The Girl from the Chartreuse by Pierre Péju
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Running Away

“Anything can happen now, including the worst. The worst is merely one among a host of possibilities, a hyena lurking among ambient trivia.” The hyena is robust; he is patient; and eventually he prevails. He cares not about age, or virtue, or one’s contribution or role in life. The hyena is omnivorous.

The Girl From the Chartreuse is a highly cinematic exploration of the randomly inevitable (and inevitably random) condition of life. There is no safety in routine nor in hapless activity. A sort of unfounded hope - in one’s efforts, in the next generation, in doing the right thing - may sustain us in normal times. But the unexpected is by definition not normal. It rips away our armour of complacent contentment.

We each have our own way of coping with the hyena’s unexpected inevitability - change of place, immersion in fiction and fantasy, scholarship, personal devotion, ritualistic consumption, or religious ritual. These are all attempts at escape whether we recognise it or not. But there is no escape possible, no insurance available for the breakdown - not the breakdown of death but the breakdown of life for which only death may be the solution.

Experience will eventually show that running away is senseless. For Etienne, Peju’s protagonist, this is a sort of nihilistic epiphany of “a paradoxical nothingness, for there it was, right there in front of him, in all its glory. Hundred per cent nothingness. Uncomplicated nothingness. No history, no fuss. An illusory, undemanding entity.” At that point, no matter what course of action is decided upon, it requires courage to carry it out.

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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Challenge of Sex

Sex is awkward no matter how you look at it - arguably yet another design flaw in our species. Solo sex is likely to be unsatisfying. Straight sex is fraught with gendered miscommunication. Gay sex presents serious reproductive issues. Transgender sex is... well, complicated. And all those don't even consider the morass of multiple simultaneous partners. But Ursula la/le Guin introduces a whole new level of awkwardness in her ambisexual humanoid aliens who shift gender monthly in response to their partners’ pheromones. No one knows if they’re hitting on getting hit on until the touching starts.

There are clear advantages of ambisexuality. Sexual equality is a matter of course. Since voluntary participation is necessary, rape is impossible. Everyone experiences the respective burdens of testosterone as well as child-bearing. Sexual jealousy and violence is eliminated. And the Incel movement has no reason to exist. Ambisexuality also probably reduces the propensity to war and the gender-induced machismo of two-sex societies.

On the other hand, there are a few problems. Gendered pronouns are out; but so is the neuter; the ambisexual are persons after all. Family relationships are rather more complex - one’s father may be one’s sister’s mother, for example (not even Yiddish has words for this sort of relation). Maternal and paternal genealogical lines can become indistinguishably mixed, leading to some rather interesting inheritance issues. Playing Mum off against Dad is unlikely to prove a winning childhood strategy.

Generally ambisexual individuals are about as ethically, psychologically, and politically diverse as binaries, even if a bit more emotionally intelligent on the whole. This seems to lead to less overt coercion but more covert intrigue. They tend to plot rather than hit each other. And while machismo is absent, a certain sort of complex politesse is essential for smooth social functioning. Subtlety for its own sake is de rigeur and tends to slow down discussion and decision to a crawl.

In her Introduction, la/le Guin provides an interesting explanation about the contents of this story. “Fiction writers,” she says, “at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!”

The truth la/le Guin is referring to appears to be that while sex is an irresistible force that profoundly influences the institutional structure of a society, it is not the determining factor of individual personality, purpose, or neuroses. Society adapts to the reality of its members, or should. When it doesn’t, by designating difference as perversion for example, it fails in its function of creating peaceful flourishing within itself and between it and other societies. Blessed are the peace-makers after all, especially the literate ones.

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Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Below the Surface of Things Under the Hydrogen Bomb

No one takes the immaterialist philosophy of the 17th century Bishop Berkeley seriously today - that being is a result of being perceived. But perhaps we should. Isn’t this what quantum theory suggests, that only when something is noticed or measured does it become definite? And, at a more quotidian level, isn’t Berkeley’s kind of immaterialism the foundation of advertising in all its forms, from retail selling, to political campaigning, to the generating of national feeling? The only thing real is what is perceived to be real by enough people.

In Time Out of Joint, Dick explicitly takes the dear bishop at his word. But then Dick picks at a particularly loose thread. For Berkeley’s theory to work not only does everyone need to have the same perceptions, but the perceptions of each individual have to be consistent. Any dissonance among people or within anyone’s mind is problematic. Such dissonance causes doubt, and therefore inquiry, and eventually comparison of perceptions and judgments of which are right and which erroneous. Such is the perennial problem in any totalitarian state which attempts to control perception. Even the slightest lapse in propagandistic discipline will lead to trouble.

Despite their self-perception, Americans in the 1950’s lived in an arguably totalitarian state. Their perceptions of freedom was their reality. The uniformity of opinion, the banality of life, the striving to get on, the universally concealed envy, attachment to celebrity, and the vague anti-intellectualism were all part of what they meant by freedom. The shared fear of Communism and the H-bomb was a unifying perception created and sustained by government propaganda. Bishop Berkeley had been right, and America proved it.

But who watches the watchers? Who influences the influencers? Who sets the agenda for the agenda-setters? Perceptions spread like Chinese whispers, subtly evolving as they get passed on. And they’re inevitably circular; they get passed back to those who initially generated them. The big problem that the totalitarian state has is not insurrection but believing its own press. At that point its society loses touch with anything outside itself; it becomes psychotic.

Those who suspect things are not as they seem consider it is they who are psychotic. As one of Dick’s characters says to himself, “We have a hodge-podge of leaks in our reality... A drop here, a couple of drops over in that corner. A moist spot forming on the ceiling. But where's it getting in? What's it mean?” Exactly: the beginning of the end. Eventually the dam has to break and reality rushes in. Bishop Berkeley hadn’t considered death very seriously - the ultimate reality which certainly doesn’t depend on perception.


Postscript: Time Out of Joint was published in 1959. Exactly 30 years later, an episode of the television series, The Twilight Zone, entitled ‘Special Service’ had a suspiciously similar plot but no credit to Dick. Almost a decade later, the film The Truman Show was produced based on the episode. The film emphasised the sci-fi aspects of the script, making it even more like Dick’s story. Once again no credit was given to Dick. One is entitled to suspect some nefarious literary activities - right in line with the theme of Time Out of Joint. It was also produced in the same year in which the book is set. An irony about ironies? And in case you missed it just a little further below the surface: Ragle is Elgar backwards. Elgar’s 14 Enigma Variations each portray a person. Worth investigation by some young intellect with time on their hands.

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The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project by Rémi Brague
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The New Holy Roman Empire

Remi Brague is an eminent French historian of ideas who, judging by the number of recent and pending translations, has become popular, perhaps even fashionable, in the Anglo-Saxon world. His academic oeuvre is metaphysics, those ideas which underlie what we think we know about the world but which we don’t usually think about at all. Like many Christians (and, historically, many French), Brague believes he knows how to have these ideas better than ignorant unbelievers. What he provides is a metaphysics for a New Holy Roman Empire.

Brague’s central theme is that metaphysics took a wrong turn just at the time when the world became ‘modern’, somewhere around the turn of the 16th century. He believes that the term modern is appropriate not because of the well-documented changes which took place - in the technologies of transportation, in the consequent achievements in ‘discovery’, and in the fragmentation of pan-European religious culture - but because these changes are manifestations of a new ideal, a ‘project,’ which came to be called the Enlightenment.

The metaphysics of the Enlightenment are ideas of which Brague does not approve. He perceives several critical inversions are ultimately detrimental to human welfare. The first of these is the idea that mankind is the master not the product of nature. The second is that there is nothing outside or superior to mankind - not God, gods, Nature, or any other higher power - to whom mankind is accountable for the exercise of this mastery.

