Vanessa George

I have just learnt about Vanessa George; who worked in a nursery and has apparently sexually abused children in ways worse than various judges have ever heard and too badly for the BBC to possibly give any details even on the 10 o’clock news.

I was going to say: of course, I am not glad, in any way, that paedophilic child abuse, particularly such apparently terrible abuse, has occurred; but, given that child abuse has occurred, I’m – I don’t know that there’s an appropriate word – but the fact that it was a woman (in fact two women and one man) is, in an indirect way, almost a good thing, because it proves that paedophilia is not exclusively male, and that the cultural fear of the lone man alone with children versus the implicit trust of the lone woman, is an unjust and sexist view.

(The problem being that this means no one will trust anyone with their children; but society was heading in that direction anyway. If we can’t just accept that most people are trustworthy, whatever the news says, at the very least, we should mistrust equally.)

And I was about to comment that nobody on the news had mentioned the gender issue; which meant they were going to pretend it wasn’t something that everyone was highly conscious of because they’d realised it would look horribly sexist. When suddenly they decided to do an interview in which there was only one question. And that question was (to paraphrase) “Isn’t it particularly disgusting considering it’s a woman, and doesn’t it make the crime more depraved than ever?”

No.

It makes it equally as depraved as if it was committed by a man. It just makes it more of a shock, because we don’t hear about female paedophiles.

I don’t know why paedophilia happens, but strikes me it happens to people who are a bit fucked up. And women can be just as fucked up as men. And women can be just as guilty of sexual depravation as men. Sure.

The problem is the attitude that women aren’t paedophiles fucks everyone over. Because it means men are unfairly discriminated against when there’s no evidence that they’re going to turn into child sex offenders. Until women turn out to be just as bad, when they’re apparently judged to be even worse than men.

I hate paedophilia. But I also hate sexism.

Myth and, er, God

or Where did I put my Cynicism?

This is a response to rockinlibrarian‘s lj post, on the Death of Myth, in which, importantly, she points out that all religious stories can be termed ‘mythology’ and it doesn’t mean they’re just silly stories, it means they hold symbolic, but not literal, truth.

*

(So I had a lot of thoughts. And they are disparate and incoherent, and this is the one I’m going to focus on.)

IF (and I haven’t made up my mind yet, but bear with me) IF myth is ok, (and not, say, a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and propaganda*)…

…then we can believe in the reality of Darwin’s evolution, but also the symbolic truth contained within religious (Christian?) mythology (again; ‘mythology’ in the sense of stories which communicate symbolic, but not literal, truths; not as in ‘stupid stories believe by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’).

I speak, by the way, as an atheist. Or, if you will, an Exceedingly Sceptical Agnostic.

BUT why stop there? Why stop with just reading the Old Testament symbolically (which, incidentally, Christians have been doing ever since they wrote the New Testament, never mind since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species,) or the whole bible symbolically (ie. no, Christ didn’t really perform all those miracles, they’re just symbols for the power of God, and the values he holds dear; like self-sacrifice, or, say, feeding hungry strangers even if there’s five thousand of them, or trying to do stuff even if everyone thinks its impossible and finding you can walk on water).

What if we just go one step further and say that God is a Myth. But the good kind.

If we say, then, that God is as real as (to take Amy’s example) Persephone. The Greeks didn’t really believe in Persephone. A few ignorant peasants might have. Mostly she was just a useful symbol of springtime, a way of embodying and understanding the things in the world – which also had a scientific explanation – on an emotional level (see Everflame’s lj on the importance of emotion in human decision-making). She was not real, but what she meant was. (No one ever really believed in Proserpina though. Poor thing.)

I don’t believe in a literal God. I certainly do not believe in a God whose word is supposedly the Bible. I don’t need to rehearse the various inconsistencies or moral cruxes in the Bible, a kazillion people have already done that for me. The Bible is too small, too flawed, too human, too outdated, to be a universal word of God for all time. It is Old Mythology. Mythology is always renewing itself for new societies in new contexts with new values. (Mutation. Survival of the fittest. Just like genetics.) That is why Persephone is now just a ‘stupid story only believed by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’.

