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A Typically Complex Essay About Imaginative Constructions (With a Sidelong Glance at Fantasy Fiction) and the Doubtful Wages of Conceptual Complexity
Jerry Cullum
We (the human species, that is) handle complexity poorly. We underconnect or we overconnect, and whichever we tend to do, we adroitly ignore evidence that tends to contradict our chosen preference. As I have written before, it is amazing that we learned to bracket so many misleading cues and clues and follow logical inferences as amazingly well as we have done. (Of course, those who do amazingly well in a few dozen departments of thought frequently aren’t worth a damn in all the other ones. Our species progresses only because there are so many of us that we can afford some wastage en route.)
We underconnect with regard to structurally but not phenomenologically similar types of cause. It took forever for cardiologists to decide that inflammation anywhere in the body contributes to certain types of heart disease, and that so do fluctuations in blood chemistry based on sleep interruptions. It isn’t just that one thing leads to another, as in the maxim about the loss of the horseshoe nail and the kingdom; it’s that inflamed gums and inflamed stomach lining are structurally identical in their effects on the circulatory system, even though their respective causes may or may not be autonomous.
More often, we have difficulty keeping things apart that seem structurally similar but are not. This failing is so prevalent, and so frequently obvious to observers, that wise counter-sayings have arisen to counsel against excessive skepticism: “Just because you’re clinically paranoid, it doesn’t mean that your separately arisen enemies are not forming secret alliances against you.”
Theoreticians like to tsk-tsk about those who project stereotypes upon the Other, but as a species we do seem to have trouble, planet-wide, with categories more complicated than Us and Them. At best, we create subcategories for the different types of Them (and the different types and conditions within Us).
It’s intriguing to follow the rapid development of ways of handling historical moments in which differences crop up faster than anybody can keep track of them. The Age of Exploration (in which Europeans were not the only ones out there exploring) was one such; the age of colonialism was, if anything, a still more subversive one, and the nineteenth and twentieth century Colonial Expositions seem to be simultaneously festivals celebrating exoticism and ways of handling the anxieties created by the sheer diversity of the world’s variously developed cultures. Despite the efforts to imagine a prettily unidirectional evolution of civilization, from illogical barbarity towards greater logical organization and comprehension and mastery of the environment and of the world in general—despite that model of human history, the several histories the colonizers were assiduously uncovering offered, at the very least, evidence that supported the older models of discovery and rise followed by total loss and lapse, as symbolized in such artworks as Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire.
In Blood and Mistletoe, Ronald Hutton shows how over the centuries, the various nations of the British Isles projected the concerns of their day onto the ambiguous evidence of what the ancient Druids had been and what Iron Age Britain was like. But the same kind of projection and metaphor-creation was going on vis-à-vis every element of history that challenged the imagination, whether the element was indigenous or alien.
It is interesting to compare Europe’s versions of Egyptomania with the racially-charged versions of Egypt that arose in the United States in the same time period. See Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania for an account that begins with accounts of mummies on display in the early days of the American republic, progresses through pre-Civil War disputes over the skin color of the Egyptians, and unexpectedly shades off into an analysis of nineteenth-century fantasies of subterranean civilizations accessed through holes in the polar regions—the linkage between the two topics being the imaginary (white) explorers’ failed attempt to maintain a coherent sense of control and superiority in moments of “excavation, discovery, revelation, and chronological collapse.” In these prototypical fictions, the self-confident explorers find that what they believed to be knowledge was incorrect in a few crucial regards, and that it was incorrect because of mental constructs based on unsuspected ignorance.
(H. P. Lovecraft, of course, looked at nineteenth-century archaeological evidence from Harran to Ponape in much the same way as the holes-in-the-poles writers, and created some remarkable fictional composites of racial imagining coupled with his version of what Freud terms the nineteenth century’s “narcissistic hurts” to human self-esteem. A bit earlier, Arthur Machen had likewise wrested some remarkable horror fiction out of late-Victorian difficulties with difference. And I am sure that historians of whom I am unaware have amply analyzed Lovecraft and Machen’s place in intellectual history.)
The full-blown Age of Colonialism was also the dawning of the Age of Comparison—as Joseph Campbell memorably pointed out in The Masks of God without noticing the full implications of that. And as I’ve just said, whether the topic was Druids or Dravidians, the same sets of data could be used to prop up the local sense of cultural superiority, beat the established religion over the head, or assert the glories and intrinsic superiority of an immutable tradition—a tradition which often was made up ad hoc as the traditionalists went along. (See Trevor-Roper’s The Invention of Scotland or Hobsbawn’s The Invention of Tradition for the relatively recent creation of some of the United Kingdom’s most immemorial customs and practices. See books like somebody-or-other’s popularizing How the Scots Invented the Modern World (a title presumably inspired by Thomas Cahill’s best-seller How the Irish Saved Civilization) for the contrary anti-traditionalist impulses, at the same time and in more or less the same geographic territory.)
