The Author is Dead : Long live John Scalzi

Martin McGrath has an interesting piece up about the politics of John Scalzi's Green Soldier trilogy (namely Old Man's War and the two books that follow it).  He also links to Nicholas Whyte having to deal with detailed responses to his political analysis by none other than the author himself.  I haven't read Old Man's War and have no intension of doing so, having little stomach for war stories, but I was struck by the similarities between Whyte's run in with Scalzi and my run in with fans of George Martin when I, like Whyte, accused the author of being right wing.

The response to accusations of right-wingery tend to take two general shapes.

Firstly, it's made clear that actually, the author is not in the least bit right wing.

Secondly, it's pointed out that the book is not intended as a commentary upon our world and therefore political and moral judgments coming from our world do not work.

Thirdly, it's intimated that if you read further in the series, you'll find evidence for thinking that actually, the author does not sympathise with the right wingers he seems to sympathise with.

If you read through the hundreds of posts that appeared in the wake of my off-hand comment about how right-wing and creepy it is for Ned Stark to carry out his own executions  in A Game of Thrones and for this to be seen as a sign of moral character you'll see that those same three arguments pop up in different shapes and sizes and with more or less detailing.  In fact, the difference between Whyte's run in with Scalzi and my run in with Martin's fans is that Whyte is diplomatic and polite whereas I was confrontational and rude.  However, I think that Whyte's claims stand, just as I think my claims about Martin stand and that's because I think that these three lines of argument fail to understand the principles of criticism.  I can't comment upon how right wing Old Man's War actually is, but I certainly can comment upon those three lines of argument.

Let us begin by considering the first line of argument.

Claim : Author X's book is right wing.

Counter-argument : A) Author X is not right wing.  B) No author could produce a book with politics he disagreed with.  Therefore, C) Author X's book is not right wing.

Premise A I'm happy to accept as true.  I don't know Scalzi and consider it quite funny that supporting Kerry in the last set of US Presidential elections should be taken as some kind of espousal of left wing politics but, for the sake of argument, I'm happy to accept that he's not right wing.  In fact, I'd be happy to accept that he's as pink as a lady's pink parts for the purposes of this discussion because I think that the argument fails because premise B is false.

I categorically reject the idea that the author is an unimpeachable source of information about his own works.  I think this for two reasons.  Firstly, I think that what a book means and what a book is intended to mean are two completely separate things.  It's the job of a literary critic not to work out the mindset of a writer but to plumb the depths of a particular text for meaning.  As such, it's quite possible that Old Man's War, or indeed, A Game of Thrones to be a right wing text regardless of the intentions of its author.  This viewpoint is associated with the death of the author, as discussed by Roland Barthes in 1967.  Secondly, setting aside the general principle that a literary critic has as much say in what a book means as an author does, I think that, psychologically speaking, it's quite possible and indeed common, for one to be more right or left wing than one realises.  Few of us have the time, training and intellectual energy to put our philosophical perspectives in complete logical order so it's quite possible that one can consider oneself liberal right up until the moment someone points out that actually, some unexamined assumption we've been operating under all our lives, is quite right wing.  you hear a lot of this when dealing with racial and sexual prejudice as a person can claim to be tolerant and progressive right up until the moment their daughter brings home a black boyfriend or their son turns out to be gay.  So for this reason I don't think that one can trust an author's perspectives upon their own politics.  Consider both of these arguments and it becomes clear that an author's real-world politics really doesn't bear much of a relation to the politics of their fictional writings and that as a result, "the author is not right wing" does not refute the claim that "the author's book is right wing".

Of course, this means that one cannot move from "this book is right wing" to "John Scalzi is right wing".  One can only ever get as far as "John Scalzi produces right wing fiction", which is not the same thing.

Let's now move on to the second line of argument.

Claim : Author X's book is right wing.

Counter-argument : A) the claim "author X's book is right wing" involves the use of certain moral decision-making faculties.  B) These moral decision-making faculties do not apply when it comes to the setting of the book.  Therefore, C) One cannot sensibly describe author X's book as right wing.

As with the previous line of argument, I see no reason for not accepting premise A as the real work is being done by premise B.  Whereas the first line of argument attempted to suggest that the claim "Author X's book is right wing" is false, the second line of argument attempts to suggest that the claim is neither true nor false but rather an example of a category mistake whereby the critic makes a judgement about something he can't make a judgement about.  The counter-argument is that just as it doesn't make any sense to say that the colour green is fascistic, it does not make sense to say that Old Man's War is right wing.

