Category / Books

by Jonathan M

Hotel du Lac (1984) By Anita Brookner – A Charnel House with 24 Hour Porterage

One of the numerous themes drifting through David Fincher’s exquisitely realised but biographically off-target The Social Network (2010) is the idea that social networking assumes an understanding of human interaction that is both unnaturally stilted and unhealthily reductive.  The fact that Sorkin’s script depicts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a social spastic, a high-functioning autistic and a ruthless bastard conveys the idea that Facebook does not so much replicate the college experience online as reduce it down to its component parts as understood by someone who, at some fundamental level, does not understand the beautiful complexities social interaction.  Facebook, we are lead to believe, is what our social lives would be like had Mark Zuckerberg coded human psychology.  The difference between Facebook friends and real friends is the difference between the way that Zuckerberg sees the world and how the world really is. While my viewing of The Social Network left me feeling that Aaron Sorkin simply does not understand where the founder of Facebook is coming from, I find it hard to disagree with the suggestion that social networking casts humanity in quite an ugly light.

Take a long hard look at your Twitter feed or your Facebook friend updates and you will most likely find not the carefree banter of people exchanging ideas and pleasantries but a lot of different people working a lot of different angles: Please RT! New Press Release! New Blog Post! Nominate My Stories For This Award!  Someone is Saying Something Wrong, Go Shower Them With Hate!  Spend enough time on Twitter and you start to wonder whether Sorkin’s Zuckerberg might not have been on to something when he boiled human interaction down to a simple numbers game.  Are those pleasantries and ideas ever anything more than currency in a game of self-advancement?  Do we have friends or do we have allies?  Do we do anything that is not motivated purely by the pursuit of power, prestige and pleasure?

Anita Brookner’s Booker prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac (1984) is a book that paints a similar portrait of human interaction. The novel suggests that beneath the genteel façade and old world charm of an off-season luxury hotel on the lake of Geneva lurks a hideous charnel house in which the modest and the self-effacing are dismembered and devoured by the greedy, the ambitious and the selfish.

 

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by Jonathan M

What Makes An Idea Popular?

In my recent piece on James C. Scott’s toweringly excellent The Art of Not Being Governed (2010), I suggested that there are unwritten laws governing the up-take of particular theories.  Laws that have less to do with logic, reason and scientific rigour than they do with our deep psychological needs.

For example, Gibbons’ The History of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789) argues that the Roman Empire fell into decline because the Romans lost their sense of civic responsibility and their hunger for military conquest.  This idea that power leads to moral corruption and that moral corruption leads to social decay seems to coincide with a similar pattern of rise and fall that features in the theories of both Giambattista Vico and Ibn Khaldun.

These different works attempt to account for radically different societies and yet they all share a similar underlying narrative.  A narrative of rise and fall that even pops up in places such as The Bible and Plato’s allegory of The Cave.  In my piece, I suggest that the over-arching narrative described by Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed is so powerful that it may come to rival that of Vico and Ibn Khaldun as a source of inspiration for writers and artists (let alone academic historians and political scientists).  My aim with this piece is to delve further into this intuition and try to unpack some of the ideas contained within it.  Does it make sense to talk about selecting theories on the basis of criteria other than truth? Do these other criteria in any way relate to truth?  What are the aesthetics of ideas?  These are some of the questions I will try to address with this piece.

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by Jonathan M

The Art of Not Being Governed (2010) By James C. Scott – A Weapons-grade Meme

For providence ordained that the people with gigantic proportions and the greatest strength would wander the mountain heights like beasts with natural strength.  Then, on hearing the first thunder after the universal flood, they entered the earth in its mountain caves, and subjected themselves to the superior force which they imagined as Jupiter.  All their pride and ferocity was converted to astonishment, and they humbled themselves before this divinity.  Given the order of human institutions, divine providence could not conceivably have acted otherwise to end their bestial wandering through the earth’s forests, and to establish the order of human civil institutions – Section 1097