To get back to Machen and Lovecraft: August Derleth was criticized for Christianizing Lovecraft’s schema—but more accurately, he dualized it into good vs. evil presences, helpers vs. harmers. (The much later practitioners of the Lovecraft Mythos have tried to address the cultural concerns of the twenty-first century, but that is another topic entirely.) And much other fantasy literature simply replicates the structure that Huston Smith discerns in the world’s religions: a human realm; a lower intermediate realm of fairy folk or goblins and/or other mischievous or helpful little or invisible creatures; a higher intermediate realm of daevas or angels or bodhisattvas or whatever; and the highest realm of the gods, or of the One, or of the former as the forecourt of the latter, whether the latter be the Creator or the Clear Light.
Now, as I briefly mentioned above, one thing that is interesting about our pluralistic times is that serious-minded fantasy fiction has finally caught up with all the problems of identity and difference. Neil Gaiman at least tried to incorporate all the pantheons in American Gods, and in fiction after fiction by other writers, superheroes who used to be separate and semiautonomous are today mixed, matched, and dropped into mash-ups as relatively contemporary as DJ mixes. This is not your father’s fantasy, even if con after con (in both senses of the word) still offers the same old simple-minded dreck. Simplicity sells, and complexity gives itself away.
But no matter how complex our imaginative structures get, we still aren’t as good as we might be in imagining how immensely many separate and internally unrelated—but externally related—stories might be going on at the same time. One reason to love Lovecraft’s opening sentence about the most blessed faculty of mind being its inability to correlate all its contents is this: that there might not be, as in a Pynchon novel, one hidden story linking up all the seemingly unrelated little stories; it might be that there are many unrelated stories making up the component parts of the One Big Story. Bernie Madoff didn’t need subprime mortgages or deregulated investment banking to wreck a substantial part of the global economy. But Iceland needed them to become a global economic power, and much of the world financial crisis can be handled under the old folktale category of “two thieves or con artists deceive one another, and each one’s deception destroys the other.” Except that the deception is also self-deception.
What makes Daniel Pinchbeck such a fascinatingly impossible character is his attempt to get it together while keeping it all apart. Like a good comparativist, he notices that there are many incompatible fantasies and fascinations abroad in the world; unlike a good comparativist, he explores the possibility that each fantasy has a basis in reality, but they are not necessarily the same bases. To read 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is to follow a trickster down the rabbit hole of plural realities that feed back into the one reality in which all of us live.
It’s just that Pinchbeck’s version of that reality incorporates the prospect that the world as we know it is right, with a few key additions and modifications that we may find preposterous: in Mr. Pinchbeck’s planet, we project our own childhood sexual traumas onto the world, just as Sigmund Freud told us we do, and we invent imaginary beings and then mistake them for objective realities, just as Carl Jung (and thinkers from the Hebrew Prophets onward) told us; but in spite of that, we might at least entertain the possibility of Terence McKenna’s assertion that a sentient alien life form would probably be one we wouldn’t recognize as such, and that the aliens now on earth are fungi existing primarily below ground and communicating with human beings through the brain’s capacity for hallucination; and we might entertain the possibility that we ourselves create the forms of the quasi-humanoid aliens supposedly engaged in abductions, but that we do so in a way closer to the creation of autonomous beings in Tibetan Buddhism, and that the emotions and lacks in those aliens are as real as anything else generated as an independently acting thought form in this field of illusion we call the world.
By the time Marcuse and Marx have found their way into Pinchbeck’s dizzyingly diverse mix, we expect to find the Red Queen lurking around the next corner. Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.
But as in the story Richard Hugo recounts in The Right Madness on Skye, there is a time to tell simple madmen, “Had you the right madness, bread would be secure.” And physics is not the only discipline in which the adequacy of theories can be argued in terms of whether or not they are crazy enough.
The problem lies in understanding that not just any old craziness will do the trick. And this is the same in fantasy fiction as in anthropology or history or interdisciplinary cultural studies, which may be other and more respectable species of fantasy fiction.
The traditions dwell in regions that have something in common with Philip Wheelwright’s (was it?) notion of “assertorial lightness,” neither denying unequivocally nor flatfootedly affirming, so that in the intermediate imaginal world, when one asks “Do these beings exist, or do they not exist?” the correct answer is “Yes.” But that “yes” is open to decades of experimental rigor.
