the casual critic

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.

All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.

As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.

The novel’s imaginative force is buttressed by the exquisite quality of the writing. Fusing form with substance, Peake’s writing is as ornate, meandering and overabundant as Gormenghast itself. His characters are archetypes in the Dickensian mould: hyper-real cyphers for roles that we all recognise (the Professor, the Nursemaid, the Servant), but written with enough depth and pathos to make them come alive as individuals. The narrative meanders like a river delta, with manifold branches that have no bearing on the plot. At one point there is a 60 odd page diversion about a party, which is as brilliant as it is pointless. Gormenghast is a gothic cathedral of words, not meant to be read as a story, but to be experienced aesthetically as the literary equivalent of stained glass and gargoyles.

Gormenghast does of course have a story, or stories, but it is Titus Groan’s coming-of-age and his quest to self-actualise as an individual, free from the oppressive heritage of Castle and Line, that is the thread through the trilogy. Abstracted from the gothic grandeur of its setting, this is a standard narrative: boy grows up, discovers love, does violence against his enemies, wrestles with the strictures of his parents, and sets out to find himself. Titus is not a traditional hero: he is often passive, irresolute or irrational, especially when contrasted to the self-sufficient Muzzlehatch or the ruthlessly calculating Steerpike. This does not much vary the traditional pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, as the universe helpfully makes up for Titus’ deficiencies by ensuring the necessary characters are in the right place at the right time.

This device works within the setting of a Castle, where it creates the sense of Gormenghast acting as a character in the story. It works considerably less well once Titus escapes the Castle at the end of the second book. The third novel is built on the same dream logic as the first two, but without the presence of the Castle as a focal point, both the plot and the story seriously tax the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. The areas Titus explores are equally isolated from a wider world as Gormenghast is, yet without any obvious reason for this. Characters reportedly move hundreds of miles, yet by cosmic coincidence arrive at the right place at the right time. Unlike Gormenghast, these locations do not function or exist in their own right, they are there simply as canvas for the plot. The same applies to most of the characters in the third book, and in particular the women. The novels clearly show their age here, with the female characters being defined by their relationship to Titus and the function they fulfill as part of his development. And while male characters manage to exhibit a range of virtues and flaws, the women are almost exclusively either vain, insecure, or both. Among these, Titus’ sister Fuschia has the most developed and interesting narrative arc, which makes its premature termination in book two all the more disappointing.

Despite these signs of age, and the narrative sprawl of book three, Gormenghast is a totally absorbing read. The work it requires on the part of the reader to navigate its labyrinthine narratives and linguistic crenelations are what make it a rewarding, if not exactly easy, experience. As the Countess warns Titus before his escape: once you are of the Castle, it will stay with you forever.

#books #fiction #speculative

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

Compared to season 1, the surface level plot of Season 2 is less compelling. The Temporal Loom is conceptually unconvincing, and like most other series dabbling in multiversal physics, one shouldn’t scrutinise the (temporal) logic too closely lest it falls apart faster than you can say ‘event horizon’. Cinematographically Season 2 also leans less into the ‘70s bureaucratic vibes of the first season, instead confining the action mostly to the slightly odd maintenance department and a Star Trek-esque control centre.

Just like season 1, however, Loki season 2 contends with themes more interesting than its unconvincing plot. Season 1 wanted to make us think about the balance between individual freedom and the greater good. Season 2 harkens back to that tension a bit, but shifts its main focus to what you do the day after a revolution. For revolution is what the death of HRW brings about: a complete rupture in how the universe operates, and who is in charge of it.

What season 2 wants to get across is that while revolutions may be difficult, what happens after is harder. Viewers familiar with revolutionary history will find no shortage of familiar challenges that beset the new regime at the TVA. There is the old-guard counter-revolution, led by General Dox and breakaway elements of the TVA, whose numbers for reasons of complex multidimensional physics range between 3 and infinite, but are always exactly what the plot requires. There are opportunists seeking power, represented by the double-crossing Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes. But both of these are mere distractions to the biggest challenge: how to make sure that after the rupture, society (in this case reality as represented by the Temporal Loom) doesn’t fail to reproduce itself.

