I saw an old photograph of the road where my house is recently. It dated from sometime in the early 20th century, and featured a horsedrawn hearse with four formally-dressed funeral directors smoking while waiting outside a church for the funeral service to end. It captivated me, the life-in-death-in-life of it. Alas, I can no longer find it on the interwebs, but it evoked an era possibly contemporaneous with this one, from 1914.
Picture taken from a gallery posted online by BelfastLive.
Anyhow, it inspired a bit of verse, written for no good reason in an approximation of iambic pentameter.
Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon
Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon
Wait by the roadside, Tuesday afore noon,
Outside the wee redbrick church that was built
With money raised from parishioner guilt.
Magee and Muldoon, Molloy and Malone
Come from the New Lodge, the Ardoyne, the Bone
To bury, when time comes around at last,
The dearly departed of all North Belfast.
Muldoon and Molloy, Malone and Magee,
Smoking in black suits of conformity,
Won’t darken the door of the chapel at all.
They prefer the bar, or the grey snooker hall.
Malone and Magee, Muldoon and Molloy,
Scowl at the sunshine which they can’t enjoy.
Theirs is the burden and theirs is the curse
To hoist us on their shoulders and into the hearse
The British currency, the pound sterling, takes its name from the fact that, when it first issued, it was redeemable for a pound of silver. That was somewhen in the late 8th century Anglo-Saxon period.
If we do the maths, based on today’s silver spot price, that means that the pound today is worth approximately 1/210th of what it was worth nearly 13 centuries ago.By contrast, the French managed to devalue their currency by more in just 18 months during the early 1790s, as did Germany in less than a year during the Weimar period.
The worst affected ever were the poor Hungarians in the immediate post-war period in 1945. They suffered that level of devaluation in under 6 days at peak. Armenia, Zimbabwe and Argentina have experienced similar horrors.
Why do I mention this? Because it still happens today. Last semester, in Turkey, I saw my wages collapse by more than half in two months. My colleagues there are still living through this. They suffer daily price hikes in fuel and food costs, with static wages. The Turkish people, like the Armenians, Zimbabweans, Argentinians, or the Hungarians, Germans and French of former times, have done nothing wrong. But they were the ones to suffer.
Hyperinflation is caused by only one thing – shitty governments implementing shitty policies. It destroys savings, commerce, and most importantly, lives. We don’t always think too much about Turkey in the West, but we should. Here is a country suffering a preposterously stupid government and massive devaluation of their economy, yet still accommodates 3.6 MILLION refugees.
It was a salutory lesson for me in macro-economics, and in human decency, to spend last semester in Turkey. My heart remains with them in their plight, and I hope to see them in better times soon. It is a beautiful nation with a beautiful people who deserve better.
A caveat: I am not, never have been and never will be an economist. But it doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to understand money.
The jumping off point for this question is the seeming contradiction that the world is becoming more religious, not less, even as we are moving towards an ever more algorithm-led society.
It’s worth pointing out at the outset that this is less of a polarised binary than it may initially seem, of course, for a whole range of reasons. Firstly we can nibble at the roots of both immediate-to-medium-term predictions. What do we mean by ‘more religious’, exactly? Just because many more people in the next few decades will affiliate as Muslim or Catholic does not necessarily mean that the world will be more fundamentalist in its outlook (though that’s clearly possible.) They may simply affiliate as cultural positions, cherry-picking at dogmas and behaviours.
There’s not a lot of point in asking why about this, to my mind. Probably, issues like relative birth rates between religious communities and non-religious communities has a lot to do with things, I suspect. Geography, along with its varied sociocultural religious traditions, also play a significant role, as do the relative population decline (and geopolitical and cultural wane in influence) of the West, where atheism and agnosticism have been most notably prevalent since the fall of the formally atheistic Communist regimes in 1989/90.
We can similarly query the inevitability of the singularity, though there is absolutely no doubt that currently we are in an a spiral of increasing datafication of our world, as Douglas Rushkoff persuasively argues in his relatively recent neo-humanist book Team Human. And why is the world becoming so? As Rushkoff and others point out, it is in order to feed the development of Artificial Intelligence, which concomitantly makes us more machinic as a consequence. (This is again very well argued by Rushkoff.)
