How Augustus shaped our political language

With a bonus section on the maddest claim to the succession of the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire continues to be a big deal for people, for some reason. I studied it at school and naturally I always found it interesting – it just is. I didn’t really understand just how weird people were about it till I went to the site of the Temple of Julius Caesar and saw that people had left flowers there. Here we are, at the temple to a guy who was very much a genocidal dictator who died two thousand years ago, and people are still putting flowers down here. Two thousand years is a long time, long enough that some of those people were almost certainly descended from people killed by Caesar and, quite possibly, also descended from the people who killed Caesar. I would also wager money that some of the people who laid flowers thought that they themselves were descended from Caesar, which is the least likely of those three options although, again, given it was so long ago, it’s at least possible.

Wild though such speculation is, they certainly wouldn’t be alone in thinking of themselves as being, one way or another, descended from Rome, or a certain idea of Rome, anyway. The word ‘Caesar’ in its various forms (Kaiser (German), Tsar (Slavic), Qaysar (Arabic)) lived on as a title for just shy of two thousand years until the deposition of the last Tsar of Bulgaria in 1946 (incredibly, he’s still alive at time of writing, though of course no longer a tsar). In one of history’s small ironies, in the actual Roman Empire, Caesar meant something a bit more like modern ‘prince’, in that it denoted the heir apparent; Augustus was the main title of the emperor. Caesar himself never used Caesar as a title because it was, after all, just his name.

A king by any other name

But this determination to hang on to Roman names and titles doesn’t stop with Caesar, either the word or the man. You might already know that ’emperor’ is derived from the Latin imperator, a word which goes even further back than Caesar, to the kings of Rome. It originally meant, basically, ‘guy who gives the orders’ (think of ‘imperative’) and hence ‘military commander’, but was later tagged on to the many names and titles accrued by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, who, by general consensus, is considered the first Roman emperor. Like Caesar and Augustus, ‘Imperator’ was literally Augustus’ name, albeit an assumed one. He used it as his praenomen, equivalent to a first name, in his regnal name, which was in full ‘Imperator Caesar Augustus’.

So, all of Augustus’ names became titles upon his death or at some point afterwards. But he did also use various titles in their own right, associated with the various offices he held. These included Princeps Civitatus, ‘First Citizen’, and Princeps Senatus, ‘First of the Senate’ and hence leader of the Senate. These two titles were rolled into one, princeps, from which we derive our word ‘prince’, still very much in use as both senior royal and, in the case of Monaco, head of state. The use of princeps as a title continued for centuries, until the emperor Diocletian decided it was time to stop pretending he wasn’t a monarch. Outside of strict etymology, the concept of a leading politician as merely ‘first-among-equals’ survives today in the terms ‘premier’, ‘prime minister’ and ‘first minister’, and in numerous other political and judicial concepts. It survives, too, in the way we address the speakers of parliaments as ‘Mister’ or ‘Madam’ Speaker. George Washington was thinking of this later usage when he decided that the President of the United States should be addressed as ‘Mr/Madam President’. Even ‘First Lady/Gentleman’ as an honorary tag for the spouse of a president descends from this idea of the First Citizen of Rome.

As well as being Princeps Senatus, which gave Augustus the right to speak first in the Senate, he was also often one of the two consuls throughout his rule. Like imperator, the title of consul predated Augustus, but unlike imperator it never became the sole preserve of the emperor. It too has been revived at various points, lastly (I think), during the French Revolution. As in republican and imperial Rome, the French consulate was an office held by multiple people, but with three instead of two officers. However, this three-part rule also had its antecedent in Rome: both Julius Caesar and Augustus were part of different ‘Triumvirates’, wherein the rule of the empire was divided up between three rivals, who eventually turned on one another. As with both Roman triumvirates, the French consulate was unstable and shortly collapsed, leading to sole rule by just one of the triumvirs: Napoelon.

Like Julius Caesar, Augustus was also made pontifex maximus, the high priest of the Roman religion. This survives today as one of the titles of the Bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope. The word ‘pontiff’, used for both the Pope himself and Catholic bishops in general, derives from the same term.

Other titles granted to Augustus were tribuni plebis (tribune of the plebs, whence ‘tribune’ in modern English) and censor, both of which again survive today, although neither has ever been used for a head of state, as far as I know. Like all good (bad) revolutionary populist leaders, Caesar and Augustus stole power from the very people whose names they acted in, rendering the tribunes, originally the offices of the common plebeian classes, even more of a pointless facade than the rest of the institutions of Rome that they variously co-opted and overthrew.

A quick recap: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Princeps Civitatus, Princeps Senatus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuni Plebis, Censor and (occasionally) Consul. That’s nine or so names and titles (counting ‘princeps’ twice). All survived him as titles. Seven survived not only the first emperor but the fall of the empire many centuries later. Only ‘Augustus’ itself has fallen away entirely as a familiar word (except in the name of the month and as a given name – not a common one in English, granted), while ‘censor’ is a familiar word with an unrelated meaning (the Roman ‘censor’ conducted the census). Of those seven surviving titles, five have been used as names of heads of state or government: emperor, kaiser/tsar/qaysar, prince and pontiff (because the Pope is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s least nationy nation), with only consul having a long break before its brief revival. Those last two big survivors, Prince and Pontiff, are still going strong today, so that, at least as far as etymology’s concerned, we’re still living in the world Augustus built. If we count the various ‘premier/first/prime minister’-type titles, of which there are dozens around the world, then princeps has the longest legacy of them all. In fact, the only one of Augustus’ regnal names and titles which didn’t survive the empire in any major way was, ironically, the one that was of greatest importance to the Romans themselves: Augustus.

Old names for old guys

Beside the titles associated specifically with Augustus, we’ve hung on to ‘senate‘ as a legislative body made up of old guys (no longer quite exclusively, but the etymology of the word ‘senate’ is related to age, as also seen in ‘senile’; insert your own joke here). We also still have the concept of a Dictator. Dictator means the one who speaks, as in ‘my word is law’, but it would be a stretch and also just daft to relate it to the idea of a ‘Speaker’ in a legislative assembly. Julius Caesar was Dictator Perpetuo – dictator for life – but Augustus repudiated this title for himself and in fact abolished the office. Now, a cynic might say he only did this because he already was a dictator in all but name, but a cynic at the time, particularly one who didn’t want to be crucified, might just shut up. Like Augustus, modern dictators don’t tend to include ‘dictator’ as part of their titles, preferring benign sounding title like ‘Chairman‘ or ‘General Secretary‘. So even when we don’t use Roman titles, the manner in which we don’t use them is similar to the Romans.

But it’s not just etymology where we can see the influence of Rome on our political ideas. There are all those words, of course, for our senates, pontiffs, premiers and princes. Then there’s the nominal separation of powers of judges, magistrates, military leaders and priests. There’s our multiple legislative houses, (houses of commons, lords, representatives and so forth replacing the senate and the tribunes). We also rely on clever little fictions (everyone knows the King of England isn’t really the Head of the Church of England and everyone knows the US President isn’t really the head of the army). And, more symbolically still, there’s our obsession with putting eagles on flags and seals. With all of that and more, we’re still leaning heavily on Roman ideas of government and leadership.

