Art & Criticism

Suspension of disbelief

Published on December 12, 20112 Comments

John Scalzi is being a bit silly about suspension of disbelief:

“When my daughter was much younger, my wife was reading to her from a picture book about a snowman who came to life and befriended a young boy, and on each page they would do a particular activity: build a snow fort, slide down a hill, enjoy a bowl of soup and so on. The last three pages had the snowman walking, then running, and then flying. At which point my wife got an unhappy look on her face and said ‘A flying snowman? That’s just ridiculous!’

[…]

“So, yeah: In a film with impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud (not to mention legions of ghost warriors and battle elephants larger than tanks), are we really going to complain about insufficiently dense lava? Because if you’re going to demand that be accurate in a physical sense, I want to know why you’re giving the rest of that stuff a pass. If you’re going to complain that the snowman flies, you should also be able to explain why it’s okay to have it eat hot soup.”

No, no, you don’t.

Suspension of disbelief is a private thing and like all matters of taste cannot be discussed. If you don’t believe in flying snowmen nothing will get you to take them seriously. And while that’s a deliberately silly example, we do this all the time, whether or not it’s drawing the line at vampires that sparkle in the sunshine or at having the Force explained as being caused by socalled midichlorians. Especially when these sort of developments go against the earlier established “rules” of an universe or don’t fit the traditional tone of a (sub)genre, they can be hard to swallow. This also explains why some adaptations of e.g. Sherlock Holmes work and some don’t. The recent modern BBC updating of Holmes worked because it kept the cores of Holmes and Watson intact, but for some people it just won’t work without the Victorian fogs.

But that’s not really what Scalzi was talking about, because his original ire was awoken by a discussion about the realism of the lava at the end of the last Lord of the Rings movie. This is entirely different from not believing in flying snowmen, as this is about something that actually exists in the real world and you therefore can get wrong. Just like there was no reason for sound in space in Star Wars, there was no real reason for the lava to behave wrongly in the LotR movie, save for dramatic reasons. It’s therefore sort of acceptable in this example, but usually this sort of thing is either an error or just pure sloppiness on the part of the writer.

It’s the writer’s job to make their worlds as believable as possible — unless it’s not of course — and these sort of mistakes drop people right out. Even in a fantasy world you need to keep everyday reality straight. One commenter at James Nicolls’ place, quoting C. K. Chesterton, put it best:

“It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr. Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr. Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawingroom and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible, it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.”

Shakespeare: not that special after all

Published on October 26, 2011Leave a comment

This bit in Stephen Fry’s excellent series on language, Planet Word piqued my interest, as he goes into the standard spiel about the marvels of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It continues with Stephen Fry making the case for him as not just the greatest writer in English, but arguably in any language, a not uncommon view. It annoyed me a bit, this unquestioned image of Shakespeare as a towering genius no other writer can be compared to.

And it turns out I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by this myth making. As Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme argues, this sort of inflated view of Shakespeare plays right in the hands of those who would deny the very existence of him but as a mask for someone they’d think more suited for the role of world’s best writer:

The tendency to discuss Shakespeare in isolation from other dramatists (if not in isolation from his cultural surrounds) is one feature of mainstream scholarship that mirrors a similarly exclusive focus on the part of the self-proclaimed skeptics. This parallel is partly what I had in mind when I called Bardolatry anti-Stratfordianism’s twin in my last post. It’s no coincidence that historically, the authorship controversy only came into being once Shakespeare had been elevated to the status of unparalleled genius, and it certainly seems to me that people writing in praise of Shakespeare have done almost as much damage as those out to undermine his authorial identity.

Because the standard view of Shakespeare sees him as standing apart and above his contemporaries, it becomes more plausible to assume that therefore he cannot have been the simple actor-poet he appeared to be, ergo somebody more elevated must’ve written his plays for him, be it Francis Bacon or the17th earl of Oxford. But once you do put him back into the context in which he lived and worked, it turns out that actually, Shakespeare was not that special and his achievements become more understandable:

Two things stand out to me in Craig’s analysis. The obvious one is how directly his arguments contradict the notion that Shakespeare was exceptionally knowledgeable. As Craig and others suggest, Shakespeare’s artistry lies in the inventive ways he uses his words — his knack for putting simple words in the service of a complex thought, or for arranging usual terms in an unusual way; his ability to connect images and ideas, to use words to bring thought, things, and people to an imaginary life. That, however, seems to me much closer to a talent than to a skill.

