Book-Eaters and Titanomachy

TW: a brief discussion of cannibalism

Back in November, I posted the following to Facebook:

Does anyone else find themselves, at times, thinking, "I ate that book," rather than, "I read that book"?

Eating a book, for me, is different from reading it. If you read a book, you look at the words, understand them, and recognize the whole book as an object. If you eat a book, you do all of that, but then you also internalize it, assembling its ideas and perspectives into yourself. Moreover, you bring those perspectives into yourself as one perspective among many, and you do not take it as is; you fix it, alter it, improve it, nuance it, cut out the stuff that doesn't work, fit it into your framework. It may challenge you, but after you've responded to its challenge, you then challenge it. You internalize it, but you also tame it. If you merely internalize it, and you let it take you over, you did not eat the book, but rather the book ate you.

(Today, I was thinking of a book, and then imagined telling someone, "I ate that book," and it was weird but also made sense to me.)

What I doubt any of my Friends knew was that I had in mind the Majesty 2 computer game. The goblin shamans, in what is probably a pretty problematic joke, are said to have a “from stomach to heart” philosophy: they learn about potions and medicine and so forth by eating everything they find or concoct. If it cures them, they know. If it makes them sick, they know. They learn by eating. This struck me as a limited philosophy; I feel like shamans would be interested in a lot more than just medicine. So I started to imagine that “from stomach to heart” had metaphorical applications elsewhere: all learning was imagined as eating. Certainly we use traces of this metaphor ourselves, allowing thoughts to “digest” and maintaining a “balanced diet” of books or news sources. Thus, one day, my brain produced the quirk of thinking, “I ate that book.”

(The other influence was endocannibalism, the practice of eating your in-laws when they die so they stay a part of the tribe. Cannibalism holds no appeal for me in itself, but when I learned about endocannibalism I could immediately understand why some cultures practice it.)

Eating ideas is an agonistic vision, though, isn’t it? Either I eat or I am eaten: if I do not conquer it, it conquers me. And lately I’ve noticed that there is this dynamic in my learning process. If I find a work important or influential, I am at first taken away with it and I see everything in its terms. And then, in a little while, I decide it is time to outgrow it; either this happens when I start to see its cracks, or I decide it needs to happen and I look for the cracks. Sometimes I think of it as wrestling with angels, but the metaphors I use more often are destroying idols and titanomachy.

Titanomachy refers to the war, in Greek mythology, which the Olympian gods waged against the Titans. The Titans were like the gods-before-the-gods, brutal and terrible figures; their king, Cronus, was not only the god of time but also the father of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. So in the Titanomachy, the Olympians fought and killed their parents. But Cronus, too, overthrew the god who came before him, his own father Uranus, a god personifying the sky. These sorts of battles recur in mythology across the world, where a pantheon declares war on a dangerous and more ancient force.

Besides being one of Freud’s more obvious sources, the titanomachy reminds me of Tillich’s idea of the Protestant Principle, which I’ve discussed before. We have a certain conception about God, but this idea must be false in some respects since humans are finite, flawed, and contingent creatures trying to reason about the infinite, perfect, and absolute. Thus any honest attempt to approach God must include a willingness to tear down those ideas about God to replace them with new ones. Most people are not called to do this, but in theory you might need to build a conception of God (an idol, I would call it), and then promptly smash it; build a new one, and promptly smash it; on and on until you die. I do not know if titanomachy is a crude metaphor for this process, but certainly we could use it as one: primordial gods replaced by ancient gods replaced by classical gods replaced by new gods. If you think of idols as standing in for ideas about anything rather than just ideas about God, you’ve got a sense of how I’m imagining things.

I have no thesis here: this post is intended to record the clumsy metaphors I’ve been using for learning. Sometimes I have enthusiasms; I incorporate a worldview; it threatens to overwhelm me; I wrestle against it; I break it; I incorporate its pieces into my pantheon. This is also a crude metaphor, though, since I do not feel any hostility or resentment in this process. I still have much fondness for the poor idols I damage. Of course not all engagement is like this; other times I resist from the outset and am only slowly won over, from within. Other times an idea just does not take at all.

On Pilgrims and Aliens

I wrote a bit before about Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking, arguing that in rejecting scholarship it rejects community. After I finished the book, I had quite a few more complaints about it, some of which I addressed in this post I wrote for one of my tumblrs. Here's an excerpt:

As previously discussed, H. P. Lovecraft saw the world as radically Other, and he reacted with horror; he also saw non-white people and uneducated people as radically Other, and he reacted to them with horror. His cosmicism—the view that we are insignificant in the strange Otherness of the world—is inseparable from his racism. Northrop Frye, whose high view of literature and society comes from a deep fear of the natural world and its apparent indifference to us, had little attention for non-Western literature; I suspect that he suffers from the same sense of the Other, but he reacts by ignoring or delegitimizing, rather than despising, those people whose experiences are too different than his own. In rejecting the Other, both reject people. I wonder—but no more than wonder—whether Gros suffers a fate much like this; he rejects the Other, but misidentifies the natural world as his, owned by the mere fact that he walks into the forest, strains against the wind, drinks from a stream with his hands; in his book he frequently writes that the one who walks owns all that he sees. When Gros does recognize the Other in people he doesn’t quite understand, he rejects them, dismisses them, pities them, at times despises them. And in so doing these men make themselves more alone than they could otherwise be: if they are alienated from society, they seem to alienate themselves.

You'll see that I've written about Lovecraft and Frye over there already. I guess I've started blogging a little bit on my tumblr; I changed the name recently, and discussed why I changed the name, and that become a thing. I've been thinking about how Otherness influences my thinking and engagement with the world--yes, yes, Christian has attached himself to yet another construct--and since I needed to point that out to explain why I was doing what I was doing, that's become a theme over there.

As a bonus, I'll give you an excerpt from an article that I read yesterday, which I thought was related. It's from Hiromi Goto's "A Bending Light: Thoughts of Story, Diversity, and Social Responsibility," in the Winter 2014 issue of Ricepaper, which is itself an excerpt from her Guest of Honour Speech at the WisCon28 Conference. The piece convinced me to go ahead and publish the tumblr post. Here's the excerpt:

When writers try to imagine different ways of engaging, humans to other humans, humans with aliens, humans with animals, all these different relationships, we can make possible new kinds of engagements. To bring stories alive in this way is to try to make change in the workings and fabric of our world. If something is not of this world already, it first needs to be imagined. After it is imagined, it needs to be shaped by the parameters of language. And in writing, in the utterance, the story can begin its life. It can become.

You can read the rest at Goto's blog.

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Also: I've been reading from Gordon Marino's Basic Writings of Existentialism, which contain a number of excerpts I haven't read before, or associated with existentialism, or even heard of; so far I've read the excerpts from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, and Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche is more persuasive than I remembered, until he pulls outside terrible bit of psychology or really bad biology; there are parts I pretty much whole-heartedly agree with, and then other parts that seem plausible enough but definitely subject to empirical falsification, and others that are just nonsense. I appreciated what I read of The Sickness Unto Death, though it took me a long time to figure out how to read it; reading Fear and Trembling convinced me that I'm less intelligent and less informed than I thought, because I understood maybe half of it. I guess I'm a philosophical baby.

Fixing Arthas and Narrative Time-Travel

[Edit 25 Jan 2015: I was meaner than I ought to have been in this review. Arthas is not good by the standards of novels, generally; it is possibly quite good at what it is supposed to be and do, that is, produce a fictionalization of the games on which it's based, maintaining much of the narrative tenor of those games, for an audience which cares about very different things than the standards of good novels, or good genre fiction. I guess I can't judge either Golden for attempting to make such an object or the book's target audience for caring about the things they care about. That said, my specific critiques still hold: Golden doesn't trust her audience, and that mars the book.]

Image source: Connor on Flickr. This image depicts a sign reading "To Time Bridge."

In November my brother showed me a book that a friend had lent to him: Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, by Christie Golden. In case you don’t know, Arthas is one of many novelizations based on the Warcraft franchise; it follows one of the games’ major protagonist/villains from his childhood to his ascendance to the Frozen Throne, an emblem of terrible and evil power. In many ways it is a typical tragedy, with a hero who becomes a villain, feeling compelled toward a fate which he could have avoided at any time. It depicts the events in the game and fleshes out what happened off-camera and how the characters came to be who they are. It’s also awful.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s supposed to be a good novel. It is not even a novel so much as it is a novelization; it is a supplement to the games. The book is written, I think, for people unused to reading novels: the prose is simple and the characterization simpler. Golden does have a few clever tricks up her sleeve. For instance, she sets up echoes throughout the novel, so that certain episodes or phrases in the first quarter of the novel allude to events later in Arthas’s life—and therefore events later in the novel—that players will remember from the games. He is knighted by a man he will later kill; a horse he later resurrects from the dead is born and dies; he meets Jaina and then they part, as you know from the games that they’ll reunite and then be estranged for good. You can see the foundation for the familiar story unfold before you, and then that story unfolds before you. It’s a nice touch. But it doesn’t make up for the rest of it.

