Utilitarian Review 10/25/14

Posted on October 25, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Shonté Daniels on cosplaying and race.

Paul Mullins with drawings of guys, dogs, and cars for the gay utopia.

Me on how British abolitionism was used in favor of racist imperialism.

Adrian Bonenberger on how Lovecraft influenced his war memoir.

Chris Gavaler on Ghost Rider and selling your soul to your corporate overlords.

Josselin Moneyron on forthcoming classic manga from Breakdown Press, including work by Maki.

Me on Philip Sandifer’s critical history of Wonder Woman, and WW and the male gaze.

Me on Hunger Games, Ann Halam’s lovely Dr. Franklin’s Island, and the best music you’ve never heard. (A sideways introduction to our upcoming roundtable on the Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

— I reviewed Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman book.

—I talked about how gamergate is mirroring comics history (Sarkessian= Groth, sort of.)

—I talk about Annie Lennox and how sex and feminism is for white women.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about why men don’t read romance novels.

At Reason I talked to sex workers and experts to see if the U.S. should adopt Canada’s C36 bill on prostitution.

At Splice Today I argued that the GOP opposes Obamacare because Obama.

Other Links

Mistress Matisse on Seattle’s End Demand campaign against johns.

Mariame Kaba on Ferguson, justice, and applauding black death.

Dear Author on why pseudonyms are necessary.

Sara Benincasa on feeling unwelcome in games.

The Best Music You’ve Never Heard

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This is a sideways introduction to our roundtable on The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of, which will begin next week. An index to the roundtable is here.
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The Hunger Games is a best-selling book that pretty clearly always intended, or at least wanted, to be a best-selling book. Katniss has become a recognizable one-word brand, like Beyoncé or Rihanna — and that iconic fame in our world simply mirrors her celebrity status in the world of the book. The Hunger Games can be seen in some ways as a satire of reality TV and the rapacious culture of fame, but the emphasis on viewing and spectacle also seems like a kind of dream, or wish — Suzanne Collins imagines everyone watching Katniss as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone will watch Katniss; she is, and was always meant to be, a rock star.

“Dr. Franklin’s Island,” by Ann Halam (Gwyneth Jones) on the other hand, is an unknown YA book that seems like it always intended to be unknown. The novel is told from the point of view of Semi, a shy science nerd who’s won a trip to a research facility accompanied by other science nerds and a couple of television personalities. Semi finds the pospect of interacting with all the other kids, much less being televised, terrifying — and in response to her wish, the plane crashes in the middle of the sea, and everyone dies except her, a cool girl named Miranda, and a cranky, unpleasant boy named Arnie.

The three have some amazing adventures; the island is controlled by mad scientist Dr. Franklin, who injects them with animal DNA and transforms them into superhero animal people. But this isn’t a superhero story where the hero saves the world and everyone cheers. Instead, the action of the story is all almost completely private. One of the loveliest passages in the book, and in some sense the most spectacular, occurs after Semi is transformed into a manta ray.

I was floating in water. It was over me, under me, all around me. It was the air that I breahted. I wasn’t frightened. I still felt good, and delighted with my new body. Sunlight was warming my back, and that felt very nice. I glided up toward the shimmering liquid light, until I was breaking the surface and looked around.

Katniss’ big moment is triumphing on TV; Semi’s is just the sensation of being in her body; of swimming within the prose, quiet, unobserved, inward turned.

Shortly after this, Semi sees her friend Miranda, transformed into a bird, and then realizes that the two can’t speak to each other. The isolation is terrifying…but

Next thing I knew, everything was white. It was like being inside a cloud: like being surrounded by the dazzling, soft, white cloud-country you sometimes see from a plane window. I saw Miranda, standing with her back to me. I knew it was Miranda at once, Miranda the way I remembered her from the beach.

From the isolation of the water, Semi goes to a no-space. This turns out to be a kind of imaginary meeting place enabled by telepathy — but it also could be read as reading; the white cloud-country is the blank of the page, and the connection between Semi and Miranda is the private, quite connection you have when you have with Semi when you read the book. Rather than a hero who competes and wins and gains the adoration and pity of crowds, Halam’s book leads her shy character through a series of escalating isolations — from island, to manta ray, to cloud telepathy. There are adventures and dangers and friendship, but none of it is acted out in public; it’s all a secret. The world never finds out what happens to Dr. Franklin, or hears about his experiments; the kids manage to change back to human, and have the ability to resume their animal forms, but they’re (understandably) afraid of being experimented on, and never tell anyone. This is the last passage in the book.

