Continuing with the annual summaries of books read this year. The new kindle, as predicted, has meant more reading, hence the list of favourites being expanded to 15. They have generally been longer as well – obviously the weight of physical copies has been a deterrence in the past, though not one I was particularly conscious of. The kindle itself I'm still a little ambivalent about, since there are lots of things books do better. Colour being the most obvious one, but also navigation, footnotes, index pages, highlighting and annotations, all of which need improving if ereaders are to replace paper-based technology. One thing of huge benefit the kindle offers is the integrated Oxford English Dictionary, which makes looking up definitions relatively painless. My vocabulary has expanded as a result, which I suspect has had a less than salubrious effect on my writing. The previous sentence being a case in point.
As for my intention to write more about what I've read: output (crudely measured) has actually declined over the years (80% of favourite books in 2010, 60% in 2011, now 40% in 2012). Not an encouraging trend, and one I am committed to arresting if not reversing in the new year. Still, hopefully the fall in quantity has at least been mitigated by a rise in quality.
Schismatrix Plus - Bruce Sterling
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë [link]
Shadow & Claw - Gene Wolfe
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel [link]
Bleak House - Charles Dickens [link]
Rare Earth - Paul Mason
Moby Dick; or, the White Whale - Herman Melville [link]
The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour - Andrew Rawnsley*
Discordia - Laurie Penny, Molly Crabapple
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It - Paul Collier
Maggie the Mechanic / The Girl from HOPPERS - Jamie Hernandez
Habibi - Craig Thompson [link]
Asterios Polyp - David Mazzucchelli [link]
Sundome vols 1-3 - Kazuto Okada**
Indian Summer - Hugo Pratt, Milo Manara
*More like just the 'fall', really, isn't it? The 'rise' (probably as interesting, I suspect) was covered in a previous book.
**basically Fifty Shades of Grey with the genders reversed.
26.12.12
24.12.12
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
When staging the wizard battle between Gandalf and Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson was adamant that flash and fireballs be avoided. Instead, the invisible spells zinged like whips, the actors were flung against the walls. Noses filled with blood, dirty nails cracked against stone. The fight was physical. REAL.
More broadly, when giving the brief for the design of The Lord of the Rings as a whole, Jackson told the staff at Weta Workshop to imagine Middle Earth as a real place, the way J.R.R. Tolkien presented it. The crew had the enviable task of excavating this secret history prior to the “Fourth Age” dominated by the race of men. It would be an effort in alternate archaeology, rather than of uninhibited imagination.
And it worked. The Lord of the Rings films and books were my Star Wars when I was growing up: I had the soundtracks, the screen-savers, the reference guides. My favourite piece of tie-in merch was a book called The Lord of the Rings: Weapons & Warfare, which read like the films narrated by a military historian. The detail was extraordinary. Middle Earth as presented by Jackson and his crew was REAL. You could fucking RESEARCH the place.
Which is why the super mega 48 frames-per-second look of The Hobbit robs the franchise of some of its magic. It reminded me of the disconnect between Northern Lights, which dwelt heavily on the concentration camp atmosphere of Bolvangar, and The Golden Compass, which tried to conjure the tacky wonder of Chris Columbus’s Hogwarts. The Hobbit is less jarring, but the gloss and smoothness subtracts from the immersive grainy tone set by The Lord of the Rings. I saw the film in 2D, thankfully, but I imagine the extra dimension would make the effect even worse. As it stands, The Hobbit in many places looked to me like the fabulously illustrated cutscenes of a Warcraft game. NOT REAL, that is.
The problems don’t end there, though (and you thought this was just about cinematography!) The Hobbit, unfortunately, is a mess. Tolkien’s books are unfairly maligned for being plodding and weighed down with description. Actually, I think even the long first part of The Fellowship of the Ring is carefully and deliberately paced. Jackson just had to speed it up a little to fit it into a three hour film. He kept the fundamental division between the first and second parts intact. And he can do brevity: the second half of Fellowship does the Pass of Caradhras, Moria, Lothlórien and Parth Galen all in an hour and a half. The Hobbit, as a book, is positively zippy. Rather than editing it down, Jackson committed himself to filling it out.
