Marvel's The Avengers - a movie review
Sep. 13th, 2012 07:55 pmWaringing – SPOILERS all over the place. This is written from the assumption that everyone who reads it will have seen the film
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Alan Moore, like Jack Kirby before him, was capable, when not at the top of his game, of being quite extraordinarily bad - not just, like the King, bad out of tiredness and lack of interest, but out of complete wrong-headedness, out of taking the wrong approach and insisting with it. A lot of his worst stuff is to do with sex. Moore is not really any good with pornography; even if you take the view, as I do, that achievement in pornography is intrinsically the lowest kind of artistic achievement and barely excuses the waste of talent, nonetheless there are several authors, from Crepax to Manara and to Eleutieri Serpieri, who have done better, much better than Moore. Lost Girls is shamefully bad, and it has in common with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that Moore gets literary characters from earlier writers embarrassingly wrong - his Dorothy Gale, with her cliched and insulting American accent, makes L. Frank Baum's sweet little dreamer into a vulgar slut, and his Alice is little better. The reason why Crepax and Eleutieri Serpieri's best pornography works, is that their "heroines" don't have that ultimately depressing kind of vulgarity that makes it unimaginable that Dorothy should ever have dreamed of Oz or Alice ever seen a rabbit with a pocket-watch.
Bad though Lost Girls is, though, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worse. It is the nadir of Moore's writing, and the nemesis, alas, of his justifiable ambition to rethink and rewrite the basics of popular literature.
At the heart of the failure is one simple fact: Moore gets every single character wrong, and, I think it may be said, does so for a reason. Mycroft Holmes is not, and cannot be, a spymaster, an executive, a man in charge. And the reason is obvious: his indolence and lack of ambition. His enormously fat body is the token of a mind that will not bother, will not shift, even though its natural talent still takes pleasure in feeding on and understanding millions of facts. Holmes is an infallible adviser when his advice is sought, but he does not bother even to straighten out someone's course if he knows that someone is moving to disaster - unless the someone asks for his advice. The notion of Holmes searching out and organizing an elite squad of adventurers, like Nick Fury does in the forthcoming Avengers movie, is as absurd - as his brother Sherlock would put it - as to find a London tram in a country lane.
Now this kind of learned indolence was perfectly understandable to an English reader of the 1890s. It was natural - if extreme - to the more intelligent members of an upper middle class that lived largely on inherited income and saw no great need to work for a living. It is quite clear that Sherlock Holmes, as much as his brother, sought out his job not to make a living but because it pleased and fulfilled him. Moore got Mycroft Holmes wrong, as he would have Sherlock, because he missed his whole social background.
The mistakes about Captain Nemo are of another order. First, he is way out of his time. In 1890 Captain Nemo, a veteran of the 1858 Indian war, would be dead, or at least too old to feature actively in any adventure. It is also unimaginable that this man, who experienced the English as a destructive swarm of enemies across his beloved land, committing any amount of war crimes, would ever collaborate with them on anything; his whole purpose was to become what we now call a terrorist, driving the then dominant British marine from the seas with his submarine. And the heavy Indian costume in which Kevin O'Neill dresses him is also wrong: in the Verne novel, the French adventurers don't know the Captain's nationality till he tells them, for he has adopted a wholly Western mode of dress and behaviour. I think it would be impossible for anyone but an Englishman to imagine a man who has suffered at the hands of the English as Nemo has suffered, and whose nation has suffered as India has, has being reconciled with them; as well imagine Giuseppe Mazzini entering the Austrian service, or the exiles of modern Poland shaking hands with General Jaruzelski. (Yes, some people would do such a thing - but why call them heroes?) In using Nemo, Moore is simply being self-indulgent, or rather nationally indulgent, allowing himself the kind of fantasy that belongs in bad fanfic.