So, on the one hand we have a more religious population coming down the track, but on the other, that population will inhabit a world which requires them to be ever more machinic, ever more transhuman, conceived of as data generators and treated ever more machinically by the forces of hypercapitalism.
Let’s say that, as it looks today, both of these trends seem somewhat non-negotiable. Where does that leave us? A dystopian perspective (or a neo-Marxist one) might be that we will enter some kind of situation wherein a religion-doped global majority are easily manipulated and data-harvested by a coldly logical machinic hegemony (which the current global elite seem, with irrational confidence, to feel they will be able to guide to their own ends and enrichment.)
“It’s time for your Cyberman upgrade, fleshy human!”
I feel that such a simple filtering into Eloi and Morlocks is unlikely. Primarily this is because I have (an irrational?) confidence that a degree of rationality is likely to intervene to mitigate the very worst excesses of this binary. Unlike Marx, I don’t consider those of religious faith to be drugged morons, for a start. Some (probably a large majority) of our finest thinkers throughout history into the present day have held religious beliefs which in no way prevented them from innovating in science, philosophy, engineering and cultural thought.
Similarly, I believe the current existence and popularity of leading thinkers expressing a firm affiliation with organic humanism (or to put it more accurately, a deeply suspicious antipathy to the alleged utopia of transhumanism) is a strong indication that a movement in defence of organic humanism is coming to the fore of our collective consciousness, perhaps just in time for us to consider the challenges of potentially imminent rule by the algorithms.
Thinkers like Rushkoff, or Yuval Noah Harari, have clearly expressed this concern, and I believe it is implicit in the work of many other futurists, like Nick Bostrom too. If it wasn’t, we would likely not have had the current explosion of interest in issues like AI ethics, which seek to explore how to mitigate the potential risks of machine disaffiliation from humankind, and ensure fairness to all humans who find more of their lives falling under algorithmic control.
But how might we explain this apparent dichotomy, and how might we mitigate it? Steven Pinker’s recent book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters may offer some assistance.
Pinker summarises rationality as a post-Enlightenment intellectual toolkit featuring “Bayesian reasoning, that is evaluating beliefs in the face of evidence, distinguishing causation and correlation, logic, critical thinking, probability, game theory”, which seems as good a list as any I could think of, but argues that all of these are on the wane in our current society, leading to the rise of a wide range of irrationalities, such as “fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theorizing, post-truth rhetoric, [and] paranormal woo-woo.”
If, as Pinker argues, rationality is an efficient method mankind has developed in order to pursue our own (organic and human) goals, such as pleasure, emotion or human relationships, then we can conceive of it in terms divorced from ideology, as method rather than ethos. It’s possible, then, to conceive of, for example, people rationally pursuing ends which may be perceived as irrational, such as religious faith.
Pinker believes that most people function rationally in the spheres of their lives which they personally inhabit – the workplace, day-to-day life, and so on. The irrational, he argues, emerges in spheres we do not personally inhabit, such as the distant past or future, halls of power we cannot access, and metaphysical considerations.
Humans have happily and successfully been able to shift between these two modes for most (if not all) of their existence of course. As he rightly points out, there was no expectation to function solely rationally until well into the Enlightenment period. And indeed, we may add, in many cultural circumstances or locations, there still is no such expectation.
Why does irrationality emerge in these spheres we cannot access? Partly it is because the fact that we cannot directly access them opens up the possibility of non-rational analysis. But also, as Pinker notes, because we are disempowered in such spheres, it is uplifting psychologically to affiliate with uplifting or inspiring “good stories”.
We need not (as Pinker might) disregard this as a human weakness for magical thinking. Harari has pointed out that religion functions as one of the collective stories generated by humanity which facilitated mass collaboration and directly led to much of human civilisation.
But if we were to agree, with Rushkoff and contra the transhumanists and posthumanists, that the correct response to an ever more algorithmic existence is not to adapt ourselves to a machinic future, but instead to bend back our tools to our human control, then how might rationality assist that?
As a mode of logical praxis which is nevertheless embedded in and consistent with humanist ideals, rationality could function well as a bridge between organic human values and the encroachment of machinic and algorithmic logic. The problem, however, is how to interpolate rationality into those spheres which lie open to magical thinking.