Throughout history, by adopting these old Roman names, titles and concepts, or local variants, those various kings, politicians and pretenders were trying to say something about themselves and, quite often, the thing they were trying to say was: ‘This country is the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire and I am the legitimate successor to the Roman Emperors.’ Nowadays, we don’t tend to actually invoke the translatio imperii, the idea that some ruler or other was the successor to the Roman Empire. This is almost a shame, I think, because its one of those wonderfully mad ideas that exists with a local logic that makes no sense from the outside, like monarchy or test match cricket.

Who gets to be a Roman?

Somewhere near the top of the page, I promised to explain the maddest claims to be the successor to the Roman Empire. Unsurprisingly, it’s the English (see above, re: monarchy, test match cricket).

Like much that is strange about our country, we can blame Henry VIII for this one. As we all know, Henry VIII was desperate to father a son but struggled to beget¹ one who wasn’t stillborn or illegitimate or, for all anyone knows, both. Having convinced himself that the fault lay with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, he tried to get a divorce. Naturally, to do this he had to literally send a letter to the Pope and ask for permission. Unfortunately for Henry, the Pope said no and you had to listen to the Pope because, see above, he sort of, but not really, derived his authority from Augustus, the high priest of a different, pagan religion, and who, in any case, never ruled any of England, the place Henry lived in. I did say that none of this made sense.

To try and get around the fact that Augustus’ sort-of great-great-great-etc.-successor didn’t want him to dump his wife, Henry split away from the Catholic church. This was kind of a big problem, because apart from anything else, many people at the time maintained this strange fiction that there was only one earthly power, reflecting the sole heavenly power, God. The fact that there was just obviously not just one earthly power was no impediment to this way of thinking. This is the same ‘reason’, incidentally, that centuries later Napoleon (yeah, him again) got a Pope² to come all the way to Paris to hand him a crown. And it’s why until shockingly recently, western historians still referred to Caesar and his successors as rulers of the world³. The world is quite a big place, and it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t rule it or even know about most of it. He didn’t even rule the biggest empire at the time, because that was China, a place Caesar had probably never heard of. Nevertheless, he doth bestride the world like a colossus.

However! To match the extremely strange views of political philosophers of the time, there were also plenty of extremely strange historians who were willing to advance still stranger theories about exactly who bestrid the world and why. According to these historians (or the English ones, anyway), Henry VIII did in fact have the right to rule England and the brand new Church of England. Did they derive this idea from some straightforward notion like sovereignty or right of conquest? Did they derive it just from the fact that there was, really quite obviously, more than one king knocking about the place?

No, they did not. They derived it from the Romans. Unfortunately for them, there was no reason whatsoever to do this. Instead, they hallucinated one.

Saint Helena was the mother of Constantine I (‘the Great’), who you may recall was the first Christian Emperor of Rome. This bit of the argument is the strongest bit of it, because it’s true. This Helena, they said, was English and the argument starts to go downhill really quite rapidly at this point because, first, England didn’t exist at the time and, secondly, she was actually Greek. Anyway, they somehow went on, because the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor⁴ was British (no), that meant that the very idea of a Christian Roman Empire was also British (hang on –) and so that also means that whoever happens to be King of England now, a millennium later, inherited that right from the Romans (what?).

The reason English historians sort of got away with this kind of thing is that everyone was at it. The Holy Roman Empire (supported by the Pope), the Ottoman Empire (supported by ruling Constantinople and possessing heavy artillery), the Byzantine Emperors (till they found themselves on the receiving end of said artillery), the Trebizond empire, the Tsar of Russia, the Bulgarian empire and some distant relatives of the last Byzantine Emperor (all supported principally by themselves), each made some sort of claim to being successors of the Roman Empire. There are many more examples; these are just the claims made during Henry VIII’s lifetime.

Oh, incidentally, the problem of there being six or seven different emperors is called ‘The problem of two emperors’. Could pre-modern historians actually count? Experts suspect that no.

Who gets to be a Trojan?

At least for the English, then, the fixation with Rome was at first a matter of political convenience. And once people are obsessed with something, it tends to self-replicate: we’re kind of obsessed with the Romans because the generations before us were obsessed with them, too. Many of our contemporary ideas of what happened during the fall of the Republic are heavily influenced by William Shakespeare. He’s the reason we still use the name ‘Mark Antony’ for the man who called himself Marcus Antonius. Shakespeare wrote four plays about Rome (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra⁵, and Coriolanus – more on which below) and one (Troilus and Cressida) about the Trojans, from whom the Romans, for similar mad reasons to those discussed above, thought they were descended.

So, you might say that the source of our strange idea that it’s important to establish a succession of imperial power from a distant, mythologised past was also invented… by the Romans.

And another thing…

What got me thinking about the Romans this week was watching Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Like Richard III, which I wrote about last week, it has an updated setting, which suits it quite well. Again, the performances are all excellent (Vanessa Redgrave in particular stands out as Volumnia), though no amount of acting can disguise the fact that Coriolanus is a very odd play with a deeply unsympathetic protagonist. The summary is that he hates poor people. He becomes a military hero by defeating the Volscians at Corioles, is granted the name ‘Coriolanus’ and expects to be elected consul, but is thwarted in this by the tribunes. He then goes to the same Volscians he had conquered and persuades them to march on Rome under his leadership. When he arrives at Rome, his mum comes out and points out to him that it might not be such a good idea to sack the city where his family lives and, this having apparently not previously occurred to him, he agrees to stop. When he goes back to the Volscians they, presumably annoyed at having marched all the way to Rome for nothing, murder him.

It’s all very dark and difficult. Even Frank Kermode struggled to interpret it, which tells you something about how tough it is. Probably the key oddity is that Coriolanus doesn’t much go in for soliloquies. Hamlet behaves quite oddly, but he regularly stops to tell the audience what’s going on; even when he contradicts himself, he at least tells us he’s contradicting himself. Coriolanus rarely talks to the audience and spends most of the play bellowing at the plebs. Still, even odd Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Volumnia’s big speeches are excellent and Aufidius (Gerard Butler) is compelling as a mirror of his great rival, Coriolanus. Fiennes acts the hell out of everything, as per, glaring unnervingly at everyone (I’m sure he blinks at some point but it feels as though he doesn’t) and conveying his character’s fundamental brokenness. He portrays Coriolanus as more of a machine than a human being, an absolute wreck of a man, and so succeeds in making Shakespeare’s strangest hero if not actually sympathetic, at least understandable.

