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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Having previously written about anti-utopianism, I wanted to write about its analogue, dystopianism. If modern literature tends not to feature utopian themes of the kind promulgated by William Morris then it similarly seems not to feature dystopian themes of the kind familiar from Huxley and Orwell, even if many of the predictions made in those novels are increasingly being fulfilled.
The nearest example of a dystopian writer is JG Ballard. Ballard's work tends to depict artificial communities existing in a society characterised by alienation and anomie, where violence becomes the only means of release from this paralysing conformity. " While Ballard's fiction has become increasingly 'realistic,' it's not difficult to see how this would relate to novels like Brave New World. Nontheless, it's difficult to see Ballard as the heir of a politically engaged aspect of science fiction, not least due to the zeal with which his characters reach towards the dystopian future. The violence within novels from Crash to Super Cannes serves as both a rebellion against society and as an integral component of it, while the violence itself is both an innate psychopathology and a product of modern society. As Ballard puts it, "I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with." To take the example of Millennium People, rebellion ("an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.") is both a rejection of society and a product of it, as much as sexual tourism ("thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better"). The difference from previous Ballard novels lies in the inherent absurdity of a middle-class revolution; "we're trying to rescue them from heaven.. I want to be brainwashed." Not only this, but the novel suggests that any such rebellion is effectively assimilated, as with Kay Churchill becoming a TV presenter; "far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country's civic traditions."
The question in Ballard's novels has always been whether the suburbanisation of the soul simply creates frustrations (the "new vices" referred to) that lead to a release of primitive impulses (a model that would be congruent with Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents. In Super Cannes, Ballard notes that "Homo Sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites... these criminal activities have helped them rediscover themselves. An atropied moral sensibility is alive agin.") or whether it actively creates an entirely modern form of psychopathy "the old morality belonged to a cruder stage of human development... since they couldn't rely on self control they needed ethical taboos." The question is this; are the violent executives in the novel, as Penrose suggests, really no different from figures like Gilles De Rais? One of the hallmarks of Ballard's surrealist approach to the novel is that these events are seen via a number of distorting mirrors. The perspective continually shifts, leaving the answers to those questions unclear. For example, Penrose comments that "she's a rebel, but she doesn't realise that Eden Olympia is the biggest rebellion of all," when he has previously been at pains to portray Eden Olympia as a form of social evolution; "perverse behaviours were once potentially dangerous. Societies weren't strong enough to allow them to flourish." In this, Ballard's surrealism is particularly adept; by distorting the events through the eyes of a multiple overlapping statements and perspectives the reader is exposed to the same form of disorientation as the characters. The most obvious device for this is his customary device of a heavily biased narrator, where we are invited to determine whether his own psychopathy is any different to that promoted by Penrose.
Another example worth considering is Michel Houellebecq, whose shares with Ballard an idea of how the consumer society and the sexual revolution alike have commoditised emotion. To Houellebecq alienation is not a lifestyle; it is something determined by the fragmentation of social being; "just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation." Atomised features a discussion of Brave New World as a utopian novel based on the ideas advanced in Julian Huxley's 1931 What Dare I Think?:"Everyone says that Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against ageing, the leisure society. This is precisely the world we have tried - and so far failed - to create."
Atomised itself is certainly an utopian novel advancing extropian ideas that rather recall HG Wells. However, his more recent novel The Possibility of an Island is much closer to the dystopian tradition, aligning it to apocalytic novels like those of Wyndham and the early Ballard. Houellebecq assumes a series of environmental catastrophes leading to the destruction of society, but differs from earlier novels by applauding the demise of the human species allowing as it does for the rise of a genetically modified race as a replacement. The Elohminite movement depicted in the novel itself rests upon a number of internal contradictions, particularly in the way it depends on a consumer society that turns youth into a commodity that can be indefinitely preserved only for this expectation to be inevitably disappointed. Its force depends entirely on what it opposes, just as Daniel's career depends on the sensibilities it deliberately provokes and outrages; "if the fluidification of forms of behaviour required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalogue of restrained conduct, it was perfectly suited to a celebration of the will and ego". The consequence of this ambiguity is that the new species of neohumans find themselves leaving the calm of their habitations and exploring a post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by savage humans for whom the collapse of civilisation has been total and complete. The neohumans are both revolted by these creatures (the culture of the mind being impossible in a society locked into struggles for existence) while remaining unsatisfied by their own lack of will and consequent stagnation. As a species they achieve nothing and their lack of suffering effectively leaves them as an evolutionary dead-end.