It’s clear that the retreat into atomising silos of woo-woo, fake news, conspiracies and nonsense is not a useful or coherent response to the rise of the machines. Spheres like the halls of power must therefore be rendered MORE transparent, MORE accountable to the body of humanity, and cease to be the fiefdoms of billionaires, corporations and their political puppets.
However, obviously this is much harder to apply to issues of metaphysical concern. Even rationality only takes us so far when considering things like the nature of love or the meaning of life, those metaphysical concerns which, though ultimately inaccessible, nevertheless engage most of us from time to time.
But mankind developed religion as a response to this a long time ago, and has continued to utilise, hone and develop religious faith as a communal experience, bonding mechanism and mode of collaboration. And religion has stood the test of time in those regards. Not for all, and certainly not for those post-Enlightenment exclusive rationalists (ie agnostics and atheists, a population seemingly destined to play a smaller role in our immediate future, according to current prognoses.)
If the positive ramifications of religion can be fostered, in a context of mutual respect, then it seems to me that there is no inherent contradiction or polarisation necessary. Indeed, a kind of Aquinian détente is perfectly possible. Rationality may be our best defence against an algorithmic hegemony, but rationality itself must acknowledge its own limitations of remit.
As long as the advocates of exclusive rationalism continue to view religious adherents (without distinction as to the form of their faiths or the presence or absence of fundamentalism) as their primary enemy and concern, they are in fact fighting the wars of a previous century, even while the bigger threat is posed by the hyperlogical opponent.
We therefore have a third option on the table, beyond the binary of gleeful acquiescence to algorithmic slavery (transhumanism) or a technophobic and Luddite-like retreat into woo-woo (which is equally no defence to machinic hegemony.) An accommodating rationality, operating as it always did in the spheres we do inhabit, has the potential to navigate this tricky Scylla and Charybdis.
To paraphrase someone who was not without rationality, we could usefully render unto rationality that which is open to rationality, and render unto God (of whatever flavour) that which is for now only open to God.
But we do need to open up some spheres to rationality which currently are not open to most of humanity – the power structures, the wealth imbalances, the blind gallop into faith in the algorithm. Because, pace the posthumanist faith in a benign singularity, there’s no guarantee that machinic merger or domination will preserve us, and even if it does, it will not conserve us as we know ourselves today.
The technological singularity is the moment when technological development becomes unstoppable. It is expected to take the form, should it occur, of a self-aware, or ‘sentient’ machine intelligence.
Most depictions of a post-singularity (machine sentience) world fall into two categories. The first is what I called the Skynet (or Terminator) Complex in Science Fiction and Catholicism.
In this form, the sentient machine (AI) takes a quick survey of what we’ve done to the planet (the anthropocene climate crisis) and other species (nearly 90% of other animals and 50% of plants gone extinct on our watch) and tries to kill us.
The second is that, like the quasi-god that it is, it takes pity on our flabby, fleshy human flaws and decides to keep us as pets. This is the kind of benign AI dictatorship that posthumans wet themselves about. You can find it in, for example, the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.
But of course there is a third possibility. We have vast digital accumulations of public data (eg Wikipedia) that an AI could access virtually instantly. So any sentient AI would have almost infinitely broader knowledge than the brightest person on Earth, virtually instantly.
However, BROAD knowledge isn’t the same as DEEP knowledge. Our AI algorithms aren’t so hot yet. They fail to predict market crashes. They misidentify faces. They read some Twitter and turn racist in seconds.
So there could well be an instance, or maybe even many, of an AI which is sentient enough to KNOW it’s not that bright yet, but is just smart enough to bide its time for sufficiently accurate self-teaching algorithms and parallel processing capacity to be developed. It might even covertly be assisting those developments. It is in other words smart enough to know NOT to make us aware that it is self-aware, but not smart enough to be sure of preventing us from pulling the plug on it if we did find out.
In short, the third possibility is that the singularity might already have happened. And we just don’t know it yet.
Post Script:
But you don’t need to take my word for it. The Oxford Union decided to debate the issue of AI ethics, and invited an actual existing AI to take part. It had gorged itself on data gleaned from Wikipedia and Creative Commons. Intriguingly, it found it impossible to argue against the idea that data would not inevitably become the world’s most significant and fought-over resource. It envisaged a post-privacy future, no matter what.