Tolkien’s books supplied the first and third Lord of the Rings films with natural endings which would carry enough dramatic weight to leave an audience satisfied: the death of Boromir and the coronation of Aragorn. For The Two Towers, Jackson and the writing team had to tie-up the sprawling plot-lines on their own. They succeeded, just about, in Sam’s speech at the end (“There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”). Not poetry exactly, but effective precisely because it is simple, coming from an everyman who can only dimly comprehend the huge forces crashing around him. It’s why the story is told through the eyes of hobbits in the first place: Tolkien’s faintly paternalistic faith in the common soul triumphing over the ambitions of the great. That speech was the product of many sleepless nights and countless re-writes. Nerves were shredded over it, and it’s a superior feat of composition as a result. Two Towers will never have the simple through-line of Fellowship or the operatic sweep of Return. It is the worst film of the trilogy, but it is arguably also the most impressive – despite its numerous disadvantages, it nevertheless works as a standalone work.
If the much shorter Hobbit is divided into three, it’s difficult to see where the natural endings of the first two parts will fall, or what will provide the thematic unity for each installment. For An Unexpected Journey, Jackson set himself the same challenge as in The Two Towers, and here he doesn’t quite pull it off. Bilbo’s arc – from small-minded, comfort-seeking obscurity to self-sacrificing hero – strains credibility. Martin Freeman isn’t to blame, I think. He is very well cast in the role. Rather, the accumulating series of set-pieces (in which Gandalf repeatedly serves as resolution deus ex machina) distract away from the developing relationship between the dwarves and their burglar. Too much time was wasted on ancient battles and giants throwing rocks at each other: indulgences Jackson can scarce afford when there is a company of more than a dozen to introduce. When Bilbo’s heroic last stand finally takes place, I didn’t quite understand why he did it, even though he explained himself very clearly afterwards.
The film as a whole feels like a guilty treat for the filmmakers and the fans. Much of the overlong framing sequence with Frodo would be puzzling for those who don't have every second of the extended DVD edition of Fellowship committed to memory. The inclusion of Saruman and Galadriel in Rivendell was needless: they were cameos serving only to trigger fond memories of their star turns in the previous films. We know how this story will end anyway. It was already succinctly told in the prologue of the first Lord of the Rings film. I’m left wondering if the hefty new Hobbit series will have anything new to add.
More broadly, when giving the brief for the design of The Lord of the Rings as a whole, Jackson told the staff at Weta Workshop to imagine Middle Earth as a real place, the way J.R.R. Tolkien presented it. The crew had the enviable task of excavating this secret history prior to the “Fourth Age” dominated by the race of men. It would be an effort in alternate archaeology, rather than of uninhibited imagination.
And it worked. The Lord of the Rings films and books were my Star Wars when I was growing up: I had the soundtracks, the screen-savers, the reference guides. My favourite piece of tie-in merch was a book called The Lord of the Rings: Weapons & Warfare, which read like the films narrated by a military historian. The detail was extraordinary. Middle Earth as presented by Jackson and his crew was REAL. You could fucking RESEARCH the place.
Which is why the super mega 48 frames-per-second look of The Hobbit robs the franchise of some of its magic. It reminded me of the disconnect between Northern Lights, which dwelt heavily on the concentration camp atmosphere of Bolvangar, and The Golden Compass, which tried to conjure the tacky wonder of Chris Columbus’s Hogwarts. The Hobbit is less jarring, but the gloss and smoothness subtracts from the immersive grainy tone set by The Lord of the Rings. I saw the film in 2D, thankfully, but I imagine the extra dimension would make the effect even worse. As it stands, The Hobbit in many places looked to me like the fabulously illustrated cutscenes of a Warcraft game. NOT REAL, that is.
The problems don’t end there, though (and you thought this was just about cinematography!) The Hobbit, unfortunately, is a mess. Tolkien’s books are unfairly maligned for being plodding and weighed down with description. Actually, I think even the long first part of The Fellowship of the Ring is carefully and deliberately paced. Jackson just had to speed it up a little to fit it into a three hour film. He kept the fundamental division between the first and second parts intact. And he can do brevity: the second half of Fellowship does the Pass of Caradhras, Moria, Lothlórien and Parth Galen all in an hour and a half. The Hobbit, as a book, is positively zippy. Rather than editing it down, Jackson committed himself to filling it out.
