Ok, one last Star Wars post (just one tiny wafer, sir…) and then I’ll return to more serious issues. (Sorry to those of you who read this blog looking for something other than a cadet branch of Star Wars geekery…)
In the comments on my last post, Dan talks about “nerd hermeneutics”, about the ways in which a fiction like Star Wars invites a particular kind of reader to make it into more than it is, to fill in its gaps, invent coherencies, see themes that are only barely there. I think the key attribute that it is “in the text” that invites this labor is that Star Wars, like Middle-Earth, self-presents as a “total world” text, whose referentiality largely turns inward.
While nerd hermeneutics can be serious, even pompous, as it goes about its business, it’s ultimately a form of interpretative gymnastics, a system-inventing game. The skills and passion it requires are also not really that different from non-nerd hermeneutics: the difference is less in the intellectual substance of the work as in the sociology and importance of the two practices.
The biggest mistake that some non-nerd hermeneuts make in looking on with curled lip is to assume that the work of nerd hermeneutics is about wish fulfillment, about fashioning universes in which we would prefer to live. There’s some of that going on, to be sure, and I mentioned it in an earlier post. Jedis, wizards, nobility, superheroes are attractive figures to adolescent geeks who imagine themselves as possessing inner talents and merits that are scorned or marginalized in the wider culture. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned the one issue of Scott McCloud’s astonishing comic Zot in this context before, but during his “Earth Stories” arc, in issue #31, the story of the character Ronnie is so eerily on target that it unnerved me and evidently others: McCloud comments that it has led some readers to accuse him of “spying on them”. Ronnie’s an alienated and very serious, almost humorless, geek who dreams of writing comics. He’s had a day full of teenage melodrama and at the end of it he slides into a chair and imagines a sort of Cyclops-and-Phoenix against the whole world apocalypse scene while listening to bombastic symphonic music. The imaginary world Ronnie slips into magnifies and ennobles his adolescent angst.
But a substantial amount of nerd hermeneutics is not about wish fulfillment, quite the contrary. Like David Brin, the more hermeneutical work I do on Star Wars, the less I want to live in its universe at any time. In the end, I don’t like the Jedi at all, much less wish I were one. The way I “read” them by filling in the interpretative cracks (sometimes yawning gaps) in Lucas’ vision? An ascetic order of militant monks, celibates, clueless about the real world, smug, hierarchical (and worse yet, hereditary), ripping young children away from their families. If being Jedi were something that anyone with sufficient will, desire, and training could be, that would be one thing, but instead it seems to be something like being a mutant, you have to be born with the right supply of midichlorians.
The same certainly goes for Middle-Earth. In Middle-Earth, being morally right is largely about living within the contours of the role that the gods have decreed for you, accepting your place in life, bearing the burdens designated for you. It’s a marvelous “total world” to do hermeneutical work on, and a rousing story, but I would find it a horrible place to actually live.
This is the thing about total-world fictions: the pleasure of the text lies in filling out the world in its own terms. I would be profoundly offended if the upcoming film version of the C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books soft-pedaled or discarded the overt Christian content of those books. Not because I strongly identify with that content particularly (though The Last Battle is the most appealing presentation of death and apocalypse I’ve ever seen from a Christian thinker), but because it’s part of the total-world rules that Lewis set out. It’s the necessary foundation of his fiction, and from that foundation, a nerd hermeneutician could ask many interesting things. Say, for example, how the Calormens got into that world, and if they’re Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, why they weren’t equally threatening to the White Witch. Or for that matter, where all the nasty evil creatures in the Witch’s army come from, given that she’s the only evil creature in Narnia at the Creation. And so on.
That I would defend those foundations as integral to the fictions built upon them has nothing to do with my imaginative desires, with envisioning a world in which I would like to live. I’m hard-pressed to think of a total-world fiction that I like in which I would actually prefer to live, in fact. Superhero comics? No way: entire cities, families, neighborhoods get wasted by psychotics, aliens, disasters on a regular basis, and human institutions are more or less beholden to an unelected elite of superpowered people. Hierarchical medieval or science-fantasy worlds? No, for a lot of reasons. I’m actually hard-pressed to think of a total-world fiction where the protagonists are fully human characters and the abiding themes are about the achievement of self, the exploration and achievement of individual freedom, the reform or transformation of the world, the building of better societies, the cultivation of pleasure, the sacrifice of oneself for the good of others, or any of the other things that mobilize secular modern humans for good (and ill). Earthsea, maybe.
