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.

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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.

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*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.

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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?

"Her Naked Glory": Objectification and Female Nudity in Television and Film

I've been reading* a bit of commentary about "Blurred Lines" and Game of Thrones, particularly regarding female nudity and objectification. In the comment sections more than the articles themselves I've noticed a few people (mainly women, incidentally) asking if female nudity couldn't be empowering (or be read as empowering) in certain cases. While the individual comments I saw were not really well worked out with regard to "Blurred Lines," which we probably cannot read as empowering if we're being honest about the video, I still think that this is a question worth asking. I don't really have an answer, but I do want to break this broader question into a few more specific ones.

1. Are representations of female nudity always erotic?
I ask this because male nudity isn't always erotic. In the first season of Game of Thrones (the only season I've seen), there is a lot of female nudity but there is also some male nudity. In the first instance of male nudity that I recall, there is really no sense that that nudity is erotic. It's humiliating and objectifying, yes, but not erotic. (A man is forced to march naked and tied to a horse as a punishment for attempting to murder another character.) So my suspicion is that, if male nudity is not always erotic, then female nudity wouldn't be, either.

2. Are representations of female nudity always objectifying?
I have little to say about this, except that if the answer to this question is no and the answer to the previous question is no, we have to ask the next question.

3. Are representations of female nudity, when erotic, always objectifying?
Again, for reasons like those above, I am assuming that it isn't. The example that's usually cited here is lesbian pornography (as in real lesbian pornography, made by women about women for women, not pornography made about lesbian women by straight men for straight men), but the example that comes to mind for me might be Irene Adler in the BBC's Sherlock. She appears naked as a way of exercising power, and I think her agency is deliberately emphasized in that scene, but I'm not always sure that this sort of agency is maintained as the representation crosses the fourth wall. In other words, can a female character still be objectified for the sake of male viewers while maintaining agency within the fiction?

(Note that you can set this up as a chart, with two columns and two rows; the columns would be erotic/non-erotic and the rows would be objectifying/non-objectifying. I've covered three of the four cells now, but the fourth, non-erotic objectification, is pretty obvious, I think, in that if non-erotic nudity is possible, then non-erotic objectifying nudity must be, since objectification does not rely on eroticization to function. That statement is a pretty important piece of evidence, though.)

4. If the answer is no to questions 1 through 3, then under what conditions do representations of female nudity a) become erotic and b) become objectifying?
This is the question that really interests me, and that I am most ignorant about so far. I suspect that I know the answers to #1-#3 as far as I am asking those questions abstractly: so, representations of female nudity almost certainly aren't always inherently erotic. But maybe, in the cultural and representational settings I inhabit, the conditions making nudity both erotic and objectifying are always present; maybe, under patriarchy, where the assumed viewpoint of any text is both male and heterosexual, and where male heterosexuality assumes subject status at the expense of female subjectivity, representations of female nudity always become erotic and objectifying, regardless of the text's own features. I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that I could believe that it is true without much convincing. But I would need some convincing.

The point where I resist this story that I've posited is where, under patriarchy, male heterosexuality's assumption of subject status always entails objectifying women. I think it's easy to do, and that we (as in "heterosexual men" and not "you and I") are encouraged (by whom?) to assert subjectity at the expense of female subjectivity, but I don't think it's inevitable. That's one place where I'd need convincing. And I'd also need convincing that the assumed reader/viewer is always male and heterosexual. (In other words, just because patriarchy is big and strong doesn't mean it's omnipotent and omnipresent.)

In other words, we are confronted with the problem--the same problem, really, that all textual or cultural interpretation confronts in some way or another--of where meaning resides: intention? reception? context? form? Does a film objectify women, or does the director objectify them, or do the veiwers? Do well-intentioned viewers, watching a well-intentioned and well-executed film, nonetheless objectify nude women when watching in a patriarchal context? Can the act of watching, in anyway and by anyone, recover agency for women represented erotically when nude? Or is it some formal (or intertextual) feature of the film itself that objectifies or does not objectify nude women, and that feature trumps anything you or I might bring to the text? The answers to these questions certainly aren't obvious in the general case of textual interpretation or the specific case of representations of female nudity.

We can ask a version of question #4 of women even when clothed, obviously: Under what conditions do representations of women a) become erotic and b) become objectifying? However, because we criticize films for gratuitous nudity and not for a gratuitous presence of women (the problem is the exact opposite), I think there is something special about nudity that lends it to objectification. (Notice, too, that when people criticize a film for gratuitous nudity, they almost always mean female nudity, not nudity in general.) And gratuitous female nudity does seem for most people to mean "erotic objectification of women" in and of itself, which makes me think that these questions are particularly apt, since if female nudity is not always objectifying, then we ("you and I" this time, not "heterosexual men") should probably be criticizing films a bit more pointedly and accurately than just saying "gratuitous nudity" without explaining how it is objectifying in this case.

(I'm assuming feminist reasons and not prudish ones for criticizing a film for gratuitous nudity. While rather prudish myself, I don't consider prudishness grounds for criticizing a film; it might mean you don't like the film, but it has no bearing on the film's quality.)

5. Are representations of female nudity ever empowering for women, and under what conditions?
Which is the question I started out with. It isn't a question I feel I can answer, though, this time not because of ignorance (as in #4), but because I'm a dude. I feel that this particular question is probably one that men can't answer.
______________
(The title quote comes from Paradise Lost and refers to a pre-lapsarian Eve. There's some obvious baggage with that quotation--for example, Milton's spectacular sexism--which is why I chose it. Because, you know, so-called empowering nudity might come with misogynist baggage.)
*OK, skimming.

What Genres Mean [Index Post]

I've written enough about different genres and how their form impacts meaning that I think I should make an index post bringing them together and sorting them. There might be some doubling up, since one post might fit into multiple groups. ("Other People's Epics," in particular, ends one sequence and begins another.) Pretty much all of these can be found through the "genre and form" or the "poetic form" labels, but those labels also retrieve lots of other things, so I hope this is useful in its organization and specificity.