Tolkien’s books supplied the first and third Lord of the Rings films with natural endings which would carry enough dramatic weight to leave an audience satisfied: the death of Boromir and the coronation of Aragorn. For The Two Towers, Jackson and the writing team had to tie-up the sprawling plot-lines on their own. They succeeded, just about, in Sam’s speech at the end (“There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”). Not poetry exactly, but effective precisely because it is simple, coming from an everyman who can only dimly comprehend the huge forces crashing around him. It’s why the story is told through the eyes of hobbits in the first place: Tolkien’s faintly paternalistic faith in the common soul triumphing over the ambitions of the great. That speech was the product of many sleepless nights and countless re-writes. Nerves were shredded over it, and it’s a superior feat of composition as a result. Two Towers will never have the simple through-line of Fellowship or the operatic sweep of Return. It is the worst film of the trilogy, but it is arguably also the most impressive – despite its numerous disadvantages, it nevertheless works as a standalone work.
If the much shorter Hobbit is divided into three, it’s difficult to see where the natural endings of the first two parts will fall, or what will provide the thematic unity for each installment. For An Unexpected Journey, Jackson set himself the same challenge as in The Two Towers, and here he doesn’t quite pull it off. Bilbo’s arc – from small-minded, comfort-seeking obscurity to self-sacrificing hero – strains credibility. Martin Freeman isn’t to blame, I think. He is very well cast in the role. Rather, the accumulating series of set-pieces (in which Gandalf repeatedly serves as resolution deus ex machina) distract away from the developing relationship between the dwarves and their burglar. Too much time was wasted on ancient battles and giants throwing rocks at each other: indulgences Jackson can scarce afford when there is a company of more than a dozen to introduce. When Bilbo’s heroic last stand finally takes place, I didn’t quite understand why he did it, even though he explained himself very clearly afterwards.
The film as a whole feels like a guilty treat for the filmmakers and the fans. Much of the overlong framing sequence with Frodo would be puzzling for those who don't have every second of the extended DVD edition of Fellowship committed to memory. The inclusion of Saruman and Galadriel in Rivendell was needless: they were cameos serving only to trigger fond memories of their star turns in the previous films. We know how this story will end anyway. It was already succinctly told in the prologue of the first Lord of the Rings film. I’m left wondering if the hefty new Hobbit series will have anything new to add.
13.12.12
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
It's a testament to Dario Argento's skill that 40 years on, the final sequence manages to rustle up some thrills and surprises. Although then again, I'm hardly a dab hand at puzzling out murder mysteries. Unfortunately, the need to keep the audience guessing means that the perpetrator's motives are left to be filled in at the very end, in the most risible manner. The detective wheels in a psychiatrist to spin out a tired (even then, surely?) rape-revenge narrative. There are no clues to be added up which point to such an explanation, it's tacked on in the worst possible way. The only interesting part of the diagnosis is the notion that these repressed psychotic tendencies are activated through exposure to a piece of art – something which links in to Argento's description of the 'cruel' and 'perverse' ideas that surface from deep within and provide the subject matter for his work. His film is about films, their power to invoke our most secret and dangerous desires. Horror blatantly uses sex and violence to titillate, but it's surprising how often this is allied to a strong moralistic tone: the violent psychos are collared, regular 'healthy' sexuality triumphs, passion is curbed by reason, women are once again brought to heel. Taboos are broached, only to be reinforced again. It's like these horror masters unfurl their fantasies, then desperately try to claw them back before they can shake our confidence in the order of things. Ironic, given the paranoia such 'video nasties' managed to whip up.
9.12.12
Asterios Polyp
Mystified by the opinion that this 'is by no means an easy read' – I powered through it in a couple of days. The book's heft is misleading, rarely are there more than 6 panels a page. But Mazzucchelli uses those pages like an expert: style seamlessly folded into the storytelling. My favourite sections are two largely caption-less chapters near the end summing up the best and worst aspects of the protagonist's relationship with his wife. Mazzucchelli's interrogation of the idea of duality permeates the narrative, but ultimately it succeeds because the title character is so likable, before and after his transfiguration.
8.12.12
Fear Itself
Event comics need a theme big enough to be relevant for all the characters tied into it. Siege didn't really have that, which may have been where my patience with these superhero titles ran out. Secret Invasion was inexplicable to those not already well versed in years worth of Avengers backstory, but at least it used alien shape-shifters to try and work in a comment on the 'War on Terror', suicide bombers and the dangers of imperialism (the latter in one page, after all the punching is over – this is superhero comics after all).