I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, withno bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there….

An uninhabited island isn’t enough; Semi wants to go away to a whole different planet, where she and Miranda can change and be together, alone. In part, this seems like a gracefully hyperbolic extension of the closet; a gay utopia of sensuous transformation where the atmosphere is different enough that unnameable love is possible. But it’s also a dream of invisibility — to be lost, in a different form. It’s even a kind of invisibility within invisibility; this isn’t something that “really happens” in the novel — it’s a wish, a coda, outside the narrative, a fantasy within the science-fiction, imagined within imagination, both buried under and outside the story. It is displaced; a vision without a viewer.

The pleasure of The Hunger Games seems like it is in large part, and is meant to be in large part, the pleasure of participating in a pop culture phenomena; it’s about watching with everyone, and being part of the everyone through watching. Dr. Franklin’s Island instead enjoys being somewhere, and something, unseen. While everyone else is talking about Katniss, Semi swims on her own page, through music no one has heard.

Gazing At Wonder Woman

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I belatedly read Philip Sandifer’s A Golden Thread: An Unauthorized Critical History of Wonder Woman earlier this week. As the title says, this is a blow by blow reading of basically every Wonder Woman comic-book iteration from Marston all the way on up through Azzarello. It’s similar in focus to Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman Unbound — though Hanley lets his focus drift a bit more, talking about other female superheroes, talking in depth about the matriarchal theories held by Gloria Steinem’s circle, and generally trying to position Wonder Woman as an important cultural force, or at least a center of interest. Sandifer is more committed to close readings of the comics (and the occasional related media property).

In some ways, then, Sandifer’s book has the same problem as Hanley’s only more so; that problem being, it’s not entirely clear why anyone would want to do close readings of all Wonder Woman comics from the primordial ooze to the present, given that (a) they were mostly horrible, and (b) they weren’t at all popular. Why does anyone want to analyze the ways in which this particular unread piece of pulp detritus is mediocre? Why would anyone but hard core fans want to read it? It seems like Sandifer has consigned himself to a misty, bleak pop purgatory, following that golden thread into a bland, milk-covered bog.

Given that he’s in that bog, though, there’s something heroic about Sandifer’s determination to wade through it. The entire history of Wonder Woman comics doesn’t really deserve a decent chronicler, but Sandifer nevertheless determines to provide it with one. His writing throughout is elegant and entertaining and even, almost impossibly, passionate. His respectful, fair, and blistering denunciation of Gloria Steinem’s blinkered take on Wonder Woman, feminism, and (not least) trans people is a highlight, but it’s got lots of company, such as the brilliant discussion of Harry Peter’s art, tracing it to Victorian pornography and Beardsley. His readings hardly ever dovetail with mine; he thinks the I Ching era was exciting and ambitious; I think it was largely dreck; he thinks Greg Rucka brilliantly incorporated Wonder Woman’s history of bondage imagery into the Hiketeia; I think Greg Rucka is a humorless, pompous ass; he thinks Marston was an interesting creator but not a genius, etc. etc. But Sandifer always makes a stimulating case, and if I think his Greg Rucka is a lot smarter and more sensitive to the character’s hsitory than the real Greg Rucka — well, that just means I got to read and enjoy that Wonder Woman story Phil Sandifer wrote. If DC was smart (which they are not), they’d hire Sandifer to write their Wonder Woman comics for them.

Anyway, I thought I’d just quickly talk about one of Sandifer’s discussions which I found intriguing. In his analysis of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, he references Laura Mulvey, and notes that her ideas about the gaze seem to work uncomfortably well; Carter, he says, is consistently framed by a male gaze. For instance,”Shots in which the camera tracks the eye movements of male characters looking at Lynda Carter (whether as Wonder Woman or Diana Prince) are exceedingly common. Scenes where Diana and Steve talk in his office are routinely shot with the cameras positioned behind Steve’s desk.” Sandifer goes on:

Of course, Wonder Woman has always been overtly sexualized. Marston’s conception of her as a figure to which men would willingly submit is still based on the external idolization of women by men. But there’s an intrinsic difference between the sexualization of an ink drawing and the sexualization of an actual human being. Carnal desires projected on a page of ink necessarily exist entirely within the realm of imagination. The sexualization of Lynda Carter has an actual person as the object of desire.

