Bioshock Infinite

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The original Bioshock is one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past decade, with an aggregate Metacritic score of 96 out of 100. It’s typically praised for its implicit criticism of Objectivist philosophy. The game is set in the hidden, underwater city of Rapture, which was established by an eccentric billionaire as a refuge away from the “parasites,” similar in concept to Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. Of course, everything goes to shit and the city becomes overrun with psychotic killers who’ve been altering their genes to gain superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, the game is more clever than intelligent. Its critique of Objectivism is undermined by the gameplay’s emphasis on repetitive violence and overcoming all obstacles and opponents. In effect, the game suggests that Great Men who rely on money are foolish and/or wicked, but Great Men who slaughter their way through an entire city are still worthy of being the hero.* Bioshock Infinite adopts the same gameplay and storytelling approach as its predecessor and suffers from the same problem.

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The sequel is more accurately described as a prequel, because while the first Bioshock takes place in the 1960’s, Bioshock Infinite is set in the second decade of the twentieth century. And instead of an underwater city Bioshock Infinite is set in the floating city of Columbia, hidden somewhere in the skies above the North Altantic. To picture Columbia, imagine a fusion of the Confederacy, Puritan New England, and Disneyland. Columbia was founded by a fanatical preacher named Comstock and an enigmatic scientist named Lutece. Lutece helped Comstock build a city away from the fallen “Sodom” of the surface, where he could create a fantasyland for WASPs: all white, all Protestant, and all middle class. But no pseudo-Confederacy could function without slaves, so Comstock was forced to purchase black and Irish prisoners from the mainland. Needless to say, this servile class resented its oppression, and as the plot begins the city of Columbia is already on the verge of a revolution.

The story follows Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton, who is hired by mysterious figures to rescue a girl name Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a prisoner in Columbia, but she’s also blessed with the power to open tears in space-time, and Comstock intends to use her in his master plan to rain fire on the corrupt world below. Excepting a few twists and turns, the story is basically an effort by Booker and Elizabeth to find a way off Columbia as they’re being pursued by Comstock’s men. Halfway into the story, Booker and Elizabeth aid the rebels, known as the Vox Populi, and help spark the revolution. And soon Booker and Elizabeth are also being pursued by the Vox, who view Elizabeth as a threat to their plans.

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Video game critics have generally given high marks to Bioshock Infinite. IGN gave it a 9.4 out of 10. Game Spot gave it 90 out of 100. Adam Sessler of Revision3 gushed about its awesomeness. When looking at the competition, it’s not hard to see why critics would be so easily impressed. In comparison to low brow sci-fi like Halo, or militaristic propaganda like Call of Duty, Bioshock Infinite seems to be a thoughtful work of popular entertainment. And the game developers were genuinely interested in political theory, race relations, and the darker side of American history. In other words, the game has a shiny veneer of intelligence.

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But a veneer is all there is. Bioshock Infinite is still a first person shooter, and like all FPS’s the whole point of the game is to run around and kill everything that moves. And gameplay can never be wholly separated from story or themes. The game developers are not kind in their depiction of Columbia, which embodies nearly every negative aspect of American culture: pervasive racism, jingoism, and a hostility toward anyone at the bottom of the economic heap. And the game developers have an unforgiving view of the Vox Populi as well, who are modeled after the Bolsheviks. The Vox may be slightly more sympathetic than Comstock, but their revolution has less to do with justice than with revenge and mass murder. In another context, this storyline might be taken as a general criticism of political violence, whether to oppress or to overthrow oppressors.

But Bioshock Infinite would never be mistaken for a pacifist manifesto. As Booker, the player spends nearly the entire game shooting, burning, electrocuting, and otherwise horribly mutilating anyone who gets in his way. Early in the story, Elizabeth objects to Booker’s casual approach to violence, but her objections are quickly swept aside and forgotten, all so the player can get back to the gory bits. Using violence to oppress your fellow man is bad, and using violence to overthrow the system is bad. But using violence to save the girl is just good clean fun.

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The game’s incoherent view of violence is just one example of its shallowness. Another example is the ridiculous finale. By the end of the game, Columbia is thoroughly wrecked by the war between Comstock and the Vox Populi. Rather than dealing with the consequences of the war, the game writers took the easy way out. They used an approach that’s been popular with hack sci-fi writers for decades. They created a multiverse, hence the name Bioshock Infinite, and thanks to Elizabeth’s powers the entire conflict was resolved as if it never happened. No doubt this ending was meant to be cerebral, but like too many other works of popular sci-fi it simply used technobabble and superpowers to avoid dealing with the complex issues raised in the story.

Strangely enough, a more low brow game would have been more enjoyable, as it would be lacking any pretensions besides offering a few cheap thrills. But Bioshock Infinite, in the less-than-sterling tradition of middle brow entertainment, aimed to be both entertaining and intellectual at the same time. It was only intermittently successful at being the former, and completely failed at being the latter.

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* And I’m not inclined to give the game that much credit for pointing out that Objectivism is terrible. If you’re looking for an ideology that deserves being eviscerated, Objectivism is the low hanging fruit.

 

60 thoughts on “Bioshock Infinite

  1. I really like this, Richard! A good friend and I spent a great deal of time talking about this game’s internal contradictions, in particular about how it portrays the revolutionaries as “just as bad” as the people in power and how it liberally borrows racist imagery without ever explicitly condemning them. Your comments about FPS games interested me, however; does the ludological composition of the FPS preemptively cripple its attempts at complex narrative by making everything about killing and little else? This has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. As much as I dislike condemningan entire genre, the FPS always seems to suggest by its very nature (a game where you shoot things) that some group of people must die, and from there its only a quick injection of some half-baked ideology or another to justify gleeful mass murder. And don’t get me wrong, I like my fair share of FPS games, I just wonder whether the genre will ever grow beyond CoD style massacres. I’d love to see more FPS games that emphasize creativity and ingenuity like Portal, or exploration and discovery like the Metroid Prime series (both of which, incidentally, feature female protagonists and points of view). What are your thoughts?

  2. You might want to try the two Kane & Lynch games, particularly the second one. They make a pretty good stab at making meaningful fiction from a shooting gallery.

  3. Thanks for the kind words Patrick.

    When I used FPS in the post, I was referring to the Halo or Call of Duty style of game where you are shooting actual guns with the intent of “killing” virtual enemies. I think these sorts of games will never move beyond violent, popcorn entertainment, whether the protagonist is male or female. The repetitive killing for thrills will damage any other theme that the game developers want to explore.

    But it’s interesting that you brought up Portal, which uses the mechanics of the FPS but solely for opening and closing portals on surfaces. IIRC, no one even dies in Portal (except the player, if you screw up). I would like to think that Portal could start a trend away from repetitive violence, but I’m not holding my breath. Call of Duty sells too damn well.

    I hold out more hope for hybrid games like Metroid Prime, where shooting is just one aspect of the gameplay. In those sort of “open sandbox” games, it’s possible to see game developers going in interesting directions.

  4. To say that the Vox was based on the Bolsheviks is giving the designers too much credit, I think. One of their members says to kill everyone wearing glasses. Once you decide to dig down to the feverish nihilism of charismatic maoism just to find something “just as bad” to contrast Gilded Age America you’ve reached a nadir of vapid equivocation.