Fear Itself is in line with this noble tradition, while thankfully foregoing the requirement to be up to date with the latest developments. The book starts with a protest in New York: a subtle nod to the debate around the plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero, but also perhaps casting a rueful glance at the fate of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Avengers gather on the roof of their tower to take stock, and listen to Iron Man give a State of the Marvelverse address on the way people have been 'lied to and ripped off', the threat of chaos created, and the need for a new New Deal to 'make people feel safe again'. Crazy coming from a guy in golden metal armour, but this is superhero comics after all.
In fact, Stark's admission that 'we can't punch a recession' sounds awfully like the writer's admission that the genre he's working in is not fit for the purpose of capturing a sense of today's anxieties. Ostensibly, the book's project is to show the way angry people get violent when they get really really scared. But actually, it's the fear that's the important motor for the story. And in looking for an existential threat with a sufficient apocalyptic payload, the victims of imperialism are once again drafted into service. The Serpent is Odin's brother, deprived of the throne and bent on assuming it. Odin is an indifferent God, accepting the slaughter of humankind in order to protect his near and dear. Our heroes are caught between a destructive intentions of those at the wrong end of empire, and the rejection of the 1% at the top of it.
Fear Itself is in line with this noble tradition, while thankfully foregoing the requirement to be up to date with the latest developments. The book starts with a protest in New York: a subtle nod to the debate around the plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero, but also perhaps casting a rueful glance at the fate of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Avengers gather on the roof of their tower to take stock, and listen to Iron Man give a State of the Marvelverse address on the way people have been 'lied to and ripped off', the threat of chaos created, and the need for a new New Deal to 'make people feel safe again'. Crazy coming from a guy in golden metal armour, but this is superhero comics after all.
In fact, Stark's admission that 'we can't punch a recession' sounds awfully like the writer's admission that the genre he's working in is not fit for the purpose of capturing a sense of today's anxieties. Ostensibly, the book's project is to show the way angry people get violent when they get really really scared. But actually, it's the fear that's the important motor for the story. And in looking for an existential threat with a sufficient apocalyptic payload, the victims of imperialism are once again drafted into service. The Serpent is Odin's brother, deprived of the throne and bent on assuming it. Odin is an indifferent God, accepting the slaughter of humankind in order to protect his near and dear. Our heroes are caught between a destructive intentions of those at the wrong end of empire, and the rejection of the 1% at the top of it.
28.11.12
The Book of Mormon
The Mormons' trademark shiny happy disposition is a great fit for the toothy smiles and jazz hands of musical theatre. The form's protocols are observed, but the satire cuts through the suffocating good cheer that would normally put me off. The cast have the difficult task of balancing bathos with pathos. Too much of the former and you are left with a simple diatribe against the self-delusions of religion, and anyone can do that. What is more interesting is the way religions actually work. The question that needs answering is WHY people believe these 'fucking weird', even malicious, fabrications. The Book of Mormon attempts an answer, with some success. One of the great ideas in the show is the way Elder Cunningham draws on his pop culture knowledge (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings) as a resource when adapting the Mormon holy text. This both demonstrates the way narratives are stitched together from previously articulated narratives (whatever is available), and the way religious movements have done this in the past to stay relevant. Arguably Christ used Judaism for his own purposes, as Joseph Smith used Christianity for his.
Following on from the previous post, alarm bells will start ringing whenever privileged writers try to portray less privileged cultures. Trey Stone and Matt Parker are white guys setting much of their story in Uganda, and they ask their cast to speak with African accents. To their credit, they partly get around the difficulty by very blatantly calling it out while the characters are still in America, and they continue to do so: the missionaries chant 'I am Africa!' when they successfully convert the village, and there is even a dig at Bono (who is fair game as far as I'm concerned). Parker and Stone mostly stick to making fun of American attitudes, and if you were being kind you could lump 'maggots in my scrotum' and sex with babies to cure AIDS as part of the same satirical project. However, they do also take a stab at evoking the genuine African experience by giving Nikki M. James a solo where she dreams of living a life less 'shitty'. Again, pathos expertly mixed with bathos. And any worries I had about the imposition of alien attitudes onto an existing culture were blown away by the strength of her performance. The cast as a whole were brilliant, which certainly helps Stone and Parker get away with it.