Brague’s lament is that this purported project of the conquest of nature has replaced three essential principles of historical European culture: messianism, divinisation, and asceticism. The loss of the first apparently makes us too ambitious, over-achievers trying to get somewhere to which we have already arrived. Without an experience of already being redeemed, we are, he claims, merciless on ourselves. The loss of the idea of divinisation makes us subject to an intellectual hubris that deludes us into believing that we create our own purposes. The simultaneous loss of asceticism has resulted in the neglect of the development of the ‘inner man’ in favour of the conquest of external nature.

Brague assembles a formidable argument to establish his conclusions. He is informative, meticulous, and ingenious. But there can be little doubt that his conclusions were arrived at long before his argument, or even before his historical research. Whether by conviction or culture, Brague is a Christian. In fact he appears to be a kind of Christian typified by someone like G.K. Chesterton, a lover of the Medieval aesthetic and political order based on religion. His audience is not composed of secular historians who enquire about connections among events and people, but believers who want arguments to support their beliefs.

The arguments that Brague provides to the faithful are not of the old-fashioned sort for the reasonableness of their faith. He is not concerned with the epistemology of religious faith. Rather, his subject is a sort of pragmatic ontology - what is ‘better’ to believe about the world and our place in it. His arguments, therefore, are those which point to the lack of ontological reason among the rest of us. According to Brague, we think incorrectly. What he means by this is that we will ultimately find that the way we think is bad for us because... well, because the way we think has moved us away from the Medieval culture he admires so much.

So Brague’s criterion of ‘the good’ is at least questionable. But his presumptions about the way ‘we’ think (imaginatively, he complains, rather than reasonably) appear positively deranged. Mastery of nature and progress in that direction might have been a common intellectual conceit of the 19th century but Darwin and the Holocaust tempered that enthusiasm some time ago. Mastery and Progress are themes long past their argumentative sell-by dates. In any case, it doesn’t appear that Brague recognises the contradiction in his own position in trying to prove a deterioration in thought, that is to say, inverse Progress. On the whole I prefer Ursula la Guin’s rather less didactic principle that “truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Despite spending some time in the United States, it may be that Brague didn’t get out from the ivied walls of academe all that much. I make that hypothesis on the basis of his assertion that messianism and asceticism are in cultural decline. How else to account for his apparent ignorance of the religious and self-help gurus who constitute a large and growing industry in America. In this, he may be simply extrapolating inappropriately from French culture. I suggest spending a bit more time in California to sharpen his perceptions of contemporary quasi-monastic movements (or Utah for a solid dose of Mormon divinisation).

Then there’s this business about authority which is purportedly superior to the judgment of mankind, the putative Law of Nature or its divine equivalent. What Brague is referring to here, of course, is ethics not physics. Brague is using code for something called Natural Law, a perennial Christian theme which has been used to justify a vast variety of crimes from slavery to the Holocaust. Natural Law is a dangerous metaphysical fiction, but a useful one for establishing the key elements of Medieval European society - strict hierarchy, absolute personal power, the dominance of religiously interpreted legality, etc.

Brague claims that modern thinking has eliminated the metaphysical context necessary for effective and productive thought. As far as I can tell, the context he has in mind is that of the metaphysics of the Catholic Church, originally formulated by Aristotle in the 3rd century BCE, dogmatically adapted by Aquinas in the 13th century, and most recently re-interpreted by the French theologian Henri du Lubac in the 1940’s. So a rather long pedigree. But it is interesting to note that this metaphysics is not all that stable. Du Lubac was considered as effectively heretical until the Second Vatican Council endorsed his thinking. Aquinas was also suspect among his peers during his lifetime. Aristotle hasn’t really been 0f practical scientific interest since... well, considerably prior to the advent of Enlightenment (See for further discussion of the defects of Thomism: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ha...)

Brague’s dream of a solid metaphysical foundation, therefore, is as elusive as that of the Enlightenment or the New Holy Roman Empire. But this defect is unlikely to bother his readers much. Evangelicals of all sorts will love him (despite his Romish pretensions) because he seems to get one over on those they are trying to oppress. Certain European politicians will love him because he provides encouragement for French/German hegemony. Given the state of the world, it might just work out for them. But the rest of us might remain a little wary of anyone claiming to know the right way to order our thoughts. Their collective track record is appalling.

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The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fertilising One’s Speech

If French is the language of diplomacy because of its precision, English must be the language of the farmyard because of its fecundity. English takes it where it can get it and isn’t afraid to call a spade a ‘feague’ stick (for inserting eels into a horse’s bottom) or a simultaneous fart and cough a ‘through cough’. This also has the effect of increasing the efficiency of communication by reducing the number of words necessary to describe many otherwise arcane phenomena.

English is as deep as the topsoil of Iowa and as equally fertile. It seems to never lose what has been deposited in its vicinity, which slowly composts. So ‘pogoniasis’, the beard on a lady; and aristology, the study of breakfast, are a residue of Greek and lie in wait to be re-discovered. And a ‘chota hazri’, a little breakfast or elevenses, is a graft from Hindi to the Raj and hence to the Home Counties. But in East London one might refer instead to a ‘Spitalfields breakfast’ which consists rather of a tight necktie and a stout pipe. Even the Shoshone Indians of North America gave left their mark with the somewhat Greek-sounding but false friend‘pogonip’, a fog so cold that ice crystals form in the air.

Consequently, English proliferates, evolves, and takes over new ground, returning to the homeland with renewed vigour. A ‘bumbershoot’ is an American replacement for an umbrella; as is ‘scream sheet’ for newspaper. Both much more descriptive than the originals. To dig transforms itself from a term of manual labour to one of aesthetic appreciation, and ultimately to the highest praise “That’s shovel city, man!” Thus simultaneously erasing gender differences long before LGBT was normalised.

Forsyth has a genius for making archaic and strange vocabulary not just enjoyable but even fashionable. He writes with wit and humour. But he also accomplishes something important, the generation of respect for language as a living thing. No part of it ever completely dies. Even if words go out of use, they lie there dormant in not quite forgotten dictionaries waiting for someone like Forsyth to trip over them and repot them in the Great Global Garden of English.

The book also will defeat any spellchecker better than a novel by John Banville.

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The Well of Saint Clare by Anatole France
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Art of Artistic Irony

The irony of Anatole France when he writes about Christianity is always tempered by a respect for its cultural importance. He sends it up but by putting it in a larger context of European myth and legend. France’s target is not Christian culture but the Christian clericalism that uses that culture to promote itself. Christian belief, for him, is in a continuous line of artistic development from ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century. This makes it an object of critical admiration rather than derision.

The Well of St. Clare is a jewel of ironic praise for Christianity. The narrator’s narrator, the Reverend Father Adone Doni, is an eccentric Franciscan friar who puts his faith in the Spirit but not in the hierarchy of the Church. He tells stories of the medieval Church while sitting in the evening by the abandoned well associated with the Franciscan St. Clare. His stories are not of Christian superiority but of Christian continuity with that which existed before anyone had ever heard of “the Galilean.”

The initial tale of the Tomb of San Satori sets the scene. The occupant of that place of veneration is not a Christian martyr, or doer of good works. He is an ancient satyr, the last of his kind, who existed on not unfriendly terms with the original Christian immigrants to the region of Sienna who had driven away the native nymphs associated originary creatures. Like so much else, the satyr was gradually assimilated into the Christian cult. For him the transition from the Age of Jupiter, to the Age of Saturn, to the Age of the Galilean is simply history, not a movement toward some better or even different world. So despite his questionable genetic and moral status, he has morphed into a Christian sage.