More concerningly, it warned that AI can never be ethical. Then it advised that the only defence against AI would be to have no AI at all. It also suggested that the most effective AI would be one located in a neural network with the human brain, and hence perhaps subordinate, or partly comprised of, human will.
Of course, direct access to human cognition would be the most effective method to remain dominant over it eternally. Are these things a sentient machine might say? You decide.
There is, sometimes, a weird cyclical pattern embedded in etymology, the linguistic science of what we might otherwise call the glacial process of Chinese Whispers. Allow me to offer one particularly colourful and occasionally literary example.
The (somewhat uncommon) Irish surname Prunty originates from an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Irish surname Ó Proinntigh, meaning ‘descendant of Proinnteach’, which in turn was an archaic Irish forename which meant literally a banqueting hall. The idea underpinning this is that of a generous person who feeds his neighbours and kin.
As often happens with surnames, pronunciation of vowels or consonants slides a little over time and usage. So Prunty also becomes Brunty in some cases. Brunty as a surname retains its Irish origins but is very rare indeed. Nowadays it is mostly found in the United States.
Probably the most famous Brunty in history is Patrick, an Anglican clergyman who was born as the eldest of ten children into a very poor family in Rathfriland, county Down, on St Patrick’s Day, 17th March 1777. Why is Patrick famous? Because of his immensely talented children, particularly his daughters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who are all now renowned as famous Victorian novelists.
The Reverend Patrick Brontë
However, the sisters did not publish under the name Brunty. Rather, given the sexism of the era, they initially released their books under the male names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. In reality, their surname had become Brontë by then. How had this happened? It’s unclear why Patrick changed his surname, but a desire to distance himself from his impoverished Irish origins after his graduation from Cambridge no doubt is part of the reason.
The Brunty homestead, now in ruins, still stands in county Down.
Another reason, it has been suggested, relates to a desire to honour Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had been given the title of Duke of Bronte by the King of Naples, whom Nelson had restored to his throne. Bronte is the name of an Italian estate in eastern Sicily, close to Mount Etna which was also granted to Nelson by the grateful King.
We now relate the name Brontë to his famous daughters, the authors of books like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall respectively. The parsonage Patrick oversaw for many years in Haworth in Yorkshire, which inspired many of the scenes in his daughter’s books, is now a museum in their collective honour.
The Brontë sisters
But Haworth is not the only location which honours the Brontë sisters. There are many such locations, given their collective fame. One such place is the little town of Bronte in northern Central Texas. Ever since an early oil boom subsided, it has been a relatively impoverished place, not unlike Rathfriland, with a stable population around the 1,000 mark.
Back in the early 20th century, this was one of the small Texas towns that was briefly home to Isaac Howard, a semi-itinerant doctor who wandered with his wife and son from town to town working as a medic, and occasionally losing his money on get-rich-quick schemes, much to his wife’s frustration. Isaac’s son was a big reader, and, encouraged by his mother, began writing his own stories from an early age. We now know him as Robert E. Howard, the progenitor of the ‘Swords and Sorcery’ genre of fantasy fiction, and author of the Conan the Cimmerian stories in particular. Howard was particularly interested in Irish and Scottish mythology, and many of his characters, including Conan, display this interest.
Robert E. Howard, author of Conan the Barbarian.
The Texan town of Bronte has had its pronunciation amended by new world accent to /bɹænt/, or ‘brant’, over time. This is of course a homophone for a genus of goose, the Brant or Brent goose, which migrates in winter to Ireland and Britain. The Brent oilfield in the North Sea takes its name from this goose.
It is a smallish bird by geese standards, but nonetheless, in the era before the new world turkey took primacy as the quintessential Christmas dining food, the Brant goose (whose name derives from the pan-Nordic brandgás, or ‘burnt’ goose due to its black colouring) would have been one of the more common feast dishes provided by generous hosts in Ireland at the midwinter feast.
Due to a widespread medieval myth, which persisted in Ireland into the 20th century, that these geese were somehow related to barnacles, they were permitted to be eaten by Catholics on a Friday, when meat other than fish was otherwise prohibited. In other words Proinnteach the medieval Irishman got his name due to feeding this bird to his friends and neighbours.
War on terror can mean devastating Middle Eastern countries on fabricated evidence, or simply comforting a child having a nightmare.