With reality falling apart around him, the dilemma Loki is faced with is that, if the new order cannot sustain itself, it is better to put the old order back in place, or to let the whole thing burn down and see what rises from the ashes. Loki’s allies at the new TVA, as well as latterly HRW, represent the former view, whereas the latter is represented by Sylvie taking a clear “it is better to die free than live enslaved” line. Caught between these two poles, Loki desperately tries to find a third option that would make the new order viable, but without putting the TVA back in charge or purging all realities but one.

In dealing with this question of whether it is better to have freedom even if it leads to chaos and death, or accept control and sacrifice for the greater good, Loki treats both sides thoughtfully and with sympathy. It would have been so easy to cast Sylvie as the fanatical revolutionary, willing to sacrifice everyone on the alter of ideological purity. Instead, the series shows how for someone like Sylvie, who has suffered enormously at the hands of the old order, it is better to let it all burn down and just see if something will rise from the ashes. For a good part of the season, her position seems more plausible than Loki’s, who is now cast as the reformer desperately trying to salvage elements of the old order to give the new order a fighting chance, but with very limited success.

The season finale resolves the tension through two surprising twists that make for a remarkably satisfying ending. First, after making the entire show a quest for a fix to the Temporal Loom, we discover that regardless of the efforts made, the Loom cannot be fixed because HRW designed it to fail. Turns out his prophecies were less about omniscience and more about his own handiwork. In a move whose logic echoes that of ruling elites throughout time and space, HRW designed the Loom to be a spacetime boobytrap precisely to defeat a revolution like the one Sylvie and Loki accomplished. It turns out the whole search for a version of HRW who might put matters right was a red herring all along.

Yet when all seems lost, it turns out that the way forward is not a technical fix, or even a compromise with the old order. Instead, we see Loki realise that he himself can take the place of the Loom and embrace his facet of the God of Stories, weaving the strands of all the realities together to keep them alive. Downside for Loki: he needs to sit on a multidimensional throne for, most likely, eternity, to keep the show on the road. The symbolism here is obvious: the alternative to either burning it all down, or putting the old ruling class back in charge, is for the revolutionaries (i.e., all of us) to do the constant work to keep the new society alive. Because Loki’s solution is not a single act, but a commitment to actively sustain the new order for eternity. Of course, a real post-revolutionary situation would not have such a singularly neat (if cosmic) solution. But that doesn’t diminish the message that we can have our better world, provided we are prepared to build it every single day after the revolution comes.

#tv #fiction #SF

Notes & suggestions

• Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn is a very good overview of (quasi-)revolutionary movements in recent years that were more in line with Sylvie’s approach of burning the old world down without worrying about what might come after.
• Ursula K. le Guin deals with the question of what makes a good revolution and how it is then sustained both in The Dispossessed and the related The Day before the Revolution.

First published in 2014, ‘Utopia for Realists’ is an intervention by ‘rock star historian’ Rutger Bregman to rescue the Left (who are terminally boring) by injecting fresh and radical thinking into stale policy debates. And his ideas certainly are radical. Utopia for Realists unapologetically advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the abolition on migration controls, and a 15 hour work week. With these three ideas, Bregman sets out to do two things. First, to expand our horizons and teach the Left how to think big again. And second, to demonstrate that all three policies are actually less utopian, and more plausible and beneficial, than most of us think. To do this, Bregman takes us through a lightning, though well-referenced, argument for all three proposals, and he certainly manages to persuade of their plausibility.

The whirlwind pace, though, as well as the book’s tendency to rely on sweeping generalisations, do at times make it feel somewhat like a TED Talk or Buzzfeed listicle in book form: “Three Easy Steps to Revolutionise Your Society”. On closer inspection, the eloquence and academic rigour with which Bregman puts forward his proposals don’t fully manage to obscure some glaring gaps in his analysis. Of these, the one that will confront the reader most prominently is the question why, if these proposals are both just and efficient, we are nowhere near adopting them. If, as Bregman contends, his ideas make for better societies for everyone, then what is holding us back?