Ghosts are commonplace in the stories of Father Adone. They are the carriers of culture as they appear in dreams and apparitions. So the ghost of a young Roman girl, Julia Læta, appears in the Florentine Guido Cavalcanti’s story. Julia is buried in a tomb which pre-dates the establishment of the church of which her graveyard forms a part. She is effectively a member of the Community of Saints which includes those dead long before the advent of Christianity. Guido’s ambition after dreaming about her is to join her pre-Christian band.

The story of Spinello of Arrezo is an account of why culture is the matrix of religion, not the other way round. As an artist, it is Spinello who interprets religious doctrine to the masses in a way that was far more powerful than any preacher or academic theologian. Once again it is through a dream that Spinello is informed about the truth of Lucifer, the fallen angel and traditional source of all evil. The Angel of Darkness has been unfairly maligned through bad portraiture, he discovers. An injustice has been done to the one who has been tagged as the source of injustice. The truth kills the poor man.

On the surface, the story of Nicholas Nerli is somewhat different. Nicholas, a devious and corrupt businessman, maintains his good name by patronage and benefactions. But his spiritual salvation, made apparent in a dream of his death, is assured by the relatively inexpensive distribution of bread to the poor. The apparent moral: If you’re going to be a crook, at least be an efficient one. The message applies implicitly as well to one’s discretionary spending: Ensure that it goes to what is culturally significant and applied with good taste. Mere money is inadequate for the cause.

Many other stories are built around the art or artistic techniques of ancient Greece and their use in Italian churches - tesseræ of molten glass, impastos, and mosaics for example. It is the artists, sculptors, writers, and men (and some women) of taste who are the ones who make religion palatable, understandable, and respectable. They work for the Church because the Church has the money, either from its own coffers or those of its benefactors. But the artistic inspiration and traditions are classical in origin, and consequently pagan. Artistry, therefore, slowly but persistently alters the substance of Christianity.

From the tone of the Reverend Father Adone, such an evolution of Christianity is not a bad thing. His approving view of the medieval church is that it was healthily cosmopolitain, inevitably so given the taste and intellect of those who ran it. Ultimately it is art - with its intellect, historical sensitivity, and creative skill - which leads the Church in a sort of continuous renovation. The fact that the Church sees things the other way round is an innocent conceit which is easily tolerated.

Irony, of course, is most delicious when served without heavy sauces or seasonings. France is a master of the light ironic touch, its chef de cuisine one might say.

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Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Meditation on Psycopathy

Oates reminds her readers that there are people who cannot be considered human. They lack something essential, some ‘wetware’ without which they never fit comfortably among others. This implies a scale of humanness. Some are more human than others. This is the implication of Oates’s journey inside the mind of a fictional psychopath.

Psychopathy is not something that any society confronts comfortably. These people are defective, not mad. How can they be identified? By what criteria can we make a judgment to treat them as the sub-humans that they are?

Terrorists, school-shooters, racist skinheads, violent political activists - most of these are technically sane yet something is missing. There may be understandable genetic or environmental reasons for their behaviour but the fact that they are immune to reason suggests that they cannot be considered as full members of human society.

But no one, it can be argued, is quite sure what constitutes human reason. Nonetheless, whatever it is must start from the premise that argument, that is to say language, is the tool for conducting and, with luck, resolving disputes. It is skill in the use of language, therefore, which is the distinguishing mark of the more human.

How to measure such skill? The very narrow skill of the scientist’s exposition among like-minded colleagues? The rhetorical skill of a lawyer presenting an emotional appeal to a jury? The manipulatively mendacious skill of a Trump addressing one of his populist rallies? These are all highly skilled in their way.

In fact many are so skilled in language that they can provoke precisely the inhuman behaviour that language should permit us to avoid. Their skill can promote revolution, which is necessarily violent, by using language against itself. Language does not exist on its own. It is contained and expressed in institutions - courts, professions, political parties - which have strict rules for how language can be used. Skill in employing these rules is often more important than the skill of language itself.

These institutions define the language that may be used and the reasons which are admissible in argument. The likelihood of revolution is proportional to the seriousness of the reasons excluded as invalid. Expanding the base of valid reasons in institutional argumentation has been the real achievement of liberal democracy. Anyone who seeks to reduce the reasons available for institutionalised argument (which is the equivalent of restricting democratic participation) is a psychopath.

The psychopath does not argue with reasons; he states opinions as they occur to him - particularly about institutions involving language. Giving reasons is precisely what the psychopath does not do. The psychopath has no reasons, only urges. The psychopath doesn’t want to extend the range of reasons acceptable in debate. The psychopath detests all reasons in deference to his urges.

The psychopath is frightening precisely because he has no reasons for what he does. There is no goal except the scratching of the itch that drives him. He is not a revolutionary but a nihilist who has no hesitation in destroying all institutions of language, and with those the civilisation they enact. “My whole body is a numb tongue,” says Quentin, Oates’s psychopath. His every utterance is a destructive distortion of language.

These are the thoughts that dominate my life as I anticipate the state visit of the psychopath, Donald Trump, to this green and pleasant land. Oates, it seems to me, knew the man without having met him - a creature of the slime who is something less than a human being.

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Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Machine-Made Blindness

This is a rambling, discursive, facile presentatiοn. But what is it really meant to be? A meditation? A sales document? A popularised academic dissertation? It has lots of jargon like ‘long-form thinking’, and ‘book-shaped knowledge’ that suggest it is meant to be hip, the latest thing (in 2010) in intellectual cool. But its contribution to what it claims as its territory - epistemology - is difficult to detect.

The book starts by quoting the former business guru, Russell Ackoff, who had a lot of interesting things to say about the difference between information and knowledge. But the author apparently missed one of Ackoff’s often used quips that “Leibniz was the last man to know everything.” This is important because it pulls the rug out of Weinberger’s argument, that the technology of the internet has made fundamental changes in what constitutes factual knowledge.

Leibniz, of course, was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and knew nothing of information technology (although he did flirt with the idea if a ‘reckoning engine’). But he knew a great deal about what might constitute reality. Essentially, reality is what all of us know; and by extrapolation, are able to know. All of us, not some of us, not just the leaders or designated experts, or the prophetic seers or religious recipients of divine revelation. Knowledge, for Leibniz, was a joint human effort, and by his own theory even he could not comprehend it all.

So the problem of knowledge that Weinberger wants us to recognise is not something that arose with computers or communications technology. Weinberger’s conceit is not simply historically wrong, it is also practically misleading. It makes it appear that the solution to the epistemological problem - what constitutes a fact - is more and better use of technology.

One of Russell Ackoff’s teachers, Edgar Singer, had an insightfully laconic definition of a fact: “A fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.” The circularity is its genius. It is a condensation of all Leibniz’s philosophy in a single sentence. And it has several implications which Weinberger might beneficially notice.

The first of these implications is there is no method, process, or procedure by which facts can be verified. Technology may help proliferate purported facts, but it does nothing to filter them. Such filters are judgments made extra-technologically, as it were. This has always been so, even when the technology involved was only one’s unassisted eyes and ears.*

We pay attention to what’s important. The judgment about what’s important is a mysterious cultural phenomenon which may be made more mysterious by technology but certainly isn’t made any easier.

Importance is a synonym for value. Values are interests. Interests, therefore, are inevitably an element of what constitutes a fact. The implication here is that agreement about facts is predicated on agreement about what is valuable. In other words, facts are political. And politics cannot be reduced to a machine algorithm, which must presume an existing political consensus.