Sandifer adds that Lynda Carter herself found the sexualization and objectification unpleasant; in a 1980 interview she said “I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.”

Sandifer draws a distinction between Mulvey’s gaze and sexualization in comic books on the grounds that in film (or television) a real person there’s a real person being gazed at.

I think that’s an interesting take on Mulvey’s theory…but it’s not exactly the theory itself, at least as I understand it. Mulvey’s ethical argument against narrative cinema is not against the sexualization of people, but rather against the way that gender roles are inscribed through the power of the camera placement. I’m sure Mulvey would feel that Lynda Carter’s discomfort emphasizes and extends the criticism she was making…but the criticism doesn’t rely on that alone. Rather, Mulvey’s point was that narrative cinema inscribes men as the looker/doer, and women as the fetishized object of the gaze on whom the male looks/does. Narrative film is denigrated not because it makes individual actresses uncomfortable, but because it seduces its viewers to acquiesce in stereotypical and sexist gender roles.

And I would say that this is something that comics can do as well.

This is a rather obvious example — but still instructive, I think. The pose here is deliberately designed to draw attention to the rear, and especially to what people in those neighboring buildings might possibly see, but which you can’t. The cover encourages you to mentally take Spider-Woman and turn her. There is no narrative, per se, but there remains the sadistic association of viewer (figured here pretty clearly as male) with action performed on a woman, who is frozen and fetishized, her individual body parts (the rear, the invisible crotch) presented as consumables.

And for an example featuring Wonder Woman, how about:

That’s a cover (Update: by Dick Giordano) to a comic by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan. Sandifer argues that the comic itself is intentionally and effectively feminist — which may well be. The cover, though, seems like a textbook example of Mulvey’s theories. The Elongated Man, that virtual double-entendre, looks at Wonder Woman through a video camera while a circle of men point their phalluses, er, guns at her. Tied up, Wonder Woman coos with a come-hither tilt, asking to be “killed”, her hand hovering over her crotch. The heroine is immobilized by and for the male gaze, begging for action that is figured, not especially subtly, as sexualized violence. And note especially that the reader is specifically positioned with, and encouraged to identify with, the male with the camera; we are supposed to watch with Elongated Man, the good guy who stares at the willing, supplicant woman.

The bondage there is of course a holdover, and perhaps a nod, to Marston.

Marston just about never fits that easily into Mulvey’s formulation, though. In this panel, for example, there is no man gazing; women are the actors, whooshing about with Peter’s energetic motion lines. But more than that, the motion, or the narrative, is not linear; the Amazons can be seen either as a group in motion, or as one replicating individual racing around the pole, a rushing frozen sequence of bodies with Wonder Woman at the fulcrum. The narrative is frozen in fetishistic contemplation of women…but it’s also a rush of motion, a narrative that doesn’t go anywhere, or need to go anywhere. The (male or female) viewer, is frozen giddily like Wonder Woman, watching without motion a motion that goes nowhere. Mulvey argues that women “connote something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying castration and hence unpleasure.” But the circle here doesn’t disavow the lack of a penis; rather it glories in it, as the still observer is merged with the still, bound woman in a game of delightful submission to disempowerment. Mulvey argues that narrative cinema is about denying male castration; Marston’s gaze, on the contrary, embraces it as an exciting option for children of every gender.
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Sandifer’s A Golden Thread is available here.

And, as you probably know, you can preorder my Wonder Woman book and read more about the joys of castration here.

Anti-Manga, The Anti-Classics Way

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Josselin Moneyron

This October, London’s Breakdown Press published Masahiko Matsumoto’s The Man Next Door, the second in their new art manga collection. Curated by art historian Ryan Holmberg and featuring Breakdown’s characteristic risograph technique, the anthology of four stories highlights much of what makes the young collection such a unique aesthetic proposition.