How about the “His Dark Materials” trilogy by Phillip Pullman?
I wouldn’t want to live in his universe, no, though the struggles and motivations of many of his characters are designed to be much more friendly to the aspirations of modern secular humans.
Does the “Star Trek” universe count?
No, because it’s not a total world fiction. It occasionally poorly simulates one, and over time the collective labor of many fans has attempted to make it one, but Star Trek’s referentiality often points outside its own text. DS9 was kind of an exception.
Yes, because I’d be willing to live in the Federation, even the pod-people era of Next Generation.
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Babylon 5 counts. I’d live there, even with all the bad stuff that goes down. Like life, only with aliens and shit.
What about Robin Hobb’s Liveship series? She manages to create a very flawed and imperfect world, but one in which people are geniune, and striving for improvement. Social mobility starts off somewhat limited, but seems to be (I’m only 2/3 through it) about to expand rather a lot.
Part of what might be going on here, too, is that most worlds in which nerd hermeneutics are appealing are necessarily worlds in conflict– otherwise, the stories wouldn’t be of much interest, would they? So we have to look past the “geez, who’d want to live THEN?” reaction to global catastrophe/war/missing socks/whatever and decide whether or not the world post-conflict (or pre-, but then you’d have to live through it) is interesting enough.
Hmm. Not seriously: Cities In Flight — you get to live in NYC, but it flies around the galaxy. Until the Universe ends, which might come at an inconvenient moment for you.
Greg Egan-land?
I just want to know how we wound up in The Space Merchants….
I’d think the Culture series of Iain M. Banks should qualify.
Yes, Banks’ Culture is a great example. Humanistic, quasi-utopian, but also morally complex, arguably even corrupt in certain ways. Recognizable but also better than the world in which we live.
Your comment about the “filling in the gaps” reminded me of a thought I’ve had a few times about Star Wars, and Revenge of the Sith in particular. I almost feel that the reason the whole Star Wars cycle attracts so much abuse is that we expect it to work in certain ways like a novel, and instead it works like an old-style epic. That is, a lot of the power in, say, the Aeneid or the Iliad is that there are lots and lots of gaps. Characters are sketched in outline, motives are disposed of in a sentence or two, and dialogue is formulaic and cliched. That’s becuase none of that is the point. Those epic poems were bare-bones outlines of the story that the listeners could fill in for themselves, augmented by truly gorgeous linguistic riffs and massive passages of purple prose.
In contrast, a novel tends to try for extreme detail. Characters examined and described in great detail, long investigations into motivation, realistic fleshed-out dialogue. Rather than being a sketch of a story with artistic flourishes, a novel aims to be the complete story in itself, without the reader having to add too much himself (at least as far as characterization and plot go). Two people who’ve read the same novel should be able to come to an agreement on what the characters are like and, in large part, why they do what they do. This isn’t always the case, but when motivations are left ambiguous it’s deliberate and seen as a departure–it’s noticeable. In contrast, in the epic you’re just told “Achilles did so-and-so” and left to fill in, from your knowledge of the culture in which he lived and your own perceptions of the world, why he did it.
Star Wars, and RotS especially, seems to fit this epic mold. RotS doesn’t explain, really, why Anakin did what he did; but I feel like I understand it anyway, because I fill it in with the part of me that could succumb to the same temptations. Lucas doesn’t give you a fully explored character and tell you “this is why he did it”; instead, he gives you a set of forces acting on Anakin that push him in that direction, and leaves you to decide for yourself 1 why these forces act so powerfully, and 2 which of them were important. For me, it’s the whole idea of “I have the power to fix things.” At the end of the movie, when Anakin suggest to Padme that they overthrow Palpatine, seize control, and establish a peaceful rule over the galaxy, and make things the way they ought to be–that spoke to me powerfully. If not for the truly horrendus things Anakin was doing to try to get there, I could see myself making the same choice–especially if a powerful and trusted authority figure spent a couple years putting me in a position where I would make that choice.
But if that one doesn’t speak to you, there are other justifications you can choose. He did it to save Padme. He did it because he felt like Palpatine respected him, and the Jedi Council were just using him. He did it because he valued the institutions of the Republic over the institutions of the Jedi. He did it because the Council violated his trust. This ambiguity is really nice in some ways, because it lets you read the story that touches you most powerfully. But it comes at the expense of a strongly characterized, novel-like construction. Lucas just plots a basic story, then throws in a lot of the Hollywood equivalent of purple prose–special effects.
