There is an interesting and critical piece here on the role and hype of digital humanities in the humanities.
While I've said elsewhere that interactive fiction and the digital publishing hold great promise for writers as well as scholars, I think overblown representations of the inevitability and scope of new technologies should be considered with the utmost caution.
I recall the simple proposition I learned from programming BASIC in high school: Garbage In, Garbage Out (or ask a silly question, get a silly answer). The digital archive and the digital medium can't substitute for clear, informed thinking and the accumulation of humanist scholarship. Machine logic can only show you the same data in different forms. Literature is a matter for memory, imagination and the human experience; the understanding is in the particulars that data-analysis can only abstract.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
History, fiction, revelance
It's interesting, if disconcerting, to find oneself living in a state of Australia under an administration which seems intent on resurrecting regressive notions in criminal law that were part of the eighteenth century background to The Raven's Seal, or even my new work.
A writer is always on the hunt for new ideas, but this shows me that ideas of crime, law and punishment are always in flux, and that historical attitudes can find currency, and relevance, today. Hence historical fiction is not always about the dead past but instead a dialog between past and present, the character of ourselves as we were and as we are now. Sometimes, the past in fiction illuminates, as we glimpse of ourselves in the historical mist.
For example, the eighteenth century of The Raven's Seal was a period of great economic growth and upheaval: in many ways the foundation and apex of modern capitalism. But the cost of this growth was massive and growing inequality, a broad process of dispossession – an issue more than familiar to us today. In this case, as the few gain extraordinary wealth and the many lose prosperity and stability, I wanted to ask who the real criminals were: where was the invisible hand moving like a pick-pocket's, who could guide it, and who really grew wealthy at the expense of others? This mystery persists with us today, although the causes and policies that contribute to it are not particularly opaque, only the solution. What stands out from the eighteenth century experience is that though the markets are a game, they are by no means a neutral game: those who get to set the rules come to disproportionately reap the prizes, and at the same time label their play by the illusory name "fairness". In the case of The Raven's Seal, the codes of crime and punishment, privilege and service, were part of these rules.
We still live with the legacy and attitudes of the deep eighteenth century. In A Hangman for Ghosts, I'm interested in the "System" as a notion and a mystery, and the system of penal transportation which transplanted whole blocks of the "criminal classes" from one land to another. The task is to weave the story of crime and discovery around it. But as a character notes in The Raven's Seal, if you want to find who's guilty, first ask: "who profits?".
A writer is always on the hunt for new ideas, but this shows me that ideas of crime, law and punishment are always in flux, and that historical attitudes can find currency, and relevance, today. Hence historical fiction is not always about the dead past but instead a dialog between past and present, the character of ourselves as we were and as we are now. Sometimes, the past in fiction illuminates, as we glimpse of ourselves in the historical mist.
For example, the eighteenth century of The Raven's Seal was a period of great economic growth and upheaval: in many ways the foundation and apex of modern capitalism. But the cost of this growth was massive and growing inequality, a broad process of dispossession – an issue more than familiar to us today. In this case, as the few gain extraordinary wealth and the many lose prosperity and stability, I wanted to ask who the real criminals were: where was the invisible hand moving like a pick-pocket's, who could guide it, and who really grew wealthy at the expense of others? This mystery persists with us today, although the causes and policies that contribute to it are not particularly opaque, only the solution. What stands out from the eighteenth century experience is that though the markets are a game, they are by no means a neutral game: those who get to set the rules come to disproportionately reap the prizes, and at the same time label their play by the illusory name "fairness". In the case of The Raven's Seal, the codes of crime and punishment, privilege and service, were part of these rules.
We still live with the legacy and attitudes of the deep eighteenth century. In A Hangman for Ghosts, I'm interested in the "System" as a notion and a mystery, and the system of penal transportation which transplanted whole blocks of the "criminal classes" from one land to another. The task is to weave the story of crime and discovery around it. But as a character notes in The Raven's Seal, if you want to find who's guilty, first ask: "who profits?".