Other People's [Insert Genre]s Series
In which I talk about how genres alter their content and what this means for choosing the best genre as a vehicle for an idea. In which I also talk about imagining other people's epics, mysteries, etc.
Other People's Epics
Other People's Mysteries
Other People's [Insert Genre]s

National Epics
In which my thinking about potential national epics, particularly an epic for Soviet Canuckistan, evolves somewhat.
7 Quick Takes (XLVIII)
The Canadian Epic
Other People's Epics

The Fantasy Genre
In which I think about problems unique to the fantasy genre.
Magic Realism and the Trick of Taxonomy
Magic, Maps, and Mystery

Miscellany
Multiculturalism in the Monster Kingdom, Parts I and II, which I considered putting under both National Epics and The Fantasy Genre, and in which I talk about how Cyberlore's Majesty 2 both does and does not tell a compelling story about the creation of a hybrid monster culture
As For Me and My House, in which I talk about the self-account genre, a la Judith Butler, in relation to the coming-out narrative, the testimony, and self-disclosure of mental illness.
This Exploitation Might Not Be the Kind You're Thinking of, in which I talk about exploitation flicks and group identities.
A New Poetic Form, in which I make up a form called an aubadina, which is really just a messed-up sonnet, designed specifically to express the parting of ways.

I will update this as I write more posts like these.

How Should We Criticize Art?

An Art's Four Campfires Redux

While looking at my stats today I discovered that a computer game blogger has recently picked up my post about Art's Four Campfires, in which I explain Scott McCloud's idea that there are four distinct sets of values which motivate artists and shape the work they create. I was excited that someone was finally trying to answer the open question I had about how one could apply these campfires to computer games; while I sometimes play computer games (I recently played through Bastion and quite enjoyed it), I do not have nearly enough experience with them, or with even close to enough genres, to be able to talk intelligently about their form in a way that a Four Campfires analysis would require. However, I could not remember why I had found McCloud's idea interesting in the first place, so I re-read my other posts on the issue (here and here) and realized that the Four Campfires can support, and provide a partial vocabulary for, the kind of discussions of art (books, movies, etc.) that I would like to see happen instead of the ones that often do happen.

In case you either forget or weren't around when I first wrote my first Four Campfires post , I'll encourage you to take the link back (here again) and skip to the summary I gave of the Four Campfires. (They have bold headings and are rather short, so don't be daunted by the length of the post.) For the rest of this post I will assume that you know what the Campfires are.

The first thing I want to note is that the Four Campfires are of very little use in a proper literary criticism setting.* While once upon a time literary criticism was, on an institutional level, at least partly about deciding which works are good and which works are bad, which works canonical and which works non-canonical, that is no longer the case. So in my employment of the Four Campfires, I am departing from my department, so to speak, at least temporarily, because I think the Four Campfires are most useful when making value-judgements.

One of my pet peeves when reading a discussion of art (whether books, television, movies, etc.) is when the critic devalues the art for failing to do what that critic wants the art to do. So, for instance, if a person criticizes a television show because its storyline is incoherent or because its visuals are sub-par, I can get annoyed. Specifically, I get annoyed when someone criticizes a work because it fails to do something other than what the work appears to be trying to do. If a work seems guided by a Classicist ethic, supported by Animism, then expecting it to push boundaries is unfair. If a work seems guided by a Formalist or Iconoclastic ethic, then expecting it to have engaging characters or a coherent plot is unfair. Enjoying a particular experience more than another is perfectly fine, but to criticize a work for being a different kind of work than you enjoy is not.

I do not, however, think that criticizing is never warranted.** I think there are two kinds of situation—and, joyously, they are frequent—where criticizing is warranted. The first is when a work is seems to be attempting a particular goal—say, an Animist one—and fails to do so. In this case, you can discuss how the work seems to fail at its own goal. As an example, many people feel that shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica failed in their final seasons to tell compelling stories, and I would take compelling storytelling to be a primary goal of both shows. Alternately, I found 300 to be an astoundingly ugly movie; my brother assures me that the composition of each frame is nearly perfect, and so if I can take that to be an indication that the director had Classicist goals, I can feel comfortable criticizing 300 for its failure to meet those goals. (I could of course be wrong in that assessment—maybe I have poor taste—but in that case my criticizing will be inaccurate rather than misplaced.)

The second kind of situation in which criticizing makes sense is when a work has negative ideological content. It is in this sort of situation that criticism overlaps with criticizing: in literary criticism, one of the things we do most often (though there is a lot more to it than this) is read texts as embodying and/or containing ideological content. The contention is that absolutely all texts have some discoverable relationship to ideology (or, if you don't like ideology, to worldview or cosmology or belief). Not all authors intend to make claims about the universe with their texts, but nonetheless their texts do make some claims. One of the functions of criticism is to uncover this content. Often scholars in literary criticism will make explicit or implicit value judgements about that content. In this sense, the criticism of and the criticizing of a text overlap.

For instance, I find 300 an ugly movie, but if I'm going to criticize it (which I sometimes do) I'm probably going to do so on ideological grounds. To wit, it is not only sexist, but it also overwrites classical history in order to disguise its misogyny. Furthermore, I often make long arguments about the movie's abuse of history in order to promote ideals, obviously of an “American” character, that are mainly used to justify imperial violence. (I had written out that argument in a draft this post, but it took up too much space and is not necessary for this conversation). Whether or not the director intended to justify American foreign violence is beside the point; 300 does it anyway and someone needs to criticize it for doing that. If a piece of art is sexist, racist, homophobic, or whatever, criticizing the text for that ideology is warranted regardless of the artist's goals. That said, I will not criticize a work for failing to espouse the particular claims about the world or ask the particular questions about the world that I would like it to espouse or ask; my criticizing is reserved for what the work does do or tries but fails to do, not what I would have like it to do.

To summarize, I get annoyed when people criticize art for not attempting the same goals, or holding the same aesthetic values, as themselves, but I am all for criticizing art for failing to achieve its apparent goals or for espousing, intentionally or otherwise, dangerous ideology. To bring this back to McCloud's idea (which was really just a pretext for ranting on this topic), what I like about the Four Campfires are that they produce a vocabulary for the kinds of values which an artist can try to achieve; if I were to start criticizing the Four Campfires (more than I already have), I would say that they simply do not produce enough of a vocabulary. But maybe they don't have to. Maybe they are just a starting point.

(And now that I've thought this through, I'm noticing that I'm doing for aesthetics in this post what I tried to do for ethics in a recent set of posts. Oddly—or maybe not oddly, since aesthetics and ethics are different things—I am much more willing to come to clear conclusions in art than I am in morality. What is odd, I guess, is that in aesthetics I derive my certainty from ethical grounds, which I shouldn't be able to do when I am less certain about those very ethics. But it's only an apparent contradiction, not a real one; while I am not sure how I can be certain of particular ethical beliefs, I know that I am certain of them.)