The story is obvious, clichéd, overdramatic, frenetic, and disorganized. (This is not entirely Golden’s fault, since this is also true of the games.) It has not so much atmosphere or texture as it has references; mentioning items you can find in World of Warcraft does not make Azeroth seem real. The great blocks of exposition are tough to read. But the worst mistake is that Golden doesn’t trust the reader. Whenever two characters have some history with one another that impacts their current interaction—for instance, Kael and Arthas were romantic rivals over Jaina before becoming political enemies as well—either the narrator or the characters themselves summarize that history. Golden does not trust that the reader will be able to remember an event that happened a few short chapters ago; or, perhaps, she does not trust that reader can connect that event with the character’s current motives and emotions. She digs out all of the subtext and just makes it text. Not only is this repetitive, but it also renders the dialogue unrealistic and scuttles all of the tension. The characters live on the surface of themselves; any time they may have depth, they dredge it all up for us to see.*

So I wondered whether I could improve the novel in a quick and easy way. Could I, for instance, simply rearrange the chapters?

A friend of mine has told me that she never reads novels in the order they’re presented. She skips between chapters, backward and forward; she doesn’t even read a page in order, but jumps all over it. And this is of course a way of approaching novels: if we imagine a novel as a structure, rather than a flow, then you can see how visiting parts in a different order is still sensible so long as you can keep track of how those parts relate. I asked if she is more likely to read something in order if it’s not a linear narrative, and she said she was somewhat more likely to, because then she feels as though the order is more deliberate and less arbitrary.** But, of course, most novels aren’t entirely linear; even absolute genre-trash skips around in time a little bit. Mystery novels are most notable for narrative time-travel: they almost always refer back to the past, or to several hypothetical pasts, over and over again, to the point of obsession. And it’s not just mystery novels: flashbacks (technical term: analepsis) are common in all genres. And there are popular films and novels that play with this. Memento, which happens in reverse order, seems to me a deliberate play on the mystery novel’s obsession with the past. The page to which “analepsis” links mentions that in the Harry Potter novels, the Pensieve—a magical device for experiencing another person’s memory as though it were currently happening—is a way of making flashbacks an in-world event rather than just a narrative technique. Once Upon a Time divides each episode between the present and the past, where the present (almost) always proceeds in order from episode to episode while the past jumps all over the place. These stories maintain a linear chronology as a frame, but within that frame they still skip about, and so non-chronological narratives seem more common than you might at first think.

So, when trying to fix Arthas, the first thing I thought I could do was simply run the chapters backwards. Read the last chapter first, then the second last, and so on. The tension would come from the fact that you didn’t know how Arthas got to this point; you are thrown in the middle of history and are trying to uncover its origins. And, in fact, that’s the point of this novelization. For those of us who’ve played the games (or skimmed the wiki), we already know how it ends; we’re reading the book, presumably, to see how it begins. So why not make that part of its very form? For a few pages, this actually makes Arthas half-decent: the references to creatures and landmarks are off-hand enough that the fantasy world feels both mysterious and real because it isn’t over-described. And the opening image, with Arthas and his army climbing out of a subterranean world into the freezing Northrend wastes, is a fairly powerful cold open (pun mostly not intended).

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work after a few pages. As I said, Golden does not trust the reader, so all of the banter that happens during the climactic battle rehashes the conflicts that have already occurred. The last chapter contains a summary of the whole novel. So, if this were to work, you’d have to not only reverse the chapters but also cut large parts of the dialogue and exposition so that the past is only hinted at and not revealed outright. Even worse, though, the first few chapters aren’t very interesting, so the ending would be disappointing. There’s a certain poetic resonance to the first chapter: Arthas, as a child, watches as a foal is born, and then he encounters a friend who mourns the death of his father; this friend says, “I hate winter,” which is a somewhat heavy-handed reference to Arthas’s whole life but makes a good enough end for the book. There could be something bittersweet to it, if the third and second chapter set it up properly, but instead they limp a bit without the future to compel them. Nothing about those chapters ties the boy to either the hero he could have become or the villain he did become, and the narrative potential is squandered as a result.

So I worked away at a few other possible chapter arrangements, and the one I liked best switched between the first half and the second half of the novel, with the Culling of Stratholme (the event in which Arthas turns from hotheaded protagonist to aspiring villain)† as the point which joins the two half-narratives. However, the dialogue would still have to be fixed or removed, and the echoes that I mentioned before would be flattened: the set-up and the resolution would appear side-by-side, which means they wouldn’t stretch out across the novel any more. That would be a shame, because that echoing was one of Golden’s better choices. Nonetheless, it was an interesting experiment. I’ll include my suggested chapter order at the bottom of the post.

This exercise got me thinking: if a person were writing a novel from scratch, how might that person organize the chapters in a non-linear way? Part of the problem, as I see it, is that while some readers would be pretty excited about the idea, a number of other readers would be reluctant to read a book that’s “out of order.” So you could make a compromise: print the book so that all of the pages occur in one order, but at the bottom of each page there is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style direction. Instead of a choice between two branches of a narrative, however, the direction would simply read, If you want to read the book in the author’s recommended order, go to the next page. If you want to read the book in chronological order, go to page 48. Indeed, you could have multiple narrative orders: If you want to read the book in the editor’s recommended order, go to page 79. Whichever order the pages were in would be the easiest order, so you’d have to decide which experience you want to be easier to follow and which you want to require more work. In an electronic medium, you could use hyperlinks rather than instructions, or toggle between the two arrangements.

Of course, this would only work for a story that is told best out of order (as I think the Arthas story would be). Some stories might in fact be best told in chronological order. However, since that’s the conventional choice, it’s probably the case that many stories would be better told in another order than that one but haven’t been because no one thought of it. You would have to consider this on a novel-by-novel basis.

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Proposed new order for Christie Golden’s Arthas: Rise of the Lich King:

Prologue, Chapter 24, Chapter 13, Chapter 23, Chapter 11, Chapter 22, Chapter 10, Chapter 21, Chapter 9, Interlude 2, Chapter 20, Chapter 8, Chapter 19, Chapter 7, Chapter 18, Chapter 6, Chapter 17, Chapter 5, Interlude 1, Chapter 16, Chapter 4, Chapter 15, Chapter 3, Chapter 14, Chapter 2, Chapter 12, Chapter 1, Epilogue

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*In an article on American Sniper, Alyssa Rosenberg writes, “This is not dialogue. These are placeholder words that tell us what dialogue is supposed to convey.” Her assessment applies to weak dialogue in every novel, television show, and film.
**Arbitrary is not quite right, but the linearity of linear narratives is usually an unreflective decision on the author’s part. It’s a convention most people don’t question.
†Other people might point to the moment when Arthas takes the sword Frostmourne as his transition from hero to villain, but despite Blizzard’s best efforts, in neither the game nor the book is that scene as emotionally turbulent as the events at Stratholme; furthermore, at Stratholme he crosses a moral threshold which drives all of his friends away from him, sends him in Frostmourne’s direction, and probably makes the reader like him a lot less. How Arthas acts at Stratholme makes the tragedy seem inevitable, so it works better as the story’s turning point than the Frostmourne event does, even if the latter is the turning point in the games.

Must the Philosopher Walk Alone?

or, Families that Cite Together Stick Together

One of my favourite places to walk; copyright mine.

[EDIT: Just a few hours after posting this, I have realized one way in which I was unfair to Gros, because his discussion does reflect some of my own views on the world, and one very serious error that Gros committed and I forgot to bring up; I'll maybe need to write a second post, but until then read this thing I wrote for one of my tumbrls, which will suggest where I was unfair.]

I am trying to read Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. I found it in a Chapters, reading the blurb:

In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us. 

Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought.

I had thought this would be a creative and intellectually rigourous account of the way these different philosophers thought about walking, and I looked forward to it. Instead, A Philosophy of Walking has turned out to be a litany of generalizations and unfounded claims in praise of walking.

I’m only about halfway through, but I think I’m starting to understand where Gros is going wrong. Consider this passage:

Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. […] Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains […]. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.

