The word that occurs to me regarding TONE is "overdetermination". You get the feeling (as you do with "the de rigueur Australian way of writing fiction") that everything is known before anything is written (like a Parkinson interview!) In Aust TV drama they usually sound like they're reading off a script. This isn't because they're bad actors (that's beside the point): it's because the world is being twisted into The Authorised Version of whatever is there to be said. (Actually the acting has to be pretty good to get the script out without breaking into a sweat: so sweatlessly that it sounds dull, like acting.)
(Yes, right now I'm watching Bay Of Fires. How long can they drag this out for?)
Another way of putting it is the difference between Julie Burchill (say) and Julie Bindel. The first takes a complaint and turns it into a story (this is NOT overdetermination); the second takes a story and turns it into a complaint.
I would think that if you wanted to be a regular at the SpecAust (or at least, someone they hadn't dropped completely) you'd want to have acquired a certain tone. That tone would avoid self-reflection, whimsy, or humour (Simon Collins does humour, but this may be a special case, since the ed. thinks himself an advertising copywriter too). It wouldn't be considered bad form to err on the side of stridency -- in fact you'd need to have been strident enough three years ago to make the point today that what you said three years ago about covid/climate change/Justin Trudeau has now been found to be irrefutably true. (Just about all the SpecAust regulars are doing this now -- notice however that in the SpecForReal they are doing it not. I suspect it's that little English thing called "reticence". Indeed, the tone of the SpecForReal is absolutely unidentifiable with that of the SpecAust -- except in the book reviews, where the ideology may be different but the tone is exactly the same.)
Paranoid? Try this test. Think of something you really, truly believe. Put it in terms of the most fervent, free-range invective (say, Rod-Liddle-level) and plonk it in the comments section of the next article that even remotely relates. If the bot comes after you within three minutes and wipes your comment out, then yes, you really are paranoid.
Of such minor miracles are micro-aggressive small-wars made. I only ever got one ping (several aeons ago), but it was well over half-pregnant: I called the SpecForReal "the Mothership", and not long after that the term turned up in one of the ed's heavy-breathing exercises, so I knew I'd won.
But my gladiatorial days are done. The SpecAust tone is well beyond me, and don't I know it. It's enough for me to know that if these people took over the world tomorrow I'd be heading for the nearest (air-conditioned!) cave.
I know what you mean. There is s certain TONE, and I don't have it. Nor am I interested in bending to suit it. I have also noticed the immense difference between Spec. Aus and 'The Mothership' - similar to the Sky New Aus/Sky News UK dichotomy.
I think it was about the commission. He saw it in terms of that -- and now he knows (because I gave him TOO MUCH INFORMATION, as they say) that it's going ahead from his initial suggestion, but with my own (irritating) way of doing things. He wants something about politics that points to the importance of what he calls "culture" (I suppose it might be closer to "morality" -- politics is downstream of culture = politics is downstream of public morality). I will do something that digs up things about culture proper that people simply aren't interested in or don't want to know, because my conception of culture is "dealing with what is true", not "dealing with what everyone wants to be true".
Still, as before (in paranoic mode), I'm just guessing. Imagine taking a think-tank right out of itself! But think-tanks aren't really intellectual life, and it's easy to guess what they really want. Something like what gets regularly served up in the Spec Aust -- "The nobility of R.G. Menzies and his Vision of Australia". (Hey, that'd be interesting to do. R.G. Menzies gave us the Murray Report in 1957, which began the serious bureaucratisation of universities, and guess what that has led to ... There's a good article in that lot.)
But as to the guy I'm talking about, I have yet to see what it all amounts to, and he certainly DID NOT lower the Silence on me as I had thought. At worst, he proposed a commission and then felt that had been unwise but was too nervous to say so. I'm not pushing something that isn't fundamentally important. What's fundamentally important, is, as I say, culture. And as usual I have to get over myself to get right into that.
Yes, yes. Well said. I agree with your comments on culture. Also interested on view of the Speccie? I've been published in there a few times and initially felt it was a great plaudit. They ignored my last submission though, and like you I tend towards paranoia. Have I alienated them with my conspiracy theories? Have I ventured too far down the rabbit hole and been added to the persona non grata list? One does the feeling that there's a level of controlled opposition in such publications.
Could be I got it all wrong (wouldn't be the first time). After I finally managed to goad him out of his silence, he seemed as enthusiastic as ever. And I did make a prat of myself with my own original enthusiasm -- never assault busy people with your own life-story! We'll see how it goes. I've certainly got as great deal out of this so far. (If the word "paranoid" comes up in respect of my dealings with cultural worthies, well mostly it's been justified. But it should never be justified when it's not justified.)
1984 and Animal Farm seem to be standard fare. I've read more than that (since high school) but not that much. "Orwell as emblem" is something I'm bound to be tackling.
What I saw in his offering was some treatment of Orwell and Penton as a straightout comparison. I replied that there were two different cultures involved. Even though both were journalist-novelists who lived and died to the same age and at almost exactly the same time (within a year of each other), one was Brit, the other Australian, and reacted similarly but not identically to similar but not identical issues in their respective cultures. I thought I could make an issue of that, and I still think so, I'm just not getting as much information back as I need. And of course I have lots of time to think about this, whereas someone in full-time employment may have no such amount of time, especially to comment at length and risk tumbling into MY territory of being irritating!
"My job or Yours!" was the headline of one of Penton's Sydney Spy articles. MY job, definitely. But is it a job? Well, in my case it doesn't have to be.
Ha ha ha, well I'm glad you're still going to get the chance to write the article. Paranoia and enthusiasm are often more closely related in our game. I can relate.
Many years since I wrote it, I noticed that someone had been reading on my Academia site an essay I left called "The Step", on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Having a spare moment or two, I flicked over to it and read it through myself. As I did so, it crept up on me, because I'm trying to write an essay on 1984, or at least on the concept of "the Orwellian", that what Conrad is doing, just as Camus is doing in The Fall, and Golding is doing in Pincher Martin (these are all written within ten years of each other) is
"Orwellian", not so much in engaging with Orwell's supposed theme of "political freedom", but something deeper, the pathos of self-examination. It's hidden in Orwell, but I've always been aware of it. I just didn't grasp it as a proper theme until the essay on Conrad cropped up in that vicinity.
I wonder about the nature of writing "political essays". Is the proper purpose political, or is it existential? Why do people write political essays? To state something that they believe in? Why? The thrust of "self-examination" is to get you into a REALLY alien world, a world where there are no landmarks, or at least where "feeling this" and "feeling that" reveal themselves as landmarks of the most treacherous sort. It's fiction, and fiction doesn't fool itself the way politics does (though it can be a rather oblique and deceptive way of being political too).
I'm writing this in the aftermath of my rather strange (email) experience of one of the political worthies of a Melbourne thinktank. He persuaded me to take an interest in Orwell, and asked me to write an essay on him along certain lines. I was flattered, and agreed, but then I said there may be problems with what you're asking, and I laid down what I thought the problems might be. I expected him to email back, but he never did. He was going to send some commissioning papers, but he never did. I hadn't asked for the commission (there was a fair bit of money involved), and though I've done commissioned stuff in the past, I've never asked for it. The loss of the commission doesn't worry me, but the surprising coldness that followed our exchange did. What was going on here? From an organisation that boasts it "never takes a step back"! (I think the reference is to "moral fearlessness"!) The lights are on -- but nobody's home.
Is this, too, what "Orwellian" means? This has nothing to do with Conrad, and I'm going to enjoy getting stuck into the Conrad connection, which is only accidentally related to what I've said above. Time and time again I've found that the culture we're living in is full of people who (as Kierkegaard puts it) "sell the sign" (in this case, civility, free expression, are just something posted on a sign, like Kierkegaard's "Laundry Taken In"). Or is it just "moral capture"? (and then: sadomasochistic disappointment?!) You expect this from the left because they're totalitarian at heart, the proper left at least -- but my father used to make the useful point that there's no more totalitarian place than Christian Heaven -- so maybe I just get what my naivety deserves!
