Reading is Writing #1: Research

I hate magic systems and you should read historiography.

Something I found working through the rubble of the past.

Note: God knows I tried, but I couldn’t stay on topic.

The purpose of literature is not to mimetically reproduce reality.

I don’t think there’s any way to argue that literature has a purpose without conceding to the enemies of literature that it must be justified through a utilitarian framework. That concession is morally, aesthetically and politically useless. Literature exists. It has existed for as long as language and, like language, its existence is threatened by technologies like Large Language Models, which sever the connection between text and intent.

However, specific forms and genres of literature have specific purposes. Science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction* exist to critique present social organization.

Because of this critical purpose, works of sci-fi, fantasy and historical fiction (and some socially critical novels of the present) owe their readers a greater fidelity to material reality than do other works. Other genres exist to produce specific emotional tones and to explore particular philosophical, literary and psychological problems. But SFF and historical fiction exist to change the social reality of the present by imagining or reconstructing alternatives.

The problem is that very few SFF and historical fiction writers understand how to create, or even understand, a social totality. By totality, I mean (badly bastardizing Lukacs) the sum of all the social and material relationships in a given society at a given time.

I intend to write several essays exploring the failures of totalities in Ready Player One and the vaguely fascist, soporific anti-realism of “Cozy Fiction.” But for now, because they can’t get mad at me on Twitter, I’ll use the novels of dead writers as punching bags. If you’ve read any SFF or historical fiction since the publication of 1984 (Asimov’s review is essential reading) you know what I’m talking about. The genre is full of political plots that are paper thin, military engagements that lack physical heft or emotional stakes, imagined worlds of unlimited brutality and permanent crisis that preclude any real social commentary through a philistine, conservative insistence on “The Way Things Were.”

These are not alternative organizations of society capable of reflecting or commenting on the present. They’re braindead reactions against particular present annoyances, or they’re regurgitations of historical mythology. The overall effect of this is—regardless of intent—a Whiggish sense of progress that removes the process of change from history and the possibility of change from the present. Badly researched SFF acts like a damp blanket for the political and social imagination.

The problem I am approaching in my fantasy novels is an historiographical one: Why did capitalism and the absolutist state emerge out of the long crisis of Feudalism? And, more specifically, how were democratic alternatives imagined, constructed and defeated?

To answer questions like that you have to know the answers to a dizzying array of much smaller questions, a narrow slice of which might run like this: how much bread does one bushel of seed grain yield? How much is retained for sustenance by farmers? What is a farm’s surplus used for? What is the system of land distribution and how does this structure the sexual relations and gender roles of rural workers? Are the people who plow the fields peasants, serfs, a rural proletariat, something between all these forms? What makes the plowman’s life worth living? How many hours of spinning and weaving is required to outfit one farm household with clothing for one year? What role does war play in this society?

Those questions are secondary to the actual writing of my fantasy works, but they structure what is possible within the narrative. A society where seed yields grain at a ratio of 1:3 is not a society capable of sustaining a city of one million people. A society with the spinning wheel will likely see women achieve more economic independence by tripling the production of yarn and thread compared to the spindle and distaff, enabling some women to earn cash wages by selling surplus skeins. That cash wage economy will increase the dominance of the cities over the country and sharpen the conflict over time and labor within peasant and proletarian households.

To give you an idea of the minimum sort of reading I think necessary to approach the answer to these Questions, I’ll run down a short (and incomplete) list of the types of research works I’ve used in this project:

1. The aforementioned inspirations: Cohn, Federici, Barbero.

2. Broad works on regions and periods in question: Richard Vaughan’s four volume series on the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, John Elliott’s Imperial Spain: 1469–1716, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II Vols. 1 & 2, Georges Duby’s Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West. Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State.

3. Primary sources for Medieval and pre-modern social and political imaginaries: The Alexiad, Froissart’s chronicles, The Song of Roland, Cohn’s compilation, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Malleus Maleficarum, Dante, Shakespeare, Bocaccio, St. Isidore, St. Catherine of Sienna.

4. Popular historiography: Eleanor Janega’s blog, Brett Devereaux’s blog.

5. Topic specific titles: John Hawkwood by William Caferro for late Medieval mercenary armies, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road by Geoffrey Parker for the organization, evolution, and operations of early modern armies, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors on the evolution and persistence of gender performance, Roland Mousnier’s Peasant Uprisings and Jan Myrdal’s Report from a Chinese Village for perspectives on class struggle in feudal societies transitioning to capitalism, Pierre Broue’s The German Revolution and Mohamed Yimam’s Wore Negari for the organization of quasi-legal revolutionary political parties, and many, many more.

6. Topically adjacent novels and books: Julian, Salammbo, God’s Bits of Wood, Germinal, The Book of the New Sun, Teamster Rebellion, The Fall of the House of Labor.

