the ramble dump

'The most logical way is to think that the death god exists.'

I recently discovered the Death Note franchise, apparently very popular worldwide, via an interesting tie with the title logo on it that somebody was wearing in a photograph. It's one of many Japanese franchises, it seems, that started out as a manga, received an anime adaptation and made its way to live-action films, soon to be needlessly remade again for a Western audience.

I got hold of the live-action film first, or at least the first part of it (they split it into two), expecting a pretty awful adaptation but feeling, for some reason, in the mood for just that. But though it felt like a TV production at times, mostly in special effects, and though I'd managed to get a horrible dubbed version which made it very hard to take seriously (as dubbing always does), it was better than I expected, and about halfway through the second one, The Last Name (after a switch to subtitles), I realised that I was actually really enjoying it.

The reason for that is genuinely clever writing, and a plot that feels like it really earns all of its twists and developments, without pulling its advancements out of thin air or resorting to the abuse of narrative tricks like misdirection.

The premise of the film is that a college-aged boy, Light Yagami, finds a Death Note dropped by a shinigami--a death god--called Ryuk. The Death Note is a notebook that causes the death of anyone whose name is written inside it as long as the user has the face of that person in mind. It contains a list of written rules specifying the terms and conditions regarding how exactly it can be used, with stuff like time limits, detailing the way a person dies, etc; all kinds of arbitrary rules resembling those of a kid making up a game as he goes along, with the primary purpose of imposing some limitations so the concept can be integrated and doesn't become immediately unwieldy and the story over very quickly.

With this context set, the story then develops into a continually inverted cat-and-mouse game between Light Yagami and the equally intelligent mysterious detective known only as L, who is trying to track him down. Obviously the concept behind the Death Note opens the story up for a lot of big questions about murder, justice, morality and so on, but the battle between these two characters, the ongoing attempts by each to outwit the other, is where this story really finds its grip.

And it works so well because it uses the rules of the Death Note (and one or two others given by the shinigami) to frame it, providing all kinds of stuff for the characters to get around or deduce or to use in imaginative ways. Characters are constantly testing the boundaries and making sacrifices, but always operating strictly by this Death Note logic, however arbitrary that logic might be. It's a what-if scenario that almost invites the viewer to take part, because we're free to try and figure out for ourselves how we might act in each situation and what the next move might be.

The result of all this is that the plot develops with some integrity, consistency and thus believability, becoming wholly immersive even though Light does have an obviously computer-generated shinigami hovering over his shoulder all the time. The story sucks you in anyway, and whatever relevance there is to the obvious big themes of morality and justice comes to arise naturally, making the whole thing much more honest and worthwhile.

This kind of sums up for me, in a sense, the strength of the sort of storytelling that isn't a slave to the kind of realism that demands a world exactly like ours, whether this fictional world logic comes to be the focused object of the plot, like the Death Note or Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics or the Loom of Fate in that ridiculous film Wanted, or whether it functions as a wider truth of the world, like magic in a Tolkien-type fantasy or the existence of anthropomorphic aliens in a space opera. These worlds, these what-if scenarios, are a way of framing our experience that allows us to transcend the literal facts of how things really, physically are in order to focus in different ways on those aspects of experience that make us tell stories in the first place. And this is something all stories do to some extent, by virtue of plotting at all.

Death Note does it well.

Labels: i am the ramblemaster, morality, rabbit-hole theory, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:14 PM 0 comments

[Note: this was majorly revised 19/08/08. Before that, it was very unclear and underdeveloped and made quite a few leaps in logic that didn't entirely make sense. I'm kind of hoping that nobody ever saw it, and that this new version is a bit more acceptable.]

I am an English student. English has always been my favourite subject. When my brother trotted off to Manchester to do Physics, we used to butt heads over it all the time. My main argument was that Physics was boring; his was that English, and later Philosophy, were wishy-washy subjects, and that Physics encompassed everything, and that Physics was therefore the most important. I continued to argue that Physics was boring. And it was, back in school.

I know that this was a pretty immature view for me to take of Physics, but I still object to the kind of claims that my brother made. Here at the University of Nottingham, I've been faced with attitudes along similar lines. Certain physicists have declared the study of literature pointless. Clans of scientifically-minded people have tittered and guffawed when they have realised they were in the midst of a Philosophy class. It is massively uncalled for.