Sorry about the really long post. I’m not sure I entirely believe this, but I know I don’t disbelieve it. I’ve been a big fan of your blog for about a year now, and I’m really curious what you think. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m certainly not unhappy with tons of Star Wars posts; I think the first thing I did when I got back from RotS was check your blog to see if you had any thoughts on it up yet.
The future interstellar society in Norman Spinrad’s novels The Void Captain’s Tale and Chile of Fortune is, I think, pretty totalizing even though it is just used in two books that I am aware of. I also think it is intended to be utopian while still leaving room for humanly interesting plots and characters. (Utopian not in the sense of perfect or close to perfect, but in the sense of more or less as good as can realistically be expected of human society.) Based on my sense of his writings (I don’t know him personally), it also appears to be tailored to Norman Spinrad’s personal tastes. I have some sense that Spinrad would find living in any utopian society, even an imperfect one constructed to his taste, a bit boring, but, then again, he moved to Paris and, I believe, has been happily living there for quite a while.
Gary Farber: This may be obvious, but we live in The Space Merchants because it was written as a work of nonfiction reportage (albeit with some tailfins and chrome tacked on).
though The Last Battle is the most appealing presentation of death and apocalypse I’ve ever seen from a Christian thinker
I quite agree. In general Christianity never seems so appealing, or so coherent, or so morally plausible to me as it does when Lewis is presenting it– in Narnia, in Screwtape, and in the apologia.
Say, for example, how the Calormens got into that world, and if they’re Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, why they weren’t equally threatening to the White Witch.
Yeah, I think that was alwasy problematic. It seems like the polity or Narnia operates under special rules relative to the world of Narnia. The talking animals and other assorted magical beasties don’t spread south, and the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve are only especially important when they come north. Probably tied to the especially-intense relationship the polity of Narnia has with Aslan– they are, in some world-appropriate way, his chosen people. He ordained founding matters about it in a way analogous to God directly ordaining rules of governance for Biblical Israel– rules that Christianity holds to have been binding then-there but not to bind elsewhere or elsewhen.
Or for that matter, where all the nasty evil creatures in the Witch’s army come from, given that she’s the only evil creature in Narnia at the Creation
That worries me less, since the Wood between the Worlds (is that right) allows movement around, and for that matter since random interworld portals show up between Earth and Narnia. If Men can wander in, why not Werewolves, from whatever world they’re native too? (They could also be creations of Tash; I don’t know that Tash is ever said to operate under the Morgoth-Sauron restriction about only perverting not creating.)
Tash is one of those things I think about in world terms with Narnia. He seems, if anything, retro-fitted. It’s rather as if Satan wasn’t around when Aslan created Narnia, but he sort of ambled in eventually. What Aslan tells Emeth after he’s gone through the Stable Door suggests that in the Narnia/Aslan universe, Satan is God’s equal and opposite, not a fallen part of God’s creation, but nothing before The Last Battle really suggests that except for the regular influx of evil creatures.
Here’s another Narnia puzzler: how much time elapsed between the creation of Narnia and the beginning of the White Witch’s reign? How many kings and queens descended from Frank and Helen were there in that interim? If the kings and queens of Archenland are descended from Frank and Helen, why aren’t they the proper rulers of Narnia rather than Caspian’s line? (I think we know why the Pensevies don’t create a dynasty of their own: it would require Lewis to admit that they had sex while adults in Narnia, which gets him into some weird territory. Though Susan appears to have flirted on the edge of that, judging from The Horse and His Boy.
I think we know why the Pensevies don’t create a dynasty of their own: it would require Lewis to admit that they had sex while adults in Narnia, which gets him into some weird territory. Which would put them, on their return to Earth, in exactly the situation the Tom Hanks character is in at the end of Big. The end of that movie always struck me as one of the oddest of wish-fulfillment fantasies: you become an adult, try out sex, and when sex makes your life too difficult, you just go back to being a kid again.
But I digress.
In creating Tash as a real being, not simply a imaginary false god created by humans, Lewis is clearly following Milton in Paradise Lost, where all the gods of the Mediterranean world are revealed to be demons, that is, fallen angels in the service of the Daddy Fallen Angel, Satan.
” In creating Tash as a real being, not simply a imaginary false god created by humans, Lewis is clearly following Milton in Paradise Lost, where all the gods of the Mediterranean world are revealed to be demons, that is, fallen angels in the service of the Daddy Fallen Angel, Satan.”
This predates Milton. A lot of early Christians held that the pagan gods were real, but that they were demons. See Augustine, City of God, for example.