Reading about, and discussing books you haven't read: Observations on Stanislaw Lem and Toni Morrison

Some mornings, I ramble. This morning, I shall ramble. Fair warning. The current educational hullaballoo centers on Toni Morrison's Beloved. Should it be taught in schools? What's your opinion? An informed opinion would require that you read the book. Have you... read it? Some proportion of you have. Some proportion of you have not. Statistically, less than 50% of you have read it. Then again, how would that be true? Nobody reads this damned blog, and 50% of 0 is 0, so less than 50% would be less than zero. We're talking about Toni Morrison, not Bret Easton Ellis. I just posed a mathematical impossibility. Of course, for reasons that I do not fully understand, people actually click on my incoherent ramblings about obscure science fiction books and their supposed applications to modern politics, economics and society, and the obscurity of these books would suggest that clicks are coming from people who haven't read the books, so somethin's goin' on here. But I'm gettin' ahead of myself. Anyway, so Toni Morrison. Have you read Beloved? Probably not. Maybe, but probably not. That won't stop you from getting your hackles up, but don't pretend you've read a book when you haven't. It makes it difficult to comment on the educational value of the novel.

Because what's really going on here is critical race theory alert, critical race theory alert. Despite the facts that a) unless people have read either source material, or something like my persnickety and grumbly series on critical race theory, they don't know what it is, b) Beloved has, in technical terms, "fuck-all" to do with critical race theory, and c) roughly epsilon per cent of the people engaged in this public freak-out have read it, recalling that "epsilon" is the Greek character we use in math for a value arbitrarily close to, but not precisely zero, and sorry but my blog editor doesn't like Greek today.

Have you read Beloved?

If no, does that stop you from having an opinion?

Fascinating.

What about Idiota, or "The Idiot," by Gian Carlo Spallanzani? C'mon. Classic. You did this in, like, college world lit, or something, right? A couple has a kid with developmental disabilities, but they pretend he's fine, the kid has violent episodes, and the couple keeps covering it up because they're just wrapped up in the story they've told themselves that the kid is fine?

Right now, you're searching your memory for whether or not you've read Spallanzani. Some of you probably have the inkling that you have. If we were having a discussion about whether or not the violent imagery in Idiota were too graphic for schools, or something, you'd have opinions, and you'd join the debate, and so forth.

Here's the thing. I know with 100% certainty that you haven't read Idiota.

Because that book doesn't fucking exist.

And that brings me to Stanislaw Lem. I love this fuckin' guy. How many times do I have to tell you to get into Lem? Let's revisit one of his weirder works. A Perfect Vacuum. Here's what my man did. He imagined a bunch of books that don't exist, and wrote essays critiquing them. A Perfect Vacuum is the compilation of those essays, critiquing books that don't exist, because Lem just imagined the books without writing them. The imagined books ranged from weirdo novels to pseudo-scholarly works (which were, honestly, less profound than Lem thought), and in order to write the essays, Lem had to summarize the books for you, then give you some critiques of his own ideas, from the voice of someone else. It's weird as fuck. Which, I suppose, makes this a good Halloween post. Anyway, the point is that when you read any given essay in A Perfect Vacuum, it's actually kind of like reading one of my Sunday posts on a science fiction novel that you haven't read. Yes, those books exist, but if you haven't read them, from your perspective, the reading experience is similar except that I suck, and Lem was a genius. Which is a rather big difference, admittedly, but I'm making a separate point, so no, you don't need to tell me about the magnitude of the difference between Lem's genius and my ineptitude. Yes, I know.

But let's take a moment to summarize a couple of the summaries of non-existent books in Lem's compilation of literary criticism essays on novels that he never bothered to write, and hence attributed to people who don't exist. (I fucking love Stanislaw Lem.)

As I said, when Lem tried to write about scholarship, it didn't work out so well. Just to pick two examples, very briefly, one of the imagined books is On The Impossibility Of Life, attributed to Cezar Kouska. Essentially, it's some elaborate butterfly effect blather, constructed to say that the probability of you coming into existence is basically zero, hence the laws of probability must be thrown out. Lem makes a bunch of errors. The gambler's fallacy, most importantly. As a statistician, Lem's mathematical errors bugged the shit out of me. Then, there's The New Cosmogony. Lem imagines a physicist who claims that the laws of physics result from a game played between very old sentient beings settling the order of the universe. Lem so doesn't understand game theory, and hence doesn't understand the problem of multiple equilibria. Some day, maybe I'll bother to write about all the shit Lem got wrong in his attempts at statistical and game theoretic analysis, which admittedly are going to be sticking points for me, but then again, I have other fish to fry today.