    And an FPS is just a game of first-person spatial navigation with force projection over distance as the primary mechanic. Its ties to gun fetishism and killing minorities is no more primal than comics’ to superheroes.

  5. There are some quasi-non-violent, or at least non-lethal FPS games — chiefly the Thief games, which frown on you killing anyone. (Humans, at least).On the harder, more complex difficulty setting, killing anyone means you lose the game.

    It was also possible to play Deus Ex almost entirely without killing anyone (except for a few bosses and non-humans), although for the most part the game itself doesn’t recognise a distinction between that and mowing down everyone in sight…so it’s more of a player-imposed constraint, but the game really is designed so that that’s a perfectly viable playing strategy.

    Of course, you might argue that there’s not that great a difference between shooting people’s heads off, and “merely” knocking them unconscious; either way, you leave behind a trail of bodies.But I certainly felt the difference as a player “knowing” that my victims would be all right when they woke up.

    Anyway, running around and shooting Randians sounds like my exact idea of a good time…

  6. “and “merely” knocking them unconscious; either way, you leave behind a trail of bodies.But I certainly felt the difference as a player “knowing” that my victims would be all right when they woke up.”

    The thing is, people aren’t “all right” after you knock them unconscious. Head trauma is a pretty serious injury; you knock someone out like that, there’s a quite decent chance they’ll end up in the hospital or with serious long term damage.

    Obviously killing people is worse. But I do sometimes wonder about the ubiquitous narrative convention whereby bashing people in the skull is presented as the moral equivalent of turning off a light switch.

  7. Isaac Butler left a message on facebook; I was encouraging him to put it here, and maybe he was planning to, but I figured I’d share it one way or the other. He takes issue with Richard

    Basically because I think the post is defacto arguing against artistic ambition and ignoring the context of the industry and art form in which the Bioshock series is made, an industry that essentially forbids explicitly political content and where the defacto politics are always right wing. Or that BIOSHOCK emerges at the EXACT moment that Rand’s ideas started getting taken seriously in US politics. Etc.

  8. Noah — well, yeah, absolutely. It still plays less violently, especially in Deus Ex, where it’s way easier to kill. There’s also player-imposed “ghost runs”, where you try not to cause any damage whatsoever to other humans, which is super-tricky but generally a possible option.

  9. Hm, I basically disagree with Isaac on everything he said. I’m not against artistic ambition in games. I love Portal, for example, which actually uses the FPS mechanic in a genuinely innovative, and non-violent, way.

    But Bioshock is making a political statement in a very shallow manner, using social commentary and historical allusion as way to “dress up” what is, at its heart, a standard adventure narrative focused on repetitive violence.

    Also, not to quibble, but Bioshock came out in 2007. Randian philosophy had become popular among the uber-class long before then.

  10. ————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …The thing is, people aren’t “all right” after you knock them unconscious. Head trauma is a pretty serious injury; you knock someone out like that, there’s a quite decent chance they’ll end up in the hospital or with serious long term damage.
    —————————

    Yeah, I recall a TV guide article where the writer watched a Western’s fight in a saloon. Each time a bottle or chair was broken over somebody’s head, the doctor would enumerate the various horrendous injuries that would likely result.

    After a while — the hero having has several chairs broken over his head, and still punching away — the doc said, “This man is obviously dead.”

    —————————-
    Obviously killing people is worse. But I do sometimes wonder about the ubiquitous narrative convention whereby bashing people in the skull is presented as the moral equivalent of turning off a light switch.
    —————————–

    Yeah: “Kids, don’t try this at home!” But there are narrative mechanics involved; if you want a character incapacitated without killing them, are you supposed to wrestle and unilaterally tie them down, gag them? A laborious and awkward business.

    And, somehow, carrying a batch of knockout-drug syringes to jab the opposition with doesn’t have the manly “oomph” of a bash to the noggin…

    Speaking of “conventions,” couldn’t help but think of the “Mad” parody of “Bringing Up Father,” with the hapless Jiggs realistically rendered (by Krigstein, no less), bleeding and suffering contusions from the plates Maggie was always smashing over his head:

    https://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EC_0001.jpg

  11. so i guess i shouldn’t hold my breath for a computer simulation of one of those “simulated” safaris where they shoot elephants with tranquilizers so that hunters can get photographed with their prey.

  12. Hey Richard,

    Noah! You scooped me! I meant to rewrite this in a more constructive comments-discussiony way!

    Seriously, tho. Richard, you explicitly come out against artistic ambition:

    “Strangely enough, a more low brow game would have been more enjoyable, as it would be lacking any pretensions besides offering a few cheap thrills.”

    But this is also because you and I start from two different places. You start from a place of immediate suspicion w/r/t what the Bioshock series is trying to do. You think it’s shallowly (and, you strongly imply, intentionally shallowly, if you’ll forgive the double adverb) to gussie up a standard-issue first person shooter with some bullshit political content and ponderous sci-fi tropes. I disagree. I think in both the first and third games, Bioshock is trying to do something quite ambitious with storytelling, theme and design with mixed success.

    TO be clear: I think the fact that Bioshock: Infinite is a First Person Shooter hampers it and leads it to all kinds of internal contradictions which are interesting, they’re the kinds of contradictions than generally get filed under the name ludonarrative dissonance, when a video game’s story and its actual mechanics are at odds. It’s a major storytelling problem the video game world is facing right now. And, indeed, if you google ludonarrative the second thing that comes up as a suggestion is “ludonarrative dissonance bioshock:infinite.”

    But ludonarrative dissonance is present in most story-based video games at this point. (the major example most people use is the Uncharted games where charming Indiana Jonesish rogue Nathan Drake kills something like 600 people over the course of the trilogy). The problem is so insurmountable that Tom Bissell, the critic who popularized the term, now thinks that it’s not worth talking about, that it is essentially impossible to do games with ambitious stories that don’t contain ludonarrative dissonance because games also, or so the industry and market have both declared, contain violence.

    As to the ending being a cop-out… the ending of the game overtly calls you a war criminal and demands your death in order for you to atone for everything you’ve done/will do (hard to come up with the right verbs when you’re dealing with time travel paradoxes). That doesn’t really seem like a cop-out to me. Literally, there are two characters you care about in the game, Elizabeth and yourself. And you have to die. That’s a pretty big consequence. It also seems in keeping with the ways the first game uses the mechanics of games to explore the idea of free will and the (non)possibility of libertarianism.

    Finally, to address a couple of other commenters:
    (1) the revolutionary movement is pretty obviously modeled at least in part on the Khmer Rouge, who did actually kill anyone they found who had glasses. That’s a real world thing that happened. Apparently the designers deserve at least some credit.

    (2) the game is also obviously anti-racist in its intent. Much of the plot hinges on the horrors of the Battle of Wounded Knee and the first thing that tells you that COLUMBIA is not all its seems is that random strangers start saying racist things about everyone from asians to the irish. The player is making his way through a racist totalitarian society. That society is not going to frame racist things in a way that condemns them.

    Again, I just want to reiterate, I think that game has problems. And I think the violence is one of them. I just don’t think it makes everything else about it not-worthwhile.

