infinitely better one to have, its imposition is still a negative thing. You’re fighting the good fight but in the worst way possible and end up as bad as what you fought till that point. As if those who are victim of prejudices are ready to discriminate in turn. Instead of fighting abuse, we take turns at it. So the problem is not WHAT to discriminate, but condemn discrimination in all possible forms.

Going to the core of the problem, this is part of a larger issue called “education”. These days women complain all the time because popular culture is filled with the display of sexual objectification. It’s an important battle for a better society as is the one about gay civil rights. What they DO NOT understand is that you don’t fight this battle by starting to CENSOR culture everywhere and FORBID the display of the sexual objectification of women. You fight this battle by “educating” women to RESIST CULTURAL MODELS. Build up antibodies. To think with their fucking mind. To not be constantly under the effect of manipulation and peer pressure. Then diversify culture and reach a different public.

Last thing I wanted to say is on the neverending debate between “mainstream” and genre fiction. I’ve written my opinion in a forum post and it’s really all I have to say. I don’t see any debate to be possible because matters are really straightforward. The rest appears to me just like a pointless treadmill whose purpose is clearly not about its actual argument:

—
Do you think a guy who barely has a grasp of grammar could tell a good book from a bad one? One’d say probably not.

Do you think that someone who read 5 books all his life could tell a good book from a bad one better than a guy who read 500 books? Probably not.

This is the “axis” of specialization. It is objective. Surely in order to READ you NEED to be educated at a certain level or it’s just gibberish. If you follow this axis you go all the way up to a literary major and the guys who hand out the Nobel Prize, and who obviously know what they are doing, the same way an engineer knows what he’s doing after a whole life spent learning very complicate (specialized) stuff.

Now.

The problem isn’t so much that popular works pretend to be “literature”. BUT that literature pretends to be meaningful and relevant (in the same way an engineer building a bridge is). Because that’s the point. The specialization of literature is kind of objective in the way it works, and it exists and is not subjective. One can’t argue the Nobel Prize for literature.

But you CAN argue whether it’s just specialized masturbation or actually meaningful. And more often than not serious literature is absolutely irrelevant, narcissistic and solipsistic. Intellectual wankery for those who have that kind of kink.

P.S.
I consider myself one of them.

Trystero (2)

“only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.”

The Dream of the Red Chamber (2) – Postmodernism

A couple of things left from the other post. I’m surprised to find here traces of “self-awareness” and use of playful circular devices that are so typical of Postmodernism.

I’ll continue to quote parts of the introduction:

But for all the little hair-cracks that the scholar’s magnifying glass reveals, The Story of the Stone is an amazing achievement and the psychological insight and sophisticated humour with which it is written can often delude a reader into judging it as if it were a modern novel. In fact neither the idea that fiction can be created out of the author’s own experience, nor the idea that it can be concerned as much with inner experience – with motives, attitudes and feelings – as with outward events, both of which are a commonplace with us, had been so much as dreamed of in Xueqin’s day.

As regards the various ‘devices’ which Xueqin employs for converting remembered fact into artistic fiction, one he makes persistent use throughout the novel is the antinomy of zhen and jia, meaning respectively ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, but both regarded by Xueqin as being different parts of a single underlying Reality:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

is the inscription written up over the gateway to the Land of Illusion which we pass through at the beginning of the novel.

‘Jia’, the surname of the family in the novel, is also a pun on this other jia which means ‘fictitious’. The Jias of the novel are connected in various ways with a mysterious family in Nanking called the Zhens – another word-play – who are a sort of mirror-reflection of the Jia family.

It is easy to imagine that many of the Stone‘s ‘devices’ had their genesis at this stage: the presentation of fiction and reality or reality and illusion or the waking world and the dreaming world as opposite sides of a sort of single super-reality, for example – like the two worlds one on each side of the mirror.

All of it sounding weirdly close to the topic of my blog in the past weeks. No matter what stuff I pick up, I end up again and again in the same places.

What surprises me here is how deliberate it is all, and not really a strained interpretation of today. What Xueqin was doing was about redressing his family and people he knew as fiction, this is a common practice. But he was doing this by incorporating in the novel the awareness for its own device, and so all this playful interplay of fiction with reality, that probably comes back as one of the key to interpret the “secret” of this novel.

Such devices play a functional part in the structure of the novel; but many of the symbols, word-plays and secret patterns with which the novel abounds seem to be used out of sheer ebullience, as though the author was playing some sort of game with himself and did not much care whether he was observed or not.

And finally another striking feature of this novel is that it seems to have its core on the women. Something that is discussed right at the beginning of the book, in Postmodern style as the book describes its own possible frameworks, merits and limits. A sort of self-dialogue:

it contains no examples of moral grandeur among its characters – no statesmanship, no social message of any kind. All I can find in it, in fact, are a number of females, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or insignificant virtue. Even if I were to copy all this out, I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book.

‘What makes these romances even more detestable is the stilted, bombastic language – inanities dressed in pompous rhetoric, remote alike from nature and common sense and teeming with the grossest absurdities.
‘Surely my “number of females”, whom I spent half a lifetime studying with my own eyes and ears, are preferable to this kind of stuff? I do not claim that they are better people than the ones who appear in books written before my lifetime; I am only saying that the contemplation of their actions and motives may prove a more effective antidote to boredom and melancholy.
‘All that my story narrates, the meetings and partings, the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs of fortune, are recorded exactly as they happened. I have not dared to add the tiniest bit of touching-up, for fear of losing the true picture.’

As consequence of all this, Vanitas, starting off in the Void (which is Truth) came to the contemplation of Form (which is Illusion); and from Form engendered Passion; and by communicating Passion, entered again into Form; and from Form awoke to the Void (which is Truth).

Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustachioed signior’ I am now supposed to have become. The realization brought with it an overpowering sense of shame and remorse, and for a while I was plunged in the deepest despair. There and then I resolved to make a record of all the recollections of those days I could muster – those golden days when I dressed in silk and ate delicately, when we still nestled in the protecting shadow of the Ancestors and Heaven still smiled on us.

I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it into a story and writing it in the vernacular? In this way the memorial to my beloved girls could at one and the same time serve as a source of harmless entertainment and as a warning to those who were in the same predicament as myself but who were still in need of awakening.