Let's take two. I have already mentioned Idiota. Lem's premise for the novel he never wrote (but should obviously have written), was that parents have a child who is "developmentally disabled," in the terminology that we are now supposed to use, but will probably be displaced within about five years, thank you very much, Steven Pinker. Rrrrr...eally. Anyway, the parents can't deal with the fact that the kid is "an idiot," so they construct an elaborate lie for themselves-- a fantasy world, as the kid grows up, in which the kid is just totally normal, and intellectually and emotionally healthy. But he isn't. He isn't just "an idiot." He's violent. He kills someone, and the parents won't let themselves believe it, so they go so far as to cover it up, to maintain the lie for themselves.

It's a pretty interesting concept, isn't it? (Also, very much in keeping with Lem's reality-warped style.)

You'd read that, wouldn't you?

But most people wouldn't bother, because nobody reads. So you could imagine a post, on this blog, in which I describe the novel, and analogize the kid to Donald Trump, and the parents to the GOP, right? Trump is a sociopathic idiot (true), the Republican Party told itself that they would be the responsible actors and make everything run smoothly when they found themselves saddled with him (true, or rather, it's true that they told themselves this), they lied to the country about Trump to get him elected for their own sakes, but told the lie so many times that they're trapped by the lie (true), and now they'll cover up anything Trump does for the preservation of that lie (true). Bam. Blog post about a book you've never read. I could write that, you'd read it, and Bob's your uncle, In Tenure Veritas blog post. Except that the novel doesn't exist, but if I didn't tell you that, you wouldn't know. But Lem already wrote the review of the novel, sans-Trump references, and you can just go read that.

Next, consider Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVI. Ooh, boy. This one was fuckin' weird. So here's the novel that Lem didn't write, but should have written. A nazi general gets out while the gettin's good, because he sees that Germany is about to lose. He takes a fuckload of money and some people with him and settles in Argentina. What does he do with his money? He builds his batshit crazy, uneducated mental image of the Court of Louis XVI, with himself as Louis, and everyone else as courtiers. At first, the people around him are just there for the money, because Taudlitz (the German wannabe-Louis) is the guy who has the money, but they wind up so wrapped up in the lie, which Taudlitz demands they play to the hilt, that the lie becomes all-consuming.

Um... do I have to explain to you how easy it would be for me to write a Trump-as-Taudlitz, GOP-as-courtiers post? C'mon. That post writes itself. And Lem did all the hard work, analyzing the nonexistent book with every step except connecting it to Trump and the GOP, because they weren't around yet.

So a few points. First, Lem was going for balls-out crazy, and part of the problem of modern American politics is that the surrealism of Stanislaw Lem is just too easy to connect to what we observe. Yet, that's not really why I'm doing this today. I'm thinking about a few other matters. The observation of reading a critique and analysis of a book one hasn't read. It sounds strange, but of course, I've done that. I do it to figure out what to read next, but also, A Perfect Vacuum is actually weirdly engaging. (Much of it, anyway.) And if you're now wondering whether or not A Perfect Vacuum exists-- if I've fucked with your head that much-- those ideas are way too good for me. I suck. Only someone like Lem is going to come up with cool shit like that. It's just a shame he didn't write the damned books. Then again, it's kind of fun that A Perfect Vacuum exists as it does.

Which leads to the observation that... strangely, even though very few people read this pretentious, little blog, a subset of people who read anything on this damned blog actually sometimes click on my science fiction ramblings. And statistically, it is unlikely that the subset has actually read all of those books. I cannot ascribe a probability of zero to this possibility, but the likelihood is low, which means there are people (very few, but not zero) reading ramblin's about books they haven't read, likely for the promise of application to modern politics.