[…]

In other words, there appears to be no direct connection between levels of formal education and verbal prodigiousness: Fletcher, as a bishop’s son surely the most culturally elevated of the thirteen, barely ranks above obscure Robert Wilson in vocabulary. It may seem predictable that university wits like Greene, Marlowe, or Peele should be fonder of verbal variety than Shakespeare, but that Dekker uses over 100 more distinct words per play than him may come as a surprise. Webster and his more Baroque register, Jonson and his ambition to display his autodidactically acquired learning — it makes sense that such writers made use of more words than the man who supposedly had a larger vocabulary than anyone, ever, once one steps outside the echo-chamber of Bardolatry. And of course not a single person on Craig’s list can boast an aristocratic background. The most prodigious of them all, John Webster, may even have continued to run his father’s coach-making business at the same time as he was writing the most verbally rich plays of his age.

Crudely summarised: because we know more of Shakespeare’s work, as he wrote more and/or more of his work survived, not to mention because we pay more attention to it, he seems to be much more extraordinary than he actually is. Once restored to his proper context, his achievements are still spectacular but not inhumanly so.

On writing book reviews

Published on September 19, 2011

Andrew Wheeler writes about how his old job at the SFBC taught him how to review books:

I started off in “book reviewing” by writing internal book reports for the SFBC; I did six of them my first week at the club, back in April of 1991. I was very eager, and incredibly willing to read almost anything my boss put in front of me — I recognize that same eagerness and enthusiasm in a lot of young bloggers now, and wince to remember when I was like that. I was lucky in two ways: those reports had a clear structure (one phrase to define a book in genre and style, several paragraphs of plot description, and then a short personal evaluation at the end), and they were internal; no one outside the company ever read them.

I wrote hundreds of those over the next few years, learning to boil down complicated plots to their essences, to take good notes on books as I read them, to keep track of characters, and lots of other mechanical skills. More importantly, I learned to read actively, to think about a book as I was reading it and to start making hypotheses and guesses about the shape and course of a book while in the middle of it. That’s one of the core necessities for a critic of any kind: you need to engage with the work directly, to think about where it seems to be going (rather than where you want it to go, or where it does eventually go) and get a sense for the shape of those works.

That actively reading of a book, to read it with one eye on what you’re going to write about it is the essence of critical reading. You’re not just looking at the story itself, but also at why the author might have made the choices they made in telling the story, or at the deep structures of the plot and how the need to end the story in another hunderd pages or so limits what can happen now. It’s the same for non-fiction, where you’re looking at how the author structures their arguments and how you’ll be able to quickly summarise the key points of it in your review later. It does sort of inhibits your ability to lose yourself in a book…

Joost Swarte — more than just a pencil pusher

Published on September 12, 2011

Joost Swarte may arguably be Holland’s most important modern cartoonist — he’s certainly the best known outside of the Netherlands — but that’s just one of his talents. He’s an artist working in the tradition of say a Rietveld as much as a Marten Toonder; multidisciplinary, but with a signature visual style that’s noticable in all his art. The following three videos showcase this neatly.

First up, a short impression of 6 sculptures Swarte created for the Palace of Justice in Arnhem in 2004. You may want to turn down the sound to avoid the annoying background music.

Second, (social) building society Ymere had asked Swarte, working together with the architect Sytze Visser, to design four showcase rental appartments to “pep up” the Willemsstraat in Amsterdam, in the Jordaan area. This was done as part of a social regeneration project, to stimulate some interest in a neighbourhood that had been somewhat neglected in recent years. These appartments were opened in February of last year, with Swarte and his family having lived there for month as a trial of his own design. Video is in Dutch obviously, made by Ymere to promote the project (and not doing very well considering the less than fifty views it has had so far..)

Finally, there’s the multifunctional children’s chair, as explained and demonstrated by Swarte himself:

Rambling on about Sim (with a side order of Dick)

Published on September 5, 20112 Comments

Cerebus

Tim O’Neil continues his exploration of Dave Sim and Cerebus with a summing up of essential facts you need to know about Dave Sim:

Dave Sim does not see the world the same way that you or I do.

This fact is a consequence of the first three. Sim rejects modernity on an almost wholesale basis, an abjuration that extends all the way to having a disinclination for computers (his internet presence often takes the form of transcripts uploaded from his electric typewriter). His religious turn – a turn which was preceded by and followed perhaps as an inevitable consequence of his conservative turn – recasts almost the entirety of modern existence in negative terms. He dislikes Picasso and dislikes Freud and dislikes Marx and (although I can’t remember specifically if it’s come up) probably dislikes Nietzsche as well.