Obviously, there's a degree of overlap between the first and second lines of argument.  Indeed, in his response to Whyte, Scalzi says that he did not intend the book to be a commentary upon real world politics.  The implication being that because that was not his authorial intention, one cannot interpret the book as picking political sides.  Obviously, I think this particular argument fails for the same reason I think all arguments of the first type fail : Scalzi is in no better position to say what his book is about than Nicholas Whyte is.

However, setting aside appeals to authorial fiat, I do not agree that fictional worlds are a type of entity that are impervious to moral evaluation.  This line of argument depends for its heavy lifting upon the philosophical basis for multiculturalism.  Multiculturalism flows in part from the historical legacy of the West wanting to impose its moral standards upon other nations and cultures, frequently doing immense harm in the process.  The political reaction to this (part of a wider pattern of anti-colonialism) is to suggest that there are discrete moral communities that operate by their own, internally consistent, rules but one can never export the values of one moral community and apply it sensibly to a different community.  In the context of literature, the argument suggests that because it is wrong to judge one culture from the perspective of another, it is wrong for us in the real world to morally evaluate a fictional novel.  One can only ever accept a book on its own terms.

The problem with this line of argument is that it is confusing cultural politics with more abstract philosoophy.  The reason why one cannot morally evaluate the goings-on of one culture from the perspective of another is because to do so is fascistic and to destroy other cultures which have just as much of a right to exist as ours does.  The argument here is, weirdly enough, moral.  It isn't impossible to make judgments about other cultures, it is wrong.  In the case of real world cultures, this argument carries some weight because ultimately you're forcing people to believe what you believe against their will.  However, in the case of a fictional world, such moral arguments simply disappear.  Instead, we have to look to more abstract philosophical claims.

If you look at the philosophy, rather than the politics, behind trans-world political evaluations, the claim that one cannot make such judgements becomes even more interesting.  The epistemological doctrine known as coherentism certainly defends the idea that one can't judge one world by the standards of another.  The idea behind coherentism is that epistemic communities do not depend for their truth upon correspondence with the real world but rather internal consistency.  This means that, according to coherentism, one cannot politically evaluate the world of Old Man's War when those political judgments are based in our world... instead we must take the book on its own terms and accept the ethics of the book which suggest that the good guys are good guys and not militaristic fascists.

The problem with this line of argument is that the attacker of the claim is effectively picking and choosing the bits that aren't incommensurable.  When we read the story we are to react as though it were a tail of derring-do in our world, the characters' psychologies are to be assumed to be the same as ours but it is only the politics that seemingly don't port across.  If a fictional or historical world is incommensurable with our own then I would suggest that this applies across the board.  However, as long as it's supposed to be a story about humans that we are supposed to be able to engage with then political judgments about the content of the book are as correct as judgments as to where to place one's sympathy or whether or not one consider the book a good story.  Either the fictional world or our world exist in separate epistemic communities or they do not.  One cannot have it both ways.

The third and final line of argument is, I think, the only one that really comes close to posing the critic problems as rather than trying to dismiss the critic's analysis out of hand by special pleading, the attacker of the claim is actually engaging with him on a critical level.

Claim : Author X's book is right wing.

Counter-Argument : A) The political calibre of a book is determined not by what is included between the covers of said book, but by the entire series of which the book is a part.  B) Other books in the series feature developments that either undermine the claim directly or strongly support a different analysis that is incompatible with that made in the claim.  Therefore, C) "Author X's book is right wing" is false.

I think that this is a decent argument and can only think of a couple of caveats to apply to it.  Firstly, I think it is reliant upon a very specific conception of what constitutes the relevant text or frame of reference.  It is not immediately clear why it should be that "The Green Soldier Trilogy" should be a better frame of reference than "Old Man's War" or, for that matter, a single sentence.  I suspect that the heft behind this argument is ultimately that the book was intended, by the author, to be a part of a series and therefore it should be seen as a part of a series.  However, for the reasons stated previously, I don't think that the author has any authority here and so a critic deciding to limit himself to a particular book is in no way silly or wrong, as long as he makes it clear that that's what he is doing.  I see no problem with "Old Man's War is a right wing book" and "The Green Soldier Trilogy, of which Old Man's War is a part, is not a right wing series" both being true.  Secondly, while for the sake of intellectual expediency, it is always a good idea to assume that the subject of your analysis is consistent (because otherwise it would be impossible to pin it down on anything), I do not think that fiction is necessarily logically consistent when it comes to politics.  Therefore, I think it's possible that even a series of books can be both pro- and anti-democracy for example.  Indeed, inconsistencies, even those that are explained away can be identified as such by critics.  For example, I think a critic might very well formulate a theory that Scalzi's work begins being right wing and then softens  over time, changing the political camber of the series as it goes.  There are several obvious theories as to why this might happen.