The collection is heir to the “Masters of Alternative Manga” line, one of the two that Holmberg helmed for Picturebox, Inc. Only one volume came out before Picturebox announced that it wouldn’t produce any new books, an anthology of short stories by cult author Seiichi Hayashi called Gold Pollen and other stories. (Two books came out in the other collection, called “Ten Cent Manga” : Tezuka’s highly entertaining The Mysterious Underground Men and the less accessible Last of the Mohicans, by underappreciated pioneer Shigeru Sugiura.)

While the Ten Cent Manga series remains orphaned, the Alt Manga collection has sparked the interest of other publishers, and what should have been the follow-up to Gold Pollen, an anthology of shorts by Tadao Tsuge titled Trash Market, will be published by Canada’s venerable Drawn & Quarterly. Tadao, the younger brother of alt manga superstar Yoshiharu Tsuge, was a fixture of the GARO magazine in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and an obsessive chronicler of social anxieties in a Japan still haunted by the war.

The D&Q connection makes perfect sense in the light of their previous interests in manga publishing. The Breakdown Press one is less intuitive, and the particularities of its inception are a big part of what makes it so original and exciting.

The London-based publisher is distinctly inspired by zine culture. They printed all their first books using a Risograph machine, a piece of Japanese office equipment that blends screen printing and photocopy, and which has proved very popular recently among underground publishers. They met Holmberg while he was in England for a fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Art & Culture. The institute and the Japan Foundation were looking to invite Hayashi to England, and “I wanted to do something to commemorate the event”, says Holmberg. Breakdown Press happened to be looking for that kind of projects, and the planets aligned. They settled on a 1969 story of loneliness and rural exodus, Flowering Harbour ; Holmberg wrote an introduction and translated an article by Hayashi, while Breakdown Press’s first published author and de facto art director Joe Kessler handled the design and printing with Victory Press. The result, a 40-page, 5.4” by 7.6”, perfect-bound book, resembles neither the mass-produced commercial manga nor the large hardcovers of other classics collections. As Breakdown’s Simon Hacking explains, “What we really loved about the Flowering Harbour project was the opportunity to work with a cartoonist who is much more established and revered than any we’d worked with before, but to do so in a format that matched our existing output. Printing the book using a Risograph at the printer we’ve used for all of our books, and getting Joe Kessler […] to design the book allowed us to make a 40-year-old comic from the other side of the world feel like part of our line.”

On September 23rd, the Cartoon Museum in London launched the “Gekiga” exhibition, an occasion for Holmberg and Breakdown to publish another short piece of comic history. The Man Next Door collects four stories (including the titular “Man Next Door”) by Masahiko Matsumoto, the least known but most discreetly influential of the members of the Gekiga Workshop (more famous peers being Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito and comic giant Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who later told – and in a way rewrote – the story of the gekiga revolution). Again, Holmberg wrote an introduction and translated a 2004 article by the author himself. Kessler designed the book and the Risograph was put to good use. Each story is printed in its own colour, a great detail since all anthologies nowadays are printed in black, while the magazines themselves often used colored ink.

The homemade touch of the books and the “opportunistic” character of the line-up manage a strange feat : they make the works feel current. Their origins and historical context are obviously explained, but the articles in the books themselves are introductions : short, to-the-point and easily digested. They don’t break the spell that preserves these strange little books from the “glass dome” curse of patrimonial anthologies. And for those who would like to delve much deeper than that, Holmberg actually accompanies each release with lengthy and much-researched discussions on the authors and stories as part of his TCJ column “What was alternative manga ?”.

But as fascinating as the experiment has been so far, its most exciting developments are still to come. Because Breakdown Press are at exactly the right moment in their history, in terms of size and ambition, to tackle some big, crazy projects. Starting with a reputedly unpublishable masterpiece of alt comics, the experimental anti-manga of Sasaki Maki. Despite the enduring success of Maki’s Complete Comic Works in Japan, Holmberg had up to now failed to have an anthology edited in English. “I remember pitching a Maki collection to Dan Nadel at PictureBox many many years ago, 5 or 6 years ago, and he said, no way! no story = no sales.”

Admittedly, the short stories Maki drew in the 60’s and 70’s are among the most abstruse ever produced, but strolling through this seemingly meaningless interweaving of political, symbolic and pop imagery is an experience like few others. For every fan of the psychedelic era, or anybody interested in seeing what Japanese counterculture looked like at the height of its creative drive, this is essential reading. And it’s no wonder that the best-selling (though himself often obscure) novelist Haruki Murakami defines the artist as the defining voice of the period. “With my novels, he confesses in the foreword to Maki’s Japanese collection, I try to do for this generation what Sasaki Maki did for mine.”

