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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.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Death held an especial place in the Victorian psyche. The combination of sentimental literature, with its stressing of the more pathetic (in the sense of pathos) emotions and the evangelical revival ensured that death acquired a prominence in Victorian life that it did not before and has not since.
Notoriously, Victorian literature loved to dwell on death of the pure and helpless, from Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop to Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. The horror genre, typified by Stoker and Poe, dwelt lovingly on bodily decay and life after death, playing expertly on fears of being buried alive. The elegy grew to particular prominence with Tennyson's In Memoriam and Arnold's Thrysis, while such works as Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel and Wuthering Heights aestheticised death as a state of romantic longing. Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, noted the particular place tuberculosis held for the Victorian mind; it was a wasting disease founded on passion, a consumption of the life force. In painting, Ophelia was perhaps the most obsessive figure for the Pre-Raphaelite painter, perfectly unifying Thanatos and Eros and represented in her listless state by Watts, Rossetti, Millais, Hughes and Waterhouse. It is not for nothing for that Pre-Raphaelite angels grace most of the Victorian cemeteries. Much the same applied to children; throughout the likes of Dickens and Kingsley there is the sense that death is a blessed release that prevents children from ever falling from a primal state of innocence and being corrupted by the world (a rather palpable variant of which occurs in Hardy's Jude the Obscure). The work of Hans Christian Anderson (a house guest of Dickens) in particular can only be described as thanatophilic; the virtue of the little mermaid will be rewarded in heaven not through wedded bliss. Consider the mesmeric battles in Stoker's Lair of the White Worm and how they leave that novel's heroine drained of her vitality or the similar outcomes in Trilby. Spiritualism became increasingly popular, with Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger proceeding from exploring a lost world of dinosaurs in one story to exploring the other world in a later narrative; not for nothing is it said that the Victorians treated death as simply another territory to be conquered.
More empirically, as the population of nineteenth century London increased and social conditions deteriorated, the demands on London's cemeteries rapidly exceeded the available space. High property prices and the crowded condition of London’s churchyards led to incidents of bodysnatching and of older graves being emptied to make way for the new. The solution, for the upper and middle classes at least, was to build seven new cemeteries at a remove from the city, of which Kensal Green was the first. Funerals promptly went into fashion and came to cost far more than weddings, with both the ceremony and the tomb having to be as grandiose as possible. In short, the 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians or jewellery that utilised a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe.
Covering a considerable expanse, Kensal’s necropolis represents as formidable an example of Victorian engineering and architecture as the museums in Kensington or the Houses of Parliament. The tombs cover a bewildering range of styles, from obelisks and pyramids to mourning angels (often with a trumpet to herald the day of the resurrection), to funerary urns half covered with veils, broken pillars (symbolising a life cut short) as well as the vogue for Celtic crosses. The results remind me of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial, wherein two profoundly different philosophies rest in uncomfortable proximity, namely Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other. The funerary urns are especially redolent of this, pointing as they do to Roman burial practices; in spite of cremation typically being considered pagan and unconscionable. One of the graves in Kensal Green is that of the judge who presided over a notorious case, whereby scandalised Welsh villagers realised that the self-proclaimed Archdruid William Price had taken the remains of his five month old son (rather inevitably named ‘Jesus Christ’) to a nearby hill in order to cremate the corpse. The villagers halted the ceremony and a court case followed, whereupon it was finally decided that cremation could be legalised.
Kensal Green was the first of the 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering as a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves and squirrels played between the tombs. Conrad mentions Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard and there seem little doubt that the design of these 'garden cemeteries' was an attempt to offer the dead a form of rest that was far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Where Highgate has a hermetic aspect to it that leaves it largely divorced from the surrounding world, Kensal’s ugly brick walls do comparatively little to insulate it from the world of the living.
Nonetheless, where a modern cemetery is orderly and utilitarian, Kensal Green is filled with the mythology of the underworld. The decaying monuments along the central avenue cover every conceivable architectural style, with sphinxes, angels, wyverns and atlantes guarding tombs designed in Neo-classical austerity, Gothic Revival intricacy and even in the Egyptian style that become fashionable after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Columns, pillars and caskets on one side of the central avenue compete with obelisks, spires and canopies on the other. The tomb of Sir William Casement is perhaps most striking in this respect. Egyptian tombs were often found to contain Shabti, funerary figures made of wood, stone or faience, that would serve as servants in the afterlife. Sir William Casement was a Victorian general who had served in India. This depiction of an Indian servant (allegedly), is one of four flanking each corner of his tomb's canopy and rather reminds me of a Shabti.