So says Giambattista Vico in the conclusion to his masterwork of political philosophy The Principles of a New Science of the Common Nature of Nations (1725).  Cruelly overlooked at the time of its publication, Vico’s work has since gone on to capture the imagination of thinkers and artists including Isaiah Berlin, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Northrop Frye and Samuel Beckett.  What has ensured the immortality of Vico’s vision is neither the fundamental correctness of his argument nor the soundness of his methods but the power of his central narrative.  Vico argues that all of human affairs can be accounted for in terms of a cyclical progression through three distinct ages: the divine, the heroic and the human.  As humanity moves from stage to stage its approach to language changes and as its approach to language changes, so do its attitudes to law, reason and the nature of government.  Ever upwards humanity tumbles until its thinking becomes so efficiently rational that it becomes incapable of seeing beyond its own selfish interests resulting in societal collapse amidst what Vico called “Barbarie della Reflessione” — the barbarism of reflection.  Having returned itself to an age of primitive superstition and savagery, humanity begins again its upward journey.  Forever moving upwards.  Forever passing out of the shadow of barbarism and into the light of civilisation.

 

Echoes of this picturesque rendering of the process of civilisation can also be found in the 14th Century Arab polymath Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377).  Ibn Khaldun argued that there was a fundamental currency to civilisation known as ‘Asabiyyah’.  Asabiyyah represents not just social cohesion and in-group solidarity but also group consciousness and the capacity to think and act as a single political unit. The social groups with the greatest amounts of asabiyyah were nomadic tribesmen and this great sense of social togetherness allowed them not only to accumulate wealth and power but also to assure the smooth transition of wealth and power from one generation to the next allowing the creation first of hereditary dynasties and then of civilisations.  As the generations pass and the descendants of the tribesmen become increasingly used to the trappings of civilisation, their asabiyyah slowly ebbs away.  Eventually, the dynasty’s asabiyyah levels are no longer sufficient to maintain a grip on power and the civilisation falls into decline until another group of nomadic tribesmen turn up and use their greater levels of social cohesion and political unity to make a grab for power. As Voltaire so memorably put it:

 

History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.

 

These traditional accounts of the rise of civilisation emphasise the role of the state as agent. Growing and developing in a structure-less vacuum where life is nasty, brutish and short, the state is presented as the only institution capable of providing the sort of stable and conflict-free communal living that is necessary for human flourishing.  Under this view, people existing outside of the state system are either passive entities waiting in misery and poverty to be embraced by a nearby state or they are highly organised state-like entities poised to make the final step up to civilisation by themselves.  The circularity of this definition is obvious: only states have agency and if an institution has agency but is not a state then it must be about to become a state.

 

James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed takes a hammer to this neat little circle. Scott suggests that, far from being the passive victims of Hobbesian circumstance, many non-state groups actively choose to adopt such ‘uncivilised’ characteristics as illiteracy, religious extremism and reliance upon hunter-gathering modes of subsistence as part of a coordinated strategy for evading state control.  This suggestion that one can be uncivilised by choice is not only a radical departure from traditional state-based models of civilisation, it also provides us with a central narrative so powerful that it rivals that of Vico’s tumbling savages, Ibn Khaldun’s decaying nomads and Voltaire’s fleeing slippers. The Art of Not Being Governed is a book that shakes our notions of civilisation to the very core and, as a result, can only be described as a masterpiece that deserves to influence the artists and thinkers of the future in the same way as Vico’s works have influenced those of the past.

 

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by Jonathan M

The Hollow Men – Negative Space and Characterisation in Existentialist Fiction

There are times when our critical vocabulary is all too shallow.  There are times when our critical vocabulary becomes so deep as to be impenetrable.  There are also times when our critical vocabulary is reduced to the status of the mantra; sentences and judgments, once meaningful, loose their potency through endless repetition.  First they move from insight to cliché and then they move from cliché to mantra.  Endlessly repeated.  Endlessly meaningless.

One such mantra is the assessment that a writer is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at characterisation.  These sorts of evaluations pop up in all forms of criticism and yet they are seldom unpacked.  What makes a good character?  What makes a bad character?  When does a writer cross from one category to another?  What takes place when a writer fails to engage in ‘good’ characterisation?  Literary theory is frustratingly evasive on this question, all too often ‘good characterisation’ is defined in terms that offer little penetration and little insight beyond the obvious synonyms.  Consider, for example, the famous distinction drawn by E. M. Forster in his collection of lectures Aspects of the Novel (1927) :

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.