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1. These still being the days of begetting. ↩︎
2. A different one, presumably. ↩︎
3. Westerners weren’t alone in this, obviously. The Emperors of China also claimed to rule the whole world and treated ambassadors as servants of vassals, come to pay tribute. This was understood by everyone concerned to be an elaborate fiction, but they played along with it because, well, how else were they going to get at all that tea, silk and opium? ↩︎
4. Just to make this even more entertaining, historians of the time also imagined that Constantine I’s dad (Constantius I) was himself a secret Christian which, if it were true, which it isn’t, would mean that Constantine the Great wasn’t the first Christian emperor. I’d say this makes the theory even more nonsensical but since none of it makes sense anyway I’m not sure it really matters. ↩︎
5. These two – Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra – make a sort of loose pair, with various shared characters, most notably Antony. Obviously they’re set around the same time, too, focusing on the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. It’s from Julius Caesar that we get the image of the man – and therefore the emperors who succeeded him – bestriding the world like a colossus. ↩︎

Somehow, the Kelvin timeline returned

Paramount, the world’s most boring media company, probably, are producing yet another Star Trek Prequel. No, not a new series of Discovery, which was a prequel to the original series, nor of Strange New Worlds¹, which is also a prequel to TOS and, also, a sequel to Discovery. It’s not even another entry in the franchise-killing TV show, Enterprise (latterly rebranded Star Trek: Enterprise, to trick you into watching it). And, nope, despite being helmed by noted hack writer JJ Abrams (who has also, somehow, returned), it also is not actually a fourth ‘Kelvin’ film, which were themselves a prequel/reboot starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as characters, confusingly called Kirk and Spock, who in no way resembled the Kirk and Spock you know and ship.

No, instead, the film is a prequel to the Kelvin films. That’s right, having done a prequel-sequel with SNW, Star Trek is now creating a spacetime singularity with the world’s first prequel to a reboot (requel? preboot?). Now, you might have noticed that it makes no sense to have a Kelvin-prequel because that timeline only split off at the beginning of Star Trek (2009) in an incident involving actual-Spock and the USS Kelvin, so you cannot possibly have a ‘Kelvin film’ set before this happened, to which objection JJ Abrams says: ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the cash register.’

The rumour mill has it that it will explore the origins of Starfleet, a truly insane idea for two reasons: one, Enterprise, a previous prequel or, if you will², pre-prequel, also explored the origins of Starfleet and, not unrelatedly, was bad. Two, Starfleet is the military. Would you watch an origin story about the real-life military? ‘We realised we needed some men with guns and that we should train them a bit. Thus, the military was origined.’ No. This is not a plot. It’s barely an idea. It’s a barely-idea that’s already been done.

If, like me, you were a child in the ’90s, the word ‘prequel’ will always be first associated with The Phantom Menace³, which you might think would be enough to put Hollywood off. Somehow, no. In the world of Star Wars (the starwarsiverse? IDK), since the prequel trilogy, there have been two more film prequels (one of which was actually good so that, naturally, we were all rewarded with a TV show which was a prequel to that prequel). There have been too many Star Wars TV shows to count, never mind watch, but I’m fairly sure most of them were somewhat-prequels, given that they didn’t take place after the latest film. The Potterverse decided we needed a five-film prequel series to an imaginary textbook, so we all had to sit through The Crimes of Johnny Depp JK Rowling Grindelwald until even Warner Bros realised we’d had enough and cancelled the rest of it. Elsewhere in the world of SFF telly, we’ve also had pointless prequels to Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings forced upon us. Even The Hobbit trilogy treated the source material not as a text in its own right but as a prequel to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Scenes and character were added or altered to ‘set up’ The Fellowship of the Ring, something that was manifestly unnecessary because we’d already seen it without the setup and it was already fucking great.

There is now an entire industry making films and shows that exist to explain everything you’ve ever seen on screen in another film. The last episode of Enterprise even included an origin story for the opening ‘Space: the final frontier…’ spiel, a thing which hadn’t appeared in that TV series but also didn’t even actually exist in-universe until that moment, so I fully expect this film to introduce us to the composer of Star Trek‘s opening fanfare. They’ll say it was written as a tribute to the founder of Starfleet or some nonsense, and the circle will be complete. Until the next(/previous) spacetime singularity, anyway.

1. One episode of which gave us an origin story – a prequel, one might say – for Khan Noonien Singh, who has already appeared in a sequel and a prequel. Hey, at least they actually made him Indian, this time. Third time lucky, eh? ↩︎
2. But you shouldn’t. ↩︎
3. Can I interest you in a prequel to this article? It involves thirteen year-old me going to see Attack of the Clones and discovering it was possible to be bored while watching Star Wars. ↩︎

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Technoglossia: an imaginable itinerary through the particular universal

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.

– Gandalf the Grey

But Biggs and I were going to go to Tosche station to pick up some power converters!

– Luke Skywalker

I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow

– The Third Doctor

There’s a distinctly sci-fi/fantasy way of writing which I think a lot of people probably see as either filler or scene-setting, but I think there’s far more to it than that, when it’s done well. There are, of course, infinite examples of it being done badly, usually using the phrase ‘some kind of’ or ‘sort of’ something or other, which is neither informative nor aesthetically pleasing.

Whatever it is, exactly, I don’t think there’s not a precise term for the mode of writing, which I’ve given some samples of in the epigraph. In sci-fi it’s sometimes called technobabble (or ‘treknobabble’ when talking specifically about Star Trek), but that obviously doesn’t cover The Lord of the Rings or the other examples I’m going to get into. I don’t think ‘babble’ is an appropriate phrase for it, anyway, because I do think it serves a specific purpose, whereas ‘babble’ suggests randomness. Other terms like ‘jargon’ aren’t quite right, either, because jargon is subjective: meaningless to laypeople but meaningful to experts. With this type of writing, we usually know something of what is meant, but the precise detail is elusive.

I think a new coinage is needed. I suggest technoglossia, from the Greek techne, ‘art’, and glossia, ‘language’, hence, ‘a language of art’. As I’m going to show, technoglossia is language where meaning is irreducibly carried at the level of the phrase.

Like so much else, it was JRR Tolkien who introduced technoglossia to SFF writing. The fantastic thing about Gandalf’s speech at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm is that it seems to be absolutely freighted with meaning but it’s almost impossible to parse, even though only two of the words (Anor and Udûn) come from his invented languages. It seems to all be about different types of fire, but why should fire prevent other fire from passing? Who or what are Anor and Udûn? Why is only one of the fires – the ‘Secret’ one – given a capital F?

Tolkien has answers to all of this, naturally, but anything that requires you to look stuff up on a fansite can safely be said to be metatextual. More to the point, even when you do know what Anor and Udûn are (sort of) and what the Secret Fire might be, you still don’t really know much about what Gandalf means. ‘Anor’ turns out to be Sindarin (or Quenya?) for ‘sun’ and Udûn means ‘Hell’ or refers to a region of Mordor but presumably here it’s the former . Does knowing that Gandalf wields the sun’s flame or that the Balrog is a hellfire demon tell us much? Not really. For example, is the Secret Fire different from the flame of Anor/the sun? Can you serve one without wielding the other? It’s still unclear.

However, knowing the purported meaning does tell us something about why Tolkien wrote these lines in this way: they sound better with the Elvish words, which work better rhythmically: using Anor and Udûn brings the speech closer to iambic pentameter. The first two clauses reflect each other nicely, and then we get a great echo on ‘flame of Anor’/’flame of Udun’, contrasting the two flames. We don’t know what they are precisely, but we know they’re opposed and, most importantly, we know whose side we’re on.