Which brings us back to Toni Morrison. Have you read Beloved? I honestly don't fucking care. But the point is that you could have an opinion on it, and its place in schools even if it didn't exist. You could read criticisms and analysis of it, even if it didn't exist. Stanislaw Lem wrote an entire series of essays on books that don't exist. Someone, or actually, more than someone, is clicking on my incoherent blather about obscure science fiction novels, written on Sunday mornings because I'm fucking weird. You don't need to have read a book to have an opinion of the book. The book doesn't even need to exist for you to have an opinion of it.

What place, then, does Toni Morrison have in the classroom? I'm an Octavia Butler man, myself. As in, I assign her, along with Jemisin and others because I use science fiction novels to teach about political science. Not, I repeat, not critical race theory, which is not political science, nor social science at all. Remember, critical race theory is an anti-scientific field, rooted in postmodern epistemology. (Which actually means Lem might have dug it, but Lem was a better novelist than scholar, as I have even noted in this post!)

The complaint against teaching Beloved can be evaluated independently of the novel. It's... bullshit. And I say this having written a long series about how critical race theory is bullshit, and has no place in K-12 curriculum. The novel is disturbing and makes you feel icky? Boo-hoo, little snowflake! Adult themes? Grow the fuck up. It wasn't given to elementary school, or middle school. It was AP.

Could Beloved be used in a way that runs afoul of principles I have stated? Of course. Anything can. Then again, stick kids in band room, and have the teacher beat the shit out of a student with a saxophone, and that's child abuse. That doesn't invalidate the saxophone. That's just improper use of the horn. For the record, so is everything Eric Dolphy did. Obscure jazz zing!

Anyway, remember what critical race theory is. It's not "teaching the full history," or any of those lies being told by those who reflexively rush to defend anything linked to the phrase, "critical race theory." It is a scholarly body of literature begun by Derrick Bell, continuing through people like Kimberle Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, and up through Richard Delgado and lots of others with a set of 1) claims about how the world works, 2) normative principles, and 3) tactics for how to bring about changes guided by those normative principles, because it is a "critical theory," and all critical theories have those three elements. There are variations of CRT, but all variations are rooted in the idea that America is basically a conspiracy to set up and maintain a racial hierarchy, which is permanent. This is the core of all CRT. I'm putting the links to my long-form CRT series below today's music. Anyway, could one read Beloved in that context, through that lens? Yeah. Is that the only lens that one could use to read Beloved? No! It's a novel. Novels can be read a lot of ways. If you read Toni Morrison from some sicko perspective, you're a sicko, but it isn't Delgado analysis. It's a novel, and that means there are a lot of ways to use it.

But you reactions here tell you something about how you are already looking at the process. Even if you haven't read it. And that's my point. Patricia Williams didn't write that book. Toni Morrison did. And you've probably never read Patricia Williams. The people telling you that a) "critical race theory" is just teaching the full history, and/or that b) they aren't even really teaching CRT in schools, haven't read Patricia Williams anyway. They don't know what they're saying. They just know that there's a phrase-- "critical race theory"-- which they're supposed to defend. So even though there's a body of literature that they haven't read, they have to defend it.

So once again, we come back to people reading about shit they haven't read, and talking about shit they haven't read.

So I come back to Stanislaw Lem. This is all such a sick, fucking joke. At some level, A Perfect Vacuum let Lem write about ideas that he couldn't get into novel form, but at some level, it was warped humor, but we live forever in the warped humor of Stanislaw Lem, discussing books and articles that nobody has ever fucking read.

If a tree falls in the forest, and gets pulped and turned into paper for journals and books that nobody reads, do those books and journals exist? If people talk about those books and journals without reading them, does the tree come back to life? And how far into my navel can I stick my head?

Postmodern, surreal bullshit makes for fun fiction. Lem demonstrated that, year after year. But it makes our politics suck.

Anyway, A Perfect Vacuum really does exist. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go buy it, or maybe borrow it from a library. Beloved, or Kindred or The Fifth Season... go fucking read. Also, if you want to understand critical race theory, read some of the actual source material, like Bell, Crenshaw, and Harris, and then go read some critiques. Not just me. I'm just some schlub, shouting into the void. James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose are pretty up-to-date. Critical race theory is bullshit. Conspiratorial, anti-scientific bullshit. That doesn't mean some whiny, little shit complaining about Beloved is anything other than the very snowflake conservatives are always ranting about. Just... enough of this. Go. Read. (Links below the music.)

Chon, "Book," from Grow.