He is parroting Nietzsche here, but these ideas are not Nietzsche’s alone. In a later chapter, he describes the sorts of book which he likes, to which I’m sure he aspires:

Writing ought to be this: testimony to a wordless, living experience. Not the commentary on another book, not the exegesis of another text. The book as witness … but witness in the sense of the baton in a relay race.* Thus does the book, born out of experience, refer to that experience. Books are not to teach us how to live (that is the sad task of lesson-givers), but to make us want to live, to live differently: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle.

A book that makes us want to live differently sounds great, but it is strange to think such a book could only come out of one’s own direct experience of life. I would argue that there’s something more troubling behind his dislike of scholarly books and argument; Gros also seems hostile to community. Let’s go back to the bit about books written in response to other books: “They are born of a compilation of the other books on the table. They are like fattened geese: crammed with citations, stuffed with references, weighed down with annotations. […] They verify, specify, rectify; a phrase becomes a paragraph, a whole chapter.” The jeremiad against verification, specification, and citation do not just discount careful thought, but also exhibit a skepticism toward conversation, toward engaging with other people’s thought. This appears in a directly stated preference for walking with no more than four people; “with no more than that, you can still walk without talking.” And this is the logic of those philosophers he esteems: Nietzsche, who sought solitude for the sake of his “freedom: no explanations to give, no compromises to stand in his way,” and who stands on the mountain, above the other people, from which vantage he can see through their vain moralities and conventional pieties; Rousseau, whose lonely walks through peaceful, domesticated woods taught him what both humans and nature are like; Thoreau, for whom authentic living is solitary and for whom society consists of three people.

And, indeed, there are glimpses of the book I wanted to read in this one; if Gros is right that Rousseau walked into the woods, away from all people, to learn what people are like, then that gives us some good insight into Rousseau’s failed project. The woods are not pre-civilized nature, and you can’t learn what humans in nature are like by visiting them. It becomes possible to see how Rousseau’s approach to the project went wrong from the start. But Gros is not interested in critiquing Rousseau; the books he critiques are always generalized, shown in the abstract. The ones he mentions directly, he always agrees with. And this is also strange, since Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Kant are hardly good playmates. Critique would likely seem too like the citations and specifications Gros despises, however.

All of this means that Gros gives the impression that he would be indifferent to this critique I am writing, not just because I am no one, just some blogger, but also because my critique is of the order of citation, of libraries, “overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations.” (The irony, of course, is that Gros’s refutations are the indefinite ones, since he will not quote those he disagrees with.) Perhaps he did not mean to, but Gros immunes himself from criticism at the same time that he cuts himself off from community.

I do like walking, though I do it less than I ought to; I understand Gros’s joy in leg muscles and trails and trees and rocks and scents carried on the fresh air. And I think while walking, to be sure; but, as everyone does—as Gros must do to—I carry conversations, culture, society with me when I walk, and when I get back it is to take part in the conversation again. Sometimes I find a walk necessary to free myself from the terms another person has set on the discussion, but that is in the service of coming back to the discussion. And, indeed, life experience can improve walking, can enrich the literary and philosophical traditions one has learned. But there is not the split that Gros suggests: without a personal engagement in the world, indeed citation and reference might be vain parroting, but that engagement need not be solitary, and without community you cannot open yourself to correction, to further learning, to others' experiences. And so I found A Philosophy of Walking a disappointment.

Again, I have not yet finished the book. If I find more worth discussing, I’ll come back.

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*The footnote given reads thus: “The French word témoin, meaning witness, has the subsidiary meaning of baton passed between runners in a relay race [translator’s note].”

Please Read Responsibly?

A Using Theory Post 

A person might think I was a bit hard on John Green's "books belong to their readers" theory of interpretation when outlining my own. Well, it turns out that I wasn't hard enough on it; in the meantime I discovered a rather more insidious version of that argument, coming from John Green himself.

Before I begin, I want to preface this all by saying that I respect John Green's commitment to public education very much; I find his Internet presence kind, compassionate, and otherwise admirable; his politics seem empathetic, and in general he seems well-intentioned. My impression is that he is likable, and worthy of being liked. But at the same time there are some problems with his theory of interpretation, and I hope you'll agree with me when I'm done here that those problems require attention.

John Green published the following Tweets (on a date which I have not been able to determine):

The transcription reads like this:

I was sedated for an endoscopy today and was told to stay off social media for a day. So you know what that means: Twitter rant. | I've been marathoning Twilight movies all day, which has been totally enjoyable... | ...and I'm thinking about how easy it is to dehumanize the creator or fans of something extremely popular. | I've done this, too. I made fun of the Twilight movies without even having watched them. I'm sorry for that, and embarrassed. | When we make fun of Twilight, we're ridiculing the enthusiasm people have for unironic love stories. Have we nothing better to satirize? | Yes, you can read misogynistic gender dynamics into the stories, but tens of millions of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. | Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong? | Isn't our disdain FAR more misogynistic than anything in the stories? | Art that is entertaining and useful to people is a good thing to have in this world. And I'm grateful for it and celebrate it. | So big ups to the Twilight fandom, and to Stephanie Meyer, who has been relentlessly attacked professionally and personally over Twilight... | ...in ways that male authors of love stories never are. I'm gonna go back to watching the movies now. /rant

(I used "|" rather than "/" to indicate line breaks because Green used a "/" himself.) Of course Green is saying some important things in this rant: it is maybe inadvisable to criticize something that one hasn't read (though this varies depending on the quality of the sources you have read which describe the text); the way in which criticism of the Twilight fandom resorts to insulting age and gender is a problem; if female authors of love stories are attacked in a way that male authors are not (and I have no reason to doubt Green's observation), then this is a serious problem, too. I don't mean to detract from any of these valuable claims. And I haven't read Twilight, so I guess I can't give you a good reading of it. But I can notice, and will notice, that John Green is using an enormously troubling theory of interpretation in the middle of his rant. Essentially, he places the responsibility for a text's meaning entirely on the reader's shoulders.

Green at first seems only to be claiming that "misogynistic gender dynamics" are not inherent to the books or films, but are rather something that certain readers have manufactured: he writes, "Yes, you can read misogynistic gender dynamics into the stories..." (emphasis mine), and the phrase "read into" is usually used to imply that the interpretation is something the reader added to the text. In the terms of biblical studies, "read into" indicates eisegesis rather than exegesis. So far Green seems to be making a typical anti-intellectual claim about feminist interpretation: the text is only what it appears to be with a naive reading, and any further meanings are simply added by the interpreter, so neither the text nor the author are responsible for those meanings. But Green then makes a strange move when he writes, "...but tens of millions of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who have found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong?" This exhortation suggests a different theory of interpretation than the one which insists on a naive reading of a text; rather, it suggests that interpretation is an act of agency on the part of the reader, and it suggests that the number of people who support a particular interpretation gives that interpretation legitimacy.

This a whole new spin on "books belong to their readers." In this version, a text has no independent meaning outside of how different readers have read it: if readers choose to read Twilight as having misogynistic gender dynamics, then it does; if readers choose not to, then it doesn't. And since nothing can be said about the text in itself, the only meaningful distinction between interpretations is whether or not they will produce a valuable reading experience. But Green goes further: the meaning of a book seems to derive from its readers collectively. He seems to say that if "tens of millions" of people interpret a book in a particular way, then that is the best way to interpret it; at the very least he suggests that if millions of people interpret a book in a particular way, then it's a legitimate interpretation.

Of course this theory of interpretation is almost certainly false, and texts do have a set of meanings intrinsic to themselves; see Part I of my Theory of Reading series for that. But I also want to suggest that Green's error here isn't innocuous. If the meaning of a text is determined entirely by the reader, then no criticism of any text is possible: the Mein Kampfs and Marc Discoll's sermons of the world are only awful because we interpret them that way. Such inability to criticize gives those people who are harmed by such texts no ability to explain that harm, and it prevents us from holding people accountable for what they say and write. Or, alternately, if the majority interpretation of a work is taken to be correct, then we are holding authors responsible for things that they did not write. Neither situation is at all desirable: the meaning of what people is independent of its readers and we can therefore hold them accountable for what they actually wrote, but the "books belong to their readers" theory denies us that necessary ability. This applies not just to the fringe cases of hate speech, but to any speech act at all.

