Revisiting Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Part I: The lens of Mark Twain and books that beg for cancellation

 I have been thinking about doing this for a while (and hinting at it), and finally, let's do it.  I don't re-read very frequently.  There are too many un-read books in the world, so a book has to have something special for me to devote my unclaimed time to it for another go-around.  Neal Stephenson is among the great writers, and great thinkers of our time, but if we're being fully honest, dude's even more long-winded than I am, and I don't know when to shut the fuck up.  At least when it comes to the written word.  The difference, of course, is that he is a great writer, and I suck.  But the thing is, reading even one of his books is a serious time commitment.  Re-reading takes less time than the first go-around, but with Stephenson, it's still a fuckload of time over which Huygens and Hooke could argue about measurement.  And the Baroque Cycle consists of three Stephenson-length tomes.  And some of his books are more intellectually dense than others.  Snowcrash is awesome, of course, but bluntly there's more goin' on in Anathem.  Snowcrash is just more fun.

The Baroque Cycle is dense, and going through it, even in something like a cursory way, and thinking about it, is time consuming, even if I do it just 'cuz I fucking love these books and I think they have something to say.

My primary reason for revisiting them is that they describe a world in transition (looks around...).  They describe not only the dramatic scientific advancements taking place during the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, but the economic changes, and the political changes forced by them.  Along with that, there is high adventure, but weirdo that I am, I prefer the lecture from Leibniz (who is a recurring character) on the mathematical puzzle of library organization.  It has to do with basic number theory!  Gee... really sellin' the books, aren't I?  OK, there's Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe and his adventures in piracy!  And... international economics...

Anyway, my purpose in revisiting the series was to think about world transformation, economic transformation, and all of that, yet before I get-a-goin' on that, reading the books in 2021 is somewhat different from reading them when they first came out.  Quicksilver was released in 2003, followed by The Confusion in 2005, and The System of the World in the same year.

So, remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  One of my favorites.  Somehow, it became controversial in modern America, not for its clear abolitionism, but for the fact that its diction was era-consistent, and characters spoke as they would have spoken.  Anyway, revisiting the Baroque Cycle in the era of wokeness has had me thinking about Huck Finn.  There is a plot that is vaguely Finn-esque, and Stephenson's fascination with the history of language is somewhere between educational and confrontational.  That makes my Stephenson fanboy-ism "overdetermined," in statistical terminology.

So here's our Finn plot, as I stretch the analogy in order to get to Twain.  One of our main characters is the total badass, Eliza.  Eliza comes from Qwghlm, which is a fictional pair of islands north of the British Isles where no, you can't buy a vowel, but she winds up picked up by Barbary corsairs as a child, and sold into slavery to the Turks.  So... Jim, in the absurdly strained analogy I shall make.  Fuck off.  My blog, I can write whatever I want.

At the Battle of Vienna, an English vagabond-- Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe-- who had joined up with the Polish-Lithuanian army, breaks away from the shenanigans to loot.  He finds Eliza, and frees her.  They escape together.  So, he's... well, he's more Tom than Huck, and he's way more of an asshole even than Tom, but it creates something resembling an analogy.

Eliza, basically because she's a fucking genius, turns herself into one of the most important people in Europe.  She recognizes changes to the financial system, exploits them, and goes from slave to indispensable person across multiple countries.  She is also an abolitionist, to the degree that anyone in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries can be abolitionists in "high society."

This means you get some very interesting examinations of slavery, combined with a lot of language that would offend the very delicate sensibilities of those who would ban Twain.  And that's where I'm-a-goin'.  Let's talk modern, woke politics, language and history.

"Faggot."  Did you just have yourself a little reaction?  South Park did an episode about this word, but several years after Stephenson published the series.  This word is all over these books.  OK, now what does the word mean?

Have you ever spent any time playing with the Oxford English Dictionary?  I love this fucking thing.  It tells you the history of a word.  You can trace out multiple definitions, and how a word has changed its meaning over time.  As a prescriptivist, I get annoyed as I watch people misuse words, and as I watch people try to change the definitions of words, but that's a lecture for another time.  My challenge was for you to define the word, "faggot."  Allow me to specify.  Define it as it was defined in 1675.

"Faggot," has gone through many transformations, and it is currently more un-sayable than "fuck."  It is not quite as un-sayable as a word that can only be typed as, "the n-word," but the principle demonstrated by that observation is that the words that are actually, truly taboo in modern, American English are group slurs.  (Plug for McWhorter's new book...)

Carlin's seven words?  Only "cunt" still has any power.  "Faggot?"  Way more dangerous to say than "fuck," although for similar reasons, "cocksucker" may still retain some capacity to shock.