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Slow reading The Lord of the Rings, part 4
A change of scene for reading. A long vacation in New Zealand has given me the chance to advance through Book Five and the battle for Gondor and Minas Tirith. Landscape has a powerful influence of reading: no one who has lived in sight of or visited the Southern Alps of New Zealand can help but see them as the Misty Mountains. Every turn of the road presents a vista of Eriador or The Shire. The vineyards of Malborough are surely those of the Pelennor Fields. All these sights and memories rise in the imagination as I read in New Zealand.
But today I'm thinking about a particular incident: the journey of Aragorn and the Grey Company through the Paths of the Dead. I've thought and read before that Aragorn's journey in the Paths is similar to Gandalf's battle in the deeps of the world against the Balrog, a struggle through death towards rebirth. And so, to some extent, it is. But the Paths of the Dead are not Moria, and this is a journey that Aragorn chooses. To me, the Paths represent the accumulated weight of the past, the legacy and the debts that Aragorn must accept if he is to give up the freedom of Strider to become the King, returned. But just as all forests in Middle-earth are not idyllic but dark and threatening, so the past is sometimes fraught with memory, failure and fear. This is what Aragorn, alone, must bargain with and resolve.
But there is a price to pay, and the character of Aragorn seems to me to become flatter and more remote as the book proceeds. While acting as warrior-king and healer, we glimpse less of his inner life. He becomes less the character and more the symbol.
This is partly in contrast to Theoden, whose death is all the more shocking and moving because we understand the human complexity and vulnerability within the king.
But one thing is clear: although he drew on heroic modes of expression, Tolkien had no illusions about the battlefield. For all that his characters accomplish in war, the instances of blindness, disorientation and sheer terror are what stand out in this reading.
But today I'm thinking about a particular incident: the journey of Aragorn and the Grey Company through the Paths of the Dead. I've thought and read before that Aragorn's journey in the Paths is similar to Gandalf's battle in the deeps of the world against the Balrog, a struggle through death towards rebirth. And so, to some extent, it is. But the Paths of the Dead are not Moria, and this is a journey that Aragorn chooses. To me, the Paths represent the accumulated weight of the past, the legacy and the debts that Aragorn must accept if he is to give up the freedom of Strider to become the King, returned. But just as all forests in Middle-earth are not idyllic but dark and threatening, so the past is sometimes fraught with memory, failure and fear. This is what Aragorn, alone, must bargain with and resolve.
But there is a price to pay, and the character of Aragorn seems to me to become flatter and more remote as the book proceeds. While acting as warrior-king and healer, we glimpse less of his inner life. He becomes less the character and more the symbol.
This is partly in contrast to Theoden, whose death is all the more shocking and moving because we understand the human complexity and vulnerability within the king.
But one thing is clear: although he drew on heroic modes of expression, Tolkien had no illusions about the battlefield. For all that his characters accomplish in war, the instances of blindness, disorientation and sheer terror are what stand out in this reading.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Working out the mystery
For 2014, work continues on my new mystery, A Hangman for Ghosts. A mystery is really two stories: the story of a crime, its consequences and the discovery of the truth of that crime, and the concealed story of what led to the crime, its causes, motives, who is guilty, and why. The investigator leads in the first story to discover the second.
A mystery writer guesses the end, but I for one don't always know what lies between the discovery of the crime and the finding of the criminal. In a sense, I'm writing to work out what happens, and what has happened. And so A Hangman for Ghosts has sometimes intrigued and baffled me, and taken me in unexpected directions as much as the difficult and secretive protagonist. But I'm halfway there, or more, and begin to see it emerging.
In the meantime, here's what I know:
A Hangman for Ghosts
“To escape this place entirely we would need to destroy our memories – we would require a slaughter-man for memory, a hangman for ghosts.”
Sydney, New South Wales, 1829
When a series of brutal murders shake even the penal colony, officials look to the hated executioner, Gabriel Carver, a felon who purchased his own reprieve by turning against his fellow prisoners, for answers. But the sardonic Carver has an aptitude for brutal truths – if not self-preservation – and his dogged search for the truth will lead back to the prison hulks, his own dark path, and into the corrupt heart of the Empire and a shocking reversal.