*On the note of number, I'm not sure whether to treat “the Four Campfires” as plural (because there are four) or singular (because it's one conceptual tool). I'm going with plural because it makes more sense syntactically, but it's maybe worth pointing out that I'm thinking about it as a singular tool. Also, if I missed an instance of singular use when editing, at least you'll know why it was singular in the first place. It has nothing to do with my usual habit of writing too quickly and not editing it enough.

**I am using “criticizing” instead of “criticism” because, in my vocabulary, “criticism” is the kind of thing that scholars do in English departments, and it bears more resemblance to the colloquial meaning of “analysis” than to the colloquial meaning of “criticism.” I repeat that reviewing books and determining their artistic merit is not that discipline's primary function. I realize the verbal "criticizing" is awkward but it's all I've got.

Does Communism Need a Better Aesthetics?

In talking with a friend of mine who identifies as Marxist, I realized that my position on communism is fairly muddled. While I generally consider myself a socialist rather than a communist, I realized that I had no particular reason to choose socialism over communism besides complacency. Part of my preference for socialism is probably quite unlike most people's criticisms of communism: I grudgingly endorse strong state control as a means of enforcing environmental and anti-discrimination initiatives (largely because I'm cynical about the efficacy of grassroots activism to make any difference), and socialism requires a centralized state in ways that communism does not (or, at least, I tend to associate socialism with a centralized state and communism with communes and collectives). However, I do not think that that really explains why I dislike communism.

The real reason I dislike communism is that I find it ugly.

For me, the communist aesthetic is founded entirely in the realm of labour. Of course this makes sense, since communist thought has historically been a critique of capitalism and the particular labour relations within capitalist economics. It is perfectly logical that communism would return repeatedly to labour, and given Marx's historical position, that labour tends to be imagined as industrial. The images of communism are of factory-work and by extension of automation. At times, the images might be agricultural, but they are not particularly pastoral. Thanks perhaps to Soviet Russian propaganda but almost certainly to the reality of farm work as well, agricultural work in communist aesthetics appears mechanized and labour-intensive. Not only is none of this pretty, it is also undesirable. In truth, I dislike both the idea of difficult manual labour and the idea of work in a factory setting. (As Northrop Frye explicitly puts it, the world of labour is not the worst of all worlds, but it is closer to the world we reject than the world we desire. I don't think I need to lean on Frye for such a claim, though. Among other things, I am only making claims about my imagining of these economic systems; I am not making claims about a universal imagination.)

Of course it is the case that unpleasant working conditions are even more characteristic of capitalism than of communism; uncovering that fact is one of communism's chief critiques. But because communism makes the reality of hard work, industrialization, and mechanization apparent, it is communism that I associate with those realities. Capitalism, meanwhile, promotes an appealing fiction as its aesthetic, one of hygienic consumption, choice, and leisure. Of course, all of these are fictions: we work more, destroy more, have fewer meaningful options under capitalism. However, capitalism appears pleasant, especially to those of us in the middle class.

Let's look at that word “pleasant,” because it's also important. The primary emotions promoted by capitalism (or, I should say, capitalist advertising, because I'm reifying capitalism and I shouldn't do that) is pleasure, satisfaction, and admiration. The emotions that I associate with communism are much different. In fact, I don't associate many emotions at all with communism, since I think of it as largely dehumanized and mechanized. But when I think of communism I also think of revolution, and I associate revolution with anger or some similar passion. And I also think of union meetings, and I associate union meetings with frustration and discomfort.

Of course I know that advertising is a lie and I am at times able to return to capitalism the aesthetics of labour, alienation, struggle, anger, and destruction, but it is ordinarily free-market capitalism that I think of in those senses. Socialism, or the kind of socialism practised in Canada, at any rate, is really capitalism with sort-of-communist aspirations, and it ought to be subject to many of the same critiques as free-market capitalism. However, since socialism is certainly less subject to some of those critiques, I associate socialism with other, more attractive aesthetics: trees and clean water (ie. environmentalism), the redemption of criminals (ie. rehabilitative programs), the rescue of the downtrodden (ie. welfare, public health care), the inculcation of culture (ie. public education), the connections that connect and thereby produce a nation (ie. postal system, roads). Socialism obviously looks better than capitalism (as it should!), but somehow it manages to dodge the trap that caught communism by not directly critiquing capitalism itself, instead appearing as an improved form of capitalism.

A political position's aesthetics is a very silly basis on which to judge it, but I think I'm right in attributing my preference to aesthetics, and I suspect I'm not the only one to do so. The problem isn't just understanding that advertisers, and others invested in a capitalist economy, have produced an aesthetic of capitalism that is fictitious. The problem is with the aesthetics I associate with communism: perhaps communism needs a better PR job, but perhaps it is also true that I need to re-think my own conception of communism's aesthetics.

I am not stating that I now am a communist; rather, I am noting that in order to think through economic systems I need to first address how concerns about aesthetics are impeding the clarity of my thought. It also occurs to me that in other countries, or even other parts of this country, or even other demographics in this part of Canada, such aesthetics might differ.

Def Poetry: Knock Knock

If my last post discouraged you (and I could see how one might find it discouraging), may I suggest you listen to this def poetry, Daniel Beaty's "Knock Knock":

Why I Love Spoken Word, But Hate This

Actually, I won't be talking at all about what I like about spoken word, and I don't like using the word hate. But I couldn't resist that title.

I had been about to write a post about something else, but instead I am going to write on this before it loses any timeliness and before I cool off and don't care about it any more.

Those of you who wander the Christian and atheist blogospheres have likely encountered this video already:



When watching this video however many weeks ago it hit the 'sphere, I was somewhat impressed by his spoken word abilities (rhythm and rhyme are hard, yo) and somewhat more impressed by his rhetorical prowess, but not at all impressed by his ability to construct a plausible argument. This has already been hashed over plenty on the Internet, so I won't go there again.

But there was something else that bothered me, something in how he spoke. I couldn't put my finger on it. I knew he must have some skill, since his end-rhyming was pretty impressive, as was his ability to use symmetrical structures. So what bothered me?