  13. “The problem is so insurmountable that Tom Bissell, the critic who popularized the term, now thinks that it’s not worth talking about, that it is essentially impossible to do games with ambitious stories that don’t contain ludonarrative dissonance because games also, or so the industry and market have both declared, contain violence. ”

    I don’t know that this is an objection to Richard’s points, though? It’s just saying that the problems he identifies can’t be fixed in video games…i.e., that video games are never going to overcome their genre weaknesses and will always be second-class art at best.

    Which is possible, but not especially impressive if you don’t want to grade on a curve, right? It sounds a bit like some of the arguments you hear when you criticize comics — i.e., they are what they are and more can’t really be expected of them. Which again may be true but is also condescending and not exactly an argument for their quality….

  14. HI Isaac,

    And of course Elizabeth has to die too, or at least blink out of existence when you do (i.e., when she kills you/you give up/whatever).

    But to be Bioshock:Infinite‘s ending seems to be a rather dismal commentary on gaming — or perhaps game development — itself. The game (any game) tries to “create new worlds,” to imagine new histories, to give gamers a feeling of control, maybe even to “make people care,” but as the end of the game tells you, all these promises of newness, change, and choice are illusory. The final vision is not of a million branching pathways but of a million doors all leading to the same place, all scripted and predetermined — just like any video game.

    So in Bioshock:Infinite, the “choice” between Comstock and the Vox is meaningless because every choice in the game is meaningless — meaningless because it’s a game, meaningless because it’s programmed, meaningless because it must ultimately give the industry what it demands, meaningless because it always leads you back into the dead-end space of the game (or perhaps gaming) itself. (And of course, even after your character’s death, he too reappears at home, just as you reappear afterwards at the start screen.) As Richard might put it, the only choice Bioshock is to shoot or not play, and as the game tells you: it’s impossible not to play.

  15. Hey Peter,

    I don’t disagree with you. I think the game is ultimately a bummer. I dont’ think that’ makes it bad. And it is certainly in keeping with the ending of the first game, which explicitly interweaves the game’s political content, ideas about free will, and the nature of video games. I mean, the ending twist to the first game is startling. But it IS also a kind of fuck you to the player.

    And of course, this all happens in the context of games building more and more and more choice into their architecture, so it’s kind of interesting on a meta-level as well.

    Hey Noah,

    I’m just bringing up that it’s an industry wide issue. I don’t think Tom Bissell’s position is necessarily right. He’s just thought more and longer and written more on this than anyone else around. He literally wrote the book on the issue. So I brought it up more because it’s interesting. I think the industry is at a really interesting crisis of sorts in terms of writing right now. The kinds of stories and the ability to tell those stories is getting more and more ambitious, but the actual kinds of games in which those stories are being told aren’t.

    As I said, I agree with Richard that the FPS frame for this story is deeply problematic and leads to all sorts of odd contradictions that are worth talking about and mining. I just (a) don’t think it sinks the game or makes the game’s other aspects unworthy of engagement and (b) don’t think the things that are ambitious and interesting and strange and beautiful about the game are cynical wallpaper.

    Here’s one thing about Bioshock:Infinite I haven’t really seen discussed that I find intersting as well: The story of the game is really, really derivative of all sorts of things but, in particular with the aesthetics around the tears and the quantum worlds, of the television show FRINGE. But no one i know (including myself!) who has noticed this seems to mind. There is something about the act of controlling the protagonist moving through the world that changes our appreciation of these things on an affect-level. And I don’t know what it is. But it’s really interesting.

    (Oh and this is obviously the play where I should say that folks who are bothered by this kind of violence and looking for more successful, less dissonant videogame experiences should absolutely check out Telltale Games’s take on THE WALKING DEAD, which is the most successful treatment of that material in any medium and does some really fascinating things with choice mechanics and… well… the inevitability of death).

  16. It depends on whether or not you think their quality is contingent on ludonarrative consistency, Noah. I mean, you can take political issue with just about anything—you can call out Roald Dahl for being a terrible human being, despite writing wonderful books, or you can argue that Martin Scorsese’s work is worthless as critique of violence because it celebrates violence, but I think the implicit assertion of an absolute system of artistic ethics over an obviously more complicated, even problematic aesthetic is a step backward. The point of criticism is primarily to engage with a work of art and describe how it works (at least as I understand the discipline).

    It’s true, BioShock: Infinite portrays all of the factions within its world as at least problematic. But that’s much more interesting than making the Vox a bunch of noble savages, to my mind. It’s also true that the game is a shooter and a lot of it is about waging war on all of those factions; I don’t think that makes the game contradictory or bad *necessarily*, I think that means that it’s not pacifist. But to an extent, I agree that it’s troubling to play a game that tries to create rich characters and then gives you a wide variety of weapons to shoot at them. (Reminds you of Full Metal Jacket, right? “I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture, and kill them.”) I don’t think that makes the game uninteresting or its exploration of complex topics like race and guilt worthless.

  17. ” I mean, you can take political issue with just about anything—you can call out Roald Dahl for being a terrible human being, despite writing wonderful books, or you can argue that Martin Scorsese’s work is worthless as critique of violence because it celebrates violence,”

    I don’t really see what would be wrong with either of those things. I don’t really think how writers behave personally has to have much to do with how you appreciate their work…though on the other hand it can, and if you did a reading based on Dahl’s personal failings, it could be interesting. And…I think Scorcese is kind of an overrated hack, for the most part. I’ve never seen a movie of his that I thought was worth much.

  18. I’ve never done this before, I’m not a commenter on any site by habit, and am loathe to look like a self promoter but I’ve written about the question of violence in Bioshock:Infinite and the critical perception of the game in a way I feel would interest some in this discussion:

    http://midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/shit-air-will-fuck-your-face

    If this is spamy or irrelevant, you’re welcome to delete it.

    A much more focused (but 4 times as long) review of Bioshock Infinite, with specific reference to its ludonarrative dissonance issues is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDCUqer7UrM and it has nothing to do with me.

  19. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on Scorsese (really? “The Departed?” “The Age of Innocence?” “King of Comedy?” All just bullshit?), and I have never seen an interesting reading of a writer’s work that required me to scold him or her for beliefs the critic asserted were implicit in the writing.

    With respect to the game, I also think it’s worth asking yourself whether or not you’re playing a character who would do the things the gamer is asked to do. One of the most impressive aspects of “BioShock: Infinite” from my perspective was the way Ken Levine fleshed out Booker’s own personality. I think it lessens the burden on the player to have a character who would behave in the way the narrative instructs him to act. You have a little wiggle room with Booker, but the game owns its ideas about the world rather than giving you a “moral choice” dichotomy like the first one did. Seems like progress.

  20. I’m not able to listen to that podcast right now but surely it should be obvious that there are an abundance of completely nonviolent games (or “software” if you prefer, since some dont really have any game elements).

    Racing and sports are two massively popular genres that only sometimes have violence.
    Music simulation, music creation games, rhythm/action music games, dance games, karaoke, exercise aids, meditation aids (a small genre admittedly), vehicle simulation, social network Second Life stuff, Tetris, videogames that mimic traditional board and card games, games where you only avoid danger but never hurt anyone, farming games, games where you manage a business, games where you create and manage a family or a hospital or even a civilisation, sex simulation, dating games, art creation, cooking guides, brain training, pet caring, extreme sports like skateboarding or biking or freerunning, all sorts of puzzle and collecting games, games where you navigate mazes and obstacles, pinball, nonviolent detective and adventure or rpg games, interactive films or books.