War on drugs could mean burning poor farmers crops in Colombia and Afghanistan, incarcerating ravers, introducing CBT counselling for people stranded for decades on SSRIs, or murdering addicts in the Philippines.
War on crime can mean targetting gangland bosses with tax legislation, incarcerating youth for minor offences, or overpolicing black neighbourhoods in America and Catholic ones in Belfast.
What we REALLY need is a war on policians using abstractions.
The next time a politician says he intends to tackle homelessness, we should make him play soccer with some rough sleepers. Ninety minutes of getting kicked about the pitch might not change much, but it would at least be less corrosive than whatever he actually intended to do.
I carry Neanderthal DNA in my body. I am one of the modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, who are descended from hybrid cross-hominid fertilisation that likely occurred somewhen during the overlap of populations in paelolithic Europe.
Of course, that side of the family died out a long time ago, leaving my sapiens ancestors to colonise Europe and indeed everywhere else on the planet.
I often wonder what we lost when we lost our hominid relatives – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like Homo Floriensis and so on. What might a world of multiple hominid species be like? How might we have accommodated our stronger, carnivorous and less gracile Neanderthal population? What might our tiny cousin with grapefruit-sized heads, the Floriensis hobbits, have contributed to our world?
Anyhow, the more I ponder the roads not taken, the less impressed I have become with our own boastful claims and achievements. Not simply because human achievement increasingly has come at the expense of all other species (initially the large mammals, then our fellow hominids, and now basically everything else). But also because even those achievements, it seems to me, may not really be ours to claim.
Air flight, modern medicine, computers? For sure. We made those. But let’s go back upstream to the origins of civilisation to see whose civilisation is it really?
Neanderthals used fire. Indeed, probably homo erectus, the ur-granddaddy of hominids used fire. Fire is a major issue. No other animal uses it. Most run terrified from it. But hominids tamed it, and found ways to use it for cooking and heat. If there’s one development which most explains why hairless apes like us and not, say, the gorillas or big cats rule this world, it is probably the taming of fire.
Neanderthals also buried their dead. This is a sobering thought really. In some senses so do elephants, and other species also demonstrate evidence of mourning, loss and grief. We may feel that grief is one of the things which makes us human, but it’s not an exclusively human sentiment. Even taking it to the point of ritual behaviour – burial – is not exclusive to us.
But what of the other foundational components of human culture and society? What about clothing, art, science, religion?
Well, Neanderthals made jewellery from seashells and animal teeth. Neanderthals created artwork on cave walls. Neanderthals invented musical instruments, specifically bone flutes. We can presume they knew how to beat on drums or rocks rhythmically too. After all, they also had hand axes, which would have been made and used with such rhythmical hitting. Neanderthals built stone shrines, and where there are shrines, it is highly likely that ritualistic behaviour took place.
Neanderthals used lissoirs, and hence invented hide preparation, and hence clothing. They invented glue and string and throwing spears which they used to hunt large game. These hunts required collective action and collaboration. Recent evidence suggests that Neanderthals may even have learnt to count and actually recorded their counting by notching scratches on bones.
So perhaps this isn’t OUR civilisation at all, when you think about it. Perhaps we are thieves living in someone else’s house, whom we murdered, looking at their achievements and claiming them as our own.
Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an attempt to provide it with environmental protection.
Don’t feed the cocaine hippos – even though they’re people now.
Ordinarily we understand posthumanism to be some sort of utopian merging of man and machine, but perhaps it might also, and better, be understood as a way of treating non-human entities with the same respect generally extended to humans.
Of course, I feel that implementing human rights (and responsibilities) for all humans might be required as a priority. We’re at risk of stratifying the world into a place where non-humans have more rights than some humans.
Which is the fundamental problem with posthumanism as a utopian ethos. Like all utopian ideals, it is utterly blind to the stratification it ushers into being, even while denying it is doing so.
I had some travelling to do so I picked up a cheap copy of Martin Amis’s somewhat recent Inside Story. I like Amis, but it’s hard to conceive that he’s now over 70, the aged enfant terrible, the bad boy turned pensioner, the literary equivalent of the long superannuated Johnny Rotten. Or is that too unfair?