Bregman’s explanation for this is rooted in an idealist analysis of how society works, which is rather ironic given the title of the book. According to Bregman, these policies have not been adopted because they haven’t won the argument in ‘the marketplace of ideas’. This argument shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Bregman ends the book with a full chapter dedicated to the power of ideas as a motive force for change. The purpose of the book, then, is to advance the argument for these policies as a way of getting them adopted.

This belief in the power of ideas is mirrored by a near aversion to contemplate other forms of power, in particular political or class power. Utopia for Realists bases its arguments on what is best for the common good of society, but in doing so fails to consider what interests would be negatively impacted by its ideas, and would hence oppose them. This analytical limitation leads the book into bizarre and naïve conclusions, which become increasingly frustrating as it progresses. Despite Bregman frequently concluding that it is capitalist structures (e.g. the determination of wages by the market) that result in undesirable social outcomes, he is evidently unwilling to diagnose capitalism itself as the force opposing his ideas for the good society. This leaves him with the common conceit that what we have is a form of ‘bad capitalism’, and that if we could only replace it with ‘capitalism with a human face’ through some palatable policies, the outcome would be better for everyone. Capitalists themselves included.

This disinclination to see the inherent dynamics of capitalism itself as a driving force for situation we find ourselves in can clearly be seen from, among many examples, the way Bregman explains US President Nixon’s failure to implement UBI. As Utopia for Realists would have it, Nixon was misinformed by an incorrect understanding of the Speenhamland system (an early British welfare programme). Bregman responds with an argument for why the story about Speenhamland was wrong, and why UBI actually does work. What he doesn’t do is interrogate why one of Nixon’s advisors would go through the trouble of digging out a study of an esoteric British welfare programme to torpedo UBI, and what interest they might serve in doing so.

This is a blindspot that Utopia for Realists finds itself in time and again. The book references David Graeber’s critique of ‘bullshit jobs’ to argue that waste collectors have greater social value than bankers, but doesn’t question why bankers get paid more regardless. It rails against means-tested welfare, without analysing how it functions as a means of social discipline. When discussing the education system, the book simply declares that ‘we’ rather than ‘the market’ can dictate what worthwhile education is, without considering whether ‘the market’ isn’t the reward system that ‘we’ use to do just that. It is almost as if Bregman has taken Graeber’s injunction that it is us humans who ultimately shape reality to mean that we can simply negate structural forces like markets through sheer force of will, rather than through collective work to create something better.

That neither force of will nor good ideas are sufficient has been amply demonstrated by the 10 years since the book was first published. In that time we have seen the rise and fall of left wing movements both the UK and the US that share a programmatic similarity with the prescriptions in Utopia for Realists. Yet while the ambitions of the Sanders and Corbyn programmes were if anything much less radical (because moderated by the need to be ‘electable’), the response was not a spirited debate about policy, but a ‘nuke it from orbit’ approach that was shared by everyone from the Right to the liberal centre-left, with the nadir in the UK probably being a BBC Presenter asking whether Corbynistas would nationalise sausages. It is telling that this one period when the Left wasn’t ‘dull as a doorknob’ and managed to generate popular excitement, Bregman couldn’t bring himself to endorsing it. One wonders what he thinks now that normality has been restored with Biden and Starmer.

Even before these defeats, the contention that society is shaped through a fair battle of ideas was naïve at best, and disingenuous at worst. The use of disinformation (Big Tobacco, climate denialism, ‘think tanks’) has been understood for decades, and where that fails there is always simple repression (e.g. the gagging and anti-union laws in the UK). Power to turn ideas into reality doesn’t only come from the barrel of a gun, but it has to come from somewhere.

Where Utopia for Realists succeeds is in expanding the discursive space around matters of working hours, free movement and a fundamental right to dignity. And even there, the book is hardly as original as it presents itself to be, it’s claim to novelty being more indicative of a lack of engagement with anyone to the left of Ed Miliband. Bregman may be a ‘phenomenon’ (according to the dust jacket), but his failure to acknowledge, let alone contend with, the structural forces arrayed against his proposals might make this book salonfähig in the liberal talking circuit, but those who want to understand how to realise utopia are better off looking elsewhere.