In this sense, Houellebecq's novel follows in the line of Margaret Atwood's (whose The Handmaid's Tale is the closest modern novel written in the vein of Orwell and Huxley) Oryx and Crake where a society based around social inequality and gates communities falls victim to a genetically engineered plague that allows for the rise of a new species that lacks the worst traits of humanity (though in both cases, it is suggested that the posthumans are far from being what is intended, with Houellebecq's species walking out onto the ruined earth in search of what is left of their ancestors). it would be perfectly possible to read Oryx and Crake as a dystopian text where Crake, a Faust-figure like Nemo, Moreau or Frankenstein, pursues dangerous technologies without thought for the consequences, unintended (such as the Craker's development of symbolic thought and religion) or otherwise (the success of the engineered virus). On the other hand, most dystopian novels, including Brave New World, 1984 and We deal with the suppression of biological imperatives rather than their alteration. But comparisons with other Atwood novels suggest otherwise. Surfacing is full of similar dystopian theories concerning an American invasion of Canada for its oil reserves, and sees its protagonist retreat from civilisation into nature (feeling a guilt at being human and expressing a desire for humanity to disappear); similarly, throughout Oryx and Crake mankind is viewed as an aggressive species that consumes resources indiscriminately (essentially, as Easter Island writ large); the Crakers represent a similar retreat to nature, allowing Crake to take on the mantle of an almost heroic figure instead. Oryx and Crake's overall depiction is more ambiguous than Surfacing since the damage is largely done by environmentalist characters rather than corporate strategy.
posted by Richard 7:41 pm
Thursday, July 06, 2006
"Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country" - Umberto Eco
In Italian Hours Henry James wrote that "to delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity." Perversity is perhaps the correct term for interest in decay and ruins, in spite of figures like Midas Dekkers who are prepared to see such matters in a Heraclitean spirit of celebrating cycles of destruction and renewal. Dekkers cites the example of how the bombing of the Natural History Museum during the blitz led to the rebirth of ancient silk tree seeds from China, woken by the fire brigade's hoses. Modern society, according to Dekkers, is obsessed with realising the dreams of Dorian Gray, in opposition to earlier conventions of memento mori; the skull in Holbein's paintings or Donne's tolling bell. Seeing, as Eliot had it, the skull beneath the skin.
In practice though, although few can bring themselves to be so sanguine our interest in the derelict is rather more deep seated than Dekkers would have supposed. This may well be why I recently found myself standing amidst the burnt out remains of the Crystal Palace, originally built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. All that remains are a set of empty terraces, the sort of enigma that would leave archaeologists with endless speculation. The terraces of the Crystal Palace are graced with headless statues while Sphinxes guard the entrance way to nothingness. Based on the designs of ruined Egyptian temples, the Sphinxes seem entirely at home with their place amidst overgrown oak trees, returned to the same state as the Egyptian ruins they were based on. Behind the trees, a BBC transmitter mast now holds domain over the empty spaces of the park.
Some architecture has within it the potential for decay and ruin; the ruins of the gothic St Dunstan in the East wear their decay as if they had never been anything else, while the baroque ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars are decidedly ill at ease with their decline. As this was one of Wren's attempts at gothic, decay seems to become it, with the walls and spire still standing while the interior was been turned into a garden; water trickles from a fountain while blue pansies flower where the pulpit would have been; a haven of peace and serenity. The foliage within the church is lush and verdant; it is, however, rather odd to look through the empty gothic arches and see banana trees and magnolias. The delicate vaulting of the white Portland stone almost looks like bleached bones.
