In Search of the Subjunctive Mood

For about a year now I've been sporadically musing on the steampunk fad that has lately gripped our field. This morning, likely because of the coincidence of my line-editing my novella "A Question of Grammar" last night and reading Christina Milletti's essay in Fiction's Present this morning, some of my thoughts about steampunk’s attractions have jelled. As often happens when I read interesting essays and articles, my thoughts at a certain point took off on a tangent to Milletti's argument. This intellectual practice of mine is perhaps not fair to the authors of the articles and essays I read, but I long ago made the decision to allow my thoughts to go where they will, rather than rein in my imagination in an effort to appreciate and evaluate the argument on offer. (I am, after all, an apostate academic. I left that fold almost thirty years ago, and never feel the slightest guilt for not reading work by academics as it is supposed to be read.) The fact is, my thoughts are always, at best, scattered and diffuse, open to the connections that interest me most.

Christina Milletti, writing about Gertrude Stein's and Christine Brooke-Rose's different uses of language to "jam the theoretical machinery itself...suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal" (and here Milletti is herself borrowing from Luce Irigaray, writing in another context), declares:

In other words, since alternative systems of power cannot be enacted in the face of ever more opaque political discourse--as Bush "revealingly" noted in 2004, for instance, "We stand for things"-- the only plausible response is to prevent a continued pretension to consensus.

The insistence on lockstep consensus started with 9/11, of course. I'm sure most USians recall the bizarre totality of this consensus in 2002 and 2003 especially, when it was still a radical departure from “normal.” Although some "dissent" can now be spoken and even, occasionally, heard in the public sphere, it strikes me that the nature of that lockstep consensus has shifted rather than disappeared. (And let’s face it, we've become accustomed to it in ways that would surprise our pre-9/11 selves.) Still, lockstep consensus was not unknown to us before 9/11. I recall it prevailing through the 1950s and early 1960s. And after the end of the Vietnam war, it routinely came to be summoned (however briefly) whenever the US started a new war or mounted a one- or two-day military strike on a third-world target. I will note that lockstep consensus arose even when the war was opposed in advance. A huge opposition made itself felt before the first US-Iraq war in 1991 (aka "the Gulf War"), when on the very day the attack began 90% of the public professed to be opposed to it. The morning after the US military began flying “sorties,” however, the media woke to unanimous support, and though people were being arrested all over the country for performing civil disobedience in opposition to the war, the only picture presented by the media was that of total, unanimous support and most polls showed inverted attitudes toward the war (i.e., 90% for and 10% opposed). (IIRC, that was the war in which the government explicitly began to put journalists in bed with the military. Such that, for instance, US journalists at the scene reported the triumphal success of Patriot Missiles in protecting Israel and Kuwait from scud missiles, when in fact an objective study later revealed that they were an utter failure and simply served propagandistic ends the media were thrilled to enable.)

Now the US is in an ongoing state of what the Bush administration announced as perpetual war and which the Obama administration is doing its best to maintain and even expand. We've been told that this permanent state of war may well last for a hundred years. (Some of us figure that if it does, after a few decades the US won't be around to continue waging it.) One of the permanent wars the US has been fighting carries the military tag of "Operation Enduring Freedom." (It's the current POTUS's favorite war, perhaps because everyone who knows anything about it says it cannot be “won.”) The "enduring" in that tag covers a lot of territory. On the front lines of enduring are the Afghanis, who are the primary target of robo-warplanes and the deep-pocket funding of savage warlords and opium exporters who have endless amounts of cash and weaponry for making the lives of everyone in their territory a bitter, living hell. The US soldier and veteran and the US tax-payer-- i.e., the poor and middle classes, who continue to lose the few public services they ever enjoyed, not the billionaires who actually determine and profit from US policy-- are also required to endure. And finally there's the entire world, which has to endure not only this nihilistic distraction from all that needs to be done as it sinks into ever more dire straits, but also the warping of the very concept of "freedom," which obviously means something to US policymakers vastly different from what it used to mean to everyone else.

"Words mean what I say they mean, Alice." And who doubts that US policymakers aren't, collectively, Humpty Dumpty?