#books #nonfiction #politics

#books #fiction #speculative

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.

We see the world of Oryx & Crake through the eyes of Snowman/Jimmy. Snowman is the last surviving human, an obsolete relic from a vanished civilisation. Through Snowman, Atwood shows us that an individual human is a contradiction in terms. Devoid of relations with other humans or a shared humanity, Snowman is a subject without purpose, who doesn’t so much survive as merely exist. His only role is to look after the ‘Crakers’, a group of post-human humanoids who have inherited the Earth, and who could probably have done without Snowman’s guidance if it wasn’t for the dangerous trash humanity has left behind.

Jimmy is Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic incarnation. Flashbacks tell us of Jimmy’s childhood, teenage years and adolescence. It is in these chapters that we discover the world before the fall. It is a world already ravaged by climate change, with American society split between those living a nasty, brutish and short existence in the ‘pleeplands’, and those, like Jimmy, who are fortunate enough to live in the highly competitive but at least vaguely secure Compounds of a handful of biotech megacorps. We don’t see a lot of the world beyond the United States, but the implication is that is riven by war, plague, and famine.

However, the bleakness of Oryx & Crake does not lie in the actions of the unscrupulous corporate giants whose actions threaten to destroy the world. If anything, the megacorps have a somewhat cartoonish feel to them, with names like HealthWyzer and RejuvenEssence. They are also by now a fairly worn trope, and although Oryx & Crake predates cultural products such as WALL-E or The Outer Worlds, we had already seen this representation in Snowcrash, Fallout or Bladerunner. Instead, the cynicism comes from the fundamental lack of agency of almost everyone in the book, creating a pervasive feeling of inertia and fatalism.

The inertia is most pronounced for Snowman. Although he eventually goes on a pilgrimage, it is difficult to be invested in the outcome of anything that happens to him, because he serves no other role than acting as the story’s narrator. The ambiguity about his fate at the end of the book evokes indifference rather than any sense of dramatic tension.

The same holds true for the Jimmy chapters, because in the end Jimmy is a fundamentally uninterested and uninteresting character, and those two things are not unrelated. Jimmy’s is a stereotypical story of emotionally deprived childhood, detached adolescence and damaged early adulthood. Jimmy neither cares for nor is interested in the world he inhabits, apart from his imbalanced friendship with the titular Crake and his bizarre and unhealthy obsession with a child seen in a pornographic video, who turns out to be the titular Oryx. Like Snowman, Jimmy doesn’t really have a purpose in life and so more or less drifts through it rather than exerting any real agency.

The same lack of agency is evident in all the other characters in the novel, who are also disappointingly one-dimensional, from the emotionally distant mother and the disinterested but jovial father, to the corporate goons and the overwrought artists of Jimmy’s university years. Apart from Jimmy’s mother, none of them exhibit much interest in the world they inhabit, or any desire to act upon it.

The only character with a real sense of purpose is Crake, and this is something Jimmy senses when they first meet. Crake is a boy/man with a vision, and this alone makes him different, mysterious, enviable and above all, powerful. Crake is also a sociopathic genius, as evidenced by his effortless hacking of his uncle’s bank account as a child and his inevitable ascendence to the most prestigious university and employer.

It is this position of Crake as the only character with any real capacity and will to act which turns Oryx & Crake’s message into one of fatalistic cynicism. For what hope is there of averting the apocalypse if the only people who can change anything are superhuman geniuses who believe that humanity is the virus? The book presents no alternatives to the mad scientist theory of history: its mundane characters are powerless and uninterested, its bright intellects are corrupted, and the denizens of the pleeplands are as useless as the proles in Orwell’s 1984. What little collective action the book presents is only there as background, and in any event is totally ineffective.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Atwood’s warning is about the dangers of collective inertia. But with Crake presented as the only counterpoint, it is unclear what lesseon we are then expected to take away from this story. The pervasive sense of futility also makes the book generally quite boring. Jimmy/Snowman is just not very compelling as a character, nor is the support cast, which makes it difficult to care about anyone in the book, or what happens to them, including the billions of humans who ultimately die, though generally off stage. On top of that, Crake’s role in the story is telegraphed with a 12 foot neon sign as soon as he is introduced, making the sequence of events quite predictable. One doesn’t introduce a mad scientist in Act I if one doesn’t intend to use them.