I like the Indian story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The Elephant is God. The Blind men touch different parts and decide it is a tree, a wall, a snake, a spear. God is bigger than any of these things, and they cannot grasp all of it at once.

If there is a God, it is beyond anything we conceive. It doesn’t have a special place in its heart for Earth, because the universe is much bigger than that, and there is Probably Life Somewhere. If it cares about each of us as individuals, then it also cares for every animal, every insect, every amoeba as an individual. Alternatively, to it we are amoeba and irrelevant. Its morality is, again, more sophisticated than we can possibly understand or hope to emulate. Maybe it is a creator, maybe not. Maybe it is a controller, maybe not. Maybe it has powers to change the laws of the universe, maybe not.

Possibly the most defining feature of God as it (he, usually) is understood by most (all, probably) human religions, is that he is a conscious, thinking being.

Funky Quarkism

As an atheist, it is easy to say that religion is designed to fill in the gaps of what we cannot yet explain, with, erm ‘magic’ or else ‘something spiritual’. BUT all good scientists know there is a limit to human science. We can find out the physical laws that govern the universe, and the tiny particles that make it up. We can even find reasons why those laws are so, by discovering new tiny particles (quarks) and new laws (quarks come in flavours, which must occur in certain cuisines combinations). But however far we push it there will always be another ‘why?’ And the ‘why’ that we will never be able to explain; to which the answer is ‘just because’; the final set of laws that govern everything in the universe, no exceptions; these are the ultimate Unexplained, and can, in a way, be labelled ‘God’.

But… they’re not conscious.

Incidentally, if there is a conscious God, I think he/it is superconscious. Whatever that entails. We are vegetables in comparison.

Back to the mythological God.

The Christian God is insufficient to convey truth to many modern, civilised humans, because he jars with modern science and modern morality, blah blah. I mean, his mythology is a good 2000 years old. That’s twice as long as that of the Ancient Greeks lasted. Good going, hey?

But that doesn’t mean that some sort of god mythology is not still useful, cannot still convey truth, to modern humans. We are not beyond God.

I mean, science has its prophets: Newton, Einstein. Dawkins is a zealous priest. Darwin, perhaps, is its Christ (a ‘myth’ of modern science: that the whole Victorian religious doubt thing started with Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the modern age of science begins 1859. In fact, it was a general feeling growing up among a growing community of educated men who were part of the development of scientist from an amateur pursuit to a professional career. Lamarck suggested species adaptation over time in 1809. Lyell, a geologist, argued that the world was many thousands of years older than the Bible allowed, in 1830. Darwin couldn’t have published, couldn’t have been listened to, unless a few people, at least, were already willing to hear. His Origin, you might say, is a modern mythical symbol.)

The old God symbolised a benevolent universe, a commonality between all men, reassurance in the shared inevitability of death, a reminder that in life all humans are as important as each other and deserve to have their problems heard, and a reason to be a nice to other people.

And these are good things. And this God-the-Symbol is one I am willing to believe in (provided we understand that he is symbolically, not literally, true, and he therefore avoids becoming a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and/or propaganda**).

But he remains an outdated myth.

And, er, I tentatively move that Darwinism (perhaps with some Quantum Physics thrown in, mostly because that I dig that shit) is the new (and better, partly because it’s a little more true, but mostly because it has evolved for our times) ‘mythology’.

* on which more later. Perhaps.

** as above.

Genre versus Literature: Bullshit.

(Another rebuttal to James Kelman via Cheryl Morgan and Ellen Datlow)

So literary fiction isn’t generic?

Typical modern literary fiction is set in a realistic world, usually within the last 50 (stretching, perhaps, to 100) years. It often depicts characters who go on an ‘emotional journey’, who begin disturbed, or bereaved, and overcome or come to terms with this emotion; or else who begin naïve and, through some traumatic (usually) experience, mature. Often uses a poetic, or at least self-consciously aesthetic, narrative voice. Frequently attempts to tackle serious political or social issues of the present day: racism, 9/11, drugs, mental illness….

