Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2025
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualification to opine on
ancient history, the anthropology of the transition to literacy, or even on
feminist science fiction. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd
hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more
cranky than usual.
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
Re-read because I couldn't interest myself in a couple of
other pieces of mind candy and thought "you know who did this sort of thing well...". Which got me thinking, again, about the relationship between this
series and feminism. The obvious and accepted understanding of the Ancillary
books is that they are feminist science fiction. But I think there's a
defensible, textually-supported reading of them which is, if not anti-feminist
exactly, then one whose attitude to feminism is at best ambiguous.
The starting point for this is a pair of propositions about the story-world
which I take to be thoroughly established by the text.
- The Radch, the society in which we spend almost all our time and whose
viewpoint we adopt, is, by our lights, an awful, evil place.
- The Radch is completely free of sexism, patriarchy and misogyny.
To the first point, the Radch checks pretty much all the boxes for an Evil
Empire (by post-WWII standards). Radchaai society is violent,
militarist, imperialist, exploitative, aggressive, hierarchical, and obsessed
with both status and ritual purity. The internal hierarchy of Radchaai
citizens is intense, and often sexualized ("kneeling to"). Ancillaries, who
are so vital to the Radch, are created through a process that combines
enslavement with physical and mental violation, described in ways very
reminiscent of rape, with what is effectively (mental) murder thrown in.
At the same time, the Radchaai are people who literally don't see gender
[1,
2]. It follows that patriarchy does not exist,
neither does misogyny or sexism. (I suppose that there could be very
unconscious implicit biases towards or against people with certain genitalia,
but I don't think there's anything in the text to support this.) And yet, the
Radch embraces all that awfulness in the previous paragraph very
enthusiastically, to the point where suggestions to be a bit less
enslave-and-mind-rape-y, on merely pragmatic grounds, helps causes political
crisis and civil war. The text doesn't, I think, offer any reason to think
that this not seeing gender helps cause the Radch to do the awful
things they do, but the story makes plain that they go together perfectly
well.
What the books are saying, in effect, is "We could completely eliminate
patriarchy and sexism, we could make them unthinkable, and we could
(would?) still have violence and exploitation, and people would even still
find ways to sexualize them". The Radch has eliminated one dimension of
categorical inequality and ascriptive status (gender), but it has left plenty
of others (and invented some new ones, compared to us), and those are
what it organizes its violence and oppression around. The novels' viewpoint is
one where different sorts of oppression are analytically and
practically dissociable, and certainly not one where sexism and patriarchy
are the key evils from which all else bad flows. This seems like a view one
couldn't get to without having wrestled with feminism, to be post-feminist in a
pretty literal sense, but it's not an especially feminist one, indeed it's
I have no idea if this is what Leckie had mind. §
[1]: Admittedly, Breq can deal with gender-using
barbarians when she has to, but, as a segment of a ship of conquest, she has an
unusual amount of experience of dealing with non-Radchaai (in addition to her
years outside the Radch as Breq). And even for her it's awkward and
artificial. ^
[2]: I think, incidentally, that
this makes Leckie's decision to use English feminine terms to represent
Radchaai an artistic mistake. I say this with even more hesitation than the
rest of this, since she can actually write excellent fiction and I can't. And
I appreciate the tweaking of those who just blithely say that masculine terms
should be read as embracing everyone. But I think it would have been better if
she had consistently used the genuinely sex-neutral options --- singular "they"
instead of "she", "parent" and "sibling" instead of "mother" and "sister", and
so forth. As it is, the use of the English female terms
everywhere, except for "sir" and "Lord", does not convey "these people
don't see gender" to a contemporary audience. ^
John M. Rosenfield, The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans [doi:10.1525/9780520418066]
Old-fashioned art history (it's from 1967!), but thorough, good at
analyzing the art, and good at clearly delineating speculation and uncertainty
from (comparatively) solid conclusions.
