Encyclopedia Troglodytica

[steepholm]

I can't think of a better writer of children's fantasy currently working in Britain than Frances Hardinge. I have fjm to thank for recommending her to me, back when Fly By Night came out (in fact, I've still got fjm's copy - oops!), but my favourite until now has probably been Gullstruck Island/The Lost Conspiracy. Her latest, A Face Like Glass, may rival that for the top spot, although it's too soon to tell. I've only just finished it, and the dust is still settling in my cerebellum.

DWJ fans will notice much that is DWJ-ish about Hardinge's work, especially her second book, Verdigris Deep, which reads eerily like one of Jones's earlier books (say, Wilkins' Tooth or The Ogre Downstairs). This latest is less obviously Jonesy, although the Epilogue may well make you think of Power of Three. But Hardinge was not a Jones reader, apparently, so perhaps that says more about my own limited reading than anything else.

Hardinge specializes in extravagantly baroque fantasy worlds, with plots to match. I'm not going to attempt a summary of this one or get too spoilery, but there are some wonderful touches, such as the Grand Steward, the ruler of Caverna (the underground city where the book is set), who daren't sleep for fear of conspiracies, and so has trained the left and right halves of his brain to take it in turns to run the city while the other rests: one ordered and logical, the other instinctive and creative, and each with its own set of court favourites. Then there are the Cartographers, obsessive mappers of the city whose compulsion has driven them to infectious, glossolaliac insanity. Hardinge does a lot too with the eponymous conceit of the book, that the inhabitants of Caverna are born without the capacity for facial expression, and must learn Faces in order to express themselves. The lower class drudges are taught only a few faces, all of them expressions of deference and cheerful humility suitable to their station, while the rich can hire one of the city's Facesmiths, who with the aid of their Putty Girls design and model the latest facial haute couture. As this suggests, there is a lot in this book that has application to our own world's follies and injustices, although it doesn't read like an allegory.

Hardinge is an excellent prose writer, something I meet rarely enough that I feel the need to mention it. As a cheese lover, for example, I was struck by this description of the effect of eating a morsel of Stackfalter Sturton, one of the delicacies concocted by Caverna's Master Craftsmen:

It burst apart, and it turned out that it had always been made of music. Not music for the ear, but notes of pure soul and haunting memory. She had no body, and yet she sensed that her nose was a cathedral where a choir was singing full-throatedly, and her mouth a nation with its own history and legends of staggering beauty.

It's not a perfect book. Hardinge's plot is a wonder, but she has found no better way of conveying some of its finer points than to have the villain explain the details of their machinations even while locked in mortal combat with our heroine - a cliche, but no more plausible for that. Again, with my worldbuilding hat on (and very pretty it is too, broad brimmed and fringed with stars), I wonder whether even the passage I quoted above quite makes sense, given that the person being reminded of a cathedral lives in a world where they don't exist.

Anyway. I didn't actually set out to write a review, so much as to note that A Face Like Glass is another to add to my collection of Plato's Cave books. I was thinking of writing an article on these at some point, starting with C. S. Lewis's The Silver Chair. There are quite a lot of them - books where the Cave is all that the protagonist has ever known (or at any rate can remember), and they discover over the course of the story what lies beyond the veil of illusion. They aren't all set in caves: Lois Lowry's The Giver is a classic Cave book. Even DWJ's The Homeward Bounders qualifies, given that the protagonist muses at one point: "For a while after that, I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall. They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that.” It's all in Plato, Jamie - what do they teach them in these worlds? Arguably, Forster's Marabar caves are a kind of nihilistic inversion, in which people go from the outer world into the cave, and find that nothing is real (or at any rate meaningful). I suspect there are many SF books with plots that turn on this idea, too.

Maybe it's just too widespread a trope for useful discussion? Should I confine myself to the paranoid fantasies, perhaps? One thing Plato never explained was who had set things up like that, or why - an inviting omission. I suppose we have to include everything from The Truman Show to The Matrix, even so.

Ah, how can we map the caves? Is this an article, a book, or a endless quest worthy of a Cartographer?

Comments

THB-Plato conversation?!?!?