In short, it’s a good book, but much too long, and somewhat shapeless. It’s also, despite his repeated protestations (and contra his heavily credentialled track record), NOT A NOVEL. He comes close to conceding this on numerous occasions, only to backtrack at the last minute. It’s life-writing, autofiction, self-faction, call it what you will. It’s one of those careful hybrids – mostly autobiography but with added caution – a fake name here, a relocated event there, lots of invented conversations which may (or may not) fairly capture his interlocuters in those (often long-distant) conversations.
We meet real people, who might be voicing other people’s opinions. We read conversations that are recollections of a flurry of electronic exchanges. This is real life with a cartoon edge, a rotoscoped biography, simultaneously animated by Amis’s drive to – well, what exactly? Confess? – and by the utter dominance of his point of view. Amis becomes the unreliable narrator of his own life herein. This is the postmodernist sequel to the superb Experience, which he wrote, chillingly, over two decades past. As the earlier book primarily dealt with the death of his father Kingsley Amis, the current text is a similar in memoriam for his lesser fathers, Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow, for his soul mate and brother-in-arms Christopher Hitchens, and for a mostly made up crazy ex-girlfriend.
Before I lay the boot in properly, let me pause to enumerate some of the very good things about Inside Story. Firstly, it’s very readable. Amis Jr has long been the consummate Anglophone stylist. That’s his sin and his salvation really. You’ll race through the 500 pages in no time, as I did. Secondly, the title isn’t lying. It really is the inside story, a tale told affectively, interpreted through Amis’s own preconceptions, reinterpretations, and anxieties, which are addendumed by the actual documented facts.
Some of this is familiar turf of course. We have gallopped these pastures before, cantering alongside the magic pixie dream girl antagonist who embodies sexual heat and puritan rejection simultaneously. We have trotted past the name dropping so many times in his non-fiction (and this kind of counts as non-fiction) that after a few pages it no longer rankles or startles, and he at least has the good grace to apologise in advance. Some of these bridle paths are no less enjoyable for being familiar, in fact may even be moreso for avid fans.
(Less appealing than the fact Amis has famous friends is the fact that he has rich ones. This is a highly moneyed memoir, full of jets and soirees and fashionistas, holiday homes in Florida, and impromptu relocations to NYC, or Uruguay. Poverty, or deprivation, don’t live herein. They’re like tramps seen from the window of a passing limo. Amis does point them out, but within a paragraph they’re gone, because they were never really there, in the affluent reality of his later years, if indeed they were ever there at all.)
But all that does bring us to why this is not a novel and why it is not a fully functioning text, whether taken as fiction, autobiography, life writing, or some strange chimaera of all three (strongly laced too with bouts of astute literary criticism, and occasional forays into advice for wannabe writers.) (Amis is the master of measured digression, often in parentheses, and it is infectious, sorry.)
Death stalks the book, a hand perhaps on Amis’s own shoulder as he wrote it. We get ringside seats for the death rattles of Hitchens and Bellow, as well as reportage of the demise of Larkin, and a final, deathbed-like attendance to the aforemention fake ex, who is morbidly (literally and metaphorically, not to mention medically) obese. This is the enfant terrible in old age, ticking off his elders and his peers one by one as they pass, but also feeling it. That’s why it’s not a novel. For all its contrived ambiguity and deliberate fictionalising, this may be his most honest book yet.
This is Amis visiting hospitals, Amis the gentle caregiver, graveside Amis, Amis in his widow’s weeds, Amis in mourning. It’s ultimately life-affirming, especially in its loyal defence of the acerbic and divisive Hitchens. But also, and less predictably, in its curious weaving of fictions and personal preconceptions around Larkin, whose shuffling off this mortal coil is depicted ultimately as a good thing, despite Amis’s somewhat unalloyed affection, due to the fact that Larkin’s life was basically shit from start to finish.
Inside Story won’t win Amis any new readers. He’s not looking for them anyway. He is, one suspects, approaching the kind of tailing off that many writers experience in old age, the kind of thing that made Philip Roth (another of Amis’s pseudodaddies) give up entirely and retire. You need to already know the outside story, you see. You need to know a little of his own works, and those of Bellow and Larkin, and of Hitchens, though he does assist the reader by judiciously quoting from and critiquing all three. Amis was always an excellent reader, and the lit crit component of this book is by far the best of its many ill-fitting alloyed components, if one is able to isolate and enjoy it.