    After all that, I see books and films as far more limited. I’m not a massive games fan, I actually tend to avoid them these days, but I think the main limitation is what sells. But many of these genres I mentioned are extremely popular. Violence in games might be a majority but it isnt totally dominant. a lot of people have made a living off of creating nonviolent games.

  21. Personally, I’m most inclined to agree with anti_strunt W/R/T FPS games. I only regularly play one FPS, Team Fortress 2, and I do so for the ridiculously fun strategizing that it involves, especially when it’s played with friends. I’d like to think there’s something genuinely useful (or fun? is fun useful?) in an FPS that makes strategy and custonimization, rather than just plowing through bodies, an integral part of the gameplay. There’s probably as many types of potential FPS games as there are of any genre. But like most genres, its the most mindlessly violent games that sell the best.

  22. “I have never seen an interesting reading of a writer’s work that required me to scold him or her for beliefs the critic asserted were implicit in the writing.”

    Mileage varies…but there are lots of interesting readings which link writers attitudes and the work they do. Gay readings of Oscar Wilde’s work, for example, seem virtually demanded. I’ve seen interesting discussions of Tolstoy’s treatment of his wife wrt the treatment of women in his novels. Same with Shakespeare’s royalist proclivities. Not sure why any of that should be out of bounds. Also not sure why you seem to think it’s impossible to figure out what a writer thinks or how they acted in their lives. Folks leave records. You can dispute interpretations, but it’s really not especially controversial to point out that Ezra Pound was a fascist and an anti-semite, nor hard to see how that had an impact on his writing.

    Haven’t seen all those Scorcese films; one of those things where you see a couple highly praised works and don’t like them and so aren’t necessarily inspired to examine the rest of the oeuvre.

  23. It’s not out of bounds, I just find it uninteresting as far as it relates to the actual work. Just seems like variations on the intentional fallacy to me. Of course Ezra Pound was a horrible fascist—I’m not really curious about attacks on his poetry that cite his politics. The implication seems to be that there’s nothing to learn from people with whom we disagree, which is usually the opposite of the case.

    Ah, see, this is the thing about the Scorsese oeuvre itself: it is broader than its devotees would have you believe. “Age of Innocence” is just gorgeous, and “The King of Comedy” is really strange and good. Everybody’s going to hate some of them—I’m kind of a superfan and I can’t stand “Raging Bull”—but I contend that there’s something great in there for most tastes.

  24. There is a thing in games with people saying “it’s okay, you’re only killing monsters”. Recently I read David Cronenberg saying that he thought the popularity of zombies could be boiled down to the videogame pleasure of violence and the supposedly guilt free circumstance of the violence being on zombies.
    In games like Caslte Wolfenstein and Medal Of Honor people say “It’s okay, youre only killing Nazis”, but I’ve always thought that should only raise more moral questions but most seem to act like there is no further need to question.
    I recall Charlie Brooker doing a show where he was playing one of these games, killings Nazis and he stabs one in the face and says “that guy has a wife and kids at home” jokingly acknowledging that this could either make you feel guilty or even make it more fun to kill for sick bastards.
    I got into some arguments about the fantasy of killing Nazis because I wasnt sure how to feel about every single human who fought for Germany in WW2. I’m not that well educated on WW1-2, I dont know if every German soldier are technically called Nazis (can somebody answer that please?), surely there were some soldiers who knew very little or nothing about the Nazi ideology? People who couldnt read or write and knew nothing about politics.
    I might be wrong in my assumptions but I really dont feel like I know enough to condemn every German fighter because I dont know how much knowledge and responsibility they all had; and then there were people in the Nazis who were against the movement and tried to stop it or tried to help jews.

    I still find it bizarre that Ayn Rand called religion “mental slavery” and said she hated republicans and conservatives and said she wanted to destroy all traditional american values; yet she is embraced by people who she hated.
    Is this the same as lefties who know nothing about the violent dictators they praise but have this false romantic image of them, or just ignore the reality and pretend they were different?
    Or are there really lots of Randians who really agree with Rand? I think people who are her near opposite just use her as someone to give them some sort of credibility, but just ignore anything she said that they dont agree with, which was a hell of a lot.

  25. I’m not that comprehensive on Marty. Never even seen Taxi Driver (but I want to). King Of Comedy is amazing. Goodfellas is good I think. I was lukewarm on Raging Bull, the photography was amazing in the fight scenes, I think he really wants to show how dumb the macho bickering is (but many guys will just think it is cool, I think the popularity of gangster films is up of a large percentage of people who watch it as an asshole power fantasy and miss the point completely), but Tokyo Fist is a million times better.

  26. “I’m not really curious about attacks on his poetry that cite his politics. The implication seems to be that there’s nothing to learn from people with whom we disagree, which is usually the opposite of the case.”

    This seems really limited to me. I don’t care whether people are attacking his poetry or just analyzing it, but his fascism and anti-semitism are really central to his work. Talking about that isn’t denying you can learn something from it. It’s part of learning something from it. Figuring out how hate or sexism or racism functions in art is one way to think about how it functions in art. It’s not about fighting over the morality or lack thereof of some dead asshole; it’s thinking about how this guy who is central to our canon used some really noxious ideas because those noxious ideas, central as they are to our canon, might possibly still be relevant.

    Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver; those are the ones I know I’ve seen, and find all of them tedious and irritating…but maybe I should try Age of Innocence sometime. Just read the book, which was all right….

  27. Robert, there are certainly moral ambiguities aplenty in treatment of Germans in WW II. For example, at the end of the war, German women were apparently systematically raped by Russian occupying forces (and somewhat less systematically, but still not infrequently, raped by Western occupying forces.) That’s largely ignored/covered up because it’s hard to talk about it in a way that lets everybody continue to portray the Germans as the aggressors and as evil (and they were the aggressors, and the ideology was evil…but that doesn’t mean that torturing civilians is okay….)

  28. “it’s thinking about how this guy who is central to our canon used some really noxious ideas because those noxious ideas, central as they are to our canon, might possibly still be relevant.”

    Shouldn’t you be able to do this without knowing what his actual beliefs were, though?

    Anyway, thanks for this article, Robert; all this ludonarrative dissonance stuff is new to me (since I don’t play videogames and I’m kind of in line with Peter’s disposition), so it’s interesting.

  29. But how do you feel on the level of going around killing WW2 german soldiers in a game? Again I ask if german soldiers of the time are all technically Nazis? There must have been people who were just fighting a war and werent that involved or even aware of the Nazi ideology. So when people say “it’s okay, I’m only killing Nazis in this game”, it just makes me wonder what makes it okay. Comparing the battle to real life, how sure can you be of what type of person you are killing or if you should even get pleasure from it.

    Again, I’d highly recommend King Of Comedy. I’d like to see him do a full blown horror film because he is a big fan of them. He was visibly excited about the horror elements in Shutter Island in an interview(which I’ve never seen).

  30. “Shouldn’t you be able to do this without knowing what his actual beliefs were, though?”

    Well…possibly. Looking at just the text as text can be one way to go…but you could also look at his other writings, or his pro-Mussolini speeches, or whatever. I don’t have any problem with pure textual analysis, but I also think it’s fine to bring in other materials. Both approaches have been used by lots and lots of people; both can go interesting places. It just seems arbitrary to say one always has to do one or the other.

  31. Robert,

    I think it’s important to keep two things distinct about that (even though I don’t think you were addressing me): (1) what all the slaughter does to the message of the game itself (e.g., does it cause dissonance with what appears to be the overall intent of the game) vs. (2) does it really matter if someone enjoys killing a lot of Nazis in a game? I’d say a pacifist could still enjoy the latter without any conflict to his moral view. But, 1 is a definite problem for the game. Similarly, regarding Scorsese, I’m not so sure that he doesn’t want you to identify with the gangsters he portrays, find them attractive in some way, or be entertained. Seems to me that he does. However, being entertained by criminals in movies (or games) doesn’t really say much about one’s own realworld moral views. I still wouldn’t want to hang out with such thugs in real life.

    Noah,

    Sure, but it’s a problem if the only way anyone sees the heinous stuff supposedly in a text is after they know about the creator’s own personal life. It could be that the personal life helped you notice something about the text that was hidden, but it’s quite possible that it led you into a reductive reading strategy. But I’m inclined to think that if the heinous view is of such structural importance to a creator’s work, then you really shouldn’t have to know what kind of swine he was in real life.

  32. I think a lot of people would admit to finding gangsters in films funny, and a lot of people are up for identifying with any type of human being no matter how bad and even finding admirable qualities in the worst of people, I’m okay with that.
    But I doubt Scorsese intended people to think being a paranoid insecure macho wifebeater thug was cool, but there are plenty of people who responded that way, “that’s so cool, I wish I could be as big an asshole as that”. The way Scarface became an icon and an idol (also becoming a videogame about violence as fun, nauseatingly) despite being a total slog of a boring film.
    I think Sopranos played with this a bit, with the gangsters quoting classic gangster films and seemingly modeling themselves on them. I remember a friend who worked in a hotel was serving gangsters and he said they all acted like they were in a film.
    I think these films have become such a big part of the cinema canon very much aided by people who enjoy them for all the wrong reasons even if a lot of those directors are very skilled.

  33. “but it’s a problem if the only way anyone sees the heinous stuff supposedly in a text is after they know about the creator’s own personal life. It could be that the personal life helped you notice something about the text that was hidden, but it’s quite possible that it led you into a reductive reading strategy.”

    I don’t know…it just doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me. If you come away with an illuminating reading, it doesn’t really bother me one way or the other where the bits of the reading came from — whether it’s from the text, or the life, or another text by the author, or some random text over there.

  34. “Talking about that isn’t denying you can learn something from it. It’s part of learning something from it. Figuring out how hate or sexism or racism functions in art is one way to think about how it functions in art. It’s not about fighting over the morality or lack thereof of some dead asshole; it’s thinking about how this guy who is central to our canon used some really noxious ideas because those noxious ideas, central as they are to our canon, might possibly still be relevant.”

    So, forgive me, but I find that kind of horrifying. It sounds to me like you’re saying that an author’s personal politics—and we have to limit that to what he did and said, since we can’t ever know what he thought or intended—should follow his art around like a bad smell forever. I just can’t accept that. It would paralyze art. It would destroy criticism. Every artist who’s ever done anything contemporary ethicist-critics decide is wrong would have to be regarded as some kind of horrible cancer or taint whose every influencee must be regarded with suspicion because they could have some kind of subtextual notion inherited from the jerks among their artistic forebears.

    I also take pretty serious issue with your assertion that Pound’s fascism and anti-semitism are central to his poetry. His anti-semitism shows up in a couple of detailed descriptions in the Cantos and his fascism not at all. With respect purely to his art—which is where, I would assert, we are required by the breadth of our knowledge to locate criticism of that art—he’s no worse than, say, Evelyn Waugh.

  35. Robert; I think people often refer to all soldiers as Nazis (i.e., Nazi forces). But I’m sure not all German soldiers were ideologically committed to Nazism.

    Sam, do you think art is generated by some sort of brain in a jar? All art is of its time; it’s tied into the politics and issues of its day. And…what exactly is the downside to remembering or occasionally thinking about an artist’s politics, exactly? It’s like you’ve got some idea of art as this pure little flower that’ll get corrupted if people look at it too closely, or glance over to the side or a second to see what it’s growing out of. That just seems silly to me. I mean, are you every artist ever’s mother? Or what?

    Re: Pound. I think you are wandering way, way out on a limb and sawing if you’re telling me that his politics didn’t have anything to do with his art. His anti-semitism is all over the place, as is his fascism; both tied up in his loathing of modernity and capitalism and, somewhat contradictorily, with his elitism and mistrust of democracy.

    Eliot’s anti-semitism is a pretty big deal too in his work. Milton’s politics are thoroughly relevant to just about everything he wrote. Wordsworth’s changing politics are hugely important to his work, and to the reception of his work at the time in poetry and criticism. For that matter, Chris Ware’s public performance of his own misery is pretty thoroughly enmeshed in his artwork (as Bart Beaty has pointed out.)

    As somebody who spent a fair bit of time writing about William Marston, the idea that his polyamorous living arrangement, or his philosophical theories, have nothing to do with his art strikes me as…well, not convincing, let’s say. That’s the case with most artists to one degree or another. Not that you have to deal with the life, but folks who do aren’t committing some sin against aesthetics.

  36. Noah says… “But I’m sure not all German soldiers were ideologically committed to Nazism.”

    But arent there a fair amount of stories of Nazi leaders and german soldiers who rebelled against the Nazi ideology? It seems impossible that every soldier would have been committed to Nazism, I’d imagine there must have been some who didnt even know much about the ideology, unless you had to pass some sort of test proving you understood Nazism to fight for germany.

  37. ——————————-
    Sam says:

    [to Noah] It sounds to me like you’re saying that an author’s personal politics—and we have to limit that to what he did and said, since we can’t ever know what he thought or intended—should follow his art around like a bad smell forever. I just can’t accept that. It would paralyze art. It would destroy criticism. Every artist who’s ever done anything contemporary ethicist-critics decide is wrong would have to be regarded as some kind of horrible cancer or taint whose every influencee must be regarded with suspicion because they could have some kind of subtextual notion inherited from the jerks among their artistic forebears…
    ——————————

    That’s exactly his attitude. As for destroying criticism, nuggets of “wisdom” such as…

    ———————————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …I think Scorcese is kind of an overrated hack, for the most part. I’ve never seen a movie of his that I thought was worth much.
    ———————————-

    …are as likely to do the job; adding to the general attitude that all criticism is merely a batch of personal opinions reekingly squirted out; any actual precision or proper weighing of the value of the work in question irrelevant.

    ——————————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Sam, do you think art is generated by some sort of brain in a jar? All art is of its time; it’s tied into the politics and issues of its day. And…what exactly is the downside to remembering or occasionally thinking about an artist’s politics, exactly? It’s like you’ve got some idea of art as this pure little flower that’ll get corrupted if people look at it too closely, or glance over to the side or a second to see what it’s growing out of. That just seems silly to me. I mean, are you every artist ever’s mother? Or what?