Following on from the previous post, alarm bells will start ringing whenever privileged writers try to portray less privileged cultures. Trey Stone and Matt Parker are white guys setting much of their story in Uganda, and they ask their cast to speak with African accents. To their credit, they partly get around the difficulty by very blatantly calling it out while the characters are still in America, and they continue to do so: the missionaries chant 'I am Africa!' when they successfully convert the village, and there is even a dig at Bono (who is fair game as far as I'm concerned). Parker and Stone mostly stick to making fun of American attitudes, and if you were being kind you could lump 'maggots in my scrotum' and sex with babies to cure AIDS as part of the same satirical project. However, they do also take a stab at evoking the genuine African experience by giving Nikki M. James a solo where she dreams of living a life less 'shitty'. Again, pathos expertly mixed with bathos. And any worries I had about the imposition of alien attitudes onto an existing culture were blown away by the strength of her performance. The cast as a whole were brilliant, which certainly helps Stone and Parker get away with it.
10.11.12
Habibi
The controversy over the book's 'orientalism' is certainly worth paying attention to. Obviously, Craig Thompson is an American depicting a vaguely Middle Eastern setting and culture, which will inevitably set alarm bells ringing. It doesn't help that the book features a sultan's harem, slavery, and the sexual abuse of children and women. The author certainly doesn't exhibit a sense of superiority. Neither is there a significant amount of 'othering' going on, at least on a conscious level (not like, say, Frank Herbert's concern over the hubris of 'Western man'). If anything, Habibi ends on a distinctly cosmopolitan note. I'm thinking particularly of the third and fourth panel on p.672, where the new family walk into and are lost in a crowd of people – out of the story and into our lives – Thompson is working under the assumption that the characters he is portraying ultimately share the same essence and worth as us, and that condescension or idolization are both to be avoided. The author's intentions are irreproachable in that respect.
If I have a problem with the book, it is with Thompson's predilection for over-explaining himself, brought out particularly in the eighth, image-less, chapter. His characters sometimes spend too much time telling the reader the precise reasons behind their emotions or actions. That said, Thompson's sense of precision is also one of the book's great strengths, in that it is put together with extreme care as a visual narrative. He employes a dazzling array of devices (repetitions, contrasts, symbols) in telling the story, to the extent where I get the impression the book could work as a pretty solid primer for the range of possibilities presented by the comics form. In that spirit, I'll note some of the effects I noticed in the first chapter below.
The first panel of a drop of ink is all meta, obv, but the idea as developed in the rest of the page is a bit more subtle than that. Sure, this is the creation of the story as well as the world, but the ink is also a river – a sustainer of life. The book will continue with these transitions between religious myths and lived experience. Indeed, one of its main themes will be the way such bedtime stories layer and make sense of our reality.
The page is divided into a nine-panel grid. Later on, Thompson will explicitly draw attention to the range of patterns that can be worked into these nine squares – the fact that they can be read vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally. This is also brought out on the first page. The middle panels make reference to the water / earth / fire / air idea which will be significant later. There is a certain male-female contrast between the left and right of the page. Finally, panels 3 and 9 foreshadow the very end of the book: where our heroes decide to go up the river, and where Dodola is freed from the predations of a patriarchal society.
On the next two pages there is a cross-page contrast between a hand holding money on the top left corner and a hand holding a pen on top right (which also recalls the very first panel). Dodola appears to be sold for water as well as money – the issue of control and exploitation of natural resources is something the book will continue to explore.
Page 12 is another nine-panel grid, with certain visual repetitions when read vertically. The final panel on that page ('So pure') is called back to on page 14 ('It proves that you were pure') – the veneration suggested by the act of washing the feet contrasted with the subjection of the veil. The image of the veil is carried on to the next page, where it symbolises people's separation from the divine essence – the separation of reality and storytelling. The implication being that writing can lift that veil.
The next couple of pages map out a progression from literacy to knowledge and corruption – an orthodox reading of the fall of man as a journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. Page 19 literally draws a religious frame around the events portrayed in page 22.