Visiting these places, it's rather difficult not to think of Albert Speer's theory of ruin value:"The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that 'bridge of tradition' to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My 'theory' was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.
To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler's entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler's closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins.'"
What often tends to be most disturbing about Nazi ideology is the manner in which it reflects other aspects of Romanticism that are deeply embedded in our culture, just as the spectre of communism casts a shade over certain Enlightenment ideals of progress. Consider the example of Joseph Gandy, the English Piranesi who illustrated John Soane's designs. Like Gibbon contemplating the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he had been on the grant tour to Rome where he had explored the Catacombs and the Appian way. At this point, much of Imperial Rome remained in a stated of unconserved decay, with the Colosseum, overwhelmed with trees, vines and other vegetation. The grand tour certainly marked an important point in the history of decay, transforming interest into the theoretical symmetry of classical architecture into an interest into the ruined state of the buildings themselves. In 1855, the English botanist Richard Deacon had published his Flora of the Colosseum, recording the 420 species of plant growing there. The six acres of flora included species so rare in Western Europe that their seeds must originally have been carried there, Deacon conjectured, by the animals imported from Asia and Africa for the city's games and spectacles. Gandy returned to England and imagined it through the lens of what he had seen, transforming Soane's Bank of England into a Roman ruin. Just as Speer drew Hitler's imaginings of Berlin as Babylon, so did Gandy draw Soane's vision of London as Rome. Nor was Gandy alone in this; the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire to claim descent from Imperial Rome led to the Hapsburg dynasty building fake Roman ruins on their estate at Schoenbrunn. The Gothic revival in architecture was prefigured with the building of such counterfeits, whether at Pottsdam or at the Hell Fire Caves in Buckinghamshire. All over Europe, country houses acquiried gothic folloies and manufactured ruins, often sitting alongside classical temples in the Palladian vein.
Villages would be moved to make way for these vistas, with only the church for company as a reminder of where the village had once been. Sometimes bits of the cottages would be retained as romantic ruins, evacuated and aestheticised according to the picturesque tastes of the upper classes.
Prior to this, Burckhardt, writing in his The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, had spoken of the Renaissance had seen the ruins of Rome as of interest to patriots and historians rather than to pilgrims, citing the example of Petrarch and of the unearthing of the corpse of a Roman woman whose remains were treated with as much veneration as those of a saint. The Renaissance came to see ruins as a bridge to the classical world, with inscriptions on monuments, tombs, stelae and fragments of statuary, columns and pediments representing an incomplete Rossetta stone that would unlock the secrets of the ancient world. Alternatively, Renaissance painting woukd depict as a hinterland upon which to present the sacred or suffering martyr, suggesting the ultimate triumph of Christendom over Roman paganism and representing the ambivalence of the Renaissance towards the reconstruction of the classical world.
In time, this was an ambivalence that was to be resolved in favour of the glory that was Greece and the splendour that was Rome, as with Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins showing a figure against the remains of a titan statue (a trope that returns in the gothic novel, such as Walpole's The Castle of Otranto), despairing of matching its sublimity in his own work. The influence of the grand tour and travel in general was especially important in this regard; Chateuabriand in Ottoman Athens, Nerval in Constantinople, Ruskin in Venice, Flaubert in Egypt, Dickens at the Appian Way and Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla; Ozymandias being both an allegory of the fall of tyranny and a lament for the mutability of things. Equally, it lent a political aspect to things, as visitors from Western Europe went to see the remains of fallen Empires; Venice and Athens had after all, like Britain, once been great maritime powers. Later visions of where London stood were, to put it bluntly, frequently rather self-pitying melancholy prompted by the fall of Empire, as with Macaulay's vision of a future New Zealand tourist standing on a broken arch of London Bridge and contemplating, "in the midst of a vast solitude," the ruinous dome of St. Paul's Cathedral and a desolate city.