Most poignant is the tomb of Mary Gibson, a neo-classical canopy supported by two pillars at each corner and surmounted by four stone angels. Built in the ostentatious but less than durable choice of marble, the tomb has weathered badly, with the wreath previously held by the angels having already crumbed to dust. The pillars have already weakened badly and the collapse of the entire edifice will not be long delayed. My feelings about this are decidedly ambivalent; I am saddened to see so many of the tombs being slowly corroded into nothingness but am equally conscious that I am enough of a Romantic to be fascinated by decay and ruin (Conrad notes the disturbingly carious aspect assumed by many of the broken tombstones). Had I seen many of these tombs before they had been weathered and eroded I would doubtless have thought them the pretentious product of an over-moneyed middle class (lacking the need to gain a place in history through their monuments, the likes of Brunel, Babbage or Thackeray all have more restrained tombs).
Walking round it feels like discovering the ruins of an ancient city, a London Angkor Wat. Nonetheless, this remains a cemetery of the bourgeois and the excluded. The most impressive tombs belong to enterprising charlatans who had got rich through such fields as circus equestrianism or by selling quack patent remedies that they refused to take on their own death beds, while the other extreme is represented by writers like Trollope and Hood who were not considered worthy of being embraced by Westminster Abbey and by disgraced royals who had either committed indiscretions with Equerries or who had contracted morganatic marriages in contravention of the Royal Marriage Act, which states that permission for Royal offspring under a certain age to marry must be granted by the sovereign. These tombs only serve to reinforce the impression of Kensal Green as a city of the dead, with the list of characters residing there bearing a marked resemblance to the sort of caricature a Trollope or Thackeray novel would be filled with (though perhaps not a Dickens novel; internment here being sufficiently expensive to exclude the working classes). For example, there is Dr James Barry, a successful army doctor who worked tirelessly to improve Cape Town's water system, performed one of the first known successful Caesarean sections, sought to improve the conditions of the common soldier and fought several duels whenever he felt himself slighted. He was only unmasked as a woman after her death, having concealed the fact (as well as the signs of pregnancy) from even her closest associates, a feat worthy of a Wilkie Collins heroine (or possibly a Sherlock Holmes story: The Strange Case of Dr James Miranda Barry perhaps).
For a further plot that could only have been contrived by a Braddon or Collins sensation novel, there is the tomb of the Duke of Portland. The Duke was an eccentric recluse, who permitted no-one except his valet to see him in person in his quarters and had double letterboxes built into his rooms; one for ingoing mail and another for outgoing mail. It was in short, inevitable that he became a source of gossip, ranging from suspicions of disfigurement, madness or wild orgies. These Lerouxesque rumours were only further fuelled by the fact that the Duke had built an underground labyrinth of passages beneath his estate. Built by a veritable army of workmen, the labyrinth had contained a ballroom, a library, a billiards room and an observatory with a glass roof. The ballroom had a hydraulic lift (admittedly not that uncommon; Kensal’s Greek revival Chapel comes equipped with hydraulic catafalque that leads down into the catacombs) that could carry 20 guests from the surface and a ceiling that was painted as a giant sunset, all of which seems somewhat excessive, given that the Duke was far too reclusive to hold any balls in it. The tunnels were alleged to have emerged at Worksop railway station and were wide enough at several points for two carriages to pass by one another. However, if the Duke had business in London, it seems that in practice he took his hearse to Worksop and had the whole carriage loaded onto a railway truck. Upon his arrival to his London residence in Cavendish Square, all the household staff was ordered out of sight when he hurried into his study through the front hall.
Upon his death the tunnels became the locus of a claim by a certain Anna Maria Druce that her husband and the Duke were one and the same, thereby entitling her son to inherit the Duke’s Portland estate. Her contention was that her husband had faked his death in order to return to a secluded existence on his estate, having previously used the tunnels and the railway to move between his two lives unobserved. A legal case of a similar order of magnitude to Jarndyce and Jarndyce ensued and was only resolved when the cadaver of Mr Druce was exhumed from Highgate Cemetery and found to be present and correct, in spite of the claim from Mrs Druce that the coffin contained only lead weights. Two witnesses were tried for perjury while Anna Maria was confined to an asylum.
Kensal Green does have one important characteristic that I have entirely elided from this account; it is still a working cemetery that is still run by the same company that established it. Though ostensibly Anglican, the presence of Cyrillic and Hebrew on many of the modern tombs suggests a more ecumenical approach. As graves here are every bit as expensive today as they were for the Victorians, it is notable that Chinese appears a popular lingua franca across many recent tombs, presumably representing one of the city’s more enterprising communities. It’s interesting to think of what future visitors will make of these once they are as worn and decayed as their Victorian forebears. It seems to me that the differences of language and style for the modern graves seem slight when set againt the Victorian profusion of imagery and its babel-like quality.