So a ‘round’ character is convincing while a ‘flat’ character is not.  This advances us precious little.  What makes some characters more convincing than others?  Which techniques reliably produce rounded characters?

One place to find inspiration is the visual arts.  One of the most important concepts to the analysis of visual composition is the idea of negative space.  Negative space can be described as the space that exists around the foregrounded object, but it can also be quite a bit more.  Indeed, when an untrained photographer takes a picture of something, they tend to see everything that is not a part of that something as mere background.  However, by focussing solely on the object itself, unskilled artists will frequently produce a picture that seems somehow wrong.  Aesthetically imbalanced.  Strangely ugly.  Frequently, this is because of a lack of attention to the space surrounding the foregrounded object.  Indeed, in order to force their students to take negative space into account, composition teachers will frequently ask them to draw not the object itself but the space surrounding that object.  It is only by balancing the use of positive space with the use of negative space that elegant composition can be achieved.

This principle also applies to characterisation.

 

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by Jonathan M

A Different Style of Criticism

Erudition is conformity.  It is to read the ‘right books’ and write in the ‘correct manner’.  It is to be a good citizen.  It is to bend the knee in order to be anointed with the kiss of acceptance.

I write the way I write and I think the way I think because of the books I read, the films I watch, the podcasts I listen to and the people I look up to.  I am a part of a set of traditions; Cahiers du Cinema meets Science Fiction fandom meets analytical philosophy meets critical theory.  Because I am a part of these various traditions, I measure my improvement in terms of my asymptotic approach to their styles and values.  In this I am no different to anyone else whether you are seeking to publish short stories, climb the corporate ladder or find love.  We all bend the knee.

This is one reason why it is always a pleasure to encounter something that is both undeniably brilliant and completely detached from the intellectual traditions to which you aspire and belong.

 

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by Jonathan M

Absence of Mind (2010) By Marilynne Robinson – For Christ’s Sake Let it Go!

It has become something of a critical cliché to end a review or an essay with a phrase such as “…and find out something about what it means to be human”.  The elevation of this simple characterisation of a piece’s themes and ideas into a full-blown cliché is partly a reflection of its over-use by unimaginative critics and partly a reflection of the sheer number of works of art that attempt to engage with issues of personal identity.  Indeed, the crisis of identity is perhaps the central recurring theme behind all of modern literature.  However, despite all of the books, films and plays devoted to excavating conceptions of the self, surprisingly little headway has been made.  We are still alienated from our deepest desires.  We are still trapped between the need to be social creatures and the desire to be true to ourselves.  We are still fundamentally estranged from each other’s subjectivities.

In fact, art’s lack of progress has been so complete that one might well be tempted to conclude that art — whether it be literary, dramatic, cinematic or figurative — simply lacks the capacity to generate the kind of robust truths that stand up to close intellectual scrutiny.  After all, if one does not turn to interpretative dance when one wants to discern the nature of a neutron star, why should we turn to poetry when we want to discover who we are?

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson’s extended essay Absence of Mind – The Dispelling of Inwardness From The Modern Myth of The Self is an attempt to address this very question.  Robinson feels that the rise and rise of scientific conceptions of the self have resulted in a general impoverishment of discourse surrounding human nature.  An impoverishment that has left us alienated not only from the many ancient and richly metaphysical traditions embodied by the arts, philosophy, and religion, but also from ourselves and our willingness to trust our own insights into who we are and what we want.

Unfortunately, rather than clearly defenestrating these shrunken visions of humanity and providing a sustained and rigorous argument in favour of a richly metaphysical conception of the self, Robinson provides us with a one hundred and thirty page-long howl of entitlement.  Robinson is sloppy in her choice of targets, meretricious in her engagement with science and vacuous in her proclamations.  Absence of Mind is a book that fizzles with anger at the idea that scientists refuse to take Robinson’s private intuitions into account when formulating their theories but when the time comes for Robinson to articulate a reason — any reason — as to why they should, she remains oddly silent.  Absence of Mind is a book written with little insight and with little to say.