The main argument around science-the-subjects versus, specifically, English-the-subject seems to be one of usefulness, and how students of the former are dismissing the latter on the basis of, say, a novel being subjective and fictional and therefore a complete waste of time in spending a degree on. On the other hand, science is supposedly much more sensible and worthwhile because it strives to be objective. Much of physics, for example, is grounded in mathematics and supported by empirical evidence, which gives it the apparent prestige of being pure, solid facts about the universe. Right, so. As it's mostly the physicists I know who seem so rested on their pedestals, I'm going to use them as my main example while I attempt to call such individuals out for being close-minded.

Let's first address the objectivity versus subjectivity deal. Maths, as a form of logic, is extremely useful. Empirical evidence is also valuable, and when this logic is applied to it, we can attempt to construct some pretty coherent theories about the universe. Yes, these theories try to be based on objectivity, but however much they may be supported by validating evidence, how many of these theories contain speculation, educated guesses and offered interpretations of the universe? How far could science get if they didn't? And, pause for thought: how is this so different from literature? By this I mean that both fundamentally require the construction of a narrative based on human observation, whatever logic or specific methodology you may use to support it. The same is true of philosophy, of history, of many other subjects. Both science and literature involve the construction of such narratives from the human perspective: they are, in their different ways, based on human experience--so to begin with, it's worth bearing in mind that science will never be completely objective because we're essentially working from a subjective starting point: our own minds. The evidence may be actually out there, but the whole concept of empirical evidence is that we're verifying its existence based on our own experiences with it--our own observations.

The pursuit of scientific truth, physical truth, is a noble endeavour and has proved to be incredibly useful, but any scientist who really understands his or her subject has to acknowledge the part that subjectivity and storytelling play in the construction of theories, and that establishing 'facts' is always contingent on the reliability of such empirical evidence. I know that rigorous checks can be made to ensure that such evidence is reliable as possible, but science is an ongoing thing and in the meantime, as has been demonstrated countless times, theories of the world can be very coherent and seemingly much supported, but all it takes is the tiniest bit of new evidence to show that what was previously considered fact was actually a not-quite-accurate fiction based on the limits of human perspective up until that point.

This does not, of course, validate the practice of literary analysis in any way. Literature employs no such rigorous scientific methodology, and for whatever part temporary fictions might play in the scientific process, it would be ridiculous to claim that literature is valuable or useful in the same ways as science. But they're different subjects for a reason. Science, as mentioned, strives for objectivity, whereas literature and literary theory do to much less of an extent, if at all--but this is because they're searching for different kinds of meaning. When we come to analyse literature, the entire methodology is different because we're looking for something different--applying to a novel the scientific method, or the quantitative logic of mathematics, may indeed get you nowhere, but makes no sense to require from literature, or any of the arts, scientific meaning. Science can, to an ever-increasing extent, explain the how and the why of the universe. It may explain its origins, our origins, why we act the way we act -- but it can't explain what any of this means to us. That's the realm of the arts and humanities.* This isn't to say that a scientific approach towards literature is always going to be useless--a science fiction novel that speculates the possibility of a future world could be evaluated for likelihood based on our current scientific knowledge. But to insist on a solely scientific approach to literature is...well, missing the point. In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for example, it's not the fact that magic corrupts to which we can attribute much meaning, in relation to our own world--it's the suggestion that power does. The meaning in a world of fiction, or a work of art, will always be figurative. It is representative, rather than physical.

And again, the lack of scientifically verifiable truth in these representations does not mean they are academically worthless--even though it's still an illustration rather than anything physically real. To claim that is like dismissing an illustration or a diagram in a physics textbook. It might be a simplified or distorted or exaggerated representation of the universe, but that doesn't mean it's useless. And that's what literary criticism is all about: deciding whether something that the book or poem represents is oversimplified, biased or distorted, or if it does offer us a useful way of looking at something, maybe even encouraging us to look at this thing in a way that we haven't done before. None of it can establish fact, but it can make important suggestions, ones that we can still apply to our own lives in a way that might apply to our view of humanity in general or our own feelings specifically. Science is the discipline for determining the 'truth' of a physical universe--but if you're going to insist on looking for physical truth in a novel or a painting, it's your own fault if you get nothing out of it.

