Borges is a writer who I had been somewhat aware of for a while, read a few passages of and enjoyed, but never got around to reading deliberately. So when I set out a reading list for 2018, his collection Ficciones, generally regarded as the most accessible starting point in reading him, seemed an obvious inclusion.
Ficciones is a set of seventeen short stories, originally published in two separate volumes in the 1940s and then later collated; they first appeared in English in 1962. Borges wrote in Spanish, though he was heavily influenced by English writers, in particular G. K. Chesterton. There is a tremendous playfulness in many of Borges' stories, exemplified by my favourite story from the collection: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Pierre Menard is a deceased author and the story is an appreciation of his work, in particular of his greatest project: an attempt to rewrite Don Quixote in the exact same words used by Miguel de Cervantes. The narrator of this story therefore takes Menard to have made a conscious decision to write not in his own native land and time, but instead in "the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope". His Don Quixote is a wild and romantic figure, in contrast to de Cervantes' more pedestrian protagonist.
There are other wonderful stories. The Library of Babel is an excellent counterpoint and companion to Pierre Menard, Three Versions of Judas is another masterful piece of intellectual trolling, and The Form of the Sword and Theme of the Traitor and the Hero provide scintillating plots which blast by in only a few pages. Borges' writing style goes after my own heart, with numerous allusions to both the real and the imaginary. But the quality is distinctly uneven. The Circular Ruins is eminently forgettable. The End will seem quite pointless to anyone who is not already familiar with the Argentine national epic Martín Fierro. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is The Secret Miracle, a story about a Jewish playwright in 1940s Prague struggling to complete his masterwork before his execution by the Nazis. By a miracle he is allowed to unfurl it all to its conclusion, to put each word into place - but only in his head, and it dies with him. There's a fantastic basis for a story there, but it seems so incomplete. One might argue that the point would be spoiled if we were to know what this play is about, but I'm not buying that - we already know that he was granted this miracle to complete it, something which no-one else inside the story would have been privy to. So the content of this play seems like a massive missed opportunity to draw parallels with the greater story, to exude some moral about life, or to draw some dramatic irony with the situation in which the playwright finds himself.
Indeed, with several of the less allusive stories one begins to wonder why one does not simply read the Wikipedia page for each of the stories. Perhaps one does not gain so much intellectually from reading Pierre Menard that one could not also learn from the Wikipedia page, but Borges' charming voice makes the extra reading time well worth the investment. Some of the better stories combine abstract theorising and an actual story, again making them worth the time to read properly. But unless one enjoys all of the writing styles which Borges employs, one is liable to find some of the stories to be distinctly full of air and little else.
Overall, I definitely recommend the book - if nothing else, most of the stories are pretty short and there's a pdf of Borges' collected works to be found on Google for free, so the costs of trying him and not enjoying it are trivial. More importantly, while there are some dull stories the greatest stories are magnificent, and the good significantly outweighs the mediocre. But if, after a couple of pages into a story, you still have no idea what it's actually about, take that as a sign that it may be worth skipping ahead to the next one.
A Persian Cafe, Edward Lord Weeks
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 January 2018
Tuesday, 22 August 2017
The Metaethics of the Harry Potter universe
The field of metaethics is broadly concerned with the following questions: are there any true moral facts? And if so, how can we come to know them?
As an example of what this would mean: take natural-rights libertarianism, as espoused by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and legions of spotty teenagers. According to this theory, there exist certain facts along the lines of the following:
(a) The copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia upstairs is my property.
(b) For any entity X, if X is my property then others ought not to interfere with my usage of X unless my usage of X interferes with their usage of an entity Y which is their property.
Of course, a lot of attention in this kind of theory will be devoted to exactly what it means to say that an entity is someone's property. A standard response made by a non-libertarian philosopher would be to observe that the notion of property is entirely socially constructed. To bring out the difference between socially-constructed and non-socially-constructed features of things, compare the properties of belonging to a person and of being less dense than water. Whether something belongs to me or my neighbour is determined entirely by the beliefs of society: if everyone believes the copy of ASU upstairs belongs to my neighbour, it's not that everyone is wrong - it's that the book actually is my neighbours, and I will be obliged to return it to him at the next opportunity. If something is less dense than water, however, it matters not one jot what any of us believes - it will float, and all the assertions in the world will not change that.
