Over at Ancillary Review of Books (which I was previously unfamiliar with, but which I will be checking out more now), Zachary Gillan (ditto previous parenthetical) published a very good essay entitled “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.”
Essays that argue about the political content of various genres (e.g. fairy tales are inherently feminist / antifeminist) can be a little interesting, but they usually read like fan theories for self-important academics. Gillan elides this by instead asking how an antifascist might mine weird fiction for lessons / tools, were she so inclined. I find this approach way more palatable.
It boils down, I think, to two axioms:
To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root.
To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.)
He goes on to elaborate on these ideas in clear and persuasive prose. Right near the end things get a little tedious as he quotes people who quote Marx. But overall I really liked this.
Ran Prieur recent linked to this back post in his blog. It’s got a lot of really interesting stuff, and it supports my idea that having access to variety is a good thing for humans (or at least for other primates).
I’m currently reading the Husain Haddawy translation of The Arabian Nights, and I came across this quote:
He spent ten days in preparation, packing what he needed, together with the gifts together with the gifts the princes and merchants of the city had given him for his journey. Then he set out with the king with his heart on fire to be leaving his city for a whole year. He left, with fifty Mamluks and many guides and servants, bearing one hundred loads of gifts, rarities, and treasures, as well as money.
There’s something fun about this description of wealth. It really tickles my imagination with the variety of treasure it describes. It’s about the furthest thing from the abstracted, frictionless, digital conception of money we have today. Luckily, it seems older tradition of treasure is being kept alive in children’s media, and fantasy media, and especially the intersection of the two.
Scrooge McDuck in his giant vault of gold coins, mixed with stacks of paper money and a bucket of jewels off to the side.Smaug the dragon atop his hoard of treasure: mostly gold coins but with tons of jewels, weapons, and rarities.The Cave of Wonders from Aladdin (1992): Mountains of gold coins are mixed with a wide variety of other gold artifacts.
All of these examples use gold coins as a base (maybe because they’re simple to draw) but then mixes in other things because just having a bunch of gold coins would be boring. Gold is obviously valuable, so you might think it does a lot of the heavy lifting in conveying a sense of wealth. But I think the variety of treasure on display is also important.
Consider the graphic novel Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith (who also does the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). Bea Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf, but set in modern day suburbia and charactered entirely by children. There are very fun descriptions and illustrations of the massive stockpile of candy these children amass. Care is taken to describe how many different kinds of sweets are in their hoard. It definitely creates the sense that these children are living the good life1.
Not too long ago the Srsly Wrong podcast did an episode on Ecological Luxury, in which they explore if and how we can secure a high standard of living while also staying sustainable. I think this is part of the solution. Having access to a wide variety of things probably feeds all sorts of built in biases- that’s why we see a tendency for it across times and cultures, and also in children. And if we can feed those biases in a sustainable way (e.g. with candy rather than with gold) we can create a sense of wealth that isn’t as socially ruinous as current versions of wealth.
Maybe. I don’t know if this would work, and I’m sure it would create it’s own problems. Have a glut of options isn’t a good thing for example. But it’s something to ponder.
The word “wealth” can be slippery, so let me clarify that this is more or less what I mean: the ability to partake in lots of luxuries. ↩︎
Cosmic horror, I think, is predicated on imagining a sort of “anti-human” universe. All horror is probably anti-human to some degree. Monsters and slashers want to kill or hurt humans, or violate their desires in some way. But cosmic horror goes several steps further. It imagines that the fundamental makeup of reality is intractable to human analysis. This is why Lovecraft’s protagonists often go insane. The universe is under no obligation to make sense; in fact, trying to make sense of it might be poisonous.
I was talking to my partner recently and realized that folk horror actually posits something similar. Folk horror is a big, nebulous term (much like cosmic horror, I suppose). Right now I mean the aspects of folk horror that emphasize the scariness of nature and ancient “pagan” rituals that were somehow more in tune with nature than modern civilization. These stories agree that reality isn’t human-centric, but brings the idea closer to home. Instead of encouraging us to imagine abstract physical laws or the vacuum of deep space, it invites us to imagine a forest. We don’t need to travel billions of years before we leave the familiar behind- one or two thousand will do the trick nicely.
And in thinking about this, it also brings to mind the stories of Franz Kafka, especially his hand-wringing about dehumanizing bureaucracies. Cosmic horror suggests that the universe, writ large, is incomprehensible and noxious to humans. Folk horror (at least some folk horror) says even the nature close at hand is antithetical to humans, though this effect is probably exacerbated by modern life1. And Kafka confirms the folk horror thesis by showing how modern society breeds neuroses and alienation.
All this sort of makes me think of a telescoping taxonomy, sort of like how physics contains chemistry, which in turn contains biology. But it also makes me think about how humans are pretty good at imagining themselves as separate from things. The universe isn’t for us, and nature isn’t for us, and society isn’t for us. Oh no, where to turn! But I think these impressions only hold if your starting point is to imagine the world as highly anthropomorphic and deliberate and good, with humans holding dominion over it all. In other words, these ideas are scary in the context of a a particular kind of Christian worldview. There’s a reason cosmic horror has a strong anti-Christian subtext, and it’s the same reason folk horror often pits Christianity against paganism. (I don’t remember Christianity being a strong theme in Kafka’s works, but it’s been a while since I’ve read him.)
Actually, in all of the above cases, the “thing” that isn’t for us is just stuff that we’re already part of. How could the universe not be for us when we’re clearly part of the universe? It’s like imagining the ocean isn’t “for” fish because fish can still die in the ocean. The same goes for our place in nature2 and society. Anti-human horror is great at blowing up a sort of western, Christian, Victorian worldview, but it’s not so good at replacing that worldview. For that, we need to understand continuousness between ourselves and the systems with exist inside.