The same, from a slightly different viewpoint, may be said of his treatment of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. Mr.Hyde is not the Hulk. He is not actually stronger or in any way more powerful than Dr.Jekyll; in fact, he is shorter, and so stupid in any way that matters that he makes himself noticed and eventually hunted by common citizens. His difference is quite simply his total unconcern with others. He is defined by the fact that if he wants to go in one direction and there is a little girl in his way, he will simply trample the little girl and go on, barely thinking of what he has done. He is the ultimate psychopath, and that is what makes the scenes featuring him so memorable. Moore should have left hims strictly alone: the notion of Mr.Hyde as part of any team is as preposterous as taming a man-eating tiger. The question is, how can such an obvious mistake have been made? Apart, of course, from the same bad fanfic reflex I spoke of about Captain Nemo. And the answer is, in this case, difficult to get. The closest I can come, I think, is to suggest that Moore underestimates evil itself. Not that he can't do memorable villains; his TAO, from his run on WildC.A.T.s, may just be the best supervillain ever conceived, and many others make you shiver with horror and disgust. But he underrates evil in the abstract. In Swamp Thing #50, he inexcusably claimed to be able to carry out a Hegelian synthesis of good and evil, something that denies the very definition of evil. And the characteristic of Mr.Hyde is quite simply that he is evil; perhaps Moore hasn't taken his complete disregard for others seriously enough. Or perhaps he just wanted to have another big character in his roster, fanboy style.
edited in: Allan Quartermain, the South African bush hunter, is found in an opium den in Egypt, smoking his life away. Well, I suppose anyone can become an addict, but of all people, Quartermain is the least likely. He is a staunch, enduring man, of very modest background and endless endurance, a working-class, salt-of-the-earth type displaced to the frontier of the British Empire and enduring an extraordinary series of adventures just because they are the kind of things a man is apt to endure in that kind of part. He is, in fact, a British Imperial version of the slow-talking heroes of the classic American western, and must reflect Rider Haggard's own experience of frontier people. Now the point is whether you can imagine a John Wayne hero - or Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine - wasting his life away in an alien big city's opium dens. I can't - he wouldn't even enter the city in question.
As I never read The Invisible Man, I won't deal with this character, save to say that a character who uses invisibility for nothing better than to tup a number of dubious maidens does not strike me as very interesting. Invisible and not much of a person. Plus, we are once again faced with the fact that Moore is no good with sex.
Bad though the treatment of all these characters is, much the worst - and, in my view, the reason for the failure of the whole mini-series - is Mina Harker. It is bad enough that Moore has completely destroyed the central point of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. So Mina was not saved after all, and she is a vampire; just another victim of Dracula's, like so many before, and probably so many afterwards. The whole point of the story was to oppose, to resist, to fight, and to destroy, this ancient and apparently ineradicable evil; and to save Mina. And here is the second and worse point. This Mina is a bitch, pure and simple. She belongs with the woman-hating products of writers far, far below Alan Moore, and strongly suggests that you cannot have a woman in authority without her behaving like a victim of permanent PMS. This is the exact opposite of what the real Mina was about. Part of the greatness of Dracula, a great masterpiece by a writer of no great talent, is that he completely solves the conundrum at the heart of much Victorian fiction: if you are fighting for a woman's sake, then the woman must be worth fighting for. Mina is emphatically a woman worth living and dying for. She is loving, warm-hearted, intelligent, quick to understand and to adapt, physically and mentally fearless, and has an absolutely colossal moral courage. She deliberately dives into Dracula's darkness, risking her life and soul, so that her friends can pursue and destroy the monster. From about half-way through the novel, she is their real leader, much more than Van Helsing; and there is nothing strange or excessive about the fact that one of the heroes is relieved, as he dies, to see the physical sign that the menace has passed from her. For this they all had fought, and evidently even to die in this cause was good enough.
Clearly the idea of men defending women is out of fashion, but unless you understand it you will not understand any amount of fiction from the Iliad to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves (in which Disney and his team of geniuses comprehensively failed to do what Bram Stoker had achieved). A man must be willing to die for his woman; or, if he obeys the Western notion of chivalry, for any woman who is not demonstrably guilty or treacherous. (Even the obvious instance doesn't follow. In La Traviata, Violetta is a high-class tart, and Germont senior despises her lifestyle, but he is revolted when his son treats her roughly in public, and upbraids him before a crowd of his friends: women, all women, are to be treated with respect.) Dracula is one of the most successful avatars of the concept: a handful of brave and upright men gather together to save one woman and avenge another (Lucy Westenra). That is the story, that is the concept, that is the core of values at the heart of Dracula; and because Moore did not understand it, he was unable to render any of Mina's interest. Just as, because he did not understand the world of the Victorian upper middle classes, he miscast that idle and unclubbable fellow, Mycroft Holmes, as a hard-driving modern executive. The error is the same: provinciality, possibly compounded with Moore's well-known political beliefs, leading to distorted and ultimately uninteresting versions of characters that only made sense in their own background.