I like being naive. It gets you into surprising places. (Hopefully, it will get me properly into 1984, and all the rest of Orwell's stuff.) Back in high school French we did The Little Prince. After that, naivety is not a problem. Except in the busy world of signs.
How fascinating. For me personally there is nothing more contemptible in the field of professional correspondence than simply not replying. Even a polite 'go f*** yourself' is preferable to the cowardly ghosting. I'm curious though, what were the parameters of the essay he wanted you to write and the problems your foresaw?
Have you read much Orwell? I am well familiar with 1984 and Animal Farm but woefully behind on the rest of the catalogue. I bought most of the books some years ago but left them unread in NZ when I came here, where they gather dust in my storage unit. I must liberate them on my next trip back.
A nice short novel that everyone aspiring to get away from themself should have read by the age of eighteen: Albert Camus, The Fall. Undoubtedly, we all waded through "The Stranger", line by line, in French -- in French -- at the age of seventeen -- but The Fall is another thing altogether.
The fun thing about writing a novel is that you're writing for other people, and only later on do you realise what you were really saying all along (and benefit from the fact that none of THAT was for other people). If you keep at it long enough (i.e. over 44 years) you will eventually realise that you have ended up with something that contains NOTHING of what you started with. And you will be very glad about that, as should have been the author who had a first novel win a literary award when the poor author was eighteen and hopes that no-one will ask about it 44 years later. "But I only wrote it because I knew it would win that literary award!" she complained, "and I had no idea I would have vengeful authors waiting for me in dark alleys and writing horrid reviews of my treatment of the Ukrainians, and the Holocaust, and all the other fab things I know Leonie and Dave would like! Just because THEY never wrote anything that even approached a fably successful book like I did!" It is not a good idea to be this person, but maybe a novel about this person, so long as you don't become this person.
A writer's life is not a happy one.
The hatred she got scared the wits out of her, and she turned (as I once experienced the full blast of her) into a monster. A right-wing monster, let me say, who almost deputised for Dave and his LDP crew except that she'd have to renounce her Brit citizenship, and who'd consign themselves to The Antipodes forever even for a seat in Parliament?
A writer's life is not a happy one.
So read the Camus and love the fact that the species of woke that drove him out of Algeria was so ferocious that you'd never want to go back, for all the beach, sunshine and nostalgia in the world. (Oh, and the Amsterdam of The Fall makes it perfectly clear exactly what he was sacrificing.)
A writer's life is not a happy one. but it is certainly serendipitous -- I'm currently writing a chapter in my novel that is set in Amsterdam. While I'm at it I must get around to reading Camus -- have been meaning to for YEARS.
People find this "novel writing itself" thing to be a bit specious. Is what???? No, novels that don't write themselves are written by either by the Politburo or by the place your wannabe publisher banks with.
This doesn't mean that after the novel has written itself it will be "finished", or that you don't have an obligation to "finish" it yourself. Once you get to the editing stage, you really are taking your novel, with all its waywardness, in hand. And you can overdo the hand, but of course editing is as much a function of writing as "thinking things up".
When you're thinking things up, you're stuck between where you are now and where you will be at the end ("what the novel means"). And so you should be. This is called "thinking", and the proof of the "plot" novel (as far as I can see) is that where you are now (actually writing the thing) is very close indeed to where you will end up, while the "theme" novel really has it quite a long way away. (Sometimes, as in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the whole novel is an INVESTIGATION into where you SHOULD end up. This is where the novel of ethics can work -- it is very far from the "novel of preaching".)
The realist approach to novel-writing (and the root of the "theme" novel) is that any book, no matter how fictional, will raise an issue (its own choice is the issue with serious content, receiving inquiring, objective respect), and this issue is not your creation, even though your "investigation" of it will be (-- or will be addressed by your decisions). And to make your treatment "convincing", your issue has to be treated as a serious, real thing (which is actually what "creative" means -- otherwise it just means "well I got away with it because, look, I have two million readers").
The other day I sent a parody novel offshoot (of one of my books) to someone I thought might be interested in a crooked take into the history of philosophy -- written by one of my characters. This person I sent it to, said to me (having read it) something rather flattering -- "I'd like to meet Gatesworth" (the character). I routinely distinguish myself from G (the author of a few of my parodies), because he writes in a completely different way to me, and thinks up things I'd ever never think up, or does the whole thing so much more easily than I would.
I still have to edit him.
Jim
PS I think I said, all novels contain theme, plot and voice. The question of which type a novel will be, is addressed by which principle organises the others, or subordinates the others to criteria you'd never read the novel to fulfil. (Do you read William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury for the theme or the voice? This one is tricky, but I dare say, you read S&F for the fulfilment of the theme by the voice, but not the fulfilment of the voice by the theme. I dare say too -- and I'm biased, of course -- that you read just about any Patrick White for the fulfilment of the voice by the theme (i.e. the voice comes first) -- providing you can actually FIND a theme in all that hokey Jungian philosophy he serves up. Voss is possibly an exception, because he allows some of his characters to go off and have minds of their own, and "voices" of their own to go with that. But the novel of voice, I think, is rather intolerant of what Bakhtin called the Dostoevskyan "dialogic" or "polyphonic" mode of writing. Nowadays we're being served up a whole lot of aboriginal stuff, and don't let me get onto the subject of "monologic racism" -- maybe we should call it "the racism of voice". And Ayn Rand, of course, is a monologic writer -- her literary inspiration seems more to be Chernyshevsky than any of the REAL Russian novelists.)
PPS John Anderson said (significantly) in 1927: "There is no real distinction between thinking and experiment. In each case we require some hypothesis, and in each case we test it by reference to what we believe, or find, to be the case, i.e. by reference to whether its consequences are in accordance with the facts which we know."
Thanks Jim - I found this very useful - especially your first three paragraphs. Being far more widely read than I, you lose me a little in some of your literary references but this is no matter -- I hope we can keep the conversation going and perhaps at some point you might be interested in taking a look at some of my novel. After a two week hiatus in which I drank rather too much gin, I've been feeling a bit disheartened with the novel writing (always happens after I take a break and go all introspective and inevitably start second guessing everything my life) but what you said at the beginning of this comment I find reassuring and indeed providing the impetus to dive back in. "Novels that don't write themselves are written by either by the Politburo or by the place your wannabe publisher banks with." -- I feel I should print this out and put it up on the wall by my desk.
Last week I spent an unconscionable amount of time on a novel I first started 43 years ago (44, if I allow a first draft that is among the most truly execrable things I have ever written). Even after drafts from 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2017, and 2018, I found passages that had been very little changed from the 1980 which I could no longer tolerate, and out they went. The novelist’s life is not a happy one. Fortunately, this one is unpublished, so I can afford to make jokes about Politburos and bankers.
Sure, why not. I’ll give your book a go. But, of course, it’ll be a swap. After soooooo many drafts my novel is bound to be brilliant, and so I can expect to be told so, right? (especially with all that shit ripped out of it … but wait … how did that survive for so long if I wasn’t at heart a chronically self-centred idiot?)
I saw the thing on your drinking-frenzy. It was, actually, quite compelling. I don’t drink, never have, can’t stand the stuff, wonder what gets into people, etc., but know I’d be dead by now if I ever did, knowing my capacity for self-indulgence and self-delusion. I could tick off any number of other things I don’t do (did I mention self-satisfaction?), but when it comes to the things I DO do (some of which have only been made illegal recently) I understand the need for self-discipline. Do you know where Woke goes to die? Right down into its deep, deep self. I’m counting the number of recently fallen windmills. It’s because it lacks self-discipline. It can’t receive a rejection-slip without screaming at the sparrows (or any pet rock that will listen).
