George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

I’m with the consensus. Best yet.

For whatever reason, A Song of Ice and Fire really has its hooks in me by this point. A number of people I know who’ve read the series thus far have told me that A Storm of Swords is their favorite, and thus far I have to agree. More than anything, the book is good because Martin maintains a general inventiveness in plot and depth in character.

To return to the running thread of the discussion, my concern with Martin has been the extent to which he revises Tolkein’s influence on the genre. Right now, my concern is that the genre, nearly without exception takes a European center to its fantastic settings. Middle Earth is Europe, and the Shire is rural England. We know this. Even a Moorcock, who so thoroughly revised Tolkein’s ethical framework, maintained this European focus. His principal non-Melibonean characters were either Europeans by another name or exoticized others, sympathetic or no. In Tolkein, Sauron enlists the forces of Islam, if one scratches below the surface.

There can be no doubt that Westeros is, for the greater part, Europe. You could argue about Dorne, but the rest is there. I make this point without judgement, but with some concern. Why? Because one of the reasons I engage with literature the way I do is because literature, particularly more lowbrow forms of it, those for “entertainment’s sake” shape the way we as people see our world and the other people in it. This, and the fact that when we imagine that something is “just entertainment” we are all the less likely to be conscious as people of how what we read (or otherwise consume) affects our thinking about our world. My concern is that the thoroughly Eurocentric character of the genre can leave a reader with the impression that Europe–or the settler colonies Europeans established–is the center of the world and its history. This can transfer easily, especially in one of the settler colonies like that in which I live, to people. White people become the center of the world’s action, and their phenotypes become the norm. This type of thing has concrete, destructive consequences.

So, Martin doesn’t change this aspect of the genre. The question then becomes, how does he handle Europe? Discussions about what Europe means are very important, just like though we know Marx didn’t deal in depth, in his major works, with the non-European world, what he had to say about Europe is of enduring importance.

The colonialist line on Europe is that it took a civilizing turn away from the rest of the world when the Greeks defeated the Persians. Where others had superstitions, Europeans had philosophy. This predicated the Roman and British Empires both, and is why the English-speaking peoples gave us heavy industry.

There is a second, less discussed, and much more accurate and useful take on Europe. Rather than a Europe that breaks from the rest of the world with the Greeks, we have a Europe that breaks in the modern period. Of interest here is Carlo Ginzburg’s work, which I’ve discussed before. In essence, what we see with Ginzburg’s work is the process of church orthodoxy rooting out–physically–localized, indigenous religious practices under the guise of a struggle against witchcraft. This happens both under the context of the new Reformation and the development of modern, global, colonialist capitalism. The point here is that Europe was, as it continues to be, split unto itself.

We imagine Europeans, and, it follows, their white descendants in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, as peoples entirely culturally–genetically, to the biological racists–distinct from the indigenous peoples they displaced in their colonialist primitive accumulation. However one deals with this, though, the arrival of those Europeans who settled other peoples’ lands was the end of another, European process as much as it was the beginning of another. What a Ginzburg points to is a Europe that was as much connected to its particular, local land as any indigenous culture could be. In this view, Europe split from the rest of the world when it cut off its own roots in its own land.

All this discussion, because Martin deals with this process, in his way. Jojen Reed is the best example, at least in Storm of Swords. Bran, too, but Jojen is the one who is conscious of the processes involved. Tolkein gave us happy Hobbits living in their English countryside, but Martin gets to something more real: indigenous peoples under seige by settlers. The settlers–think the kings of Westeros, with their ideologues, the maesters–imagine that what had been there before is now entirely gone, but they’re wrong. The land still functions through people like Jojen.

Why is this important? Because one of the sustaining fictions of white supremacy is the lie, cherished as fact by explicit racists and privileged white liberals both, that “the Indians are gone.” I can’t count how many times I’ve heard that precise sentence from people who considered themselves on the left. Indigenous people are not gone, though white settlers did their damnedest. And who were those white people? Not people who were at some basic essence different from those they displaced, but people whose bond to their land had been forcibly cut, who found themselves at some level unmoored, and, as such, capable of great social violence. I return to Chief Seattle, to whom I will continue to return, again and again:

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.

Frank Miller, Batman: Year One

I had and exchange with the tremendous Matthew Southworth on Twitter.

Valuing, as I do, the opinion of creators in a medium–Southworth not only the artist on the brilliant Stumptown comic, but a musician as well–I figured it might be time for me to get over my distaste for Frank Miller. Not even so much for Miller’s work, which I’ve largely avoided, but for Frank Miller.

As this isn’t a comics blog, a word or two about Miller. He is one of two names that’s near-always mentioned as part of the Great Growing-Up of comics as a medium in the mid-1980′s. Alan Moore is the other name, almost always mentioned first despite alphabetical order. Where Moore’s work is cited for literary ambition, Miller’s work, particularly his run with Batman, above all The Dark Night Returns, is tagged with terms like, “gritty realism,” and “adult-oriented.” Batman, in Miller’s world, is intensely violent and sociopathic, but sociopathic against criminals. He is a criminal against criminals. Society, in Miller, consists of helpless, faceless masses, a small number of venal movers and shakers, and a vastly smaller still number of decent people who actively try to improve society.

Not as problematic as Miller’s Occupy rant.

So, Miller clearly has never been a little-”d” democrat, and he showed it with a now-famous rant against Occupy, in 2011, published, no link provided here but easily enough found, on his own blog:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

And that was just the first full paragraph. Moore responded:

I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it.

So, when Southworth pointed to Miller’s Batman: Year One as his all-time favorite comic, it’s not so much that I was sceptical of its quality, but I approached it with some concern. I’d tried previously to make it through The Dark Night Returns, but very simply could not stomach Batman’s sociopathy.

Batman: Year One, despite the title, isn’t about Batman, however, but about James Gordon, future Commissioner Gordon. [ADDENDUM: to be clear, it's Batman who takes the primary focus in the book. What I'd argue, though, is that the real drama takes place with Gordon's development.] Part of the problem with a world view like Miller’s is that it substitutes contradiction for nuance. Batman is a criminal who fights crime. Contradiction. Miller, despite this, achieves some nuance with Gordon. He has an extramarital affair, but is torn up about it. Not that remorse is an excuse, but it does show some real complexity. I suppose if anything, reading Year One gives me the clear impression that, at his best, Miller can write.

The problem of course is that Miller, like Moore, demands to be read not only for entertainment, but for ideas. And so, while I agree with China Mieville that we need to allow ourselves to enjoy art even when the politics of the work repulse us, part of the enjoyment of a work of art for me is precisely the process of critiquing it on among other things political grounds.

This is not an original observation–Moore himself made it among others–but the thorough reprehensibility of Miller’s social politics is entirely on display throughout Year One. Above all, his famous misogyny. Selina Kyle, Catwoman, is a prostitute. Most of the women we see here are as it happens involved in sex work. The exception to this is the colleague–subordinate, actually–with whom Gordon has an affair, and Gordon’s wife. The partner in Gordon’s affair, in Miller’s imagination, is, despite her professional credentials, really just ready to jump in the sack with her boss. Gordon’s wife is the only woman in the thing who is not, fundamentally, a sexual object, and Gordon is, clearly, turned of by her. In Miller’s world, if a woman isn’t simply and completely sexual, she’s repulsive.

Even in something like this, which from what I gather is leagues away from something as gratuitously brutal as Sin City, Miller’s work drips misanthropy. This is not simply a moral or political failing, but an aesthetic one. People in general, in Miller, are pretty rotten creatures. It begs the question, then, why there is any virtue in fighting crime. Why protect people who are themselves crap–because Miller, fan of Ayn Rand, certainly sees people that way. Heroes tower above sheep. Rand, whatever else you’ll say–and I know this only from others’ reports–had John Galt up pick up his marbles and leave. That made sense, given the point she was making about society. There is no reason to help people if people in general are truly crap.

Revenge motivates Miller’s Batman, not any sense of wanting to improve society. We see how the Wayne parents’ murder scarred their son, Bruce, but there’s no indication–necessary for aesthetic reasons–that Bruce transferred the pain he felt because of the trauma to any kind of appreciation for living people. For Bruce to become Batman, he needs to have said at some point to himself,

Wow. It sucked the my parents were killed in front of me. But look at this living person in front of me. He’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. They’re worth fighting for.

With that thought process, Batman could be Batman and still keep his “darkness.” Without that kind of thought process, you can’t explain why someone would put in the effort into becoming Batman. As it stands, Batman is really just a d**k. But my impression is that Miller understands being a d**k better than he understands anything else.

George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

Beset by illness, I plowed through the last 200 pages of A Clash of Kings much more quickly than I expected to. A part of me had thought I’d finish both it and the ensuing A Storm of Swords before the third season of the HBO series began, but that train’s left the station. 960 pages is long. Needless to say, the best part of being fairly sick was the time spent with this book. Generally I felt awful.