As for my brother's claim (made a couple of years ago now, whether he still believes this or not) that the 'humanities' are, by definition, too limited for focusing only on humanity--can it really be argued anyway that the aims of science don't ultimately come back to ourselves? Even if science, say, sketches out an aim of preserving an animal species, it comes back to issues of our responsibility. It makes no sense to sever the human aspect from the aims of science. If you're going to argue for the 'usefulness' or 'importance' of science, surely you can't be referring to the construction of some abstract realm of knowledge that just sits there. In this case, therefore, the argument against the focus on humanity doesn't really apply.

I do think it's also worth pursuing knowledge for the sake of itself, purely because we find the world around us interesting. That's part of life too, and the arts do it by the moundful. But it remains true that some questions of science -- for example, facts about distant galaxies -- might be considered academically interesting while arguably having no bearing whatsoever on how we live our lives. Not everything has to be about the direct utilitarianism of something, and there are loads of different functions and purposes to all the different subjects that this rant won't have covered -- more than anything else, I do the subject 'English' because I enjoy it -- but my point is that in terms of this direct 'usefulness' or 'importance' that some of my sciency friends seem to argue for, science can't always claim the highground. Literature, the arts, philosophy...they're all about human interpretion of the universe, which makes them, as already argued, in a way not so different from science. But in often being more focused on what is important to us, they are not only, as a whole, just as relevant as the sciences, but I would argue sometimes even more so. Having everything explained in purely technical terms isn't necessarily meaningful or useful, and it definitely isn't all-encompassing.*

And for all those people who think that literary criticism is just about making stuff up: yes, literature and literary theory can be self-indulgent waffle. Art can be pretentious; but science can be quack. The fact that meaning can be subjective in art, and derived from a novel, say, even if it wasn't explicitly intended by the author (and a lot of literary theory examines precisely this idea), does not mean that it can't be meaningful at all. If, however, someone writes an essay and they are consciously making the whole thing up, or trying to be overly academic or obtuse, and if there really is nothing to it, then the practise of literary theory will, or at least should, reject it as the pretentious crap it is.

I'm hoping it's clear enough that I'm not trying to put science down. I mean, I love science. Some of my best friends are scientists. But those of them who seek to dismiss the arts have so far not been able to do so on valid or non-hypocritical grounds. Science isn't more important than the arts and the arts aren't more important than the sciences. They are complementary, and the distinction between them is overexaggerated anyway.* The arts have often been lampooned for their multitude of pretentious twats, and probably with good reason. But I think the snobs among the scientists need to get over themselves too.


* This fat footnote exists just to bring together those three statements that have been asterisk'd. For the first asterisk, in relation to 'what it means to us', here's an example: the study of biology and evolutionary psychology may go a long way to explaining how and why we came to feel an emotion like sympathy, but as soon as you start talking about the implications of this technical explanation on how we are now forced to view ourselves, we're into the area of philosophy. At this point, to reinforce asterisk two, it has then gone beyond a purely technical account. Literature might then come in as somebody's chosen form of expression for such an idea.

As for asterisk three, I would argue that the division between the subjects is partially arbitrary anyway: even between the sciences themselves, physics can only explain so far before it becomes a matter of chemistry, and in turn, biology. In this vast spectrum of human endeavour, the sciences would gradually become social studies, which would in turn become the humanities. The arts can operate as media of expression for all of the above. In any case, each offer very specific areas of study. Even if you argue that chemistry and biology could be counted as subcategories of physics, as an area of academic study -- as 'Physics' -- this is just not true. It stops short or has limited overlap before it becomes something that you are not studying, while the Chemists and Biologists are. Likewise, Literature could not exist without Linguistics, but the study of Linguistics does not encompass Literature. No subject has dominion.

Labels: i am the ramblemaster, literature, science, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:37 PM 0 comments

As a sort of a continuation of this post, which was about the worth of stories beyond entertainment, and possibly linked to this post, which discusses what might and might not count as 'art', I was thinking about the complexity of some stories, with all the metaphors, inferences and allusions that they can be filled with. My main question, as I was reading all about this kind of thing in the introduction to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the lecture and seminar next week, was: to what end?