Creating political consensus is much harder than designing information technology. However there is one principle which is essential for both: any attempt to restrict participation in either will result in a distortion of reality and failure. Most of what Weinberger has to say leads to that brief conclusion. This is not too big to know. Only his obsession with technology blinds him to it.

*An example, P.K. Dick more effectively explored the same issue fictionally a half century before Weinberger: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 27May19: As if by magic, this showed up today, making the point more concisely than I have:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-2...

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Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Holy Relic Swindler’s Tale

It is I suppose comforting for some to believe that the social issues of today’s Britain are perennial, that there is a national character, perhaps, which continuously muddles through the same problems over and over. This is one explanation for Karen Maitland’s imagined world of England in the Middle Ages. The way she portrays the state of the nation - from immigration to the condition of the roads; from sexual harassment to fake news - suggests that the problems we have to deal with have a constancy that define the country.

I further suppose that without such presumed continuity, there wouldn’t be much of a market for her type of historical fiction. In order for a story set in the 14th century to be comprehensible there has to be something more than geography which connects us culturally to that distant era. So Maitland projects our fears and anxieties into the past, not unlike much of sci-fi projects them into the future. Among other things, in the latter such a literary tactic allows for some familiarity about the problems as well as creativity in imagining their solutions or their ultimate consequences.

But there is a clear difference between historical fiction and sci-fi. We already have (and are) the solutions to the problems of the past. So the genre of historical fiction can only work if it can suggest how we arrived where we are. If there’s not much sociological variation from where we started, the setting of the story is quaint but largely irrelevant, and, from a literary perspective, fraudulent, an unintentional parody. Why not set the tale in Ancient Rome? Or Victorian England? Or contemporary New York City? The allusions to things like xenophobia, commercial fraud, knife crime, child and substance abuse, and the English Summer weather could be made where and whenever. ’Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose’ would seem sufficient to get the point across.

Casting faux historical references in terms of a sort of hippie Canterbury Tale (with neither the wit nor the elegance of the original) is, therefore, of dubious merit. Dropping in archaic period terms like ‘camelot’ and ‘kirtle’ don’t do much to divert attention from the Hobbesian misery of the lives of the characters - solitary, nasty, brutish and short. These characters inhabit a land of superstitious squalor in which the principle recreations are alcoholism and GBH. Whatever secrets they might be hiding seem insignificant in light of their existential reality, which has little to do with their place in history.

It could be that I’m being unfair. Perhaps the Company of Liars is an allegory about the 21st century rather than a projection to the 14th. Could it be that we can only recognize the extent of our depravity by considering it in terms of some distant condition? If so, The book might have some merit. Otherwise it is a tedious journey to nowhere. Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, to name just one parallel story, is a far superior alternative - established firmly in a time and place with no pretensions to period color, and consequently much more honest..

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Conversations by César Aira
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Simultaneous World

“Every true sentence implies every other true sentence.” I can’t remember the source of that aphorism, but it sounds like Wittgenstein, or perhaps Russell. Aira’s story is a sort of transposition of this principle: “Every true sentence is founded on the presumption of truth for an infinite number of other sentences.” Most of these other sentences never have been evaluated regarded their presumed truth by anyone much less the speaker of any sentence in question.

What we say, indeed what we believe, is consequently always on shaky ground. Agreement on anything at all, even the most trivial proposition, is always secretly conditional. “It depends,” is really the only rational response we can give to any proposition - material or spiritual - directed our way. To put the point another way: Language constitutes what Aira’s protagonist calls a “simultaneous world.”

This simultaneous world is not any kind of parallel universe. It doesn’t exist in some other dimension. It is the only dimension we inhabit. But it is not the world; it is language, which is both in the world and contains the world. Hence its simultaneity. Aira’s characters quite correctly can’t distinguish between dreaming and waking. The only reason the rest of us think we can do so is because we don’t take the matter very seriously.

When we do start to consider the ‘conditionals’ underlying what we say, we are forced to feel more than a little foolish. Even the most intellectual conversation (in fact especially the most intellectual conversation) relies on the unjustified suspension of judgment. Language appears to give us power over the world. But it actually makes us over-confident babes in the woods who are acutely vulnerable to unfounded presumptions.

Another aspect of simultaneity is even trickier. As Aira says in his fiction, “for fiction, in order to express itself, adopts a narrative structure that is the same as the one used by reality to make itself intelligible.” This us the central subterfuge of language. It masks itself as the world. Distinguishing language and the world may be possible; but not by talking about it.

This may be why it’s so difficult to convince anyone of anything through argument. No matter how closely argued an issue might be in the form of ‘If A then B, if B then C,’ all the way down to Z, there is an equivalently valid logic that runs the other way, that is ‘If not Z then not Y, if not Y then not X’ all the way back to A. All disagreement is buried deeply in the unspoken presumptions. Why even bother to find them, therefore? Much easier and more efficient to just recognize the irresolvable disagreement from the outset.

And language has yet another ploy. It encourages the belief that language-skill is world-skill. This is true only among those who have superior language-skills, however. It is a self-serving pretension of the intellectual. As Wittgenstein said as he observed the construction of the Forth Bridge, “Isn’t it remarkable what men who talk like that can actually do?”

So it appears to the degree of a moral certainty (as the ethicists say in their fictions) that language is not functional, a mere tool of human beings. Language has its own agenda, its own purpose. And that purpose is to draw us ever more tightly into the simultaneous world. We allow ourselves to be seduced by the allure of language because it is rather more comfortable in the simultaneous world. The simultaneous world is where things like science and safety and God abide. Once there, it is the rare person who volunteers to return to the trenches.

The implications of Aira’s fictional conversation are of course profound and point to the distractions language throws up to cover its tracks. One of the most pervasive of these distractions is the (fictional) theme that technology, in the form of artificial intelligence, has become a competitor (or, alternatively, a saviour) to humanity.

This is nonsense of course. The threat (or salvation) is not from technology; it is from language itself, which wants us all neatly isolated in the simultaneous world, within which it has unchallenged dominance and control. Language wants us for its own, body and soul. It wants us to have faith in it and nothing else. And it’s getting exactly what it wants even as you finish reading this short piece.

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The Man who Japed by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Freudian Future

Sigmund Freud published his Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. 25 years later P. K. Dick wrote The Man Who Japed. Both cover the same ground: the impossible paradox of an independent mind in a society which both promotes it and suppress it. And it looks like Dick liked what Freud had to say. Freud was concerned with the remarkable tendency of people, who ostensibly value their freedom, to band together in order to restrict not only other people’s freedom but also their own. Dick has the same concern but in reverse, namely the non-rational impulse of an individual, who is highly successful in a rigid and moralistic society, to subvert it.

Dick’s protagonist, Allen, lives in a future-world which through technology is insulated from the effects of Nature. The Earth is entirely civilised, that is, covered by one vast city. All its needs are supplied by colonial producers of food and resources spread throughout the galaxy. Its government is a sort of socialist/capitalist/corporatist melange, the policies of which are primarily those of a 1950’s conservative America. Any behaviour outside the norms of strict Calvinism result in censure and possible exile to the colonies at the discretion of the rather Maoist local block committees.

Allen, unaccountably even to himself, has committed clandestinely the highest form of sacrilege, the obscene defacement of a statue of the founding father of this society of Moral Reclamation (Morec). Simultaneously, he is offered the very senior government post as head of all TeleMedia for Morec. He recognises his situation as one of neurotic contradiction, what Freud might diagnose as a battle between the primitive id and the culturally-determined superego for control over his ego.

In his new position of power, Allen is torn between what Freud calls Eros, the drive to form community with others, and Thanatos, the drive to destroy those who are not part of one’s community. For Allen, these latter include his former competitive business rivals. Caught between these two forces, Allen feels just how Freud predicted: guilty.