The 'River Map' of the chapter's title refers to the nine-square maths problem which stops the flooding in Dodola's story, but also serves as a metaphor for the imposition of order on an unpredictable world. Taking that a bit further in a meta direction, comics are also a way of imposing order on reality – magic charms that will protect us against devils and make us braver when faced with the unknown. The story will go on to explore other themes, and this first chapter almost serves as an introduction to the methodology Thompson will use to do so. For me, this internal logic makes it the strongest of the lot.
If I have a problem with the book, it is with Thompson's predilection for over-explaining himself, brought out particularly in the eighth, image-less, chapter. His characters sometimes spend too much time telling the reader the precise reasons behind their emotions or actions. That said, Thompson's sense of precision is also one of the book's great strengths, in that it is put together with extreme care as a visual narrative. He employes a dazzling array of devices (repetitions, contrasts, symbols) in telling the story, to the extent where I get the impression the book could work as a pretty solid primer for the range of possibilities presented by the comics form. In that spirit, I'll note some of the effects I noticed in the first chapter below.
The first panel of a drop of ink is all meta, obv, but the idea as developed in the rest of the page is a bit more subtle than that. Sure, this is the creation of the story as well as the world, but the ink is also a river – a sustainer of life. The book will continue with these transitions between religious myths and lived experience. Indeed, one of its main themes will be the way such bedtime stories layer and make sense of our reality.
The page is divided into a nine-panel grid. Later on, Thompson will explicitly draw attention to the range of patterns that can be worked into these nine squares – the fact that they can be read vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally. This is also brought out on the first page. The middle panels make reference to the water / earth / fire / air idea which will be significant later. There is a certain male-female contrast between the left and right of the page. Finally, panels 3 and 9 foreshadow the very end of the book: where our heroes decide to go up the river, and where Dodola is freed from the predations of a patriarchal society.
On the next two pages there is a cross-page contrast between a hand holding money on the top left corner and a hand holding a pen on top right (which also recalls the very first panel). Dodola appears to be sold for water as well as money – the issue of control and exploitation of natural resources is something the book will continue to explore.
Page 12 is another nine-panel grid, with certain visual repetitions when read vertically. The final panel on that page ('So pure') is called back to on page 14 ('It proves that you were pure') – the veneration suggested by the act of washing the feet contrasted with the subjection of the veil. The image of the veil is carried on to the next page, where it symbolises people's separation from the divine essence – the separation of reality and storytelling. The implication being that writing can lift that veil.
The next couple of pages map out a progression from literacy to knowledge and corruption – an orthodox reading of the fall of man as a journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. Page 19 literally draws a religious frame around the events portrayed in page 22.
The 'River Map' of the chapter's title refers to the nine-square maths problem which stops the flooding in Dodola's story, but also serves as a metaphor for the imposition of order on an unpredictable world. Taking that a bit further in a meta direction, comics are also a way of imposing order on reality – magic charms that will protect us against devils and make us braver when faced with the unknown. The story will go on to explore other themes, and this first chapter almost serves as an introduction to the methodology Thompson will use to do so. For me, this internal logic makes it the strongest of the lot.
7.11.12
The Castle of Cagliostro
I remember Harold Bloom said somewhere that the object of Don Quixote's quest is ultimately unanswerable, that he endures his many humiliations because the reader demands it of him. I was reminded of this at the end of The Castle of Cagliostro (Hayao Miazaki's first film), when Clarisse asks Lupin to stay with her, and Lupin physically pulls himself away from the proposition. He can't settle down. Why? Unanswerable by the film itself, it's because the readers of the manga and the watchers of the anime series demand that Lupin stay the same adventurer-thief. Telling that such a finale does not feel like a cynical move to ensure the viability of further sequels, but rather suggests comparisons with Cervantes. Fact is, in that moment, I believed that Lupin is genuinely torn up at the prospect of love and serenity at the cost of abandoning his true self and forgoing a life of danger and excitement. Whatever essential qualities the character embodies (and I knew nothing about Lupin III before watching this film) Miazaki did a fine job of encapsulating them, and demonstrating just how essential they are.
31.10.12
The Death of the Author
In keeping with my snide attempts to play down the philosophical innovations of canonical enemies of positivism, I'm going to attempt to demonstrate the way the implications of Roland Barthes's famous essay do not (as far as I can tell) actually amount to a grand departure from traditional literary criticism.