There’s a definite hint here that, much like Jules in the final scene of Pulp Fiction, Gandalf just needed some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before he popped a cop in his ass. (Or did he expect the Balrog to go, ‘Oh yeah, good point. I’ll head home, then’?) In fact, in Pulp Fiction, Jules even notes that the content of what he’s saying isn’t important and allows of several possible interpretations. Certainly in the minds of whoever makes and buys t-shirts and posters with film quotes on them, the first interpretation, that it’s just cool, remains the prevailing one.

If you don’t have a Bible handy, you can look up Ezekiel 25:17 online and check whether Jules is really quoting it (he isn’t). For both Tolkien and Tarantino, what’s relevant is not the words themselves but their aesthetic value. Both are examples of what Tolkien called a ‘cellar door’: words or phrases with an aesthetic beauty that has nothing to do with their actual meaning. The reason this is technoglossia, though, is that ‘cellar doors’ are beautiful whenever and however they’re used, and independent of their meaning, but technoglossia serves a particular purpose.

Obviously the flipside of the existence of cellardoors is that there are some sounds that are just ugly. With apologies to the Gretchens and Ferguses of the world, I honestly though both those names were made up for fictional characters who the audience were supposed to dislike. There’s no earthly reason anyone would choose to attach those sounds to a baby. Sorry. I’m also not a huge fan of my name, if it helps. Slightly perversely, I do think it suits me, but did I have any choice but to be a weird nerd after I was lumbered with the name Frank Podmore? Imagine if I was a bodybuilder or something. It would just be crazy. No one would believe me. You read the name Frank Podmore and you just know that’s a guy with strong opinions about Balrogs (which do not have wings).

Anyway.

Treknobabble is a subtype, usually used to dig Star Trek writers out of plotholes caused by the laws of physics. Transporters obviously can’t work because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Not a problem: the Enterprise has a Heisenberg compensator! (I love this.) Here, treknobabble, and the associated imaginary technology, does the job that ‘fate’ does in fantasy fiction, by making sense of things that make no sense. Treknobabble is usually not chosen for its aesthetic quality, though naturally some of it is better than others. Reportedly, some Trek writers specialised in writing it and would be called on to add something appropriate when required. Similarly, some actors were especialy good at delivering it. The aesthetics of certain phrases I think partly explains why Star Trek‘s writers are notably fond of some phrases, almost to the point of their becoming snowclones. ‘Subspace/space-time anomalies’, for example, crop up so often that they’re no longer anomalous. Much like the possibly related ‘subspace/space-time phenomenon’, these sound best with an American accent.

We can see this effect happening with other technobabble, too. I don’t think neutron flows exist outside of Doctor Who but, if they do, you couldn’t reverse their polarity because neutrons don’t have one – hence the name. But aesthetically speaking, you couldn’t ‘reverse the polarity of the proton flow’ or the ‘electron flow’ because, ironically or not, neither alternative flows. Here, the Third Doctor gives us a sentence which is not only meaningless but defies a basic principle of the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter because it sounds right.

This foregrounding of aesthetic over meaning exists outside of SFF too. Sigur Rós often sing in ‘Hopelandic’, which the press often wrongly refer to as an invented language. It’s actually just a collection of speechlike sounds, an auditory equivalent of asemic writing. We can’t call Gandalf or the Doctor’s entires in this blog ‘asemic’, because they have meaning, but it at least gets us closer. There are also millions of fans of opera who enjoy music sung in languages they don’t speak. I’m not a big opera fan myself. Someone once gave me a spare ticket to see Carmen and I quite enjoyed it but I genuinely had to look it up just now to find out what language it’s in (French). Like most people who have ever listened to Carmen, I enjoyed the whole thing, including the words, on a purely aesthetic level, much as Sigur Rós fans enjoy their songs in Hopelandic (and Icelandic, for the overwhelming majority of us who don’t speak it).

In Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode reports asking a Shakesperean actor what they did when confronted with speeches they didn’t understand. The answer: they tried to deliver it as though they did understand it. Trek‘s actors did much the same thing. Again, it’s fair to say that a lot of Shakespeare goes entirely over the heads of contemporary audiences, yet we still flock to hear it performed.

Another parallel is in Finnegans Wake, another work that hacks often describe as being written in an invented language. In fact, it is recognisably English, often in a Hiberno-English dialect, in most of its grammar and vocabulary. For example, I just let the book fall open at random and landed on the passage famous for giving the langauge the word ‘quark’:

— Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark

Finnegans Wake, p. 383

Clearly, this isn’t a ‘made-up language’. Apart from ‘quark’, there’s no entirely made-up word here. The syntax is Hiberno-English and the only other oddity is ‘Muster’ (a real word) where we might expect ‘Mister’ or ‘Master’. What we don’t have for most of the Wake is the kind of clear meaning that we normally expect. It’s nonetheless a lot more like technobabble than it is like Hopelandic.

The other oddity of the Wake is that James Joyce insisted that it all had meaning, but most readers struggle to discern it and, even among those who feel they understand it, there’s not much agreement as to ‘the’ meaning (whether ‘actual’ or ‘original’ or ‘intended’). Whether this makes it a novel or something else entirely is an open question. One interpretation is that it was intended to foreground aesthetic beauty over meaning, in which case it has something in common with Tolkien’s use of invented language in LotR (particularly the elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin). It’s possibly not a coincidence that both work best when read aloud.

This might be a more controversial claim, but technoglossia also occurs outside of SFF and postmodernism. For example, we all know the word ‘tightfisted’ meaning ‘stingy’. It seems to refer to the way a miser might hang on to their cash or wallet: with a tight fist. So far so good. But look how Charles Dickens, from whom we derive the word, uses it in A Christmas Carol:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!

(my italics)

Scrooge doesn’t have a tight fist. He is a tight fist. This is more complex metaphor, but there’s more to it than that. What does this idea actually mean? Or, rather, how does it mean what it means?

Let’s break it down: I have some idea what a grindstone is, though I’ve never seen one. Based on what I know, it sounds like having a tight fist would be a good practice, approved by all health and safety officers, since I don’t want to drop what I’m grinding. But clearly Dickens isn’t complimenting Scrooge’s grinding technique. If Dickens had simply said, ‘He was (or had) a tight fisted hand’, it wouldn’t mean much at all. Nor if he said he was ‘a fist (or hand) at the grindstone’. Much like Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog, the meaning here is both obvious and hard to parse: take away any element and it falls apart completely. The phrase needs every word to convey the meaning, but when we break it down, the meaning seems to slip away from us. Maybe we’re not being tightfisted enough?

This is technoglossia. Neither Dickens, nor Tolkien, nor the various writers of Doctor Who and Star Trek are babbling when they use language this way. Nor is it exclusive to SFF, as we’ve seen with Dickens. It’s a mode unto itself, one which conveys a primary meaning at the level of the phrase, a meaning which, crucially, cannot be found only through analysing the meanings of the component words. SFF uses it perhaps more than other genres, though it can also be found in, e.g., CSI‘s descriptions of how forensics works (‘Enhance!’). It may appear more often in SFF partly because of Tolkien’s influence and partly because, when you’re imagining a new world it may come naturally to you to also bend the language a bit, even when you’re not also inventing one. I expect you can find technoglossia in all kinds of writing, though, because, as we’ve seen with Dickens, it’s a uniquely powerful way of conveying an idea.