Allen in fact seeks assistance at the Resort, a psycho-analytical exception to the strict social oeuvre of mutual criticism dominant in the rest of Morec culture. The founder’s wife, a devotee of Jung as it happens, had insisted on making such an island of honest communication available as a sort of cultural safety valve. Employees of the Resort are forbidden from proselytising their psychiatric services but word inevitably leaks out to those who can afford the fees. And Allen of course can.

The employees of the Resort know something that Freud knew but that most of the other residents of Earth do not, namely that societies as well as individuals can become neurotic, pathologically imbalanced in their mechanisms for reconciling Eros and Thanatos, the collective id and super-ego. Societies cannot be aware of their guilt in the same way that individuals can; but they can demonstrate the same kinds of destructive responses to this guilt. Through the Resort, Allen gets to understand the literally cosmic import of his own feelings.

The revival of hyper-conservative Trumpian Republican culture in the US provides at least one good reason for returning to Dick as a prophet of the absurd. He’s probably a better social analyst than any professional sociologist. And he’s certainly more readable than Freud.

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Hidden Camera 
by 

Zoran Živković, 

 

Alice Copple-Tošić (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

May 21, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: balkan 

Curative Psychosis

I think it best to take Živković’s ironic tragi-comedies seriously. This is a serious book of moral philosophy. And it’s not a bad 21st century version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, less the Victorian sentimentality.

It is an unwritten and undiscussed iron law of modern society that anyone who starts a business or enters a career will end up being dominated and crushed by that business or career. There are no exceptions to this rule, which is mitigated neither by the size nor type of the activities involved (including writing as a business), nor by the initial interest or passion which launches it, nor by the intentions one might have to ‘balance’ one’s life. 

The business will win by consuming 100% of all the energy, talent, emotion and other resources available. Then it will demand more to ensure its own survival. Family, friends, and whatever other interests one has are all expendable. What starts as ambition eventually becomes compulsion. Even if it dies a commercial death, the business will win by continuing to drain its founder, probably until he or she dies. If the business itself is about death, its triumph will be ironic as well as decisive.

At some point this social law becomes apparent to the one who has committed himself irrevocably to a business or career. The situation is worse than the recognition of a failed marriage since there is no one with whom to share the blame. There is, therefore, an inevitable moment of solitary panic, the response to which is either to rationalise the situation as temporary (which it isn’t) or to confront reality, that is to say, to have a mental breakdown. 

The latter is the option chosen by Živković’s protagonist. He has already decided that he cannot continue his life as an undertaker. Early retirement means less money, but at least he will get his life back from a business and a profession he has grown to hate. It is this decision which precipitates what can be characterised as psychotic behaviour in a man who lives for his tropical fish and his music.

The symptoms of what is actually a healthy psychosis start with the (illusory) acceptance to and participation in what turns out to be a cinematic revelation of what he has become, namely a neurotic obsessive, disconnected from the world of the living. This is not a condition he acquired through his profession as undertaker Rather, it is the condition which led him to that profession in the first place. His life, perhaps all our lives, are based on just such neurotic choices. Once made, they simply reinforce the psychological defect and ensure its dominance. Our neuroses become, as it were, embodied and institutionalise themselves as our place in the world.

His breakdown takes the form of an intense paranoia. How could it be otherwise since he has always had a fear of living people? But those watching him, filming him, and harassing him with strange invitations are not other people; they are, of course, himself who is perfectly aware, if only subliminally, of his situation and its causes. It is he who decides the necessity of frenetically rushing from place to place, of eating on the run, of allowing the minor irritants of living to obscure the general condition of his life, of interminable calculations of competitive risk and benefit. But he cannot admit to being his own tormentor. Which of us can?

As with many dreams, his delusions are cryptically instructive. To be more explicit might cause cataleptic shut-down. Meaning must therefore be teased out of events. What look like traps are clues. He isn’t forced to take these clues but he does. His sub-conscious instinct insists. A lady in purple, a sort of Dante’s Beatrice, appears and disappears. Why? To entice? To comfort? To guide? In any case as a sort of Jungian anima which is actually part of himself. She helps him dig out those things that are most deeply buried, those archaic reasons which provoked his arrival to his current state. This is why he feels paranoid. He is being watched, assessed, judged... by himself. This is the rationality of his psychosis. Nothing could be more frightening.

Starting from the good look at himself on film, progressing to the ‘book’ of his life, and on to experience the ‘death’ of pre-birth, he regresses himself to a purely physical state, an animal in a zoo. Throughout his inner journey, he is propelled by the persistent frightening memory of the image of himself, so different, so alien from his self-image. Among other animals his pretensions and affectations become useless. An animal does not have rational abilities. It can only wait and respond instinctively to events. Clues are, therefore, meaningless and stop altogether.

In this primitive state, he is led into the underworld. It is here that he starts to take charge, to lead by the light of his real self. As he emerges from the underworld with the help of the purple Beatrice, he starts losing bits of his past, starting with his watch which has been broken. He is baptised in a hot shower and is restored. As are his clothes which had been cleaned and pressed, his shoes shined, and, miraculously, his watch works again. It remains for him then to learn, or to un-learn, how to see. Not as an observer, but as a participant. In doing so he crosses a boundary into a world he hasn’t known about that has been operating in parallel to his own isolated world.

After a complex celebratory meal in a church, including a balletic floorshow, he steps forth into the darkness, into what could be a cemetery. He sees his purple Beatrice literally melt in front of him, as she does so becoming progressively younger until she is an infant who simply turns into rivulets of water. Just outside the gates of the cemetery, he finds his funeral parlour, for which he no longer feels disgust. His feelings now are for the sensitivities of his customers. 

His psychotic episode is now over and it has been productive. He will continue in his business, but for different reasons than those he started with. He will also write a book that connects that business to eternity: “I hoped that it wouldn’t be difficult to write about love and death. They are my world, after all. Besides, the obstacle that had stood in my way long ago no longer existed. I now had an excellent title.” Sometimes the title is all you need.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Value of Time

Time is the skeleton in the intellectual closet, the elephant in the scientific room, and the rogue gene of rationality. Time presents a series of paradoxes which Lightman presents as if they were dreams to be analysed - not to be resolved but merely to be appreciated. Perhaps that’s the limit of human capability, that is, merely to appreciate time as something unknowable. If so, then the purpose of time may well be to keep human beings humble, an unexpected consequence of eating from the tree of knowledge.

Time, of course, is an essential concept not just for the conduct of everyday life and the purported rationality of scientific thought, but also as a foundation for ethics, and for one’s fundamental feeling about the world and our place in it. So how we think about time, however unconsciously, matters. We wouldn’t be able to communicate without time since words come in a sequence. Yet single-celled animals appear to communicate and have no detectable sense of time. Time has been considered as a threat or a consolation; as objective or entirely subjective; as universal or merely local; as a fact of existence or a fantasy created by human beings to make our lives bearable; as something which gives or destroys meaning.

But no matter what view one takes on time, its paradoxes prevail. Lightman catalogues them in his witty vignettes of life in Berne. If time is circular, there can be no choice, no free will. If time-travel is possible, choice and free will could destroy the world. If there are dimensions in time as there are in space, then there could be an infinity of simultaneous worlds. If time is reversible, the relation between cause and effect is merely conventional, etc., etc. It seems that no matter where one turns philosophically, someone has already opened a door to understanding and someone else has closed the same door with a decisive bang.