Bad though Lost Girls is, though, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worse. It is the nadir of Moore's writing, and the nemesis, alas, of his justifiable ambition to rethink and rewrite the basics of popular literature.
At the heart of the failure is one simple fact: Moore gets every single character wrong, and, I think it may be said, does so for a reason. Mycroft Holmes is not, and cannot be, a spymaster, an executive, a man in charge. And the reason is obvious: his indolence and lack of ambition. His enormously fat body is the token of a mind that will not bother, will not shift, even though its natural talent still takes pleasure in feeding on and understanding millions of facts. Holmes is an infallible adviser when his advice is sought, but he does not bother even to straighten out someone's course if he knows that someone is moving to disaster - unless the someone asks for his advice. The notion of Holmes searching out and organizing an elite squad of adventurers, like Nick Fury does in the forthcoming Avengers movie, is as absurd - as his brother Sherlock would put it - as to find a London tram in a country lane.
Now this kind of learned indolence was perfectly understandable to an English reader of the 1890s. It was natural - if extreme - to the more intelligent members of an upper middle class that lived largely on inherited income and saw no great need to work for a living. It is quite clear that Sherlock Holmes, as much as his brother, sought out his job not to make a living but because it pleased and fulfilled him. Moore got Mycroft Holmes wrong, as he would have Sherlock, because he missed his whole social background.
The mistakes about Captain Nemo are of another order. First, he is way out of his time. In 1890 Captain Nemo, a veteran of the 1858 Indian war, would be dead, or at least too old to feature actively in any adventure. It is also unimaginable that this man, who experienced the English as a destructive swarm of enemies across his beloved land, committing any amount of war crimes, would ever collaborate with them on anything; his whole purpose was to become what we now call a terrorist, driving the then dominant British marine from the seas with his submarine. And the heavy Indian costume in which Kevin O'Neill dresses him is also wrong: in the Verne novel, the French adventurers don't know the Captain's nationality till he tells them, for he has adopted a wholly Western mode of dress and behaviour. I think it would be impossible for anyone but an Englishman to imagine a man who has suffered at the hands of the English as Nemo has suffered, and whose nation has suffered as India has, has being reconciled with them; as well imagine Giuseppe Mazzini entering the Austrian service, or the exiles of modern Poland shaking hands with General Jaruzelski. (Yes, some people would do such a thing - but why call them heroes?) In using Nemo, Moore is simply being self-indulgent, or rather nationally indulgent, allowing himself the kind of fantasy that belongs in bad fanfic.
The same, from a slightly different viewpoint, may be said of his treatment of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. Mr.Hyde is not the Hulk. He is not actually stronger or in any way more powerful than Dr.Jekyll; in fact, he is shorter, and so stupid in any way that matters that he makes himself noticed and eventually hunted by common citizens. His difference is quite simply his total unconcern with others. He is defined by the fact that if he wants to go in one direction and there is a little girl in his way, he will simply trample the little girl and go on, barely thinking of what he has done. He is the ultimate psychopath, and that is what makes the scenes featuring him so memorable. Moore should have left hims strictly alone: the notion of Mr.Hyde as part of any team is as preposterous as taming a man-eating tiger. The question is, how can such an obvious mistake have been made? Apart, of course, from the same bad fanfic reflex I spoke of about Captain Nemo. And the answer is, in this case, difficult to get. The closest I can come, I think, is to suggest that Moore underestimates evil itself. Not that he can't do memorable villains; his TAO, from his run on WildC.A.T.s, may just be the best supervillain ever conceived, and many others make you shiver with horror and disgust. But he underrates evil in the abstract. In Swamp Thing #50, he inexcusably claimed to be able to carry out a Hegelian synthesis of good and evil, something that denies the very definition of evil. And the characteristic of Mr.Hyde is quite simply that he is evil; perhaps Moore hasn't taken his complete disregard for others seriously enough. Or perhaps he just wanted to have another big character in his roster, fanboy style.