Substantively, A Clash of Kings improved on A Game of Thrones. We all miss Ned Stark, but what struck me, having seen the series, was how well-developed the characters are in this second book compared to the series. Arya Stark stands out. There’s a lot more going on with her in the book than the show. So too Davos, Stannis Baratheon’s “Onion Knight.” These are fantastic characters, and the show simply does not do them justice.

Any glance at any of the bits I’ve written on fantasy here will reveal that one of my hobby horses is to bemoan how thoroughly Eurocentric the genre as it exists is. I noted that while Martin certainly demolishes Tolkein’s almost entirely-male conceptual precedent, he does so in a world that is, basically, late Medieval Europe. In particular, I am concerned when indigenous people–in Martin’s world we have “the Children of the Forest” are “all gone” or at least presumed to be.

My point has nothing to do with fantasy lit per se but rather that I’ve had too many conversations with actually-existing white people (it’s white people that concern me most because I am one, and because they still hold, as a group, social sway in this country) who say things like, “gee, the Native Americans really had a good thing going. Too bad they’re all gone.” This, despite the very real presence of all kinds of Native people not only on reservations but living in your city, white man. This approach allows this country to not deal with the present results of past genocide, and it’s not good. So, when I see that trope play itself out in fantasy lit, I know that it soothes the white subconscious in a way that will not move us forward.

So, let me then say that it’s becoming clear that Martin’s approach to indigenous people is more nuanced than was clear, or at least clear to me, in A Game of Thrones. First, we meet Jojen, who has the ability of greensight. He is of a group of people who, while not children of the forest, “keep the old ways.” Those old ways, clearly, still work in this new world of Westeros, and that is leagues removed from the idea that “those nice people are all dead and gone now.” It puts the question of our full, human relationship to land and ancestry into the present, rather than the past. There are other examples as well: Bran Stark is a “warg,” inhabiting the body of his direwolf in dreams, and one gets the feeling that we will meet children of the forest in later volumes. Good for Martin.

I’m nearly 200 pages into the third book as I write this. I don’t feel like I’ll bother with the HBO series for some time, if at all. Good series, better books.

Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing

I have an ambivalent relationship to Alan Moore.  On the one hand, I admire his skill immensely.  Anyone who has genuinely mastered a craft and has, further, added to it, deserves respect.  Also, I sympathize with anyone whose ambition is create a work that will earn a chosen medium the respect it deserves but is often denied.  I work in popular (often “folk,” a term I really don’t care for) music, and Moore in comics.  I fancy myself an artist, and so does Moore.  All this is great.

Scriptor asinus est.

At the same time, having taken some Latin classes when I was a schoolboy, I recognize, to take the example, Moore’s frequent use of schoolboy Latin for the smarmy pretension that it actually is.  I know that dropping Latin phrases makes a person seem well-educated, but believe me, people, if I can read it without a dictionary or Google, all it means is that Moore attended Latin class when he was a kid, and he may or may not have passed it.

I also–and at some point I want to write a piece on this–take strong issue with the elevation of Watchmen above, more or less, every comic ever written.  It was at the right place at the right time, but as a coherent critique of the fascist tendency implicit in both the superhero as a literary device and United States history writ large, it misses the mark.  No understanding of race at all in it: Moore’s America is a drama among white people.  The real America is not so narrow and never was.

So, Moore’s Swamp Thing: everything that bothered me about Moore in Watchmen, which made Promethea unreadable for me (I tried) and which seemed toned down in the British setting of V for Vendetta, all this everything is there in Swamp Thing.  Somehow, however, it’s all made tolerable by the near-total inanity of the titular character.  The Swamp Thing itself, a walking, talking plant, is such an idiotic idea that the best of Moore’s brilliance–and to be sure, he’s brilliant–can shine.

I don’t know the back story of why Moore took on the series, and I’m not inclined to research it.  I prefer to imagine, possibly correctly, that, balls swollen from Watchmen, he asked for the single worst character in the DC universe, the one every writer dreaded getting, so he could do something fantastic and prove how small minded the other writers on the staff were.  No idea if that happened, but it would be nice.

The introduction makes a big deal about the first storyline in the book, which details how any why the Swamp Thing came into being, completely ignoring Len Wein‘s original idea, which, knowing nothing about it, apparently didn’t really make a lot of sense.  I will say that Moore’s take works beautifully: it’s internally consistent, and has a veneer of scientific plausibility that makes one forget in the moment how completely unrealistic the idea of a walking, talking plant actually is.  This reader forgot, while reading it, how totally stupid the actual premise of the comic was.  That’s an achievement.

