Rewriting our cultural origins through fantasy…

I’m working on an analysis of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series – a dangerous activity since I haven’t finished it yet – and I’m starting to work from the theory that fantasy offers us a chance to rewrite our cultural origin stories. This approach comes from the idea that

1. fiction of the apocalypse offers a chance to rewrite our future, minus all the messy stuff that got wiped out in the actual apocalypse and offering us a chance for our chastened, humbled selves to rethink our future along lines more in approach with what we should believe (insert your belief system here); or
2. science fiction offers us a chance to write our futures by including all that messy stuff, but adding some sort of paradigm-shifting scientific discovery or technological breakthrough that forces (or enables) us to rethink key assumptions about that future (Gibson’s the-moment-when-it-all-changed)

This approach comes from reading Jessica Hurley’s beautiful article on Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. She argues vociferously for Whitehead’s novel as a corrective to the euphoria about America as a post-racial nation after Obama’s election, and she characterizes Whitehead’s novel as one in which history’s sheer weight crashes down the barriers that we erect to keep it out (this barrier being our history as a slave nation). As she puts it, novels like Whitehead’s enable us to “recover lost histories” and to show how “those disavowed histories manifest themselves in the present and make themselves visible on the surface” – 319.

This helped me think about ways in which Erikson (and Esslemont, although I haven’t read his novels yet) might be critiquing fantasy. I had originally worked from the perspective of identity, and while there’s plenty of identity work going on in this series what I’m particularly interested in right now is how they are critiquing fantasy’s approach to war.

So the argument goes like this, I think…

• the fantasy template that they’re critiquing is from LOTR, of course, and all the thousands of novels afterwards that have gazillions of noble elves, irascible but lovable dwarves, and evil orcs, balrogs, etc.
  • this does not include Donaldson, Delaney, et al, and is more directed at those who skipped the Silmarillion, the appendices to LOTR, and so on…Tolkien was a WWI vet, and I don’t think he glamorizes war necessarily, as the glowing sword folks often meet grisly ends in the non-LOTR parts of his world.
• that series rewrites our origin stories about war as a grinding but necessary evil, something that heroes do reluctantly and with no sense of joy but only sorrow and need.
• these same heroes often triumph through sheer will, power, and a magic sword that is attached to some sort of prophesy or other nearly magical power.

(NOTE: for all the admiration I have for Martin, and for what he is trying to do to upend fantasy conventions, I think that he also attempts this recreation – my guess is that ASOIAF reimagines our origin myths about the Enlightenment, especially in terms of accumulating wisdom instead of knowledge)

• we want these heroes – John Snow and maybe Danerys Targaryen in ASOIAF, for instance – and their modern incarnations are Rambo and that sort…
  • i’m not trying to ignore all the political arguments and the masculinity issues on display here, as instead I’m looking at another way in which these texts “manifest themselves  in the present and makes themselves visible on the surface” in Hurley’s words…
• MBOTF questions the re-imagination in general, and it does in a bunch of ways – war, religion, social structures, and more…
• my first attempt at this will be looking at modes of combat, and the current novel has a couple of distinct markers – we get to see a couple of different takes…
  • Brys Benedict’s thoughts: (Dust of Dreams 137) “Soldiers lived difficult lives, Brys well knew. Friends lost in horrible, sudden ways. scars hardening over the years, ambitions crushed and dreams set aside. The world of possibilities diminished and betrayals threatened from every shadow. a soldier must place his or her trust in the one who commands, and by extension in that which the commander serves in turn. in the case of these Bonehunters, Brys understood that they and their Adjunct had been betrayed by their empire’s ruler. They were adrift, and it was all Tavore could do to hold the army together; that they had launched an invasion of Lether was in itself extraordinary. Division and brigades – in his own kingdom’s history- had mutinied in response to commands nowhere near as extreme. For this reason alone, Brys held the Adjunct in true respect, and he was convinced that she possessed some hidden quality, a secret virtue, that her soldiers well recognized and responded to-and Brys wondered if he would come to see it for himself, perhaps this very night”
  • Another, more obvious in its implications: (Dust of Dreams 88) “Mortal Sword Krughava reminded Tanakalian of his childhood. She could have stridden out from any of a dozen tales of legend he had listened to curled up beneath skins and furs, all those breathtaking adventures of great heroes pure of heart, bold and stalwart, who always knew who deserved the sharp end of their sword, and who only ever erred in their faith in others-until such time, at the tale’s dramatic climax, when the truth of betrayal and whatnot was revealed, and punishment soundly delivered.”
  • The third example comes from the point of view of the warrior priest Tanakalian, wondering at the camaraderie developed by the Malazans: “He understood the necessity for propriety, and the burden of tradition that ensured meaning to all that they did – and all that they were – but he had spent time on the command ship of the Adjunct, in the company of Malazans. They displayed an ease in shared hardship that had at first shocked the Shield Anvil, until he comprehended the value of such behavior. There could be no challenging the discipline of the Bonehunters when battle was summoned. But the force that truly held them together was found in the camaraderie they displayed during those interminably long periods of inactivity, such as all armies were forced to endure. Indeed, Tanakalian had come to delight in their brash lack of decorum, their open irreverence and their strange penchant for revelling in the absurd. (Dust of Dreams 75)
    • through a sort of ignored enforcement of military formality, one in which enlisted soldiers grumbled and pranked and spoke freely to officers, determining the best course of action by consensus or by compelling argument rather than sheer power of command. I wonder if Whiskeyjack and Dujek Onearm fit this mode as well…
• all of this speaks to a new model army, one that I think aligns better with modern notions of war than those of the past, at least as we idealize and rewrite that past.
  • but my point is that it’s more realistic. I have read some of Bernard Cornwell’s Arthur novels, and I would have never have guessed of the prevalence of the shield wall without reading it. Two sides locked in fierce pushing combat, trying to protect each other, as someone else who I can’t find put it unable to whip out their cool combo moves on each other. It’s as incapable of creating the flashing glorious battle figure as is the idea of charging machine gun nests – moments of individual heroism that are to be celebrated, of course, but no one can overcome the machine gun’s bullets through sheer force of will.
  • The Romans, right, conquered through team work and protecting each other…