Though the anthology, scheduled for the beginning of 2015, won’t have the same look as the mini-manga published so far, it will certainly have the Breakdown feel, especially since Joe Kessler is now their official house art director. And if their latest offerings, printed in offset for greater versatility, are any measure, it is going to look gorgeous. Of course, it’s not like anybody involved is hoping for great financial success, but even if it all goes terribly wrong, let’s hope that the initiative will spark many copycats. Because these little classics feel different, and new, and imply in their own humble way that the range of what small press can do has suddenly broadened.

How to Sell Your Soul

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I started reading comics as a kid at a particularly satanic moment. Not only had vampires and werewolves crashed through the gatekeeping Comic Code, but the literal Son of Satan demanded his own title in 1973. My favorite supernatural superhero though was the demonic motorcyclist Ghost Rider. Marvel writer Gary Friedrich said the flaming skull idea was his. In fact, Friedrich said the whole character was and sued a few weeks after Columbia released their first Ghost Rider movie (it barely broke even, so I’m still confused how Nicholas Cage managed a sequel). In the comic, Friedrich wrote about the Evel Knievel-inspired Johnny Blaze signing away rights to his soul to save his adoptive father from cancer. A U.S. District Judge wrote in her court opinion that Friedrich had signed his rights away to Marvel.

It’s a diabolically common comic book plot, dating back to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signing DC-owner Harry Donnenfeld’s standard contract and handing their mobster boss Superman for $130. But that wasn’t the first superhero deal with the devil.

When Mephistopheles offered to be Faust’s “servant,” the wizened scholar wisely asked “how must I thy services repay?” demanding “the condition plainly be exprest!” In exchange for his soul (“under-signest merely with a drop of blood”), Faust wanted superhuman knowledge. He’d exhausted all human study—philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, theology—but was “no nearer to the infinite.” Goethe introduces him alone in his study, moments before conjuring his first spirit:

Therefore myself to magic I give,
In hope, through spirit-voice and might,
Secrets now veiled to bring to light,
That I no more, with aching brow,
Need speak of what I nothing know;
That I the force may recognise
That binds creation’s inmost energies;
Her vital powers, her embryo seeds survey,
And fling the trade in empty words away.

Goethe published the first half of his dramatic poem Faust in 1808, based on the German alchemist Johann Georg Faust who supposedly died in a laboratory explosion when the devil came to collect him personally (the German Church had said the two were in league). An anonymous historian included their actual contract, complete with its legalistic “whereas” and “whereof” jargon, in the first 1587 compilation of the legend. Christopher Marlowe introduced the doctor to English audiences two decades later, but I prefer Goethe’s version. His Faust is the first superman. One of the spirits he conjures asks: “What vexes you, oh Ubermensch!”

Friedrich Nietzsche famously adopted the term, but only after reading Lord Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred while still in school. Young Friedrich called Byron’s Faustian knock-off an “Ubermensch who commands the spirits” and felt “profoundly related to this work,” preferring it over Goethe’s. Byron first heard Faust the summer the Shelleys visited his Geneva manor. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein that same visit, and her mad scientist, like Byron’s mad magician, inherited Faust’s “ardent mind,/ Which unrestrain’d still presses on for ever.” All three o’erleapt the human sphere to know what “Doth for the Deity alone subsist!”

I teach playwriting, so if either poet showed up in class, we’d have to have a very long discussion about the word “dramatic.” Though equally unstageable, Manfred is Faust minus Mephistopheles, a subtraction that probably won over the impressionable Nietzsche. Manfred doesn’t barter his soul to anyone but his diabolical self. His powers were “purchased by no compact” but “by superior science,” “strength of mind,” and a whole lotta “daring.” He accepts his approaching death, but defies “The Power which summons me,” refusing “to render up my soul to” the demonic spirit he orders “Back to thy hell! Thou hast no power upon me.”

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter

The abbot at Manfred’s side urges him to pray for salvation, but Manfred will have none of that either, content to “die as I have lived—alone.” His soul takes its earthless flight, whither the abbot dreads to think. He means Hell, which is where Marlowe sent his Faust in the last act of his tragedy, dragged down like Don Giovanni by the Commandatore’s statue. But the first part of Goethe’s trajedie ends with the repentant Faust’s arrival in Heaven—another reason for Nietzsche to prefer Byron’s ubermensch.