Ultimately, I like my comics less artsy than highbrow “graphic novels,” but more substantial than run-of-the-mill superhero stuff.  A guy like Jack Kirby, however, I can admire because it’s so clear how talented he was, and how thoroughly he was in control of his medium.  In general I find Moore’s position–capital “A” “Artist”–annoying at best and juvenile at worst, even if the juvenile in question would doubtless be a child prodigy.  With Swamp Thing, the character itself tones everything down a bit, and we’re left with Moore’s considerable talent and intelligence.  Go ye forth and read.

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Short take: I don’t think I’ve read better fantasy than Game of Thrones. It beats hell out of The Hobbit, for sure.

Longer take: I saw some of the episodes of the HBO series and was impressed, and I’d seen Martin’s name referenced all over the place as someone whose work was an “attempt to revise Tolkein,” the quote from no place in particular but surely used by more than one observer. I’m all for ditching the Tolkein model of retrograde monarchist, legitimist, patriarchal, racist fantasy (adjectives is no particular order).

I will not rehearse the plot, widely available elsewhere. More of interest is the role Martin may play in junking the Tolkein model, and then the larger question of whether or not the genre can even be salvaged in a socio-political sense.

Before I hit the political stuff, I should point out that not only is the book better than what I’ve seen in the series (to be sure a worthy adaptation), it’s as well-written as any fantasy I’ve read. Martin is not simply an exceptional technician, but rather he brings a broad and deep understanding of human social development in both cultural and historical terms. I imagine I would disagree with his take on some of these understandings, but we would actually have something to disagree about. Everything about his work indicates not only an exceptional curiosity but a willingness and ability to do the reading it’s satisfaction requires.

So, on to the scorecard. Round One, Gender. Martin comes out of this gate strong, and not only takes the point but for my money gets a bonus for actually having a much more forward approach to gender than not only Tolkein–low-hanging fruit, you might say–but than the HBO series. Meaning, unlike the series, Martin’s book doesn’t undermine itself with soft-core porn.

The issue with gender is both a matter of women and men. If Martin deals with it well, we see a range of ways that characters can be women and be men, and also the ways that they are socialized into relatively constrained roles. This he does.

First, women. Most important is that Martin draws his female characters as fully as his males. The Stark sisters, Sansa and Arya are instructive: both are female children of a great lord, so each has enormous status and no institutional power. They boys get the institutional power. Martin clarifies the gender role in this way. However, and this is the key, the two respond entirely differently to the situation. Sansa wants to play at courtly romance, and Arya learns how to use a sword herself. Two responses to the same problem.

Outlining the problem, Martin then puts forward the exceptions, which in reality–fantasy is fantasy, but it must have resonance with our actual experience as people to have meaning–happen consistently. How do women find themselves wielding institutional power in a rigidly patriarchal institutional system? Two ways: 1) through men and 2) by creating a new set of rules. For the first, we have Cersei Lannister, who, once Robert Baratheon shuffles off his mortal coil, acts as regent more or less for her son, the contemptible Joffrey.

Beauty, thy name is eyeball.

For possibility 2) above, we have Daenerys Targaryen. Emilia Clarke, who portrays her in the series, has taken no small amount of flack on Tumblr for her acting, which never bothered me as I don’t expect much from television. In any event, and though it barely begins in this first novel, we can see that Daenerys, in addition to developing personal qualities that fit her for wielding political power, creates a new set of rules. Receiving dragon’s eggs for a wedding gift and through magic of some sort hatching the dragons successfully, we see her becoming a political leader through the new rule: the person with the dragons makes the rules. Nobody will argue with the dragons. Clearly, this will be a thread a couple books down the road.

Second, men. Not just women, but men, too. And what, in Martin, is a man? Not just a rightful heir to the throne who now is a ranger, but we see a variety of men. Above all, we have Tyrion Lannister, widely considered the most interesting character of any. He is very likely the single clearest-thinker in the book, certainly the most decent in his family–not an achievement, as the near-universal villainy of the Lannisters is one of the weak elements in Martin’s conception–and a dwarf, disappointing to his father because he will never, in an obvious way, achieve martial valor expected of a man of his class. Tyrion has a full sexual life in his relationship with Shae, and shows himself to be a military asset despite his personal stature. Martin sketches the expections of a man, and then shows how real men in their diversity of being confound them.