--- I had not appreciated, before reading this, just how scant the
historical sources are for the whole existence of the Kushan empire. I don't
in any way mean to imply it didn't exist --- the fact that one sees the same
distinctive names with similar art across disparate sites separated by a month's walk
along the Grand Trunk Road (to say nothing of all those coins) says there
was something --- but it is nonetheless a remarkable feat of
conjecture. I'd like to read a good account of the historiography here...
§
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato [doi:10.4159/9780674038431]
I am going to repeat that I am not a classicist, and so am not really
entitled to judge this book. Nonetheless, I do!
I will quote one of Havelock's own summaries:
Let us recapitulate the educational experience of the Homeric
and post-Homeric Greek. He is required as a civilised being to become acquainted with the history, the social organisation, the technical competence and the moral imperatives of his group. This group will in post-Homeric times be his city, but his city in turn is able to function only as a fragment of the total Hellenic world. It shares a consciousness in which he is keenly aware that he, as a Hellene, partakes. This over-all body of experience (we shall avoid the word 'knowledge') is incorporated in a rhythmic narrative or set of narratives which he memorises and which is subject to recall in his memory. Such is poetic tradition, essentially something he accepts uncritically, or else it fails to survive in his living memory. Its acceptance and retention are made psychologically possible by a mechanism of self-surrender to the poetic performance, and of self-identification with the situations and the stories related in the performance. Only when the spell is fully effective can his mnemonic powers be fully mobilised. His receptivity to the tradition has thus, from the standpoint of inner psychology, a degree of automatism which however is counter-balanced by a direct and unfettered capacity for action, in accordance with the paradigms he has absorbed. 'His not to reason why.' [ch. 11, pp. 198--199; any remaining glitches are, for once, due to OCR errors in the ProQuest electronic version and not my typing]
Elsewhere, Havelock repeatedly speaks of "hypnotism". This is all, supposedly,
what Plato is reacting
against.
Let me highlight two among many considerations which incline me to
discount this almost totally.
- We have an extensive anthropological record of non-literate societies all
over the world, many of them possessing elaborate traditions of poetic arts
and political sophistication. In none of them do we find populations
hypnotized by oral epics which are also tribal encyclopedias.
- Regarded as encyclopedias, the Homeric epics are worthless. You
could not, in fact, learn how to load a ship from the first book of
the Iliad, though this is one of Havelock's repeated examples
(starting on pp. 81--82). You could not actually learn any art from
the Iliad, not even combined-infantry-and-chariot * tactics. (You
could learn many vivid ways to describe violent death.) Havelock even
realizes/admits this (p. 83: "[T]he descriptions are always typical rather than
detailed. It was no doubt part of Plato's objection that this was so: the poet
was not an expert."), but it does not seem to lead him to reconsider. One
wonders what Havelock would make of the "technical" passages in science
fiction, or for that matter in airport thrillers.
To be very clear, I have no doubt whatsoever that the transition from an oral
to a literate culture really changed how the ancient Greeks thought, because
it changes how everyone
thinks. But I cannot swallow either Havelock's account of the pre-literate Greeks, or of the transition.
--- I picked this book up in 1998 **, and kept putting off reading it for no very good
reason. I am glad I finally worked my way through it --- Havelock was a good
writer who wore evidently-vast learning lightly --- but I am going to mentally
shelve it under "elaborate constructions of overwhelmingly imaginary
pasts". §
*: I think the most usefully detailed description of any art or practice in the whole of the Iliad is actually
in book 23 (lines 305--351), where Nestor as-you-know-Bob's his son Antilochus about how to win a chariot race with inferior horses. It is, of course, part of Nestor's character to give elaborate and redundant advice to the young. ^
**: In a long-vanished bookstore in Santa Fe on Palace Avenue
that specialized in classics and in conservative books, especially those
with an esoteric bent. (I strongly suspect the owners of being "Traditionalists" in Sedgwick's sense.) ^
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Afghanistan and Central Asia
Posted at January 31, 2025 23:59 | permanent link