Since property is socially constructed, then, perhaps we ought to construct it strategically so that it operates to the greatest advantage of all. Thus we might decide to agree that notions such as taxation are baked into the very notion of property: taxation is not theft, but simply the proper functioning of the property system. (There's a more ambitious version of this argument which holds that no property would exist without a state and so submission to the state in general is part of what it means to own property, but this is silly because (a) property has existed throughout history without the existence of states and (b) even if that were not the case, it's not at all clear how the move from an is to an ought is supposed to be occurring here).
One thing that would support natural rights libertarianism, then, would be if facts about property somehow turned out not to be socially constructed but to be intrinsic features of the world in the same way as density. It turns out that there is a well-known fictional universe in which this is the case: the Harry Potter novels, in which a key reveal towards the end of the last book is that the Elder Wand, a weapon of deadly power, never truly recognised Voldemort as its possessor - despite him having wielded it for much of the last book, ever since he ransacked the tomb of Dumbledore, a previous owner of the Wand. Instead, the wand recognised first Draco Malfoy and then Harry Potter as its true owner, despite neither of them having prior to this point even touched the wand. In the Harry Potter universe, ownership is not a social construct but a real and tangible feature of the universe - and so it may well be impossible, even if desirable, to move to a more socially beneficial meaning of the notion of "property".
Libertarians should not rejoice too quickly, however: the way the wand passes between owners almost always involves violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovitch, Dumbledore kept it after defeating Grindelwald, Malfoy ambushed and disarmed Dumbledore, Harry burgled and overpowered Malfoy. While there are substantial facts about property, which stand in addition to the facts which are known through science and empiricism, they are surely different from the facts which libertarians would have us believe. Perhaps not entirely different - wands aside, most objects seem to behave much as they do in the actual universe with regard to owners - but not the same either.
As a final aside, it is interesting to note that this universe also contains one of the more notable examples of a society with markedly different but non-utopian rules concerning property. I refer, of course, to the goblins, who believe all objects to truly belong to their makers: one cannot purchase an object, only rent it for life. To pass on to one's heirs something that one did not produce oneself is regarded by goblins as theft. Unless the original maker of the Elder Wand is still alive (and according to tradition, the wand was in fact made by Death Himself), this theory must surely remain live as a possible metaethical truth about property in the Harry Potter universe.
As an example of what this would mean: take natural-rights libertarianism, as espoused by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and legions of spotty teenagers. According to this theory, there exist certain facts along the lines of the following:
(a) The copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia upstairs is my property.
(b) For any entity X, if X is my property then others ought not to interfere with my usage of X unless my usage of X interferes with their usage of an entity Y which is their property.
Of course, a lot of attention in this kind of theory will be devoted to exactly what it means to say that an entity is someone's property. A standard response made by a non-libertarian philosopher would be to observe that the notion of property is entirely socially constructed. To bring out the difference between socially-constructed and non-socially-constructed features of things, compare the properties of belonging to a person and of being less dense than water. Whether something belongs to me or my neighbour is determined entirely by the beliefs of society: if everyone believes the copy of ASU upstairs belongs to my neighbour, it's not that everyone is wrong - it's that the book actually is my neighbours, and I will be obliged to return it to him at the next opportunity. If something is less dense than water, however, it matters not one jot what any of us believes - it will float, and all the assertions in the world will not change that.
Since property is socially constructed, then, perhaps we ought to construct it strategically so that it operates to the greatest advantage of all. Thus we might decide to agree that notions such as taxation are baked into the very notion of property: taxation is not theft, but simply the proper functioning of the property system. (There's a more ambitious version of this argument which holds that no property would exist without a state and so submission to the state in general is part of what it means to own property, but this is silly because (a) property has existed throughout history without the existence of states and (b) even if that were not the case, it's not at all clear how the move from an is to an ought is supposed to be occurring here).
One thing that would support natural rights libertarianism, then, would be if facts about property somehow turned out not to be socially constructed but to be intrinsic features of the world in the same way as density. It turns out that there is a well-known fictional universe in which this is the case: the Harry Potter novels, in which a key reveal towards the end of the last book is that the Elder Wand, a weapon of deadly power, never truly recognised Voldemort as its possessor - despite him having wielded it for much of the last book, ever since he ransacked the tomb of Dumbledore, a previous owner of the Wand. Instead, the wand recognised first Draco Malfoy and then Harry Potter as its true owner, despite neither of them having prior to this point even touched the wand. In the Harry Potter universe, ownership is not a social construct but a real and tangible feature of the universe - and so it may well be impossible, even if desirable, to move to a more socially beneficial meaning of the notion of "property".