After Manfred, Byron started composing his satiric epic Don Juan, leaping from a damned alchemist named John to a damned womanizer named John. George Bernard Shaw landed in Byron’s footsteps when he modernized Don Juan as an aristocratic eugenicist in his 1903 play Man and Superman—the first time Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” is translated “superman.” Shaw’s John, however, never signs his soul away, just his life when in his last act he submits to marriage—an institution he’d opposed as an obstacle to breeding supermen. He wants to populate the planet with a race of goodlooking philosopher-athletes.

Goethe’s Faust could have demanded invulnerability and super-strength, but his superpowers seem more noble:

The scope of all my powers henceforth be this,
To bare my breast to every pang,—to know
In my heart’s core all human weal and woe,
To grasp in thought the lofty and the deep,
Men’s various fortunes on my breast to heap,
And thus to theirs dilate my individual mind,
And share at length with them the shipwreck of mankind.

Compare that to one of the more recent soul-selling superheroes, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. When the former CIA assassin died, he made a deal with a demon to see his wife again—and next thing he’s sporting a necroplasmic body with superhuman strength and infinite regenerative powers. He battles angels, demons, and a range of human thugs—but not publishers. McFarlane was one of a group of artists who rebelled against Marvel’s “work for hire” requirement that employees give up all ownership rights—a policy they reversed when they formed Image Comics in 1992. Spawn was one of the company’s first titles.

I applaud their business practices, but when I picked up Spawn No. 8 from a magazine shelf in my local bookstore, I was horrified. It seemed my favorite writer, Alan Moore, had sold not his soul but his signature intelligence when penning the script. But I’m still glad it sold well, and even spawned a movie that grossed more than Ghost Rider. Meanwhile, Siegel, Shuster, and their heirs have spent decades battling the Mephistophelean DC. Their lawsuits kept the Hollywood Superman in Development Hell for a few years—a 2008 judge almost stripped DC of the copyright—but Warner Bros’ lawyer minions always win in appeals. Marlowe sent his Faust shrieking into Hell, but maybe someday the spirits of the U.S. court system will answer his final prayer:

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d!

Lovecraft’s War Memoirs

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Adrian Bonenberger

I made a strange discovery recently. Reading the Delta Green Call of Cthulhu RPG sourcebooks for a different perspective on the H.P. Lovecraft narrative (as well as to interact with and enjoy one of my favorite literary worlds), it occurred to me that a great deal of the current literature coming out of the forever war in Afghanistan and the Middle East are basically horror stories.

Much of the current literature on war comes to us in the form of memoir. Many of these accounts focus on special operations soldiers such as SEALs, Rangers, Delta, CIA, or mercenaries formerly employed by one of these groups. The bulk of the remainder of the memoirs are firsthand accounts produced by combat veterans from regular units. My own memoir, Afghan Post, is an epistolary account drawn from journal entries and letters to others during my time deployed. LTC Peter Molin, who reviewed Afghan Post for his blog Time Now (detailing war-themed literature) said that it reads like bildungsroman – a coming of age story.

Meditating on Lovecraft, though, I realized that my memoir makes a lot more sense as horror, and I suspect that this holds true for a great many of the war memoirs we’re used to encountering as non-fiction essay.

For those unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft it’s probably worth making a wild overgeneralization and claiming, briefly, that he was responsible for establishing the genre of modern horror as we know it. In Lovecraft’s stories, a protagonist who operates on the fringes of society (private detective, university researcher, scientist, a relative to some obscure and eccentric person) is presented with a mystery about the nature of the universe. The solution to the mystery is either some horrifying revelation about the nature of the universe that drives the protagonist mad, or a monster that kills the protagonist.

Given the frame of a universe wherein people are killed or driven mad by what they see and do, it’s not difficult to see how war memoirs or any trauma story could lend themselves to comparison and analysis. Most contemporary participants in war (who are, in America at least, all volunteers), elect to take part in state sanctioned violence. Whether they are shooting at enemies or being shot at, the emotional progressions moves in most cases quite naturally and predictably from some form of idealism to realism and, ultimately, to pessimism (and, frequently, to suicide as well).