edited in: Allan Quartermain, the South African bush hunter, is found in an opium den in Egypt, smoking his life away. Well, I suppose anyone can become an addict, but of all people, Quartermain is the least likely. He is a staunch, enduring man, of very modest background and endless endurance, a working-class, salt-of-the-earth type displaced to the frontier of the British Empire and enduring an extraordinary series of adventures just because they are the kind of things a man is apt to endure in that kind of part. He is, in fact, a British Imperial version of the slow-talking heroes of the classic American western, and must reflect Rider Haggard's own experience of frontier people. Now the point is whether you can imagine a John Wayne hero - or Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine - wasting his life away in an alien big city's opium dens. I can't - he wouldn't even enter the city in question.
As I never read The Invisible Man, I won't deal with this character, save to say that a character who uses invisibility for nothing better than to tup a number of dubious maidens does not strike me as very interesting. Invisible and not much of a person. Plus, we are once again faced with the fact that Moore is no good with sex.
Bad though the treatment of all these characters is, much the worst - and, in my view, the reason for the failure of the whole mini-series - is Mina Harker. It is bad enough that Moore has completely destroyed the central point of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. So Mina was not saved after all, and she is a vampire; just another victim of Dracula's, like so many before, and probably so many afterwards. The whole point of the story was to oppose, to resist, to fight, and to destroy, this ancient and apparently ineradicable evil; and to save Mina. And here is the second and worse point. This Mina is a bitch, pure and simple. She belongs with the woman-hating products of writers far, far below Alan Moore, and strongly suggests that you cannot have a woman in authority without her behaving like a victim of permanent PMS. This is the exact opposite of what the real Mina was about. Part of the greatness of Dracula, a great masterpiece by a writer of no great talent, is that he completely solves the conundrum at the heart of much Victorian fiction: if you are fighting for a woman's sake, then the woman must be worth fighting for. Mina is emphatically a woman worth living and dying for. She is loving, warm-hearted, intelligent, quick to understand and to adapt, physically and mentally fearless, and has an absolutely colossal moral courage. She deliberately dives into Dracula's darkness, risking her life and soul, so that her friends can pursue and destroy the monster. From about half-way through the novel, she is their real leader, much more than Van Helsing; and there is nothing strange or excessive about the fact that one of the heroes is relieved, as he dies, to see the physical sign that the menace has passed from her. For this they all had fought, and evidently even to die in this cause was good enough.
Clearly the idea of men defending women is out of fashion, but unless you understand it you will not understand any amount of fiction from the Iliad to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves (in which Disney and his team of geniuses comprehensively failed to do what Bram Stoker had achieved). A man must be willing to die for his woman; or, if he obeys the Western notion of chivalry, for any woman who is not demonstrably guilty or treacherous. (Even the obvious instance doesn't follow. In La Traviata, Violetta is a high-class tart, and Germont senior despises her lifestyle, but he is revolted when his son treats her roughly in public, and upbraids him before a crowd of his friends: women, all women, are to be treated with respect.) Dracula is one of the most successful avatars of the concept: a handful of brave and upright men gather together to save one woman and avenge another (Lucy Westenra). That is the story, that is the concept, that is the core of values at the heart of Dracula; and because Moore did not understand it, he was unable to render any of Mina's interest. Just as, because he did not understand the world of the Victorian upper middle classes, he miscast that idle and unclubbable fellow, Mycroft Holmes, as a hard-driving modern executive. The error is the same: provinciality, possibly compounded with Moore's well-known political beliefs, leading to distorted and ultimately uninteresting versions of characters that only made sense in their own background.
(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2011 12:50 amFor a considerable part of my life, I worked - unpaid - as a reviewer and critic, especially but not exclusively of comics. Amazon, too, bears the scars of my activities in the field. ( Read more... )
An essay on twentieth-century music...