Libertarians should not rejoice too quickly, however: the way the wand passes between owners almost always involves violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovitch, Dumbledore kept it after defeating Grindelwald, Malfoy ambushed and disarmed Dumbledore, Harry burgled and overpowered Malfoy. While there are substantial facts about property, which stand in addition to the facts which are known through science and empiricism, they are surely different from the facts which libertarians would have us believe. Perhaps not entirely different - wands aside, most objects seem to behave much as they do in the actual universe with regard to owners - but not the same either.
As a final aside, it is interesting to note that this universe also contains one of the more notable examples of a society with markedly different but non-utopian rules concerning property. I refer, of course, to the goblins, who believe all objects to truly belong to their makers: one cannot purchase an object, only rent it for life. To pass on to one's heirs something that one did not produce oneself is regarded by goblins as theft. Unless the original maker of the Elder Wand is still alive (and according to tradition, the wand was in fact made by Death Himself), this theory must surely remain live as a possible metaethical truth about property in the Harry Potter universe.
Thursday, 5 June 2014
Review of The Fault in our Stars (book)
WARNING - Spoilers ahead.
It's a fair while since I've just sat down and read a book. If you can read a book without breaks except for meals and using the toilet, then that says something good about the book. The Fault in our Stars tells the story of Hazel and Augustus, a teenaged couple facing the fact that we are all going to die and the universe has no inherent meaning and that they in particular are going to die soon due to cancer. In a sense it's pretty morbid, but they remain surprisingly upbeat for people who find the whole "dying with courage" to be a load of trite nonsense.
There are three things in the book I can think of that, in my opinion, deserve criticism. The first was the tendency for scripted dialogue, e.g. a argument in the opening pages about attending support group:
Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."
Mom: "One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities."
Me: "Please just let me watch America's Next Top Model. It's an activity."
And so on. It communicates what is being said, but at the same time it feels a bit lazy to me.
The second is that the pace of the story is not really very clear. It'll skip a week or so, then go into detail about a single day, and there's nothing wrong with that but it makes the whole relationship feel very rushed, even though it is apparently happening over the space of several months. Perhaps this was a deliberate stylistic decision - the novel is at the very least influenced by Romeo and Juliet, the most rushed romance of them all - but it still feels a but jarring when Augustus invites Hazel to come to Amsterdam with him when they've known each other for barely 100 pages.
Finally, even though the novel is written in the first person, from Hazel's perspective, I don't feel like you get a great view of what makes her an individual. Maybe it's just my lack of emotional intelligence shining through here, but while you can easily paint Augustus as a playful teenager, old beyond his years, given to dramatic monologues and gestures, who would be right at home in an Oscar Wilde novel, it's far harder to paint a picture of Hazel. There's morbidity, and there's a fear of hurting others and an acceptance of social exclusion, but in her speaking patterns and her desires it's difficult to see her as tremendously different from any other teenage girl.
With that said, what in particular do I wish to compliment? There are some very nicely turned phrases; Green does an excellent job of making you care about the characters, they're believable and interesting. The pre-funeral is a wonderful scene, if a bit cheesy. Dying is represented painfully accurately.
All in all, I'd definitely recommend the book. I've spent a lot more time dwelling on what I didn't like, but I think that's more because in general the novel is consistently enjoyable and worth reading.
It's a fair while since I've just sat down and read a book. If you can read a book without breaks except for meals and using the toilet, then that says something good about the book. The Fault in our Stars tells the story of Hazel and Augustus, a teenaged couple facing the fact that we are all going to die and the universe has no inherent meaning and that they in particular are going to die soon due to cancer. In a sense it's pretty morbid, but they remain surprisingly upbeat for people who find the whole "dying with courage" to be a load of trite nonsense.
There are three things in the book I can think of that, in my opinion, deserve criticism. The first was the tendency for scripted dialogue, e.g. a argument in the opening pages about attending support group:
Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."
Mom: "One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities."
Me: "Please just let me watch America's Next Top Model. It's an activity."
And so on. It communicates what is being said, but at the same time it feels a bit lazy to me.