Labels: Architecture, Culture, Decay, History, London, Macabre
posted by Richard 7:58 pm
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Sometime ago, I came across a piece by Tristam Hunt, arguing that the counter-factual genre represented an inherently conservative view of history, in that it privileged notions of individual initiative over deeper forces of socio-economic change. Now Slavoj Zizek has written on the same subject:"Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ histories the preserve of conservative historians? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced Russia in the 20th century had Lenin been shot on arriving at the Finland Station...
Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Catholicism, which conceived of human redemption as being dependent on good deeds, Protestantism insisted on predestination: why then did Protestantism function as the ideology of early capitalism? Why did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?"
Zizek makes a number of valid points, noting that the communist left required some notion of individual scenarios precisely in order to effect the Russian revolution (since Marx had supposed that only capitalist societies would be ripe for revolution while a fedalist society like Russia would have to become a captialist state first). As a recent spat of comments on this blog demonstrated, much hard-left thinking deals with the possibility of a communist society that was constructed in the manner Marx indicated rather than having being perverted by Lenin; not a proposition I agree with but nonetheless its difficult to conclude that wish-fulfillment is solely the province of the right (what if Trotsky had replaced Lenin rather than Stalin, for example?). Equally, it could be argued that counter-factual fiction has more commonly reflected a whig view of history, with both Pavane and Bring the Jubilee reflect changes that were aberrations from a idea of history as progress.
One further issue, is that much of modern conservatism strikes me as having a rather limited approach to the idea of individual agency, due to much if it having embraced a form of determinism that is considerably more rigid than anything proposed by Marx (whose writing was after all concerned with little more than alternative means of social and economic organisation) whether that applies to Fukuyama's End of History or Pinker's The Blank Slate.Labels: Counterfactuals, History
posted by Richard 2:36 pm
Monday, June 14, 2004
Niall Ferguson has given an interview on the reasons why the ten failed American attempts at nation building so outweigh the two successful examples:"The current account deficit of 5 percent of GDP translates into a huge reliance on foreign capital. Whereas a hundred years ago, Britain was the world’s banker -- it exported capital in net terms on a colossal scale and was in a position to underwrite its imperial activities with serious investment... You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world’s biggest debtor... The second deficit is a manpower deficit. There are no colonists, no settlers willing to leave the United States and go out and Americanize the Middle East, the way that a hundred years ago there were people pouring out of the British Isles.
It’s probably going to take ten years at the basic minimum to make Iraq a stable, functioning market economy with something resembling democracy. And I just think that there is a complete lack of realism about that here because people think, "Oh, this isn’t empire, this is just liberation. "
To a large extent, I can't help wondering if this isn't an overly optimistic judgement on America's suitability for its putative imperial role. In economic terms, US economic growth has essentially been funded by foreign investment, which tends to prove elusive during unstable conditions. While a heavily industrialised economy might well benefit from warfare, this is not sufficient for the US economy where consumer spending tends to prove as elusive during unstable conditions as foreign investment.
This difficulty extends rather further than a lack of realism over Empire; it also applies to the very nature of the US military. British troops had been prepared for activity in Iraq through years of experience in urban warfare (Northern Ireland) and the broader diplomatic and policing activities (UN peace keeping missions ironically enough, something shunned by the US after the respective debacles in Lebanon and Somalia) an occupation requires. By contrast, the technological superiority of the US hyperpower tends to rest on precision guidance weapons delivered by airpower. Frederick Kagan argues that this represents a serious flaw in US military strategy:"Even in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo, ground forces or the threat of their use played the decisive role in bringing the enemy to surrender. In Afghanistan and Bosnia, the U.S. relied on local forces to supply the ground troops, which helped convince the hostile regimes to give in, but also left the U.S. politically beholden to its allies and unable to achieve its political aims as a result. During the Kosovo operation Slobodan Milosevic withstood the American air attack right up until it became clear that a ground attack might follow—and then he surrendered... it goes without saying that only ground forces can execute the peacemaking, peacekeeping, and reconstruction activities that have been essential to success in most of the wars America has fought in the past hundred years."