Neither of these caveats blow the arguments leveled by Scalzi or the fans of George Martin out of the water but they do suggest that "Ah, but it changes in later books" isn't as straightforward a refutation as it might at first appear. 

Comments

[Kirk]

This is a minor quibble, as I think you address this a little later on. I have a problem when you say that evaluating a culture by the standards of another is morally wrong, because to do so would be inherently fascistic and thus anti-moral. Now, I might be prepared to accept this as argument to not intervene in other cultures' affairs. Indeed, we may have other reasons not to do so as well - the sheer practical difficulties making the attempt.

However, the mere act of evaluating is not what's doing the 'bad stuff' here. I think it's perfectly acceptable for me to evaluate other cultures morally. For example, any culture which performs acts which are physically harmful on people, for reasons that don't stack up, is morally inferior to one that doesn't. So I feel perfectly happy to describe cultures like that as morally reprehensible. And I would also like it if they didn't have those practices.

This seems perfectly fine to me, until you talk about trying to change these people's minds by force. I think the act of evaluating them is justified, but that attempting to do something about it might involve methods that run counter to some of our other moral beliefs. Or it could turn out to be hugely impractical, in which case we should not make an attempt out of prudence.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Kirk :-) --

I agree with you.

I think that you can judge other cultures and civilisations. In fact, I think that multiculturalism taken to its logical conclusion means the inability to question a man as he stabs you. We are all, ultimately, cultures of one.

However, I wasn't holding up that argument as something I believe in. Rather as an argument which I think the defenders of Old Man's War and A Game of Thrones tacitly rely upon. I think it fails for the same reasons you do.

[Kirk]

Ah, I think I understand the line of argument now, and why it appeared that you'd contradicted yourself there. I had thought that at first you were allowing the claim that evaluating cultures is in some sense immoral to go through, but pointing out that this worry is assuaged by the fact that we are talking about fictional worlds here.

If instead you think the whole idea is arse, then i'm quite happy to accept that.

As you say, aside from the other problems of relativism (like the incoherence of its claim to tolerance), i've always wondered why it doesn't lapse into a form of subjectivism. I keep thinking 'but why are we stopping at the level of cultures?'

Am I correct in supposing that by multiculturalism, as you have been using the word here, you mean a political doctrine based in the notion of cultural relativism with stress placed on the usual claim of tolerance that cultural relativism makes?

[Conrad]

What's so bad about writing right-wing fiction? And what constitutes such?

I happily read left-wing sf (Richard Morgan come to mind), and real right wing sf (John Ringo and Tom Kratman come to mind - pity you do not read military sf since you should check out A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex to truly understand what right wing sf is - there are quite a few free sample chapters online from both books)

Mr. Scalzi's series is quite middle of the road politically, sociologically and whatever...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Kirk --

That is what I mean by the term, yes. Tangentially, I don't think multiculturalism is arse, but I do think it falls into similar problems as those encountered by people who want novels to be both engaged with AND protected from certain kinds of engagement. When British culture rubs up against various arab, african and asian cultures we want to tolerate some bits but not others. The problem is that there's no obvious philosophical basis for picking and choosing elements of other's cultures beyond "We agree with this bit" and "We don't agree with that bit".

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Conrad :-) --

There's a fine and long tradition of SF being incredibly right wing and it's continued by Orson Scott Card (who is getting increasingly right wing and crazy as he gets older, a few more years and I suspect he'll be signing death warrants) and Harry Turtledove to name but two.

However, I think that the SF audience has shifted far enough since the 50's that it's probably quite a bit harder to be right wing than it was. Back then you could be openly racist and quasi-fascistic because loads of non-college graduates still read SF. Now, increasingly, I think that reading for fun, let alone reading genre, is the preserve of the educated and so I think that a rip roaring tale of American supremacy and man's rightful lordship over women would go down like a lead balloon.

As a result, I think that politics can be tricky, especially in the milsf world where ultimately you have the believe that you're better off fighting than using diplomacy (which is quite right wing a belief in and of itself). So I think that authors have to walk a tight-rope on these kinds of matters. Hence Scalzi himself turning up to defend his books from the charge that they're right wing.

[A.R.Yngve]

Jonathan casually makes a very important point here which I'd like to expand on...

Namely, that in Military SF "ultimately you have the believe that you're better off fighting than using diplomacy".