So I’m making absurd generalisations? So you can think of 1000 exceptions? So can I. But these are exactly the kind of assumptions advocators of ‘literary’ fiction make about ‘genre’ fiction.

The Princess Bride: Fantasy cliche meets farce.

Yes, there are fantasy books with dragon slayers who possess ornate swords and unpronounceable names, and who go forth to vanquish evil, winning fair maiden in the meantime (although you may have trouble finding them; they’re not that common). Yes, detectives usually solve the crimes set before them, yes there are a fair few spaceships and alien species floating around science fiction, and yes romances tend to end up happily ever after.

But it is extraordinarily narrow-minded to think that superficial details like these determine the quality of an entire book.

The realistic novel is a 19^th century invention. We’ve been obsessed with it ever since, to the extent that we’ve forgotten that anything else (apart from, maybe, poetry, which no one reads anyway*) can be literature. But of course it can. I’m going to have to pluck a few examples off the (endless) shelf, here….

Science-fiction: this whole genre is hugely literary. Pioneered by writers like Mary Shelley, taking off in the late Victorian era with H.G. Wells, and carrying on up to Orwell, sci-fi has always been about pushing the boundaries of what is possible, of questioning what makes humans human, of exploring alternative solutions to social problems. Most of the sci-fi we call literature does not go to the extent of spaceships, but asks what would be the consequences if human ingenuity or tendencies went one step too far. Which is not to say that spaceships can’t be literary too.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) – if this isn’t (proto-)magic-realism I don’t know what it is. The guy makes a wish and it comes true; he gives his soul to a portrait, and consequently never ages. That’s magic. It’s also literature.

18^th Century Romance Novels – such as those by Defoe. These weren’t called novels. They were called ‘histories’. The pretence was that Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the rest, were real people, who really had lived for decades on desert islands/accidentally married their brothers/become mistresses of the king. These tales were in the same vein as ‘real life stories’ in magazines. They were popular because of their sensationalism and scandal. Roxana rockets to a racy page-turning finish. It’s breathtaking. It is also far from realistic. Whether Moll Flanders ever repents of her criminality is a matter of hot debate, and her character development is hardly secure. These ‘histories’ are formulaic, insofar as they are all presented as autobiographies of the sensational lives of individuals from humble backgrounds, often involving illicit affairs and general criminality. Buyers of such histories knew what sort of story they were in for. But they are still literature.

Dracula (Bram Stoker) – blood-sucking, animorphing, coffin-dwelling vampires, with stake and crucifix-wielding, sexy, ass-kicking slayers. Literature.

Titania: Fairy. With wings. And a silly dress.

Shakespeare – I’m sorry. Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fairies and men with donkey’s heads. The Tempest: Sprites, cannibals, and tropical sorceresses. Macbeth: Witches and prophecies. And no these were not considered realistic at the time.

In fact, the Shakespeare point deserves elaboration. Shakespeare plays divide into three main catergories. Or – wait for it – genres**. True, one or two of them are problematic. But at the time, at the time Shakespeare was criticised for not sticking to generic convention.

(Side note: Shakespeare was always the Big Man. Even when he was writing, all his contemporaries knew he was a Big Man. Some tried to compete. While he was still alive this seemed possible, but in fact none compare. Shakespeare really is that great. No. Really.)

This whole anti-formulaic business is a modern taste, not an artistic rule. Plenty of modern critics like to think its Shakespeare’s deviation that makes him so great, but that’s more narrow-mindedness. Too much deviation, and no one would have paid to see a Shakespeare play. In which case Shakespeare wouldn’t have written plays. What he does is use formulae ingenuously. If Shakespeare had written purely for the market, his plays wouldn’t have worked; they would have no soul and no appeal. But Shakespeare knew about money and he knew how to make the stuff. He writes good plays and he wants a tidy income (which he gets). Does this compromise his artistic integrity? I say no. I say all writers are bloody human.

