You said the future happened
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newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
no subject
the thing that actually makes [Auberon Quin] dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all --If the emphasis here is that the lack of center is what makes Quin (as opposed to other people) dangerous is the lack of a center, then that's something I can get behind, conceptually. A person without a center can be dangerous. But I do think a self-centered person can also be dangerous.
the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. --Definitely agree with this. We need look no further than religions. They can have what seems from the outside to be pretty charlatan-like beginnings, and yet the faith of the people who adhere to them can transform them. You can end up with a durable new religion--or a death cult. Definitely what matters is not how things begin but how they are believed in.
Anyway, clearly another good book that I missed. I'll have to rectify that (... eventually).
no subject
Which I have not read! How did you find it?
A person without a center can be dangerous. But I do think a self-centered person can also be dangerous.
Absolutely; they're famous for it. I just think it's a different angle of danger.
(Aside from the fact that he really doesn't believe for much of the novel in the meaningfulness of anything—himself included; it is not the same thing as solipsism, even when it produces similarly careless results—I think the other reason I resist reading Auberon Quin, as Ashby does, as "nothing but a troll doing it for 'teh lulz' . . . a fiend concerned with his own pleasure and amusement and little else" is the one
--Definitely agree with this. We need look no further than religions. They can have what seems from the outside to be pretty charlatan-like beginnings, and yet the faith of the people who adhere to them can transform them. You can end up with a durable new religion--or a death cult. Definitely what matters is not how things begin but how they are believed in.
I really think you would like this novel. It comes down so strongly in favor of loving things because they are real—they are invested with their own meaning simply by existing—that even when I disagree with passages or philosophies or even alternate sentences, it's talking about something that really matters.
Anyway, clearly another good book that I missed. I'll have to rectify that (... eventually).
No rush!
no subject
It comes down so strongly in favor of loving things because they are real—they are invested with their own meaning simply by existing. YES. I love that.
Re: Orthodoxy, what I recall was thinking that he was as lively a writer on Christianity as CS Lewis was, but that he had a similar flaw to Lewis, and to a greater extent, which is that if you had reservations about the theological point he was trying to make, then while you might admire the storytelling, so to speak, you didn't end up persuaded. To vastly simplify--and this is based on my very hazy recollection of the feel of the book rather than even one single specific point (I can remember none at the moment)--it would be as if he said, "Now, believers are, of course, basically either sheep or goats, and--" and then went on to be very intelligent, witty, and thought provoking in his analogy and in extrapolating things about sheep and goats ... when you don't accept the premise at all. Some things are just asserted. But I guess this is always a problem when you're talking about something. What things do you present as axiomatic, and which ones not?
no subject
That makes sense to me. There are some axioms in The Napoleon of Notting Hill which do not persuade me, but I still love the book.