All this is enough for a start, methinks…

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

In the middle of my reading spree Ready Player One came up, so I plunged in. It was a quick read, and my guess is that the plot has been dissected all over the web (Wikipedia’s entry gives us all the details we need to know), so I won’t worry about it.

Some thoughts:

• I’m always fascinated by what some folks consider to be the highlights of 80s pop culture. It’s almost always quite different than mine. This different perspective reminds me of how often I used to diss contemporary readings of text (‘they didn’t have the perspective of history yar yar yar’), and I’m not quite as confident in my dismissals as I used to be.
• The idea of trailer stacks and blends of technology is an understandable and projectable view of the future…
• making game developers into heroes is fun, although it reminds me of a line from a Mekons song – “Making journalists into heroes takes some doing.”
• the list of games that the protagonist had to solve was a solid list, including as it did lots of arcade games and a bunch of nods to board games…
• as a text for gamer nerds it works, and although it feels like a check-the-box approach to fiction I am okay with adding african-american lesbians and characters who are not the height of ideal physical beauty as heroes…

 

 

Steve Erikson – Toll the Hounds

Aside from the fact that I spent the first 600 pages of this novel trying to figure out what it meant to toll the hounds, I finished book eight of this series with a couple of answers and a whole bunch more questions. I’ll try them here…