Today, someone I know posted this on Facebook:




And then I figured it out. OK, yes, his claims have a few holes (1. non-Christian families, which are not centred around Jesus, seem to fair no worse than Christian ones; 2. coming from a broken home does not really qualify you for marriage advice; 3. suggesting that "centring on Jesus" is a discrete acheivement one must attain before marriage seems to be an impossible prerequisite, since by most accounts that centring is a lifelong process), but that's not what bothered me so much.

No, what bothered me was that, despite his ability to rhyme things (which, as I said before, rhyming well, as opposed to passably, is hard), he's actually not that great of a spoken word poet. If you care to listen to these performances, I suggest you count the number of times he begins clauses (sentences in particular) with the following:

1. "I mean [if] ..."
2. "Like, ..."
3. "I'm [just] sayin' ..."
4. "Don't you see..."
5. "I guess..."
6. "See, ..."

(That last one is his favourite.)

I understand that rhythm is difficult, but if you need to fill it in with these same phrases, you need to do some more work. These transitions are fine once in a while; unfortunately, he's got so many of them that it starts to look like a tic. That's not good art. That just sounds silly. And once something sounds silly, I stop taking it seriously.*

Also, speaking of rhythm, his rhythm isn't always that good after all. Notice that quite a few phrases are rushed to fit them into the line. ("Self-righteousness" in the first video is a good example.) *tch* That's sloppy. I don't expect you to be the master of rhythm and rhyme (if you're bored, start that video at 2:57 and stop at 4:49), but I do expect you to try.

What does it says about me that I care more about the formal concerns than I am about the ideological content. It's not that I care about the content, but the aesthetics bother me far more. In part I continue to wonder why Christians seem incapable of producing great quality of art these days. Maybe we need more Winter Christians in the studio?

(To be fair, there are some great lines in the first video: "a museum for good people v. a hospital for the broken" is an effective image, regardless of the value of its ideological content. And also to be fair, when I found out that his inspiration for the second was Mark Driscoll, any chance he had with me was lost.)

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*Of course I'm fully aware that my own writing has particular tics. Beginning clauses with "that is" is one of them; beginning sentences with conjunctions is another. While I'm not much better, I would be quite sure not to use those some habitual phrases in poetry or fiction that I was writing. Why prose is generally less governed by aesthetics? Perhaps because we think it is a transparent medium (which of course it isn't).

Another Account of My Absence

G'day, all.

Welcome, if you're here from Unequally Yoked, where the guest post I wrote is now up. To be honest, I'm fairly sure I've made an embarassment of myself, but I suppose we'll have to wait and see what the response is. If you look through some recent posts, you'll see I've provided further positioning about religion in preparation for your arrival. I hope it's helpful or enlightening.

That guest post has reminded me that I haven't done a 7 Quick Takes in a little while, and those spare regular readers I have might be as interested in what's happening in my life more than in my theology/philosophy. (You know, friends and family.) So I figure I should give a run-down of what's been going on in (unusually) sunny Van. However, as it is not a Friday, I feel hesistant about actually writing a 7 Quick Takes today. I'm a genre nerd, after all. However, I will maintain the numbered and bolded list format. Hopefully it will be less of a sprawl that way, but, well, most of what I do resembles sprawling in one way or another, so don't get your hopes up.

1. Part of my absence has been related to Netflix, so I'll start with that. I watched a movie a while back that I would like to recommend called Arranged. Rochel and Nasiri (Orthodox Jewish and Muslim respectively) both start jobs at an elementary school, where the students and staff all assume that they could not get along. Ironically, it is this assumption that causes them to become friends and, together, approach their up-coming arranged marriages and their principal's attempts to "liberate" them. This is an excellent movie, one well worth watching. It has much to recommend it, but most of all it manages to show the downsides of controlling parents while still affirming traditional lifestyles. In particular, Rochel's experience at a contemporary party reflected my own experiences.

I might also recommend 7 Khoom Maaf (Seven Sins Forgiven), a Bollywood film about Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes, an Indian woman who tends to choose the wrong men and, after wedding them, murder them. It's actually a very good film about a very broken woman who seems propelled despite herself on a path of love and violence. A particular scene I found interesting involved two anatomically atypical men engaged in a fight (the pre-arranged sort, in a ring, with spectators) in which neither the spectators nor the camera saw them as anything but competent, dangerous combatants. Their anatomies/abilities aren't ever mentioned.

I have watched a lot more than this (X-Men, the final Harry Potter, Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, The Rite, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, seasons 2-3 of Heroes), but these are the ones that seem to me worth mentioning.

2. I went to No. 5 Road in Richmond and took photos. No. 5 Road is known for the sheer number of churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras positioned along it. It has the nickname "The Highway to Heaven" (which isn't really fair, I don't think, to those groups who don't have a concept of heaven). However, because the buildings are recessed on their properties, I didn't get as many nice photos as I would have liked. As a result of this, though, I have started a photo series I am calling The Architecture of Belief, adding to it photos of any house of worship I photograph. I'll add some of those here.

Since then, I have also visited a few labyrinths to photograph, including an abandoned one.

3. I've recently become aware of Gene Robinson and David Somerville. The latter, actually, I learned about when attending a requiem service for him. Ironic? And the former I stumbled on researching for a previous post, and have since listened to his talks on Youtube. His 2008 Creating Change speech is well worth it. (I'm not a big fan of the introduction, so don't let that turn you off of the speech.) This also marks my opinions rather entirely, I guess.

4. Volunteering at the Crane Production Facility is great. (Recap: I narrate selected texts into a computer program; Crane staff will then take my narration and others' narrations and composite them into an audio book for the text impaired.) I've read all sorts of interesting and challenging things, like Proust (that was ambitious!), the appendices of some book, and parts of David Suzuki's The Sacred Balance, an eco-activist book. Yo, American readers, do you guys know who Suzuki is? He's a big deal in Canada, but it's hard to tell how much the States is aware of our exports.

Anyway, Suzuki's book is interesting and fascinatingly composed (I like that kind of science writing a lot), but I do have one complaint: omitting the serial comma in complex lists is atrocious! It's impossible to read it aloud correctly the first time, since that comma is crucial for signalling that this is a new member you're coming upon and that you need to balance your voice accordingly. I had to re-do I don't know how many sentences due to this. Go Team Serial Comma!

5. I visited the Belkin Art Gallery. The current exhibit is Material Witness. Not all of it was my cup of tea, but I should say that I found Konrad Wendt's Gegenstand brilliant (it's a split log--one half is art, the other is firewood), and I loved Martha Wilson's Orchids.