Jul. 30th, 2010 12:36 pm...which I wrote years ago.
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A film I love
Sep. 28th, 2009 09:00 amI think I have seen a good part of all the animation and live action superhero films and TV series ever made, from the beautiful old Superman cartoons of forties to some Smallville and all of Buffy. And with due respect to all the others, I do not think that anyone will ever do anything better than Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Already by the second they had lost the plot, but the first is the perfect superhero film. The reasons are manifold. First, the soundtrack is not only among the musically finest ever composed for any film, but one that evokes from beginning to end all the imaginative content of the superhero genre - the passion, the pursuit and fight, the drama and the darkness. Second, the costume designs - both the Joker's and Batman's. The designers understood that for live action, superhero costumes need to be redesigned from top to bottom, since what looks good in four-colour comics most often looks tacky and pointless in live-action (a bad flaw in all the Superman movies and TV serials, and even worse in the old Wonder Woman serial). They had, however, the sense of keeping the Joker pretty much as he is in the comics; in his case, tackiness actually adds to the sinister hilarity of the character. And there is the heart-stopping moment when Jack Nicholson's face paint slips off and we realize that he is no longer even the thug - a thug, but still human - that he had been so far. The build-up in the Nicholson Joker character is an amazing piece of work: already as Jack Palance's treacherous and half-mad enforcer he is sufficiently scary, but we are progressively shown worse and worse insanity, till he becomes a thing of genuine horror - a conception, to my mind, more subtle and effective than Heath Ledger's. And this leads us to the actors. Nicholson is magnificent in a surprisingly demanding role, developing further and further layers of insanity with a sense of timing and artistic insight that make this one of his best performances ever. Kim Basinger is simply radiant; in a sense, it is not very important whether she can act or not (although her acting is not at all bad, in my view) because her luminous beauty keeps our eyes on the screen in and of itself. Michael Keaton and Robert Wuhl are quite good as two different - and yet oddly similar - kinds of good guy character, and all the minor figures (with the exception of an oddly elderly and lumbering Commissioner Gordon) are beautifully cast and rendered. Anton Furst's urban gothic designs have been universally praised. But at the heart of it, in my view, lies the vision. It is what holds everything else together. Realistically speaking, the story makes no sense; but Tim Burton has allowed the archetypal power of the images to control the narrative, and the result is not only exciting but profoundly convincing. No wonder that the music plays such a large part. This is a story that appeals more to our unconscious, indeed to our collective imaginative heritage, than to our commonsense reason. If you insist on keeping things sensible, or if you have a defensive reaction against the experience of being swept away, you will never get this movie.
Actually, I do think that Joss Whedon has something of a prejudice against male homosexuals. I do not mean a violent, burn'em-at-the-stake, pathological hatred, but simply the kind of negative blokeish feeling that was, not so long ago, virtually universal. In all seven years of the series, I have not seen a single gay male character treated with respect; on the other hand, I have seen a considerable amount of negative humour or unpleasant portrayals. The underlying homosexual attraction between the three nerds, for instance, is both fairly evident and fairly negative - it leads Jonathan and Andrew to let their better sense be overruled by their dominant partner, and is at any rate associated personalities so ludicrous and ineffective as to count as a classical negative description of effeminacy. At the same time, there are jokes of which homosexuality or buggery are the implicit catchphrase; for instance, when Jonathan and Andrew are fleeing to Mexico and find themselves with a truck driver who seems to have designs on their virtue. When they realize what he wants, we are meant to laugh. A good few villains and vampires, beginning with Mister Trick, have high-camp attitudes and hints of effeminacy. And I think that this is not actually changed by the supposedly positive portrayal of lesbianism, which seems to me to reduce itself partly to the well-known male fantasy, and partly to a portrayal of two damaged women - Tara with her oppressive family background, and Willow with her dangerously addictive personality. On the whole, I find the interest of "queer theorists" and such in BtVS sadly misplaced.