Returning to all the talk in that first linked post of stories being able to suggest, the most obvious answer would probably be that all the figurative language and symbolic descriptions and motifs and so on can, obviously, be used beyond their simple function as poetic narrative to illustrate the kinds of things that a book or film or play is considering, using comparisons that may be effective enough to throw a new light or a different perspective on the subject matter.

Of course, there will always be some manipulation occurring here on the part of the author. This is why, for all the importance of receptivity and open-mindedness when it comes to art, the practice of literary criticism and the like can be a useful thing. The author is likely to be playing with the perceptions, preconceptions or ideas of the reader or audience to illicit a certain response -- this is one of the most powerful features of storytelling -- and it's up to the reader to be equally open-minded and rational enough to be able to identify where he or she might be the subject of this manipulation; and then to decide if the way in which the author is provoking this response might, as the author thinks it does, have something to it. As well as identifying manipulation, a critical approach can be used to mine the worth of a story. After consideration, you might feel that a certain comparison yields some truth; that the alternative perspective offered might just be of some value.

I've already mentioned my wariness of allegory. Allegory is the use of an extended metaphor to get a point across. But if I don't object to the potential philosophical value of figurative language in general, how can I object to allegory? What's the difference beyond levels of subtlety? Well, the extension of metaphor in this way, after representing something in a certain way as all metaphors do, then has the clear intention of drawing a conclusion from it for you. As Tolkien said in a passage I've already quoted, allegory is all about the 'purposed domination of the author' -- it sets out to make your mind up for you. The more subtle use of figurative language and symbology, as I've already said, is not without its potential for manipulation, but there's more freedom for the reader, more room for interpretation. The further you try to extend a metaphor, the less suggestive and the more controlling of the interpretation you're being, and it's much more likely that the comparison is then distorted or oversimplified as a result.

There are other ways in which inference can be abused. When I was thinking about Wilde's opinion of art, I mentioned pretentiousness. That could be applied here in the cases of those who will infer and allude and present empty motifs just for the sake of seeming clever. Poetic pretentiousness can often be found in the use of 'purple prose', by those who attempt to use over-elaborate and extremely flowery language to add prestige or suchlike to their work, and this can then be taken a step further by those who use similar methods to portray themselves as profound. When an author seems to think that the esotericism of a text is an indicator of how philosophically deep it is and rattles off some lengthy, convoluted metaphor supposedly, for example, penetrating the fundamental human condition (or something like that), we would have to question how someone could talk for so long out of their own arse.

Here's another form this pretence might take. For this next one, I'm going to use an example that could be argued either way. I seem to use these films as an example for a lot of things, but anyway: many have claimed that the Matrix films are very 'philosophical' in nature. The story is undoubtedly packed with a thousand inferences, references and allusions to all kinds of philosophers and different schools of philosophical thought in varying degrees of subtlety; but maybe all these things were dropped in merely to give the illusion that the films had philosophical depth (which would have been ironic, considering the subject of the films). Were the Wachowski Brothers trying too hard to make the films seem 'intelligent', or do the Matrix films really give us something to think about?

As fun a game as it might be for us to successfully identify all the various references and incorporated symbology in the films, and as clever as it might make the audience and the filmmakers feel, it may be an ultimately pointless activity. An argument often given in defence of the films is something along the lines of, 'You didn't enjoy the films because you haven't attempted to appreciate all the philosophy behind it', to which the retort is usually, 'You need to get out more.' It's hard to say how much genuine philosophy is involved in the Matrix films and how much is just there to give the impression of it (I'd say it seems a bit of both -- I think it illustrates a lot of philosophical ideas pretty well and gives us a lot to think about, but there are times when it feels like a bit of a symbological overload or philosophy for the look of it).