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I kind of see THB as an anti-(neo?)Platonic book? In addition to that passage you quote, we have Helen:

"'You have sat down in a place of glass,' she said. 'Glass is all round you, and the place is dark. Now, light a light inside your place of glass. All round you, at once, there are reflections, going back infinitely, until your glass place is multiplied many times over. That is like the worlds, in a way. Except that it is not, because now you have to imagine other people in the reflections of your glass place, and lights lit on the outside of your place of glass too, so that you can see these lights reflected, outside and inside also, over and over again, along with your own place. By now there are myriads, all shining and overlapping, and you do not know which is real. This is the way of the worlds. All are real, lights and reflections alike. We pass from one to another, like light.'

"Helen stopped and thought a bit. 'Except,' she said, 'that no one these days can pass through the glass. I was given two explanations of that. One is that, in the midst of all the lights, you sit in your place of glass, and this you know to be real. So it is the Real Place. But the other explanation was that, in the midst of the multiplicity of worlds, there is a true Real Place, known to be real by Uquar. They told me Uquar lived in the Real Place.'"

And Him:

"'Except,' he said, 'when I discovered all this, each world was its own Real Place. They still seem that way to those who are not Homeward Bound. But they aren't, not now, and that is my fault. . . . Well, it came to me that if reality were removed from the worlds, it could be concentrated in one place.'"

I guess this gets to your "One thing Plato never explained was who had set things up like that, or why - an inviting omission," point. But Plato, and certainly the Neo-Platonists, seem to have believed that Platonic ideals were a good thing, and that it is good to come outside of the cave and see reality. THB seems to be arguing that no, things should not be like that, reality should be everywhere, and if some things are more real than others, if there is a world outside the cave, this is a bad thing, someone set it up like that so as to control other people. As I say in my completely un-essay like notes (whence I'm getting my quotations, by the way), I think ultimately THB tends to prefer the "lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call life" side to the "loathsome mask has fallen" side, although it's slightly more complicated than that, which is why I would find it very difficult to actually write the essay based on the notes. . . .

Anyway, thanks for bringing up the topic, always happy to get the chance to talk about this :) :) :) Given that I very much came to (Neo?)-Platonism through Gnosticism, my two favorite things to add to your list are Valis and Xenogears, predictably if you know my intellectual interests at all ;-)

Re: THB-Plato conversation?!?!?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to find a fellow Cartographer. As your links demonstrate, we've both been thinking about this phenomenon for a while!

The paranoid fantasy is only one instantiation: the cave may or may not be a prison, may or may not be a place of illusion. A non-paranoid example (though it's not as central to the book) might be that bit in Pratchett's Wee Free Men, where Tiffany wants to go to Hogwarts a school for magic - i.e., she wants to leave the cave of limited perception that is her ordinary life - and she is taken to the top of a hill (by Granny Weatherwax, I think?) and shown a view of her own world, and told that that is the school for magic. It may be a bit of a stretch to see this as an anti-Platonic sentiment, but that's where it sits in my head.

Thanks for your additions to my list!

So excited to be discussing this I had to break it up into two comments!

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Yes - in fact, as my link demonstrates, you were a major influence on me in the first place ;-)

I like what you say about Wee Free Men (Pratchett being one of the many things I ought to read but have not) :) I tend to think, in general - well, like I said, I come to this from a largely Gnostic direction. I did read Plato at the age of 17 in my odd high school political science course where about half of the course was spent on Plato and Aristotle, but my reactions were very anti-Platonic at the time. But that same year I read Valis and played Xenogears and somehow, despite the blatant Platonism of the whole thing, fell madly in love with Gnosticism. Gnosticism, of course, inevitably fits into the paranoid fantasy category. But one thing that interests me about contemporay SpecFic based on Gnosticism is that it generally does not tend to ultimately come down supporting the full Gnostic worldview, even if it accepts the basic premise that someone set up the cave as a prison that keeps us from a more acceptable true reality - works like Xenogears and Angel Sanctuary (an extremely bizarre manga that may seem largely incoherent but, I think, is more consistent with its Gnostic themes than one might think at first) tend to suggest that just because other realities have metaphysical priority does not in fact give them moral priority, and that the best thing to do is not to abandon the cave but instead to simply ignore the external reality and make the cave even better than the external reality would be - in other words, ideals that Him on His Rock would be fairly happy with. Valis is far more traditionally Gnostic, thematically, but even there it winds up very ambiguous - the paranoid in paranoid fantasy is emphasized quite strongly.