This is not to say that Oryx & Crake doesn’t provide some interesting food for thought: on the nature of being human, the point of the arts and culture, or the capitalist death drive. But on the whole, its characters and plot are too superficial to be compelling, and its world is neither an effective warning nor an imagining of an alternative to our current trajectory. We remain trapped in the neoliberal frame where there is no alternative: the trolley has only one track, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

#books #nonfiction #history

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.

Late Victorian Holocausts centres on a series of famines across the globe that occurred between roughly 1876 and 1902, with many different parts of the world affected simultaneously. One strand of Davis’s book is to identify the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as the climatological driver of crop failures in areas as far apart as Brazil and China. Yet the main strength of Late Victorian Holocausts is Davis’s investigation of how these naturally occurring phenomena were catastrophically exacerbated by the forcible integration of countries into the world capitalist system, either directly as colonies like India, or otherwise through dependency on credit or as the result of war, as was the case with Brazil and China.

After all, Davis points out, the ENSO has been a natural phenomenon for centuries, yet the famines of the late 19th century were of a scale hitherto unimaginable. Davis persuasively argues that, rather than bringing benefits to these countries, integration into the capitalist system fatally weakened their resilience to droughts and other natural disasters. Subsistence farming gave way to cash cropping, with peasant farmers left destitute and without locally grown produce when global prices collapsed. Mechanisms of resilience, such as China’s ‘eternal granaries’ or arrangements of mutual aid in India, were broken down because the market deemed them ‘inefficient’. And even where food was produced locally, integration into the world market meant starving communities saw their produce exported overseas where it could gain a higher price. Nor was this just the unfortunate effect of impersonal environmental and economic factors. Late Victorian Holocausts shows that at every turn, rigid pro-market ideology defeated even the most lacklustre compassion. Especially in India, British colonial administrators deployed openly Malthusian policies, forced marching thousands of starving peasants into work camps, where they had to ‘earn’ rations that were smaller than those provided in Nazi extermination camps.

The descriptions of the impact of famine and imperial policies are where Davis’s brilliance comes through with cold fury, but they are also the ones I most struggled to read. I often found myself having to put the book down for a while simply to process the staggering scale of human suffering inflicted on the world’s poor and marginalised. Late Victorian Holocaust relentlessly documents the death tolls resulting from the famines: regions where 95% of the population starve, canyons filled with skeletons, casualty numbers going up to the tens of millions. It is statistics returned as tragedy with a vengeance.

Yet Late Victorian Holocausts is not simply a polemic. If anything, it is rather academic for a work of ‘popular’ non-fiction. Descriptions of emaciated children sometimes sit incongruently next to tabulations of rice production in northern Chinese provinces. Overleaf from the ideological insanity of 19th century economic liberalism we find a detailed history of ENSO events. The sheer amount of detail can make the book somewhat inaccessible at times, and I was rather surprised there wasn’t more of a conclusion to tie it all together at the end. Instead the book finishes in the way it makes most of its argument: with three in-depth chapters on the long term impacts on India, China and Brazil. Yet while the argument comes through well in the detail, I did think this rather left it to the reader to fully connect the four distinct parts of the book.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend Late Victorian Holocausts to anyone interested in world history, or who wants to understand why the world now looks the way it does. I cannot pretend it was a pleasant read. The book has no patience for vague notions that ‘colonialism was bad’, and mercilessly confronts you with the actual brutality of it. It most certainly obliterates any notion that peripheral nations somehow benefitted from benevolent integration into the world capitalist system: the railroads were never there to bring civilisation, but to carry away the grain. Hence it makes for essential reading in our times of culture war where the Right vocally claims that ‘Empire was good, actually’. The millions upon millions of starved Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others would surely argue otherwise, had they actually lived to tell the tale.