    Re: Pound. I think you are wandering way, way out on a limb and sawing if you’re telling me that his politics didn’t have anything to do with his art…
    ——————————–

    Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!

    Did Sam say that all art was totally unconnected, not even remotely “tied into the politics and issues of its day”? Or that some creator’s ideology “did not have anything to do with their art”? Did he say one should never “remember… or occasionally think… about an artist’s politics”?

    Hardly. (If we’re not going to let mere reality bound our accusations, as usual, why don’t you say his argument was crammed with homophobia, misogyny, racism, “ableism,” anti-Semitism too?)

    Rather, he argued against forever damning, say, Wagner or Shakespeare because of anti-Semitism; blasting El Greco and Bernini for being favored artists of the murderous, intolerant, oppressive Catholic Church (oh, but you’re a big defender of that; they’re not mass-murdering atheists!); the idiocy of monomaniacally making all art be judged by what is politically correct rather than aesthetically worthy.

    Where that leads to is what we got with the Socialist Realist art that Stalin’s lackeys pushed…

  38. I’m still enjoying the debate, Mike, but I appreciate your articulating some of the things I wasn’t quite sure how to say. Noah, I’m definitely not saying that art is generated by a brain in a jar, but I am saying that it’s generated by at least two brains affected by (probably) very different social and political ideas, especially given a long enough time between the lives of artist and the spectator. You, Noah, are as integral a component to the experience of “BioShock: Infinite” or “Watchmen” or whatever as Ken Levine or Alan Moore. You create the art with the artist (if a tree falls in a wood, etc.). That’s why I see the discussion of the artist’s politics specifically as they relate to the art as useless at best and an ongoing act of poisoning the well at worst—I mean, I like Marston’s Wonder Woman as much as the next guy and actually think his inclusion of Freudian insanity in children’s comics makes for a useful commentary on Marston, but it doesn’t really improve my experience of the book. I can read his stuff chortling up my sleeve and congratulating myself on being smarter than Jane Wonder Woman-reader, but that keeps me from engaging with the story and the characters. With respect to Pound, I’m simply saying that you can’t prove one way or the other WHAT his politics had to do with his art. You weren’t in his head when it was being written, therefore you, I, T.S. Eliot and Katy Perry know the exact same amount about his internal intellectual process of writing the Cantos.

    I’ve become very, very leery of the kind of scolding, moralizing takedowns of artists. To get out of the realm of the hypothetical, let’s take the recent blogospheric explosion of criticism around Alan Moore with respect to his use of rape as a plot device. I love Alan Moore’s work. I think he’s a genius. I understand that it’s kind of weird that rape shows up in a ton of his comics, especially when it shows up in something like Tom Strong that’s ostensibly for kids, but what too many people have done is look at that preponderance, decide (based on nothing! Just on an assertion of ethical superiority to the artist!) that the fact that he wants to talk about rape, however interestingly contextualized or sympathetically drawn the victims are, is capital-U Unacceptable and that Moore is a Misogynist, and that maybe his strong female characters simply mean that he doesn’t understand that he’s a Misogynist but that henceforth there must be an invisible label reading “WARNING: CONTAINS MISOGYNY” across all of his books forever and ever amen. I’m not saying that you or anyone else has directly made this claim (which I think is pretty extreme), but I do think the volume of writing that scolds the reader into using that lens has meant that it’s simply the way people think about his work now. There’s a growing subsection of people with whom I can’t talk about Alan Moore anymore, whose first and only response to the new issue of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” is always going to be, “Yeah, but that guy’s a misogynist.” Suddenly everybody interesting is Roman Polanski, in that folks demand that you engage with something other than the work you’re trying to experience in order to opine. That’s just poor criticism.

    Anyway, I really hope I haven’t offended you. Isaac is a mutual friend and he speaks very highly of you and I’ve often read and enjoyed stuff on this blog. Please do let me know what you think of “The Age of Innocence” if you ever get around to watching it.

  39. Robert it’s inconceivable that in an army made up of conscripts everyone would be a Nazi, or a Communist or a Churchill voter. A lot of German soldiers were from the working class which was traditionally social democratic. They might have overwhelmingly followed orders, even going so far as to kill Jews they had no particular hatred towards but that doesn’t mean they were committed to the nebulous ideology called Nazism. In fact most of the high command, while conservative and even expansionist, wasn’t that fond of Nazism either.

    Still, the Nazi’s are a godsend to game designers, fiction- and script writers as an almost unequivocally evil opponent that actually existed. I might feel bad about something like the scene in Inglorious Basterds where an officers gets cruelly beaten to death but he’s pretty obviously fighting for the bad cause.

  40. Hey Sam. I’m actually really quite hard to offend. I mean, it can be done if you try, but simply telling me you don’t agree with something I’ve said isn’t going to do it.

    “…what his politics had to do with his art. You weren’t in his head when it was being written, therefore you, I, T.S. Eliot and Katy Perry know the exact same amount about his internal intellectual process of writing the Cantos.”

    You really can’t “prove” anything about art, pretty much. I mean, you can find textual evidence to say, x was written at point y, but in terms of meaning, it’s all more or less up for grabs. As these things go, Pound’s fascism and anti-semitism is quite well established, and he’s not shy about putting it in his work. You can certainly refuse to see it, or refuse to talk about it, or say you want to talk about something else instead. But by most standards of proof, it’s there, and referring to some sort of bizarre “art can be math” defense to deny it seems like wishful thinking.

    I’d certainly agree that readers are as involved in meaning making as writers or artists. It’s communication. What follows from that to me, though, is not some sort of claim that you can’t speak to politics or morality in art. It just means the speaking is a communication, not an absolute. Which seems fine; you can talk about these issues without claiming some sort of n-space beyond subjectivity.

    Re: Wonder Woman. I’m not sure why you think talking about Marston’s psychological theories makes you smarter, or trying to be smarter, than his readers. I think folks respond to the not at all buried sexual implications and not at all buried psychological claims and messages just like they respond to anything else. Putting Marston in conversation with other writers — feminists and psychologists, for example, both groups he was very much aware of — may mean shifting the readership slightly…but why shouldn’t you do that? How can you avoid it? His original readers are dead, for the most part. And he was trying to change the world, not just write a comic. Insisting that he can’t have any contact with the world, or that mentioning his ambitions is wrong, seems like you’re just imposing your own needs and interests and limitations on him. Which, again, is inevitable, but not a reason to scorn other people’s readings for doing that same thing.

    Finally; Alan Moore. Moore is extremely engaged in discussing women and queer people throughout his work. Again, to deny him that seems like you’re limiting his ambitions, or refusing him ground that he’s very clearly staked out.

    I don’t think he’s always successful in dealing with those issues. But sometimes he is, and very movingly so. Refusing to talk about the times he fails means you’re unable to talk intelligently, or perhaps at all, about the ways he succeeds, or how his struggle is meaningful. I certainly think dismissing Alan Moore as a misogynist is wrong. But insisting that you can’t have the conversation diminishes him too, in an inverse but parallel way.