In spite of all this, the place of ruin and decay within Romantic aesthetics was a surprisingly precarious one; such things were not explicitly singled out by Kant, he did nonetheless discuss how architecture could partake of the sublime as much as nature. Ruins occupy a space between nature and civilisation that means they can either be seen as symbols of the sublime and transcendent (as one would expect from Kant) or as symbols of the ephemeral. While Romanticism was based upon an appreciation of infinity, this found its expression in an understanding of the world as fragments, as ruins. As Schlegel put it, "many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin." The Romantic aesthetic prized the incomplete and the ephemeral, as with Coleridge's fragmented epiphany in Kubla Khan or with De Quincey's citation of Piranesi's engravings of ruined civilisation in the midst of his disquisitions upon the transsendental.
In this sense, the uneasy relationship of decay to Romantic aesthetics is similar to that between the Gothic novel and Romantic literature. Where Romanticism largely concerned itself with the nounemnal and the transcendental, Ann Radcliffe's distinction of terror and horror. The former, we are told, partakes of the sublime and expands the soul, the latter only creates revulsion, with many such tales creating horror far more easily than terror. Given the uncertainty as to whether ruins symbolise the transcendent or simply corruption, it was essentially inevitable that ruins would be prominent within the gothic novel, as with Dracula's castle, Otranto's ruins or this passage from Melmoth the Wanderer;"He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief, and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility. Singular contrast! The relics of art forever decaying,—the productions of nature forever renewed."
The sublimity of the ruin was not to be stated fully until Ruskin, who saw architectural decay as a return to nature. Distinguishing between what he termed a lesser and higher picturesque, a concept that seemed to sit between beauty and the sublime. To Ruskin, the picturesque lacked a transcendental aspect and was essentially a response to what he saw as the monotonous, symmetrical and utilitarian character of architecture, a classical conception at odds with Romantic views of nature."A broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one; a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one; every excrescence or cleft involves some additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss on eaves or wall adds to the delightfulness of colour. Hence in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill, such elements of sublimity — complex light and shade, varied colour, undulatory form, and so on — as can generally be found only in noble natural objects, woods, rocks, or mountains."
Equally, Ruskin is also concerned with the decay and decomposition of the natural world, with pollution, industrialisation and building. In Modern Painters, he characterises the modern landscape painting as indistinct, occluded by cloud and fog. The natural world has come to resemble, in fact, the murky atmosphere of the modern city, or of the industrial hinterland. The landscapes of Constable, given way to the shrouded land found in Turner, Whistler and Monet.
Ruin is a subject that is inevitably divisive, between the importance of conserving a past that is at risk of being irrevocably lost and the aesthetics of decay. This is perhaps particularly acute today, when ancient ruins have typically been preserved and restored. William Morris, who had happily depicted London and the Palace of Westminster as having falled into ruin, nonetheless established a tradition of preserving historical architecture that was contined through other figures like Betjeman. There can indeed be something rather disturbing about visited restored buildings. The act of restoring an old building frequently does so by destroying layer after layer of history to reveal the desired outcome, just as Schliemann did with all of the cities he found at Hissarlik until he was satisfied he had found the Troy he wanted, or as Evans did at Knossos. In other words, it can be an extremely destructive and arbitrary process. There is something rather awkward about the hyperreal recreations of buildings, which seems as lacking in authenticity as the faked ruins favoured in the eighteenth century. Not to mention that the very idea of conservation has the unwelcome tinge of conservatism to it, which sits uncomfortably for someone ill at ease with the idea of tradition for tradition's sake. After all, most of the buildings prized as part of our heritage were built by either discarding the styles of the past or through the more literal means of destroying the buildings of the past.
So, I wanted to visit an unrestored building instead, of which there can be few better examples than the Midland Grand Hotel, now known as St Pancras Chambers. If there was ever a case study in architectural hubris it was this; built in luxuriant gothic style (it was not unknown for visitors to mistake it for a cathedral and ask when services began), its lack of either central heating or bathrooms ensured its downfall; perhaps rather incongruously so, since its 'ascending rooms' were state of the art at the time. Entering inside, elaborate columns coated in gold leaf sit alongside walls where the paint has flaked away and floors where the boards have rotted away. Pre-Raphaelite murals of Chaucerian scenes and wyvern gargoyles rest in the darkness. In spite of my above comments it's difficult not to feel disconsolate at the Fifties beige or Edwardian burgundy paint covering the gold and crimson Victorian wall patterns. This is particularly so when one ascends the best preserved part of the building; the grand staircase. This imposing lined with gothic arches, through which light seeps into the gloom, leads up to a ceiling vaulted around a central boss, and incongruously painted with a blue sky and gold stars. Even in the dark the blazing colours shine out.