But in 1675, "faggot" was as banal a word as "keyboard," with a meaning bearing little resemblance to what you have been thinking as I meander my way through this Sunday morning ritual of mine.  In 1675, a "faggot" was...  a bundle of sticks.  That's it.  So if a couple of people were out on the road, they'd have to stop to build a fire.  The word, "faggot," is not only appropriate for the era, it is consistent with the setting.  So holy fucking shit, does Stephenson write, "faggot," a lot!  Let's be blunt about this.  There is using the correct word, and then there's rubbing your face in it.  And Stephenson is rubbing your face in the fact that in the 17th Century, it is an innocuous word that means something else entirely.

So he revels in the sequence of letters, and the historical fact that they mean something else.

And there are a fuckload of antiquated racial slurs, like "blackamoor."  I honestly needed to look that one up.  I mean, you can kinda guess, given the phonetics and spelling, but it'll depend on context whether or not you can tell that it's a slur, or even a reference to a human, and that's kind of the point.  When was the last time you heard someone call a person a "blackamoor?"  The racism really is over-the-top.  But like in Huck Finn, the world really was just fucking like that.

To what extent was Stephenson writing with a sense of realism?  To what extent was he reveling in the act of writing?

There is a lot that isn't realistic.  Most of the dialog is written in Stephenson's characteristically witty style, and he throws in modern references that are out of time, just for the fun of it.  Jack paraphrases from the song, "New York, New York," when he talks about how his "vagabond boots are longing to stray," Vrej Esphahnian uses modern business jargon...  Stephenson does not actually write in period dialog.  That would actually be quite tedious, and Stephenson, despite his verbosity, is anything but tedious.  (I formally apologize for my tediousness.)  Yet the use of racial slurs, and the general tenor of gross racism is period-consistent.

And throwing that word, "faggot," around, is period-consistent.

So we have this tension, and Stephenson is pushing it.

You can sort of see this in several plays-within-the-books.  He just goes over the fucking top.  And yet, you can't actually read the novels as anything other than abolitionist.  And there is nothing homophobic about the novels either.  Isaac Newton and Nicolas Fatio, for example, are written as a gay couple, with no judgment from Stephenson.  I mean, they can't exactly march in a London or Cambridge pride parade, and yeah, Newton is crazy, and an asshole, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the character of Newton in the series is gay.  And Leibniz... anyway, while the historicity of this plot element can be debated, the basic point is that there is nothing in the novels that is actually homophobic.  Instead, the smartest person in the history of the human species is gay.  And... meh.  Even the Puritan, Daniel Waterhouse doesn't appear to give a shit.

Yet the books are filled with gratuitous uses of the word, "faggot," and more racial slurs than I could count, including many I had never encountered before reading the books.

Of course, there will never be a cry to remove Neal Stephenson books from schools because no K-12 school would ever assign Neal Stephenson.  K-12 curriculum is mandated by law to suck, so they aren't allowed to assign Neal Stephenson.  They are required to assign shit books in order to make kids hate reading, because that way, everyone just watches tv, rotting their fucking brains, and keeping the country in a zombie state, and no, I won't type "wake up, sheeple," but goddamnit, why can't our schools assign some good books?

Yes, I'm still bitter about being assigned fucking Melville.  And Jane fucking Austen.  I know some of you think she was good, but no.  No.  Jane Austen sucked.  Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witness, Jane Austen sucked!

Anyway, I'm back.  Nobody will ever assign Neal Stephenson in high school, partly because high school is required by law to suck, and partly because his books are too fucking long for high schoolers, and I get that, but still.  This is a solvable problem.  If these books were found in a high school library, though, and the people who complain about Twain did read them... imagine the reaction.

Not only does "the n-word" appear, but many more creative slurs, along with the period-correct use of "faggot," and if we're totally honest, a lot of stuff that puritanical types wouldn't want kids reading anyway.

Yet, if you actually want to learn something about European history, economics, some science... this is a way more fun way to do it!  Am I saying they should scrap their text books and assign Neal Stephenson?  Yes.  Will they?  No.  They'd ban/burn him first.

Twain occupies a strange place in the American canon.  One is "required" to read Twain in order to be considered literate, and come on.  He was fucking awesome!  Way better than Jane Austen!  I will die on that hill.  Yet Twain was among the first canonical authors to get cancelled.

Idiots decided that his books needed to be removed from school libraries or censored.

Fuck you, assholes.  Mark Twain rules.  Not only does he rule, there is historical value in addition to literary value in having people, including young people, read him.  In the same way, I think there is historical value, in addition to literary value, in reading the Baroque Cycle, while noting that the same politics that made Twain an early spark in the cancellation wars would be far more incendiary with respect to Stephenson.

The basic problem is this.  Those who seek to cancel are intrinsically simple-minded.  They try to find a simple rule in a world of complexity.  "You said a naughty word, so we're punishing you."  The punishment can range from removing books from school libraries and curricula to de-platforming to trying to get people fired from their jobs to... in the UK, sending the fucking cops after people for "non-crime hate incidents."  Yes, for fucking real.  The cops will go after you when you have not actually committed any crime, and the cops know that.  "I need to check your thinking."  Go and google that phrase.  Not a joke, except in the cosmic sense.  Just ask Harry Miller.

Literature, and art more broadly are intrinsically complex.  Unless they just suck.  When someone comes along and tries to apply a simple rule, then, like "no n-word," you lose Twain, and his abolitionist novel.  I simply cannot take anyone seriously when they want to ban Twain, and once you acknowledge that you can't ban Twain, you acknowledge that you cannot reduce the question to a mechanical rule, so you need to cut this shit out.  I don't give a damn about gangsta rap, but do you want to tell Me'Shell Ndegeocello what she can't say?  Have fun trying.  I'm with Me'Shell.  She's smarter and tougher than you.

And into this space, comes The Baroque Cycle.  In 2003, when Stephenson first published Quicksilver, the first-round furor (note the phonetics) over Huck Finn had waned somewhat, and these days, the target list has expanded so much that people have seemingly forgotten about Twain.  In 2021, we live in a bizarre and paradoxical world in which an insistent and militant group rove the countryside on a quest to stamp out anyone and anything that offends their delicate sensibilities while simultaneously threatening reprisal on anyone who observes that they are doing so.  ("How dare you say that cancel culture exists?!  Hey, twitter mob!  That reactionary just said that cancel culture exists!  Get him!")

It is a sign of how the culture has changed from 2003 to 2021 that these novels read as so much more confrontational now, and consequently, so much more valuable now for the same reason that Twain will always be valuable.

Whatever people tell you not to read, you should read.  The last book I recommended was China Mieville's The City & The City.  Great book.  Within that book, there was a professor named David Bowden who screwed his career by writing a shit book called Between The City & The City.  It was roundly debunked, and his career went down in flames afterwards.  And, because of the politics in the novel, the book was actually banned in the two cities of the novel, Beszel and Ul Qoma.  Would I have read it?  Yeah.  Why?  'Cuz I was told not to.  But it was a shit book, filled with ludicrous conspiracy theories and fairy tales.  Banning shit books doesn't get you anywhere, except perhaps a backlash.

Marketplace of ideas.  Ollie was onto something there.  Whatever you are told not to read... read.  It may be shit, it may be great, but if someone really doesn't want you to read it, you'll learn something either way.

Examples.  I think you should read Karl Marx.  I think you should read Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw.  I think you should read Ludwig Von Mises.  I think they are all completely full of shit, and that their ideas should have no sway whatsoever, but if you want to understand why a bunch of Johns-- John Stuart Mill, John Locke, John Rawls, John Maynard Keynes (I have no idea what their habits were, vis-a-vis prostitutes)-- had better ideas, which should hold sway, you need to read the breadth of what has been written.

Yeah, I call bullshit on communism, hard libertarianism, CRT, and all sorts of other extremist wackadoo-ism.  But instead of telling you not to read their crazy screeds, I'm going to tell you that you should read their crazy screeds, so that you can understand exactly how crazy they were.  In the case of Von Mises, it is probably easier to read the follow-ups, and in the case of Marx, you'll want the translations (I don't actually speak German, myself), and you'd need translations for Von Mises too anyway, but Bell is perfectly comprehensible to the lay audience.  Mill?  Locke?  Rawls?  Keynes?  Easy-peasy.

Read.  Read widely.  I was disgusted and flabbergasted when the first wave of cancellation hit, and they went after Twain.  Alas, it was only the first salvo, and they're back, worse than ever.  Right now, I wonder what would happen if Stephenson handed these books to a publisher.  OK, Stephenson is a living legend.  He can publish anything, but an unknown?  No way.  This couldn't be published anymore.  And it hasn't been that long.  The same forces that decided kids shouldn't read Twain anymore wouldn't know what to do with period-correct use of the word, "faggot."

I've got an idea!  Teach about the history of language!  Hey, schools!  Teach something!  Last I checked, these people were still teaching kids that Zimbardo was on the level.  Maybe it's just hopeless, in which case, I'll just go hide in my books.

And keep shouting into the void.  I do have plenty more to say about The Baroque Cycle.

And some music.  Any time I think of Twain, I think of John Hartford.  Here's "Steam Boat Whistle Blues," from Aereo-Plain.