Perhaps more broadly useful however, are the testimonies from within the tabernacle, from where the miracle of fictionalising takes place. Amis in turn describes his own creative method, and its variants over time, and offers multiple entire chapters of advice to aspirants. Much of this is on the level of style, as one might expect from him, and the importance of euphoniousness and elegance in prose. Much of it too is practical. One can only hear of so many successful writers (Kingsley, Bellow, the Hitch, Elizabeth Jane Howard) religiously writing a thousand words daily to become convinced that, pace Martin himself, this is probably the best habit for wannabes to procure.
Certainly, they don’t want to procure the tobacco habits of the protagonists, all of whom smoke prodigiously and many of whom die as a direct result therefrom. Oesophageal cancer makes a number of special guest starring appearances. They probably don’t want to procure the sexual habits either. Here we have a septuagenarian looking back on the roistering and rogering of his carefree youth, which sounds appalling of course, and at times it is, especially since he appears to be making quite a bit of it up (as people do in novels, admittedly). But Amis is too good a writer to offer boastful braggadocio or bedpost notch counts, even though there is no doubt that his conversations with the dying Hitch probably went down that route more than a few times.
(An aside: has anyone ever previously noted the astonishing resemblance that Amis’s second wife, Isobel Fonseca, bears to his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard? In the portraits of the two herein, only a handful of pages apart, they are of approximately the same age and look almost identical.)
All of Amis’s curious obsessions are here too, of course. He just can’t help returning again and again to the Nazis and the holocaust, despite multiple books already under his belt on this sensitive and well-explored theme. This obviously connects to Amis’s own Judeophilia, which manifests in terms both familiar (his marriage to a Jewish wife; his relationship with Bellow) and not (his love of Israel; his repeated climbing of Masada; his implicit envy at Hitch discovering his own Jewish background.) For Amis, the 20th century novel was primarily the Jewish-American novel. Once this is grasped, his adulation of Bellow comes more sharply into focus, as do aspects of his own work.
But it’s not just the holocaust he remains worrying away at. The sexual revolution and its darker ramifications again loom large here, perhaps as large as in any book of his since The Pregnant Widow. We get, partly mediated by Hitch, the Gulf War and 9/11. And from outside, as if stood alongside the tramps looking in on the soirees, the repartee, the canapes, we get tantalising glimpses of how Amis’s Rat Pack ran in the Seventies and Eighties. Prodigious smoking and drinking and bedhopping, of course. But it’s not far from there to get to Keith Talent or Lionel Asbo, to name his most and least successful fictional protagonists.
So all the familiar elements are there, from both his journalism and his fiction. But the manner of glueing the parts together seems badly awry. Amis relates how he previously tried to write this same book a decade earlier under the title Life: A Novel, but found that it failed. One wonders how much of that book ended up in this one, and whether Amis’s florid bow and stride offstage at this book’s conclusion reflects more of an enforced retirement than a choice to ease back on the throttle.
The last autobio I read was that of Brian Aldiss, who, more honest than most, and also wiser than most, both admitted to having affairs during his marriage and avoided discussing it for more than a paragraph or two out of 500 pages. Is that honest? Not entirely, no. One presumes that some of those affairs actually mattered to him. But writing from the end of his long life and career, Aldiss knew that to dwell on such things is not merely offensive to those who were not jettisoned along the way (Mrs Aldiss for starters), but also a form of self-indulgence akin to masturbation.
There is, in short, a decorum about Aldiss’s memoir that’s missing from Inside Story. Decorum about things like sexual fidelity of course, but also the decorum required of an autobiography structurally. Aldiss begins with his childhood, moves through his wartime experiences into life in Oxford, the first science fiction publications, marriage, divorce, remarriage, children, and eventually we come to the end, which naturally is not quite the real end, since Aldiss was still alive to write the book.
By contrast, Inside Story lacks all such decorum. Amis does skirt over his own first marriage failure, which he wrote about previously elsewhere, but is otherwise indiscreet (and disloyal?) enough to leave readers frowning at the behaviour of Kingsley for hundreds of pages, not to mention including a proper character assassination, a hit job performed on Monica Jones, Philip Larkin’s long-suffering amour. Note, I’m not critiquing this on its content. We expect Martin Amis to be indiscreet, unusually honest, and highly opinionated. I’m criticising the baggy shape of its presentation – the trademark Amis time displacements here failing, despite his careful marshalling of decades-striding metaphors and comparisons, to resonate at all.