I first encountered H.P. Lovecraft in a Borders in Evanston, in winter of 1996. A classmate of mine, Scott Richardson, introduced me to the author when I expressed an interest in reading short horror fiction, and fatigue with Stephen King (who has also produced an incredible body of short horror fiction, for which he should be always and best remembered). Lovecraft made effective use of the epistolary device in his horror stories –At the Mountains of Madness, for example, is a novella told through the journal of an explorer and scientist in Antarctica who makes a horrible discovery. Used appropriately, the frame allows readers to experience, firsthand, the dissolution of a mind, and undergo in hours what would otherwise transpire over a course of days, weeks, or more.

When people have asked me what my inspiration was for framing Afghan Post as an epistolary memoir, I’ve told them the truth: I’ve always enjoyed writing letters and journal entries, and I found the writing of difficult personal material to be easier if it were addressed to the friends and family with whom I’d actually corresponded during my deployments to Afghanistan. A friend had sent me a copy of Les Liasions Dangereuses shortly before I began writing my memoir, so that book – told through a series of letters between two French aristocrats – was also very prominent in my mind. It did not occur to me that, in telling the story of my psychological fracturing, and splitting, I was evoking Lovecraft.

That connection works both ways, broadly speaking – Lovecraft’s stories are filled with references to war, and especially World War I. Oftentimes a character will be revealed to have been a veteran of that conflict –not surprisingly, given the time during which Lovecraft was writing, but not often remarked upon in literary studies. And nowhere moreso than in his short story The Rats in the Walls, where the narrator’s son dies from a wound inflicted in World War I, and another World War I veteran is murdered under suitably terrible circumstances – in the earth, among the scurrying of rats, which were a powerful symbol of trench life, as well as life in the hellish, muddy wasteland between trenches.

The book I wrote is the story of an intellectual and artistically inclined young man, who encounters the terrifying reality of life outside the safe confines of the developed world, and endures the emotional consequences. Reading Afghan Post now, ten months after its release and nearly a year and a half since I last edited the text, I must admit that my journey concluded with a descent into madness, from which I have only partially recovered.

While it’s irresponsible to make generalizations about something as wide and all-encompassing as war literature, which runs the gamut from fiction masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five to first-person memoirs like the controversial American Sniper, my own sense of the war narrative is this: there’s something to the process of going to war that undermines the confidence we veterans have in a naturally or passively just world. I’m surprised it took me this long to realize that I wrote a story that could honestly be described as “Memoir – Epistolary – Horror.”

Spare Them Our Good Intentions

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared in edited form in the Chicago Reader.
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We tend to think of imperialism as motivated by greed and racism, but the truth is that it is just as often actuated by altruism. Whether it’s Rudyard Kipling urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and colonize the Philippines or Christopher Hitchens urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and occupy Iraq, humanitarian concerns and foreign adventure are inseparable. As counterintuitive as it may seem, in case after case, “empathy” turns out to be another word for “invasion.”

Of course, many anti-imperialists like to argue that the conflation of empathy and invasion is simply cynical spin. From this perspective, talk of democracy is just to cover up a real obsession with (or example) oil. Imperial altruism becomes, then, a kind of complicated conspiracy theory. It is this conspiracy theory which Richard Huzzey meticulously dismantles in his new book Freedom Burning.

Freedom Burning focuses on British anti-slavery in the years following the abolition of the slave trade in 1833. Though the topic is fascinating, and certainly relevant to our own imperial moment, Huzzey is not an especially engaging writer. His book is a dry read, as it winds its way through a maze of Foreign Office policy, Parliamentary politics and long-past controversies. In many cases, Huzzey seems to go out of his way to avoid telling a good story; he references the British Niger expedition of 1841 as a disastrous result of anti-slavery ideology, but he repeatedly eschews the opportunity to explain even the outlines of that disaster, in which more than a third of the 159 Europeans died from disease.

