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A reader from New Zealand –or strictly a listener: he’s heard Dark Eden and Mother of Eden as audiobooks – writes to me as follows about the story of Eden so far:

I would love to see future development in the relationship
between the colonists and native life, more exploration of the intelligence
hinted at. Less of the nastiness or is it mental illness as a result if the
inbreeding. I know conflict is been used to create tension but it’s not so
inspiring to think the lowest denominators are so easily taking over
society.

It seems to me that there are a number of different approaches that can be taken to the construction of any fictional world. One, clearly favoured by this particular reader, is to be optimistic, to write inspirational feel-good stories about people making discoveries and overcoming adversity. There is plenty of fiction that does just that.

Another, equally valid, is to be pessimistic, and to write stories that warn us about unpleasant places where we might end up if we’re not careful. J G Ballard described his work in such terms.

A third is to be neither optimistic or pessimistic but to attempt to hold up a mirror of some kind to the world we see around us. And this is the approach I incline to. I really don’t think the people of Eden are any “nastier” than the people of Earth. They’re just human, with all the virtues and vices which that implies. In fact, I defy anyone who follows the news to tell me that the planet Earth, taken as a whole, is in any way a fairer or kinder or safer place than the planet Eden!

I tend to be a bit resistant to the idea that just because something new has been invented, I need to have one, but I have finally succumbed and replaced my old phone with an iphone I bought from my daughter.  One of the main reasons I wanted it was to be able to take photos whenever I felt like it.  Specifically, I wanted to amuse myself by taking photos of the streets around my house in suburban Cambridge, when I wander them at night to walk the dogs.

It fascinates me how easily something familiar can be made strange, simply by putting a frame round it and isolating it from its surroundings.   This house is just down the road from me.  I pass it every day.  And yet in this picture it seems (to my eyes at least) a remote and mysterious place.

Below is a takeaway that’s just round the corner, but when I showed the picture to my wife, shorn of its surroundings, she didn’t recognise it.  Isolated like this, it seems to me to take on a slightly mythic quality, pregnant with possibilities and  meanings.  What is happening in there?  Who is that man?  Whose bike is that?  Whose car?  What is the significance of that strange name?  Yet, I could walk there right now, and it would just be a very ordinary takeaway on a very ordinary street

You could say this effect is a kind of trick.  By making something into a picture we confer a spurious significance on it.  But I’d rather look at it the other way round.  Everything is charged with meaning, with significance, with mystery.  We just don’t notice it most of the time because of the corrosive effect of familiarity.

Following on from my previous post and the distinction made by Ishiguro there between literature that is “improving” in the sense of providing “spiritual and intellectual nourishment” and literature that is “improving” in the sense of being a way of climbing up the “class ladder.”   This distinction interests me, and also has some slight tangential relevance for what I’m currently writing (Eden 3), so here is a bit more thinking aloud about it:

I’m aware first of all of an immediate (and somewhat priggish) reaction on my part which says that the first of those two meanings relates to the true function of literature (or other kinds of artistic activity), and the second meaning does not.  “Real art is about improving the soul, not about showing off,” this priggish part of me wants to say.

My second thought, though, is that this initial reaction is similar to that of a Christian who complains that we have lost the true meaning of Christmas.  The celebration of the birth of Christ is actually not the true meaning of Christmas, but is a meaning that has been grafted onto a winter solstice junket that existed long long before Christ was born.  And my best guess is that the idea of art as a form of spiritual nourishment (or the even more recent idea of art as subversion) is likewise a meaning that has been grafted onto a long pre-existing activity.   The status aspect almost certainly preceded any idea of art as some sort of personal exploration by the artist.

For surely it is obvious that artistic activity, even way back in history, was all about status, power and conspicuous consumption?  The paintings in the tombs of pharoahs, the colossal relief carvings of muscular Assyrian kings: these things not only depict the power of these rulers directly, but also demonstate it. Look, they say, I am so wealthy and powerful, that I am in a position to have thousands of skilled craftsmen devote their time entirely to me!