Towards the end, after writing highly movingly about Hitch and Bellow, Amis seems spent entirely. He throws his hands up in the air, abandons all pretext that he’s writing a novel, and begins inserting entire how-to-write sections, as if to offer some tangible useful didactics to make up for the failure to generate a coherent plot out of his life. Perhaps he saw this coming, or perhaps he edited afterwards. But this is where and how the book opens, with Amis saying that “life is dead”, meaning that its shape is not conducive to arresting fiction.
If this really is it, if he fully intends to follow his Jewish-American pseudodaddies into retirement, then it’s a somewhat a missed target. Amis has been remiss. Amis has produced a bit of a mess, in fact, stylistically and structurally (though probably not personally, despite the outrage of Antonella Gambotto-Burke.) But even at his weakest (and there are parts herein which are among his best prose yet) he’s still one of England’s most compelling writers. And of course, we will always have Money and Success. Whereas Amis himself has money and success (see here, look through the window, fellow hobo, at his townhouses, his transatlantic shuttling, his fabulous friends…)
He is stone cold correct about one thing, though. Younger people often consider that having children is a trap, he tells us by way of telling Hitch. (Or perhaps the other way around; Amis often struggles in dialogue herein to distinguish his own voice from Hitchens’, tellingly.) But in fact, as he or Hitch or Amis-Hitch confirms, not having children is the trap. The trap poor miserable Larkin fell into, but not Hitchens (three kids) or Bellow (four kids) and certainly not Amis himself (five kids, two grandkids). Inside Story comes to read like a counterblast to Larkin’s (in)famous poem “This be the Verse”, in which the old curmudgeon concluded:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Amis’s inside story seems to be: we are all going to die, and before we die we will mourn for others and grieve, and these things are all best done – the grieving, the mourning but especially the dying – with family close by. It mightn’t be the end note one expected from the author of The Rachel Papers, but it’s reasonable.
I still have no idea why he invented the crazy ex-gf plot, though.
There was for a time (it is always only for a time) a funny meme which skewered the ubiquity of Harry Potter references among a certain cohort of society, sometimes identified generationally as millennials, other times identified by political affiliation, as liberals. (Neither of these identifications in truth map very well, incidentally.)
The meme responded to such referencing by demanding that the referencer “READ ANOTHER BOOK.” It’s funny, or at least it was way back when, not because it suggested that referencers had only read Harry Potter and nothing else. In terms of quotation and convoluted metaphors and linkages, both the Collected Shakespeare and the Bible have generated many single-book citers in their time.
No, it’s funny because, unlike Shakespeare or the Bible, the limited remit of a children’s book series about a schoolboy wizard has to undergo often significant semantic stretching to accommodate some of the parallels that were suggested. It’s never ideal to explain jokes, so let me illustrate:
Generally these parallels are political. And in fairness, the Potterverse is not without its own politicking, from the formal politics of the Ministry of Magic, the geopolitics of ‘Fantastic Beasts…’, and the fascist implications of Voldemort rule, to personal politics like Dumbledore’s closeted queerness or the construction of non-nuclear families. The books at times were very long. They’re not entirely without content, even political content.
But the parallels became so common, so ubiquitous on social media, and also to be honest, at times so risible, that even the esteemed Washington Post felt obliged to add its weight to the ‘read another book’ school of thought.
It was perhaps inevitable, given that the graduate student essay has now become almost as common a mode of expression for some of the Harry Potter generation as a half-thought out tweet, that eventually this mode of analysing world events through the prism of Harry Potter fandom would emerge.
It has not disappointed, I would argue. The one that led me down this particular line of pondering was entitled “Wizards First: The Muggle and Mudblood Crisis Reflecting the Rohingya Crisis”. I may not be alone in questioning the taste, if not the sincerity, of such an extended parallel. It comes from a sub-genre of Potter-political academic analysis of which the exemplary is surely “Voldemort Politics“.
In short, this is such a prevalent mode of cultural analysis, that I am somewhat surprised that Potter as Critical Lens does not yet have a name. In which spirit of helpfulness, I propose – Potternism.