Jerry Cullum
We (the human species, that is) handle complexity poorly. We underconnect or we overconnect, and whichever we tend to do, we adroitly ignore evidence that tends to contradict our chosen preference. As I have written before, it is amazing that we learned to bracket so many misleading cues and clues and follow logical inferences as amazingly well as we have done. (Of course, those who do amazingly well in a few dozen departments of thought frequently aren’t worth a damn in all the other ones. Our species progresses only because there are so many of us that we can afford some wastage en route.)
We underconnect with regard to structurally but not phenomenologically similar types of cause. It took forever for cardiologists to decide that inflammation anywhere in the body contributes to certain types of heart disease, and that so do fluctuations in blood chemistry based on sleep interruptions. It isn’t just that one thing leads to another, as in the maxim about the loss of the horseshoe nail and the kingdom; it’s that inflamed gums and inflamed stomach lining are structurally identical in their effects on the circulatory system, even though their respective causes may or may not be autonomous.
More often, we have difficulty keeping things apart that seem structurally similar but are not. This failing is so prevalent, and so frequently obvious to observers, that wise counter-sayings have arisen to counsel against excessive skepticism: “Just because you’re clinically paranoid, it doesn’t mean that your separately arisen enemies are not forming secret alliances against you.”
Theoreticians like to tsk-tsk about those who project stereotypes upon the Other, but as a species we do seem to have trouble, planet-wide, with categories more complicated than Us and Them. At best, we create subcategories for the different types of Them (and the different types and conditions within Us).
It’s intriguing to follow the rapid development of ways of handling historical moments in which differences crop up faster than anybody can keep track of them. The Age of Exploration (in which Europeans were not the only ones out there exploring) was one such; the age of colonialism was, if anything, a still more subversive one, and the nineteenth and twentieth century Colonial Expositions seem to be simultaneously festivals celebrating exoticism and ways of handling the anxieties created by the sheer diversity of the world’s variously developed cultures. Despite the efforts to imagine a prettily unidirectional evolution of civilization, from illogical barbarity towards greater logical organization and comprehension and mastery of the environment and of the world in general—despite that model of human history, the several histories the colonizers were assiduously uncovering offered, at the very least, evidence that supported the older models of discovery and rise followed by total loss and lapse, as symbolized in such artworks as Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire.
In Blood and Mistletoe, Ronald Hutton shows how over the centuries, the various nations of the British Isles projected the concerns of their day onto the ambiguous evidence of what the ancient Druids had been and what Iron Age Britain was like. But the same kind of projection and metaphor-creation was going on vis-à-vis every element of history that challenged the imagination, whether the element was indigenous or alien.
It is interesting to compare Europe’s versions of Egyptomania with the racially-charged versions of Egypt that arose in the United States in the same time period. See Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania for an account that begins with accounts of mummies on display in the early days of the American republic, progresses through pre-Civil War disputes over the skin color of the Egyptians, and unexpectedly shades off into an analysis of nineteenth-century fantasies of subterranean civilizations accessed through holes in the polar regions—the linkage between the two topics being the imaginary (white) explorers’ failed attempt to maintain a coherent sense of control and superiority in moments of “excavation, discovery, revelation, and chronological collapse.” In these prototypical fictions, the self-confident explorers find that what they believed to be knowledge was incorrect in a few crucial regards, and that it was incorrect because of mental constructs based on unsuspected ignorance.
(H. P. Lovecraft, of course, looked at nineteenth-century archaeological evidence from Harran to Ponape in much the same way as the holes-in-the-poles writers, and created some remarkable fictional composites of racial imagining coupled with his version of what Freud terms the nineteenth century’s “narcissistic hurts” to human self-esteem. A bit earlier, Arthur Machen had likewise wrested some remarkable horror fiction out of late-Victorian difficulties with difference. And I am sure that historians of whom I am unaware have amply analyzed Lovecraft and Machen’s place in intellectual history.)
The full-blown Age of Colonialism was also the dawning of the Age of Comparison—as Joseph Campbell memorably pointed out in The Masks of God without noticing the full implications of that. And as I’ve just said, whether the topic was Druids or Dravidians, the same sets of data could be used to prop up the local sense of cultural superiority, beat the established religion over the head, or assert the glories and intrinsic superiority of an immutable tradition—a tradition which often was made up ad hoc as the traditionalists went along. (See Trevor-Roper’s The Invention of Scotland or Hobsbawn’s The Invention of Tradition for the relatively recent creation of some of the United Kingdom’s most immemorial customs and practices. See books like somebody-or-other’s popularizing How the Scots Invented the Modern World (a title presumably inspired by Thomas Cahill’s best-seller How the Irish Saved Civilization) for the contrary anti-traditionalist impulses, at the same time and in more or less the same geographic territory.)
