I argue that how we configure the birth of the genre [of science fiction] has consequences for how we read the mode today. If we say SF begins with Frankenstein then we are saying that it is, at root, a Gothic mode, and that one of its shaping myths is the scientific advance and the unintended consequences thereof, ‘hubris clobbered by nemesis’ as Aldiss puts it. If we say: ‘SF begins at the end of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th’ then we’re saying SF is about modernity: industrialisation, technological acceleration and the deracinated nature of contemporary life.
By saying ‘SF begins with Kepler’ I am saying something with large consequences for how we read SF nowadays, for the way it figures — or so I believe. To be specific I am saying: SF is born out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and its rise coincided with two other things themselves closely tangled-up with that social and cultural earthquake: the scientific revolution, and the rise of Capitalism.
I’ve read Adam’s book, and he makes this case powerfully. I like to think that it converges in interesting ways with an essay of mine on fantasy.
New issue of my newsletter today – and as always, the version on the Comment website looks especially nice.
Let’s say Hogarth sees religion less in terms of mystic or transcendent aesthetic intensities, and more in terms of real-world life and engagement, social and human interaction, the moral logic of lived experience and the dignity and beauty of life as informed (actually, not idealistically) by the divine. Hogarth’s ‘scenes from the Bible’ paintings are busy, varied, human-populated scenes, and so are almost all his paintings. His is all religious art.
So: Hogarth didn’t fill exhibition halls with immaculately beautiful Virgins Mary in blue velvet dresses, but it strikes me as impossible to ‘read’ a masterpiece like ‘Gin Lane’ without understanding that the woman in the centre of the composition is, designedly, an anti-Madonna, her infant tumbling away, the sores on her legs parodic stigmata, a satiric engagement that works, as a sort of semiotic photographic-negative, to affirm precisely the religious meanings that are so dulled and diluted by the thousand polished perfected Prado Madonnas.
The Tufte theme by @pimoore is just amazing. With its shortcodes you could use micro.blog as a full-scale essay-writing environment – and a better one than anything you could readily get on other platforms. Tempting!
As someone whose guitar playing is severely compromised by damage to my fingers – thanks to decades of playing basketball – I have a lot of sympathy for these injured musicians.
heads up
I’ve been re-thinking my approach to blogging, and here’s my decision:
- Blogging has been rather parasitic on my essay-writing, so for the rest of this year and all of 2022 I am putting this blog on hiatus. We’ll see if that will help me to write more essays. Right now I’m working on one about anarchism.
- I will continue to issue my weekly newsletter.
- I will use my micro.blog, which for some time I have devoted only to photos, as a kind of online scrapbook, with links to interesting articles — including ones written by me — and brief commentary thereon. (I also my use it to record at least some of the books I read because micro.blog has a nice Bookshelf feature.)
See y’all at micro.blog! — and, I hope, elsewhere.
Hogarth
Ferdinand Mount on the new Hogarth exhibition at the Tate Britain:
Here we need, I think, to notice two large absences from Hogarth and Europe. These absences are not unique to the treatment of Hogarth – I have seen similar curatorial treatment in other recent exhibitions – but they are certainly conspicuous here. The first is the virtual absence of any aesthetic discussion. The emphasis instead is on the social background, the changing nature of the cities where the artists worked, the systems of patronage, the commercial networks. The sole mention of [Hogarth’s book] The Analysis of Beauty comes en passant, to explain the inscription of “the serpentine line of beauty” in the margin of the self-portrait with the pug. Yet the argument in The Analysis is highly relevant to any discussion of Hogarth’s Europeannness. As Joseph Burke points out, it is “in part, a sustained and at times brilliant rationalization of observed rococo principles”, the same principles which animated Watteau and Boucher. The serpentine line is intended not as another mechanical principle, such as the Golden Section, but rather as a means of imbuing art with life and movement. […]
A second and no less conspicuous absentee from these walls and these pages is religion. There is no mention at all of Hogarth’s huge early paintings, “The Pool of Bethesda” (1736) and “The Good Samaritan” (1736–7), on the staircase at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, or of the even more gigantic triptych of “The Ascension” (1755–6) at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Most striking of all these absences perhaps is that of the Foundling Hospital’s “Moses Brought Before Pharaoh’s daughter” (1746). In the catalogue the only reference to the Foundling Hospital, to which Hogarth devoted so much of his time and energy, is an illustration of the elaborate plaster ceiling in the Court Room there.
Interesting that this critique touches on the same general points as my essay on the Tate’s Blake exhibition of two years ago. There is a kind of nervous narrowness to so many exhibitions and catalogues these days, an ongoing fear that the curators will speak of artistry or religious belief and fail to be sufficiently rigorous in focusing on the purely social and political.
language, language
Capitalism, fascism, neo-liberalism, structural racism, transphobia, wokeness: these giant, airborne nouns, which float around the discourse like zeppelins, are unavoidable in some ways. We probably have to use them. But we should be aware that there is a price to be paid, in clarity and intelligence, for doing so. I sometimes read passages of writing that consist of almost nothing else. I try and use them as sparingly and as precisely as possible, wincing a little inside as I do so. And sometimes when I search for a way to say what I’m saying without using the obvious word, I find a more powerful way of saying it.
On the other hand, keeping your language vague and abstract can be a smart rhetorical tactic. It minimises your exposure to counter-evidence and argument. It means you can send luridly coloured smoke signals about where you stand without having explain or defend your position in any depth (cough, Judith Butler). It allows you to pump out feelings of animosity and outrage without defining the offence, which is why culture wars thrive in this environment.
I used to complain that people just recite the currently approved phrases (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) and therefore should look for less predictable and more vivid ways to say what they mean. Then I realized that reciting the approved phrases is the whole point. I might as well have been asking people to vary the language in the Pledge of Allegiance.
In closely related news, I have a post up at the Hog Blog on why people say that stanning for an Anglo-Saxon king is “woke tosh.”