For example, think about the commune in Midsommar (2019). They still have to deal with tragedy and death like everyone else, but the have found an older way of living that mitigates some of the suffering that comes with the territory. ↩︎
One of my pet peeves is the way people talk about nature as some concept with a tortuous boundary that excludes everything humans do, but includes all activities of all other animals. Defining nature as “stuff that doesn’t have to do with humans” is useful in some contexts, but it reinforces this concept that humans are somehow separate from the world around them. ↩︎
I think I first learned about Frantz Fanon several years ago when a documentary about him (which I still haven’t seen) hit the Criterion Channel. Traditional psychology has generally been pretty bad about considering black folks, and I’ve been interested for a while in the intersection of mental health and black culture in movies. Fanon, I learned from the movie description, was a black man and a psychiatrist, born in Martinique and educated in Paris. He went on to do much of his work in Algeria during their bloody fight for independence from France.
Reading more about Fanon, I found he was almost always described with words like “important” and “influential,” especially for his ideas on racial identity and decolonization. I had just finished a graduate program in psychology a few years before, and one that took every opportunity to brag about its emphasis on diversity. But despite this, I had never heard of Frantz Fanon! My curiosity was piqued.
More recently, I stumbled across a comment that his book “The Wretched of the Earth” set out an argument that justified violence by colonized people against their oppressors. (Side note: I didn’t actually find any such argument in the book, though Fanon does take for granted that it’s ok for people to use violence to liberate themselves from an oppressive situation). With my curiosity newly inflamed, I got my hands on a copy of the audiobook, translated by Constance Farrington, and started listening.
Almost at once my interest evaporated. The book is front-loaded with embarrassingly bad anthropology. Fanon seems to suggest that colonized people (all colonized people, regardless of time or place) do things like dance or believe in ghosts because of some psychic conflict that’s wrought by colonialism. This obviously ignores the fact that some of these traditions very likely predate colonialism.1 (I’m not a historian or an anthropologist, so please correct me if I’m wrong).
It’s also emblematic of my main complaint about the book. Fanon talks in grand, sweeping generalizations. All colonial powers have the same agenda, all colonized people have the same experience, all cities are one way, and all rural areas another. Occasionally he will refer to specific examples, but he doesn’t seem to care about arguing his point beyond simply stating it. He almost never cites other thinkers (whether they agree or disagree) and certainly never incorporates quantitative evidence. He just rambles on and on, claiming this and that, and apparently assuming his ideas will be accepted without further question.
Fanon was a Marxist, and his tendency towards generalizations is characteristic of the few other Marxist writers I’ve read, especially around this period. They seem impressed with their theory of the world and uninterested or unaware that others might need convincing2.
It’s also an odd fit for Fanon’s other ideological stances. Psychology, as opposed to, say, sociology, is very interested in the particulars of individual people. One of the few interesting parts of the book were the psychiatric case studies of individuals suffering under colonialism. This is one of the only places where Fanon allows himself to zoom in to the particulars.
But also, Fanon argues persuasively against the idea of a general African or black culture. This idea, says Fanon, actually plays into the colonial mindset. It was white outsiders who came in and essentialized everyone as “black” without paying any attention to differences in culture and history. Despite making this point very well, he continues to talk about colonized people as if there were one solution that would serve all of them.
I glazed over for much of the book. The Wikipedia article is probably a much better resource if you’re interested in Fanon’s ideas. (It also shows that others were able to get much more out of the book than I was). But I did want to end by highlighting a couple of quotes and ideas from the text that I really appreciated3.
“It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech… But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is as Césaire said: ‘To invent the souls of men.’ It means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone. In order to achieve such things, in order to actually embody them, we must, as we have already mentioned, decentralize to the utmost.”
Out of context this almost sounds like a call for anarchism! But Fanon quickly goes on to assert that his system would still have hierarchy. It’s just that the “upper echelons” would understand that their work depends on the work of the “rank and file.” Still, I like the point that if you want somebody to have more political consciousness, it’s not enough to occasionally talk at them.
“A memorable example, and one that takes on particular significance because it does not quite involve a colonial reality, was the reaction of white jazz fans when after the Second World War new styles such as bebop established themselves. For them jazz could only be the broken, desperate yearning of an old “Negro,” five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his own misfortune and the racism of the whites.”
I don’t know anything about jazz, but I do know about movies, this reminds me of some of the conversations around “black tragedy porn.” The overwhelmingly white film ecosystem will sometimes congratulate itself for making the occasional film about black people. But even when these films aren’t outright racist, and even when they don’t feature white saviors or other problematic tropes, they often heavily emphasize the tragedies that black people face due to racism. So even among white people willing to acknowledge racism, there are still ways to get it wrong.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I didn’t like this book, though it led me to some interesting ideas. We’ll see if I ever get around to that documentary about Fanon’s life.
Fanon does have seem to have a larger theory about history that I failed to fully grok. Something about how utterly colonialism reshaped people’s lives, and what this means for formerly colonized folks who try to create their own culture. Maybe if I better understood this theory I’d have less objection to his seemingly bad anthropology. ↩︎
Not trying to knock Marxists in general! A lot of Marxists have done really cool things! But I don’t think mid-20th century nonfiction writing is a good place to start engaging with them. ↩︎
Unfortunately these are from a different translation. I couldn’t find an easy to access, online version of Farrington’s translation, which I prefer, at least based on the phrasing in these quotes. ↩︎