In the same way, the tapestries and paintings hanging on the walls of stately homes demonstrate both the wealth and the discernment of their owners, while the artists who made them would have been almost entirely dependant on those wealthy people’s patronage.  And this extends beyond the visual arts.  The praise poets employed by Anglo-Saxon and Brythonic kings, for instance, demonstrated the power, wealth and taste of their masters, not only by singing their praises, but by the wit, skill and beauty of their verses.

The conspicuous consumption aspect of the visual arts is really no less blatant now than it ever was.   Claims that contemporary art serves some kind of subversive purpose often seem quite ludicrous to me when that same art is snapped up by billionaires for huge prices that are then trumpeted in the media.  (Indeed, in some cases, artists seem to have been granted a kind of alchemical power to turn essentially dull and uninteresting objects into investment opportunities and status symbols.)

In respect of books, music, film, plays, which can be consumed relatively cheaply, the link is a little less obvious: simply owning or consuming them does not directly demonstrate our wealth (unless of course you choose to pay for a box at the theatre: you don’t get much more conspicuous than that!), but it certainly can (as per my previous post) demonstrate how refined, discerning, fashionable or “hip” we are.

I’m not even sure that we can know for certain ourselves whether the “improvement” we seek from a book or an exhibition of pictures is of the first or the second kind.  We humans are such status-seeking creatures.  Just like our closest primate relatives (and most other social animals), we are constantly aware of and concerned about our position in the social hierarchy.  It’s as fundamental as sex, and like sex is all tangled up with our other motives.   You go to some fashionable arthouse movie, say, to be elevated by the cutting edge ideas and the ground-breaking cinematography, but can you really be sure that you aren’t least partly motivated by the agreeable awareness that, unlike others, you possess the necessary degree of refinement to enjoy these things?

I guess, if we can speak about pure aesthetic pleasure (pleasure unsullied, so to speak, by the status-climbing instinct) then the times we can be most certain that we are in its presence, are when we are enjoying something that isn’t fashionable, and that won’t win us status points for being seen to consume it.

A fascinating dialogue here in the New Statesman between Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman.

In particular, as someone who chooses to write within SF conventions, but dislikes being confined to a ghetto as a result, I share their exasperation with the policing of frontiers between genres.  “Why are people so preoccupied?” as Ishiguro says of the genre anxieties raised by the fact that his latest novel includes things like ogres.  “What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?”

But I was particularly taken by Ishiguro’s observations here about the class aspect of our reading choices:

I don’t have a problem, necessarily, about reading for improvement. I often choose a book because I think I’m going to enjoy it, but I think also it’s going to improve me in some sense. But when you ask yourself, “Is this going to improve me?” what are you really asking? I think I probably do turn to books for some sort of spiritual and intellectual nourishment: I think I’m going to learn something about the world, about people. But if by “improving”, we mean it would help me go up the class ladder, then it’s not what reading and writing should be about. Books are serving the same function as certain brands of cars or jewellery, in just denoting social position.

It has often struck me reading choices (along with other kinds of cultural choices) are indeed in part a form of conspicuous consumption.  They are perceived as demonstrating, not our wealth, but our refinement, taste, discernment, which have long been an important aspect of status (perhaps in part because they hint at an expensive education and a life not dominated by drudgery?).  When I listen to Oxbridge-educated voices on radio arts shows, minutely examining the merits of some cultural artifact or other, it does indeed sometimes seem to me that what is really going on is a kind of status display. Look how well-read, how refined, how exquisitely discerning we are!

And I agree with Gaiman and Ishiguro that this kind of status anxiety is, in part, the basis of the stigmatisation of “genre”.  People who are concerned to be seen as refined are anxious about touching a book with a genre label, at least in part, because they are anxious about calling their refinement into question.   Some might feel the same anxiety about serving an unfashionable wine, or wearing the wrong kind of tie at a social event, or enjoying a piece of music which their peers regard as uncool.