  41. You’re still not responding to me here, though. Nowhere have I said that you can’t talk about an author’s life or politics; I am saying that such a conversation is divorced from a discussion of his work’s politics. This really is literary theory 101, man. You accuse me of being limiting; I can think of absolutely nothing more limiting in critical terms than reducing a work of art to its author’s political ideas. I disagree strongly with Mike’s tone above, but he is correct that you keep on telling me I’m saying you can’t talk about politics when I’m not saying anything of the kind; I’m saying you can make no judgments about art based on the author’s politics. None. It’s like trying to figure out the colors a painter will use by the color of her eyes; it’s just a non sequitur. Are fascists more likely to produce art that glorifies fascism? Not necessarily. Futurist painting is basically a fascist genre in that it was popularized and practiced by fascists. Examining it closely, especially with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything particularly dangerous or oppressive about the style? Eh, not really. It’s just sort of art deco-y. Can we talk about fascist ideas of the period and how they look in the work? Sure, but that’s neither a moral judgment nor a discussion of the artists’ ideals, and it’s also no more interesting or revelatory than a discussion of its visual relationship to, say, Fauvism.

    Perhaps more clearly: I specifically object to the idea that because a particular philosophy produces bad decisions and cruelty, art that is produced by that philosophy’s adherents is somehow more likely to engender those same bad and cruel actions in its receivers. I promise, I’m more likely to punch someone after watching a Mark Burnett reality show than I am after reading a Frank Miller comic, and Mark Burnett is a delightful man while F.M. is obviously a terrible asshole.

    I don’t understand why you refuse to acknowledge the difference between an artist’s individual beliefs and the philosophy of his work; it’s really crucial. I mean, you must believe in it on some level or you’d never have read Pound in the first place; do you really refuse to believe that bad people can make good art? Does the assholery of, say, David Foster Wallace make “Infinite Jest” worthless?

    With respect to Moore, I think it’s absolutely interesting to look at his work in context with the rest of his bibliography; I just don’t think it’s valuable to take him to task for perceived infractions of some artistic code of conduct that is neither generally agreed upon nor enlightening with respect to the work itself. Remember, the question was never “does he address a nasty subject well?”, it was, “does he address a nasty subject too often?” That kind of criticism is simply the critic preening over his own moral superiority to the artist, and it involves the mechanics of the work not at all.

  42. I don’t like David Foster Wallace much. Has nothing to do with DFW being an asshole or not.

    “do you really refuse to believe that bad people can make good art?”

    I think bad people can make good art. The problem is, you seem to think that this is the only question, and the only way, that thinking about a person’s life might have an impact on reading the art, or on thinking about the art.

    That is — the point of looking at the life, or at the politics, or at the world outside the work, doesn’t need to be to say, “this person is worthless, therefore this art is worthless, therefore we shouldn’t look at the art.”

    The idea that it’s literary theory 101 not to think about an artists life in relation to the work is really, really confused. There are certainly some schools of criticism which prefer to focus on only the text. But there’s tons of biographial criticism. As just one example, Emily Dickinson’s work looks substantially different, and people have thought about it substantially differently, depending on whether they see her as completely isolated (which I think is wrong) as opposed to whether they see her as engaged with the writing of people like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Willa Cather’s work looks different if you think about her as a queer artist vs. whether you don’t. Thinking about Ezra Pound’s fascism and anti-semitism is going to affect how you think about his anti-modernism, it seems to me, which is a major theme in his work. Is he brave and thoughtful and clever in rejecting modernism? Or is his anti-modernism kind of shitty in a lot of ways? What you think about his life matters there, it seems like.

    Again, I’m not saying you have to look at the life. But it’s a long-standing critical approach, and one which can be illuminating in many instances. I mean…you think you shouldn’t read the author’s letters? You shouldn’t read earlier drafts? You shouldn’t read earlier published drafts? How narrow does your focus have to be for it to be suddenly magically unlimiting?

    I think the problem here is that you’re conflating an ideological objection with a methodological one. You don’t really think that you should only think about the work in all circumstances always always always, surely? If someone pointed out that Mark Twain had spent time on riverboats, it would be okay to mention that in terms of his work as something that tells you a bit about his intentions and interests. What you object to is political and moral criticism. The Alan Moore example seems to make that point, because people are actually objecting to the misogyny they see *in the work*, not in his personal life. (The bit of Alan Moore’s personal life that actually seems relevant and interesting to me in a certain amount of his work is his polyamory, especially as it relates to his queer sympathies…and as that relates to Marston’s polyamory and work. But that’s another issue…)

    Anyway…lots of people are uncomfortable with moral and political criticism of art. As I said, if you want to criticize poetry by scanning iambs, or talk about the formal balance of comics pages or whatever, that’s cool; I enjoy reading and doing that criticsm. But to rule out moral and political criticism altogether I find really depressing, inasmuch as one of the things I really enjoy, or think about, or respond to in art is the way that artists deal with such issues. Virginia Woolf or Joanna Russ are not more interesting if you chop off their feminist commitments; D. H. Lawrence is not more interesting if you take away his misogyny; Rudyard Kiplins isn’t more interesting if you take away his imperialism. Decontextualizing people doesn’t generally make them better artists, in my view. Again, folks are welcome to focus on different things or do different things, but when you tell me that in order to enjoy art correctly I have to systematically rob much of the art I love of much of its interest, I have to respectfully disagree.

    Re: Pound; he certainly has formal virtues, but I find him mostly arrogant, unpleasant, and intolerable as a writer. That certainly has something to do with his fascism, his elitism, and his anti-semitism, all of which are wound throughout his work, it seems like to me. Even in something like In a Station of the Metro, it’s hard to separate the unpleasant politics from the vision of individuals bound together into a blank natural unit. Is that reading less interesting than one which just says looks at the rhythm of the words, and/or let us appreciate these universal human truths? It seems like it depends on what you’re interested in. But insisting that one interpretation is invalid and the other is the right one is not expanding the range of what criticism can do, from my perspective.

  43. I don’t know diddly about poetry, but I’m having a hard time seeing what value you find in Pound after rooting his anti-modernism in various shitty personal bigotries. There doesn’t seem to be a disagreement here over analyzing a work’s politics, but instead a type of intentional interpretation that might be more accurately called guilt by association. Isn’t it possible, for example, that anti-modernism might lead some to fascism, rather than vice versa? One might admire Pound’s anti-modernism in his art while abhorring his political fascism. It might be possible to not see the fascism at all in the work: don’t forget that some theorists actually do argue that fascism is rooted in modernism, not against it. Pound’s work might help us figure that out, but you’re cutting off the questioning when you start with the reduction of his anti-modernism to his fascist sympathies.

    Furthermore, you have to agree that a completely non-fascist reading is just as good as any other if you can’t “prove” otherwise.

    Also, I wonder if it would matter much to you if you found out some misogynist writer had a perfectly loving relationship. Or that some bigot’s best friend is gay or black? What about if an artist is a pedophile or pro-pedophilia — does that cast a black cloud over everything Delany writes on sexuality?

  44. Good grief. Okay:
    1) You still insist on conflating your moral judgment of the author based on his or her biography with your moral judgment of the work. Of course it’s not unreasonable to do queer readings of Willa Cather. But it’s also true that many, even most fruitful readings of older work are contemporized in ways that have *absolutely nothing* to do with the author’s life. Psychoanalytical readings of the Greeks are the foundation of psychoanalysis. Freud, despite his invention of the time machine, had absolutely no influence on those people.