What this means in practice is that he explicitly rejects the language and collective metaphors that we – many of us, at least, of the leftist, liberal or conservative persuasions – use to discuss the contemporary world. Although he has little patience for narrow-minded congregationalists, he has cast his rhetorical lot in with the forces of anti-modernity who insist on using the language of scripture to diagnose the sins of the present. He outright dismisses the language of contemporary (and by “contemporary” in this instance I mean at least the last 250-300 years) philosophy and social theory as meaningless “bafflegab.”

You know who that reminded me off? Philip K. Dick, another autodidact with an idiosyncratic personal religious worldview very much out of step with modern society, whose work is inseparable from these beliefs, especially his later novels. Both reject contemporary America as wrong and false, both make for uncomfortable reading to the point where you are tempted to question their sanity.

Where they differ, if Tim is right in his assumptions, is that whereas Dick has only become more popular since his death in 1982, has been embraced by the literary mainstream as well as remained popular by his original genre audience, Sim’s magnus opus may die unmourned and unloved with him, save for those in academia who will read Cerebus out of intellectual curiosity or as an artifact of a specific period in the evolution of the American comics artform. Certainly the critical and reader attention Cerebus gets right now is considerably less than you’d expect from a comic that was for decades one of the automatic standard bearers of the idea that comics = art, so it’s quite possible Tim is right.

Cerebus

What Tim has not yet looked at is whether or not the idea that few if any people will ever tackle the whole of Cerebus ever again is a bad thing. In other words, how much of Cerebus is worth reading for somebody who isn’t an academic or critic looking for dissertation material. Perhaps only the “good parts” version of Cerebus — High Society, Church and State, maybe Jaka’s Story — deserves to be read. There’s too much focus in comics criticism on complete runs of a given series or creator anyway, as e.g. the recent Hooded Utilitarian comics poll showed, where of the top ten entries, only two were for discrete stories, the rest for full runs of iconic comics. Which is cheating, as even in the best run there are weaker and stronger issues, stories worthy of inclusion on a Top 115 list and stories that aren’t. It’s also lazy, as you don’t have to think or argue for what Fantastic Four story to include…. The whole of Cerebus is not worth reading, but parts of it are excellent.

But there is a larger problem with Cerebus, as commenter moose n squirrel argues:

You reduce Sim’s views to a highly idiosyncratic and eccentric religious conservatism, and just shrug them off, as if he’s a harmless old crank because nobody’s going to slog through “Chasing YHWH” and convert to his one-man version of Gnosticism.

But the core of Sim’s worldview is not mere “religious conservatism” – it’s hatred of women, which is hardly eccentric or idiosyncratic. Indeed, Sim’s ideas about women are all too sadly common – again, I ask you to look at the numbers of women who are subject to domestic and sexual violence in the United States, at the percentage of women who’ve been raped, at the number of women who, once raped, don’t bother reporting that rape because they see such an action as futile. Hatred of women is not some sad curiosity limited to one obscure Canadian cartoonist. And as much as Sim attempts to dress his hatred of women up with a bunch of bullshit religious cosmology, the core of his message is the same vicious misogynistic bullshit women have been getting from assholes like him for the last six thousand years.

Again: if Sim’s target was black people instead of women, if people from Africa were the soul-sucking voids that corrupted pure, rational white men, would it be so easy to dismiss? If he built a vast cosmology explaining how white men of Northern European descent have all been enslaved by Jews, would we be hearing any arguments about how “well, obviously he’s a little crazy, but you’ve really got to appreciate what he did with his lettering”? And if not, what makes the hatred and oppression of women more acceptable than the hatred and oppression of these other groups?

It’s a bit too pat to say that you should separate the art from the artist’s politics. With some you can, but with Dave Sim this is of course impossible as his worldview informs everything he did with Cerebus. I can well understand people who want to stay clear of this, or who do not want to support such views by buying Sim’s books. On the other hand, to take Sim to tasks for all the oppression women have suffered and do suffer in the world is a bit too much. In the end Sim is a harmless old crank, with disgusting views but neither in a position of power to enforce those views nor likely to seduce anybody to his side through his artwork. Enjoying his art while rejecting his politics is much easier to do than it is even with somebody like Jack Chick, whose worldview is of a similar nastiness yet whose comics have been studied and even enjoyed by the very same people his pamphlets condemn to hell.