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by Jonathan M

The Red and The Black (1830) – Forever Tumbling Upwards

The politics of sympathy and social advancement is always a tricky question.

Many stories feature characters with humble origins overcoming set-backs and challenges in order to rise to positions of prominence traditionally unthinkable for people from their social class.  Consider, for example, d’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels; who would have thought that that nearly penniless member of the provincial nobility who crept into Paris on a sandy-coloured horse would wind up, thirty years later, as Marshal of France?  Stories in which sympathetic characters rise to the top of their societies serve to redeem those societies.  Indeed, the message to be taken away from the Three Musketeers is what while Louis XIII may have been a weak and easily-manipulated King who was cuckolded by the Prime Minister of his nation’s greatest military rival, he did at least preside over a society in which the cream could rise to the top.  Cardinal Richelieu is a sinister and ruthless presence but he can recognise talent when he sees it and this capacity for well-deserved social advancement means that Louis XIII’s France, much like its King, deserves a reputation for being ‘Just’.  If only a little bit.  The flip side of this depiction of heroic cream rising to the top is to be found in the genre known as the Picaresque novel.  Characterised by such works as the autobiography of Bienvenuto Cellini and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), the Picaresque novel frequently features a roguish and frequently unsympathetic character achieving wealth and status through under-handed means.  The implication being that if Barry Lyndon achieved wealth and position by being a scoundrel, it is probably safe to assume that the same is true of anyone in that society who possesses either wealth or status.

The difference between works such as The d’Artagnan Romances and The Luck of Barry Lyndon demonstrate that by adopting a different stance towards their protagonists, authors can adopt entirely different attitudes towards the societies they are describing.  A sympathetic character who rises to the top redeems his society by his accomplishment while an unsympathetic character damns his.

Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir walks a fine line between these two approaches to social advancement.  Stendhal tries hard to make his protagonist Julien Sorel appear sympathetic but despite being intelligent, ambitious, capable, romantic and democratic in sentiment, Sorrel’s rise to the top of French society constitutes one of the most vicious and wide-ranging social satires imaginable.  Stendhal’s book leaves the period of the post-Napoleonic Bourbon Restoration looking hysterical, preposterous and profoundly unjust.

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by Jonathan M

How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007) By Pierre Bayard – What is not Said Trumps What is not Read

In a recent issue of his popular history podcast Hardcore History, Dan Carlin expressed a note of regret regarding the direction that historical scholarship has taken over the last generation or so.  Time was, argues Carlin, that historians were in the Big Picture business: They would study whole periods of human history, cogitate upon them and then produce epic works of scholarship that drew upon their entire reserves of specialist knowledge and general scholarship in order to produce some universal moral or theory about human nature and society.  The exemplars of this type of historian, argues Carlin, are Will and Ariel Durant — whose 11-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning The Story of Civilization is, shockingly, currently out of print — but I would also list Kenneth Waltz whose Man, The State , And War (1959) remains one of the foundation texts of International Relations.

Contemporary scholars, suggests Carlin, are not just specialists but niche-dwellers.  Their interests lie precisely not in the Big Picture but in high definition images of microscopically small areas.  Most contemporary academic scholarship focuses upon areas so precisely defined and delimited that not only have the products of academic research become increasingly irrelevant to the intellectual culture at large, they are frequently inaccessible and incomprehensible even to other academics working in similar fields.  Modern academia is about depth, not breadth.  Specificity, not generality.

Of course, this is the result of changes in the culture of higher education.  Even after the Second World War, university education in general and post-graduate education in particular were still comparatively uncommon allowing researchers enough intellectual lebensraum in which to discuss big ideas without replicating each other’s work and treading on each others’ toes.  However, as the number of post-graduate students increased, so too did the need for more and more people to carve out professional niches for themselves.  As population numbers increased, so did competition for intellectual territory and in order to survive, young graduate students were forced to carve out small specialised intellectual niches that could sustain an entire career’s worth of research purely through the depth and power of their obscurity and inaccessibility.