Round two: legitimism. Martin exposes legitimism–the idea of a “rightful” king descended by blood–for the farce it is. Like Marx’s critique of political economy’s abstraction from actual history in Capital, v. 1′s famous section on “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” so does Martin note that state power is, in some original struggle, always stolen. The sitting king, Robert Baratheon, stole his throne. By the end of the book, Joffrey, publicly known as his son and heir but in fact his wife’s son through an incestuous relationship with her brother, takes the throne. The veneer of legitimacy there, but not legitimacy in fact.

Martin’s larger point, similar to Moorcock’s with Elric, is that monarchs were, as a group, awful people who did awful things to keep themselves in power. It went to their heads. The king Baratheon replaced was insane and presided over slaughter. Baratheon, friend to Eddard Stark, the most sympathetic of the noble lords in the book, is himself sympathetic but at the same time miserable as a ruler and not at all suited to it. Joffrey, his replacement, is petulant and cruel. Very simply, quite the contrary to Tolkein’s absurdly sanitized true king, there are no good kings in Martin, and the violence they use to maintain themselves is only legitimate in hindsight, never in advance.

Nearly done.

Round Three (in this fight): Class.  I might better put this as “social identity,” but given the text “class” is the more appropriate word.  Tolkein’s approach to the genre, which largely defined its terms, was rigidly classist, fairly obviously.  The drama was between elites, and the laboring classes showed up for the battles.  Not surprising from a Tory.

It is, at least thus far, the same in Game of Thrones, to my disappointment.  To be sure, Martin will tell the story Martin intuits, and one likely can’t resolve all the tensions in a genre in one novel or even one series, just as much as Tolkein crystallized the form of the genre rather than invented it.  In any event, though there is much opportunity to really develop a broader look at class, Martin elects not to.  One imagines he could.

That’s all for now. I’m in the second book and will talk about indigenous people when I do the write-up of that one.

Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: the Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton

I had known of Anthony Braxton for decades, but it’s only in the past year or so that I’ve really been able to connect to his music.  Partially, this is because I have a newfound living situation in which I can listen to what I want when I want to.  Bouncing around the internet, I read a post on the man’s work that made me realize that for most of us, digging Braxton or, really any of the avant-garde so-called, is a solitary pursuit, most often on headphones.

The single, blissfully single life affords this possibility.  That’s meant that I’ve gotten back to exploring the “free jazz“–we know the label isn’t ideal–movement of the 1960′s forward.  Lots of late Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Carter–a lot of John Carter–and Ornette of course, though especially Skies of America.  I’d heard much more of the New York school as opposed to Chicago, so opening up to Braxton was something of a revelation: there is a lot more to this music than just “energy.”  To be clear about what we’re dealing with, here you go.  Not exactly the same quartet, but the same year and 3/4 the same personnel:

Lock followed Braxton’s quartet on its 1985 tour of Britain.  The resulting book, Forces in Motion, takes the form of tour diary interspersed with interviews, primarily of Braxton but also of each of the group’s other members, followed by three postscripts on relevant topics.  Lock has other books, and one at the library here, that are more systematic overviews of the music, but this is what it is and the relatively unvarnished text preserves a spontaneity that among other things puts Braxton in a great light.  The man may have a reputation for forbidding music, but personally he’s very engaging with an enormously sweet quality to him.  He comes off as a very, very kind individual.

The takeaway from the book is very simply that it serves as what seems to me an ideal introduction to the deep significance of Braxton’s project.  It’s, for lack of a better word, a spiritual endeavor, among other things, and though he doesn’t put it in precisely these terms Braxton is trying, through sound, to turn back the world-nonsense of these last five hundred years.  As quick as he is to draw influence from white musicians–Braxton is generous even to those, like Phil Woods, who critique him viciously–Braxton demolishes the philosophical, musical, and spiritual underpinnings of white supremacy.

I took a class once in, more or less, critical theory, and the professor really wanted us to understand and engage the ideas at hand.  She assigned a fair amount of Foucault, but mostly from Power-Knowledge, a collection of, mainly, interviews.  She noted that when Foucault just talked, he said what he meant, and it made everything easier.  The same, I can glean from the excepts from Braxton’s Tri-axium Writings, would be true of Braxton.  If you want to really get everything, read the Tri-axium Writings, just like if you really want to understand Marx, you need to read Capital.  That said, Braxton can sum things up and give a person a lot to go forward with.  The book provides this.

Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada

As I have noted more than once before, Ishmael Reed is likely my favorite living author and certainly my favorite living satirist.  Flight to Canada is a very good friend’s Reed book of choice.