Barthes begins with the contention that "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself ... the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins". We may ask how watertight this distinction is, whether narrative really does not act with a view to effect reality (understood as broadly as possible). Although this is exactly what Barthes wants to get away from, I am left wondering what can motivate 'intransitive' writing? Are writers satisfied merely with the playful reproduction of symbols? More on this below.
Barthes provides a sweeping historical survey of the rise of the author, suggesting that narratives were originally 'performed' by 'mediators' (perhaps the oral tradition which produced the works of Homer is an example of this). "The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual". It is "logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author". Broad strokes, obviously, and I am compelled to put forward the fact that anti-capitalist theories and experiments have been formulated within a positivist framework, an interjection spurred by my commitment to the notion that any critique of current relations of production has to be couched in an empirical understanding of the world.
Barthes goes on to use the French symbolist poet Mallarmé as an example of the "essentially verbal condition of literature", where "only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'". Easy to say about symbolist poetry perhaps, but Proust is a more difficult fit. According to Barthes, the author of In Search of Lost Time "blurs writer and characters": Charlus does not imitate his real-life inspiration Montesquiou. As I understand it, Barthes is saying that Charlus is the original way Proust saw Montesquiou, and the real person behind the character is only a 'secondary fragment'. Again, not territory Barthes is interested in, but this leaves us bereft of an exploration of the way the character of Charlus was created by his author.
Barthes suggests that "the author is never more than the instance of writing" – "there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now" – an "enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered". I am not capable of fully engaging with this argument, since I'm not familiar with the linguistic theories Barthes is appealing to. As I understand it, the basic point being made is that language is not tied down to the task of representing a universally understood reality. But from this, Barthes goes on to argue that "the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin ... no other origin than language itself." In this light, authors merely regurgitate the language they have internalised. Their thoughts and emotions are already encoded in the language they are familiar with, so the act of writing is the manipulation of these codes into new forms. The text is therefore qualitatively different from those original emotions and thoughts. Fair enough, although it would be well to remember that authors are not merely unconscious language reproduction machines. They make conscious choices about the language they use, and these choices are to some degree recoverable.
For Barthes, a text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash ... a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ... "the book is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred". In other words, writers do not express feelings, but repackage existing quotations. Language develops over time independently of the reality in which it is used. However, we should not forget that we use language to do things like communicate our understanding of reality to each other (both in very direct ways such as recipes and indirect ways such as fairy tales). Therefore, you can argue that certain writings are intended to be understood by others as a record of the author's understanding of reality. Their meanings are to some extent recoverable and we can have some sense of the person behind the writing they have produced. Leaving that aside, there is also the very simple point that even if we wish to describe works as a collection of quotations (thoughts and emotions encoded in enunciations previously uttered), these quotations can still be traced, and the way they are assembled by the author can be recovered and explained by the critic.
Barthes does not see the point in doing this: "to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing". Once the author and their "hypostases" (society, history, psyche, liberty) are discovered, the critic claims victory. Barthes describes this as an act of tyranny: instead, "to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law". I can only understand this point through Nietzsche, who identifies a religious impulse in the practitioners of the scientific method – their need to explain reality through the collection and comparison of empirical data is a manifestation of a hunger for a single transcendent truth by which to order that reality. Rejecting such an impulse is indeed a radical move: the individual reader has complete liberty to read the text in whatever way they want. But is such individualism desirable? I do not think it is when it comes to throwing away useful things like reason, science and law, but what about traditional literary criticism? Ultimately, what is to be gained from a complete understanding of the author of a text? This is perhaps the most probing and unsettling question Barthes leaves us with, and one I'm not sure I can answer yet, but notably, Barthes doesn't really provide an answer to it either. It appears that for him, liberty from considerations of authorship is self-evidently preferable.
However, Barthes has quite an unusual concept of what a 'reader' of a text is: "he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" – "the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost". We may ask how a reader would be able to know more about a work's sources than the author, but it is clear that for Barthes, the reader is no longer a person. Rather, he is "without history, biography, psychology". I can only understand this to be an unreachable ideal – a vantage point that gives access to every single linguistic experience and stimulus the author of a work has ever had. Obviously, this is not possible, but ironically enough, it is generally the vantage point that literary critics work towards. Crudely put, the critic who finds and "disentangles" the most "quotations" can claim victory – only a minor modification in the understanding of the methodology Barthes is arguing against.