The second is that the pace of the story is not really very clear. It'll skip a week or so, then go into detail about a single day, and there's nothing wrong with that but it makes the whole relationship feel very rushed, even though it is apparently happening over the space of several months. Perhaps this was a deliberate stylistic decision - the novel is at the very least influenced by Romeo and Juliet, the most rushed romance of them all - but it still feels a but jarring when Augustus invites Hazel to come to Amsterdam with him when they've known each other for barely 100 pages.
Finally, even though the novel is written in the first person, from Hazel's perspective, I don't feel like you get a great view of what makes her an individual. Maybe it's just my lack of emotional intelligence shining through here, but while you can easily paint Augustus as a playful teenager, old beyond his years, given to dramatic monologues and gestures, who would be right at home in an Oscar Wilde novel, it's far harder to paint a picture of Hazel. There's morbidity, and there's a fear of hurting others and an acceptance of social exclusion, but in her speaking patterns and her desires it's difficult to see her as tremendously different from any other teenage girl.
With that said, what in particular do I wish to compliment? There are some very nicely turned phrases; Green does an excellent job of making you care about the characters, they're believable and interesting. The pre-funeral is a wonderful scene, if a bit cheesy. Dying is represented painfully accurately.
All in all, I'd definitely recommend the book. I've spent a lot more time dwelling on what I didn't like, but I think that's more because in general the novel is consistently enjoyable and worth reading.
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
In Defence of Ron
By now you can hardly have avoided the announcement. J.K. Rowling thinks, in hindsight, that Ron and Hermione were wrong for each other and that perhaps Harry and Hermione would have been a better match.
I was even more disappointed by Eric Crampton's take, a polemic replete with HPMOR quotes and a determination to ignore the fact that we're talking about an 11-year-old. Yes, Ron inherited some silly ideas from his parents (and from the Wizarding World as a whole) but he also had a cool head under fire and an admirable willingness to put his interests aside to serve others. In the first book alone note that, apart from his heroic sacrifice in the chess game, it was he who had the sense to think of lighting a fire when confronted with Devil's Snare.
I'm not going to attempt to defend the Ron/Hermione relationship - if they managed to be friends for six years and Ron only developed an interest in Hermione when she suddenly morphed into the actress playing her then I'm happy to lump it in with most late-teenage you're-fit-let's-date relationships, albeit with considerably more intense shared experiences than most. Harry and Ginny at least had complementary personalities - Ron and Hermione would never have become friends without Harry's influence. (If we're brutally honest, it's doubtful that Hermione would have had friends at all for at least her first four years at Hogwarts were it not for the troll incident - at least, not among the Gryffindors. Maybe she'd have bonded with Neville over neither of them having anyone else to hang out with?).
I remember one fanfic I read suggested that, in an alternate universe with no Ginny Harry would (being rich, famous, presumably good-looking) have had his choice of girls, and gone for the one who he found most interesting - Luna. I like this theory, and Luna would certainly be my favourite alternative to Ginny. I don't know that I'd say that Luna was the best girl for Harry, but I would definitely say that (of the characters appearing in the books) Harry would have been the best guy for Luna. He never mocks her, which puts him ahead of just about everyone else to begin with. Let's hope that Rolf Scamander was suitably eccentric.
I was even more disappointed by Eric Crampton's take, a polemic replete with HPMOR quotes and a determination to ignore the fact that we're talking about an 11-year-old. Yes, Ron inherited some silly ideas from his parents (and from the Wizarding World as a whole) but he also had a cool head under fire and an admirable willingness to put his interests aside to serve others. In the first book alone note that, apart from his heroic sacrifice in the chess game, it was he who had the sense to think of lighting a fire when confronted with Devil's Snare.
I'm not going to attempt to defend the Ron/Hermione relationship - if they managed to be friends for six years and Ron only developed an interest in Hermione when she suddenly morphed into the actress playing her then I'm happy to lump it in with most late-teenage you're-fit-let's-date relationships, albeit with considerably more intense shared experiences than most. Harry and Ginny at least had complementary personalities - Ron and Hermione would never have become friends without Harry's influence. (If we're brutally honest, it's doubtful that Hermione would have had friends at all for at least her first four years at Hogwarts were it not for the troll incident - at least, not among the Gryffindors. Maybe she'd have bonded with Neville over neither of them having anyone else to hang out with?).