This may very well be the Reed book with which to start.  Mumbo Jumbo certainly puts forward a broad critical-theoretical framework in a way that Flight to Canada doesn’t, but by Reed’s standards the fact that Flight to Canada feels, using a more conventional syntax that either Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down or Mumbo Jumbo, like a more conventional read, makes it a good way in.

Reed, as far as substance goes, sacrifices nothing.  Set during and immediately after the United States’ Civil war, the topic here is black resistance.  Correctly, Reed gives us no compliant Blacks in the narrative, but rather shows numerous different, active responses to slavery and racist violence.  There’s the titular escape, but also Uncle Robin’s staying close to Master Swille and ultimate reliance on ancestral gods/spirits to inherit his estate: certainly a victory.  Reed has a sure sense of what resistance is, but a broad notion of what it might be.  Famously, on p. 88 of my edition:

Each man to his own Canada.

Words to live by.

Briefly: Reed’s humor is entirely on display throughout the novel.  Frequently, I laughed out loud, and as far as raw, satirical humor goes, his only equal might be the Marx Brothers at their best.  Truly, he’s that funny.

I’m at a loss for further words and have already returned the book to the library.  Get the book an read it for yourself, and fill with gratitude.

David Anthony Durham, The Sacred Band

I read something recently that made the point that fantasy writers are in a bind of sorts.  For marketing purposes, one must write a trilogy, because that’s what the audience expects, after Tolkien.  However, third books in trilogies apparently sell very poorly.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  I know I was the first person to check out David Anthony Durham‘s The Sacred Band, the third book in the Acacia trilogy.  People are missing out, I suppose.

The short story is that Durham pulled it off.  I am not sure, given his chops, that this is that great an achievement.  He is more writer than most people who make their living from it.

More interesting is that Durham resolved a number of the tensions in the series in good ways.  In particular–and I don’t know his politics, I don’t know his political vocabulary, so I don’t know how he would phrase this–he reverses the fascist tendency in the genre to great effect.

I use the word very deliberately.  Tolkein, despite having fought the Hun himself, and despite the whole Lord of the Rings series working in its way as among other things a proxy narrative for the war against Hitler, used deeply fascist logic in his approach to his subject.  Moorcock aimed his punch well, only to pull it:

He claimed that his work was primarily linguistic in its original conception, that there were no symbols or allegories to be found in it, but his beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don’t think these books are ‘fascist’, but they certainly don’t exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.

In 2012, this is like some colleague of Pat Buchanan‘s saying that he’s not saying Pat’s precisely racist, but that he would do better to keep his mouth shut.  If it quacks, it’s a duck.  Yes, Tolkein’s books were fascist, but not the fascism of the actual Brownshirt.  His was the fascism of we see so well portrayed in “Heimat.”  Resistance to change become willingness to back genocide.  Be clear: Tolkein’s solution to conflict is genocide.  When Sauron goes, so goes his entire crew.

Zizek is on-topic:

Picking and choosing is the problem.  I’ve had all kinds of discussions with people who want to like the idea of Buddhism.  (Leave aside the practice of it.)  People balk at the idea that attachment produces suffering.  “But I love my dear husband!  That’s good!”  Sure, it’s good.  You suffer over it, though.  Why?  Because of your discriminating mind.  Tolkein loves the Hobbits but he hates the Orcs.  The Hobbits are good and the Orcs are bad.  So, who commits the genocide?  The good guys.  Durham rebuts:

[Rialus:] “Yes, but they want war and conquest, murder just as much. They are vile. Just vile!”

[Aliver:] “They are not ‘just vile.’ There is more to them than that.  If you cannot see that, then you have only one of two choices: destroy them or be destroyed by them.” (524)

Can’t fault Aliver’s logic, and much of the US electorate would do well do consider its implications.

No character or group of people, in Durham, is without some perfectly comprehensible explanation for their behavior or pursuit that makes it impossible to dismiss him, her, or them as evil.  The adversary army, the Auldek, invades because evidence convinces them that they will once more become fertile in a new land.  Their actions are unfortunate, but very comprehensible.

This is how I see the genre, plainly: we have Tolkein, Moorcock’s critique, and then, broadly speaking, a hashing out between the two, with Tolkein holding sway above all commercially.  I have made it clear that I adore Moorcock, but his critique, aside from stylistic, is political and ontological, where Durham’s is ethical and historical.  Politically, Moorcock critiques Tolkein’s Toryism from an anarchist perspective, and denies the existence of good and evil, positing instead order and chaos.  Good for Moorcock!