Let’s twist

How the surprise turn of events took over narrative fiction

A father and son are in a terrible car accident. The father dies at the scene. The son is taken to hospital for emergency surgery. The on-call surgeon sees the child and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son!’

Who is the surgeon?

This old riddle is a simple story with a twist. The reader is presented with a setup, then a mystery. The setup tells us everything we need to know to solve the mystery, but the presentation, relying on assumed social prejudices about the gender of surgeons, occludes the solution. And in retrospect, the answer is obvious: the surgeon [spoiler alert!] is a woman, the boy’s mother. Other possible answers, like that the surgeon is one half of a gay couple, or an adoptive father or stepfather, are not allowed: the teller of the riddle has a specific solution to the mystery.

If the setup is told differently, there’s no mystery. For example, in the fourth sentence, adding a pronoun (‘the surgeon sees the boy and she says’) removes the possibility that the reader will fail to understand the crucial information. Indeed, if you add this detail, there’s hardly anything resembling a story at all. The limited available information also means that the riddle is somewhat like a joke: it’s disposable. Knowing the answer spoils the story, such as it is.

This is illustrative of an increasing and in many ways quite strange element of contemporary audience expectations of fiction: that there must be a twist: that all setups should not just introduce key characters and concepts, but that there must be a hidden meaning, a mystery of some kind, to solve.

The reader will be unsurprised to learn that there is no twist in this blog and that I am, indeed, on about Star Wars again.

After The Force Awakens came out, a section of the fanbase began, almost immediately, to speculate wildly about just who Rey was and where she was ‘really’ from. The film’s answers (that she was a scavenger from Jakku) were automatically regarded as inaccurate. What’s more, many fans were convinced that the answer to this question was hidden somewhere in the film: it wouldn’t be a straightforward reveal, like the famous one from The Empire Strikes Back. No, it was somewhere in the text they’d been presented with. Fans suggested, for example, that Rey’s fighting style or even her leitmotif must hold the clues to the secret of her parentage. The truth – that JJ Abrams is a terrible hack who writes badly because he thinks mystery = plot – was simply disregarded.

The fact is, unlike the author of the riddle, Abrams had no idea where he was going with any of this stuff. But, as anyone who’s watched his TED Talk¹ will know, he thinks that simply setting up mysteries is enough for a plot. That’s why he had no interest in actually solving any of Lost’s many ‘mysteries’. This is why the finales of the Star Wars sequel movies (episodes VII-IX) and of Lost were widely agreed to be unsatisfying: rather than setting up characters, Abrams set up mysteries, and solving mysteries is like solving the riddle: there’s nothing left afterwards.

Star Wars, the original movie, is a great movie because it has absolutely headlong plot development, which is to say, character development. In Abram’s TED Talk, at around 08:50, he sums up his view of Star Wars, which is of a series of ‘mystery boxes’ being opened. But he’s missing a couple of points, most vitally: each of the ‘boxes’ is ‘opened’ (i.e., the mystery is solved) and the writer, George Lucas, always knows what’s going to be in them.

The extent to which Lucas had the whole trilogy planned out is debated (he says he always knew where the plot was going, including the big reveals of Luke, Leia and Vader’s relationship, but the internal evidence suggests he didn’t). Nevertheless, the first movie, unlike The Force Awakens, doesn’t end with a whole load of loose ends (or mystery boxes, to use Abrams’ term) to be picked up in the sequel. Punters weren’t walking out and asking each other how Luke tunes into the force after only about fifteen minutes of training and some encouragement from a ghost, or who Leia’s parents were, or where the dice ornament hanging from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon came from.

No. Star Wars ends triumphantly and clearly. Sure, we want to spend more time in this universe, we might be curious about how (or whether) Obi Wan Kenobi speaks to Luke despite being dead. Because we’re genre-savvy, we skate over inconsistencies because we know that they’re just part of the genre. We don’t walk away not knowing any more than we walked in not knowing.

Abrams doesn’t seem to appreciate this. Extraordinarily, he doesn’t even accurately sum up the unfolding of the plot: ‘The droids meet the mysterious woman – who’s that? – we don’t know’. You’d have to be pretty slow not to realise that the elegant woman in flowing robes, who is also the only woman we’ve seen up to this point, is Princess Leia, as she’s the only person mentioned by name in the opening crawl. The next ‘mystery’, per Abrams, is ‘Who the hell’s Obi Wan Kenobi?’ but, again, Leia has made it clear that he’s a soldier or warrior, who knew her father and fought in the Clone Wars (whatever they are). This is actually quite a lot of information to have about someone and, crucially, it’s everything we need to know at this stage. Nothing vital is left out. There’s no mystery. Leia’s message isn’t at all cryptic. In fact, it’s sufficiently specific that, had it fallen into enemy hands, the Rebellion would probably have been doomed. This is the source of the narrative tension in the first act: the fate of the Rebellion and therefore the galaxy rests on the shoulders of a couple of pretty useless-seeming droids. They’re going to find an old soldier. Great, we know there’s a war on, so finding an old soldier makes perfect sense. Granted, there is more to know about Kenobi. The fact that he’s a Jedi, the most important thing about him, is left out at this stage. But this isn’t a mystery in any usual sense of the word. It’s just something we don’t know yet, in the same way we don’t yet know that Luke’s going to meet someone called Han Solo in a few scenes.

Abrams ignores an actual mystery, ‘What were the Clone Wars?’, because it shows that his thesis is nonsense. These wars are the only mysterious thing Leia mentions in the message and it doesn’t drive the plot forward at all. It’s great world-building, part of what’s made the ongoing expansion of the franchise a popular, if not critical or artistic, success, but if Leia had said, ‘Many years ago you fought alongside my father against the Empire’ or just left off the specific conflict, it would have done very little to change the plot. The mystery is totally irrelevant.

Note that when George Lucas answers this one mystery ad nauseam in various movies and TV shows, it’s, again, totally boring (the Clone Wars? Why, they were a war, with clones). What we might be persuaded to care about is not the military and political ramifications (or trade negotiations!) of an imaginary conflict fought by robots, clones and space wizards, but what happens to the characters during the conflict.

Okay, it’s easy to pick on Abrams (fun, too). In fairness to him, I’m not completely convinced he believes his own argument. He jokes at the beginning of the talk about having to come up with something ‘profound’ to say, so he was possibly trolling the whole time. He’s way better when he talks about Jaws and how the quiet character beats are what makes the movie great. He even says what’s good about the film, the way it develops ‘character – the stuff that matters’. That is, it’s not a mystery. If Abrams had made Jaws, fans would still be arguing about whether there really was a shark. Except, they wouldn’t, because there wouldn’t be any fans. But the problem I’m picking on isn’t Abram’s hacky plotting (or his not coincidental struggle to construct a coherent argument), but the folk understanding of plot, of which his work from Lost onwards is emblematic.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a different Star Wars director, how he approaches plot and how fans reacted to it. The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was a critical and financial success, but a very vocal segment of the fan base hated it, because, as they saw it, it failed to answer questions set up by JJ Abrams in the previous movie, questions like ‘Why is Luke Skywalker missing?’, which we started asking roughly five seconds into the movie. Now, this is exactly the problem with Abrams’ approach. For a new set of heroes to arise, he needed Luke Skywalker out of the way, so he put him out of the way, with no regard for why he was missing. Has Luke lost his powers somehow? Is he being held prisoner? Did he just want a quiet retirement? We don’t know and Abrams doesn’t care.