But Huzzey’s bland delivery only emphasizes the bitterness of his conclusion — which is that anti-slavery was not a cover-up for British imperialism. On the contrary, it was a central engine of expansion, and the coherent consensus which made that expansion possible. British determination to search all shipping on the high-seas, for example, was motivated in large part by the desire to prevent the transportation of slaves. When the British torched a West African settlement on the Gallinas River in 1845, they were not enslaving the people, but fighting for emancipation by punishing local leaders who had allegedly had dealings with slave traders. They were, sincerely, burning the village in order to save the people. (18-19)

Anti-slavery, then, became not just the excuse, but the motive for extending and exercising British power. As Huzzey says, “anti-slavery was the popular aspect of imperial expansion,” and “Anti-slavery ideologies were one of the principal ways that commercial, spiritual, and moral objectives could be combined.” (190) This didn’t mean, or didn’t just mean, that politicians couched their policies in anti-slavery terms in order to appeal to the public. It also meant, as Huzzey shows, that politicians, like their constituents, thought about, and conceived of, foreign policy against the background of an anti-slavery consensus to which virtually everyone, politicians and public, had to conform. Huzzey notes that it was basically impossible “to be taken seriously in public debates if an author defended slavery.” (46) Thus, for example, some Brits advocated against the naval suppression of the slave trade. But they did so on solidly anti-slavery grounds, arguing that forcing the trade underground could worsen conditions for transported slaves, and even caused slavers to throw their cargo overboard when a British ship approached. (133)

Anti-slavery ideology was so flexible that it could even exist alongside open and vicious racism. Indeed, as Huzzey depressingly chronicles, anti-slavery actually provided white Britons with a strong rationale for hating their black countrymen. In the first place, the prevalence of slavery in African nations, and the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade, were attributed by white Europeans to black racial inferiority and immorality. (192)

Even more damaging, though, was the coalescence of anti-slavery and racism in the West Indies. There, freed British slaves were reluctant to return to the plantation system, preferring instead to work for themselves. This understandable desire for autonomy and self-respect was interpreted by white Britons as laziness and backwardness, and solidified racist stereotypes of black people. Even the anti-slavery argument that slavery was catastrophically dehumanizing was turned against black people. If blacks were dehumanized, then they shouldn’t be treated as human, the reasoning went — and so anti-slavery provided the foundation for coercive laws forcing black people back into virtual slavery on the plantations. (192)

An ideology of freedom, then, did not lead to an ideology of equality. On the contrary, a belief in freedom ended up justifying and enforcing inequity. Not only did British anti-slavery ideology encourage racism — it arguably encouraged slave-trading. Even as the British boarded the ships of other nations in search of slaves, their own vessels carried hundred of thousands of Indian laborers across the empire. These Indians were not technically “slaves,” but were instead indentured servants or people working under debt bondage or contract. There was some outcry against the treatment of these workers, who were certainly coerced in many cases. However, this coercion was not necessarily seen as incompatible with anti-slavery. On the contrary, since ex-slaves were viewed as lazy and irresponsible, it was generally thought that some form of forced labor was needed to secure a stable post-slavery economy. East Indians were brought to the West Indies to make blacks work without slavery. Thus, again, anti-slavery required (wage or contract) slavery. (201-202)

Huzzey points out that one of the main contributions of anti-slavery to imperialism is simple attention. The suppression of the slave trade provided much early interest in Africa where otherwise there would have been little or none.” (191) Thus, the very energy and focus that had allowed for the abolition of slavery within Britain flowed naturally, once that slavery was abolished, into a continued focus on, and meddling in, Africa, with devastating long-term consequences.

Were those consequences worth the abolition of slavery? If slavery had been abandoned earlier, might there have been a more thorough and rapacious imperial presence in Africa? If slavery had been allowed to continue for longer — say, till after the American Civil War — would Africa have been subject to shorter and less crippling European colonization?

Huzzey raises these questions, but is too careful to attempt to answer them. Still, I wish every would-be do-gooder, whether of left, right, or center, would read his book — and not just because turning pages might briefly distract them from their violent schemes of world-betterment. Huzzey’s book suggests not just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that the road to hell is paved specifically with our good intentions. Freedom, democracy, empathy, even equality — all America’s ideals are WMDs waiting to be armed and detonated wherever our attention happens to alight, whether it’s in Africa, Kosovo, or Iran. U.S. humanitarian efforts throughout the world are, of course, laudable, and do enormous good. But even so, it’s hard to read Freedom Burning without wondering whether it might be better for everyone else if we cared about them a little less, and minded our own business a little more.
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The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: October 2014