While I might imagine that Durham and I both vote pragmatically left, there is nothing in the Acacia trilogy that is specifically political.  Rather, there is an ethical imperative: a person must act in a way that recognizes the fundamental humanity of all other humans.  Leave off that we are dealing with all kinds of different species in a fantasy novel.  The point is that everyone in the book has a backstory and everyone in the book wants to be happy.  If we recognize this impulse in another, it is impossible to slaughter him or her.  What did the orcs want, in Tolkein?  If Tolkein had dropped his Toryist, genocidal approach to the orcs, he might have noted that they didn’t create themselves, nor did they create their impulses.  Not that massacring villages is OK, but it’s an action.  The orcs as beings were another matter.  They were like a bunch of drunks: they needed to stop their nonsense, but they came by it honestly.

Durham’s historical critique aims not simply at Tolkein’s model of benign and therefore fictional monarchy but rather at large states generally, and United States as a historical process specifically.  The genre disguises it, as well as the specificities of the plot, but when we are talking about major societies run by slave power, in the case of Ushen Brae, slave souls’ power, the US needs to enter the discussion.  The point is that, quite the contrary to the typical fantasy-genre nonsense of a good monarchical state, Durham takes pains to illustrate how the states in the novels maintain themselves through the extraction of labor power from subject populations.  The royal family, adhering to the contours of the genre, provides focus for the plot, but their state has a rotten moral core and Durham makes no bones about it.  If one were to apply his basic question–how do states maintain themselves?–to the US, the US would look pretty bad.  The central role of the slave trade in Acacia’s fortunes obliquely, as Acacia is a supplier rather than consumer of slaves, inevitably raises the question of how the United States became a world power in the nineteenth century.  At least, it ought to.  This is what distinguishes Durham from Moorcock.  Where Moorcock took a contrary position to Tolkein on abstract ideological grounds, Durham does so on concrete historical grounds.  Actually-existing large states, he notes, have always been ugly.

Well-played, Durham.

Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

Cover of Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, Book 2)

I suppose I should sum up right at the beginning.  Both Frank Herbert and I should have left well-enough alone: he in the writing, and me in the reading.  I had been told that none of Dune‘s sequels was cut from anything resembling the same quality of cloth, and Dune Messiah proved the point.

Famously, Miles Davis asked John Coltrane why he soloed for so long.  Coltrane responded that he didn’t know how to stop.  Miles then said, “take the horn out of your mouth.”  I side in that discussion with Coltrane, but Miles, had he been speaking with Frank Herbert, would have been right on point.  Put down the pen.  If nothing else, Dune Messiah is a cautionary tale about the dangers of continued writing after a story is over.

A few points about Dune itself.  It straddled a lot of lines politically, and this allowed some appeal.  Paul Atreides, led the Fremen, an occupied, indigenous underclass on its own planet, Arrakis, to not only power but to conquest of other planets.  Written in the 1960′s, Dune benefited from the broader historical context of the anti-imperialist struggle.  One sympathized with the Fremen, who were the good guys.  Herbert, as I noted in my first piece, focused on Paul–we might call him “Lawrence of Arrakis”–for reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of.  Was it a plot device or did Herbert see natives as historically passive?  We find out in Dune Messiah that, indeed, natives are historically passive.  No surprise here, but certainly disappointment.

The bulk of the struggle in the book, if not necessarily the plot, is Paul’s regret over his role in history.  He unleashed a Fremen jihad, leading to the deaths of billions, and can do nothing to stop it.  Poor boy gets all weepy half the time in his imperial helplessness.  We now get Herbert’s take on liberation movements: aren’t they all just bloody messes in the end?  This is how liberals justify the maintenance of a bloody, but normalized, status quo.  Oh, but if we changed things, people might get hurt.  I don’t suggest that bloodshed should be taken lightly, but this line of thought is precisely the kind of thing that Gramsci was dealing with when he looked at liberals’ role in capitalist hegemony.

Much is made, largely through the character of Alia, Paul’s sister, of the cultishness of the Fremen.  Paul detests what he takes to be their naive superstition.  One can take this position if one wants, and we can agree or disagree–I myself  have had enough experience in meditation to no longer doubt the possibility of basically any religious sentiment or experience.  The problem here is that Paul detests this superstition, or religiosity, while getting filthy rich off it.  Paul, seen through the lens of his personal morality and its revulsion at bloodshed, is sympathetic.  Seen through the lens of his class position, he is, at best, an ass.