6. I made revisions to a paper on religion and Asian Canadian identity that might get published at some point. I hate revisions (who doesn't?), but it certainly is a stronger paper for it. A book arrived in the university library between drafts, and the information in that book played a large role in those improvements. Funny how much timing has to do with this sort of thing.

7. I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Surrealist exhibit was less interesting to me (though I found some of the philosophical ideas underpinning Surrealism quite interesting, and I found the cultural influences on it--West Coast culture, natural history museums, Freud, Greek myth--a fascinating blend). I did quite enjoy Ken Lum's work, though: his social criticism is sharp, but also quite fun in a lot of ways. His stuff has a quotidian or pop and low culture feel to it, what with 80s-style portraiture attached to billboard-style logos of the subject's names. He also plays a lot with mirrors, and I found his mirror maze a lot of fun. I'd never been in a mirror maze before.

That afternoon I also visited the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, which is small and out of the way, but worth the visit (if you like Haida art or art theory). I also paid $5 to hold an albino Burmese python named Buttercup and have my picture taken with her. She was a beautiful, heavy, strong animal. The feel of her muscles on my shoulders and neck was wonderful and somewhat disconcerting.

8. I've been apartment-hunting. If all goes well, I'll have a place by the middle of the month, which will give me two weeks to move from one to the other. Fingers crossed.

9. I finally made the trip down to Granville Island to walk around. It's a nice place, though much of its pleasure costs money. There's a lot to look at, though, especially if you are interested in the creation of urban spaces. Much of the area is situated underneath a bridge, so to see how that bridge is used in the definition of vertical space was interesting. There were also lots of wedding photo shoots around when I was visiting.

10. Church stuff: I am being trained for more liturgical responsibilities; specifically, I am being prepared for proto-deacon roles. This is quite unusual (or, you know, unorthodox), as I'm not a deacon or even a diaconal candidate. However, the goal (I think) is to have multiple able to perform all tasks (except the priestly ones, of course) so that liturgical assistants don't need to serve every day. The irony is that I serve almost every week (I haven't had a week without some responsibility since getting back to Vancouver in June), but this might ease off in September, when the other server will be able to come more often.

11. Books. I've not been reading as much as is my wont, but I'll mention Emma and The Epistemology of the Closet. Wikipedia should be able to help you out with both of those, but I'll mention that I found Emma quite slow at the outset and quite engaging at the end, and that I'm quite pleased with Epistemology, especially as the first Axiom that Sedgwick posits is that "People are different from each other." A passing familiarity with my previous posts will indicate how important this idea is to me.

Aaaaaaand I think that should do. There's been letter-writing and MOA-visiting and what have you in there, but I imagine that should satisfy the curiosities of those who care.

Graffiti Jungle

A week or so ago I went down to Wreck Beach for a photoshoot and noticed a ruined, graffitied building in the woods. I decided to take photos of it as though I were some explorer voyaging deep in the Mesoamerican Jungle, finding some opulent Mayan ruin. About 0.3 seconds later I realized how colonial this idea was, but thought I might still be able to get a good photoshoot out of it. Overall I consider the theme of that day's photography to be Decay. (If I was a more experimental photographer I could have done something with De/Composition, I suppose, but that's not me. Not yet, anyway.)
So when looking at these photos, please recall that I was thinking about colonialism as I took them. And that I do not live in a jungle, but in a temperate rainforest.

7 Quick Takes (70)

1. Last weekend I watched some movies with the fam: Casino Royale, Blood Diamond, The Bucket List, and parts of PS I Love You. I don't think I have anything to say about any of them right now.
(I am sure other stuff happened. We likely went for a walk outside; I went to church; I read The Girl Who Played With Fire; I probably read Castle Waiting Vol. 2 if I hadn't done that earlier.)

2. On Monday we went to Edmonton. That afternoon and night we went to Whyte Street and to the West Edmonton Mall. At the West Ed my brother bought and had fitted a suit, I bought The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittester and The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis, and my mother got painting supplies. My father, brother, and I then went to the gun range. I don't think I have ever fired a real gun before. It was fun but I know that the other two enjoyed it far more than I did. We tried three different revolvers. I wasn't terribly good.

3. On Tuesday we went to the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Royal Alberta Museum. As always the RAM was interesting; in particular I enjoyed the temporary exhibit of nature photography. The AGA was also interesting, though I understand far less about it. I liked some of the Symbolists; I liked some of the Canadian landscape painters; I did not care for Matisse; I quite liked Burtynsky, but then I already knew that. His Bengladesh shipbreaking series is wonderful. That evening we returned to the Mall, where we discovered that the new Harry Potter was sold out. So Nick and I went to the nerd store and then I got a cinnamon bun and went to Chapter's and then, finally, we went to see The Tourist. It was enjoyable enough but I have problems with it. I can't tell you the problems without spoiling the film, though, so I'll desist.

4. On Wednesday we returned to Fort McMurray. I wrote a letter on the way. When we returned we took some ridiculous pictures as a family.

5. Thursday morning my brother caught a plane back to school.

6. For much of yesterday and today I worked on my Asian Canadian paper. I am almost done.

7. It's New Year's Eve or some such thing. You know, I like the idea of seasonal cycles. I've never understood New Year's, though. It seems like a silly thing to celebrate, the turn of an arbitrary demarkation. Such are we funny creatures, that one bit of time should seem different from another bit of time just because we have collectively decided to put a marker between them.

Please go see the host of this fine carnival, one Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary.

Photosynthesis Like Colour

I'm in the midst of writing (and grading) finals, so I haven't a lot of free time to spend posting. One of those finals, the one that is currently stressing me, is about Thomson's The Seasons and Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants. This means that I am writing about nature and botanical literature. In the spirit of that, I thought I would type out a passage from Wade Davis' One River, in which talking botany becomes something like aesthetic mysticism. I will warn you that there's a swear (gasp) in it, as well as something that reads, when out of context, like pantheistic psychedalia near the end, but otherwise it's quite fascinating:

As the afternoon wore on, the conversation turned to botany and in particular a new book that made a great fuss about house plants responding to music and human voices. For Tim the very idea was ridiculous.
"Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart?" I remember him saying. "And even if it did, why should that impress us? I mean, they can eat light. Isn't that enough?"
He went on to speak of photosynthesis the way an artist might describe color. He said that at dusk the process is reversed and that plants actually emit small amounts of light. He referred to sap as the green blood of plants, explaining that chlorophyll is structurally almost the same as the pigment of our blood, only the iron in hemoglobin is replaced by magnesium in plants. He spoke of the way plants grow, a seed of grass producing sixty miles of root hairs in a day, six thousand miles over the course of a season; a field of hay exhaling five hundred tons of water into the air each day; a flower pushing its blossom through three inches of pavement; a single catkin of a birch tree producing five million grains of pollen; a tree living for four thousand years. Unlike every other botanist I had known, he was not obsessed with classification. For him Latin names were like koans or lines of verse. He remembered them effortlessly, taking particular delight in their origins. "When you say the names of the plants," he said at one point, "you say the names of the gods."