Again about Othello
May. 17th, 2008 06:07 amThe trouble with having a style is that you may produce something that looks finished and polished when it really is nothing of the kind. My attempt at an answer to ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elskuligr a few days back was one such thing; I was falling asleep on my feet as I wrote, and I managed to miss nearly every point of importance I wanted to make. But my unfortunate facility gave the piece a deceptive air of polish. A less generous opponent than elskuligr might well have asked me what I was really trying to prove, since it is not clear at all.
What I really should have said, then, is something like this. For the impact of Othello on reader and spectator, we do not need to know that Iago is a Spanish type. We do not need to know that Spain was England's enemy as Shakespeare wrote, that every Englishman regarded her as the great perturber of European peace (nor that the Spanish, with more justification, saw Elizabeth's England in the same light); that negative ethnic cliches about intrigue and poison were universally believed. We do not even need to know that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic (the evidence is overwhelming), that his admiration for Italian city states such as Venice was pretty nearly boundless, that he tended to shift on Spain alone the poisoner-intriguer ethnic cliche that other contemporaries tended to spread equally between Spain and Italy (think of Webster's hideous picture of Italy); not even, perhaps, that Turkey was regarded pretty much as what was left of the West looked at Hitler about 1940. We do not need to know any of those things, because Shakespeare has distilled from them all those elements that are universally relevant to human experience rather than merely local. We do not have to resurrect dead slanders against Italians or Spaniards to feel the full force of something like Iago: my God, how many underhanded, ambitious, resentful, destructive persons can be found in the average office, the average workplace? How many of us have seen a popular and admired person admit into his/her company someone wholly unworthy of it, and the ruinous results? We do not need to feel the terror of Turkey to understand that the fall of a personality as full, rounded, beautiful and bold as Othello is a catastrophe that diminishes us all: Shakespeare has brought out his excellence, not only in such magnificent language as "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!", nor even in the way he masters a violent riot merely by stepping in, but in the memorable romance with Desdemona - if such a woman, everyone understands, falls in love with such a man (and how eloquently he describes their falling in love, in the presence of all the great men in Venice!), he must be worth what he seems. In other words, the central experience afforded us by a great drama such as Othello does not depend on local associations: because it is rooted in universal experiences, it can be understood pretty much across the board.
elskuligr a few days back was one such thing; I was falling asleep on my feet as I wrote, and I managed to miss nearly every point of importance I wanted to make. But my unfortunate facility gave the piece a deceptive air of polish. A less generous opponent than elskuligr might well have asked me what I was really trying to prove, since it is not clear at all.What I really should have said, then, is something like this. For the impact of Othello on reader and spectator, we do not need to know that Iago is a Spanish type. We do not need to know that Spain was England's enemy as Shakespeare wrote, that every Englishman regarded her as the great perturber of European peace (nor that the Spanish, with more justification, saw Elizabeth's England in the same light); that negative ethnic cliches about intrigue and poison were universally believed. We do not even need to know that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic (the evidence is overwhelming), that his admiration for Italian city states such as Venice was pretty nearly boundless, that he tended to shift on Spain alone the poisoner-intriguer ethnic cliche that other contemporaries tended to spread equally between Spain and Italy (think of Webster's hideous picture of Italy); not even, perhaps, that Turkey was regarded pretty much as what was left of the West looked at Hitler about 1940. We do not need to know any of those things, because Shakespeare has distilled from them all those elements that are universally relevant to human experience rather than merely local. We do not have to resurrect dead slanders against Italians or Spaniards to feel the full force of something like Iago: my God, how many underhanded, ambitious, resentful, destructive persons can be found in the average office, the average workplace? How many of us have seen a popular and admired person admit into his/her company someone wholly unworthy of it, and the ruinous results? We do not need to feel the terror of Turkey to understand that the fall of a personality as full, rounded, beautiful and bold as Othello is a catastrophe that diminishes us all: Shakespeare has brought out his excellence, not only in such magnificent language as "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!", nor even in the way he masters a violent riot merely by stepping in, but in the memorable romance with Desdemona - if such a woman, everyone understands, falls in love with such a man (and how eloquently he describes their falling in love, in the presence of all the great men in Venice!), he must be worth what he seems. In other words, the central experience afforded us by a great drama such as Othello does not depend on local associations: because it is rooted in universal experiences, it can be understood pretty much across the board.