7. Popular general histories of these problems including Annibale’s podcast series on the Venetian Republic at Radio War Nerd, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, Eric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor, Matt Christman’s CushVlog series on the development of protestantism.

A more thorough research project would entail archival work in multiple languages—my limited language skills and ongoing academic boycotts of the Bundesrepublik preclude that, alas. But you can see here the beginnings of the submerged work that goes into understanding the function of pre-industrial and very early industrial societies.

To give you an example of a writer who, emphatically, did not Do The Work, I give thee Sir Walter Scott. That son of a bitch didn’t know a thing about Feudalism. He couldn’t tell you how many acres of land were needed to feed the population of 12th century London. His novels were all slop and high sentiment and, if Mark Twain is to be believed, they proved such a poor mirror for their own present that the slaveholders who read them got all puffed up and started the Civil War.

So it matters that a writer knows medieval women in Europe had to spend most of their waking hours spinning wool, that peasant diets became less varied and less nutritious from the 15th century onwards, that pretty much every city had a higher death rate than birth rate until the late 19th century. We must know how fragmented polities and feudal societies and agrarian economies functioned, and how their participants believed they functioned, because these are the underlying forces that structure and condition the emotional worlds we are using to make indirect arguments against the present.

If we do not wield those forces very carefully, we will find ourselves writing and believing some very foolish things.

The role of Magic

In fantasy Magic papers over some of the problems of the social totality. But not all of them.

I expect, dear Reader, that what I’m about to say will be the first serious point of aesthetic rupture between (some of) You and me. This is because I am an Extremist about the role of magic in fiction.

I come from an historical materialist intellectual tradition and I am unsatisfied with any systematized use of magic that breaks the metabolic logic of a world. Magic is metaphor. Magic is the cloven hoof print in the snow and the weeping wounds of the penitent and the parts of ourselves we can neither purge nor understand. It takes the incomprehensible and the inexpressible and transforms them into a language of interacting symbols.

But it can’t keep a famine away.

While modern societies experience magical thought primarily through money worship and recreational paranoia, for pre-modern societies magic was an iterative form of social knowledge. It was, as Brett Deveraux has written, an essentially arbitrary accretion of practices and beliefs imbued with symbolic power, which mattered much more for the role it played in shaping social practice than in its impact on the physical world.

I object, on an aesthetic level, to so-called ‘hard magic systems.’ Indeed, I object to any system of magic. I think it is telling the foremost proponent of logically coherent magic systems in American Letters is an adherent of Mormonism, a spiritual regurgitation of capitalist mysticism so shocking in its theological arrogance, so bold in its narcissism, and so systematic in its cosmology as to drive me into sympathy with Catholicism.

As an example, the doctrine of transubstantiation is genuine, real capital M, Magic. There is a bleak and beautiful power in eating the actual flesh of God. Tolkien, whose magic is an immaculate expression of spiritual power, was—of course—a Catholic, as was Gene Wolfe, perhaps the greatest writer to take seriously the proposition that technology and magic can become synonymous. Even Toni Morrison, author of one the great magical novels of the 20th century (Beloved), converted to Catholicism.

Magic must be as free as the unknown currents of the heart. Pretty much all anglophone magic systems are reducible to Calvinist conservatism mixed with awe for the power of properly applied Capital: An elect minority has been granted power from God, now they play out their secular theology and conjure streams of molten metal.

It’s giving Andrew Carnegie.

But more than that, I think, systematized magic and cheap restoration fantasies, (Act 1: Bad King :( Act 2: The Harrowing Trials of the Chosen One. Act 3: Good King :)) makes for bad literature and bad social criticism. The Good King is dead! Lee Harvey Oswald put a hole in his head, allegedly. I don’t think it’s interesting to tell ourselves palliating fairy tales, or to vitiate our older myths to satisfy the present appetite for retellings that reconcile The Imagined Past with the political priorities of 21st century liberalism. After all, 21st century liberalism isn’t even reconciled with its own political priorities (Genocide! Inclusion?).**

Still, the speculative writer looks neither forward, nor backwards. They are not an angel of history, redeeming the past. They search through the wreckage of time to find some still burning spark that can cast the present in a new light, be that the embers of a cookfire or the flash of the hydrogen bomb.

That search is The Work.

Next week I will publish my rough reading list for the coming semester and give you a recap of my first writing seminar at Bennington College.

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* I exclude here romance and cozy adaptations of genre, the purposes of which tend respectively towards wish fulfillment and titillation (good) and analgesic escapism (bad). Another socially critical purpose of SFF is to draw forward submerged contradictions in the present, in which case you need to understand the present totality and should read Gabriel Winant.

**The structural crisis beginning in 1991 has birthed last coherent gasp of industrial liberalism: The Libidinal Dictatorship of the Treatlerite.