Barthes begins with the contention that "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself ... the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins". We may ask how watertight this distinction is, whether narrative really does not act with a view to effect reality (understood as broadly as possible). Although this is exactly what Barthes wants to get away from, I am left wondering what can motivate 'intransitive' writing? Are writers satisfied merely with the playful reproduction of symbols? More on this below.
Barthes provides a sweeping historical survey of the rise of the author, suggesting that narratives were originally 'performed' by 'mediators' (perhaps the oral tradition which produced the works of Homer is an example of this). "The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual". It is "logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author". Broad strokes, obviously, and I am compelled to put forward the fact that anti-capitalist theories and experiments have been formulated within a positivist framework, an interjection spurred by my commitment to the notion that any critique of current relations of production has to be couched in an empirical understanding of the world.
Barthes goes on to use the French symbolist poet Mallarmé as an example of the "essentially verbal condition of literature", where "only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'". Easy to say about symbolist poetry perhaps, but Proust is a more difficult fit. According to Barthes, the author of In Search of Lost Time "blurs writer and characters": Charlus does not imitate his real-life inspiration Montesquiou. As I understand it, Barthes is saying that Charlus is the original way Proust saw Montesquiou, and the real person behind the character is only a 'secondary fragment'. Again, not territory Barthes is interested in, but this leaves us bereft of an exploration of the way the character of Charlus was created by his author.
Barthes suggests that "the author is never more than the instance of writing" – "there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now" – an "enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered". I am not capable of fully engaging with this argument, since I'm not familiar with the linguistic theories Barthes is appealing to. As I understand it, the basic point being made is that language is not tied down to the task of representing a universally understood reality. But from this, Barthes goes on to argue that "the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin ... no other origin than language itself." In this light, authors merely regurgitate the language they have internalised. Their thoughts and emotions are already encoded in the language they are familiar with, so the act of writing is the manipulation of these codes into new forms. The text is therefore qualitatively different from those original emotions and thoughts. Fair enough, although it would be well to remember that authors are not merely unconscious language reproduction machines. They make conscious choices about the language they use, and these choices are to some degree recoverable.
For Barthes, a text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash ... a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ... "the book is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred". In other words, writers do not express feelings, but repackage existing quotations. Language develops over time independently of the reality in which it is used. However, we should not forget that we use language to do things like communicate our understanding of reality to each other (both in very direct ways such as recipes and indirect ways such as fairy tales). Therefore, you can argue that certain writings are intended to be understood by others as a record of the author's understanding of reality. Their meanings are to some extent recoverable and we can have some sense of the person behind the writing they have produced. Leaving that aside, there is also the very simple point that even if we wish to describe works as a collection of quotations (thoughts and emotions encoded in enunciations previously uttered), these quotations can still be traced, and the way they are assembled by the author can be recovered and explained by the critic.
Barthes does not see the point in doing this: "to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing". Once the author and their "hypostases" (society, history, psyche, liberty) are discovered, the critic claims victory. Barthes describes this as an act of tyranny: instead, "to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law". I can only understand this point through Nietzsche, who identifies a religious impulse in the practitioners of the scientific method – their need to explain reality through the collection and comparison of empirical data is a manifestation of a hunger for a single transcendent truth by which to order that reality. Rejecting such an impulse is indeed a radical move: the individual reader has complete liberty to read the text in whatever way they want. But is such individualism desirable? I do not think it is when it comes to throwing away useful things like reason, science and law, but what about traditional literary criticism? Ultimately, what is to be gained from a complete understanding of the author of a text? This is perhaps the most probing and unsettling question Barthes leaves us with, and one I'm not sure I can answer yet, but notably, Barthes doesn't really provide an answer to it either. It appears that for him, liberty from considerations of authorship is self-evidently preferable.
However, Barthes has quite an unusual concept of what a 'reader' of a text is: "he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" – "the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost". We may ask how a reader would be able to know more about a work's sources than the author, but it is clear that for Barthes, the reader is no longer a person. Rather, he is "without history, biography, psychology". I can only understand this to be an unreachable ideal – a vantage point that gives access to every single linguistic experience and stimulus the author of a work has ever had. Obviously, this is not possible, but ironically enough, it is generally the vantage point that literary critics work towards. Crudely put, the critic who finds and "disentangles" the most "quotations" can claim victory – only a minor modification in the understanding of the methodology Barthes is arguing against.
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