What Green wants to protect, I think, is the value that those millions of readers have gotten from Twilight: "Do we really believe that tens of millions of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by these stories are merely wrong?" But this is a question wrongly asked: there's no reason that latent (or not-so-latent) misogyny would make those readers' comfort and inspiration somehow wrong or inauthentic. Rather, Twilight proves capable of providing comfort and inspiration in spite of its misogyny. (It's also possible that the comfort and inspiration is based on the readers' internalized misogyny, such that what seems to be a good reading experience is a detrimental one, but I don't want to rely on that argument because I've been feeling queasy lately about suggesting people have false consciousness when they disagree with me about what's been good for them.) This is why it's both useful and true to distinguish between the reader's experience and the text's meaning.

The irony, of course, is that John Green regularly relies on the independent existence of a text's meaning. The first is in his practice of literary interpretation, which is part of his professional career. There is no point whatsoever in interpreting texts if whatever interpretation you like is admissible: you could read the phone book as a communist epic if you wanted to under his stated theory. (Of course, it may be possible to read the phone book as a communist epic with legitimate interpretation, but the point is that it also may not be possible, and you can't tell until you try.) But, furthermore, John Green's own books are regularly misread, and he insists that those are misreadings. It is often charged that his novel Paper Towns is an example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story, where by loving a quirky girl character the boy protagonist is freed from a boring life, and often frees the quirky girl in some way, too. Green rejects the interpretation:

Have the people who constantly accuse me of this stuff read my books? Paper Towns is devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl; the novel ends (this is not really a spoiler) with a young woman essentially saying, “Do you really still live in this fantasy land where boys can save girls by being romantically interested in them?” I do not know how I could have been less ambiguous about this without calling the novel The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed [source].

He knows perfectly well that his intentions are not relevant to the conversation (source), so on what does he rely to claim that this is a misreading? Well, he relies on the text's own features, the only thing on which he can rely: he offers a brief analysis of the novel using paraphrases of the text itself.

---

So who is responsible for the meaning of a text?

The author, I would say, in terms of moral responsibility: it is the author's actions which produced the text. And we apply all of the concerns of moral responsibility to the question when we are asking whether an author is culpable for problems with the text. The author's intention does not determine whether or not the text caused harm; on the other hand, the author's ability to anticipate whether the text would cause harm isn't irrelevant, either. It the text's harm is utterly unpredictable, then the author cannot really be held responsible for that harm.

But how can we tell if an author could predict a book's harm? Look at Paper Towns: many many teenage boys read this as an endorsement of treating their female colleagues like Manic Pixie Dream Girls (or so I've read on tumblr). Could Green have predicted this frequent misreading?* I don't know if I can answer that, but his culpability relies on the answer. My guess is that he's not on the hook for Paper Towns, at least not insofar as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is concerned. But the sheer purported ubiquity of the misreading gives me pause: how plausible is it that a frequent misreading is all that wrong? It's still wrong, absolutely, but I'm inclined to say that there's something about the text which lends itself to being misread in that way. In the case of Paper Towns, a reader who knows nothing about feminist criticism, or who is already invested in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, might be prone to misreading the book in this particular way.

This discussion throws up a strange consequence, though: it looks like readers are responsible for their reading, in some senses. Namely, insofar as authors aren't responsible for misreadings of their tests, are readers then responsible for whatever misreadings they commit? I suspect so, but it's hard to say. There could be a middle space of simple error, where no one is at fault (or maybe there's a middle space of overlap, where both are). And there's still a lot left unanswered: the "insofar" in the second sentence of this paragraph will be really hard to determine, for example. I admit that it is really hard for me to say how charitable we ought to be when working out whether an author could have predicted the way zer book was interpreted. Fortunately, the stakes aren't often very high, but when they are, I feel strongly that we need to keep clearly in mind the distinctions between the author's knowledge of the text, the text's internal meanings, and the reading experience.

---

*I have not read Twilight, but I have read Paper Towns, and it is my assessment that Green's claim is right: the book deflates the Manic Pixie Dream Girl narrative. However, his critique only becomes obvious in the last quarter of the novel. For the first half, the novel appears to be the sort of story it is critiquing, and I'm not sure I'd fault someone for putting the book down during that time if the apparent MPDG narrative was upsetting them.

---

UPDATE: My friend Jon wrote the following on my Facebook in response to this post, and gave me permission to share it here:

Yes, you can read a critique of the MPDG trope into PT, but hundreds of thousands of people have also proven that you don't HAVE to. | Do we really believe that hundreds of thousands of people who found themselves comforted and inspired by the hope that they can save a girl by being romantically interested in her are merely wrong?

13 of 2013

I've been clutched by the desire to write a year-in-review post and, being who I am, I'm listing media. (I'm departing from just books because I've started watching more tv shows and movies.)

TV Shows

1. Supernatural

I could have listed Game of Thrones or Andromeda, if I were simply choosing based on whether I had watched and enjoyed them; I think I've seen the first season of Game of Thrones three times now, and it remains one of the most compelling fantasy TV shows--or even fantasy movies--that I've seen so far, and while my enjoyment of Andromeda was more mixed, I thoroughly enjoyed both the overall idea of the show--a diplomatic version of the Pax Romana--and the characters Andromeda/Rommie and Trance Gemini (as characters and as thought experiments). But I've got to choose Supernatural. I might even mention Once Upon a Time, which was compelling at least in its repeated undercutting of the "happily ever after" idea and its surprising second season twist on Sleeping Beauty.

I have an appetite that only The X-Files has come close to really satisfying. I started to watch Supernatural in a half-hearted attempt to appease that appetite, and found that it was something worth watching all on its own. Those first few seasons were atmospheric in the particularly wonderful way of being their own atmosphere: the mix of classic rock, staticy radios, dive bars, abandoned buildings, and strangely filmic ghosts worked well together to make a feel which was distinct. That atmosphere faded out as the series went on, and Supernatural did become an inferior show, but I'd still say that other show it became was also worth watching, at least some of the time, because of its secondary characters. I, like everyone else, I think, got frustrated with the show's habit of killing off it's most interesting characters, sometimes even permanently, but I suppose the good thing about the Senecan death rate is that it prompted them to make more wonderful characters. The best summary I heard was this: "For a show that hated women, it had some of the best female characters."

Books (fiction)

2. The Golem and the Jinni

I've written about this already (link). But it really was wonderful--for me.

3. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones

I've written about this one, too (link). It took me a while to work into it, and it struck me as bizarre that Diana Wynne Jones has two books with Middle Eastern (and fairly Orientalist) young girls who are the avatars/manifestations of divine beings and, therefore, have magical powers. (cf The Lives of Christopher Chant.) I liked both characters, though, and Homeward Bounders wound up being pretty excellent.

4. Paper Towns, by John Green

Paper Towns is one of those books for which I made bad decisions regarding bedtimes and schoolwork. I wouldn't say it's so fantastic as some people say it is, but its fairly transparent themes are ones that I think are important: our repeated failure to imagine other people as complexly as they deserve, the sorts of selfish motives which bungle our empathy, the foolishness of the idea that love can fix certain problems, the way some people's brokenness is close enough to hurt us but still too far from us to fix, the importance (or, anyway, omnipresence) of artistic creation. If you pick it up and start feeling uneasy about how much it looks like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story, be assured that it doesn't end up that way. John Green has joked that the alternate title is The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed.

5. The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy

When I'm at my least charitable, I want to use this book as a litmus test to see if someone is worth my time or not: if someone finds the book annoying, they have failed it. The novel is an extended observation of an insufferable man's death, in which the man becomes more insufferable as he is in pain. But, for me, anyway, my irritation about this man came out the other side as compassion for him, and that seems to be the whole exercise of the book; that, and a commentary of the social norms of dying. Even the mere observation that something so un-social as dying has its norms is an observation that makes the book worth reading, in my opinion.

This quotation stuck with me: The awful, terrible act of dying was, he could see, reduced to those around him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing-room diffusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.

6. The Collected Fictions of Jorge Louis Borges

I presume I have written enough about this (link).

Books (non-fiction)

7. Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton

I've written about this one already, too (link). I'll note, though, that the reason on this list was not that I enjoyed the book terribly much, nor that I couldn't put it down, nor that I found its main thesis compelling (the first two are untrue, and the third is true in a very limited and qualified sense). The reason it's on this list is because I've found its secondary (or even tertiary) ideas fruitful. The post I've written enumerates the most interesting and summarizable of those ideas.

8. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon

This encyclopedic treatment of depression is well worth reading for anyone who has depression; I don't think it especially pulled me out of depression, but it helped me understand depression, whatever that is worth. I suppose that other people who seek to understand depression would also find it helpful. This tome is simultaneously thorough and engaging, which may make up for its length.