But in these films, and in many other films and books and so on, why require the audience or reader to have to look for these things? Why bury them so that they have to be dug out? This was already sort of answered by the allegory issue: this way, the 'answer' isn't being thrown at the audience. The fact that the readers of a book or the viewers of a film have to do more of the work invites them in and encourages them to think about it more for themselves. It encourages different interpretations and a more critical evaluation, meaning that, if it's there, the useful and relevant stuff can be properly discovered and appreciated. To use a Matrix analogy (which is, aptly, in itself a reference to something else), tumbling down the rabbit hole and having a thorough look around is surely preferable to having the rabbit come up and give you his potentially biased account.

Labels: allegory, cyberpunk, i am the ramblemaster, language, oscar wilde, philosophy, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:33 PM 0 comments

And so, like many other things this year, the Harry Potter series has come to an end. I finished Book 7 last night. In many ways, it is my favourite.

As you may have noticed, a lot of hype surrounds the Harry Potter franchise. I got into the series when I was nine or ten or thereabouts, when two, possibly three, of the books were out. It's hard to place where exactly Harry Potter became a phenomenon. It just sort of...happened. The hype has worked in an odd sort of way for me, putting me off slightly as the franchise began to reach public saturation point, but at the same time I wonder if, after all this time, I would have followed the series to the end of it wasn't so culturally prominent.

Elsewhere, hype's had the effect it always has. Something good has been blown out of all reasonable proportion by fans, publishers, journalists and critics alike, reaching fever pitch as Warner Bros get their sticky fingers into it. Insensible amounts of both merchandise and fanfic have been produced. The backlash follows, the slightly peevish detractors hastening to point out that Potter isn't really deserving of quite so much hysteria, but that's the way hype works. Critical scrutiny intensifies, a few start to pull apart and denounce the the books; the screaming mass of young fans reacts, accusing all who dare to utter a word against J.K. Holy as bitter or jealous or both. And so on and so forth.

They are, say I, good books. They're no works of art, and their main virtue is being so very readable, but while some critics have diminished it to being simply 'useful' or 'saleable' prose, I think that unduly discredits the fact that J.K. Rowling can spin a very good story. She strikes a happy medium between descriptive and natural prose with the result of a style that is charming enough to keep us hooked, just like the world she writes about. It might not have the same quaint, stilted and respectfully 'literary' charm as an author like Enid Blyton, but as a coming-of-age story, the more natural approach is probably more meaningful to the modern, non-gingerbeer drinking reader.

Rowling's appeal comes not from her magical world as such, which is only as original as any other magical world, but the fact that she makes it into such a parallel of our own, with the principles behind even the most fantastical elements or the darkest magic grounded firmly in this world (love, greed, power, death etc: problems, experiences and temptations we all have to deal with). Then there's the chocolate frogs with collectible cards, Quidditch, Apparition tests, and a dozen other direct parallels, which, while not especially imaginative, are interesting enough takes on the norm and make the wizards more like real people, and the students like real students. There are times when the similarity to our own world becomes almost bleak and depressing, as with the bureaucratic Ministry of Magic; and it's the older, dustier Hogwartian magic that really holds the interest of the reader and the characters, because that's where the adventures, dangers, twists and turns occur. And all the while, Harry suffers real, teenaged problems too. Which are, truthfully, the less interesting bits for me, but their inclusion is understandable and Rowling usually manages to strike a good balance (although it very nearly tips in Book 5).

One of the best things about the books is Rowling's ability to create warm and fuzzy moments when portraying friends and family, especially with little things like Mrs Weasley and her Christmas jumpers. In a way, these boardingschoolish portrayals do sometimes feel like they're harking back to some cosy, bygone time, but it doesn't make them feel any less genuine. One thing my sister pointed out was how the writing style has changed over the course of the series: in the earlier books, Rowling hadn't quite managed to shake off the tone of traditional children's literature, and some of the dialogue was very Blytonesque, but this helped to add to the charm, novelty and wonder experienced by the characters at that age. As the kids got older, this would probably have started to feel a bit inappropriate, and the writing has accordingly become increasingly natural, increasingly dark and, at times, increasingly soapy.