I won’t complain too much. As you can see, those rejections were in some part merited. Self-delusion needs, at least in part, to be delivered from itself. What most embittered me was the lack of CONNECTION. “Only connect”, said E.M. Forster, and after grandly quoting EMF in their keynote address to the local Writer’s Conference, Woke Publishing equally grandly whips off a rejection slip to the fact that “our list” is a “fine and private place / But only (we) woke do here embrace”. This is embittering. Coming from the mouths of babes and suck-holes.
Don’t get embittered like me.
My novel, Gatesworth’s Reunion, like your missive about re-connection, is about re-connection. Alan, who has a secret, goes back to his old school via a reunion. Though the book isn’t about me, I breathed, when I was reading it last week, the air of something past and not quite dead, the SENSE of reconnection, the AIR of something infinitely broad that could only be summoned up by not writing about yourself (because when you are writing about yourself you keep tripping over yourself).
My manuscript assessor (2006 draft) said, “Fine, it could win the Booker Prize [he did actually say, “Booker Prize”] but STILL no-one would get through it.” (That’s because it’s so incredibly anti-Woke, even in terms of the 2006 version of Woke.) Actually, what he said was—“Fine, no-one would actually get to the end of it, where all is explained, and where even an incredibly Woke person like myself loved it to death.” Or indeed: “Jim, a remarkable novel; unfortunately, it’s totally fucked.” (I’m paraphrasing, passim.)
What will I do? I dunno. No idea. All I know is that having read it last week (and having ripped the termited wood out of the attic) I am in bliss—and remain blissfully ignorant of its remaining faults. However, I somehow avoided Politburo and bankers all through the long, slow, winter years of gestation, so I can afford to make cheap jokes. And feel, in that literary sense that still pertains to the totally self-convinced, utterly smug.
Oh, and I LOVE my characters. God couldn’t love the world any better. Which (God, love, and characters) is what it is all about.
So much to get into here. I would expect nothing less than a swap with a fellow novelist. Give me another 6 months or so, I should have the first draft done, edited into a second draft and ready for feedback. That thought alone terrifies me. Am I meant to love my characters? I'm not sure I do... Not all of them at any rate. But love is a funny word... and a funny feeling.
My daily struggle involves attempting to remain unembittered (my spellcheck is telling me that's not a word - but fuck the spell check, I say. We of the quill have earned the right to invent new words as necessary for the enrichment of our language (as opposed to the invention of words, or more often, the redefinition of words, which the wokeists employee to remove all meaning from our language).
I completely agree with what you said: when you are writing about yourself you keep tripping over yourself. The main character in my novel keeps trying to be me. I have to keep reminding him he's not, and just because he is drawing on my life experiences for authenticity, he has to be his own man. It's tough, but even tougher is getting to the end of a writing project about oneself and discovering you've tripped over yourself so many times that it's not even worth editing. The next time I write about myself in long-form will be the day I get famous enough to write a memoir worth reading (aka never).
I love what you said about "where Woke goes to die? Right down into its deep, deep self... because it lacks self-discipline." How wonderfully poignant, I could write a 5000 word essay on this linkage between politics and the battle with one's self. Essentially this is the nexus where my personal struggle meets my political one -- hence 'Anxiety Addiction and Ascension'. It is how I make sense of what goes on around me -- by a thorough examination of what goes on within me. From time to time I try to bring this to life via one of my more personal/confessional pieces such as was last week's, but my feeling is most of my readers aren't here for the deep introspection, and to be honest, it's not usually a joy to write, mainly because I keep tripping over myself, but it keeps me honest to a degree, or at least shows me when I'm attempting to be dishonest.
Much more to be said on all these topics, but this novel ain't writing itself!
I'm sure your novel is a thing of greatness (though I'm dying to understand what anti-woke in 2006 looks like), and as for getting to the end -- well, I recently managed to get through both Marx and Hitler (know your enemy etc etc) and if that doesn't qualify me as a persistent reader then nothing will.
She hated Kant -- but she loved the Transcendental Ego.
The thing about the loud-and-proud ego, though, is that it cuts against fiction itself -- the crisis, the suspense, has to be visibly made up and padded out because the ego Has It All Under Control. At the opposite end, you have victim-fiction, where the character is only there to field the Literary Culture's self-pity (against which Ayn Culture's fiction is primarily directed). That is, unless you have Strong Black Woman (who makes John Galt look like Raskolnikov).
I like Endless Love for a number of reasons, but the one relevant here is that the character is recognisably self-reliant, does what he wants without having to rationalise it, but the moral opposition to him doing it is always in the balance, so you get a sort of MORAL suspense, and it's the resolution of this that's the final purpose of the book. In AR's case, the dice are loaded. In The Fountainhead this isn't quite true, but the end shows that she didn't want to come across as all Nietzschean, and the resolution has an exclamation mark that isn't quite earnt. All the way through, though, Roark never much presented himself as a Moral Being, though she obviously wanted him to be. (The rape scene, I notice, didn't feature in the movie.)
Very interesting. In the context of my protagonist this is all equally compelling and beguiling. I worry for my leading man -- and at times despair at his utter brainlessness and the harrowing spectacle of his ego, and then I remember that it must be this way for many of the reasons you touch on above.
If you haven't already read it, AR's "The Simplest Thing in the World" (google it). Half a dozen pages of the most sensible stuff she ever wrote. (I think it's in The Romantic Manifesto.)
On the JP view of Novel-Writing, there are three types: the novel of plot, the novel of theme, and the novel of voice. I've read The Power of One, so I know what sort of rubbish gets published in Australia about The Hero As Plot Device. When he published it in 1989 the plot-novel wasn't then all about Strong Black Women, but even at the time the awfulness of the book didn't altogether escape attention. Went down like a laxative, but the only way to do toxic masculinity today is to photoshop out the penis with some recognisable rendition of Kamala's eyebrows (sorry -- done that joke before). econd choice: the theme-novel. Don't be fooled: Crime and Punishment looks like a story, but Porfiry Petrovich only tags along while Raskolnikov finds himself. This is the best sort of novel, from my point of view (WARNING: AVOID CENTRAL-CHARACTER-NARCISSISM -- thousands of Raskolnikovs were once the staple of Western Literature, but the theme-novel requires one real, and probably unpublishable, ingredient: Something That No-One Has Ever Seen Before. Believe me, everyone has seen narcissism before. And Raskolnikov's narcissism is only skin-deep.) Third choice: the novel of voice. Ugh. This is where Strong Black Woman writes poetry -- and insists on doing said novel in blank verse. Nuff said.
AR famously talked about plot-theme: the novel has to mean something, over and above the building of buildings and efforts to make the trains go on time. This gets translated into Ideology: "The heroes of my novel demonstrate that values can be erected on the ruins of capitalist society". This, however, isn't a theme, it's a Wish. A theme is the discovery by the character of some tincture of reality (as with Raskolnikov). Of course, you have to have a plot, and what AR means by "plot-theme" is a series of interesting incidents that actually come to a point where reality breaks through. I suspect, though, that the more she wrote (and wrote and wrote and wrote), the more it was Hollywood that was apt to break through. But gosh I haven't read the book for maybe thirty plus years ...
Sorry Jim, this comment fell through the cracks. Interesting. Now I am wondering which type of novel mine is... I'm guessing it might be theme, but it could be plot... There's definitely some voice in there too. When I started writing I was committed to the idea of structure and forethought - then it kind of just took off and developed a mind of its own. I wonder if some of us simply can't stick to a script in this sense. My mother, another writer, is fond of remarking that her characters often end up writing themselves and she has very little control over them.
William Buckley called her the "hot-gospeller" of (I think) libertarianism. The books are less hot-gospel the earlier you go. We the Living is almost classic Russian nineteenth century fiction, and has some actual psychology in it (along the lines of The Possessed). Fountainhead hasn't, but the narrative line is more credible (and despite what AR might say, more Nietzschean) than AS.
But if you haven't read Houellebecq or Bolano -- what you are missing out on (esp. Atomised and Serotonin, &, of course, 2066). I'm reading Eco's Name of the Rose at the moment. Terrific. Have you ever read Scott Spencer? Endless Love is a billion times better than the film (which doesn't say much at all, considering what a godawful film it was -- or at least, for me, the first five minutes was) but even his first, Brain-Thieves Ball, is good enough to eat.