Photograph © 2010 Christian H

The Fantasy Genre: Magic, Maps, and Mystery

"In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."

-Huston Smith, The World's Religions.

I have a number of thoughts about the fantasy genre which I intend to explore here. (I should instead be using this time to read and think about The Loves of the Plants and The Seasons.) In this post, I will be thinking about fantasy and mystery.

Dr. Richard Beck at Experimental Theology has written a post about Harry Potter, Twilight, and modern horror and fantasy movies. Beck locates a new trend in fantasy which emphasizes the biological over the metaphysical or magical. As always you should read the whole post because any summary will by necessity fail, but the gist is that the titular examples do not so much use metaphysical versions of wizardry or vampires as their forerunners would have, but instead are interested in biology. Vampirism is less a curse than a disease; magic seems genetic and the problems of Harry's world seem racial and racist in nature, following the pseudo-scientific rhetoric we are used to in Nazism and anti-abolitionist literature. Of course, these two books are not the only ones doing this; Beck uses them as emblems of a growing trend.

I agree with Beck that this biologism is a trend, as I'd been charting (and at that time participating in) it since high school. However, I think that Harry Potty has a slight redemption to it, which is this: magic is never explained in the text. We as readers are made aware that there is a foundation to it. Hermione insists that learning the theory will help Harry improve his skill as a wizard, but we never know what that theory is. This missing piece of the picture explains how wizardry can be a skill learned and improved through practice. Otherwise it would seem awfully silly that someone could be no good at flicking their wrist and repeating pseudo-Latin. So long as you were born with magical ability, you should be able to figure out Wingardium Leviosa in minutes.

This missing foundation is not enough to rescue it from the biologism than Beck sees in it, but that's neither here nor there. It's still a perfectly good series. What interests me is how frustrated some people I know get about not knowing how magic operates. "I already suspended disbelief once," they say. "I don't want to have to do it again and again." This should not be surprising: Wikipedia offers extensive explanation of how magic in fantasy can operate. It seems natural that people who like fantasy should want to know how the magic works. People are curious, and people are increasingly interested in understanding how things work. Why should magic in fiction be any different?

To me the answer to that is simple: it would cease to be magic. If we understood magic, it would be physics; the manipulation of it would be a sufficiently advanced technology. Magic is not reducable to a sufficiently advanced technology, or at least it isn't in fiction if we happen to know how it works. That which is magical (numinous is a worth-while word to think about in this case) is to some extent or another inexplicable. I should note that this doesn't need to tax our suspension of disbelief. Most of us don't understand how airplanes stay in the air or how we get oxygen though our lungs or how the postal system works, but we go with it anyeway. There is no reason that we can't put questions of understanding aside when deciding whether or not to suspend our disbelief in fiction. (Besides, it's good for us.)

Does this mean we are wrong to want to understand? No, I do not think so. Curiousity is a good thing by most accounts. What isn't such a good thing is getting angry and putting the book down when our curiousity is not always satisfied. For one thing, it's a very childish attitude. If you are curious about a friend's private life and get indignant when they won't tell you about it, you are failing at friendship because you are failing to respect their privacy. For another thing, you would miss a lot of good fiction. And for a final thing, you will miss the pleasure of mystery.

When I read a fantasy novel that I love, I want to know more. I have scoured the Internet for details about marshwiggles, for instance. There isn't much information to be had. I loved to read the appendices to The Lord of the Rings: there is a section on the presumed origin of trolls and the troll language, and there is a section on how it came to be that Gandalf took the dwarves to Bilbo Baggins' door. There is a brief mention about why the dwarves were mainly absent from the book, and that explanation was that they were busy fighting against Sauron's goblins and dragons in the north. That's right. There's an entire military campaign, in which the villians have dragons, going on off-stage during The Lord of the Rings. This roused my curiosity. I wanted to know more.

And yet I realized that this is happened before. Once I know all that I want to know, I am not satisfied. I am disappointed. The fantasy world cannot ever live up to what I would imagine it to be. Fantasy books often have maps, so if you have one handy go and look at the map. Do you know what is going on everywhere on that map? Are there any blank spaces? I don't mean gaps in the image; I mean place names which never appear in the novel, mountains which are never described, islands which remain dark and haunted. Are there these blank spaces? I want to go to those spaces, to fill them in, but as soon as you do go there the interest in them is gone. It is only when the blank spaces remain blank that they remain interesting.

([EDIT: Reading this paranthetical again I realize that I am making too broad a gesture and too bold an assertion for my current ignorance. I won't change it but I will add that I realize there is a complex discourse about the African continent. The trick is that I don't see how I can conscientiously avoid mentioning that this sort of "mysterious geography" has had direct reprecussions on real history, and those have not been universally good. There are problems when you apply literary stuff directly to the real world.] This is directly related to colonialism: it is only because the Dark Continent is Dark that it is of interest. If you feel like you have penetrated it, that you know it, then it becomes uninteresting. And it is only when you realize that Africa is not a homogenous nation of homogenous peoples but rather a section of the world which, like every section of the world, will constantly elude complete understanding that it again becomes interesting--and worthy of respect. Of course it had always been both, but so long as we thought we knew it, we could not know that.)

I don't require that all fantasy maintains the balance between giving enough details to evoke a greater picture and never giving enough to satisfy our curiosity. I am, however, disconcerted by those who do expect complete explanations of magic in all fantasy series, since this would destroy one of the best things the fantasy genre has to offer: a mysterious cosmogeny (versus a rigourously explained cosmogeny in hard sci-fi). This is the pleasant tension, that we do want to know more about these favourite worlds but that to satisfy that desire would in the end fail to please us. It is only when we are required to wonder that it is wonderful; it is only when we can desire more than we can have that that desire is endless.

(I also think that learning to live with not understanding while maintaining the desire to understand is a habit necessary to good character, but that argument perhaps belongs elsewhere.)

Art's Four Campfires and Literature: Part 2

[This is part two of a series of posts. I suggest you read the first.]

Another problem comes to mind when discussing literature and Art’s Four Campfires, and that is the overlap between the four.

How, after all, does truth differ from content? Is truth not just a specific kind of content? And how does beauty differ from form? Is the pursuit of beauty not just a specialization of the play with form?

These particular questions are the most obvious, but more develop when we think of literature. In his TED talk, McCloud claims that these four campfire’s apply not just to comic books, where he developed them, but in all art, and in all human endeavour (though by that point they may be in a more distilled, more elemental form). So they must apply to wordcraft. Consider, then, beauty. What is beauty in a novel? Certainly we are not thinking about line quality, compositional balance, use of hue and shade. These are elements of a page, of course, if we think of it as a visual object. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the words we read, and what they mean. That is all, in a sense, content, the animist catchword. Of course, we also think of the sound the words imply, and this can be beautiful in and of itself. Think of the rhythm of the ballad or the alliteration of mediaeval verse. This is beauty divided from content, surely. But there are borderline cases. I red-facedly have not read it, but I hear that The Tempest is the most beautifully balanced play the Shakespeare has ever written. It is a masterpiece of the five act play, perfectly poised, unfolding at exactly the right pace. This is a Classicist value, right? But at the same time what we’re talking about is the presentation of a story. If we are using this beautiful composition to tell the story better, is this not an Animist project? When it comes to the beauty of storytelling, where is the line between Animism and Classicism? Lots of novels are not so beautiful to listen to, and they do not conjure beautiful visual images in our mind, but we still consider the plots themselves somehow beautiful in that they evoke similar emotions in us that beautiful things evoke. Tragedies, “dramas,” and certain types of romantic comedy (Pride and Prejudice) and adventure (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) in particular do this, I think. I have not found that teen comedies or other sorts of non-dramatic comedies do this, but maybe that’s just me. At any rate, this makes the line between beauty and story rather fuzzy.

And then there’s the question about content. I think the distinction is fairly clear between Twilight and Night. Twilight is—correct me if I’m wrong—pretty much all about the story. The writing isn’t great and no one claims that it is. It has no big ideas, it has little to no conformity to truth, and it doesn’t vary too much from formal conventions. It’s about glittery vampires and hunky werewolves and hormones and teen romance. Night, on the other hand, only comes by beauty accidentally. If there is beauty at all, it is to make a particular passage stand out in the sea of misery that makes up most of the book. It is about the truth, and in this case it is about as ugly as it can get. Night is after all about Holocaust concentration camps, about those who died in them and those who survived in them—and those who lived but did not survive. It is brutal, and if it doesn’t aspire to beauty or engaging characters (a pretty Animist goal) or formal experimentation, I think we can understand. It has a message, and that is why it was written. This utilitarian aspect does not in this case seem to diminish it as art (or Art, even, a problem-fraught distinction I might get into later), perhaps because we value emotional honesty in art and Night seems to have it.

But what about Harry Potter? Or The Lord of the Rings? Or The Chronicles of Narnia? Or His Dark Materials? Or A Ring of Endless Light? Or, in the realm of film, The Matrix? (When I listed the first four examples, you were thinking the books, right? Please tell me that you were.) These are all masterpieces of storytelling. Tolkien could have worked on his beauty, many would say; his writing comes off as dry and clunky. L’Engle sometimes seems to play formalist games with her line breaks, but by and large she remains pretty true to the genre. And Lewis has rarely been accused of gritty realism. But all of these examples have something that Twilight cannot boast: a clear subtext. Rowling’s heptilogy is about love, loyalty, honour, courage, and justice. If you doubt this, if you think she has written a simple romp, perhaps you would do well to read quotations from Dumbledore. Perhaps you would do well, actually, to read the books over again. You could also try asking Rowling. I am convinced she would support me on this. Tolkien’s saga (that word applies far more to Lord of the Rings than to Twilight) is about the hidden nature of evil, the different faces of courage (Frodo’s pity, Sam’s loyalty, Gimli and Legolas’ discarding of enmity, Aragorn’s rising to an unwanted destiny, and so forth), and the need for those courages in times of darkness. I suggest you read Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth for more on that. The Narniad is about the nature of God and the nature of virtue. Pullman’s trilogy is a sort of novelistic rebuttal against the Narniad, asking the same questions and giving different answers (read The Magician’s Book for a revealing interview about Pullman’s thoughts on Narnia, or read Pullman’s own essay on it, I suppose). L’Engle writes consistently about love, tolerance, and hope. And The Matrix (and its sequel but not, as far as I can tell, the third one) turns philosophy into a science-fiction action flick.

Subtext is clearly content, and in all of these examples it is embedded deeply into the story itself. But, at least in the eyes of the authors, the subtext is also clearly truth. Is this Animism or Iconoclasm? All of them would easily fit in Animism, but few of my examples would fit in Iconoclasm. To look at a different example, Big Fish, which has its “message” too close to the surface to be subtext, could not in anyone’s wildest imaginings fit into Iconoclasm. But when looked at theoretically, subtext or “deeper meaning” seems to be a more truth-related thing than a story-related thing. But what if that subtext is in a popular work of art (something Iconoclastic authors try to distance themselves from, supposedly), and what if that subtext is about hope, love, honour, and beauty? This does not jive with the Iconoclastic idea of the Ugly Truth. L’Engle’s books in particular are about pulling beautiful truth out of ugly reality.

The only solution I can offer to this question is this: the campfires, again, are not about classifying particular works of art. They are groups of values that artists hold about art. Thus we must look to the artist and ask what they value. Picking one catchword—Beauty, Form, Content, Truth—is not enough. We must think instead about the whole mess of ideals and goals they have, and try to form a picture from this. In the end, too, categorizing artists according to these campfires is not our goal. Our goal—or my goal, in thinking about these campfires—is to find direction for ourselves as artists, if we are artists, and to determine how to judge—or find—the value of a piece of art. This is what we must keep in mind, and what I will discuss in upcoming posts.

Art’s Four Campfires and Literature: Part I

I posted a while ago about Scott McCloud’s theory about the four campfires of art. I suggest that you read this post, but in case you do not want to, I will give you a synopsis...