This process of specialisatilon has resulted in academic criticism becoming divorced from the public sphere.  While humanities academics still do contribute to accessible cultural journals such as the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Sight & Sound and The London Review of Books, their public writings are frequently of a profoundly different character and form than their professional writings.  Indeed, the likes of A.C.Grayling and Richard Dawkins are famous public intellectuals but the works that make them well known are not necessarily the works that got them their professorships.

This shift in the humanities from an emphasis on breadth of knowledge to depth of specialisation is what lies behind Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.  The book is an extended essay that uses wit and provocation to poke fun at the cult of the specialist and argue for a return to an intellectual climate that championed the generalist over the specialist and the creative thinker over the niche-dweller.  Bayard’s book is not only funny and beautifully written, it is a wake-up call to an academic culture that foolishly surrendered the hustle and bustle of the intellectual marketplace for the easily-defended comfort of the ivory tower.

I just hope that the academics can find the stairs by themselves.

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by Jonathan M

Total Kheops (1995) By Jean-Claude Izzo – The Weight of Memory and The Responsibility of Attention

There are so many different ways in which to see the world.  Sometimes, the differences between perspectives are so vast that it seems impossible that such a range of divergent emotional responses could have been provoked by the same thing or place.  A simple country lane can be a beautiful holiday spot for walkers, a barely tolerable distance from home for commuters and a symbol of economic under-development for an ambitious local councillor.  There is only one world but it is perpetually made and destroyed by the act of looking upon it.  Wisdom lies not in the beauty or definition of one’s vision of the world but rather in one’s capacity for understanding that our vision of the world is not the only one that exists.  That other perspectives are out there and that they all have a value, even the ones that are profoundly ugly and especially the ones that hurt us when we entertain them.

The first book of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy is a book that is weighted down by the multitude of ways of looking at the French city of Marseilles.  Unlike other works of crime or historical fiction with an iconic location, it is not a book that attempts to capture the spirit of a particular place and time.  Instead, the book argues for both the absolute necessity and utter impossibility of ever completely grasping all of the different ways in which to see a particular place or person.  The book’s French title Total Kheops — lamentably released in English under the title Total Chaos — takes its name from a track on the first solo album by Kheops, the DJ of the Marseilles-based Rap outfit IAM.  ‘Total Kheops’ refers to a situation of impossible complexity.  Un bordel total.  A complete cluster fuck.

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by Jonathan M

The Purpose of Criticism – Towards an Aesthetics of Ideas

The other day, I listened to a podcast that challenged my vision of criticism by bringing together two previously distinct ideas that had been kicking around the inside of my skull for a little while now.  The podcast in question was an episode of The Marketplace of Ideas in which Colin Marshall has a conversation with the literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, author of Literature, Science and a New Humanties (2008).

Gottschall cuts a fascinating figure.  Here is a someone who has put themselves through the meat-grinder that is graduate school only to emerge on the other side having retained enough passion and ambition to carve out a career at a time when graduate school is increasingly becoming little more than an aspiration-trap through which universities monetise the intellectual fantasies of their students, exploiting their youth and naivete by dangling before them the prospect of an academic career that is utterly beyond the reach of all but the most gifted and driven of supplicants.  In a voice tinged with bitterness, Gottschall speaks of how the humanities have lost their way.  Rather than studying literature and unearthing truths about the books they work on, most literary humanists are now engaged in the construction of elaborate intellectual architectures.  Cathedrals of ideas drawing upon the pseudoscience of centuries past in order to construct readings and interpretations of texts that are completely unfalsifiable and completely uninformative.  This is not study conducted with the purpose of uncovering truth, this is study as a form of self-indulgent play.  Gottschall’s solution to the problem is to replace Literary Theory with science and quantitative analysis as the analytical engine of the humanities.

I have not read Gottschall’s book and so I cannot comment upon the feasibility of his manifesto, but the idea of literary criticism as a form of play does chime quite neatly with some of the aspects I enjoyed in M.D. Lachlan’s recent Fantasy novel Wolfsangel (2010).  That novel, it seems to me, is about exploring a metaphysical construct.  A spell, a prophecy and a werewolf that are bound together by the powers of madness, pain, love and identity.

Is Gottschall correct that criticism is completely severed from any notion of truth?  If he is, then that need not be a bad thing.

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