Although there is a lack of manpower for US military operations (the draft having been mentioned on more than a few occasions in the last year or so), the two other points Ferguson makes are arguably one; cultural. In cultural terms, America remains a nation of immigrants who look back on the rest of the world with suspicion and feel little inclination to hold a passport. While Ferguson may well be correct to note that an occupation force exactly the same size as that Britain originally used in Iraq is hardly adequate when the population of Iraq has grown greatly since that time, a further part of the problem is the general lack of knowledge of other cultures. In Ferguson's history of the British Empire he observed that the specialist knowledge of figures like TE Lawrence gave Britain a considerable advantage over Germany; it might well be said that much the same currently applies to the United States.
posted by Richard 7:30 pm
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Terry Eagleton has been reviewing a history of fascism. Much of what he says sounds reasonable, though I'm a little inclined to think that if fascism is to be defined, historical and political definitions are somewhat limited; Umberto Eco's typology of an ur-fascism has always struck me as a more convincing concept. On the whole though, I'm more struck by the observation that ends the review:"Liberal capitalist nations are becoming more authoritarian under the threat of terrorist attacks, while societies which were already authoritarian, such as China, are turning capitalist. The two systems are meeting each other, so to speak, coming the other way. Meanwhile, the globe is well furnished with capitalist set-ups that were never liberal in the first place, as well as with regimes whose former colonial proprietors exported market forces to their shores while forgetting to include democratic institutions in the cargo. The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious, and fascism is one dramatic refutation of it."
I'm a little surprised that anyone should imagine free markets and liberal democracy to be necessarily contingent. Though the theory that argues for such a connection is far from being unreasonable (the notion being that only a framework of civil rights are capable of guaranteeing the conditions for capitalism, e.g. by safeguarding property rights), one need surely only consider the respective economic fates of Weimar Germany and Hitler's Germany to think twice about that. Alternatively, one might consider the economic fates of China and post-communist Russia (particularly now that economic confidence and an increasingly authoritarian regime in the Kremlin appear to be hand in glove with one another).
posted by Richard 7:40 pm
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Following on from my previous post discussing historical parallels with the present situation in Iraq, Niall Ferguson has suggested that the experience of the British Empire in Iraq itself is the most appropriate one:"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," declared Gen. Frederick Stanley Maude — a line that could equally well have come from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this time last year. By the summer of 1920, however, the self-styled liberators faced a full-blown revolt... Then as now, the insurrection had religious origins and leaders, but it soon transcended the country's ancient ethnic and sectarian divisions. The first anti-British demonstrations were in the mosques of Baghdad. But the violence quickly spread to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where British rule was denounced by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi."
The problem with Ferguson's thesis is that he is rather selective in his account. In particular, he takes the view that the brutality with which the British suppressed that revolt will have to be emulated by the Americans if any orderly transition of power is to be effected. It is certainly true that the British were subsequently able to do just that, but Ferguson neglects to mention that the Hashemite prince Faisal was subsequently deposed, thereby allowing a fascist dictatorship to sieze power. Suffice to say that this is not quite the inspiring example Ferguson appears to view it as.Labels: History
posted by Richard 8:26 pm
Thursday, April 15, 2004
I've always rather liked the idea of counter-factuals (i.e. what if alternative versions of history), largely because it seems to me that understanding what didn't happen is often as important as what did happen. So, I was rather struck by this critique of counter-factuals:"It is surely the interaction between individual choices and historical context which is what governs the events of the past. As Karl Marx put it: "People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past." ... It is no surprise that progressives rarely involve themselves [with what if history], since implicit in it is the contention that social structures and economic conditions do not matter. Man is, we are told, a creature free of almost all historical constraints, able to make decisions on his own volition. According to Andrew Roberts, we should understand that "in human affairs anything is possible."
Accordingly, counter-factuals are seen as a preserve of the right, creating a narrative based on the actions of great men rather than of economic and technological forces. Of course, there is always a continuum in such things; only the most doctrinaire would deny a role to human agency in the face of wider forces or vice versa. But I must admit I became more favourable to this critique after reading an article by Victor Davis Hanson (who has contributed pieces to some of the counter factual books I have), imagining what if President Carter had responded with military action against Iran in 1979, comparing the actual events to the appeasement of Hitler and opposing them to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Reagan doctrine. Firstly, this assumes that these are the correct analogies for present circumstances; it could as easily be argued that Vietnam is a better analogy than Munich, or indeed the Boer War. For what it's worth, I think the Boer war is a good analogy, though I'd suggest that the Thuggee cult is possibly a better one.