Anyway. In the Renaissance ‘literature’ was, by definition, formulaic, and artistic originality was supposedly without value (this bias is as narrow-minded as our own, natch). Shakespeare may deviate, but tropes and conventions are still recognisable in all his plays. Every Comedy has a happy ending with either a wedding or the prospect of one, often of multiple couples, usually in a massive final scene in which all the characters come crowding onto the stage. Every Tragedy has a single tragic protagonist, usually with a fatal flaw (pride, envy, ambition, desire for revenge; the classics) who ultimately dies. The histories all have kings. And battles. And characters called ‘Gloucester’.

And if Shakespeare ever dares do something different, some whiner like Ben Jonson comes along and goes ‘OMG, Will, you got your Aristotle wrong again, you can’t call this literature, your Greek is like so shit.’

Back to the modern stuff.

I don’t know about you, but I have read some crap ‘literary’ books, which essentially use the fact that they deal with some serious contemporary issue to get themselves taken seriously as literature. Even if the narrative voice is stilted and awkward, the plotting nonexistent, the characters unconvincing. Never mind. It’s about 9/11. It must be nominated for a prize!!1

Is there such thing as modern literary ‘genre’ fiction?

Oh yes.

I’ll briefly mention magic-realism. It’s a controversial subject. The main objection to it, as far as I can tell, is that ‘magic isn’t real’. Well, no. But since when (and I hope I have demonstrated this) did literature have to only deal with what is real? It is how the non-real is dealt with that determines whether a book is literature, just as it should be how the ‘real’ (incidentally, ‘realistic’ fiction is still fiction. It isn’t really real. Ok?) is dealt with that makes realistic fiction literary.

But anyway.

Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. This is a weird amalgam of fairytales set in an alternate world with added witchcraft. It’s fantasy. It’s also very literary. It’s about, among other things, the psychological consequences of incestuous sex and gang rape on a naïve girl and how this impacts on her daughters and their place in the community and self-identity. Yeah?

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. Britain after the oil runs out. Censorship, rationing, compulsory contraception. And a rebel female community out in the hills fosters those on the run from the corruption, and sets out to achieve change. A novel in the mould of classic literary science fiction, where present tensions get pushed a little too far and dystopia ensues. What values should we uphold whatever the situation? How do we deal with the break-down of ‘civilisation’?

And of course Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter, and Haruki Murakami, and Meg Rosoff, and MAlorie Blackman, and Diana Wynne Jones….

…and more. Lots more. But not enough. And the ones that there are don’t get the attention they deserve, because modern society has, weirdly, conflated realism with literature. ‘Crossover’ (not that genre and literature should be mutually exclusive, but there you are) fiction is much more common in the children’s and young adult market***. Children have fewer biases, and, as their section of the bookshop is not divided into sections by genre, they don’t expect their fiction to be divided so neatly either. And they are happy to read for the story and not worry about whether what their reading is ‘literature’.

So what is ‘literature’?

Fuck knows. Ask Terry Eagleton.

*yes, I know some people do read poetry. By this comment I mean that the sales of poetry versus the sales of novels do not compare.

**the ‘romance’ and ‘problem play’ labels are modern inventions, which act in conjunction with the contemporary comedy/tragedy/history division.

***another weird idea of modern society: that ‘children’s fiction’ is an altogether separate ‘genre’, and as formulaic and unworthy of attention as adult ‘genre fiction’. More bullshit. But I’ll save it.

The Witch of Wookey Hole

Screw Oxford. I’ve found a career!

On a related note, for more information on the Witch of Wookey Hole, this is the children’s fantasy book you should be reading.

Magic as science (Science as magic)

Thoughts from the Diana Wynne Jones Conference 2009

On Saturday 4^th July, Helgard Fischer, a microbiologist who has qualifications in International Relations, and for whom English Literature is also a passion (do I hear a … ‘polymath’?) talked about the scientific nature of magic in DWJ’s Year of the Griffin, which is set inside a university for magical studies.

She pointed out the necessity of scientific knowledge and logical thinking to successful magical creation. Wizard Derk creates hybrid and adapted or mutated creatures, such as his griffin children, made using his own and his wife’s DNA, who talk and think like humans, but whose bodies are nonetheless half lion, half eagle. In order to do this Derk needs an understanding of zygotes, enzymes, etc. We are not quite sure where he learns this; but it is knowledge he has, and without it, his magic would be unsuccessful. He cannot create a griffin child simply by wanting to, he first has to understand, scientifically-and-magically, how.

Similarly his wife’s miniature universes rely on her understanding of physical and biological laws in order to construct replicas, or, more impressively yet, replicas-with-imaginative-modifications, of the universe. Once again this is not something she is able to do without a high level of scientific understanding’ the laws of gravity and motion, and in the case of construction of miniature cities, of human biology, ecology, architecture, etc. In fact, this requires the scientific knowledge of a god.

This was compared, by another attendee, to magic in Harry Potter. In The Year of the Griffin the teaching of magic is critiqued, and DWJ raises the importance of learning theory alongside practical magic. In Harry Potter, by contrast, there seems to be no theory of magic, or certainly not one which is learned. Learning magic is a process of rote-learning ‘tricks’ and spells, which accumulate over the course of one’s education. There is no apparent university post-Hogwarts (if there was one, it seems certain we would have heard tell of it from Hermione at least), and this perhaps reflects the fact that there is no room, or no perceived room (by JK and/or the wizarding community), for analysis, experimentation, creation, or even criticism, in magic.

That is no to say that there is no creation or logical thinking in magic use in the Harry Potter universe. Being an effective magic user seems not just about being able to use a spell correctly, but by thinking of the best spell, sequence of spells, or magical method, to overcome a problem or achieve a goal. This is most aptly demonstrated in the Triwizard Tournament, where each contestant must think of the most efficient way of achieving their ends using what magical knowledge they have. Thus, in order to breathe underwater, two contestants use the Bubblehead Charm, Krum transfigures his head into that of a shark, and Harry swallows gillyweed, each of these methods drawing on a different area of magical expertise, and enabling their candidates to complete the task with varying degrees of success.

Nor is the creation of magic impossible. As we see clearly in Half Blood Prince, Snape has not only adapted potions to make them more potent – something we can imagine as akin to adapting recipes, through individual taste and experimentation – but he has invented spells himself. Voldemort, similarly, invents the spell that makes him immortal in Goblet of Fire. In either case invention serves as a force for bad, which is somewhat disheartening. My sense is that, in Harry’s world, most of the spells that need to be invented, have been, especially the good ones. All that’s left to do is to think of new and ever more horrible ways of hurting your enemies. I seem to remember that the jellylegs curse can be found in a book that advertises itself by the fact that it contains ‘new’ ways of getting at your enemy (it is curious that its readers are assumed to have an enemy at all; but that, perhaps, is a subject for another time). This introduces the idea that spells do get created (or perhaps recreated) and even go through stages of fashionableness.

In either case, inventing magic is seen as an extra; something only clever (and, usually, cruel) magicians do, but which is so uncommon a pursuit among witches and wizards that Hogwarts doesn’t see fit to teach it.

In The Fentons I have explicitly treated magic as an aspect of science; it is an everyday part of a modern world, and it seems logical that the people in that world would have sought to find out how it works as much as we have sort to find out how electricity works, and the body, and space, and gravity. If you know anything about quantum physics you’ll know it’s pretty bizarre, and doesn’t make sense by ‘common sense’  laws. And although we can try to work out how it works, without allowing for some sort of higher being, we can’t know why. And, even then, we can’t account for the why of the higher being, so all in all we’re stumped.

On a more mundane level, it has long being pointed out that modern technology such as TV (moving pictures in boxes with voices?) and the internet (being able to talk to anyone, any where, any time, instantly?) are pretty much magical; certainly would appear magical to someone time travelling from even 100 years ago.

Besides which, science hasn’t explained everything. The brain, consciousness, thought, free will (or not) are things we still don’t understand, things we still have to explain with ‘magical’ names like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. Percy Shelley points out that we have always used words metaphorically for things we can’t explain literally, and I like his theory. The ‘soul’ exists; but it is not some sort of mystical, never-to-be-explained ‘essence’. It is simply a name, a signifier, a metaphor, standing in for something we haven’t understood yet.