Jack Kirby: Captain America 194-214
Feb. 12th, 2007 08:09 amThis is the first reprint of a series of essays I wrote ten or so years ago about various works by the great American cartoonist Jack Kirby. It is probably of little interest to most, so you can skip it if you want; I am reprinting them after a disagreement with johncwright. It is rather reworked, and, I hope, improved.
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johncwright. It is rather reworked, and, I hope, improved.( Read more... )
A small discovery
Sep. 25th, 2006 09:18 pmI suppose that what I am about to say will come as no surprise to anyone else, but to me it was.
Let me start from the fact that, as a writer, I am almost wholly self-taught. I have never been to a single creative writing class, and all I know about writing comes from criticism from friends and other readers, and from my fondness for the great literary critics of the past - Longinus, Dr.Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Benedetto Croce, A.C.Bradley, G.K.Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Walther Benjamin, to name a few. What is more, my experience begins with comics, a medium which shares with cinema the presumption of an objective or largely objective camera eye.
I have, therefore, been both annoyed and bewildered by the frequent critical squelches I received from betas and other readers, to do with Point Of View. I could not understand why a narrative or description that seemed to me to cover points clearly and in the necessary detail should be condemned because of (the details of the fault not even explained) POV. And not only was it strange to me, but nobody even bothered to explain it. POV was called in to condemn whole items on the assumption that failures in it should be as obvious as mistakes in elementary grammar.
As so often in cases of this kind, what was needed was to understand a whole set of different categories. This came to me all of a sudden, going over the notes of a (this needs to be said) particularly intelligent and careful beta. It occurred to me that this person regarded the so-called omniscient narrator as suspect from the word go, and took it for granted that any narrative must be done from a particular point of view, that is, that any narrative must be - understand, not may be, must be - subjective, slanted, and unreliable.
This was where I simply did not think the same way. To me, once I realized what the beta was assuming, it immediately sounded as nonsense. And that is not to criticize that beta, who, as I said, is a highly intelligent person, most of whose suggestions were very useful. No, it is a criticism of the whole culture. Not only did it conflict with the way I wanted to write, which is largely from an impersonal if not omniscient position, it also condemned the vast majority of the literature of mankind. Most cultures and most of our own history have assumed that a story should be told from an impersonal point of view. Indeed, it condemns whole genres such as epic and theatre to utter impotence. A theatre writer has only his characters and the stage to deal with: while any character may be shown with his or her foibles and slants clearly visible, unless the writer him/herself assumes an impersonal position with respect to his/her narrative, you could have no narrative at all. How does anyone stage a Hamlet that implies the unreliability, not of this or that character, but of the whole narrative structure? Perhaps here we have the root of so many indigestible and irrelevant modern stagings of classics. And as for the epic, imagine what a damned nuisance it would be to have to spend twelve or twenty-four books of narrative verse trying to determine whose POV is being taken and how that is slanted and unreliable. I think that anyone who starts reading Homer or the Mahabharata assumes an impersonal narrator as a matter of course; if they didn't, I very much doubt whether they could read more than a few verses. And above all, they would miss the point of everything they read.
Narrative with a personal accent, narrative built from a definite POV, is a highly useful device, and I hope I can handle it no worse than most; but POV raised to a fundamental and inevitable constructive principle of the whole art of narration, seems to me no more than a piece of intellectual dictatorship - of that "dictatorship of relativism" that the Pope, himself no mean artist with words, warned against. Far from enlarging the range and depth of literary art, it narrows it. It demands an extra layer of attention from writer and reader all the time, and that for no good reason.
Worst of all, it seems to me an intrusion of an omniscient-narrator of a peculiarly poisonous and arrogant stripe. If I, like Trollope or even Tolstoy, simply start out by saying, "it was this way, and this way, and then this happened," I think that the stupidest reader will not forget that this is, after all, my narrative, and the way I see things. But if my narrative - which never ceases to be my narrative - starts from the presumption that I can, as narrator, catch the different accents, mentalities and views of all my characters, and write from their point of view rather than mine, then I am exercising the most appaling presumption and tyranny over both my characters and my readers. I am assuming that I am impartial enough to hear each of their voices exactly as they are, and to transmit them to the readers without the interference of myself as "omniscient narrator." In other words, I claim to be omniscient enough to be twenty, forty, a hundred narrators. The truth, of course, is that I never once cease to be myself.