One distressing thing about it: parts of the book led me to believe that there was something worth my time that I could wrest from my depression, something like a combination of compassion, empathy, and perspective, a sort of moral capability that was hard to develop otherwise. And then it told me that many people with depression fail to get this benefit, that they become morally cramped people, that the moral capability is something you still have to work for. That was disheartening; part of realizing that I'm not as good and moral as I'd like to be is wanting to be a better person, a generally good impulse, and it's distressing when that impulse is frustrated.

9. The Dynamic of Faith, by Paul Tillich

Since I just finished this book last week, it may be too soon to put it on the list. (That's why I haven't put Home on it, even though I found it tremendously good. Eve Tushnet's review of it is worth reading [link].) Further, I wasn't entirely convinced by Tillich's argument; too much of it derives from how he's chosen to define words, without any argument about why we should understand those words this way. But I think I can tentatively justify it's inclusion for a few reasons: in Tillich's "Protestant Principle," I found an articulation of why, precisely, I am compelled by Protestantism for which I myself hadn't been able to find the words; I found answers to particular questions about what faith is which might be useful in those arguments that sometimes happen about whether or not atheists have faith, what systems count as religions, etc.; and I was actually engaged enough by a book of theology that I overcame my cynicism about it. Maybe it'll be a gateway book; maybe from here I'll go on to somebody like Barth.

Movies

10. The Beasts of the Southern Wild

This is an absolutely wonderful movie. You'll encounter reviews of it saying that it romanticizes poverty; don't listen to them. The answer to that charge is either, "No, it really doesn't," or "Yes, and it ought to, and it must"; I'm not yet sure which it is. The film is about a little girl named Mudpuppy who lives in The Bathtub, the swamplands on the water side of a giant levee. For the first third of the film I was mainly in horror about what I perceived as the poor parenting Mudpuppy was receiving; by the second half of the film I found myself desperately in love with the screwed-up and misguided adults around her. (The transition time was maybe the most startling.) These are a people who can't trust the system trying to help them because that system has betrayed them so many times before, and as much as I understand the officials representing that system, I can't fault the people of the Bathtub for refusing that help, either.

But the movie is also about the mythology of childhood--not that childhood has become sort of a myth in North America, though that is also true, but the way certain children make myths out of their lives, are reliant on the strange and screwed-up and ignorant people around them for the resources they need to express their moral feelings. And in that sense, the on-going metaphors of the film--the flood, which is real, and the monstrous Aurochs, which Mudpuppy believes/imagines are stampeding towards them from the Antarctic--are very compelling.

A friend of mine said of the movie, "I learned so much about strength from an eight-year old."

11. The Fingersmith

I don't know what to say about this (or whether it ought to go here or go under TV Shows, since it's one of those two-part BBC mini-series). But I still feel like The Fingersmith edges out Catching Fire, which I almost put here, so I suppose I must account for it.

I can't really even say what it is I liked about it: I almost never go in for the whole "the character you thought was innocent was actually jaded/compromised in an unexpected way, and the character you thought was compromised was innocent in an unexpected way" schtick, maybe because the idea of innocence seems so weird to me, but here it worked surprisingly well. Perhaps it was the theme of reconciliation that caught my interest, and the compelling way that people hurt those they love for selfish and cowardly purposes. Who will you hurt in order to escape a life that is killing you morally? What harm will you do to save your soul--and, of course, can you save your soul by doing harm? I don't think The Fingersmith even begins to answer those questions, but at least it asks them.

It does becomes dangerously close to have the standard sorts of problems that depictions of same-sex relationships tend to have--the "love that can never be" theme, etc.--but I think that it does manage to dodge a few of them and it manages to hobble on despite the rest.

Short Fiction-ish

12. "A Collection of things I like in order", by Sunny Chan

I often think that including things written by people I know is cheating, but I'll do it anyway. I have almost nothing to say at all about this piece, except that it's fantastic and a must-read and all of that good stuff. If you've ever thought that there's nothing poetic about academia, then let this put that error to rest. (link)

Music

13. Postmodern Jukebox

What's this, you say? Christian is putting music on a list like this? I almost thought he had no ears, he's so indifferent to music. Not so!, I say. I just don't talk about it much because I haven't the vocabulary.

There's something super-catchy about Postmodern Jukebox's songs. They do covers of pop-songs in the musical styles of the past (or the gauche present): a jazz "Thrift Shop," a "Just (Tap) Dance," a swing (?) "Gentleman." And, since the lead singer is female, their bluegrass cover of the terribly misogynistic "Blurred Lines" comes off in her voice as inspired by a common misreading Adrienne Rich.

I may not listen to Postmodern Jukebox as much as I listen to some other groups, but I'm nonetheless excited about what they do.

A Perfectly Viable Story, of a Minor Kind

A Review of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Coetzee is one of those excellent novelists of whom I have not read nearly enough. I bought Diary of a Bad Year as a present for myself after my undergraduate degree and hadn't gotten around to it until now. I'm glad I finally did read it, though I think I'm better equipped to read it now rather than after my undergrad.

If unconventional novels aren't your cup of tea, then you might not enjoy Diary quite so much as I did. It has three sections that run parallel to one another: the base of the book is a set of essays, called Strong Opinions, by the protagonist, an elderly author and professor who may or may not be a fictionalized version of Coetzee himself; the next section is a set of reflections by the protagonist on his relationship with his typist, Anya, a shockingly attractive Filipina woman who lives in his apartment complex; the third section is Anya's account of the essays, her relationship with the author, who she calls Senior C, and her live-in partner Alan, a ruthless businessman. The trick is that each page is literally divided between these three sections; the essays run along the top, the author's reflections run along the middle, and Anya's reflections run along the bottom.

Plot is minimal. Anya and Senior C gradually figure out their working relationship, but still fail to understand one another; Alan becomes jealous of the time Anya spends with Senior C; it slowly becomes clear that Alan has hatched some kind of scheme regarding Senior C. That's about all that happens. The main interest in the novel (for me) comes from two things.

First, I enjoyed the essays themselves--mainly political, occasionally aesthetic or mathematico-philosophical--and the place they held in the novel. At first, anyway, they are clever and acute (if sometimes tremendously wrong) but still seem a bit oblivious; since the reader also encounters Anya's commentary on the essays, there's something undefended, exposed, unawares about them. Toward the end of the novel, the character of the essays change; they become more reflective, less bold, more...human, perhaps? Perhaps I enjoyed them because I am (or at any rate was) an academic; even in their error, I feel a sort of affinity with their project, and I enjoyed seeing them soften, seeing them shaped by the characters' lives, seeing their concerns shape the characters' lives.

Second, I enjoyed the degree to which the characters failed to understand one another. All three principle characters had different ideas about what their relationships with one another were; all three characters also failed to understand the other characters ideas. This was ultimately enjoyable, but at times horribly frustrating, because as much as Senior C might be wrong about some things (he is usually wrong when he talks about mathematics), Alan's critiques of Senior C's essays are even worse; he badly misunderstands philosophy, making category errors all of the place. To an extent, this is an academic's nightmare and dream: the reader proves the necessity of the academic's work by failing to understand these ideas, but at the same time and by the same token proves the futility of the academic's work, as well. The character who, by the end, became perhaps Senior C's best reader, to my surprise and joy, was Anya, the pragmatic under-educated typist who proved to be smarter than she seemed (or, very possibly, became smarter in her time with Senior C).
And it's unclear whether Anya or Alan understood Senior C's personal motives at all; Alan seemed to think that there was a love-triangle going on, which is possible but so incredibly boring, while Anya thought that there was something sexual but much more innocent going on, which is also possible, but we don't get many clues from Senior C regarding his attitude toward Anya by the end of the novel.

I don't want to say much more because I'm afraid of spoiling--this isn't a novel that can easily be spoiled, since none of its effects rely much on surprise, but there are a few things which maybe ought to be discovered alone. However, I'll note that there some ideas in his essays that might stand to be discussed, and I may do that on this blog. He certainly has produced some interesting ideas. In the meantime, I'll drop two quotations from the essays for your consideration:

So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: While it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home.

and,

These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them.

Alas, I don't think Diary of a Bad Year will be quite pass that last test.

EDIT: I should note that the title of this post is a quotation from the novel, describing a story Senior C contemplates writing but ultimately doesn't write.

Kinds of Abandon in The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker.

Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni is a lovely novel, even if it does read a little like the first novel it is (there's too much coincidence). As the back of the book explains, it is about Chava, a golem, and Ahmad, a jinni, arriving in New York City in 1899. Chava's master-husband wakes her for the first time minutes before his unsuspected death; when Chava arrives in New York, she is masterless. Ahmad has been trapped in a flask for centuries, and when he is released by a Syrian tinsmith in Manhattan he is still trapped in the human form given to him by the same Bedouin wizard who put him in the bottle. Assorted plotlines unfurl and characters develop, including members of both the Syrian and Jewish immigrant communities and including Yehudah Schaalman, a deadly Kabbalist sorcerer. In a sense it is a book about immigrants in America (Wecker says so explicitly), as the Golem and the Jinni are immigrants in immigrant communities, but the eponymous protagonists are also immigrants to a parody humanity, both trying to act human despite the ways in which their natures rebel against human constraints.

Chava and Ahmad become friends of a sort (though their first meeting is late in the novel, more than a third of the way through), bound by the fact that each of them is a mythical creature pretending to be human for fear that the humans around them, compared to whom both Chava and Ahmad are incredibly powerful, would quickly destroy them in fear and distrust. But they make poor, quarrelsome friends most of the time, because as much as both of their natures resist the humanity they are forced to take on, they resist in very different ways. Chava is a golem, a creature made to serve; without a master, she is aimless, and a quirk of the magic which bound her to her master now allows her (compels her) to feel the desires of everyone she encounters, and when she feels those desires she has an impulse to serve them. (With one exception: she was made to be sexually faithful to her husband.) Chava also fears running amok; whenever a golem gets a taste for violence, it is said, that golem will never stop. Ahmad, on the other hand, is a powerful jinni, a fire spirit once able to enter dreams, fly, and change his shape at will. He roamed the deserts and acted on his whims and desires without thought to consequence. While he retains some of his power, he is bound to human form and certain human vulnerabilities (and worse). And so while both struggle with being human, their desires are radically different: Chava hates the freedom of being human, while Ahmad hates the constraints of being human. Let me excerpt a passage for you (I admit it's a little long):

She shook her head. "You misunderstand me. Each golem is built to serve a master. When I woke, I was already bound to mine. To his will. I heard every thing, and I obeyed with no hesitation."
"That's terrible," the Jinni said.
"To you, perhaps. To me it felt like the way things were meant to be. And when he died--when that connection left me--I no longer had a clear purpose. Now I'm bound to everyone, if only a little. I have to fight against it, I can't be solving everyone's wishes. But sometimes, at the bakery where I work, I'll give someone a loaf of bread--and it answers a need. For a moment, that person is my master. And in that moment, I'm content. If I were as independent as you wish you were, I'd feel I had no purpose at all"
He frowned. "Were you so happy, to be ruled by another."
"Happy is not the word," she said. "It felt right."
"All right, then let me ask you this. If by some chance or magic you could have your master back again, would you wish it?"
It was an obvious question, but one that she had never quite asked herself. But then, couldn't she guess? What sort of man would take a golem for a wife, the way a delivery man might purchase a new cart?
But oh, to be returned to that certainty! The memory of it rose up, sharp and beguiling. And she wouldn't feel as though she was being used. One choice, one decision--and then, nothing.
"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe I would. Though in a way, I think it would be like dying. But perhaps it would be for the best. I make so many mistakes, on my own."
...
She'd half decided to turn back toward Broadway; but then he said, "Do you remember what I told you before? That I was captured, but have no memory of it?"
"Yes, of course I remember."
"I have no idea," he said, "how long I was that man's servant. His slave. I don't know what he made me do. I might have killed my own kind." There was a tight edge in his voice, painful to hear. "But even worse would be if I did it all gladly. If he robbed me of my will, and turned me against myself. Given a choice, I'd sooner extinguish myself in the ocean."
"But if all those terrible things did happen, then it was the wizard's fault, not yours," she said.
Again, that not-quite laugh. "Do you have colleagues at this bakery where you work?"
"Of course," she said. "Moe and Thea Radzin, and Anna Blumberg."
He said, "Imagine that your precious master returns to you, and you give yourself to him, as you said you perhaps would. Because you make so many mistakes. And he says, 'Please, my dear golem, kill those good people at the bakery, the Radzins and Anna Blumberg. Rip them limb from limb."
"But why--"
"Oh, for whatever reason! They insult him, or make threats against him, or he simply develops a whim. Imagine it. And then tell me what comfort it gives to think it wasn't your own fault."
This was a possibility she'd never considered. And now she couldn't help but picture it: grabbing Moe Radzin by the wrist and pulling until his arm came free. She had the strength. She could do it. And all the while, that peace and certainty.

To be honest, I am more sympathetic to Chava's plight than to Ahmad's. Ahmad's desire is freedom, and his growth as a character is to move from moral nihilism to greater responsibility; his attendant fear is simply that he will lose his freedom. Chava's desire is to be servant to a master which will grant her certainty in her decisions, but her fear is more than just that she'll remain aimless; her fear becomes the dark parody of what she desires, that she will be servant to someone who would cause her to hurt others. And, indeed, this is precisely what the threat of running amok is to her: she would be servant to her own darkest impulse, the golem's buried but ever-present taste for violence. It's not just that I recognize both Chava's fears and her desires more than I recognize Ahmad's; I find the fact that what she fears is the logical extension of what she desires to be more interesting than Ahmad's simplicity.

But what interests me most is how both of them desire a kind of abandonment. Ahmad wants to abandon himself to his own desires, be they good or bad; he wants to abandon himself to freedom. Chava wants to abandon herself to her master's desires; she wants to abandon herself to service. If each of them got what they wished, they would lose themselves. Chava explicitly acknowledges this--"I think it would be like dying"--but even Ahmad would dissolve into a sort of formlessness, being a shape-shifter and perpetual wanderer. He would not be recongizable. (To an extent this is a writer's trick; he would probably have a continued sense of identity, but his jinni name is kept from us because it's supposedly inarticulable by humans, and in the flashbacks to his time as a free jinni he did not appear, at least to me, to be quite as fully developed a character as when he was human; at any rate, it wasn't until he starts following humans and investigating them that he starts to differentiate from other jinn. I think this was deliberate on Wecker's part.) As much as Chava's nature and Ahmad's nature rebel against their current human condition, it is exactly that condition--not free of conscience or consequence, but free to make decisions nonetheless--which makes them characters. They gain identity by their humanity.

While The Golem and the Jinni is no allegory, the point is pretty plain. Chava and Ahmad are different in origin and different in ability than humans, but otherwise they are hardly different at all. This sense that being human is horribly uncomfortable, either because we rebel against the limitations our humanity gives us or because we rebel against the freedom our humanity gives us. Some people prefer one rebellion to another, but each fails. From what I can tell Wecker is not particularly religious, but I think that between Chava and Ahmad (but more Chava) some of the particular struggles and griefs of religious life are well represented. I saw much of my own fears and concerns in Chava, and while I do not feel that The Golem and the Jinni provided much way forward as far as those struggles go, I nonetheless found it an enormously satisfying read, not least because character-driven fantasy novels are so hard to come by.

An Enemy of Utopia for Utopia's Sake

http://www.amazon.ca/Why-Marx-Right-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300169434

A while back I read Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, his defense of Marxism. The book is organized into ten chapters, each rebutting a typical argument against Marxism. I would have found this an effective structure--it is one of the reasons that I bought the book--if he hadn't frequently wandered from the topic or covered material he had already addressed in a previous chapter. As far as style goes, Eagleton is direct and readable, but he relies overmuch on imperfect metaphors or examples and at times he reminds me a lot of C. S. Lewis in the latter's most snide and uncharitable passages. To give one example of many possible ones, Eagleton tends to make a lot of unnecessary potshots against postmodernism, and I say that they are unnecessary because he could deal with particular postmodernist criticisms of Marxism without making ad hominem attacks against postmodernists generally. Maybe this sporadic sniping seems really weird to me in part because the Marxist friend I know best also calls herself a postmodernists, so the two schools of thought apparently are not locked in mortal combat; he can be dismantling postmodern critiques without trying to discredit all of postmodernism. And instead of spreading his many arguments against postmodernist ideas over the whole book, he could have organized them into one chapter, as he does with all of the other critiques. This is far from the only example of his uncharitable and snide handling of his critics, but it is the one I found most glaring.

As a very general assessment, I don't think reading this book will make you walk away a communist, but I sure hope it would make you walk away with very serious reservations about capitalism. Eagleton's defenses of Marx and his critiques of capitalism are astute, but I would say that he does a better job of showing why we should ditch capitalism than he does showing why we should adopt Marxism. This imbalance is partly a consequence of the structure, but it remains the case that he doesn't explain why Marxism is better than the other non-capitalist options, because there are other options. For instance, there are more kinds of communism than Marxism, but there are also things that aren't capitalism that also aren't communism. Marx wasn't the only one who has provided resources for anti-capitalist thought, cf the Gospel of Luke.