I'd certainly hate to think that such a building would fall further into decay and would love to see what these rooms look like once the paint has been scraped away to reveal the original frescos. But equally, much of why it is so striking is simply because it is a modern ruin; brightly lit and immaculate rooms as opposed to the current dark and cavernous interior would in many ways be a poor replacement. Now that St Pancras is set to become the main terminal for the Eurostar it is being restored; the prospect of what sea change it is now set to undergo is in itself a fascinating one. As Hugh Pearman puts it, cities regenerate themselves from their own scar tissue. It might seem perverse to appreciate the scarring, but perhaps that is just because it has the allure of the ephemeral. So an abandoned railway station in Paris, beloved of art-film makers, becomes the Musee d'Orsay, while a dilapidated power station becomes the Tate Modern. One further difficulty with the contemporary atttitude towards decay is that so many modern ruins are essentially visions of lost future, whose modernist architecture, such as that of Battersea Power Station or the many decaying art deco cinemas, remains more futuristic than was has replaced it. Similarly, much modernist literature was bifurcated between the modernist (the Futurists, most obviously) and the archaic, with its replacement of the medieval with Picasso's reception of the Lascaux cave painting, the African influence on Modigliani or Pound's fusion of ancient Greece and China.
Where modern literature represents decay, it only does so in an anomalous form, such as JG Ballard's Drowned World or The Crystal World; "Down Oxford Street the buildings were festooned with ivy and Virginia creeper. Trees grew from the windows of Selfridges, the pavements and Tarmac were split by plane trees spreading across Marble Arch from Hyde Park... at the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines." UnlikeWyndham's apolcalyptic fiction, Ballard sees decay as a form of death instinct, entropic regress, far removed from the sublime or picturesque.
Ruin has essentially come to be regarded as a failure to preserve the past, and has ceased to represent the tragic, sublime or transcendent. John Piper's "pleasing decay" has translated into "criminal neglect." In short, it is increasingly difficult to think of Ruskin's higher and lower picturesque as being readily distinguishable. On the other hand, the modern interest in the ruined and decay is more likely to explore derelict factories, asylums, Icelandic farms, places like Chernobyl, Russian submarine bases or ghost villages than ancient ruins; places that are out of kilter from the notions of urban space as productive, efficient and regular. This is in many respects a form of flaneurism, in the sense meant by Benjamin; bourgeois dilettantes seeking out the derelict and discraded as a vicarious thrill. A form of post-romantic fascination with decay that no longer relates to romantic aesthetics. Such experiences are seen as somehow more 'real' and less mediated than the conventional city, as with Benjamin's own denunciation of the passing of the arcades into the department store; "In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled... it is the gaze of the flaneur, whose mode of life still surrounds the approaching desolation of city life with a propitiatory luster."Labels: Architecture, Cataclysm, Decay, Literature, Ruins
posted by Richard 9:11 pm
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Charlie Stross writes about the current resurgence in British science fiction and the converse decline in American science fiction:"During the 1947-79 period, an era of British political history dominated by the long shadow of the retreat from empire, there was a definite note of pessimism to SF's vision of the future. Margaret Thatcher's government was a polarizing force in British culture. It shook society to its core, closing off some avenues and opening up others. It was a period of deep uncertainty and stark division, during which the post-war consensus established by the One Nation Conservatives and the Old Labour Party evaporated as if it had never existed... The heavy industries -- coal, steel, shipbuilding, heavy engineering -- went to the wall. Those that survive today are much smaller specialists competing in global markets, not the archaic and historic legacy of the 19th century. And it was during the Thatcher years that the fate of the British Empire was finally sealed -- not with a bang but a firework show, as Chris Patten managed the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1996... Britain's future within the EU was becoming visible, and a new political epoch was dawning in which rather than being a retreating imperial power the culture of the UK would reflect its position as one of the poles of influence within a new, nascent superpower.