I remember one fanfic I read suggested that, in an alternate universe with no Ginny Harry would (being rich, famous, presumably good-looking) have had his choice of girls, and gone for the one who he found most interesting - Luna. I like this theory, and Luna would certainly be my favourite alternative to Ginny. I don't know that I'd say that Luna was the best girl for Harry, but I would definitely say that (of the characters appearing in the books) Harry would have been the best guy for Luna. He never mocks her, which puts him ahead of just about everyone else to begin with. Let's hope that Rolf Scamander was suitably eccentric.
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Libertarian Fiction
Students for Liberty are running a fiction contest for a story, 1000-10,000 words long, "illustrating the positive role of freedom in human life".
I recently read a suggestion somewhere - I forget where it was - that it is impossible to write a great story advocating something, and that all the great political novels - Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps Atlas Shrugged if you're into that kind of thing - were railing against a system. I'm thinking that I might attempt to write an entry for this competition, and I'm thinking that I might set it in an anarcho-capitalist society. This, of course, incurs great danger in terms of literary quality.
I must avoid presenting it as utopian - partly because I don't see this as entirely realistic and partly because it's a story, and every story aimed at people above the age of six needs a problem. I could make the problem an evil, aggressive state which neighbours the anarchist society, but this seems rather close to the Ayn Rand-type "Freedom Good, State Bad" assertion that most libertarians secretly believe but tends to turn off the uninitiated. So, what I want to do is to, in a sense, normalise anarchy: to present it as a valid, workable alternative to our current socialist/corporatist hybrid with its own unique benefits and its own unique problems.
How can I best emphasise the difference between my fictional society and those which currently exist? My protagonist should fill a role which would change significantly in an anarchist society. The industry I would expect to change most is that of law creation and enforcement. And it just so happens that one of the great genres - the whodunnit - is entirely about people in this line of work.
So my main character should be a detective. I don't want him to be a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes, because this is supposed to be realistic and believable. Deducing from a left-behind banana skin that the murderer was a left-handed homosexual with an interest in stamp collecting is beyond the ability of the average genius, let alone the average person who might possibly read my story.
I also need problems for them to overcome. I'm thinking that Creative Destruction could play a role - perhaps a company gone down the toilet, taking a load of data with it. I like the idea of the crime being investigated being the murder of a man with no friends or family - presumably he paid a company to commit to catching his killer, as an (unfortunately insufficient) form of self-defence.
That's about as far as I've got with thinking through it, so far. I'm also re-listening to David Friedman's talk "Vinge, Heinlein, the Sagas and Me", which looks at a variety of anarchist structures, both historical and fictional.
I recently read a suggestion somewhere - I forget where it was - that it is impossible to write a great story advocating something, and that all the great political novels - Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps Atlas Shrugged if you're into that kind of thing - were railing against a system. I'm thinking that I might attempt to write an entry for this competition, and I'm thinking that I might set it in an anarcho-capitalist society. This, of course, incurs great danger in terms of literary quality.
I must avoid presenting it as utopian - partly because I don't see this as entirely realistic and partly because it's a story, and every story aimed at people above the age of six needs a problem. I could make the problem an evil, aggressive state which neighbours the anarchist society, but this seems rather close to the Ayn Rand-type "Freedom Good, State Bad" assertion that most libertarians secretly believe but tends to turn off the uninitiated. So, what I want to do is to, in a sense, normalise anarchy: to present it as a valid, workable alternative to our current socialist/corporatist hybrid with its own unique benefits and its own unique problems.
How can I best emphasise the difference between my fictional society and those which currently exist? My protagonist should fill a role which would change significantly in an anarchist society. The industry I would expect to change most is that of law creation and enforcement. And it just so happens that one of the great genres - the whodunnit - is entirely about people in this line of work.
So my main character should be a detective. I don't want him to be a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes, because this is supposed to be realistic and believable. Deducing from a left-behind banana skin that the murderer was a left-handed homosexual with an interest in stamp collecting is beyond the ability of the average genius, let alone the average person who might possibly read my story.
I also need problems for them to overcome. I'm thinking that Creative Destruction could play a role - perhaps a company gone down the toilet, taking a load of data with it. I like the idea of the crime being investigated being the murder of a man with no friends or family - presumably he paid a company to commit to catching his killer, as an (unfortunately insufficient) form of self-defence.
That's about as far as I've got with thinking through it, so far. I'm also re-listening to David Friedman's talk "Vinge, Heinlein, the Sagas and Me", which looks at a variety of anarchist structures, both historical and fictional.
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