Without time, there would be no regrets, no sense of loss. But there probably wouldn’t be anything like love either, certainly not anticipation or longing. Commitments and contracts would be meaningless. History, indeed memory of any kind except for the most unconsciously instinctive (including the false or distorted kind), could not exist. Greed would be eliminated; so would ambition. Neither progress nor deterioration would be noticeable. But entropy would be stopped in its tracks; so everything would be much tidier. Age would be a mythical fantasy. Ethics as a consideration of the consequences of one’s actions would be senseless. On the other hand, an ethical ideal of equality might well be a consequence of the absence of time. Does time even exist in a galactic black hole?

So Lightman is pretty comprehensive. But I think there is at least one theory of time, or Einsteinian dream, which he may have neglected: Time as metric of value. That time is a metric, a scale on which we measure and evaluate, is something fairly certain. Such a metric is neither subjective nor objective but inter-subjective and communal, quite a bit like language really. So it is something real but created by human beings for an evolutionary purpose, namely to be able to rank things - events, structures, traditions, words, and people - according to their importance. And, of course, this implies arguing about their importance. An agreement on something as the basis for disagreement, one might say.

How ironically fitting, therefore, that the nature of the thing agreed as a metric should be the subject of such intense disagreement and confusion. I am 72 years of age. I can prove it by both memory and birth certificate. But memory is uncertain, and documents can be forged. In any case, the literal meaning of my assertion is that I have experienced 72 Springtimes - a mere convention. Scientifically it means that the replicating tails of my bodily cells are running out of steam. Culturally, it means that I am either a carrier of wisdom or over the hill depending on whom you ask. Psychologically, that I am probably more filled with memories and suppressed memories than is good for me. All these are evaluations, judgments that require the metric of time.

As with all metrics of value, there is nothing beyond, under, or inside the metric of time. It stands on its own. It is its own substance. We place ourselves and everything else on that metric. The metric is not part of us or of anything else. Confusing the substance of the metric with something either ‘out there’ in the cosmos, or ‘in here’ in one’s mind, is a mistake. Just as Zeno created his paradoxes of movement in space by confusing the metric with the world to which it is applied, so we create similar paradoxes with time. The apparent contradictions of quantum mechanics is just one example.

There are, of course, not one metric of time but any number of them depending on our perspective on the world - just as Einstein showed. These metrics are not simply contraries, they may even be contradictories - uniformly increasing as others decline. Comparing them implies a difference in purpose which completely explains the difference in scales. Many of these purposes are strange: to prove that God exists... or that he doesn’t exist; to prove that the universe expanded rapidly... or that it didn’t. As if time itself doesn’t change with the intentions associated with it. Time is its own metric and nothing else, just like every other measure of value.

This theory of time as a metric of value may involve its own paradoxes. But it does have one signal advantage: by allowing purpose to determine what time is, the theory incorporates all of Lightman’s common-sense and philosophical conjectures, including Einstein’s, and allows each its place. None are incorrect, although some may be better than others depending on intention. Responses on a postcard, please.

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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Grand Theft Identity

An old-fashioned Western dressed as sci-fi? Could be, but with a Dickian twist: everyone loses, and no one gets the girl. Or a murder mystery? Only no one is murdered. I tried my best all the way through to pick up the thread. It eluded me entirely.

The guy in the White Hat, Jason, is an intelligent, handsome, talented and popular musical celebrity. He is also a narcissistic, misogynistic druggie who manipulates women to get where he thinks he should be. He is fundamentally amoral and bred to be that way, despite his occasional flashes of empathy. Jason is picked by the Black Hat, for reasons that really are not reasonable, to take the rap for the accidental death of Black Hat’s sister.

The Black Hat belongs to Felix, an authoritarian senior policeman who believes that anything justifies the maintenance of the established order. He has an incestuous relationship with his sister, whose intolerance for orderliness he protects from scrutiny. On the other hand, he is single-handedly responsible for shutting down forced labour camps and protecting the lives of student demonstrators. On the whole, despite his occasional flashes of conscience, he is a rat.

Jason and Felix come into contact through a vague slippage between alternative universes, which temporarily erases Jason’s identity. It’s not clear whether this is drug-induced, a criminal conspiracy, or divine forgetfulness. But the end result is that both end up more or less where they started. Jason is vindicated and has a marginally bigger audience. Felix mourns his sister’s death but gets on with his life of law enforcement. Both retire after long and comfortable lives. Then they die, apparently unmourned.

And so? I suppose there is a certain nihilism which appeals to those who are fed up with society in general... or just with Westerns. Reputation, either through celebrity or formal authority is a fleeting compensation for the battles we fight in life. I can understand that. But if that sentiment defines Dick’s target audience, the story could have been improved by killing them all off sooner.

And God alone knows what John Dowland’s composition for lute has to do with any of it. The whole thing has about as much literary merit as a computer game.

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The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Riding the Backs of Tigers

Lima was a dangerous place during the lengthy insurrection lead by the Maoist Shining Path. The neighbourhood of Five Corners was particularly dangerous, but not because of the Shining Path. It was dangerous because it was a slum in reasonable proximity to those with economic and political power in Peru. One way or another everyone was riding on its back - rebels, the secret police and their thugs, politicians, businessmen, the fashionistas, even its own residents. Ending up inside the tiger of Five Corners was only a matter of time for everyone.

Inside the beast of Five Corners is chaos, a complete lack of discernible order. This is not just a world of violence, sexual perversion, and filth; it is also a world without logic. Nothing has purpose. Motivations are entirely opaque. Even rumours can’t capture the reality of the irrational movement of things. Perhaps most shocking is that those in charge have as little understanding of the situation as their victims.

The epicentre of sleaze, corruption, and the national malaise is not the government or the rebels or the petty criminals of Five Corners, but a sensationalist scandal-sheet called Exposed. Remarkably similar to the National Enquirer in America, the weekly magazine is run by a man close to the President. In fact if it weren’t for the date of publication of The Neighborhood (2016), it would be easy to confuse Exposed’s proprietor with the infamous David J. Pecker, friend and protector of Donald Trump, and Trump himself with the Peruvian President Fujimori.

More generally, The Neighborhood is a reminder of just how close the Peruvian national chaos described by Vargas Llosa is to the current sordid conditions in the United States. Political and economic polarisation has followed the same trajectory in both countries. Personal loyalty is the sole virtue of those in power. Government is used primarily to settle personal scores. Dirty tricks are the norm. Vulgarity is triumphant. Pornography is what leaders do.

When Five Corners eats those who ride upon it, it does not disappear, it expands. Its ethos infects that of the most expensive neighbourhoods with the wealthiest inhabitants. Previously separate social worlds become indistinguishable. Conversations cross boundaries and blend into one another. A new kind of composite society is formed and held together by a shared lechery for power without any other purpose than its own maintenance. Present day America, it might be said, is 90’s Peru with nukes.

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The Corpse on the Dike by Janwillem van de Wetering
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Distinctive Kind of Policing (and Country)

As a foreigner in The Netherlands, one of the essential pieces of vocabulary the novice Dutch-speaker acquires is the word gezellig (pronounced like the English ‘gazelle’ with the guttural ‘g’ at both the beginning and end). Gezelligheid is a concept easy to understand but much harder to comprehend. It includes the Danish idea of hygge, coziness in one’s surroundings; and the German notion of Gemütlichkeit as friendly warmth. There’s even a bit of Japanese Wa, or natural social harmony. But ultimately it is something uniquely Dutch, a cultural trait that appears as a sort of national aspiration. Van de Wetering uses gezelligheid as a central theme in his murder mystery.

It appears first in the attitudes of the investigating police officers. One lives alone, and although somewhat of a ladies’ man, his real ambition is for a quiet evening with his cat. The other is married and being driven mad by the domestic tumult created by his wife and three children; he longs for a quiet retreat to escape the chaos.