Let me start from the fact that, as a writer, I am almost wholly self-taught. I have never been to a single creative writing class, and all I know about writing comes from criticism from friends and other readers, and from my fondness for the great literary critics of the past - Longinus, Dr.Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Benedetto Croce, A.C.Bradley, G.K.Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Walther Benjamin, to name a few. What is more, my experience begins with comics, a medium which shares with cinema the presumption of an objective or largely objective camera eye.
I have, therefore, been both annoyed and bewildered by the frequent critical squelches I received from betas and other readers, to do with Point Of View. I could not understand why a narrative or description that seemed to me to cover points clearly and in the necessary detail should be condemned because of (the details of the fault not even explained) POV. And not only was it strange to me, but nobody even bothered to explain it. POV was called in to condemn whole items on the assumption that failures in it should be as obvious as mistakes in elementary grammar.
As so often in cases of this kind, what was needed was to understand a whole set of different categories. This came to me all of a sudden, going over the notes of a (this needs to be said) particularly intelligent and careful beta. It occurred to me that this person regarded the so-called omniscient narrator as suspect from the word go, and took it for granted that any narrative must be done from a particular point of view, that is, that any narrative must be - understand, not may be, must be - subjective, slanted, and unreliable.
This was where I simply did not think the same way. To me, once I realized what the beta was assuming, it immediately sounded as nonsense. And that is not to criticize that beta, who, as I said, is a highly intelligent person, most of whose suggestions were very useful. No, it is a criticism of the whole culture. Not only did it conflict with the way I wanted to write, which is largely from an impersonal if not omniscient position, it also condemned the vast majority of the literature of mankind. Most cultures and most of our own history have assumed that a story should be told from an impersonal point of view. Indeed, it condemns whole genres such as epic and theatre to utter impotence. A theatre writer has only his characters and the stage to deal with: while any character may be shown with his or her foibles and slants clearly visible, unless the writer him/herself assumes an impersonal position with respect to his/her narrative, you could have no narrative at all. How does anyone stage a Hamlet that implies the unreliability, not of this or that character, but of the whole narrative structure? Perhaps here we have the root of so many indigestible and irrelevant modern stagings of classics. And as for the epic, imagine what a damned nuisance it would be to have to spend twelve or twenty-four books of narrative verse trying to determine whose POV is being taken and how that is slanted and unreliable. I think that anyone who starts reading Homer or the Mahabharata assumes an impersonal narrator as a matter of course; if they didn't, I very much doubt whether they could read more than a few verses. And above all, they would miss the point of everything they read.
Narrative with a personal accent, narrative built from a definite POV, is a highly useful device, and I hope I can handle it no worse than most; but POV raised to a fundamental and inevitable constructive principle of the whole art of narration, seems to me no more than a piece of intellectual dictatorship - of that "dictatorship of relativism" that the Pope, himself no mean artist with words, warned against. Far from enlarging the range and depth of literary art, it narrows it. It demands an extra layer of attention from writer and reader all the time, and that for no good reason.
Worst of all, it seems to me an intrusion of an omniscient-narrator of a peculiarly poisonous and arrogant stripe. If I, like Trollope or even Tolstoy, simply start out by saying, "it was this way, and this way, and then this happened," I think that the stupidest reader will not forget that this is, after all, my narrative, and the way I see things. But if my narrative - which never ceases to be my narrative - starts from the presumption that I can, as narrator, catch the different accents, mentalities and views of all my characters, and write from their point of view rather than mine, then I am exercising the most appaling presumption and tyranny over both my characters and my readers. I am assuming that I am impartial enough to hear each of their voices exactly as they are, and to transmit them to the readers without the interference of myself as "omniscient narrator." In other words, I claim to be omniscient enough to be twenty, forty, a hundred narrators. The truth, of course, is that I never once cease to be myself.