These are people who have written into the present century, and two of them are still writing today. If you want real apocalypse, try Golding's Pincher Martin (1956). We did it in high school and I became a Golding fan for life. I might try Cormac McCarthy, now that he's safely dead.
I've not read any of the authors you mention here Jim (showing my sketchy literary prowess) -- although I have read and very much admired a couple of Cormac McCarthy's books, most notably The Road, of which you may have seen the film adaption. Depressing stuff in both cases, but spiritually compelling. I just did a quick search for Endless Love, and it looks like an epic read. May have to pick up a copy.
Gotta say, I am a Scott fan. The book hit me a funny way (back in 1981!) He'd only written two others at the time, and I picked up the second at the local library. This was the 80s, so no abe or anything then -- I never got hold of the first. A few years later, by some sort of accident, I picked up Waking the Dead at a new-defunct bookshop, and thereafter lost track of him. Decades later, abe came along, and I thought, How's Scott going then? and picked up the remainder (to about 2009). I went back and read everything from no. 1, and the ones I'd read before, again. (Some of the bite was missing from Endless Love -- it seemed somehow more "reasonable" -- but that's what he is, reasonable, and he does reasonableness in the best way possible.) Then he published a couple horror things under the name Chase Novak (not reasonable at all; not even the cover-photo was reasonable). Didn't shame him at all! Finally, the two recent ones, which I've been reading (recently).
I'm saying all this because authors like that leave an indelible imprint on how I write myself. I don't write remotely like Scott Spencer, or Patricia Highsmith, or Dostoevsky, or Golding etc. etc. etc., but that's not what I mean by indelible. They don't teach me to write (I'm pretty unteachable, and I can't see myself writing anything the Standard Fiction House will ever publish -- and perhaps, ever should), but they do teach me how to think. And if writing isn't thinking, what is it?
So I don't mind AR -- she tries to think, and a lot of the stuff she writes is reasonable in a pretty undeniable way. But the suspense in Atlas Shrugged doesn't plunge you into the suspense for a dangerous world (as in 2666), nor does it open up the world to infinity (as in Serotonin or Atomised). Who Is John Galt? seems rather confected, compared with Where Is Archimboldi? And the suspense is different in another way. With Bolano you simply don't get the author constantly telling you who he is, so you really don't know what he's going to hand you next. AR, knee-deep in Soviet agitprop, couldn't keep anything hidden for more than a few pages. By the time you meet John Galt, there's already several thousand pages on what he OUGHT to be. You can tell she grew up eating and breathing some version of Jesus Christ.
Think I'll give Endless Love a try at some point. I found Atlas Shrugged very influential on the novel I'm currently writing, but in a way I find hard to describe. AR's rambling, self-indulgent style and her favoritism for certain characters appeals to my natural instincts as a writer. One gets the impression she really was making it up as she went -- which is largely how I write. I thought Atlas got a bit too far fetched at the end, but in a way that was also what was cool about it. It is fiction after all! (although closer to reality in 2023 than I care to contemplate!)
I have this sad sweet refrain that occasionally runs through my head:
Ayn! Aaaaayyynnnn!
Did you understand the music Yoko or was it all in vain?
Of course Rog(er Waters) never read Atlas Shrugged so this is obviously one of my confections.
AR I confess I haven't read for many many many many years, but when I did read it, I read it to death. (This would have been the seventies and eighties, so, before Pros and Cons.) I contain multitudes, so sitting Ayn down beside Rog for me is no big deal (though Ayn was heard to mutter, "You f--king little anti-semite", to which Rog replied, sotto voce, "Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?-- Peter Thiel, maybe?" She was dead by 1982, so this coulda woulda shoulda been just after The Wall).
Not many people realise it, but both Lenin and AR were brought up on Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, and though Ayn escaped Stalin-grad for Hollywood, she never shook the dust of the Soviet superman from her feet -- even though it was Dostoevsky's version she most wanted to escape from, all the way to, again, Hollywood. (Stavrogin by GARY COOPER!!!!!) (But here's the comedy of the century: Alyosha by William Shatner, Ivan by Richard Basehart, Dmitri by Yul Brunner. Of course, you had to be there. And Hollywood, they say, is full of canyons.)
One could say that AR is harmless enough, but when this sort of thing is done well, it can be done SUPERBLY. Look at Houellebecq's Serotonin (and you really must, if you haven't). And the idea of the mystery story grafted onto the world epic -- if Bolano's (again SUPERB) 2666 isn't AR in deep, deep drag, God knows where he got it from. (He got it from being a WRITER. Got published in his forties, was dead by fifty-three, and left thirty unpublished books behind.)
Back to Rog. His Trump (Is This The Life We Really Want? 2016) is a nasty bit of bitching, but you still have to admire the pyrotechnic timing. And at least he keeps it out of Palestine.
Back to Ayn. An education in AR is no bad thing. Barbara Branden covered the best and the worst, but those Americans -- there's an Ayn they haven't dug up, the student radical who understood Russia so deeply that nothing by Putin would have surprised her at all, just as (you said it) the Twilight Of The Idols in the West right now was so thoroughly covered that it's almost a yawn.
The Russia she escaped from was so dire that no number of Studebakers and Malibu hairstyles could ever make up for it.
(But, PS, when she got her sister over in '78, the poor thing took one look, grabbed her knitting, and took the first flight back.)
I saw Linda Burney on the ABC just now weaseling about something or other, SO COME BACK NANCY, ALL IS FORGIVEN!! (And at least she took her balls over to Taiwan.)
Perhaps the AI Threat is nothing more dangerous than a ploy to freely and endlessly scour the internet in search of dark porn collections. The prisons will be full (and of course they will completely miss Hunter Biden). (And Justin Trudeau.)
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn tripped her merry band into some valley in Colorado where internet access was particularly poor. They're still there, and (if ever they get off one another) they'll be BACK ... to take the world BACK ... for Methodism, or something.
Anyway, since they invented everything, including the internet, I'm not convinced. Even of the Methodism.
A fellow Ayn Rand reader! That book does sniff its own farts a little doesn't it? Even so, it is a masterpiece and eerily prescient of the present day.
I think AI is actually a threat, an existential threat. But the reason for this is so far unstated. If AI could not creep into your house and take over your Modern Lifestyle, it would be like one of those covid germs, contingent and random. But, of course, AI comes in on the back of the entire Interconnection Apparatus so there is nothing contingently random about it at all.
AI, it seems, is not only a threat to Ordinary People, but to the creators of the Interconnection Apparatus themselves. It seems to have the brain of Klaus Schwab and balls of Nancy Pelosi. It is, in other words, ungovernable. (Even Klaus and Nancy are having second thoughts.) Will it destroy the world? Of course it will. But fortunately it will destroy Klaus and Nancy in the process.
I'd do something about it, but unfortunately I'm too lazy even to bother with backups.
hahaha "the brain of Klaus Schwab and balls of Nancy Pelosi" - I'm having an actual lol moment here. I agree and my flippant dismissal of the AI threat in this piece is somewhat tongue in cheek and self-serving. Will it destroy us? -- yes I think so, but as to how long it will take for that to happen and exactly what form it will take, I'm not too sure. I don't think, for instance, it will be anything as cinematic as Terminator or The Matrix. It'll be more of a whimper than a bang, put it that way. But this variable is so spastic I'm not going to make any firm predictions. I suppose at bottom I see AI as an extension of our power elites -- they built it, and they did so for the same reason they do everything, to service their own throbbing egos. The only silver lining is, as you point out, that when AI does take us out, it will take us all out. These people think they can wield the one ring, as always, but it will consume them. And in the meantime, they remain our most imminent existential threat.
