Meta: Dystopia and Moral Voices: A Politico-Aesthetic Response to V for Vendetta
deliriumdriver was discussing V for Vendetta (the movie version, not the comic) in a flocked post on her journal, and it had me thinking about my own reaction to the movie. No one (and by "no one" I mean "neither deliriumdriver nor I") denies that it's a powerful emotional experience while one is in the theatre, but there is a sense in which it sort of falls apart when one
( Read more... )
As for Brave New World: I don't know the author's background, but as I read it, I really don't know whether it protested against anything; in my opinion, both ways of life - the one of the clones as well as the naturalists - were portrayed with both advantages as well as disadvantages. The biggest concern, I think, was the transplantation of people grown up in one world to the other, something that failed catastrophically in both recorded cases, the "Island full of Alphas" as well as the Savage, with dramatic consequences.
The clone world wasn't described negatively, at least not from an objective point of view. Unfree, yes. Not according to our (or at least my) moral paradigm, yes. But not negatively. It was productive. And it made its inhabitants happy, in a way. Yes, it's stagnant. And peaceful, in the very same breath.
The same goes for the savage reservations. Free, dirty and backwards. But FREE, dammit.
I think that this is one of the biggest, greatest boons of the book; there is no enemy like Big Brother in 1984, but instead there are several ways of living the reader can choose as superior- or dismiss them altogether, as I do. But there is no moral lecture behind it; it has moral, but only the moral the reader wants to see.
At least my 2 cents. Hope you're not angry for intruding.
Reply
The clone world wasn't described negatively, at least not from an objective point of view. Unfree, yes. Not according to our (or at least my) moral paradigm, yes. But not negatively.
But I think that in the societies (with their dominant moral paradigms) both in which Huxley was writing and in which we are reading the novel, our conclusions as to which way of life is better are more or less overdetermined, you know? So it functions as a moral argument the way that the other texts I've mentioned (most of them satiric) function as moral arguments.
But there is no moral lecture behind it; it has moral, but only the moral the reader wants to see.
This is basically what I meant when I said that texts do not have moral voices, and such I think it's a characteristic of all texts, not just BNW. It takes a reader to construct an author-function.
Reply
But I think that in the societies (with their dominant moral paradigms) both in which Huxley was writing and in which we are reading the novel, our conclusions as to which way of life is better are more or less overdetermined, you know?
What exactly do you mean with overdetermined? I'm not a native speaker, and what would lend itself would be the mathematical definition; that there are too many constraints for it to be fulfilled. If this is what you mean, I totally agree with you.
As for moral voices: No word. Most texts - especially the good ones, such as Dick's Minority Report or Brave New world - have none. But some books are specifically written to impress a certain point of view into the mind of the reader. Look for example at Michael Moore's books and movies, such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" which ,while still being documentaries, certainly express a "Bush is bad" opinion. (Note please: I myself am not fond of President Bush.)
Right now, I'm looking for a book someone gave as a gift for me; it's a so-called "Christian Novel", and it tries to get across the idea that Christianity is the spring of well-being. I wouldn't mind the message so much if the book wasn't absolutely drivel.
Reply
As for texts and moral voices: I suppose I should have limited myself to fictional texts, which were the ones of which I was really thinking. While I'd still claim a non-fictional text like the claim "Thou shalt not kill" does function as a floating signifier (all language does, as far as I am concerned) practically speaking its interpretation is so radically overdetermined that anyone who interpreted it differently could reasonably be said to be speaking a different language.
But the reason these non-fictional texts don't seem as flexible as BNW or Minority Report because we interpret them as being written in the author's own voice--in the cases where we don't assume the texts are expressing the viewpoint of the author, as in Swift's satire, meaning becomes much more open. And since fiction can at most give us the perspective of a narrator who can be unreliable, the way we construe the work's moral voice can never be intrinsic to the text itself.
Also, there's no formal characteristic of, say, the Constitution of the United States which prevents us from reading it as a satire. At most, we allow ourselves to be guided in the way we construct its author-function by what we know (or what we think we know) of the historical events which shaped its production--information which is extratextual to the document itself.
So no, I don't think there can be anything such as a "Christian novel"; to a Scientologist, it might function more as a satiric look at the self-delusion of Christianity. Which is likely to be a richer reading, because otherwise propaganda is likely to be, as you point out, drivel. Which brings me back to my original point: a text cannot function as literature until it can be read, so to speak, "against the grain" (or more precisely, against what had previously been considered to be the "grain").
Reply
I'll go into your post on Sunday in depth.
Just what I meant by overdetermined - Given a system of two equations and only exactly one variable which is in both equations, the variable is overdetermined iff the two equations are linear independent, i.e. if the variable, in order to solve the equation system, would need to have to separate values.
This, of course, is impossible. (Well, in most cases. Maths is entirely man-made, and I'm pretty sure one can devise some kind of system which would permit such a variable.)
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment