Henry Farrell – who has been on a storming run of insights so far this year, and if you don’t already follow his Substack you need to start forthwith – posted an especially interesting piece at the beginning of last month, considering the relationship between developments in contemporary SF (Hari Kunzru’s account of the Apocalyptic Systems Thriller such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future) and non-fiction accounts of complex systems such as Farrell’s own Underground Empire (with Abraham Newman).
We live in an enormously, terrifyingly complex world. We need new narrative techniques to make sense of it, and even more importantly to begin to articulate ways in which human beings can collectively respond to it… Rather than emphasizing the one-way passage from non-fiction to fiction, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as intertwined like twin helices, generating and regenerating new possibilities.
Non-fictional accounts of economic systems, climate science etc. supply this new (sub-)genre of SF both with raw material and with the rhetorical/literary techniques that help to convey ‘epistemological authority’. In turn, non-fiction authors ought to think a lot more about how they write and the effects of different rhetorical choices, learning from the best examples of this new branch of literature.
The epistemological authority of the non-fiction trade book sometimes needs the anchor of chases and explosions. Or a little more mundanely – it needs to trace the relationship between agency and system through the whole of the narrative, rather than suddenly and awkwardly reversing toward it at the end.
Given the importance of this point, it’s a little frustrating that there is a tendency in the post to conflate all of the different aspects of ‘form’ as opposed to content in this field. Most of the piece (and Kunzru’s original article) focuses on subject matter – the choice to talk about complex systems – with only limited discussion of the different means with which one might evoke/dissect them. ‘Epistemological authority’ – truth, or truthiness? (For some reason, what I immediately thought of here was (1) 1970s-vintage Ballard, especially his shorter works, and (2) the accumulation of very specific detail, brands of gin and guns and so forth, in Fleming and other old-fashioned thriller writers; is the crucial difference just that the subject matter is the economy rather than cigarettes?). Refusal of a ‘single window’ onto the narrative – but presumably not the abandonment of a single impersonal, omniscient narrator? Is the idea of a narrative conveying agency primarily about focalisation? All this could certainly do with unpacking.
More interestingly, there seems to be a tension in Henry’s piece – I can’t decide how far it might rather be described as a two-step – between (a) the idea that certain stylistic or narrative techniques are especially appropriate or useful for particular subject matter (a claim that the rise of the apocalyptic systems thriller mirrors, or is indeed determined by, the post-2008 disenchantment of triumphalist globalisation, just as flat, frictionless location-hopping and brief-decontextualised-episodic narrative fitted the era of globalisation’s triumphalism) and (b) the idea that certain techniques are especially appropriate for generating particular emotional or psychological responses to the subject matter (the idea that narratives need to promote a sense of agency in the face of apparently inexorable systems and processes).
The conventional response would be that neither of these ideas is really relevant to non-fiction: its key goal (it might be said) should be clarity of exposition, regardless of subject matter, and the same basic means of exposition can be applied to pretty well any subject matter. But the second idea looks especially problematic; writing in a manner intended to convey the nature of the object, even if this breaks the usual norms of non-fictional prose style, can be defended as an alternative means to the same end of developing the reader’s understanding, but writing in a manner intended to shape the reader’s response starts to look manipulative. Even if, as Henry notes, the ‘Where do we go from here?’ concluding chapter is something of a cliché in popular political economy, and that is clearly an attempt to persuade the reader in a certain direction of thinking, conventionally that is taken to be a gloss on or extrapolation from the solid, objective exposition that has come before, rather than determining the shape of the entire enterprise.
Now, of course I’m entirely on board with claims about the rhetorical nature of all writing, including non-fiction; of course it is always aiming to persuade, through different means and according to different conventions. In other words, I’d reject both the conventional responses I’ve just imagined. Rather, I am quibbling about what looks like an attempt at smuggling in one idea (it’s fine to play on the emotional responses of your readers in a good cause) under the cover of a more widely acceptable one (it’s good to tailor your rhetoric to your subject matter for the sake of exposition).
Perhaps this is very much a historian’s reaction to the argument; on the one hand, we’re saddled with a history that often involves an uncomfortably close relationship to story-telling, sometimes of the most banal kind, and on the other we’re repeatedly enjoined, or expected, to confine ourselves to the supposedly plain facts rather than indulging in excessive moralising.
But it’s certainly a very personal reaction, as I continue to think about getting my book on Thucydides and politics finished at last, with the aspiration – which I think I’ve mentioned before – that it should be not just written but well written. Given that it is trespassing on the territory of political science, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic manner, perhaps I do have more licence to consider literary flourishes. For example, do I present Thucydides himself, and the fragmentary, conflicting and unreliable ancient testimonies on his life, in a solid exposition of the evidence? Or, in the manner of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, as a somewhat mysterious foreign intellectual, encountered in cafes and libraries in different cities where he offers gnomic remarks about world affairs, about whom different rumours circulate?
Put another way; how much of a problem is it that, while Henry seeks to echo the achievements of the best contemporary Anglo-American science fiction – including chases and explosions – I want to write some kind of arty European novel..?
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