Rian Johnson provides an answer rooted in character: Luke’s well-attested hotheadedness got the better of him and, appalled by what he had done and despairing at having trained up a new tyrant to oppress the galaxy, he hid himself away.

For fans of fantasy, this explanation doesn’t work, and that’s because of the understanding of plot as information delivery, but also because fantasy fiction demands explanations in terms of rules and events, not character. If Johnson or Abrams had introduced a hitherto unexplored aspect of the Force to explain Luke’s absence, it would’ve passed by without much fanfare. It also, it’s important to note, would have been very, very boring. Because the answer would be: magic!

Johnson understood that fans wanted to know why Luke had gone missing, but was hamstrung by the fact that Abrams so clearly didn’t know himself. Johnson’s answer actually does work, plot-wise, but it requires us to dump our genre-expectations of Luke as hero chosen by destiny, and see him as more fully rounded. Unfortunately, Star Wars simply cannot bear the weight of this level of character development. That’s why, when Vader ‘redeems’ himself by preventing someone torturing his son to death right in front of him, nobody says, ‘Wait a minute, didn’t this guy still commit genocide a couple of times?’, they just accept that he’s good, now, he’s last seen hanging out with some friendly ghosts and that’s the end of the film. That’s the milieu in which Star Wars operates and that is absolutely fine for Star Wars.

Again, it’s instructive to look at the director’s other work as a point of comparison. In Knives Out, Rian Johnson demonstrated that he’s a master of knotty, complex plotting, which again demonstrates the fatuousness of the ‘Mystery Box’ concept. The plot works because Johnson knows what’s in the box. He never loses sight of what’s happening, what each character is thinking and the denouement he’s working towards. By contrast, Abrams is open about the fact that he didn’t know what the answers were when he started writing Lost or The Force Awakens. That’s why characters in both those works spend so much time staggering around aimlessly and yelling in frustration, and it’s why the audience both sympathises with the frustrated yelling and finds the denouements ultimately unsatisfying. Setting up endless cliffhangers and mysteries is a great way of keeping people tuning in, or coming to the cinema, to watch the next episode, but if the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen, either, the climax will always fall flat.

Despite undeniably including mysteries – indeed, a series of them – Knives Out doesn’t rely on mystery for its development. If it did, it would be a series of riddles or magic tricks, not a story. What it relies upon is character. Most of the first section of the film, particularly the first interviews in the library, serve to show us who the characters are: in fact the character beats are comically emphasised by Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who emphatically hits a piano key whenever one of the characters says something particularly telling.

But what’s interesting here is not the fairly hackneyed observation that plot is character, but what this tells us about what we know when we read or watch or listen to a story. What we know really quite early on in Knives Out is that Marta (Ana de Armas), the kind nurse who literally cannot tell a lie without being sick, is not the villain, and that therefore one or more of the spoilt, privileged white people must be. This, the core fact not just of the movie but of this kind of story (which is detective fiction plus morality play), is not mysterious to the audience.

What we bring to any story is a knowledge of how they work. It is very rare [SPOILER ALERT] that we don’t know what’s going to happen in a story. Some works play on this understanding more than others. One of Knives Out’s clever touches is that the audience knows that they both are and aren’t watching James Bond face off against Captain America: something’s gotta give. We’re so used to reading Chris Evans (both as a type and as an individual) as a hero that we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt even when we perhaps shouldn’t (he’s literally called Ransom!).

So, yes, it’s a clever film. It plays with our expectations, but the point of playing with expectations is that you have to first assume knowledge.

Johnson understands that plot isn’t a series of unfolding mysteries, but a matter of character development. Asked why The Last Jedi doesn’t explore Snoke’s origins, he replied that it was a film, not a Wikipedia page. Unfortunately, this didn’t satisfy a portion of the fanbase, who viewed plot as Abrams says he does, as a series of questions being answered.

Abrams, to be fair, knew how to satisfy this mindset: in The Rise of Skywalker, he answers the question: Snoke was grown in a vat, somehow, by the Emperor, who is not dead, somehow, and all his Force powers were just the Emperor, somehow.

Notice that this doesn’t answer any of the actual questions we might have about Snoke, which are character-focused: how did he become Supreme Leader? What was he doing beforehand? Does he have any existence independent of the Emperor? What does he actually want? How and why did he turn Ben Solo to the dark side? Nah, he’s just a weird test tube baby. End of story. Or, rather, end of list, because that’s all it is.

The same impulse drives all too much of every expanded universe. How did Darth Vader get his lightsaber? There’s a whole comic about this and the answer is: he built it.

But how did we end up developing this naive understanding of plot-as-info-dump? Just as mass production of text created a genre-savvy public who wanted genre-based explanations for plot developments, the answer to this question can be found in technology. What drive this impulse is the information age. The web contains a volume of freely and easily accessible information so huge that we can safely, for the purposes of a human life span, describe it as infinite. The human desire for knowledge is, likewise, infinite. But a fictional universe has limits. It’s possible (just about) to consume every single piece of official Star Wars media, to own all the merch. But, what then? We get to a point where there is nothing left: no plot, no character development that hasn’t already been fruitfully explored. There’s a reason there’s very little fic (fan- or otherwise) focusing on Luke’s time on Tattooine as a moisture farmer. Nothing much was happening to him. We don’t need to see him bullseye-ing womp rats in his T-16 because we’ve already seen him blow up the Death Star². So, once the scope for character development is fully explored, all that’s left is endless lists of facts, more an FAQ than a story. But all this stuff somehow has to be explored, to keep making money, so what we get is plotting as box-ticking exercise: what were the Clone Wars? What actually is the Kessel Run? Tick, tick, tick. But the desire for this stuff remains. Hence, the sequel movies. Hence, also, the desire to unlock their ‘mysteries’, to append endless new developments to a few hours of new movies.

Ironically, these ‘mysteries’ are precisely the things that can be left as just that. The worlds we build in our heads from these hints are always more vivid and personal than the endless spin-offs can ever be. JJ Abrams ends his TED Talk by suggesting that the ‘mystery box’ should remain closed and, while he’s wrong about how this applies to plot in general, he is right that mysteries that are extraneous to plot and character are best left unsolved.

1 Stay tuned, by the way, for my blog about Why I Hate TED Talks.

2 That said, if you are, for some reason, absolutely desperate to know more about Luke’s history of casual animal cruelty, the Rogue Squadron games do in fact allow you to bullseye womp rats in a T-16 during the training mission.

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A brief history of narrative

This is part 3 of a series, a slight digression that ended up being a bit long. Anyway, if you’d like some context, you can read part 1 and part 2.

The Iliad is right at the beginning of western fiction. Some parts of it are utterly weird and others are quite familiar. Achilles getting into a fight with a river (and winning) is probably both at the same time: you can imagine it as part of the climax in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One thing that makes the Iliad stand out against contemporary fiction, especially the MCU, is its lack of a clear protagonist/antagonist duality. Achilles is the main character, invoked in the opening line alongside the muse, and Hector is his main opponent, but Hector is by far the more sympathetic character, popping home to see his wife and kids, and getting exasperated with his feckless younger brother, while Achilles, famously, spends most of the poem sulking because he’s not been given the slave he wants.