I haven't much more to say about Why Marx Was Right as a whole; when your defense consists mainly of refutations of refutations, you don't work out much of a larger system for me to interact with (not that he has to, since he's working with a preexisting system, i.e. Marxism). However, Eagleton's greatest strength is probably his habit of incorporating lesser-known parts of Marxist thought into his defenses. Not only are these claims probable-sounding and interesting, but if they turn out to be true they'll be rather important. I'd like to share and discuss some of these ideas here.

1. There is such a thing as a universal human nature. In particular, humans have material needs, and this fundamentally effects our behaviour. This feature doesn't differentiate us from other animals. What does differentiate us from other animals is our ability to self-actualize; our ability to assess, learn about, and improve ourselves is also part of our nature.
I tend to be pretty hard on the idea of a universal human nature (in fact, if there's one argument that will tempt me to start ignoring you entirely, it's an appeal to human nature), so it's generally good to be reminded that there is at least a bare minimum of such universal nature and that that minimum determines quite a lot about us.

2. Thought cannot really be abstract; it is always grounded in materiality. First, physical bodies are the condition of thought in the first place; you can't have minds without brains. Second, thought originates from its ability to fulfill material needs. If thought did not fulfill material needs, we would never have evolved or practiced it. All thought, abstract or otherwise, has physical needs beneath it.
Marx would go on to say that these physical needs to some extent determine all thought, regardless of how apparently abstract/disinterested, or that we should at least not be surprised to find that our abstract thought covertly (even to us) serves our material needs. I find this logical process a little far-fetched--the origins of a thing do not so totally control what we can use it for--but I feel like the case is overstated rather than incorrect, especially considering what we know about human cognitive biases and how bad highly abstract thinkers tend to be at introspection/self-awareness.

3. Following #1 and #2, Marx was somewhat anti-philosophical. Eagleton says that Marx has an aversion to abstract thought. Just as thought is based in materiality, any system of thought that deserves our attention must begin with the recognition that human beings have material needs and emotions bound up with those needs. There cannot be reason divorced from those needs or emotions. Further, any philosophy that is not about those needs is omitting basic data about the world.  (Of course, Marxists can be just as guilty of this, in that many of them tend to think of people as non-gendered, etc.)
We might be able to imagine sci-fi contexts in which there are perfectly rational creatures, but it wouldn't tell us much that would be of any use to us. Further, refering to the next point, I don't think we can accurately imagine a disinterested or immaterial intelligence anyway.

4. Any radical break with the present--as in communism, but you can think of a lot of things, like abolition or gender equity or the Protestant Reformation--will result in a society that cannot be predicted from the present. In other words, even Marx doesn't really claim to know what a communist society would look like or how it would be organized. That sort of thing could only be figured out in situ, without the pressures on thought, philosophy, etc. that our current economic system makes. But, more importantly, a radical break from the present, at least in the case of Marxist revolution, would mean that a whole different set of people will be making the important decisions, and those decisions wouldn't really be freely theirs if they could be predicted in advance. This might make communism hard to sell because people want to know what they're buying, but it is unavoidably true.
What interests me about this idea isn't just that it explains the lack of specifics a lot of communists give about life under communism (excepting Fourier, of course), but that it seems relevant to a lot of arguments I see people getting into. Whenever someone makes claims about what would happen if some radical change took place, I want to shout that they can't possibly know that; if we had any evidence to go on, then it would not be a radical change because it would have happened already. It might seem like a decidedly pessimistic view of the imagination, but it's really just a pessimistic view of our imagination's predictive power.

5. Since I'm rather interested in praxis as a word (I tend to be more worried about orthopraxy than orthodoxy, but I also just like Greek words with ties to theology), I was interested to learn that Marx talks about praxis in terms of its ancient Greek context. Praxis in Greek thought refers to the activity of free-born citizens, not slaves; further, it refers to activity done for its own sake and not as a means to an end, especially not an economic end. This is what Marx, and Marxists, mean by "true production" (as opposed to "false production").
I am very drawn to the idea of praxis in this sense. As far as goals go, developing a society in which praxis is possible to all sounds like a great idea. But I'm wondering if the idea of praxis can be entirely consistent with the previous points about thought's material basis; Eagleton describes communism as a system in which material needs are met so that true production becomes possible, but it's not as though we ever stop having material needs. Hunger renews itself.

6. Negative depictions of communism tend to show uniform citizens robbed of any individuality, like drones or the Borg, but according to Marx, utter homogeneity is capitalism's dream, not communism's. Equality--the cry of the French Revolution and of liberals* everywhere--is a bourgeois value. Capitalism views employees as equal because they are interchangeable, like the parts of a machine. Anyone can work at McDonald's. Money, or exchange value, realizes the ultimate dream of equality: all money is perfectly equal because it is perfectly interchangeable. Under communism, Eagleton says, we are able to self-actualize (see the first point) and engage in praxis (see the fourth point), and it is these two things that produce individuality. No two things, and no two people, are exchangeable; people are unique.
While I'm suspicious of the dichotomy presented here, I found I was forced to agree with the general point that capitalism is no defender of individuality--for example, I can imagine little more uniform than suburbia--but there also seems to be a bit of equivocation between equality as a political right (equality before the law, gender equality) and equality as interchangeability. It's not a lot of equivocation, but there's just enough for room to quarrel.

7. Eagleton notes that Adorno described Marx "as an enemy of utopia for the sake of its realization," which I thought was a neat phrase. It means, roughly, that in order to achieve the utopian society you're looking for, one must make realistic assessments both about the world as it is and what must be done to make the world into what it ought to be. Dreamers can't realize their dreams if they don't wake up. Which seems obvious, but it's sometimes good to make seemingly-obvious claims explicit. (We might also be able to say that Marx was an enemy of philosophy for the sake of philosophy's realization.)

While these ideas are Marx's, as elucidated by Eagleton, I think what makes most of them interesting is that we don't need to be Marxists, or even communists, to find them interesting and consider whether they might be true. Certainly, if true, all of these ideas would be very useful to non-Marxists as well as to Marxists.

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*It might seem a surprise to readers, especially American ones, that I use the word "liberal" a bit dismissively, since I must look rather liberal to them. In Canada we have (at least) three major political parties: the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democrats. This reflects the spectrum of respectable political positions, those being conservative, liberal, and socialist (which in Canada does not mean communism so much as capitalism with many socialist reforms). There's a history of use here that I don't want to get into, but in brief liberalism is seen by some of the academics I learned from or hang out with as a failed attempt to make conservatism into something nicer that, ultimately, found more hygienic ways of achieving conservatism's unethical ends. Alternately, it could just mean "not left enough." I'm perhaps not as hard on liberalism as this mini-definition would imply, but we could say that I'm skeptical of liberalism's abilities to achieve its better intentions. So my use of "liberal" here does not mark me as conservative but, rather, as socialist.

Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts: My Top 25 Borges Stories

Jorge Luis Borges (Source: Wikipedia.)

Partly in response to a request for Borges recommendations, and partly because it woud make it easier when I recommend Borges in other people's comboxes (which I do with what I'm sure is annoying regularity), I have decided to compile a list of what I feel are Jorge Luis Borges's twenty-five best short stories, "best" here being the totally objective measure of how much I liked remembering them when reading Wikipedia's list of Borges's work. Before I begin, I think it is best to place Borges: you'll likely get a sense of his style just from these selections, but each of his stories appreciates the better you know his style and the different things he writes. For this reason, I suggest you read the Wikipedia page, or a similar source, before diving into his work. (I would have liked to recommend the introductions to some of his collections, but I do not have my copy of Collected Fictions on hand, so I cannot identify which collection has an introduction I would like to recommend. This is a shame, as in one of them he writes some very thoughtful things about translation. And as far as non-fiction goes, I would also like to recommend his The Book of Imaginary Beings, which is a bestiary of imaginary creatures.)

These are ordered roughly as you'd find them in a chronological collection of his work; at any rate, they are ranked as you would find them ordered within his short story collections, and the collections themselves chronologically by publication. In order to make your reading decisions easier, however, I've arranged them again below according to themes.

My summaries are deliberately incomplete because many of them are spoilable and I would never want to diminish a person's experience with Borges. Of course I won't mark which ones are the most incomplete because I don't want you starting the story expecting their to be a twist or something.