Second comment

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I think, however, when you consider it, that this makes sense, because frankly the real Platonic/Gnostic message is one that is difficult to make fully appealing. The Silver Chair is fine, of course, but if the logical extension of that principle is The Last Battle, it becomes rather more alarming - I am aware of many young Narnia-lovers (including myself) who had rather serious issues with The Last Battle. As a child, I think, IIRC, that I simply didn't understand at all what it was doing there - it didn't seem to have anything in common with all the stuff I liked about Narnia. It was just depressing and bad, and then the end did not really console me in any way. As an adult, when I reread the books for the first time after having actually studied Plato, I remember being actively offended by the end of The Last Battle - I was just reacting really viscerally against the message, which I found nearly impossible to bear. I find Adonais less intrinsically unpleasant, for some reason - maybe because I don't associate it with Christianity at all? - but it's still really, really creepy - "From the world’s bitter wind / Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. / What Adonais is, why fear we to become?. . . / Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity, / Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!. . . / That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, / That Beauty in which all things work and move, / That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse / Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love / Which through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea, / Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of / The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, / Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality." I mean, look, I wouldn't be attracted to this paranoid fantasy at all if the sentiment were totally alien to me, but it's very starkly stated and it makes quite clear exactly what accepting "that sustaining love" as something thoroughly opposed to "cold mortality" really entails. And that's not something that most of us are willing to accept most of the time - even if Keats himself had moments of being "half in love with easeful death," after reading all his letters in graduate school I can't say that it's a concept I expect would particularly have pleaed him, for instance. So, yeah - given that this is the kind of thing, especially when framed in a certain time of metaphor, that the full Gnosticism/Platonism tends to lead to, I think it is quite reasonable that lots of writers decide to go somewhere else with their use, even their sympathetic use, of the metaphor ;-)

May I add that I'm really happy that you used A Passage to India in this because, well, the only personal religious/spiritual ritual I've ever managed to actually develop for myself happens to be based on A Passage to India, although not actually on the cave passage? So it pleases me to find you discussing it in this context.

Re: Second comment

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Death isn't the only portal between us and the Platonic realm (there are also those ecstatic visions I keep telling my GP about) but sadly it appears to be the primary one. Of course, being greedy, we want the best of both worlds, and a lot of literature seems to be aimed at finding ways to bring the Platonic right into the comfort of one's cave. As we're quoting poetry, I like Yeats's take in "The Tower", where he begins depressedly:

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

But then he claims the Platonic realm as Made in Caverna:

I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.

I think Pullman does something rather similar with his "spiritual materialism", which he offers as a kind of alternative/rebuff to The Last Battle and Christianity in general.

But we should also give Christianity its due here. I admire its brilliant way of dealing with its own Gnostic inheritance through the doctrines of the incarnation and trinity. Was Jesus God or Man, spirit or flesh? Who was the genius who came up with the answer, "Both!"? Not half and half, not alternate weeks, no messing around the edges, but wholly and completely God, and wholly and completely human - and if that doesn't make sense in the ordinary way, so much the better! It's religion designed by committee (in this case the Council of Nicea), but in this case it actually does the job.

Way to cut a Gordian knot.

Re: Second comment

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously, being alive, I have only experienced the Platonic realm/Shelley's "intellectual beauty" in ecstatic visions myself! Of course, the advantage death has over ecstatic visions is that ecstatic visions rather tend to fade. . . for which, I suppose, if you're really encouraging me in the way of quoting poetry, I should go into Sylvia Plath ("Black Rook in Rainy Weather) - "The wait's begun again, / The long wait for the angel, / For that rare, random descent." Yes, that's very much how my interaction with the Pleroma is. . . "long" and "rare" and "random" are all rather fundamental to the experience. ;-)

I have not read "The Tower!" Yeats's sentiment there seems like an excellent one, assuming I am reading it correctly, and precisely the one I tend to incline to myself when I am trying to combat the appeal I find in Gnosticism.

You know, I really found The Golden Compass quite dull when I read it as a teenager. I liked The Subtle Knife better, but not enough to have ever gotten around to reading The Amber Spyglass. It's rather a shame - it's thanks to His Dark Materials that I discovered "On the Marionette Theatre", which I like enough that I really ought to finish His Dark Materials.