The word that occurs to me regarding TONE is "overdetermination". You get the feeling (as you do with "the de rigueur Australian way of writing fiction") that everything is known before anything is written (like a Parkinson interview!) In Aust TV drama they usually sound like they're reading off a script. This isn't because they're bad actors (that's beside the point): it's because the world is being twisted into The Authorised Version of whatever is there to be said. (Actually the acting has to be pretty good to get the script out without breaking into a sweat: so sweatlessly that it sounds dull, like acting.)
(Yes, right now I'm watching Bay Of Fires. How long can they drag this out for?)
Another way of putting it is the difference between Julie Burchill (say) and Julie Bindel. The first takes a complaint and turns it into a story (this is NOT overdetermination); the second takes a story and turns it into a complaint.
I would think that if you wanted to be a regular at the SpecAust (or at least, someone they hadn't dropped completely) you'd want to have acquired a certain tone. That tone would avoid self-reflection, whimsy, or humour (Simon Collins does humour, but this may be a special case, since the ed. thinks himself an advertising copywriter too). It wouldn't be considered bad form to err on the side of stridency -- in fact you'd need to have been strident enough three years ago to make the point today that what you said three years ago about covid/climate change/Justin Trudeau has now been found to be irrefutably true. (Just about all the SpecAust regulars are doing this now -- notice however that in the SpecForReal they are doing it not. I suspect it's that little English thing called "reticence". Indeed, the tone of the SpecForReal is absolutely unidentifiable with that of the SpecAust -- except in the book reviews, where the ideology may be different but the tone is exactly the same.)
Paranoid? Try this test. Think of something you really, truly believe. Put it in terms of the most fervent, free-range invective (say, Rod-Liddle-level) and plonk it in the comments section of the next article that even remotely relates. If the bot comes after you within three minutes and wipes your comment out, then yes, you really are paranoid.
Of such minor miracles are micro-aggressive small-wars made. I only ever got one ping (several aeons ago), but it was well over half-pregnant: I called the SpecForReal "the Mothership", and not long after that the term turned up in one of the ed's heavy-breathing exercises, so I knew I'd won.
But my gladiatorial days are done. The SpecAust tone is well beyond me, and don't I know it. It's enough for me to know that if these people took over the world tomorrow I'd be heading for the nearest (air-conditioned!) cave.
Now THAT'S paranoid.
I know what you mean. There is s certain TONE, and I don't have it. Nor am I interested in bending to suit it. I have also noticed the immense difference between Spec. Aus and 'The Mothership' - similar to the Sky New Aus/Sky News UK dichotomy.
I think it was about the commission. He saw it in terms of that -- and now he knows (because I gave him TOO MUCH INFORMATION, as they say) that it's going ahead from his initial suggestion, but with my own (irritating) way of doing things. He wants something about politics that points to the importance of what he calls "culture" (I suppose it might be closer to "morality" -- politics is downstream of culture = politics is downstream of public morality). I will do something that digs up things about culture proper that people simply aren't interested in or don't want to know, because my conception of culture is "dealing with what is true", not "dealing with what everyone wants to be true".
Still, as before (in paranoic mode), I'm just guessing. Imagine taking a think-tank right out of itself! But think-tanks aren't really intellectual life, and it's easy to guess what they really want. Something like what gets regularly served up in the Spec Aust -- "The nobility of R.G. Menzies and his Vision of Australia". (Hey, that'd be interesting to do. R.G. Menzies gave us the Murray Report in 1957, which began the serious bureaucratisation of universities, and guess what that has led to ... There's a good article in that lot.)
But as to the guy I'm talking about, I have yet to see what it all amounts to, and he certainly DID NOT lower the Silence on me as I had thought. At worst, he proposed a commission and then felt that had been unwise but was too nervous to say so. I'm not pushing something that isn't fundamentally important. What's fundamentally important, is, as I say, culture. And as usual I have to get over myself to get right into that.
Yes, yes. Well said. I agree with your comments on culture. Also interested on view of the Speccie? I've been published in there a few times and initially felt it was a great plaudit. They ignored my last submission though, and like you I tend towards paranoia. Have I alienated them with my conspiracy theories? Have I ventured too far down the rabbit hole and been added to the persona non grata list? One does the feeling that there's a level of controlled opposition in such publications.
Could be I got it all wrong (wouldn't be the first time). After I finally managed to goad him out of his silence, he seemed as enthusiastic as ever. And I did make a prat of myself with my own original enthusiasm -- never assault busy people with your own life-story! We'll see how it goes. I've certainly got as great deal out of this so far. (If the word "paranoid" comes up in respect of my dealings with cultural worthies, well mostly it's been justified. But it should never be justified when it's not justified.)
1984 and Animal Farm seem to be standard fare. I've read more than that (since high school) but not that much. "Orwell as emblem" is something I'm bound to be tackling.
What I saw in his offering was some treatment of Orwell and Penton as a straightout comparison. I replied that there were two different cultures involved. Even though both were journalist-novelists who lived and died to the same age and at almost exactly the same time (within a year of each other), one was Brit, the other Australian, and reacted similarly but not identically to similar but not identical issues in their respective cultures. I thought I could make an issue of that, and I still think so, I'm just not getting as much information back as I need. And of course I have lots of time to think about this, whereas someone in full-time employment may have no such amount of time, especially to comment at length and risk tumbling into MY territory of being irritating!
"My job or Yours!" was the headline of one of Penton's Sydney Spy articles. MY job, definitely. But is it a job? Well, in my case it doesn't have to be.
Ha ha ha, well I'm glad you're still going to get the chance to write the article. Paranoia and enthusiasm are often more closely related in our game. I can relate.
Many years since I wrote it, I noticed that someone had been reading on my Academia site an essay I left called "The Step", on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Having a spare moment or two, I flicked over to it and read it through myself. As I did so, it crept up on me, because I'm trying to write an essay on 1984, or at least on the concept of "the Orwellian", that what Conrad is doing, just as Camus is doing in The Fall, and Golding is doing in Pincher Martin (these are all written within ten years of each other) is
"Orwellian", not so much in engaging with Orwell's supposed theme of "political freedom", but something deeper, the pathos of self-examination. It's hidden in Orwell, but I've always been aware of it. I just didn't grasp it as a proper theme until the essay on Conrad cropped up in that vicinity.
I wonder about the nature of writing "political essays". Is the proper purpose political, or is it existential? Why do people write political essays? To state something that they believe in? Why? The thrust of "self-examination" is to get you into a REALLY alien world, a world where there are no landmarks, or at least where "feeling this" and "feeling that" reveal themselves as landmarks of the most treacherous sort. It's fiction, and fiction doesn't fool itself the way politics does (though it can be a rather oblique and deceptive way of being political too).
I'm writing this in the aftermath of my rather strange (email) experience of one of the political worthies of a Melbourne thinktank. He persuaded me to take an interest in Orwell, and asked me to write an essay on him along certain lines. I was flattered, and agreed, but then I said there may be problems with what you're asking, and I laid down what I thought the problems might be. I expected him to email back, but he never did. He was going to send some commissioning papers, but he never did. I hadn't asked for the commission (there was a fair bit of money involved), and though I've done commissioned stuff in the past, I've never asked for it. The loss of the commission doesn't worry me, but the surprising coldness that followed our exchange did. What was going on here? From an organisation that boasts it "never takes a step back"! (I think the reference is to "moral fearlessness"!) The lights are on -- but nobody's home.
Is this, too, what "Orwellian" means? This has nothing to do with Conrad, and I'm going to enjoy getting stuck into the Conrad connection, which is only accidentally related to what I've said above. Time and time again I've found that the culture we're living in is full of people who (as Kierkegaard puts it) "sell the sign" (in this case, civility, free expression, are just something posted on a sign, like Kierkegaard's "Laundry Taken In"). Or is it just "moral capture"? (and then: sadomasochistic disappointment?!) You expect this from the left because they're totalitarian at heart, the proper left at least -- but my father used to make the useful point that there's no more totalitarian place than Christian Heaven -- so maybe I just get what my naivety deserves!
