Sunday, September 30, 2012
Discussing The Exiles #1: From Masha
So, I’m hoping that we can discuss the whole idea of censorship, especially relating to the supernatural and fantastical in the story. Especially the attitude of Dickens, who denies that he really belongs because he ‘isn’t a supernaturalist’ like the rest of them, but Christmas is, after all, every bit as dangerous to the sanitized mind as Halloween. What are your thoughts? What did this story bring to mind? Anyone, Anyone??
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It's interesting but censorship isn't actually what I first think about reading this, as much as the fear of imagination. But then I suppose that's what drives a good many censors. What I find interesting here is that "why" is never really addressed, as if whatever rationalization you could give for destroying these authors' works could never be sufficient. And indeed it can't - but I really appreciate Bradubury's ability to recognize that. There's a great deal of background missing, freeing this piece from being applied to only certain types of repression and censorship and opening it up as that precious blend of cautionary tale and captivating story.
ReplyDelete-Seth
I was definitely reminded of The Giver. Sorry, M.!
ReplyDeleteSeth, your thoughts on the under-addressed "why" are smarter than mine; I spent my first read-through going, "But why would scientists want to ban fiction? Scientist love fiction!" And like, mentally inventing a non-canonical backstory in which the exiles and their creations had already come to life on earth and the only way to prevent an actual Red Death epidemic was to burn all the books they could find and stick the ones of passing historical interest in a really thick vault. I think maybe that was the plot of one of the Nightmare on Elm Streets.
Now there's a simplistic reading in my head that's blocking all the non-simplistic readings because I keep wanting to argue with it. I am still partially stuck on the "why," even though a large, sensible, and well-spoken part of me knows it's almost certainly supposed to be beside the point.
I'm going to read it again with a clear mind and come back to the discussion. I do love the premise, though -- I mean, of the exiles themselves. I feel like they're not really the people who used to have those names, with their messy biographies and inner conflicts and changing opinions, but rather their author-selves as imagined by readers, back when they had readers, now clinging to life in exile. I especially like the visual image of Poe, looking like an exaggerated newspaper engraving of himself. And I love how Dickens is convinced he doesn't belong and is in total denial. I don't know why yet; I just do.
But where is Wilkie Collins in all this? Let's pour out a little of this Amontillado on the ground for our vanished comrade in creepiness. :(
Better thoughts to follow, I hope.
" "A regrettable situation," said Bierce, smiling, "for the Yuletide merchants who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!"
ReplyDeleteHAHAHAHAHAHA! No joke...
OK, on to serious thoughts now. That one just got me.
Seth, I'm glad you said that about the 'why', because I didn't think of it, and now that it's been mentioned, I value it myself.
Unlike Laura, I didn't have any trouble picturing scientists wanting to ban fiction, because they'd obviously targeted the supernaturalists, and I have this memory of Richard Dawkins commenting that:
"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious effect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."
Not that hard-core atheists are the only ones contemplating whether speculative fiction is bad for people (especially children), which brings us back to Seth's point. :)
As a writer of fantasy, I identified right away with Poe and Bierce and the others, and started imagining myself as a shade on Mars with the shades of my characters around me. (Kind of nice, on one hand, but not a very happy ending.) It certainly made the question of censorship quite personal. I guess I don't feel that extreme censorship of speculative fiction is very likely, though. It would take global rule of a specific idea currently found most often in a certain stripe of atheist or a certain stripe of fundamentalist. And most of the world thinks those sorts of people are a bit kooky. ;)
Hey, Dawkins! Good catch, Jenna. Though in the same article he talks about liking Phillip Pullman, who definitely has some Poe-ish qualities if the one book I read from him 20 years ago is any indication.
ReplyDeleteThere's also "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
. . .where the theme is similar to Dawkins' concern above, but the author is fighting fiction with fanfiction. Have you read it, Jenna? I kind of like the premise (Harry's uncle and guardian is a biochemist instead of Vernon Dursley; Harry goes to Hogwarts and is extremely curious and skeptical of everything) but IMO it runs out of steam pretty quickly and Harry ends up just being really, really, implausibly precocious and Machiavellian and yells at everyone constantly. :(
Anyway, I don't want to get too derailed on the plausibility question in a story about fictional entities in exile on Mars. (I mean, clearly I do want to, but I shouldn't). It might be that the reason for exiling and eventually destroying the exiles isn't really central to the story. Is it?