The American future is currently uncertain, unpleasant, polarized, regimented, and pessimistic. The American century that dates to VJ Day, August 1945, is more than half over. Much as the shadows lengthened over the coal-driven British Empire during the age of oil, so the shadows are looming over the oil-driven American Empire. Peak Oil is a spectre haunting the corridors of Washington DC, as it haunts the centres of power in every other nation. But the United States is unusual among the industrialized nations in its dependence on oil, and its vulnerability when the price of oil begins to rise. Transportation and climate militate against the easy adoption of other lifestyles, and the demand for stability in the oil market is leading the current administration ever deeper into the morass of Middle Eastern politics."
I'm not convinced. Firstly, Stross both complains that American science fiction was held back by too many certainties in a world where it was the only empire and history seemed to have ended. He also complains that it is currently held back by the vision of an uncertain and troubled future. It seems difficult to have that argument both ways. In practice, the prospect of a troubled future or present should be far from an obstacle to literature; that is after all precisely the conditions under which Brave New World, 1984 and We were produced; Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake proved that such dystopian themes can still create literature in the same way. Given that Stross alludes to him I'd also note that that post-war gloom proved a highly fertile ground for John Wyndham's dystopian imagination. Above all, I can't help but rather concluding that I find it rather difficult to understand why Stross seems to feel that Britain and Europe are excluded from the factors driving American pessimism and don't have reasons of their own to face the future with trepidation.
posted by Richard 9:38 am
Thursday, July 14, 2005
In my last post I mentioned how acts of man made destruction came to resemble natural disasters due to their lack of pattern or conventional design. I was reminded of this, when a friend mentioned how someone had mistaken this picture of the Roman city of Timgad for a picture of post-war Germany. The comparison reminded me of something else; how the nearest analogy to the firebombing of German cities in World War Two would have been the destruction of Pompeii. The firestorm had similar effects to the pyroclastic flows, with suffocation killing a great many of the inhabitants while they sheltered:"Living beings were erased from the world with a deadly wind. In fire bombing as in nuclear war very little blood flows. Rescue workers in Hamburg report that the hurricane-like, blazing gusts of air reached hundreds of people one later found lying naked in the streets. Their skin was allegedly of a brown texture, their hair in good condition, their mucous membranes in their faces dried up and incrusted."Labels: Cataclysm
posted by Richard 8:20 pm
Thursday, July 07, 2005
London has certainly been subject to violence and destruction throughout its history, from the blitz to the IRA bombings (think of Conrad's The Secret Agent), in a way that New York had not when it was attacked. The city is far from being a stranger to violence and destruction. But of course, the IRA bombings in London were significantly more targeted, with warnings issued beforehand. Today's attacks remind me of something quite different; the nail bomb attacks of David Copeland from a few years ago. In both cases, the attacks balanced precise planning with an indiscriminate approach to slaughter, motivated by a utopian (never a positive term in my lexicon) dislike for the unlike (whether unbelievers or immigrants). There were no warnings, no concrete or feasible demands, merely the projection of raw force. Such things have less in common with guerilla warfare as a military technique than with sociopathy.
The worst aspect is that the extent of shock at what has happened seems diminished, in spite of its greater proximity, in comparison to what happened in New York. Partly, this is a question of scale, the horrible sense that individual tragedies must qualify as statistics before it can become a calamity, but equally the attacks here were not entirely unexpected (indeed, inevitable was the word that had been used) and there is a certain sense of fatalism, a certain horrible normalisation of destruction. At present, the bombings seem like a natural disaster that one can only respond to with the weared resignation that it has become necessary to reaccustom onself to destruction as an unavoidable part of life.