Fatalism and the belief that the way it is now is the only way it can be has been gradually seeping into the cultural fabric of the US for a long time. After 9/11 that fatalism and belief combined with lockstep consensus to utterly destroy our political system. The few USians who don't see the doom of the planet and the eventual destruction of all public services in the US as inevitable are stymied by the lock doom and gloom has on the public sphere-- and on elected officials who ignore what all but a lunatic minority of the public want. The current iteration of capitalism, which is now threatening to end access to higher education for all but a handful of people and wreck social security for the aged and cast the unemployed into the bottomless pit of the hopeless, has wrecked our economy and promises to destroy a tolerable standard of living for all but the affluent if something isn't done to reform the system and clean up the correction riddling our financial institutions and government. We all know that. And we all know that if Congress wanted to save the day, it has the resources to do so (since although poverty is steeply on the rise, so is wealth for the richest one percent). But our elected officials either believe that such change can't be accomplished or else are so financially invested in the corruption themselves that they want the public to believe it can't be accomplished. And so we're told that the financial system is in great shape. (After all, the billionaires are enjoying record profits and personal incomes. The crash of 2008 apparently was a blessing in disguise!) I could go on and on, of course. (Guantanamo? And our own Pinochet? Don't get me started.) I will only note that in 2008, most of the people who voted Obama into office believed at that particular moment that change was possible and would come about if he won. That reform of the financial system has not come (even as the scandals continue to mount), that enduring is still perpetual, that the billionaires are still calling the tune, that Obama’s administration chose to lie about the reality of BP’s damage to the environment and the people of Louisiana, are all reasons that many people who for a moment in 2008 broke out of the imperative mood and were thinking subjunctively have sunk back into fatalism.

The short of it is: in its conduct and understanding of public life, the dominant thinking in the US is currently stuck in the imperative rather than the declarative or even subjunctive mood.

All of the above is pretty obvious, I know. What is less obvious is the effect the "enduring" mindset (i.e., the thinking that insists that enduring is all there is now-- and all there can be to look forward to) is having on US fiction-- and particularly on the field of fiction we call science fiction and fantasy as it is presently constituted as we go into the second decade of the twenty-first century. (Please note, I'm talking here about f/sf in the US only.) Most striking, to me, is that we've been seeing a lot of dystopias and a lot of stories looking back or set in the past. (Sometimes, as in Julian Comstock, the story combines dystopia with looking back.) Some of the stories set in the past are escapist fluff, of course, but escapist fluff is nothing new, and I don't think we have particularly more of it now than we have had in the past. Certain settings and tropes, of course, have a higher potential for being cozy than others. (Traditional space opera is, in a sense, the sf genre's equivalent to the country-house murder mystery, just as vampire and werewolf stories are the fantasy genre's equivalent to it.) Not all of the stories looking back are cozy or escapist. That cozy versions of the past are proliferating now simply reflects that in 2010, constructions of the past are where it's at. So just what is this powerful impetus for writing about the past all about?

What it is at least partially about, I think, is the desperate desire to break out of the endurance and fatalism of the present. If the present, as many people in the US now seem to feel it is, is the only way it can be, then to imagine change one has to look into the past. (Looking into the future for change requires believing that the present isn't what has to be.) [If I were at home where I could access my library, I’d probably now cite Joanna Russ’s article about sf and the subjunctive.] Seeing and imagining the possibilities for change involves creating trajectories that are logically subjunctive (rather than imperative) in mood; such trajectories can be seen to have begun as spores or rhizomes (i.e., possibilities) in the past, as being pregnant in the present, and as having generated effects in the future. If, however, your view of the present is totally blocked, you are going to have a hard time looking for possibilities in the present that aren't of the doomed, fatalistic sort. Which means to imagine meaningful change you need to go back into the past, to "find" (or invent) the germs of something different, the seeds of alternatives, that have the potential for creating alternative trajectories through the present into the future.

Of course not all sf stories set in the past end up doing any more than simply revalidating the predominating view of the present. (Sometimes that sense of the imperative mood-- of thinking "this is what must be," no matter how different the past might be--is simply too overwhelming for the writer to escape.) But I do think for many writing steampunk or other kinds of stories set in the past, the past is the only imaginative space remaining that has escaped the lockstep consensus of enduring. The hope, I imagine, is that if you change the past, maybe we won't be forced, imaginatively, to go on enduring in the new present much less in the future that that altered past is creating.

So no. Steampunk is not just a fad. For some writers, it's a way of breaking out of the fatalism our culture has become steeped in.

Clockwork Fairies

I wanted to mention that Tor.com has kicked off their Steampunk Fortnight with my story, "Clockwork Fairies."