I like being naive. It gets you into surprising places. (Hopefully, it will get me properly into 1984, and all the rest of Orwell's stuff.) Back in high school French we did The Little Prince. After that, naivety is not a problem. Except in the busy world of signs.
How fascinating. For me personally there is nothing more contemptible in the field of professional correspondence than simply not replying. Even a polite 'go f*** yourself' is preferable to the cowardly ghosting. I'm curious though, what were the parameters of the essay he wanted you to write and the problems your foresaw?
Have you read much Orwell? I am well familiar with 1984 and Animal Farm but woefully behind on the rest of the catalogue. I bought most of the books some years ago but left them unread in NZ when I came here, where they gather dust in my storage unit. I must liberate them on my next trip back.
A nice short novel that everyone aspiring to get away from themself should have read by the age of eighteen: Albert Camus, The Fall. Undoubtedly, we all waded through "The Stranger", line by line, in French -- in French -- at the age of seventeen -- but The Fall is another thing altogether.
The fun thing about writing a novel is that you're writing for other people, and only later on do you realise what you were really saying all along (and benefit from the fact that none of THAT was for other people). If you keep at it long enough (i.e. over 44 years) you will eventually realise that you have ended up with something that contains NOTHING of what you started with. And you will be very glad about that, as should have been the author who had a first novel win a literary award when the poor author was eighteen and hopes that no-one will ask about it 44 years later. "But I only wrote it because I knew it would win that literary award!" she complained, "and I had no idea I would have vengeful authors waiting for me in dark alleys and writing horrid reviews of my treatment of the Ukrainians, and the Holocaust, and all the other fab things I know Leonie and Dave would like! Just because THEY never wrote anything that even approached a fably successful book like I did!" It is not a good idea to be this person, but maybe a novel about this person, so long as you don't become this person.
A writer's life is not a happy one.
The hatred she got scared the wits out of her, and she turned (as I once experienced the full blast of her) into a monster. A right-wing monster, let me say, who almost deputised for Dave and his LDP crew except that she'd have to renounce her Brit citizenship, and who'd consign themselves to The Antipodes forever even for a seat in Parliament?
A writer's life is not a happy one.
So read the Camus and love the fact that the species of woke that drove him out of Algeria was so ferocious that you'd never want to go back, for all the beach, sunshine and nostalgia in the world. (Oh, and the Amsterdam of The Fall makes it perfectly clear exactly what he was sacrificing.)
A writer's life is not a happy one. but it is certainly serendipitous -- I'm currently writing a chapter in my novel that is set in Amsterdam. While I'm at it I must get around to reading Camus -- have been meaning to for YEARS.
People find this "novel writing itself" thing to be a bit specious. Is what???? No, novels that don't write themselves are written by either by the Politburo or by the place your wannabe publisher banks with.
This doesn't mean that after the novel has written itself it will be "finished", or that you don't have an obligation to "finish" it yourself. Once you get to the editing stage, you really are taking your novel, with all its waywardness, in hand. And you can overdo the hand, but of course editing is as much a function of writing as "thinking things up".
When you're thinking things up, you're stuck between where you are now and where you will be at the end ("what the novel means"). And so you should be. This is called "thinking", and the proof of the "plot" novel (as far as I can see) is that where you are now (actually writing the thing) is very close indeed to where you will end up, while the "theme" novel really has it quite a long way away. (Sometimes, as in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the whole novel is an INVESTIGATION into where you SHOULD end up. This is where the novel of ethics can work -- it is very far from the "novel of preaching".)
The realist approach to novel-writing (and the root of the "theme" novel) is that any book, no matter how fictional, will raise an issue (its own choice is the issue with serious content, receiving inquiring, objective respect), and this issue is not your creation, even though your "investigation" of it will be (-- or will be addressed by your decisions). And to make your treatment "convincing", your issue has to be treated as a serious, real thing (which is actually what "creative" means -- otherwise it just means "well I got away with it because, look, I have two million readers").
The other day I sent a parody novel offshoot (of one of my books) to someone I thought might be interested in a crooked take into the history of philosophy -- written by one of my characters. This person I sent it to, said to me (having read it) something rather flattering -- "I'd like to meet Gatesworth" (the character). I routinely distinguish myself from G (the author of a few of my parodies), because he writes in a completely different way to me, and thinks up things I'd ever never think up, or does the whole thing so much more easily than I would.
I still have to edit him.
Jim
PS I think I said, all novels contain theme, plot and voice. The question of which type a novel will be, is addressed by which principle organises the others, or subordinates the others to criteria you'd never read the novel to fulfil. (Do you read William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury for the theme or the voice? This one is tricky, but I dare say, you read S&F for the fulfilment of the theme by the voice, but not the fulfilment of the voice by the theme. I dare say too -- and I'm biased, of course -- that you read just about any Patrick White for the fulfilment of the voice by the theme (i.e. the voice comes first) -- providing you can actually FIND a theme in all that hokey Jungian philosophy he serves up. Voss is possibly an exception, because he allows some of his characters to go off and have minds of their own, and "voices" of their own to go with that. But the novel of voice, I think, is rather intolerant of what Bakhtin called the Dostoevskyan "dialogic" or "polyphonic" mode of writing. Nowadays we're being served up a whole lot of aboriginal stuff, and don't let me get onto the subject of "monologic racism" -- maybe we should call it "the racism of voice". And Ayn Rand, of course, is a monologic writer -- her literary inspiration seems more to be Chernyshevsky than any of the REAL Russian novelists.)
PPS John Anderson said (significantly) in 1927: "There is no real distinction between thinking and experiment. In each case we require some hypothesis, and in each case we test it by reference to what we believe, or find, to be the case, i.e. by reference to whether its consequences are in accordance with the facts which we know."
Thanks Jim - I found this very useful - especially your first three paragraphs. Being far more widely read than I, you lose me a little in some of your literary references but this is no matter -- I hope we can keep the conversation going and perhaps at some point you might be interested in taking a look at some of my novel. After a two week hiatus in which I drank rather too much gin, I've been feeling a bit disheartened with the novel writing (always happens after I take a break and go all introspective and inevitably start second guessing everything my life) but what you said at the beginning of this comment I find reassuring and indeed providing the impetus to dive back in. "Novels that don't write themselves are written by either by the Politburo or by the place your wannabe publisher banks with." -- I feel I should print this out and put it up on the wall by my desk.
Last week I spent an unconscionable amount of time on a novel I first started 43 years ago (44, if I allow a first draft that is among the most truly execrable things I have ever written). Even after drafts from 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2017, and 2018, I found passages that had been very little changed from the 1980 which I could no longer tolerate, and out they went. The novelist’s life is not a happy one. Fortunately, this one is unpublished, so I can afford to make jokes about Politburos and bankers.
Sure, why not. I’ll give your book a go. But, of course, it’ll be a swap. After soooooo many drafts my novel is bound to be brilliant, and so I can expect to be told so, right? (especially with all that shit ripped out of it … but wait … how did that survive for so long if I wasn’t at heart a chronically self-centred idiot?)
I saw the thing on your drinking-frenzy. It was, actually, quite compelling. I don’t drink, never have, can’t stand the stuff, wonder what gets into people, etc., but know I’d be dead by now if I ever did, knowing my capacity for self-indulgence and self-delusion. I could tick off any number of other things I don’t do (did I mention self-satisfaction?), but when it comes to the things I DO do (some of which have only been made illegal recently) I understand the need for self-discipline. Do you know where Woke goes to die? Right down into its deep, deep self. I’m counting the number of recently fallen windmills. It’s because it lacks self-discipline. It can’t receive a rejection-slip without screaming at the sparrows (or any pet rock that will listen).
I won’t complain too much. As you can see, those rejections were in some part merited. Self-delusion needs, at least in part, to be delivered from itself. What most embittered me was the lack of CONNECTION. “Only connect”, said E.M. Forster, and after grandly quoting EMF in their keynote address to the local Writer’s Conference, Woke Publishing equally grandly whips off a rejection slip to the fact that “our list” is a “fine and private place / But only (we) woke do here embrace”. This is embittering. Coming from the mouths of babes and suck-holes.