Update: Some interesting perspectives from Ian McEwan:"The mood on the streets was of numb acceptance, or strange calm. People obediently shuffled this way and that, directed round road blocks by a whole new citizens' army of "support" officials - like air raid wardens from the last war... In Auden's famous poem, Musee des Beaux Arts, the tragedy of Icarus falling from the sky is accompanied by life simply refusing to be disrupted. A ploughman goes about his work, a ship "sailed calmly on", dogs keep on with "their doggy business". In London yesterday, where crowds fumbling with mobile phones tried to find unimpeded ways across the city, there was much evidence of the truth of Auden's insight. "
posted by Richard 6:21 pm
Thursday, June 09, 2005
It's often been observed that the nineteenth century was the age of utopianism, from the politics of Owen and Marx to novels like News From Nowhere, Herland and Erewhon. Equally, it's often observed that the twentieth century was the age of dystopianism, from the politics of Stalin and Hitler to novels like Brave New World, 1984 and We. What then would the present age be recalled for?
Apocalyptic fiction of a religious bent has apparently been popular in the United States, but it has secular counterparts aplenty from The Clash of Civilisations to novels like Snowcrash or Oryx and Crake. Although some modern novels like The Handmaid's Tale could still be labelled dystopian, we no longer seem to believe in the possibility of society being decisively shaped, for good or ill. Although science continues to make advances, we no long seem to see them as controllable forces. Accordingly, I've been thinking about what possibilities fiction might consider in this category;
Climate change. Certainly the possibility to have gripped the popular imagination to the greatest extent; sea levels rise endangering countries like the Netherlands and any other low-lying coastal regions. The shift of the gulf stream leaves Britain with the same climate as Alaska, and countries like Portugal and Tunisia find themselves swamped by refugees from Britain and Scandinavia. Drought affects other regions, such as China, and war erupts over water.
The Rise of fundamentalisms. Perhaps the most obvious possibility, as this is already evident in many respects. The collapse of traditions in the face of economic pressures and globalisation produce backlashes, both in the Muslim Middle-East and in Christian America. The ensuing violence leads to the further decay of concepts of liberty and privacy in favour of surveillance.
Economic inequality. The trend towards sacrificing social cohesion and equality for economic growth currently shows every sign of continuing, the likely result being increased crime and social unrest, counterparted with the rise gated communities and private security forces.
Changing economic patterns. In historical terms, the two largest economies were India and China. With these two countries increasingly able to draw on the same skills and resources as Western nations but at lower costs, a shift in 'economic gravity' from America and Europe back to India and China, with the economies of the former countries undergoing a partial collapse.
Dwindling oil supplies. As oil supplies either dwindle or fail to increase in line with burgeoning demand, the costs of transportation, energy generation and the production of plastics become increasingly impratical. The forces that have driven economic growth for the last century begin to falter, with few viable alternatives waiting in the wings. Access to remaining oil supplies increasingly defines government's military and foreign policies.
Genetic modification and eugenics. The ability to engineer forms of life is matched with the likelihood of the genetic changes becoming naturalised, opening up new prospects for ecosystems to be unbalanced, similar to the introduction of the cane toad into Australia. Genetic modification of people begins to further entrench social inequalities. On a related note, there is the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases suggests the possibility of new pandemics, while rising sea levels and global warming would also give additional impetuses to diseases like malaria.
Artificial lifeforms. Computing technologies become sufficiently advanced for the creation of sentient lifeforms that are entirely artificial. Since such technologies are used for functional reasons, issues of the rights of artificial lifeforms begin to emerge, creating the possibility for conflict.
Update: One idea that I hadn't considered in my introductory paragraph was whether or not utopian and dystopian fiction would survive themselves. These genres are in many respects products of rationalism, a belief in man's ability to order the world. Morris and Gilman held such views in the same manner that Marx and Owen did. Much of dystopian fiction rests upon the assumption that man is a blank slate that can be rewritten by totalitarian forces, just as the Sovet Union sought to create a form of new man that was not bound by tradition and history. By contrast, the present age is one where science has been increasingly questioned and fundamentalisms appear resurgent.
posted by Richard 5:20 pm