I suppose perhaps you come to Christianity from a different perspective than I do because I am not aware of having had any Christian ancestors, whereas clearly you have had a whole lot. I think this makes my relationship with Christianity rather fraught and awkward. OTOH, although obviously without any kind of lengthy cultural history to it, my mother is a Buddhist, or at least a member of some kind of bizarre Japanese Buddhist semi-cult, which probably at least partially explains why when I tend to think about actual spiritual responses to my Gnostic side Buddhism seems less fraught for me. But I guess also part of it is Jenna Moran's Hitherby Dragons retelling of the Buddha's story - I've never read a version of the Jesus story that I've found nearly so compelling or attractive ;-)

Re: Second comment

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I was actually wondering about Buddhism in relationship to this question, but decided I didn't know enough about it to comment.

Having Christian ancestors doesn't disbar one from having a fraught and awkward relationship with Christianity! But in this instance I wasn't interested so much in the Jesus story per se, as in what the early Church made of it. As you know, there were many competing theories about the nature of Christ, some of which were Gnostic or Neo-Platonist in spirit (and they had gospels to match, such as that of St Thomas, which my father was very fond of). The Nicene council was largely an attempt to get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet (as it were), and its paradoxical conclusions intrigue me. By establishing some mysteries to contemplate, it fed the tradition of Christian mysticism for centuries to come. The sceptically inclined, however, might be tempted to call it a cosmic fudge.

If you didn't like the The Golden Compass, I really wouldn't trouble yourself with The Amber Spyglass, unless of course you want to find out what happens. It's sort of like Jessica's First Prayer for atheists, stretched over 500 pages. I agree that the von Kleist is excellent, however - and I highly recommend "The Tower".

Re: Second comment

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I am not sure how much I know about Buddhism either! I'm sure my interest in Buddhism is distorted heavily by my own personal obsessions, to an even greater extent than my interest in Gnosticism. That having been said, I suppose there is a valid reason that my obsessions have clung to Buddhism as a potential area of interest ;-)

Yes, I apologize! I think I realized that I probably misread you while I was on the bus from Thailand to Singapore with no internet access (as one does :(). I am not sure that I understand the conclusions of the Nicene council myself ;-) But I don't know why not, given that, as you say, they may potentially be intriguing.

Thank you for the poetry recommendation. I did read it now. Yeats is certainly one of the poets I wish I had the opportunity to study in more detail. . . .

[thinkum]

The concept of the Cartographers has succeeded in making me want to track down Hardinge's books ASAP. :-)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You won't be disappointed!

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

I also want to track them down. Any recommendations on where to start?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

My personal favourites are A Face Like Glass and Gullstruck Island.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Gullstruck Island/Lost Conspiracy was my favorite so far too -- not just my favorite Hardinge but one of my favorites of all time. You are suggesting this one might be BETTER? *scurries off to order it*

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, as I say it may be a bit soon to tell, because of the way my brain works, but it's certainly up there.

I think in some ways it's picking up a thread from GI/LC. You remember how the Lace in that book smiled in a way that others found disconcerting, because there was an apparent disconnect between their expression and their real feelings? This book takes that theme and makes a nine-part fugue of it.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Ooooooo.

[sovay]

the Cave is all that the protagonist has ever known (or at any rate can remember), and they discover over the course of the story what lies beyond the veil of illusion.

I think of this as a standard trope of some kinds of YA dystopia. (You also get it as the punch line in Men in Black.) Is it more common in science fiction than fantasy? Most of the examples that came immediately to mind for me were things like, whoops, guess we're living on a generation starship after all.

Is this an article, a book, or a endless quest worthy of a Cartographer?

Dunno, but I'll read it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

See, I don't know much SF, but it does seem an idea that lends itself to SFnal execution. I've a feeling Philip K. Dick did it about five times, and I'm sure he wasn't alone.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Dunno, but I'll read it.

Seconded!

Nine

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

What a great topic.

There's that Ray Bradbury story about a planet so exposed to radiation that people can only leave their caves for seconds at a time, and they grow up incredibly fast, at mutant speeds. Famous one, but I am blanking on the name. Also that other Bradbury story where people get to Jupiter, put on Jupiterian bodies and to the dismay of their anthropoform handlers disappeared into the hideous methane mists. But they, in their Jovian bodies, found it beautiful.

Solaris would count too, I think. Lots of Lem would count.

And I think some of Pullman fits, though his great adult novel Galatea, with its motto Everything is what it seems, may be one of the reverse stories. James Tiptree, Jr. had one of the first virtual reality, cyberspace novels. And also Jeff Noon.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your suggestions - I knew my learned friends list would come up with other examples! And thank you for reminding me that I need to read that Pullman book: it's been languishing near the foot of my tbr list for a while.