If readers had just gradually lost interest in Poe et al., or for whatever reason they just weren't read anymore (the way e.g. 99.9999& of the literate world just doesn't bother to read 16th c. chivalric novels anymore,) would they still have been in exile? Would they still have died for good when the last page of the last of their books was poked into the fire?
Yeah, Pullman would definitely end up on Mars, even though his trilogy His Dark Materials is about overturning the Evil Church and killing God. You just do all that with your soul beside you in the form of an animal familiar.*
ReplyDelete(*PRUBON [Presumptive Reader Unworthiness Based On Non-reading] Alert: I got all that from reviews, having never read HDM myself.)
Haha, Laura, I haven't read that fan fiction. It sounds like the sort of great starting premise that couldn't possibly go anywhere good.
Since the story begins with the Exiles managing to kill off a few of the space travelers by witchcraft, and ends in the captain obliterating the Exiles by means of symbolic preservation of the last copies of these books in order to burn them in a bonfire as science finally, triumphantly, lands the human race on Mars--it's hard for me to imagine that the tension between science and supernaturalism isn't the central conflict of the tale. But perhaps someone can argue me out of that.
P.S. Masha, can we please turn off the Captcha? Those things are getting harder than ever to read, and they're SO annoying.
I move for making PRUBON an official Book Club acronym on grounds of extreme usefulness, and second the proposal to turn of Captcha if at all possible, on grounds of horribleness. I have to go through like five of them sometimes to find one I can read. :(
ReplyDeleteI second the "PRUBON" motion and really could care less about the Captcha thing except that I'm pretty excited to know it has a name. But yeah, trash it, why not.
ReplyDeleteI guess I never thought of the scientists themselves as being the killers of fiction, or the world they come from being particularly scientific - and that seems problematic given the text. But similar to Laura I imagined a sort of shadowy backdrop (less detailed and certainly less imaginitive) that involved simply "dull" minds, those concerned more with facts and only facts. Maybe that's just gleaned from other Bradbury works (he seems to abhor, or at least pity, the unimaginitive mind). So the whole conflict seemed less "science vs supernatural" and more "narrow vs broad", the scientists lack of defense against a supernatural attack comes more from their one-sided education than their natural disposition.
-Seth
so the whole conflict seemed less "science vs supernatural" and more "narrow vs broad", the scientists lack of defense against a supernatural attack comes more from their one-sided education than their natural disposition.
ReplyDeleteyes, this.
My knowledge of science is largely PRUBON, but it does seem that science, at least the kind of science required to get a bunch of Earthers to land on Mars, both requires and excites a great deal of imagination. So the idea of a genuine and sustained imagination / science conflict is hard for me to wrap my head around, but I can understand using "it's scientific!" as an excuse for trying to getting rid of some (perceived) undesirable elements in the global consciousness.
Gradgrind isn't a scientist, but maybe he thought he was being scientific because no one ever taught him that "science" wasn't Fancy Talk for "knowing a bunch of facts about horses."
But I'm still not sure if this is a problem with the text or with my reading, or not a problem or what.
"Narrow vs broad" is probably a better way of putting it, especially since Bradbury was a science fiction guy. I guess what I meant by "science" was not "inquisitive mind searching for knowledge and understanding of the natural universe" but more scientism of (and probably beyond) Dawkins' type, a careful rejection of anything supernatural.
ReplyDeleteI'm all in favor of PRUBON's adoption. But I can't take credit for its invention. That, I believe, belongs to Professor James Thomas, author of Repotting Harry Potter. ;)
Scientism is a way more precise term for my feeble brain to deal with; thanks Jenna. Also, Charles will eventually bring us some historical context for why A World Without Poe may have seemed more plausible to Bradbury in 1949 than it does to me today (heavy ideologically-motivated censorship in the US and elsewhere + increasing emphasis on science and engineering in schools + some trends in the social sciences, if I'm getting it right).
ReplyDeleteok, back to work with me.
A detail that I found interesting and a key to how I interpreted the story was that it was briefly mentioned that all the 'were' creatures, vampires, and other supernatural beasts had fled to Mars previous as science made more and more inroads on Earth.
ReplyDeleteWith that in mind, I read it as the conflict between mystery/wonder and 'awareness.' That's the best term I can come up with for it: what I mean is a kind of detached assumption of knowledge, where you find out how something works and assume that's all there is. It's the kind of attitude I see in a lot of post-modern works: the 'oh, look how clever I am for pointing out the cliches' mindset.