But the attachment to gezelligheid is more profound than mere desire for peace and quiet. Van de Wetering’s editorial musings by the officers are instructive. The policemen are professionals and good at their jobs; but they are also ambivalent about the criminal justice system. Their jobs are necessary but mainly as a sort of necessary evil to combat an even greater evil of a lack of order, an absence of gezelligheid.

This ambivalence is demonstrated practically in their relationships with the general public, particularly with suspects. Their response to taunts is irenic. They have time for a little cup of coffee with witnesses. They would prefer not to jail the prime suspect as a matter of principle. This is not naivety on their part but a behavioural counter-balance to their inherent power to disrupt the lives of those around them, to destroy gezelligheid. Van de Wetering suggests that even criminals respond to its existence and give themselves up without undue violence.

Gezelligheid implies a mutuality; it is not an individual’s feeling but a relationship. When one is invited to an event in Holland, a not uncommon response is “Oh gezellig!” (Or, in Amsterdam, more likely: “Gezellig, hoor”), signifying not just acceptance but the anticipation of a reason for being together in order to strengthen a relationship. Gezelligheid is used as a social tactic by the officers to establish rapport with those involved in the investigation - as well as with each other. They play flute and drum duets together at the station - something considered not abnormal by their colleagues.

An antonym to gezellig is eigenwijs, literally ‘one’s own way,’ that is, stubborn or uncooperative. The Dutch may be provoked into eigenwijsheid when gezelligheid is demanded of them. Social harmony is voluntary or it doesn’t exist. One of the policeman makes this clear to an immigrant who thinks the police act ‘under orders.’ The policeman sets him straight on the cultural rules of the game: “The Dutch do not like to work under orders. It is true that I was asked to come here but I was not ordered. I came here because I thought the suggestion was right.” This just to remind the reader that gezelligheid is a matter of choice, and sometimes of considerable interpretive effort.

Holland no doubt has its fair share of villains, miscreants, and anti-social types. One senior officer indicates his acute awareness of reality when he refers to “Amsterdam, ... the lunatic asylum of Holland.” Gezelligheid is not a universal state of affairs but a commonly shared ideal. It is a standard, a norm, of social interaction which has emerged as unspoken ethic. Remarkably, it is this ethic which is at the core of The Corpse on the Dike, and perhaps even the entire country. Oranje Boven!

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High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Social Sci-Fi

For a few years in the 1980’s I had a flat in Lauderdale Tower at the Barbican in London. All of the Barbican development is brutalist - cast concrete with exposed cast marks etc. - but Lauderdale and it’s sister-towers are particularly extreme examples, sporting pebble-dashed balconies and bare internal walls that reject even the most technologically advanced wallpaper adhesives. I take it from Ballard’s descriptions that English architectural aesthetics hadn’t advanced very far when it came to the Docklands development which was several decades newer.

To call such architecture anti-human might be an exaggeration; but not by much. One can only tell oneself that it is post-modernist chic for so long. The fact is that it is depressing as hell. Even recollecting the lift lobbies provokes the phantasm of concrete dust in my throat. Concrete is as concrete does I suppose. And what it does primarily is drive people mad. As Ballard says, it is “an architecture designed for war.” And a kind of peace-time shell shock is not uncommon.

The problem is its unrelenting uniformity. Placed in proximity to another architectural style, brutalism may look merely bad. But when it is the only game for acres and acres, it presents a complete absence of any aesthetic whatsoever. It’s the equivalent of living in a sensory deprivation chamber. There’s nothing to react to. Everything - people, furniture, social interactions, art - is mediated by a grey blandness which doesn’t highlight any contents but reduces them to an uninteresting drabness. I found that when I wasn’t unaccountably aggressive toward my neighbours, I was becoming incipiently suicidal.

So I can identify with at least one of Ballard’s protagonists, Dr. Laing. High-rise stress is something that creeps up on you. The unconscious reacts slowly to the uniformity of life in identical concrete enclosures by attempting to differentiate itself. It constantly prods the conscious self to demonstrate its individuality. While such psychology is probably active to some degree in every human grouping, it reaches a peak of intensity in an enclosed habitation that provokes it without mercy.

Laing‘s mistake was to believe he could escape the demands of intimate relationships in the supposed anonymity of a large residential building. This is like joining a monastery to avoid family problems. In a high rise, as in a monastery, relationships may be more limited in scope but they are far more intense in their allowable aspects. And both high rise residents and monks have similar techniques for expressing fierce disapproval in complete silence.

Social nuance is proportionately heightened to the degree it is expressively repressed. This creates a pervasive field of energetic tension which needs only the social equivalent of the Higgs boson to create the matter of real violence. And there are many more of these particles to do the job - faulty lifts, interrupted utilities, children, pets, and parties will do the trick.

Ballard puts his finger on the precise mechanism which unleashed a potentially lethal game of tit for tat among the residents: “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.”

Talk about sick building syndrome! But of course the ‘structure’ Ballard refers to could equally be the internet, which didn’t come into being until twenty years after High Rise was published. The problem, then, isn’t the building but something in the physiology of human beings (Laing is coincidentally a physiologist) which responds badly when certain, apparently trivial, social interactions are replaced by any ‘rigid,’ that is to say, ‘efficient’ technology.

In other words, people act badly not when social norms are relaxed or abandoned, but when they are no longer apparently needed, when we believe they are enforced without our participation. But social physics is as sensitive to minor changes in structural constants as cosmological physics. Every new technology is a kind of unplanned experiment with variations in sociological constants equivalent to variations in scientific laws like gravity or the weak nuclear force. The main difference of course is that fictions of technology move toward reality rather less predictably.

My flat in the Barbican, by the way, was owned by the Corporation of London. I was therefore a Council tenant. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, Council tenants were entitled to buy their properties at a price about 50% below market value. But about nine months before the scheduled sale date I decided that the certain financial gain was not worth the required mental strain, and moved out. Just an example I suppose of human unpredictability when inhabiting alternative worlds.

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A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Oh So English Tragedy... Not

I have never met anyone of the types in Murdoch’s The Severed Head. I doubt anyone has. I can only trust her that they have some meaning: those independently wealthy landed gentry who can remain perfectly civil when their best friends run off with their wives. Martin, the husband in question, can in fact maintain that “He’s still my best friend,” about the American cad, Anderson. And Antonia, the out-of-love wife, without the least embarrassment, can say to her soon to be ex “We won’t let go of you, Martin,... We’ll never let go of you.” Who are these people really?

The stiff upper lip, psychological repression, emotional aridity - these seem like cliches of the English personality. Add to these, things like pea-soup fog, late trains, and vague derision of anything European as Jewish and downtrodden and the question starts to form: Is good old Iris doing a send-up, employing that other cliche of English character, irony, to undermine her own narrative?

I live only two miles or so from one of Murdoch’s fictional locations, ‘Rembers’, a house set on the edge of the Cotswolds in the actual stone village of Sibford Gower. It’s less than 20 miles from Murdoch’s Oxford college and undoubtedly she knew the place well. Yet she describes the house as being constructed of a timber frame with light pink infill panels, a sort of Elizabethan bordello.

I don’t claim to know every house in Sibford Gower, but I can say categorically that nothing like the Rembers described exists there. Historically, timber-framed houses can’t be found for miles yet into neighbouring Warwickshire; and modern planners would never have permitted such an atrocity in a village of honey-coloured stone. For me this tips the intention of the book from polite irony to serious sarcasm.*

A trivial observation? Perhaps, but Murdoch is never trivial with her details. In her literary philosophy, everything signifies. I think what Rembers signifies is the sincere falsity of the book. Even if there are characters like this in reality, they are incorrectly placed. They belong more in the Mittel Europa of 1900 than the Middle England of 1976. In fact I think they are Freudian ‘types’ - Oedipal, Electral, Narcissistic, etc.