Links for a Monday

---For those interested in the WFC steampunk panel, Frederic S. Durbin has just reported on it at length. This bit rather leaped out at me:

The panel said that steampunk is much like the Society of (for?) Creative Anachronism (SCA) in that it tries to recreate an era as it should have been, not as it actually turned out.

---Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. According to Miller, Yagoda not only looks at the history of the memoir, but also claims that the memoir is replacing fiction. (Yes, once again, the novel is dead!) Here is Miller's own view of the matter:

It's precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed -- solipsistic -- to many readers, who usually don't feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive. Who was to blame for the author's divorce? Was he justified in his rejection of 12-step programs? Was her mother bipolar, and how might her life have been different if she had been medicated? People who have read the same memoir can talk about this stuff for hours. The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist's imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.

Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It's not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote -- otherwise, millions of people wouldn't be discussing the entirely fictional characters on "Lost" or "Mad Men" around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions -- TV shows and children's books -- have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it -- of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud -- and chances are that sooner or later we'll get bored of it, too.

---At the SF Site, Paul Kincaid reviews On Joanna Russ. Although his review agrees with mine on some points (particularly my wish that the book had spent some time looking at Russ's influence on the field), overall, our reviews have sharply different takes on the book. Big surprise, hunh? (My review for Strange Horizons ran on August 3, 2009; it's here.)

After reading the first part of the book, Kincaid comes away thinking that Russ "was prickly, difficult, not an easy person to like, which perhaps explains the intensity of the reaction against her from some sections of the sf community [i.e., rather than her feminist advocacy]"-- and actually somewhat diffident in her feminism:

The three succeeding essays, by Lisa Yaszek, Helen Merrick, and Newell and Tallentire, examine Russ in relation to the burgeoning feminist movement in science fiction. These three all stress her importance in the movement, her implacable advocacy, but all three also tell tales of her attacking other women writers who might be her rivals, including a devastating demolition of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and a rather cruel rivalry with Judith Merrill, whose place she would occasionally take as a reviewer at F&SF. From the three, therefore, we get a sense of her turning against "the girls." Alongside this, we should note also that Delany, in his essay, points out how much of the violence in her stories is by women directed at women.

This makes for an interesting parallax view: the radical trailblazer in the experimental fiction that marked the upsurge of feminist sf who was also a devotee and advocate of the most conservative forms of the genre; the leading feminist advocate who went out of her way to dismiss the writing of other women in the genre. It suggests that Russ was prickly, difficult, not an easy person to like, which perhaps explains the intensity of the reaction against her from some sections of the sf community. It also suggests someone caught at a particular moment in history, dragged in one direction by her instincts and in another by her beliefs. This divided nature goes some way towards contextualising the intense power of key works like The Female Man (1975).

Rather than seeing the pre-feminist Russ as in conflict with the Fully Feminist Russ, I, naturally, read an historically-anchored story of personal change, and as I noted in my review, that story of personal change struck me as visible in some of the essays that appeared in the second part of the book. But perhaps I read such a story because the story of such a change is common for women of Russ's (as well as my own) generation. I think we might even say that the story of a full personal conversion that changes one's relations with the world in every way imaginable functions as a trope for many feminists: which would explain why, once the trope was invoked, I had no trouble reading a story of change and personal development rather than a core personality at odds with the times. If Kincaid is actually not familiar with the story of the Click! complete with consciousness-raising (a political praxis Russ sets great store by), it probably went right over his head. I also think that Kincaid might not have picked up on some of the feminist theory Newell and Tallentire draw on their absolutely crucial discussion of the social psychology of rivalry among women battling for the single place in the male clubhouse. Horizontal violence (as activist Flo Kennedy once named it) usually has more to do with social and political dynamics than inherent nastiness in one's personality.

Also striking, for me, was Kincaid's reading one of the key themes of the book in what I can only call a really peculiar way, which I suspect, again may simply be because he has little familiarity with the feminist trope of anger:

Some [of the authors of the essays in the book], perhaps taking their cue from Russ herself, seem to sanitise this by talking about anger, but in fact anger almost always manifests itself in violence.

I think there are a legion of feminists (especially those hailing from consciousness-raising days) who would be astonished to hear that "anger" is a euphemism for violence. (Well no, to be honest, they wouldn't be astonished: this would simply be yet another example of someone Who Just Doesn't Get It.) It might also be worth noting that Pat Wheeler's essay in the volume talks explicitly about the relation of Russ's feminist anger to the violence in Russ's work.

On another point, I'm scratching my head: Kincaid complains that the book did not give due attention to the humor in Russ's work. As I recall, many of the book's contributors take appreciative note of it.