To get back to Machen and Lovecraft: August Derleth was criticized for Christianizing Lovecraft’s schema—but more accurately, he dualized it into good vs. evil presences, helpers vs. harmers. (The much later practitioners of the Lovecraft Mythos have tried to address the cultural concerns of the twenty-first century, but that is another topic entirely.) And much other fantasy literature simply replicates the structure that Huston Smith discerns in the world’s religions: a human realm; a lower intermediate realm of fairy folk or goblins and/or other mischievous or helpful little or invisible creatures; a higher intermediate realm of daevas or angels or bodhisattvas or whatever; and the highest realm of the gods, or of the One, or of the former as the forecourt of the latter, whether the latter be the Creator or the Clear Light.
Now, as I briefly mentioned above, one thing that is interesting about our pluralistic times is that serious-minded fantasy fiction has finally caught up with all the problems of identity and difference. Neil Gaiman at least tried to incorporate all the pantheons in American Gods, and in fiction after fiction by other writers, superheroes who used to be separate and semiautonomous are today mixed, matched, and dropped into mash-ups as relatively contemporary as DJ mixes. This is not your father’s fantasy, even if con after con (in both senses of the word) still offers the same old simple-minded dreck. Simplicity sells, and complexity gives itself away.
But no matter how complex our imaginative structures get, we still aren’t as good as we might be in imagining how immensely many separate and internally unrelated—but externally related—stories might be going on at the same time. One reason to love Lovecraft’s opening sentence about the most blessed faculty of mind being its inability to correlate all its contents is this: that there might not be, as in a Pynchon novel, one hidden story linking up all the seemingly unrelated little stories; it might be that there are many unrelated stories making up the component parts of the One Big Story. Bernie Madoff didn’t need subprime mortgages or deregulated investment banking to wreck a substantial part of the global economy. But Iceland needed them to become a global economic power, and much of the world financial crisis can be handled under the old folktale category of “two thieves or con artists deceive one another, and each one’s deception destroys the other.” Except that the deception is also self-deception.
What makes Daniel Pinchbeck such a fascinatingly impossible character is his attempt to get it together while keeping it all apart. Like a good comparativist, he notices that there are many incompatible fantasies and fascinations abroad in the world; unlike a good comparativist, he explores the possibility that each fantasy has a basis in reality, but they are not necessarily the same bases. To read 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is to follow a trickster down the rabbit hole of plural realities that feed back into the one reality in which all of us live.
It’s just that Pinchbeck’s version of that reality incorporates the prospect that the world as we know it is right, with a few key additions and modifications that we may find preposterous: in Mr. Pinchbeck’s planet, we project our own childhood sexual traumas onto the world, just as Sigmund Freud told us we do, and we invent imaginary beings and then mistake them for objective realities, just as Carl Jung (and thinkers from the Hebrew Prophets onward) told us; but in spite of that, we might at least entertain the possibility of Terence McKenna’s assertion that a sentient alien life form would probably be one we wouldn’t recognize as such, and that the aliens now on earth are fungi existing primarily below ground and communicating with human beings through the brain’s capacity for hallucination; and we might entertain the possibility that we ourselves create the forms of the quasi-humanoid aliens supposedly engaged in abductions, but that we do so in a way closer to the creation of autonomous beings in Tibetan Buddhism, and that the emotions and lacks in those aliens are as real as anything else generated as an independently acting thought form in this field of illusion we call the world.
By the time Marcuse and Marx have found their way into Pinchbeck’s dizzyingly diverse mix, we expect to find the Red Queen lurking around the next corner. Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.
But as in the story Richard Hugo recounts in The Right Madness on Skye, there is a time to tell simple madmen, “Had you the right madness, bread would be secure.” And physics is not the only discipline in which the adequacy of theories can be argued in terms of whether or not they are crazy enough.
The problem lies in understanding that not just any old craziness will do the trick. And this is the same in fantasy fiction as in anthropology or history or interdisciplinary cultural studies, which may be other and more respectable species of fantasy fiction.
The traditions dwell in regions that have something in common with Philip Wheelwright’s (was it?) notion of “assertorial lightness,” neither denying unequivocally nor flatfootedly affirming, so that in the intermediate imaginal world, when one asks “Do these beings exist, or do they not exist?” the correct answer is “Yes.” But that “yes” is open to decades of experimental rigor.