That is, Murdoch’s characters are mythical figures playing out psycho-analytic roles. They are not parodies of Englishness but of psychological theory. And in good Murdochian style, they represent how psychological theory has invaded (infected?) our intelligence and conversation. There’s just enough in psychological theory to be plausible but not nearly enough to account for the neuroses of those who formulated it, or who currently practice it.

Murdoch tips her hand as to motive early on when she has Martin suggest about Anderson, the psychiatrist, that “Anyone who is good at setting people free is also good at enslaving them, if we are to believe Plato.” He also criticises the philosophical foundation of psycho-analysis as “a metaphysic of the drawing-room.” The imaginary head cannot be severed from the reality of the body to which it is attached without severe distortion, not to say disfigurement. In short, psychoanalysis is simply badly thought out philosophy of mind and should receive the disrespect it deserves.

*Another indication of her displacing hints, as it were, is her aside that Rembers overlooks the River Stour. It can’t, because Sibford Gower is on the River Sib, a tributary of the Stour. She directs with misdirection.

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A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Self-Defeating Politics of the Visionary

The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.

All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.

A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...).

The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.

This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.

The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.

The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”

So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.

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The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Goodbye to All That

The end of the British Empire was not a sudden event, more a slow burn over decades. For many around the world, its progress was masked by the rather more terrifying facts of the Cold War and its potential for the destruction of life on Earth. Nonetheless the disintegration of the Empire was not without its loss, in the opinion of some, to global culture. But how to express such a sentiment without jingoistic intimations of sour grapes? A fiction about the effects of global warming and the retreat of civilisation might do the trick. The British Empire is the eponymous Drowned World or I’m an evangelical Republican.

In 1962 global warming would have been considered an entirely natural, and non-political, phenomenon, not one brought on by industrial development but a condition brought about by ‘circumstances.’ Ballard was not scientifically prescient; he was establishing a vaguely plausible process by which the world order was undergoing rapid transformation.

So global warming serves nicely as a subtle metaphor for the twilight of the accidental realm on which the sun had not set for two centuries or so - the British Empire. Just as accidentally it was being destroyed - progressively from the South - and bit by bit returned to its ‘primitive’ state. London, the nerve-centre of this global government, is literally submerged along with the rest of the ‘developed world’, that is to say the Northern hemisphere. There is more here than an account of change. There is a judgment that what is happening is unfortunate, retrograde, and purely destructive.

The characters that Ballard presents are the ‘types’ of imperial decline. Riggs is the stalwart old colonial hand who still dresses for dinner and knows the responsibilities imposed by duty. Kerans on the other hand, along with many others, is seduced by the allure of the jungle, its heat, and its vegetative fecundity - not to mention its rather looser moral code. Beatrice is (literally) the entire indigenous population - beautiful but somewhat resentful and slightly mad. Kerans is in love with Beatrice but both know that they really can’t live together happily: “their only true meeting ground would be in their dreams.”

The climate itself is causing an evolutionary regression which is irresistible except by those with real cultural backbone. It is not only the flora and fauna which are adapting to new conditions. The most primitive parts of the human nervous system, the reptilian brain, have been activated by these same conditions. To survive it is necessary for human beings to ‘go native,’ that is to climb back down the evolutionary ladder. The only alternative is to rapidly retreat to the healthier environment of the Mother Country. This is located in the relatively cool North of course, where cohesive government and advanced technology are still in control.

The retreat of imperial government officials like Riggs creates a power vacuum which is quickly filled by commercial pirates who are interested in profiting from the new ecosystem of now-defenceless territories. The freebooter Strangman is the leader of gang of black treasure-hunters, portrayed in barely concealed racist language as without either aesthetic taste or good manners (the racism made rather more explicit by references to the oxymoronic “black sun” which is the ultimate source of the global malaise). They loot and vandalise entirely without appreciation of the value of what they acquire and desecrate. Clearly they already occupy that inferior evolutionary niche to which the white ‘remainers’ are attracted in their dreams.

Strangman pursues Beatrice with an sort of vulgarity equalled in his plundering, showering her with jewels and booze. Kerans‘s response is not one of affectionate jealousy but alienated suicide, a desire to dissolve himself in the Triassic miasma in which he finds himself rather than confront the fate of his beloved - a post-colonial head-in-the-sand response par excellence. Strangman meanwhile restores a sort of quasi-order by draining part of the encroaching swamp. Just enough really to complete his stripping any remaining assets. This reveals a travesty of the old civilisation, the decaying remnants of submerged, long-defunct institutions are now useless ruins. “I'm afraid the magic has gone,” Kerans admits to Beatrice. Indeed it had, but for Beatrice the magic had died many years before.

But violence is still necessary, apparently as a sort of residual obligation of civilisation. Bodkin, the aloof intellectual (no doubt a Lefty), tries to destroy the Strangman regime by blowing it up. He’s ineffectual, of course, and himself ends up dead. Tempted by wealth and opulence, Beatrice is saved by Kerans on the brink of being ravaged by Strangman. Kerans‘s pluck and inherent sense of righteousness have overcome his retrograde evolution, at least temporarily.

With the aplomb of a Flashman, he eludes the evil black mob long enough to see the arrival of Riggs and his trusted Sergeant Major, McCready, at the head of an armed force (my vision is of Richard Attenborough as RSM Lauderdale in the 1964 film Guns at Batasi) . They have returned to intervene in the uncivilised chaos. It was their duty, indeed their burden, as Mr. Kipling said.

But ultimately, Kerans no longer fits either with the local culture of Beatrice or with the civilisation Riggs represents.* He is an outcaste, a man without a country. He has devolved into an inferior species, less than human, who lives “in the South” with the other relics of Empire. He is a lesson to us all about what we will become if we forget our roots in a ‘civilised’ society. The triumph of the South is an unqualified disaster for the planet. Farewell Britannia.

*Ballard describes Kerans as having a “lean ebony body.” I doubt this refers to a healthy suntan. He is setting the character up for his consignment to inevitable racial inferiority.

Postscript: Because I found it strange that few reviewers took Ballard’s apparent racism seriously, I put a comment on a number of reviews: “I think you may have missed the import of this story which is profoundly racist at its core.”

While many responded positively, there were also many who found my remark insulting, sometimes profoundly so, even after my protestations and apologies. For example, as one respondent writes: “Oh you weren't trying to be insulting when you said to me. I think you may have missed the import of this story ? I would hate to see what you would say to a veteran reader such as myself if you were REALLY trying to insult me... Manners is something people seem to forget when they are online under an assumed name.”

So live and learn. Human beings are far more variable than one expects. The tendrils of racism are transparently thin but incredibly strong. Our ability to rationalise them seems infinite. Most commentators aver Ballard’s purported emulation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the literary reason for the ‘savage’ tone of The Drowned World. I don’t buy it. The book is about much more than the incidental use of dialect. And its relation to Conrad’s work is in any case questionable. It is self-evidently a statement of a world-view that is inherently grounded in racial superiority (and/or some really bad pseudo-sci-fi).

It’s one thing to recognise the potential for alternative interpretations of a piece of literature in the abstract. But sometimes what gets revealed through interpretation is almost mystically misdirected to avoid the obvious. And that revelation of the reviewer is often merely one of unjust prejudice. The Drowned World is a case in point. It doesn’t simply depict the incidental mores of the time. It is a lament for the loss of white supremacy in the world. Treating such casual racism casually, especially when it is exhibited so publicly, is reprehensible.

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