This is becoming a digression. Tangentially, I argue that, based on the above examples, science is magic.

To return to Helgard Fischer, and books, she liked DWJ’s university of magic because it united the creative, the personal, the practical, and the analytical. In other words it was neither art nor science, but a meeting of the two. Trained in both biology and politics, with added interests in philosophy and literature herself, this is clearly a meeting Fischer would welcome warmly, in all areas of academic study.

Wouldn’t we all? Personally, I have always seen the process of understanding a piece of literature as similar to the process of solving a logic puzzle. You have to find clues and read symbols and put things together and tease things out to come to some sort of reasoned conclusion. Moreover, criticism teaches you never to take the world just as it presents itself, but to interrogate it, to make sure everything fits, that what you perceive is what is true. Naturally this is a useful skill to scientists. It would be to be blinded by stereotypes for me to assume that all science is descriptive, orand to believe every study stating that scientists always see the results they want to see.

Speculative fiction proves a safe space in which our fantasies for, and mysteries in, real life, can be played out, tested, and indulged in. Until every puzzle in science is solved, and every social tension resolved, we will continue to write about ‘magic’.

Fire and Hemlock

When I went to be interviewed for my Oxford place, I took Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock as a comfort book. After a thoroughly miserable day, in which I’d argued with one tutor about whether Sylvia Plath’s father was dead, and been shouted at by another over Shakespeare’s interpretation of humanity (all humans are horrible people, says Measure for Measure, and Dr John Pitcher), I was convinced I would never get a place there, and took refuge in one of my favourite books.

It only took me about three pages to remember that Polly, the heroine of Fire and Hemlock, is an English student and Oxford. Which meant that she had got in. And I hadn’t.

Actually, I did get in. But I didn’t find that out for another month, and by that time I had long since finished rereading Fire and Hemlock, leant it to an ex-boyfriend in an effort to convince him that teen fiction could be as intelligent as adult fiction (if not more), and had eaten large ammounts of depression-combatting chocolate.

Fortunately those dark days are over.

Being 17 was miserable. Two years later, rather than pining away waiting to be 18 and ‘legal’, I’m trying to reconcile myself to hitting my 20s. I’m also two-thirds of the way through my Oxford degree, I’ve just sent a first novel off to a number of agencies, (a children’s novel, which was a damn sight harder to write than any adult novel I’ve ever drafted),  and I’m going to the first ever DWJ conference this weekend.

Oh and I have a car. My God, how I love having a car.

Anyway.

The point, at the end of that exceptionally long ramble is this:

I am 19 and in (/just finishing) my second year of English at Oxford. I have therefore reached a point of near-optimum similarity to Polly in Fire and Hemlock. (I want to know where her flat was, what college she went to, which record shop she found Tom’s disk in.) I too come from a broken home. I know both Bristol and Gloucestershire well. And also own an Oxford Worlds’s Classics edition of ballads, containing both ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’.

Perhaps it is here the similarity stops. I have not lost my memory of the last 9 years. I always liked fairy tales, without some guy called Tom Lynn having to convince me. I haven’t known a musician 14 years older than me since the age of 10 who I’m imminently going to fall in love with. Oh, and I don’t know any malevolent immortal fairies with whom I have to bargain, or else face the death of loved ones. Though it would make for a good story.

I suppose we all experience a jolt of recognition, which is both comforting and uncomfortable, when we meet a character in circumstances very much like our own. The difference, perhaps, in the case of Fire and Hemlock is that every other book about Oxford students is enourmously self-satisfied and self-gratifying, typically feeding into the stereoptypes as a form of self-defining elitism. If people are part of that world, I can hardly blame them.

But I don’t like it. I like fantasy books.

So instead I’m hoping to join my own elite Oxford world: the Oxford alumni who have become fantasy authors. DWJ, of course, and Susan Cooper, and JRR Tolkein, and CS Lewis, and, more recently, Rhiannon Lassiter and Frances Hardinge.

As I say, I am going to join this world. And no ammount of shouting tutors or dead poets’ fathers are going to stop me.