Scott McCloud claims that artists fall into four clusters based on the sorts of values they have regarding their art. The Classicists value beauty and mastery of form. The Animists value the content, often understood to be the story. The Formalists value experimenting with the form or medium they are working in. If a Formalist is a comic book artist, then she will try to push the limits of what a comic can do. An Iconoclast values truth, often perceived as “ugly” and “raw.” Their catchphrases are Beauty for the Classicists, Content for the Animists, Form for the Formalists, and Truth for the Iconoclasts. They can be understood as being arranged in a square, with Classicists and Animists along the top under “Tradition” and Formalists and Iconoclasts along bottom under “Revolution”; the Classicists and Formalists are along the right, under “Art,” while the Animists are along the left, under “Life.” McCloud emphasizes that this is not cut and dry; artists often move from one campfire to another, but usually they favour one or two and spend little time at the others.

I have some problems with this breakdown, and I think some of these problems come out when you apply this idea to a medium other than comics. Thus I will use it to look at a medium I am more familiar with—literature—and at the same time use literature to look at this process.
Let’s begin by stating that different literary traditions do correspond somewhat to these groups, but not in any systematic or perfect way. The Romantics, for instance, attach nicely to the Iconoclast view; while many of them spoke a fair amount about beauty, their choices often belie a greater interest in reality, at least as they saw it. Wordsworth’s insistance on casting commoners as his protagonists, Shelley’s political ranting, and Byron’s licentiousness all indicating an interest in breaking conventions to describe the word “as it really is.” While the development of enjambment as a serious technique may be a formalist idea, it is most likely in service of their idea of “natural speech”; that is, the Romantics thought that poetry should adhere as much as possible to people’s actual speech patterns. While they failed miserably at this, such tricks as enjambment and internal revision give something of an illusion of “real” speech. Further, De Quincey’s obsessions with addiction and murder, and Coleridge’s similarly morbid themes, suggest that these authors understood the truth to be an ugly thing, and art to be a method of examining it.

On the other hand, though, the Romantic love of beauty appears to be diametrically opposite to their Iconoclastic bent. De Quincey spoke of the aesthetic pleasure of addiction and murder, and as much as addiction and murder are Iconoclastic topics (at last, as De Quincey dealt with them), aesthetics is a Classicist philosophy. Coleridge may have been morbid, but he also wrote some beautiful poetry. Byron’s rhyming has a strong Formalist play to it, and while Blake is perhaps not always inclined to writing beautiful things (if you disagree, skim through The Marriage of Heaven and Hell again), he could also be seen as a bit of a Formalist and does sometimes produce something lastingly beautiful ("Tyger, Tyger"). But perhaps the most ambiguous of all is Keats, who, after all, said that Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty. "Ode to a Nightingale" seems almost a treatise on reconciling the Classicist and Iconoclastic values.

Part of the trouble is that it is almost impossible to figure out what a poet’s values were in writing a poem, play, novel, or what have you. We have clues, yes, but if you listen to enough people talk about Shakespeare you get the sense that he was firmly rooted in all four camps. Shakespeare’s poetry is often very beautiful, and in some of his later plays he displays a clear mastery of form, making him a Classicist idol. This being said, his wordplay, his gender- and genre-bending, and his meta-theatrical games, such as those opening Julius Caesar and ending As You Like It, indicate his status as a Formalist. If my Renaissance professor is to be listened to, Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet staged a sonnet. That is, he took conventional sonnets with their Petrarchan conceits about living death, loving hate, virtuous villains, exile, and melodramatic claims that the lover will die without the beloved, and made them literal upon putting them together in a play. If this was indeed Shakespeare’s intention—and, as far as you can have evidence for such a claim, I think the evidence supports it—then he is quite the Formalist indeed. But Shakespeare also told powerful stories, and much of the appeal of such plays as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is their strength of pure storytelling. They are gripping, tragic, hilarious, or otherworldly; that is, they are moving. This is a Classicist goal. But finally, if Stephen Greenblatt is right, Shakespeare has kept an allegiance to his working class roots: in many of his plays, he shows us the tension between the oppressor and the oppressed. The institution of marriage and the role of women is displayed in a rather unflattering light in The Taming of the Shrew; the plight of the poor is apparent throughout 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV (as Greenblatt argued for the scene where Falstaff conscripts people) and at the beginning of Julius Caesar; and, of course, the bitter truth about gang violence is on stage in Romeo and Juliet. He is an Iconoclastic poet, surely...right?

We have three options, then. The first is to continue arguing for one or two campfires, claiming that while the other two come through from time to time they are in the end little more than garnishes on Shakespeare’s central concern (whatever we happen to decide it is). The second is to say that Shakespeare is one of those rare poets that in fact does draw substantially from all four campfires. It is this that makes him a worthy candidate for his position as The Bard, that one poet who defines all poets in his language. (The Romantics would then also be interesting, maybe, as a movement that managed to yoke Classicism with Iconoclasm, a difficult feat.) The third option is to say that the discussion is futile and invoke the Intentional Fallacy.

I think that this last is maybe the best course; we do have hints as to what values different poets had, of course. The Romantics, again, left a lot of writing about poetry itself, which makes it easier to gauge what their values were. So too did people like C S Lewis, Umberto Eco, T S Eliot, and Sir Philip Sidney. At the very least we can say what sort of campfire their writing about poetry fits into and see whether their poetry (or fiction) reflects these values. But Shakespeare left no writing about his poetic philosophy. The poetic philosophies of his characters don’t really count, either; it is increasingly dubious that Shakespeare believes that art holds a mirror up to nature, as his character Hamlet says. Hamlet is not Shakespeare, and we can tell pretty much from the outset that Hamlet is not a mouthpiece for his author. Thus we are guessing based on the effect the work has on us what Shakespeare’s values in writing it are, and that’s not a very reliable method at all. What we get out of it may very well be different from what Shakespeare wanted to put in. That is, it’s more than possible that Shakespeare was interested solely in beauty and story alone, and played formalist games and spouted iconoclastic ideas in service of those other two values. We will never know.

So this is something we learn. Applying these campfires to works of art is dangerous. What we can apply them to is artists themselves, if we know enough about the artist. This is obviously what McCloud intended from the outset (if you will allow me to discuss his intentions). These campfires are to reconcile the different values of different artists, not to categorize artwork itself. While categorizing an artist’s work may help identify the campfires he draws meaning from, talking to an artist about art is also an important part of that process.