I do agree, though, with Kincaid's complaint that "Delany notes that her feminism was informed by Marxism, and there is an awful lot of class conflict running alongside the gender conflict in her work. But this isn't picked up by any of the critics here, not even by Delany." There's nothing new in critics' ignoring class.The sad fact is, few critics are able to discuss the intersectionality of class, race, and gender in the same text, which is what would have been required to treat Russ's feminist-socialist politics. Faced with discussing either her feminist politics or her class politics (which I daresay Russ herself, as a socialist- or materialist-feminist, would say, are not separable), the authors not surprisingly chose to concentrate on the former.

---One last link (this one thanks to the Mumspimus): Crooks and Liars' Teabaggers punk'd by anti-racists who get them to cheer rant against European American immigrants gave me a laugh this morning (which I needed after reading about the implications of the Stupak amendment). They've got a YouTube video of an activist who masqueraded as an anti-immigration nut job and was allowed to give a speech to some cheering anti-immigration fanatics who only gradually realized was a satire-- of them. Here's an excerpt from his speech:

It's no secret that with an invasion of immigrants comes waves of crime. We see them involved in massive theft, in murder, and bringing diseases like smallpox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren't new problems, though -- they have been going on for hundreds of years, and continue to this day.

I say it's time for us to say enough is enough! Are you with me? Are you with me? Let's send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don't care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! It's time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land!

I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown. There are thousands of illegals working in those buildings, hiding in their offices, and taking Dakota jobs. Let's round them up and ship them out. Then we need to hit them at home where they sleep. I don’t care if we separate families, they should have known better when they came here illegally!

If we aren't able to stand up to these European immigrants, who can we stand up to? We need to send every one of them back home, right now.

Thank you very much, and we'll see you in the streets!

Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home!

Not so nice was that some of the middle-aged men in his audience physically attacked him once they caught on to what they were cheering for.

Remnants of WFC 2009

I'm back home in Seattle now, faintly amazed that I spent time lying in the grass in San Jose, staring up at the deep azure sky, my skin caressed by soft, amiable air. This past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, though I mostly wore my publisher/editor's hat, I enjoyed a wide range of conversations, professional, social, and personal. Many of these could be described as flash conversations-- brief, one-on-one vivid bursts that occurred in passing. Several were serial conversations that came in installments-- interrupted, only to be resumed half an hour or a day And a few were extended, almost leisurely. In short? It was a fabulously talk-driven weekend.

It was a special pleasure to meet Anna Tambour in the flesh for the first time. Though Anna originally hailed from the US, since 1976 she's lived in faraway lands in the Southern Hemisphere. Combine that with my sense of her work as frequently venturing into distant and unusual regions of the imagination, and you'll understand why it never crossed my mind that we might actually someday meet outside of cyberspace, face to face, eye to eye, breathing the very same air. And so I was astonished when, less than a week ago, I spotted her name on the WFC membership list. Did a part of me not believe it? That would explain why I was still astonished when I found a woman seated behind Anna Tambour's name tent during the mass autograph session, all warm, glowing flesh. And when I introduced myself to her, I confirmed that yes, this woman was indeed Anna Tambour incarnate, I was astonished all over again as we hugged over the table and promised to meet one another for a long breakfast early the next morning. I am not an early-morning person (as many people know well), but our meeting was unalloyed joy (even down to Anna's disbelief that the child's-size portion she ordered at Peggy Sue's diner was meant to feed only one child). I think she said she'd last been in the US in the 1990s-- and that everything had changed so much since then that it felt like another country. That sounded about right to me. Isn't it the case that for the last century there have been vast differences from decade to decade, especially in urban environments?

Although I had lots of wonderful conversation, I missed a panel--"Why Steampunk Now?" with Deborah Biancotti (M), Ann VanderMeer, Liz Gorinsky, Michael Swanwick, and Nisi Shawl-- that I dearly wished I'd made it to when I heard people in the bar talking about Nisi's brilliance discoursing on steampunk. I've found a mention of another conversation about the panel here, but not an actual first-hand description of it. I'll just note that the people talking about it in the bar said that Nisi had given more than one writer the idea of writing Ogun steampunk. I also recall hearing the expression "cotton-gin punk," though without elaboration. I'd really like to hear more about this. It'd be wonderful if someone's actually taken notes on the panel and decides to post them...

ETA There's an LJ report on the steampunk panel here, by thistle in grey.