Sometimes the dark, danger or peril does seem a bit forced, as with the lake of dead people at the end of Book 6 (which distractedly reminded me of a similar scene in The Two Towers anyway), or the death count of significant characters in the final battle for Hogwarts in Book 7, but for the most part Rowling deals with these things with a little more narrative subtlety (despite the extremely irritating 'Someone dies in this book!' promotion that's been used). Rowling also writes some fantastically animated action scenes, one of my favourites being the chaotic Quidditch World Cup match in Book 4, and Book 7 provided a series of brilliantly action-packed excursions to various places. Again, though, that final Hogwarts battle may have benefited from a little more restraint, but having what seemed like every single surviving character returning into the fray was just as awesome as it was ridiculous.

Another strong point in the series has been the complex plotting and character development through revelations and backstory, which returned spectacularly in Book 7 after a rather linear Book 6. Just like having everyone returning for that last battle, it was a nice touch having obscurely mentioned characters like Grindelwald, Bathilda Bagshot and the Grey Lady suddenly playing significant roles, but again there was the feeling that it was very nearly approaching the line between being neat and being overly convenient. Tie too many things directly into each other and the world starts shrinking.

I think the epilogue is best not mentioned, but other than that, Deathly Hallows was an excellent end to a series that I've now been following for years. And whatever I might feel about the films and the rest of the franchise, Harry Potter is definitely a lot more deserving of its attention than certain other recent literary phenomena.

Labels: harry potter, i am the ramblemaster, literature, rabbit-hole theory, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 2:39 PM 0 comments

Last month I read Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and mentioned that I'd pick out one or two other interesting points of those that it raises. So here's another:

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question. [...] A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Wilde's tone here, not surprising given the events of his own life, would seem to demonstrate a fair amount of scorn towards the attitudes of the general public. At a first read it might also come across as almost self-important, as no doubt Wilde viewed himself as one of these artists, with his dismissiveness of the idea of criticism. But Wilde makes a good point. In describing 'silly views' and 'foolish prejudices', he is not necessarily being dismissive of all the opinions a member of the public might have, but is identifying that such prejudices do exist.

This got me thinking about the way in which people do approach art: novels or films or paintings or whatever. To be 'receptive', do we have to accept absolutely anything as 'art'? Wilde never suggests that everything and anything can count as art, although for him it only seems to stop being art if it starts catering towards the wants of the population. Surely there's more to it than that, though. Is a person doing their own thing irrespective of the public, whatever it is, enough to qualify something as 'art'?

Wilde would seem to be referring to preconceptions and prejudices that might affect our appreciation of art that we have before we've even experienced it, which leaves it open whether or not he believes any kind of criticism can be applied to art (beyond for whom, or for what reasons, it was created) after the art has been experienced. He talks a lot about authority and how that has no place in matters relating to art, but what exactly does he mean by 'authority'? Does he mean that nobody can have an authoritative opinion on art, nobody can decide what counts or what doesn't, or just that any attempts to control art are unwanted?

We all approach things with our own ideas of what they should be, what it is that makes it good, and so on. For example, one might look with scorn upon the idea of techno or heavy metal as 'good music' because they define it in orchestral terms. One person might think that a good plot or realistic characters are important in a novel, whereas another might view the richness of the language itself as more important. I have a friend who gets set to rant every time Tolkien is even mentioned because it doesn't fulfill his own criteria of what makes a good story. An example Wilde uses is judging all literature by the standard of Shakespeare. We all appreciate different things. But that doesn't mean that other aspects of something, other qualities, aren't still there as something that can be appreciated by someone else. But what exactly counts as a 'quality'? This seems to depend on whether or not a person views a feature as something to appreciate. Is everything potentially something to appreciate?

Take, for example, a painting of a soup can. Or a steaming pile of shit. You might appreciate the simplicity, or maybe you could appreciate the irony of some kind of visual statement it's trying to make. In and of itself, it'd be hard to find a way to consider a pile of shit a work of art, but with context, maybe it could represent or show something else, and that would be its quality as art, whether everybody appreciates the statement made or not.

The point Wilde seems to be trying to make is that we should allow 'art' in all its forms, not seek to control it, not seek to define it in our own prejudiced terms. According to Wilde, it seems, everything is something to potentially appreciate, and what's where being receptive comes in. We should let art flourish, free from control through prejudices, so that we are enabling ourselves to truly recognise those things in art that ought to be appreciated.