A mystery writer guesses the end, but I for one don't always know what lies between the discovery of the crime and the finding of the criminal. In a sense, I'm writing to work out what happens, and what has happened. And so A Hangman for Ghosts has sometimes intrigued and baffled me, and taken me in unexpected directions as much as the difficult and secretive protagonist. But I'm halfway there, or more, and begin to see it emerging.
In the meantime, here's what I know:
A Hangman for Ghosts
“To escape this place entirely we would need to destroy our memories – we would require a slaughter-man for memory, a hangman for ghosts.”
Sydney, New South Wales, 1829
When a series of brutal murders shake even the penal colony, officials look to the hated executioner, Gabriel Carver, a felon who purchased his own reprieve by turning against his fellow prisoners, for answers. But the sardonic Carver has an aptitude for brutal truths – if not self-preservation – and his dogged search for the truth will lead back to the prison hulks, his own dark path, and into the corrupt heart of the Empire and a shocking reversal.
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Slow reading The Lord of the Rings, Part 3
So here is an update for my entry into the last part of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King.
Picking up The Return of the King (after a break to plough through The Night Land), I'm interested in how Tolkien seems to take a pause, to slow the action before the great final battles. Normally, one reads rapidly through this part of the epic, anticipating the battle for Minas Tirith and the final journey of the Ring, but this time the preparation for war is invested with an ominous calm and a subtle humanity.
Pippin arrives in Minas Tirith, is presented at the citadel to a proud and brooding Denethor, but he takes meals, looks at the view, walks in the streets, talks with soldiers and boys, watches more companies of armed men arrive. There is a sense of fragility about Minas Tirith, of a culture that is strong but has also atrophied, clinging to its history while losing territory to the Shadow. These early scenes, particularly with Beregond and his son, show us ordinary people preparing for war and disaster. They cheer for reinforcements, although the numbers are too few. They watch the gates and wonder where Faramir is. They touchingly mistake a common Hobbit for a Halfling prince; in other words, they are ordinary as well as heroic. Little happens, but then in war nothing ever really happens until the enemy arrives and the arrows, or the bombs, start falling.
The language of the narrative also changes, shifting from the brisk, sometimes idiomatic language of adventure in The Fellowship of the Ring to the archaic grammar and anachronistic phrasing that suggests Anglo-Saxon and Medieval sources. To my mind, this models the shift from the peripheral, near-eighteenth century Shire to the fulcrum of the conflict, a world remote from us in language and time. More on this as I draw closer to the end.
The language of the narrative also changes, shifting from the brisk, sometimes idiomatic language of adventure in The Fellowship of the Ring to the archaic grammar and anachronistic phrasing that suggests Anglo-Saxon and Medieval sources. To my mind, this models the shift from the peripheral, near-eighteenth century Shire to the fulcrum of the conflict, a world remote from us in language and time. More on this as I draw closer to the end.
Monday, December 2, 2013
The humanities "crisis" - a perspective
This piece in The New York Times on 'The Real Humanities Crisis' lays out the case pretty clearly. As a writer and a scholar in the humanities (first English Literature, now Creative Writing) this concerns me closely.
As the article notes, and I've mentioned before, talented writer, musicians and artists cannot make a practical living by their craft, and must pursue secondary, less fulfilling jobs as though they were careers. Even so, these Arts graduates earn less over time. And in universities (as at the University of Canterbury, as reported here), the corporatist pressure to profit and commercialise means that the Arts are steadily dismissed, devalued and defunded.
There are many reasons for this decline, and the causes differ in different contexts. But at all levels, managerial and corporatist thinking, an emphasis on economic rationales and benefits, have pushed humanities to the periphery.