The conflict and tragedy I saw, and which I think is very much alive today, is between the sense of wonder and mystery, the delight in the story itself, the humility before creation (God's or someone else's) and the arrogant, smug assumption that you know all that; you see through the superstition, you know how the trick is done, you know better.
I LOVE this discussion! I keep meaning to comment and getting distracted and coming back to find MORE..
ReplyDeleteI love the whole distinction between Narrow & Broad, Scientistic & Supernaturalist, and Bob's newest awareness & mystery. I think that they all saying about the same thing. The authors and their creations inspired a sense of the sacredness and the awesomeness of the world, the idea that we can't really know it all, ever. And that idea is dangerous to the Scientistic desire to always 'know all that'.
I'm assuming the Capthca (is that how you spell it) is turned off. I always hated them, but didn't know I was allowed to turn them off without being hacked or something..obviously not the most careful blogger ;)
Like Seth, I immediately saw the conflict as one of imagination.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the men on the rocket consider the swarm of imaginative nightmares as an attack on right mental health is very telling. The description of them is one of a people carefully sanitized from any sense of wonder.
"Smith," the Captain says, "report tomorrow for psychoanalysis." And Smith feels the disappointment of a primitive need un-met, the There Is Nothing But This. It is a particular attitude of science, as Jenna mentions, and not necessarily science itself. The fact that it is Only Science and not Science And . . .
I agree with what was said about the authors not being the historical literary figures but some manifestation of themselves through their creations. I should think that there are several artists, musicians, performers, and religious and philosophical figures on the Mars sanctuary as well.
I wrote a really long comment, but it was actually just an excuse to put up this link to some Hubble Space Telescope goodness. Speaking of awe and wonder and whatnot. It's late, so I'm going to leave the link here and save the comment for daylight. I hope you like galaxies, everyone!
ReplyDeleteI wondered if the story was an indictment of any defining ideology, and this particular brand of "science,"just standing in for any particular, as M says, desire to "know all that," a desire which can't help but fall miserably short. Though to be fair to most scientists, science is a methodology, not an ideology, and one that intrinsically doesn't have an "and now we know everything" dusting off the hands end-game, as opposed to (at least some) ideologies.
ReplyDeleteBut the "science" ideology at work in the story, whatever it is, made me wonder if ideologies operate not so much by explaining phenomena external to their own groove, but exiling said phenomena, at least from the contexts in which those phenomena are comfortable. For instance, psychology loves explaining where in our unconscious werewolves and draculas come from; maybe it's a matter of pulling Dracula out of the Dracula book and the world of gardens and lightning all and sticking him on Feud's couch or whatever.
I felt a bit dissapointed when we find out that these folks all depend on one of their books still existing somewhere. I kind of liked the idea of faux Poe and Dickens always existing because he'd once existed. It certainly would've messed-up/altered the drama of the story as it were. I guess i like the idea of a Poe (even a fictional Poe) as a fact that demands (and yet resists) explanation, with or without his read or unread books sitting around somewhere. But this is stupid.
PS, sorry to be so late to the discussion!
Hey! Sorry if I made you feel pressured! You've got some really great comments though, I'm glad you joined in!
ReplyDeleteI think that with science, in this one, what Bradbury is going for is more of a 'scientism' (as Jenna put it) - a desire to sweep the world clean of mystery, to know and understand everything, and to exile out of extistence anything unknowable. You're comment on ideologies is, I think very true, but only assuming the ideology isn't - as Bradbury's seems to be, in part that "nothing is impossible". At that point, the ideology looses the ability to exile the uncomfortable. And honestly that may be a good bit of what Bradbury is arguing against - falling into ideologies that don't allow for mystery, such as the culture he was facing in the 40s and 50s. Bradbury wants mystery embrace, with all it's terrifying strangeness.
I always assumed, with Poe and company, that their presence on Mars wasn't their true souls, but their literary ones, a part of themselves that couldn't die while the worlds they made existed, and that when their books ended, they rejoined themselves, still existing, but not living anymore. Does that make you gladder?
I'm so glad you joined in!! You should introduce yourself, down in the Introduction post, if you'd like to..if not, I might do it for you ;)
Wow, enjoying everyone's insights so much. c:
ReplyDelete