1. "The Widow Ching--Pirate" is part of The Book of Iniquities, which is famously half-plagairized. It follows the career of the eponymous women, a real historical figure whose depiction here is as much hagiography as it is biography. At the beginning of his career Borges was writing stories about ne'er-do-wells, outlaws, and thoroughly amoral people, but his interest in such characters remained throughout his life.
2. "On Exactitude in Science" is Borges's take on the map/territory problem. It is about a group of cartographers who make a map that exactly fits the empire. Baudrillard later addressed the story in Simulacra and Simulation. It looks like it is a citation, but Borges actually wrote it himself.
3. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is a review of a fictional novel of the same name. I consider it a deeply touching story; it involves a young man trying to find an ever-receding spiritual leader. I understand that it meant something different to Borges than it does to me; to be honest, I haven't read enough of Borges's essays on personality to be quite sure what it meant to Borges (or, anyway, to be as sure as one can be).
4. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is also a review of a fictional novel; this time, the novel is Don Quixote, except written by Pierre Menard rather than Cervantes. It is about how to read texts in light of their authors, among other things. Recall that, in the Spanish literary tradition, Cervantes holds much the same role as Shakespeare holds in the English literary tradition, and that Borges loved classical literature.
5. "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" is maybe the least interesting of the reviews of fictional works that I've included, but it is still interesting. As with the others, Borges suggests books that are interesting in conception but might be tedious to read in full, and I am grateful to Borges that I can think about these books without feeling bad about not having read them, since they don't exist.
6. "The Library of Babel" is one of Borges's fantasies. It is about an enormous and self-contained (ie. microcosmic) library that contains all possible books of 410-page books (of a certain format), and the philosophical consequences of this situation. It is one of Borges's many meditations on infinity. (If you like philosophy, I suggest you read the Wikipedia page on this story once you've read the original, as Wikipedia summarizes what philosophers have said about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel.)
7. "Death and the Compass" is a short detective story, one of Borges's oft-referenced genres. It is not like most mystery stories. It was the first Borges story that I read in full; it was assigned to a class in which I was the TA, and I had to teach it. Expect considerations of mirrors, a labyrinth, and one of the names of God.
8. "Three Versions of Judas" is about a fictional theologian who considers, in three different and increasingly heretical works, what the Incarnation meant and what role Judas played in it.
9. "The Dead Man" is one of Borges's gaucho stories. I have not included many of them and wanted to be sure I had a few. This one is pretty classically Borges.
10. "The Theologians" is about a rivalry between two theologians. It is also about heresy and orthodoxy. It, more than "Pierre Menard," is about how all people are one/the same, or whatever it is that I don't quite grasp about Borges.*
11. "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" is, in way, about conversions, and about finding things worth sacrificing oneself for, though I don't know if Borges would summarize it in the same way. It is not about damsels in distress at all. Like much of Borges work, it is both neo-classical and concerned with South American history and politics.
12. "The House of Asterion" is about Asterion, who is a shut-in. Don't be put off by the beginning; by the end of the story I felt much more sympathy for the narrator, not because he becomes less oblivious but because his obliviousness becomes more, well, sympathetic.
13. "The Zahir" is another fantasy or magic realist piece. It is about a fictional object, the zahir, which makes anyone who sees it become obsessed with it. Someone somewhere says it is about unrequited love, which I think is a horribly diminishing interpretation. It is in many ways the partner and opposite of "The Aleph," which I actually liked less than "The Zahir" and did not include in this list.
14. "The Maker" is about memory and poetry and what kind of life (and psychology) is necessary for art; to this end, it follows a man whose life at least begins in a way that does not predispose him to poetry. I think it is easily one of Borges's most beautiful stories.
15. "Dreamtigers" is quite short (as is "The Maker," but even that isn't so short as "Dreamtigers"). It deals entirely with Borges's obsession with tigers. It also deals with the limits of art. Borges considered it his most personal piece. Some people consider it a poem.
16. "Argumentum Ornithologicum" is a tongue-in-cheek apologetics for the existence of God based on counting birds. At least, I think it's tongue-in-cheek. It's cute and very very short, but it nearly didn't make this list.
17. "Everything and Nothing" is about identity, and Shakespeare, and art, and maybe God.
18. "Borges and I", maybe one of Borges's most well-read pieces (that's wild speculation, you should likely ignore it), is about what it's like to be an author...or, anyway, an author who strongly believes that personality doesn't exist and that identity isn't as coherent or discrete as well mostly pretend. It is not magic realist at all, by the way; it's strictly realist.
19. "The Intruder" is about a love triangle. If you've read Eve Sedgwick's Between Men, you'll realize how badly this can go. It is most interesting to read in light of Between Men, especially once you know that Borges based it on a true story, but changed two of the characters from friends to brothers specifically to prevent any homoerotic undertones. It is also one of Borges's gaucho stories.
20. "The Duel" is about a rivalry between two society ladies who take up painting. I maybe include it because I share Borges's obsession with rivalries. It's unusual for Borges in that all of the primary characters are women.
21. "The Gospel According to Mark" is a sort of surrealist take on the Gospel of Mark. A man stays with a family of illiterate labourers isolated in the pampas and introduces them to the Bible. Events take an unexpected (but in retrospect unsurprising) turn.
22. "Guayaquil" has Borges, or a near-Borges, as a protagonist. It is about some letters of Bolivar; it is also about Spanish American history, and who writes about it.
23. "There Are More Things" probably would not make this list if it was about merit, but since this list is really about which I like the best, it is here. Borges wrote it as an homage to H. P. Lovecraft, and I think in reading it I learned that Borges would likely have made a better Lovecraft than Lovecraft did. (That's maybe unfair. He'd have made a more eloquent and more patient Lovecraft, but maybe not a better Lovecraft. Unless being a less racist Lovecraft is enough to make him better, in which case...)
24. "The Book of Sand" probably would not make this list if it was about which ones I liked best, but since I am kind of pretending this list is at least sometimes about merit, it is here. Like "The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "The Aleph," and some others, it is about infinity. It is also magic realist/fantasy.
25. "Blue Tigers" could have exactly the same description as "The Book of Sand." Please note that it is not about tigers at all, actually, but having read "Dreamtigers" is probably a prerequisite to really appreciating this story and why Borges named it "Blue Tigers."

Ones I almost included but did not: "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell," "The Man on Pink Corner," "The South," and "A Yellow Rose."

Below I have organized the stories thematically. Feel free to ignore all of the headings you find boring.

Magic Realism and Fantasy Stories:
"The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Iniquity Stories (including guacho stories):
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Dead Man," "The Intruder."

South and Latin America Stories (including gaucho stories):
"The Dead Man," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Intruder," "The Duel," "Guayaquil."

More Personal Stories:
"The Maker," "Dreamtigers," "Borges and I," "Guayaquil."

Stories with Overtly Religious Themes:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'Tasim," "Death and the Compass," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Theologians," "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "The Gospel According to Mark," "The Book of Sand."

Stories with Infinity as a Theme:
"A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Stories about Literature:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "Death and the Compass," "The House of Asterion" (perhaps), "The Maker," "The Dreamtigers," "Everything and Nothing," "Borges and I," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand." (Huh. I wonder what particular theme interest me the most...)

Stories about Art:
All of those in "Stories about Literature," and "The Duel."

Stories with Mathematics or Science as a Theme:
"On Exactitude in Science," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" (maybe), "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "Blue Tigers."

Stories with Identity as a Theme:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Theologians," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "Everything and Nothing," "Borges and I."

Stories that are Quests, especially for Knowledge, kind of but not really:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Death and the Compass," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "There Are More Things," "Blue Tigers."

Stories in which Female Characters Play an Important Role:
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Intruder," "The Duel." (This is maybe one of Borges's weaknesses; he writes mainly about men. Thank goodness they are not all white, able-bodied men.)

Stories which have a Plot, as Traditionally Conceived, or anyway as Traditionally as Borges will Write:
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Death and the Compass," "The Dead Man," "The Theologians," "The Zahir," "The Intruder," "The Gospel According to Mark," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Stories which might not even be Stories but Some Unnamed Genre, maybe "Fictional Essay"**:
"On Exactitude in Science," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "Borges and I."

Stories, of this list, that are easily my favourites:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Maker," "Dreamtigers."

*The trouble is more that I don't know how to articulate what Borges is getting at than that I don't have any idea. It is much less willowy-sounding than I've made it out to be, though perhaps still less intellectually rigourous than some might care for.
**If you notice that not all of the stories are included in one of "has a traditional plot" and "might not even be a story," be assured that it's because a lot of what Borges writes is on the border between the two. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" contains a story, for instance, but also contains a fictional review of that story. Others have events but not in some sort of linear plot way.