I also believe that the humanities sometimes failed to push back, and the discipline compromised itself at many points. In English Literature, the rush towards theory, particularly deconstruction, which began (tardily) in the late eighties in New Zealand, opened the door to willed obtuseness of language and impenetrable thinking, rejecting imagination, memory and experience in favour of abstraction and the mechanical moves of deconstructive reading. The discourse of theory presented itself temptingly as a technology, a paradigm and a technical language, which in the fervour of post-modernism and post-humanism distanced criticism from writing and human creativity. This is not to reject theory, because it was necessary and useful to set aside preconceptions and to reconsider language and meaning in the literary text, but to say that literary theory and the denial of meaning and authorial agency it implied to many people led the study of literature into its own backwater. Literary theory, embedded in its own technical jargon, could not mount an effective defence against the ideology of the management technocracy.
Is there a way out? For starters, the skills that the humanities prefer — critical thinking, writing, knowledge of the genealogies and trends of human culture — are required universally, and urgently. I've argued elsewhere that we are drowning in 'word junk', that fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thinking, particularly in management culture, which has certainly brought us few real rewards outside of the constant process of rising inequalities and aimless restructuring. Having worked in the corporate sector for many years, I can say that there are no skills here that a degree in commerce or business management would have provided that cannot be acquired with ease in the course of the job, or by the simple application of order and good sense, whereas skills in research, thinking and design, as well as clear communications, are all grounded in my university studies. But there is a danger in pursuing this too far and packaging graduate skills as if they were a commodity. Selling education for its commercial utility alone lends too much credence to the notion of learning as a product that has led the humanities to this pass.
In Hard Times, Dickens was well aware of the dangers of this rigidly utilitarian way of thinking. The people need education, no doubt, but human beings also need to dream, to imagine and to be entertained. We still need to escape the dominant perspective, the market, the office, the ideology, the industrial complex that confines thought and creativity. Over the years, new ideas have emerged to 'save' the humanities: data-mining and digital humanities, Darwinist criticism, neurocriticism, but all of these offer another technology, another narrow approach. What will rescue the humanities is the practice of the humanities: writing and reading and an opening of critical perspectives. Theory can formalise and encourage insight into literature, but only more reading, more writing, more stories and more human experience will bring us back to literature. The humanities, after all, represent the study of human creativity, the one field that can always surprise and escape us. The humanist goal is to aspire to our fullest potential, our fullest awareness of ourselves. There can be no humanism if we cannot consider, articulate and study what it means to be human. We need universities, artists, Arts and Arts graduates to do that.
As the article notes, and I've mentioned before, talented writer, musicians and artists cannot make a practical living by their craft, and must pursue secondary, less fulfilling jobs as though they were careers. Even so, these Arts graduates earn less over time. And in universities (as at the University of Canterbury, as reported here), the corporatist pressure to profit and commercialise means that the Arts are steadily dismissed, devalued and defunded.
There are many reasons for this decline, and the causes differ in different contexts. But at all levels, managerial and corporatist thinking, an emphasis on economic rationales and benefits, have pushed humanities to the periphery.
I also believe that the humanities sometimes failed to push back, and the discipline compromised itself at many points. In English Literature, the rush towards theory, particularly deconstruction, which began (tardily) in the late eighties in New Zealand, opened the door to willed obtuseness of language and impenetrable thinking, rejecting imagination, memory and experience in favour of abstraction and the mechanical moves of deconstructive reading. The discourse of theory presented itself temptingly as a technology, a paradigm and a technical language, which in the fervour of post-modernism and post-humanism distanced criticism from writing and human creativity. This is not to reject theory, because it was necessary and useful to set aside preconceptions and to reconsider language and meaning in the literary text, but to say that literary theory and the denial of meaning and authorial agency it implied to many people led the study of literature into its own backwater. Literary theory, embedded in its own technical jargon, could not mount an effective defence against the ideology of the management technocracy.
Is there a way out? For starters, the skills that the humanities prefer — critical thinking, writing, knowledge of the genealogies and trends of human culture — are required universally, and urgently. I've argued elsewhere that we are drowning in 'word junk', that fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thinking, particularly in management culture, which has certainly brought us few real rewards outside of the constant process of rising inequalities and aimless restructuring. Having worked in the corporate sector for many years, I can say that there are no skills here that a degree in commerce or business management would have provided that cannot be acquired with ease in the course of the job, or by the simple application of order and good sense, whereas skills in research, thinking and design, as well as clear communications, are all grounded in my university studies. But there is a danger in pursuing this too far and packaging graduate skills as if they were a commodity. Selling education for its commercial utility alone lends too much credence to the notion of learning as a product that has led the humanities to this pass.