It's like superhero comics: if there isn't a big fight scene, the readers feel cheated. When I tried to write a "Mil-SF" novel (still trying), I figured early on that I'd have to deliberately set up two opposing forces who can't negotiate or compromise.

I.e. either one side has to be basically Nazis... or alternately, both sides are too dumb to do anything but wage war. (In defense of the Mil-SF "paradigm", one should point out that most real-life wars are inherently stupid and could have been averted with a bit of forward thinking and diplomacy.)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

This is why The Forever War is one of the few examples of liberal MilSF. There's quite a bit of fighting but at the end they realise it was all a horrible mistake.

[mark c]

The problem is that there's no obvious philosophical basis for picking and choosing elements of other's cultures beyond "We agree with this bit" and "We don't agree with that bit".

I don’t agree – if you subscribe to the classic liberal version of human rights then you can be against those parts of a culture that violate those rights – forced marriage, people being punished for sexual transgressions like pre marital sex or homosexuality, men being privileged over women etc etc.

When I read the comments in the Martin discussion, I got the sense that a lot of people believed that because it was just a fantasy book, that it was not possible for it to have any ideological depth. In their view, it was just meant as a piece of entertainment and only consisted of a surface with no hidden ideological messages or assumptions. Of course, this flies against years of cultural or literary theory but I have encountered that attitude before when people try to criticise a piece of popular culture. It’s basically saying that it is a Bad Thing to think too deeply about things that aren’t supposed to be Serious.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Mark :-) --

I agree with you. But I think that "human rights" are the product of our culture and what we're doing is saying that those elements of our culture do carry more weight than incompatible elements of other people's cultures. When you're criticising another culture's human right's record you are in fact doing the same thing as when you criticise the contents of a novel. You're saying that their world or game or epistemic community is not sacrosanct.

You're also right about the Martin discussion. After I closed the comments on that thread, it was picked up by an LJ community called fandom wank and a lot of their criticism seemed to revolve around the idea that it was preposterous thinking in that manner about popular culture. Needless to say, this blog is founded upon the idea that you can and MUST think that way about popular culture :-)

[mark c]

Hi Jonathan

Hmm, in the real life situation that assumes that the other culture is a monolithic entity in which everyone agrees with the majority/public community values. Eg in Saudi Arabia, women (for example) may not be able to publicly express what they feel about the values they are expected to live by, or not have the power to resist them, but that doesn't mean they agree with them.

This doesn't really translate well to a novel, where the characters all do what their author wants them to do, and if characters don't comment or complain about sexism, or if sexism is present but accepted or whatever, then you can take conclusions about the ideology of the writer and the book.

Of course, pretending that books or TV shows don't contain ideological depth is kind of like an appeal to "common sense", where you agree with something but don't want to actually defend it.

[Kirk]

Jonathan, I didn't mean to suggest that the whole notion of multiculturalism is arse. I tend to agree that tolerance is to be valued. I meant to suggest that the idea that the mere evaluation of another culture is immoral is arse.

Mark, I think things might be a bit more complicated than that. Although it is certainly true that there might be women in Saudi Arabia (and decent men of course) who don't agree with their treatment, but are unable to express this, it also seems to be true that there are people who do agree with the treatment. Think of some of the slaves that when freed from slavery, stayed on their plantation. It's all they know. Perhaps (I don't wish to be glib here) some of the slaves were even 'happy' to be slaves.

If I remember rightly, somebody once said to James Madison, look Madison, you treat your slaves well, and they are happy. His reply was that you should never think that; they are wretched, and they are wretched because they are slaves. I think this is broadly right.

I think it is possible to suffer without being aware of it (how else could we make sense of the suffering of an adult when disease reduces them to a state of a contented two year old?), and that morality has to be about human suffering in some way. I don't think it particularly matters whether women in Saudi Arabia, or slaves two hundred years ago are happy with their treatment: they are wrong, and they are suffering. Therefore, to me, it makes sense to judge other cultures by the best standards found in ours; but nevertheless we should be cautious about actually trying to do anything about it. It's incredibly hard to show somebody is suffering who thinks they are happy, and the idea of using force to do so runs counter to your objective.

This doesn't really engage with your post Mark, but I took it as a good starting point to construct mine :).

[Serdar]

The whole comment that can be summed up as "It's just entertainment" always bugged me as well. Sure, it's "just" entertainment, but that's also like saying it's "just" politics. It's not always about the thing in itself, but where it comes from and why it arose in the first place. You miss a lot if you don't think about those things.