The interesting thing is that this lack of good vs. evil, so key to virtually all contemporary fiction, is absent not just from the Iliad but also from the rest of ancient fiction. Like Achilles, Gilgamesh is similarly basically a problem for most of the other characters he meets: his Epic begins with the people calling upon the gods to do something to distract him because he won’t stop murdering their sons, raping their daughters (and possibly also their sons, depending on the translation) and… ringing the temple bells really loud (there may be something lost in translation here, too). What we have of ancient literature doesn’t seem to be concerned so much with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but with how the gods respond to what we do here on Earth. The Greeks gave us the word ‘hero’, but their heroes don’t much resemble ours. In fact, reading Greek literature suggests you don’t really get to be a hero at all until you’ve murdered somebody (or, at minimum, thrown a huge tantrum that indirectly leads to their death).

Even up to the time of William Shakespeare, we find many heroes who don’t really do anything very heroic. In the Big Four Tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear are all, at best, flawed characters. The titular all become murderers during the course of the play, for starters. Even Edgar, who is more ‘heroic’ than Lear, fails dreadfully at everything he attempts. Beyond the big four, Henry V commits a war crime, and that’s after we’ve had to let him off the hook for rejecting poor old Falstaff at the end of IV Part 1, and for killing Hotspur. Granted, it was a battle, but Hotspur, like Hector, was the better man, murdered by history, rather than the gods.

But, in both cases, it wasn’t history or the gods (or Prince Hal or Achilles) who killed their opponents. It was Shakespeare and Homer or, in fact, it was the narrative. They die because they have to die for the plot arcs of Hal and Achilles to make sense. While Sir Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy really did die at the Battle of Shrewsbury, he certainly wasn’t killed in single combat by the Prince of Wales. Likewise, we don’t need to dig into the historicity of The Iliad to be pretty certain that, whatever happened at Troy and whatever Homer (whoever that was) knew about it, he wouldn’t have let the facts get in the way of a good climatic duel.

Drawing on ancient epic, renaissance drama and the Bible, Paradise Lost is both the first and last ‘modern’ epic: the line between good and evil could not be more apparent. His Satan has evolved into something completely different from the minor biblical figure or the butt-of-the-joke of medieval satire, or the horrifying monster depicted in Dante’s Inferno. While not a human, he’s given a recognisably human character. He can’t die, of course, but he’s definitively defeated in the context of the narrative, humiliated by being transformed into a speechless serpent ahead of the certainty of Christ’s ultimate victory over Hell.

By the time of Jane Austen, these complex dualities have started to collapse into something simpler. There’s also a further shift: the duality has crept out of tragedy and epic, and started to affect what we’d now call romance and comedy. Austen’s characters are still realistically drawn, so that the good guys have bad points and vice-versa, but there’s little ambiguity as to whether we’d prefer to see Elizabeth Bennet end up marrying Mr Darcy or Mr Wickham. Darcy is standoffish and arrogant, but he’s also genuinely noble and selfless. Even when his arrogance combines with his selflessness to make him think that he’s doing Lizzie a favour by proposing to his social inferior, he learns from his mistakes and is rewarded in the narrative for doing so. Likewise, Wickham’s good points turn out to be superficial: he’s unambiguously a wrong’un and Austen makes sure we know it.

This trend continues with Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist is so good he’s boring, while Sykes is so evil it’s implausible that he (or anyone in his vicinity) survives as long as he does. Again, in Dickens’ better work, the characters are complex and interesting, and even occasionally push back at the morals of the day, as in Bleak House, where Lady Dedlock has a child out of wedlock, but is clearly meant to be sympathetic, even though Britons looked down on single mums not only in Dickens’ time but well into the 21st century. Nevertheless, it’s always pretty clear who we’re meant to be sympathising with, so that, in David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is definitely bad even if we think that social climbing perhaps isn’t that much of a sin.

One may NOT smile and smile and be a villain, behave

Once we’d gotten used to our protagonists being heroic and our antagonists being villainous, we couldn’t stop. This, in fact, is one of the hallmarks of genre fiction: Van Helsing isn’t just a folklorist with a niche specialism in Eastern European legends and an unusually hands-on approach, he’s a crusader for God; Count Dracula isn’t just an old aristocrat looking to make a shady real estate deal, he’s the Devil on Earth. Sherlock Holmes isn’t just a good detective, he’s also strongly motivated by a sense of justice; Moriarty isn’t just a crook he’s ‘the Napoleon of crime’. Superman isn’t just a big strong dude, he’s the big blue boyscout; Lex Luthor isn’t just a scientist/CEO, he’s a megolamaniac who wants to rule the world. Etc.

In the case of these characters the desire for a straightforward hero-villain duality has manifested itself in a way that’s embedded in the narrative. Let’s go back over our examples: Hector isn’t a villain at all, but Achilles needs a near-equal to fight, so to his death Hector goes; Iago is a villain because he takes advantage of latent villainy in others, so that it’s Othello who actually commits the crime; Satan is a villain because he’s, y’know, Satan, and commits his crime in a similar way to Iago, through manipulation; Wickham is a villain because he’s selfish and dissolute; Heep is a villain because he’s manipulative and because he’s upsetting the social order that Dickens held dear. But the villainy of Dracula is qualitatively different: there is no universe in which Dracula can be a good guy and still be Dracula. His historical analogue, as the Count himself points out, was defending his homeland when he committed his crimes – a bad guy, yes, but someone who, in another story, might have been sympathetic: a Coriolanus or even a Hector. But our Count is barely a step away from Satan himself, the enemy of all humanity, all goodness. He’s impossibly, gleefully, inhumanly evil. Horror fiction is thus part of an impulse to justify narrative arcs for heroes by creating unambiguously villainous characters, against whom we can enjoy a guilt-free struggle.

What has happened here? The need for an antagonist to push a narrative arc a certain way has become something the narrative itself has to justify: it’s no longer assumed that Hector has to die because that’s what the story demands (or even because that’s what ‘really happened&rqsuo;), so the Hector-shaped character in the narrative becomes increasingly evil, to ‘justify&rqsuo; the shape of the arc that ends with their death. No one doubts Iago is worse than Othello, even though Othello has committed a grievous wrong. No one doubts that Darcy is the better man than Wickham. On the other hand, it is literally impossible to doubt that Van Helsing is a better person than Dracula; Dracula is barely a person at all.

What we have here is postmodernism: the narrative becoming self-aware, so that one way of reading Dracula is as an exploration of the nature of the antagonist in the narrative.

Back with Shakespeare, we can now read Iago and Edmund as prototypes of these later irredeemable villains. Edmund only shows a flicker of compassion much too late; it’s a transparent bid not to go to Hell. Iago, on the other hand, is almost a pantomime villain. He’s one of the earliest villains who actively claims to be evil, which is very rarely the elevator pitch used by real-life villains (Donald Trump didn’t run on the slogan ‘Make America Evil Again’). Iago only succeeds because of other people’s, mainly Othello’s, moral failings: he serves as a sort of cautionary tale.