In Hard Times, Dickens was well aware of the dangers of this rigidly utilitarian way of thinking. The people need education, no doubt, but human beings also need to dream, to imagine and to be entertained. We still need to escape the dominant perspective, the market, the office, the ideology, the industrial complex that confines thought and creativity. Over the years, new ideas have emerged to 'save' the humanities: data-mining and digital humanities, Darwinist criticism, neurocriticism, but all of these offer another technology, another narrow approach. What will rescue the humanities is the practice of the humanities: writing and reading and an opening of critical perspectives. Theory can formalise and encourage insight into literature, but only more reading, more writing, more stories and more human experience will bring us back to literature. The humanities, after all, represent the study of human creativity, the one field that can always surprise and escape us. The humanist goal is to aspire to our fullest potential, our fullest awareness of ourselves. There can be no humanism if we cannot consider, articulate and study what it means to be human. We need universities, artists, Arts and Arts graduates to do that.
Monday, November 25, 2013
The Night Land - William Hope Hodgson
The Night Land (1912), William Hope Hodgson's science fantasy of a decaying Earth darkened by the death of the Sun in a vastly remote future, should be regarded as unreadable. The pseudo-archaic language lumbers along, the plot is simple and largely descriptive, there is virtually no dialog, the characters are thin, there is an unpleasant thread of misogyny in the character relationships, and the whole mass is excessively long and repetitive.
But The Night Land is, after a fashion, a masterpiece.
The Night Land is less a narrative than a prose-poem, a setting, a mood, an evocation of entropy and dread in a world so old that human progress is over, the Sun is dead and only the end of all things, inevitable but hugely delayed, remains. Humanity has retreated to one last Redoubt, and can only wait for extinction. The world is desolate, ruled by threatening monsters, but their nature is utterly alien. Whatever the hero of the text can gain, it will be ultimately eclipsed by the destruction and failure of everything else. Hence, in a real sense, progress, narrative advancement, is futile. The book is really about a setting, a world of alien things and impending destruction, which can be barely named, let alone described.
Hence, the archaic language is an evocation of distance, of the alienating effect of so much time. The vague names of creatures – Watchers, Silent Ones – suggest their menace and unknowability. The routine story is really the only action that is possible when all human beings can do is rescue the remaining fragments and wall them up against the gathering darkness. Hodgson's fantasy edges closer to the logic and stasis of a dream. The Night Land is about creating an impression, a sense of dread, of the night closing in and a flicker of human resistance.
This, and the scope and boldness of the author's vision of a dying universe, is what makes The Night Land unique.
But The Night Land is, after a fashion, a masterpiece.
The Night Land is less a narrative than a prose-poem, a setting, a mood, an evocation of entropy and dread in a world so old that human progress is over, the Sun is dead and only the end of all things, inevitable but hugely delayed, remains. Humanity has retreated to one last Redoubt, and can only wait for extinction. The world is desolate, ruled by threatening monsters, but their nature is utterly alien. Whatever the hero of the text can gain, it will be ultimately eclipsed by the destruction and failure of everything else. Hence, in a real sense, progress, narrative advancement, is futile. The book is really about a setting, a world of alien things and impending destruction, which can be barely named, let alone described.
Hence, the archaic language is an evocation of distance, of the alienating effect of so much time. The vague names of creatures – Watchers, Silent Ones – suggest their menace and unknowability. The routine story is really the only action that is possible when all human beings can do is rescue the remaining fragments and wall them up against the gathering darkness. Hodgson's fantasy edges closer to the logic and stasis of a dream. The Night Land is about creating an impression, a sense of dread, of the night closing in and a flicker of human resistance.
This, and the scope and boldness of the author's vision of a dying universe, is what makes The Night Land unique.
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