![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in lieu of much else
Apr. 22nd, 2008 08:45 amI suppose I should return to my odd appeal to Tim Powers (not meant seriously, no matter how well Declare imaginatively reconstructs the feel of the Cold War and the odd biography of one of the century’s most famous Soviet agents…one wouldn’t want to impose such responsibility on the other novelist who wrote a much more realistically detailed fantastic novel of the Cold War that had only one significant variance from established fact).
I suppose I ought to appeal to, say, Umberto Eco or Salman Rushdie, who may yet write the novels I have in mind without knowing that I have begged for them to be written.
Here is my typically convoluted reasoning:
Beginning in 1970 (when I wrote "A Devout Meditation for Earth Day 1970, Whereon We Also Celebrate the Birthdays of Immanuel Kant and Vladimir Lenin"), I spent my late adolescence convinced that the world was not exactly rushing toward ruin right then, but would get there nonetheless, and just a little bit before I was ready for retirement.
Paul Ehrlich’s vision of The Population Bomb was too simple and too Malthusian (see Mike Davis’ correction of this, re how really bad financial decisions lead to even worse environmental decisions). But Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect pretty well laid it out flat, circa 1975: the planet’s resources were finite, and if the resources didn’t run out thanks to technological inventiveness, then the carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s factories and the various pollutants of the world’s automobiles would do us in via atmospheric changes. And if that were resolved by a turn to…but there were, Heilbroner thought, too many reasons why the world powers would find it inconvenient to turn to much of anything that would fix all the problems.
And Doris Lessing managed to put all these realizations forth, in science-fiction-like novels that delineated our dilemmas perfectly, but that were almost totally unreadable.
Mircea Eliade’s The Forbidden Forest was a bit like Lessing’s grumpy mysticism married to Robert Musil’s philosophical musings in The Man Without Qualities. Anyone who was propelled through Eliade’s novel by the sheer curiosity as to how the mysterious happenings and beliefs of the characters would work themselves out…but few enough people could be so propelled. The ones that were, learned a great deal about the history of Europe and some of the realities of the people who lived through that history. And that was, in the end, more compelling than the strangely named room and the car that either did or did not vanish, and the beliefs of this or that character regarding their ability to step out of history, or their delusional foreknowledge about which day history would come to clobber them.
And that novel had the advantage of leaving it deeply uncertain whether anything out of the ordinary was happening at all, or whether the only mystery lay in the overheated imaginations of the characters, plus a healthy dose of odd but meaningless coincidences.
So our problem right now is that nobody is taking it upon themselves to novelize our present apocalypse. Novels like The Road fantasize a Day After, but we are in the not yet inevitable Day Before, and our major characters are more like the sleepwalkers of Hermann Broch’s novel of that title, or the differently sleepwalking characters of the Collateral Campaign in Musil’s immense epic.
So I want somebody to write a Shikasta that people will actually want to read. That is a modest enough request to make of the writerly universe.
We need a single work that will wake people up to the politics and the physics of our condition simultaneously, and something like Lessing's metaphysical allegory is one way of getting past resistance to understanding, since the entertainment level appeals to readers regardless of their beliefs about the nature of reality. But the plot and style has to render the complex facts unforgettable.
That is not typically what a novelist sets out to do, and most of those who have set out to do that have failed to produce a memorable work of art. So maybe I am asking for the impossible.
But the rhetorical exercise such as this one that is also a backhanded essay is a venerable literary form, isn't it?
I suppose I ought to appeal to, say, Umberto Eco or Salman Rushdie, who may yet write the novels I have in mind without knowing that I have begged for them to be written.
Here is my typically convoluted reasoning:
Beginning in 1970 (when I wrote "A Devout Meditation for Earth Day 1970, Whereon We Also Celebrate the Birthdays of Immanuel Kant and Vladimir Lenin"), I spent my late adolescence convinced that the world was not exactly rushing toward ruin right then, but would get there nonetheless, and just a little bit before I was ready for retirement.
Paul Ehrlich’s vision of The Population Bomb was too simple and too Malthusian (see Mike Davis’ correction of this, re how really bad financial decisions lead to even worse environmental decisions). But Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect pretty well laid it out flat, circa 1975: the planet’s resources were finite, and if the resources didn’t run out thanks to technological inventiveness, then the carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s factories and the various pollutants of the world’s automobiles would do us in via atmospheric changes. And if that were resolved by a turn to…but there were, Heilbroner thought, too many reasons why the world powers would find it inconvenient to turn to much of anything that would fix all the problems.
And Doris Lessing managed to put all these realizations forth, in science-fiction-like novels that delineated our dilemmas perfectly, but that were almost totally unreadable.
Mircea Eliade’s The Forbidden Forest was a bit like Lessing’s grumpy mysticism married to Robert Musil’s philosophical musings in The Man Without Qualities. Anyone who was propelled through Eliade’s novel by the sheer curiosity as to how the mysterious happenings and beliefs of the characters would work themselves out…but few enough people could be so propelled. The ones that were, learned a great deal about the history of Europe and some of the realities of the people who lived through that history. And that was, in the end, more compelling than the strangely named room and the car that either did or did not vanish, and the beliefs of this or that character regarding their ability to step out of history, or their delusional foreknowledge about which day history would come to clobber them.
And that novel had the advantage of leaving it deeply uncertain whether anything out of the ordinary was happening at all, or whether the only mystery lay in the overheated imaginations of the characters, plus a healthy dose of odd but meaningless coincidences.
So our problem right now is that nobody is taking it upon themselves to novelize our present apocalypse. Novels like The Road fantasize a Day After, but we are in the not yet inevitable Day Before, and our major characters are more like the sleepwalkers of Hermann Broch’s novel of that title, or the differently sleepwalking characters of the Collateral Campaign in Musil’s immense epic.
So I want somebody to write a Shikasta that people will actually want to read. That is a modest enough request to make of the writerly universe.
We need a single work that will wake people up to the politics and the physics of our condition simultaneously, and something like Lessing's metaphysical allegory is one way of getting past resistance to understanding, since the entertainment level appeals to readers regardless of their beliefs about the nature of reality. But the plot and style has to render the complex facts unforgettable.
That is not typically what a novelist sets out to do, and most of those who have set out to do that have failed to produce a memorable work of art. So maybe I am asking for the impossible.
But the rhetorical exercise such as this one that is also a backhanded essay is a venerable literary form, isn't it?