But, of course, you can only appreciate something that's really there to appreciate. There's still some vagueness about what qualifies as something to artistically appreciate. How subjective is 'art' under Wilde's definition? Does objective quality come into it at all? Wilde's definition of what doesn't count as art is still hazy beyond his for-the-self/for-the-public distinction. What else might stop something being 'art'?

We might consider some so-called 'art' to be pretentious. If a supposed work of art is produced just to promote the artist's superficial image, for example, or if all the talk of irony or representation or whatever is really just about shocking the audience or being controversial in order to get a bit of attention, then maybe pretence is all that's there. While it isn't exactly catering to what the public wants, the art is still relying on the reaction of the public, in which case, according to Wilde, it ceases to be art.

So maybe, looking at it like that, Wilde's distinction is all that's needed in art's definition. Rather than including it in any kind of definition, however, maybe this distinction is put better simply in terms of avoiding anything that can affect our receptivity: for as long as we're attending to the public, more likely than not we're also attending to its prejudices and therefore restricting ourselves. Maybe art is mostly undefinable, or at least defining it is very difficult. There's a whole load of possible subjective and objective reasons for why a person might look at or experience a piece of art and find certain appreciable qualities in it. There's no reason why it has to be either-or. Maybe we shouldn't be trying to define it. The point Wilde is driving at with receptivity, and one that perhaps overrides all discussion of objectivity versus subjectivity, is that we need to be able to keep an open mind to truly appreciate anything.

The moment [the spectator] seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

Labels: censorship, i am the ramblemaster, morality, oscar wilde, philosophy, shakespeare, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:52 PM 0 comments

When I studied Orwell's Animal Farm in school at the age of about eleven or twelve, it was never a book I was particularly fond of, perhaps just because I found the subject matter so bleak. But it still held its status as a book of value and an important piece of satirical literature.

However, while being an obvious allegory may have been the whole point of it, when I found out that all the events and characters were supposed to represent different aspects of the Soviet Union and its history, with the pigs based on certain individuals and the horses representing the classes and the building of the windmill an analogy of the Soviet's Five-Year Plans and so on and so forth - I remember feeling a bit disappointed that it was so blatant. Sure, it's supposed to be like that; it's supposed to be a frank and direct criticism of the Soviet Union. But nevertheless, I felt there was something ungenuine about it, which took the shine off the book's prestige for me. Not that all this was consciously articulated in my twelve-year-old mind - back then it was just the slight feeling that I was being lectured and that I didn't much like it.

Many people have suggested that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars. Tolkien responded to this in a foreword to the second edition:

It is neither allegorical nor topical...I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Another real danger of allegories as well as this is that characters are too often reduced to abstractions. They're there to have some kind of meaning but can end up, as characters, a bit meaningless. A notorious example of this would be one from the world of recent cinema: the Matrix trilogy. The trilogy as a whole illustrates some fine and worthy philosophical issues (albeit not especially original ones), with regards to metaphysics at least. However, one of the criticisms of the sequels in particular was that they were convoluted, bloated on all the philosophy the Wachowski brothers were trying to cram into it.

A good deal of this was religious allegory. The allusions to Neo as Christ had been strong since the first film. The same was true of the allusions to Nietzsche's ubermensch. But the first film at least worked as a story independent of allegory going by the logic of the world presented. In the sequels, however, when they continued down this path, the story began to break down. After Neo lifts up his hand and fries the Sentinel at the end of Reloaded, we're never really given an explanation for it in the third film. Exchanges between characters which should have provided us with some explanation of what was happening were vague because they couldn't be any other way. Neo's powers have supposedly transcended the Matrix. He's supposedly connected to the Source. But really, how does that work when he's in the Real World? You can believe it at a stretch going by the logic of the world as it's been presented to you so far, but it's a long stretch and a sloppy explanation. Eventually it seems to break down to, 'Because it's an allegory of...' And all these characters who were vaguely interesting in the first film have been reduced to passive, dimensionless parts of it.

Of course, if I've missed something in my attempts to understand the trilogy, I'd be happy to hear it. But despite all these allusions and allegories that were piled on top of me, it ends up feeling a bit empty.

[Edit: amendment.]

Labels: allegory, films, i am the ramblemaster, literature, morality, orwell, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 3:19 PM 4 comments