• I have managed to not notice it before, but the emphasis on journeying is big in this novel. A series of characters all journey to Darujhistan, with varying degrees of trial along the way. They all meet at the same time in this place at just the time when the Hounds of Shadow (and the Hounds of Light) start tearing up the city.
  • The ultimate destination of this journeying is often a city, although in one of the series the journey was in pursuit of a rebel army. Erikson spends lots of time showing us life on the road with a moving army, or with refugees.
• any simplistic ideas/narratives that I want to make this series fit – like Martin’s obsession with science and a world out of balance – are hard to do here…
  • multiple characters, multiple agendas, multiple agencies, and some of these involve chaos while others do not, and chaos is not necessarily bad…
    • if the ur-template for fantasy is to return a centralized authority figure to the center of that figure’s universe, and to restore balance by putting the the Platonic ideal of philosopher-king back in power after a long time out of power (restoring the land through the body and blood of a king, the Arthur rewrite), then the multiple character/multiple agenda approach is outside of generic expectations (my own code for “I don’t know what the fuck is going on”)…
      • for instance, Karsa Orlong wants to destroy civilization, but the Malazan empire brings order based on notions of law (sort of Roman, but early, noble Roman empire, and without the heavy use of slaves), there’s a freaking sword that contains a world of misery for those who die and whose souls are captured by it, the various races have their own ideas of civilization, based sort of on power and roles and duty to one’s people, and, well, the list is crazy long…
      • Anomander Rake essentially seems to commit suicide in this novel, but it feels necessary somehow to combat the addiction to some god’s blood which drops from the sky or is gathered in crucified people and others drink and become addicted to and sort of waste away to nothing…
• Finally, the agendas of the various gods feel so human and (thus) petty that it makes me wonder why folks bother to ascend…oh yeah, power..
  • and this power seems to come from an ability to wander (and maybe wonder?) through various planes of existence in ways that others can’t – i’m not sure if natural, physical laws are bent (those exist, I guess, but are subverted and tweaked all the time)
    • the only true gods seem to be Mother Dark and some sort of Father of Shadows…but I use the term ‘true god’ at my own risk
• (added to this post on December 19, 2016) I’ve been thinking a bit as I consider the religious pantheons created in this series about the ways in which power is configured. The limits of power are not well defined – we don’t know, for instance, who would win a one-on-one combat between Karsa Orlong and Icarium, just as we don’t know how Icarium can destroy cities singlehandedly…we don’t know why Kellanved and Dancer ascended, and what that has to do with the power of the Malazan Empire.
  • there are a gazillion competing powers in this world, some of which are enormously powerful, some of which don’t know their power, some of which develop intense power through a series of events humbling and traumatic, some of which lose key elements of themselves because of their power. Methinks there is something going on here…
    • as I try to puzzle this all out, I read in the Malazan wiki that Cotillion (Dancer, Kellanved’s companion although we don’t know what that means) tells the demon Apt that the reason he ascended was “to escape the nightmares of feeling…Imagine my surprise that I now thank you for such chains,” the chains being now being able to feel again as awoken by the young boy who could see the destroyed Shadow Throne.

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead is a genius.

I’ve enjoyed all of his other novels (I still think that Zone One should have ended the zombie genre, TWD be damned), but this one was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t put down a novel about the horrors of the treatment of slaves in the South in the pre-Civil War era, one that finishes with (spoiler alert!) the horrendous treatment of escaped slaves and other blacks in freakin’ Indiana. Holy cow…

 

Thoughts:

• White people on the UR risk their lives, and we don’t get much of their perspective (one or two short chapters, as I remember), but they are completely ineffective…
  • the only relatively effective resistance comes from former and runaway slaves (and freemen, who I struggle in my monolothic view of the South think exist)
• My guess is that the magical realist use of an actual underground railroad, in several permutations, serves a bunch of functions…
  • the state of the various stations portrays the differences (and maybe binaries) of care versus neglect (or maybe the binary of competence/prowess vs. ineffectiveness) – maybe as well the idea of transportation writ large…
  • because of magical realism this can happen, right?  CW is clearly tapping into the tradition of Borges and Marquez, which fits neatly with ways to document resistance to oppression…not that CW is only interested in documentation.
    • magical realism provides a different sort of view on reality, a different perspective, offering different ways of seeing…
    • the UR in our imaginations might seem simple, right?  You escape, head north, looking for the good white people, and you just keep going…
    • actual railroads, though, are linear, with crosses and exchanges and stations…they go where they are connected to, and they are dependent upon the skills and competence and physical labor of all those who construct and create and engineer them…
• CW tries to paint a nuanced picture of the South – Georgia as horrendous deep South plantation slavery, South Carolina as genocidal science, genteel Virginians – based on economic interests an structures, but violence is everywhere…
  • no matter what form oppression takes in this novel, it’s violent – even ‘good’ slave owners depend upon the implicit violence around them…
  • and incompetence, as the good slave owners don’t fill out the proper paperwork to ensure that their slaves become free after their deaths…
    • we also get the justification of sterilization, the disciplinary violence brought on by the misery everyone on the plantation feels…
      • there seem to have been no job satisfaction surveys at that time…
  • no white members of the UR, however, come from the South…they’re all transplanted Yankees. While they’re generally ineffective, CW also does not forgive the South for its intensive refusal to give up all the violence necessary to maintain the peculiar institution, even when directed against ineffective whites.
• I am reminded of reading Across Five Aprils as a kid, and the presence of the white southern Illinoisian who fought for the South because he was principled and thought that factory work was as bad as slavery…that ignorance makes me shudder now…
• and the disconnect in all of this comes from thinking of the government as a force of evil – that might have been the shining moment of the 60s, when liberals realized that the powers of the federal government could be harnessed for good, rather than supporting entrenched corporate power and greed…
  • in the days of Trump, of course, that narrative has turned…