I have been told not to bother with the other books in the series.  An AA buddy told me that, in fact, they get progressively more inane.  I accept his advice.  Let it be known though, that Herbert did, in fact, write one great novel.  That’s an achievement.

Frank Herbert, Dune

For a few years, now, I’ve been wanting to reread Frank Herbert’s Dune.  I read it on my father’s recommendation as a kid, liked it, but was curious to return to it and see what Herbert’s subtext was.  I imagined it could go a lot of different ways: the spice could represent oil, etc., in the desert, yada yada.  Also, I had an interest in rereading the Sci-fi book–this one should indeed be called, using Octavia Butler‘s preferred term, “speculative fiction“–that people said rivaled The Lord of the Rings‘ detail without, I hoped the Tory politics.  I’ll note that the following will include no quotes: having paid 50 cents for my copy at the library’s book sale, I gave my copy to someone at the local Alano Club.  I had stopped in for a cup of coffee and to finish the book, she came up and started talking to me about it and expressed an interest, so I finished it and gave it to her.  She said that she was starting to be able to read complex material in her recovery, and I thought that was very  cool.

I expected on the one hand to enjoy the book immensely, and I did.  As a yarn, it’s top-notch, though I felt like the last quarter of the book actually moved more quickly than I wanted.  Likely, this is a good sign.  That said, it sped it its end, I thought.

More of an issue to me was my worry that reading Dune would be something like watching Lawrence of Arabia: well-done, but hopelessly orientalist.

Lawrence raises Arabs above their racial lot equals Paul raises Fremen above their racial lot.  This was my fear, and I hope it’s not an original point to point out that my fear was somewhat confirmed, though much less offensively so than might have been.  That is to say, the Fremen, though initially faceless, mysterious presences in the wild, certainly got good, deep characterizations in the book and Herbert’s exploration of Fremen culture denoted an author who had actually studied desert peoples as peoples with culture.  That’s a big deal in a white American author, and he must get credit for that.

The Lawrence of Arabia problem is to some extent conditioned by the plot, and once one has a good plot to go with it seems like it would be a bad idea to ditch it.  The Atreides family is given the desert planet Arrakis as a fief.  The Harkonnen family screws them out of it and kills the Atreides Duke, Leto.  His wife, Jessica, and son, Paul, flee to safety among the Fremen, assumed dead.  Paul takes on the role of messiah and leads the Fremen to take over the planet.

In this yarn, the Fremen themselves–the indigenous people–are functionally, as in, there would be no other way with this plot, props.  They allow the real action, that between the foreign rulers, to proceed.  Clearly, I’d argue that this ought to be reversed: I’d like to read the book in which the Atreides and Harkonnens serve as plot devices so the Fremen can reclaim their ancestral land fully.

I thought this through a bit, trying to find a way out for Herbert.  There is a real issue when abject oppression is involved, and when big institutions like, in the novel, an empire and intergalactic economy are the agents of oppression.  This is more or less analagous to the struggle indigenous people have faced vis-a-vis international capital over the last 500 years or so.  Survival as a people is the one act of resistance people can choose, and in choosing it people have not always been successful.

I remember a comment in the eighth volume of the UNESCO History of Africa in which the author, noting the political and economic difficulties most African states have experienced in independence, pointed out that the colonists indeed forced themselved on the colonized culturally through education.  The colonists taught culture, history, literature, philosophy and the like.  Africa, in independence, has produced world-class culture, he argued.  What the colonists emphatically did not teach the colonized was administration and technical expertise: i.e., how to run things.  That they consciously omitted from the curriculum.  This applies here, in Dune.  If the Fremen literally had no access to the type of knowledge they would need to run things, someone else would need to give it to them.  This would be, in the direct context of the plot, Paul Atreides.

It’s not enough, though.  After having this line of thought, I remembered The Black Jacobins.  I assume Herbert hadn’t read it.  Rather than a Lawrence of Arabia, why not a Toussaint L’Ouverture?  That is indeed historical precedent–because sci-fi needs to be believable.  Indeed, some of the elements that might have allowed this are in the book, particularly the little-referenced urban Fremen.  Those people, in close contact with the foreigners, would have access, were it written into the story, to the type of technical knowledge referenced above.  So, too, did Toussaint have white collaborators.  The figure of Kynes, the planetary ecologist, could have as easily gone native–the book uses the term–and followed a Fremen, Stilgar most likely, rather than, as the book has it, led.

Nonetheless, I’m reading Dune Messiah now.  Without question this is good stuff, and my critique is a reflection of how engaged I was with the book.