Haldeman's "Forever War" was a favorite of mine when I was younger, BTW.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

"It's just entertainment" simply kicks the problem upstairs. What is entertaining to different people varies hugely. I think that kind of complain generally means "I don't like to think too much about the stuff I do for fun and by doing so you're spoiling my buzz".

I agree that you miss a lot when you have that kind of attitude, but a lot of people do.

[Franky]

I mostly agree with this post, but I think there are two more lines of argument you could consider. I don’t intend to re-open Pandora’s box, but I might as well expand a bit :

1) “The personal opinions of the narrator, or point-of-view, should not be confused with the book’s overall message.”

This is one of Scalzi’s main arguments in his response to Nicholas White: he points out that his narrator is on a “grunt-level” point of view and doesn’t understand the politics at work.
This also applies to “A Game of Thrones”: when Lord Stark is seen beheading a condemned man himself, the “point-of-view character” is his own 8-year-old son, who is very unlikely to challenge him.
The book’s politics shouldn’t be read in the opinions expressed by characters, but in the consequences of their actions. In “Old Man’s War” the character called Bender expresses anti-war ideas ; these later lead him to act stupidly and get himself killed.
Similarly, Stark’s rigid obedience to an archaic “honor code”, far from being a positive thing, causes nothing but catastrophes. Later in the book Stark deliberately chooses to trigger a war rather than tarnish his personal honor. When the character called Littlefinger (Stark’s almost exact opposite) points out that his course of action will lead to death and destruction on a massive scale, Stark just gets angry ; the fate of the smallfolk is clearly a secondary concern to him. What follows is, of course, disaster.
You could object that, since the readers are made to sympathize with Stark, the author implicitly agrees with him ; but this means little. Martin is the kind of writer who loves his characters the way parents love their children, without judging them. Some other characters, such as Littlefinger, are eminently likeable even though they routinely resort to intrigue and murder.
Martin effectively uses his multiple point-of-view narrative system to demonstrate that there are few absolute truths when it comes to politics and war. This is a far cry from genuine right wing fantasy: consider Terry Goodkind (“The Sword of Truth”), who makes it sound perfectly all right to slaughter peace protesters when they try to get in the way of the Fight for Freedom…

2) "It is unfair to treat a novel like an essay (really)."

Novels contain ideas, of course ; but in most novels, it is not the ideas that shape the story, but the story that determines which ideas may be developed. As Scalzi says, pacifism makes little sense in the setting of a uniformly hostile universe.
The political ideas in “a Game of Thrones” boil down to: “A strongman (provided he’s sane) is better than anarchy and strife, and a certain moral flexibility is required in politics”. But the book will not tell you whether or not freedom and the rule of law are better than a morally flexible strongman: that’s because Martin didn’t set out to compare the merits of different political systems, but to tell a story in a medieval, authoritarian setting. Including a discussion on democracy and freedom would have required him to either drastically alter the story, or weigh it down with unnecessary digressions.
Of course, you could argue that the choice of these settings shows a certain conservative mindset in both Scalzi and Martin, but is it enough to call them right wing ?..

[A.R.Yngve]

Sure, most pop culture contains some political/social message between the lines. But I'm no longer so sure the "hidden" messages always "get through" on a subconscious level.

Consider: Think of all the pop songs you've heard and didn't catch the lyrics... or all the books you didn't understand or bored you so you didn't finish them (or games you never played to the end, for that matter)...

To communicate ideas by fiction also means most of the communication will fail. Fans of popular culture get so predictably ticked off when someone doesn't "get it" -- but what do they expect? Perfect communication? Ain't no such thing.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Franky --

On the first issue, I think I address that. I don't think that one can infer that much from a particular book about the opinions of an author. there are too many variables.

However, I do think that you can discuss a particular book being right wing without that necessarily meaning anything about the author. Right wing authors write right wing books but then so can everyone.

On the second issue, I don't think it's unfair. Why would it be unfair? the ideas are there and they're there to be analysed and picked apart. All texts can be analysed thusly.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

AR --

Well to say that the message is hidden implies intentionality and I don't think that that stuff is necessary. A work can present an argument or a thesis without the author being conscious of that idea. In fact, the critic's job is to see a message where there might not even be one... a critic's job is creative as well as purely analytical.

[Franky]

"On the first issue, I think I address that. I don't think that one can infer that much from a particular book about the opinions of an author. there are too many variables."

My comment had nothing to do with the opinions of the author... What I meant was, the presence of right wing characters in a book doesn't mean the book itself is right wing. If liberal characters consistently make fools of themselves, the book is probably right wing. If right wing characters cause disasters through intransigeance and wrong-headed thinking, then the book is *not* right-wing.