Of course, what happens to the antagonist must, to some extent, also happen to the protagonist. As the antagonist morphs from an opponent into a dodgy character, then a true villain and finally into the embodiment of evil, the protagonist has to change too, to compensate. So, the hero has to survive: Achilles can get into a fight with the gods and come out on top in The Iliad, but when the story moves on in the rest of the cycle and he’s no longer the central figure, then he has our permission to die. Interestingly, the myth of his near-invulnerability doesn’t feature in The Iliad and appears to have been a later addition. In the earlier versions of the Epic Cycle, of which our Iliad forms only a part, he’s killed by an arrow but where it hit him isn’t specified, and his death is more an illustration of Paris’ cowardice than a climatic story beat for Achilles.

Just as later accounts of Achilles give him a supernatural invulnerability missing in the original, so genre-fiction heroes often have superpowers. Sherlock Holmes is impossibly intelligent (he is always right, always interprets the clues accurately) and also so strong that he can straighten out a poker after it’s been bent in half. Superman, the ur-superhero, started off simply impossibly strong and tough: Action Comics #1 specifies that he’s ‘faster than a speeding train’ (not faster than light, for example), that ‘nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin’ (which means a tank shell could kill or wound him) and that he can ‘leap tall buildings at a single bound’ (he can’t fly). Like Achilles, it’s only gradually that Superman’s powers came to grow out of all proportion. Some of this is for narrative purposes. In order to ratchet up the drama, he had to face increasingly dangerous obstacles, and so the writers also made him stronger in order to overcome them. More prosaically, his ability to fly came about because, when he transitioned to the big screen, constantly animating him jumping around was tedious, so the animators asked if he could fly instead. By the time of the first Christopher Reeve movie, he can move tectonic plates and turn back time. In the ’90s, he ‘died’, only to come back to life, completing the journey to becoming a Christlike figure.

Something similar tends to happen with other superheroes (Captain America goes from being the peak of human performance, i.e., a very, but not impossibly, strong man, to being able to just jump out of aeroplanes without a parachute). However they develop, the superheroes’ powers are another manifestation of what is now called ‘plot armour’. Superman doesn’t survive everything Lex Luthor throws at him just because ‘he’s the hero, so he has to’; he survives because he has superpowers. As with the villainy of the villain, here we see another aspect of the narrative – that the hero prevails – becomes not an externality driven by how narrative works, but an internal, embedded part of the hero’s character. The functions of narrative are, again, justified within the narrative itself.

By exploring the role of the hero, we can see one of the defining qualities of genre fiction: the integration of narrative structure into the narrative itself. In the next post, I’ll show how a similar process took place in the emergence of the detective story as a distinct genre.

Genre fiction: what is it anyway?

Ever since we managed to convince rich people that teaching the rest of us to read was, at minimum, a good way of keeping us off the streets, there’s been a perceived divide between ‘quality’ art and ‘mass’ art, with the related implication that the first category was good and the second category was, again, a good way of keeping people off the streets.

In the field of literature, at least, we’ve finally landed on a formulation that doesn’t implicitly position the kinds of culture that many people like with the kinds that academics like. We started with high(brow) and low(brow), then made a slight improvement to high vs. pop, then eventually noticed that, much like dividing society into upper, middle and… working, there was still an unpleasant implication, there. So, we’ve settled on ‘literary’ vs. ‘genre’. The latter because, apart from anything else, a lot of stuff we previously called ‘pop’ fails the etymological test of actually being popular.

However we label the different artistic categories, people seem to have an instinctive grasp of which is which. Presented with Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie, we have no problem categorising them as literary and genre, respectively. But, alongside the shift in terminology, there’s also been a coming together of the two strands. Is Thomas Pynchon, whose novels use tropes from ‘genre’ fiction, like hardboiled detective novels and boys-own-adventure stories, literary? Most people would say Yes, I imagine, partly because literary is sometimes a synonym for complex. What about Alan Moore, whose most famous works are in the ‘genre’ medium of comic books, but who, like Pynchon, uses the tropes of the genres he works with (superhero fiction, mostly, but also boys-own-adventure, again, the historical novel, and others) alongside complex characters and themes? Is Moore more of a ‘genre’ writer than Pynchon? If so, is this because of the medium or because the tropes of the genres he works in are more central to his narratives? Or something else?

The existence of shades of grey doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t real (in fact, a disputed border is itself evidence of difference, otherwise there’d be nothing to dispute), but if there is a real difference, we ought to be able to describe it, ideally without vague language about ‘complexity’ or ‘tropes’. I propose that one key difference is the extent to which literary plots are driven by character, while genre plots are driven by events.

Take Woolf and Christie again. What actually happens in To the Lighthouse? The ‘action’ is very limited, with almost everything that happens occurring in the minds of the characters. It’s very literary not because it requires a great deal of attention, but at least partly because it’s difficult to imagine it working with any medium other than the word. A film adaptation is almost unthinkable; it would have to rely so heavily on voiceover work that it would be little more than an audiobook with moving pictures attached. By contrast, Christie’s work has been turned into stage plays, radio plays, television shows, films and videogames. You could make a completely recognisable, even faithful, film version of Murder on the Orient Express without using a single sentence from the book. You could switch Poirot for a different detective; you could even set it on a starship and it would still be recognisably Murder on the Orient Express as long as you follow the broad strokes: there’s a murder, there are a lot of suspects and in the end it turns out they all did it, but he had it coming, so, the detective (who solves it, of course) lets them off the hook. By contrast, it’s impossible to imagine similar changes being made to To the Lighthouse without destroying it.

So, by this definition, the thing that defines ‘genre’ fiction is not the ease with which it can be slotted into a genre, but the structure of the narrative. This explains why Pynchon is ‘literary’ and Moore is not: what happens in Gravity’s Rainbow is not really much to do with a baddie firing rockets but with Slothrop’s disintegrating sense of self, whereas while Watchmen has strong characters and their decisions do affect what happens in the narrative, it is at its heart a murder mystery, and you can’t have a murder mystery without a murder; in other words you can’t write genre fiction where nothing actually happens. You can with literary fiction.

This isn’t to say that nothing can or does happens in literary fiction. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, there’s a bombing, a riot, sex, adultery, reunions of long-lost family members and a trek through the wilderness to find a missing cow, but it’s not at any point a thriller, a romance, a soap opera or a western because those tropes aren’t part of the premiss. And, while the book was made into a film, it wasn’t very good and on the whole confirms my suggestion that to film a ‘literary’ novel, you end up with far too much voiceover work. See also: Inherent Vice, which is a quite good film and probably the best attempt anyone will ever make at putting Pynchon on screen (except for The Simpsons, of course), but even so has an unnecessary and confusing scene where Sortilege (Joanna Newsom) does a voiceover while riding in a car with Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), but is clearly not ‘really there’.

So, in very broad strokes, character is what makes the difference between literary and genre fiction. We can dispense entirely with ideas of quality, complexity or popular appeal, which are all either subjective, external to the text or both. In the next post, I’ll look at why genre fiction emerged when it did, and explore the common origins of genre fiction and postmodernism.

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