Don’t get embittered like me.
My novel, Gatesworth’s Reunion, like your missive about re-connection, is about re-connection. Alan, who has a secret, goes back to his old school via a reunion. Though the book isn’t about me, I breathed, when I was reading it last week, the air of something past and not quite dead, the SENSE of reconnection, the AIR of something infinitely broad that could only be summoned up by not writing about yourself (because when you are writing about yourself you keep tripping over yourself).
My manuscript assessor (2006 draft) said, “Fine, it could win the Booker Prize [he did actually say, “Booker Prize”] but STILL no-one would get through it.” (That’s because it’s so incredibly anti-Woke, even in terms of the 2006 version of Woke.) Actually, what he said was—“Fine, no-one would actually get to the end of it, where all is explained, and where even an incredibly Woke person like myself loved it to death.” Or indeed: “Jim, a remarkable novel; unfortunately, it’s totally fucked.” (I’m paraphrasing, passim.)
What will I do? I dunno. No idea. All I know is that having read it last week (and having ripped the termited wood out of the attic) I am in bliss—and remain blissfully ignorant of its remaining faults. However, I somehow avoided Politburo and bankers all through the long, slow, winter years of gestation, so I can afford to make cheap jokes. And feel, in that literary sense that still pertains to the totally self-convinced, utterly smug.
Oh, and I LOVE my characters. God couldn’t love the world any better. Which (God, love, and characters) is what it is all about.
J.
So much to get into here. I would expect nothing less than a swap with a fellow novelist. Give me another 6 months or so, I should have the first draft done, edited into a second draft and ready for feedback. That thought alone terrifies me. Am I meant to love my characters? I'm not sure I do... Not all of them at any rate. But love is a funny word... and a funny feeling.
My daily struggle involves attempting to remain unembittered (my spellcheck is telling me that's not a word - but fuck the spell check, I say. We of the quill have earned the right to invent new words as necessary for the enrichment of our language (as opposed to the invention of words, or more often, the redefinition of words, which the wokeists employee to remove all meaning from our language).
I completely agree with what you said: when you are writing about yourself you keep tripping over yourself. The main character in my novel keeps trying to be me. I have to keep reminding him he's not, and just because he is drawing on my life experiences for authenticity, he has to be his own man. It's tough, but even tougher is getting to the end of a writing project about oneself and discovering you've tripped over yourself so many times that it's not even worth editing. The next time I write about myself in long-form will be the day I get famous enough to write a memoir worth reading (aka never).
I love what you said about "where Woke goes to die? Right down into its deep, deep self... because it lacks self-discipline." How wonderfully poignant, I could write a 5000 word essay on this linkage between politics and the battle with one's self. Essentially this is the nexus where my personal struggle meets my political one -- hence 'Anxiety Addiction and Ascension'. It is how I make sense of what goes on around me -- by a thorough examination of what goes on within me. From time to time I try to bring this to life via one of my more personal/confessional pieces such as was last week's, but my feeling is most of my readers aren't here for the deep introspection, and to be honest, it's not usually a joy to write, mainly because I keep tripping over myself, but it keeps me honest to a degree, or at least shows me when I'm attempting to be dishonest.
Much more to be said on all these topics, but this novel ain't writing itself!
I'm sure your novel is a thing of greatness (though I'm dying to understand what anti-woke in 2006 looks like), and as for getting to the end -- well, I recently managed to get through both Marx and Hitler (know your enemy etc etc) and if that doesn't qualify me as a persistent reader then nothing will.
She hated Kant -- but she loved the Transcendental Ego.
The thing about the loud-and-proud ego, though, is that it cuts against fiction itself -- the crisis, the suspense, has to be visibly made up and padded out because the ego Has It All Under Control. At the opposite end, you have victim-fiction, where the character is only there to field the Literary Culture's self-pity (against which Ayn Culture's fiction is primarily directed). That is, unless you have Strong Black Woman (who makes John Galt look like Raskolnikov).
I like Endless Love for a number of reasons, but the one relevant here is that the character is recognisably self-reliant, does what he wants without having to rationalise it, but the moral opposition to him doing it is always in the balance, so you get a sort of MORAL suspense, and it's the resolution of this that's the final purpose of the book. In AR's case, the dice are loaded. In The Fountainhead this isn't quite true, but the end shows that she didn't want to come across as all Nietzschean, and the resolution has an exclamation mark that isn't quite earnt. All the way through, though, Roark never much presented himself as a Moral Being, though she obviously wanted him to be. (The rape scene, I notice, didn't feature in the movie.)
Very interesting. In the context of my protagonist this is all equally compelling and beguiling. I worry for my leading man -- and at times despair at his utter brainlessness and the harrowing spectacle of his ego, and then I remember that it must be this way for many of the reasons you touch on above.
If you haven't already read it, AR's "The Simplest Thing in the World" (google it). Half a dozen pages of the most sensible stuff she ever wrote. (I think it's in The Romantic Manifesto.)
On the JP view of Novel-Writing, there are three types: the novel of plot, the novel of theme, and the novel of voice. I've read The Power of One, so I know what sort of rubbish gets published in Australia about The Hero As Plot Device. When he published it in 1989 the plot-novel wasn't then all about Strong Black Women, but even at the time the awfulness of the book didn't altogether escape attention. Went down like a laxative, but the only way to do toxic masculinity today is to photoshop out the penis with some recognisable rendition of Kamala's eyebrows (sorry -- done that joke before). econd choice: the theme-novel. Don't be fooled: Crime and Punishment looks like a story, but Porfiry Petrovich only tags along while Raskolnikov finds himself. This is the best sort of novel, from my point of view (WARNING: AVOID CENTRAL-CHARACTER-NARCISSISM -- thousands of Raskolnikovs were once the staple of Western Literature, but the theme-novel requires one real, and probably unpublishable, ingredient: Something That No-One Has Ever Seen Before. Believe me, everyone has seen narcissism before. And Raskolnikov's narcissism is only skin-deep.) Third choice: the novel of voice. Ugh. This is where Strong Black Woman writes poetry -- and insists on doing said novel in blank verse. Nuff said.
AR famously talked about plot-theme: the novel has to mean something, over and above the building of buildings and efforts to make the trains go on time. This gets translated into Ideology: "The heroes of my novel demonstrate that values can be erected on the ruins of capitalist society". This, however, isn't a theme, it's a Wish. A theme is the discovery by the character of some tincture of reality (as with Raskolnikov). Of course, you have to have a plot, and what AR means by "plot-theme" is a series of interesting incidents that actually come to a point where reality breaks through. I suspect, though, that the more she wrote (and wrote and wrote and wrote), the more it was Hollywood that was apt to break through. But gosh I haven't read the book for maybe thirty plus years ...
Sorry Jim, this comment fell through the cracks. Interesting. Now I am wondering which type of novel mine is... I'm guessing it might be theme, but it could be plot... There's definitely some voice in there too. When I started writing I was committed to the idea of structure and forethought - then it kind of just took off and developed a mind of its own. I wonder if some of us simply can't stick to a script in this sense. My mother, another writer, is fond of remarking that her characters often end up writing themselves and she has very little control over them.
William Buckley called her the "hot-gospeller" of (I think) libertarianism. The books are less hot-gospel the earlier you go. We the Living is almost classic Russian nineteenth century fiction, and has some actual psychology in it (along the lines of The Possessed). Fountainhead hasn't, but the narrative line is more credible (and despite what AR might say, more Nietzschean) than AS.
But if you haven't read Houellebecq or Bolano -- what you are missing out on (esp. Atomised and Serotonin, &, of course, 2066). I'm reading Eco's Name of the Rose at the moment. Terrific. Have you ever read Scott Spencer? Endless Love is a billion times better than the film (which doesn't say much at all, considering what a godawful film it was -- or at least, for me, the first five minutes was) but even his first, Brain-Thieves Ball, is good enough to eat.