Secondly, it should be observed that wider forces were indeed involved in all of these cases. To be specific, the economic and military capacity of Britain and France to defeat Germany at that point. Or the economic failure of the Soviet Union, leading to its inability to compete on military terms as the prime cause for perestroika and glasnost. That should also be set against the consequences of the Reagan doctrine in terms of instability and the risks had Gorbachev responded with force. In the present time, we might observe that the question of states is barely relevant (which makes appeasement a poor analogy), since much of the terrorism in question occurs quite independently of state structures and typically tends to thrive in opposition to them (as the history of the British Empire should testify as much as current events in Iraq). In short, I'm rather sceptical about Mr Hanson's thesis. But I do have a counter-factual of my own: what if the US had not applied the Reagan doctrine to Afghanistan? Julie Burchill had some ideas on that point. Perhaps the left can benefit from counter-factuals after all (even if only as wish-fulfilment).
Update: Scott Martens suggests that far from being conservative, counter-factuals are whiggish, depicting scenarios wherein progress is derailed from its correct course (in other words, a past tense version of dystopian fiction). He further notes that conservatism tends to be determinist in its own fashion also; constrained by a fixed notion of human nature rather than history. I'm a little reluctant to describe the genre in terms that are quite so essentialist (the term covers a multitude of sins and Hunt has a point about wish-fulfilment from conservative writers wondering if the British Empire could have been saved), but it is a good point. Consider Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, a novel where the South wins the civil war and thereby creates a backward and primitive future. In fairness, I should also say that the Davis Hanson essay I alluded to above is in a similar vein; it dealt with the possibility of the Athenian navy being defeated at Salamis.Labels: Counterfactuals, History
posted by Richard 7:39 pm
Saturday, September 20, 2003
I've recently been reading Gore Vidal's essays, one of whose more noteworthy aspects is an insistence upon the problematic aspects of American imperialism. In particular, Vidal suggests that debts to countries like Germany and Japan will limit further military adventures, possibly reducing the US to the status of countries like Argentina. Vidal's viewpoint is somewhat skewed, particularly since one of the reasons for US growth in the nineties (the essays date back to the start of the nineties) was the financing of the US by countries like Japan, whose economic malaise is arguably partly attributable to a lack of such external finance. However, Niall Ferguson suggests, amongst other things (such as an insular culture), that such factors are returning as a problem, particularly with reference to how an Empire can be financed:"One of the most striking differences between Britain's empire of a century ago and the United States today is that a century ago Britain really was the world's banker. Its net capital exports to the rest of the world were on a colossal scale between 5, and as much as 9 percent of Britain's national income. Today, as you know, the United States is far from being the world's banker. It is the world's great borrower."
I'm not actually sure this is entirely a problem; the US has used external investment to fund its own growth, but nonetheless such investment is clearly susceptible to changes (hence the outcome of political uncertainty before the Iraq war led to investment in the Eurozone instead). One possible analogy, mentioned at fistfulofeuros, was that Kissinger proposed for Germany; too large to be another European state, too small to completely dominate Europe. The same might be said of the present United States; too powerful to refrain from intervening in foreign affairs, but ultimately to insular to do so in any consistent manner.Labels: History
posted by Richard 8:22 pm
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Eric Hobsbawm has an interesting piece on the condition of modern US society; a better title might perhaps be 'After De Tocqueville.' Accordingly, much of it is as we might expect; observing that the US is not an intimate acquaintance of change, with an embalmed constitution that ensures political stablity by denying any instrument of powerful decision making through the checks and balances system and accordingly runs afoul of events unforeseen in the constitution or the decline of egalitarianism in favour of individualism. However, one theme did stand out, presented through excerpts below:"It substituted the question "In its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world... The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries... Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United States still try their hand ... at "the great American novel," ... Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old world "
It's an interesting critique, if only because it runs so contrary to so many previous discussions, which have traditionally dwelt on the imposition of American identity elsewhere in the world (a point Hobsbawm does not accept); one thinks of the efforts of the Academie Francaise to curtail American influence on French culture, by restricting the prevalence of US loan words and American music. Certainly, the United States has had enormous success in mythologising itself through popular media. Values are propagated non-verbally, through a process of being steeped in visual media.
As Neal Stephenson's essay In the Beginning There was the Command Line puts it "the basic tenet (of contemporary visual media)... is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. " To Stephenson, this is the root of the hostility towards all concepts of authority in popular culture; all authority figures become buffoons and "hip-jaded coolness" is the only place to be.
Conversely, JG Ballard in Hello America, dwelt on the pre-occupation with the metempsychosis of the self; from the pre-occupation of the Pilgrim Fathers with the salvation of the soul to the altogether more modern pre-occupation with cosmetic surgery and psychiatry; "the United States had based itself on this proposition that everyone should be able to live out his furthest fantasies, wherever they might lead, explore every opportunity, however bizarre" (conveniently this happens to be the main theme of all of Ballard's novels).Labels: History
posted by Richard 9:12 pm