These are people who have written into the present century, and two of them are still writing today. If you want real apocalypse, try Golding's Pincher Martin (1956). We did it in high school and I became a Golding fan for life. I might try Cormac McCarthy, now that he's safely dead.
I've not read any of the authors you mention here Jim (showing my sketchy literary prowess) -- although I have read and very much admired a couple of Cormac McCarthy's books, most notably The Road, of which you may have seen the film adaption. Depressing stuff in both cases, but spiritually compelling. I just did a quick search for Endless Love, and it looks like an epic read. May have to pick up a copy.
Gotta say, I am a Scott fan. The book hit me a funny way (back in 1981!) He'd only written two others at the time, and I picked up the second at the local library. This was the 80s, so no abe or anything then -- I never got hold of the first. A few years later, by some sort of accident, I picked up Waking the Dead at a new-defunct bookshop, and thereafter lost track of him. Decades later, abe came along, and I thought, How's Scott going then? and picked up the remainder (to about 2009). I went back and read everything from no. 1, and the ones I'd read before, again. (Some of the bite was missing from Endless Love -- it seemed somehow more "reasonable" -- but that's what he is, reasonable, and he does reasonableness in the best way possible.) Then he published a couple horror things under the name Chase Novak (not reasonable at all; not even the cover-photo was reasonable). Didn't shame him at all! Finally, the two recent ones, which I've been reading (recently).
I'm saying all this because authors like that leave an indelible imprint on how I write myself. I don't write remotely like Scott Spencer, or Patricia Highsmith, or Dostoevsky, or Golding etc. etc. etc., but that's not what I mean by indelible. They don't teach me to write (I'm pretty unteachable, and I can't see myself writing anything the Standard Fiction House will ever publish -- and perhaps, ever should), but they do teach me how to think. And if writing isn't thinking, what is it?
So I don't mind AR -- she tries to think, and a lot of the stuff she writes is reasonable in a pretty undeniable way. But the suspense in Atlas Shrugged doesn't plunge you into the suspense for a dangerous world (as in 2666), nor does it open up the world to infinity (as in Serotonin or Atomised). Who Is John Galt? seems rather confected, compared with Where Is Archimboldi? And the suspense is different in another way. With Bolano you simply don't get the author constantly telling you who he is, so you really don't know what he's going to hand you next. AR, knee-deep in Soviet agitprop, couldn't keep anything hidden for more than a few pages. By the time you meet John Galt, there's already several thousand pages on what he OUGHT to be. You can tell she grew up eating and breathing some version of Jesus Christ.
Think I'll give Endless Love a try at some point. I found Atlas Shrugged very influential on the novel I'm currently writing, but in a way I find hard to describe. AR's rambling, self-indulgent style and her favoritism for certain characters appeals to my natural instincts as a writer. One gets the impression she really was making it up as she went -- which is largely how I write. I thought Atlas got a bit too far fetched at the end, but in a way that was also what was cool about it. It is fiction after all! (although closer to reality in 2023 than I care to contemplate!)
I have this sad sweet refrain that occasionally runs through my head:
Ayn! Aaaaayyynnnn!
Did you understand the music Yoko or was it all in vain?
Of course Rog(er Waters) never read Atlas Shrugged so this is obviously one of my confections.
AR I confess I haven't read for many many many many years, but when I did read it, I read it to death. (This would have been the seventies and eighties, so, before Pros and Cons.) I contain multitudes, so sitting Ayn down beside Rog for me is no big deal (though Ayn was heard to mutter, "You f--king little anti-semite", to which Rog replied, sotto voce, "Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?-- Peter Thiel, maybe?" She was dead by 1982, so this coulda woulda shoulda been just after The Wall).
Not many people realise it, but both Lenin and AR were brought up on Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, and though Ayn escaped Stalin-grad for Hollywood, she never shook the dust of the Soviet superman from her feet -- even though it was Dostoevsky's version she most wanted to escape from, all the way to, again, Hollywood. (Stavrogin by GARY COOPER!!!!!) (But here's the comedy of the century: Alyosha by William Shatner, Ivan by Richard Basehart, Dmitri by Yul Brunner. Of course, you had to be there. And Hollywood, they say, is full of canyons.)
One could say that AR is harmless enough, but when this sort of thing is done well, it can be done SUPERBLY. Look at Houellebecq's Serotonin (and you really must, if you haven't). And the idea of the mystery story grafted onto the world epic -- if Bolano's (again SUPERB) 2666 isn't AR in deep, deep drag, God knows where he got it from. (He got it from being a WRITER. Got published in his forties, was dead by fifty-three, and left thirty unpublished books behind.)
Back to Rog. His Trump (Is This The Life We Really Want? 2016) is a nasty bit of bitching, but you still have to admire the pyrotechnic timing. And at least he keeps it out of Palestine.
Back to Ayn. An education in AR is no bad thing. Barbara Branden covered the best and the worst, but those Americans -- there's an Ayn they haven't dug up, the student radical who understood Russia so deeply that nothing by Putin would have surprised her at all, just as (you said it) the Twilight Of The Idols in the West right now was so thoroughly covered that it's almost a yawn.
The Russia she escaped from was so dire that no number of Studebakers and Malibu hairstyles could ever make up for it.
(But, PS, when she got her sister over in '78, the poor thing took one look, grabbed her knitting, and took the first flight back.)
You run rings around me sometimes Jim! lol-lol. Keep it coming though! I should probably read more Ayn -- I've only read Atlas.
I saw Linda Burney on the ABC just now weaseling about something or other, SO COME BACK NANCY, ALL IS FORGIVEN!! (And at least she took her balls over to Taiwan.)
Perhaps the AI Threat is nothing more dangerous than a ploy to freely and endlessly scour the internet in search of dark porn collections. The prisons will be full (and of course they will completely miss Hunter Biden). (And Justin Trudeau.)
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn tripped her merry band into some valley in Colorado where internet access was particularly poor. They're still there, and (if ever they get off one another) they'll be BACK ... to take the world BACK ... for Methodism, or something.
Anyway, since they invented everything, including the internet, I'm not convinced. Even of the Methodism.
A fellow Ayn Rand reader! That book does sniff its own farts a little doesn't it? Even so, it is a masterpiece and eerily prescient of the present day.
I think AI is actually a threat, an existential threat. But the reason for this is so far unstated. If AI could not creep into your house and take over your Modern Lifestyle, it would be like one of those covid germs, contingent and random. But, of course, AI comes in on the back of the entire Interconnection Apparatus so there is nothing contingently random about it at all.
AI, it seems, is not only a threat to Ordinary People, but to the creators of the Interconnection Apparatus themselves. It seems to have the brain of Klaus Schwab and balls of Nancy Pelosi. It is, in other words, ungovernable. (Even Klaus and Nancy are having second thoughts.) Will it destroy the world? Of course it will. But fortunately it will destroy Klaus and Nancy in the process.
I'd do something about it, but unfortunately I'm too lazy even to bother with backups.
hahaha "the brain of Klaus Schwab and balls of Nancy Pelosi" - I'm having an actual lol moment here. I agree and my flippant dismissal of the AI threat in this piece is somewhat tongue in cheek and self-serving. Will it destroy us? -- yes I think so, but as to how long it will take for that to happen and exactly what form it will take, I'm not too sure. I don't think, for instance, it will be anything as cinematic as Terminator or The Matrix. It'll be more of a whimper than a bang, put it that way. But this variable is so spastic I'm not going to make any firm predictions. I suppose at bottom I see AI as an extension of our power elites -- they built it, and they did so for the same reason they do everything, to service their own throbbing egos. The only silver lining is, as you point out, that when AI does take us out, it will take us all out. These people think they can wield the one ring, as always, but it will consume them. And in the meantime, they remain our most imminent existential threat.
Imagine the damage they could do if they were competent.
Right? They'd actually have a good shot at getting the population down to their stated goal of half a billion.