    I’ll also say that this is the second time you’ve thrown a well-respected artist under the bus when I’ve suggested he’s an example of someone who troubles your aesthetic. You can keep on doing that, but I will say that the argument here continues to be about whose perspective is more limiting, and I thought I’d call that to your attention.

    [large section trimmed for unpleasantness]

    2) You have provided me with a really excellent example of the specific thing I’m objecting to with that paragraph on Pound, so let’s just talk about that, shall we? “He certainly has formal virtues, but I find him mostly arrogant, unpleasant, and intolerable as a writer. That certainly has something to do with his fascism, his elitism, and his anti-semitism, all of which are wound throughout his work, it seems like to me.”

    That would be a very severe misjudgment on your part. Am I misreading you, or did you call everyone who likes Ezra Pound a Nazi? You dislike him because of his fascism and elitism? I like Pound quite a bit and I’m neither a fascist nor an elitist, and I read him because I read an essay by a Jewish writer (who is probably not an anti-semite) who also liked him, thank you very much. You’re dragging in pejoratives from other disciplines and applying them to literature to form this weird judgmental gestalt criticism that others everyone who disagrees with you. It’s profoundly disturbing and insulting.

    “Even in something like In a Station of the Metro, it’s hard to separate the unpleasant politics from the vision of individuals bound together into a blank natural unit. Is that reading less interesting than one which just says looks at the rhythm of the words, and/or let us appreciate these universal human truths? It seems like it depends on what you’re interested in. But insisting that one interpretation is invalid and the other is the right one is not expanding the range of what criticism can do, from my perspective.”

    It’s only a less interesting reading if you then insist that fascist qualities in his work—which, by the way, you’re talking about here as though the entire Cantos was some kind of fascist screed, which it ain’t—make him a bad writer or are superior to all other interpretations by virtue of the moral revelation about the character of the work. QED. Some interpretations ARE invalid, man. It’s not broadening criticism to dignify absurdity.

  45. Charles:

    “Idon’t know diddly about poetry, but I’m having a hard time seeing what value you find in Pound after rooting his anti-modernism in various shitty personal bigotries. There doesn’t seem to be a disagreement here over analyzing a work’s politics, but instead a type of intentional interpretation that might be more accurately called guilt by association. Isn’t it possible, for example, that anti-modernism might lead some to fascism, rather than vice versa? One might admire Pound’s anti-modernism in his art while abhorring his political fascism. It might be possible to not see the fascism at all in the work: don’t forget that some theorists actually do argue that fascism is rooted in modernism, not against it. Pound’s work might help us figure that out, but you’re cutting off the questioning when you start with the reduction of his anti-modernism to his fascist sympathies.”

    I don’t much like Pound, and would argue that he’s overrated and generally a shithead. But…sure other people could find value in him along the lines you’re discussing, and I might even find those interpetations interesting and fun to read and worthwhile. I don’t think those readings mean you’re not paying attention to his life, though; just thinking about it in relation to the work in a different way.

    “Furthermore, you have to agree that a completely non-fascist reading is just as good as any other if you can’t “prove” otherwise.”

    Like I said, readings of Pound that focus on just his prosody or allusions or whatever are fine. I do think his fascism is central to a lot of his work, and would argue that that’s a valid reading and a valuable one, for both aesthetic and political reasons. Folks could decide if those are convincing…but of course nothing is going to be proven in a mathematical or even scientific sense. Aesthetics doesn’t work like that.

    “Also, I wonder if it would matter much to you if you found out some misogynist writer had a perfectly loving relationship. Or that some bigot’s best friend is gay or black? What about if an artist is a pedophile or pro-pedophilia — does that cast a black cloud over everything Delany writes on sexuality?”

    People are complicated, I think. I don’t really know much about Dickens’ relationship with his wife, but I could imagine that it was happy and respectful. And if someone wanted to do a reading talking about the relationship between his relatonship with his wife and the women in his novels, that seems like it would be fine.

    Axl Rose is someone who has said racist shit and who had a long term professional relationship with a black man. I think both those things about him are relevant and worth thinking about.

    I think Delany’s discussions of sexuality can be uncomfortable along the lines you’re suggesting. I”m not a huge fan of his in the first place, but I wouldn’t mind someone writing a piece talking about those issues.

    Sam:

    “But it’s also true that many, even most fruitful readings of older work are contemporized in ways that have *absolutely nothing* to do with the author’s life.”

    Sure. But your arguments for getting rid of the author’s life don’t seem to me to be analytically or logically separable from arguments about other context. If you’re willing to talk about other context, the objection to the author’s life just seems like more or less random prejudice.

    “Am I misreading you, or did you call everyone who likes Ezra Pound a Nazi?”

    You’re misreading me. I don’t think that and didn’t say it. I kept saying where my own view of him was coming from. I also kept saying that other readings were fine. Not sure how you get from that to me saying that anyone who disagrees with me is evil.

    “It’s only a less interesting reading if you then insist that fascist qualities in his work—which, by the way, you’re talking about here as though the entire Cantos was some kind of fascist screed, which it ain’t—make him a bad writer or are superior to all other interpretations by virtue of the moral revelation about the character of the work. QED. Some interpretations ARE invalid, man. It’s not broadening criticism to dignify absurdity.”

    This is weird. In the first part you accuse me of blanket stating that my interpretation is superior to all others and that all others are invalid — which I didn’t say, and actually took some pains to say the opposite of — and then at the end you tell me that my interpretation is invalid and absurd and not to be tolerated. Are you fighting on behalf of truth or tolerance? And how can I be your opponent in both endeavors?

    “I’ll also say that this is the second time you’ve thrown a well-respected artist under the bus when I’ve suggested he’s an example of someone who troubles your aesthetic. You can keep on doing that, but I will say that the argument here continues to be about whose perspective is more limiting, and I thought I’d call that to your attention.”

    In both cases, your argument is something like, “If you think this, then you can’t like this person, who obviously everyone likes.” But I don’t like those people, so the appeal to authority doesn’t work.

    Also, as I said, the reason I don’t like them doesn’t have much to do with the position you’re claiming for me, in part because the position you’re claiming for me is not in fact much related to anything I’ve said.

    Maybe it would be helpful if I point out that I like many misogynist writers and a fair number of racist writers and many creators who I think are personally unpleasant in any number of ways? I don’t like Pound…but I do like Eliot. Also C.S. Lewis…

    On the other hand, I don’t think it’s wrong or evil for someone to dislike a writer because that writer is racist or sexist. Even if somebody said, “I can’t read Tolstoy because he treated his wife horribly and every time I read about the women in his work I just think what a hypocritical bastard he is,” — that seems like a pretty reasonable reaction, and a pretty reasonable way to interact with art, if it’s where you’re coming from. It’s also fine to say, “I love Tolstoy’s prose and his insight, and I can ignore how he treated his wife since it doesn’t affect my reading experience.” But to say that the second is categorically the correct view just seems like you’re arbitrarily decided that your own mix of aesthetic reactions is the best of all possible ones. Are novels more important than how people who are now dead treated each other? I don’t think there’s one answer to that question that’s always right. I’m happy enough to let different people come to different answers, anyway. I don’t see how it oppresses me, or hurts art, if they do.

    I do like Anna Karenina, incidentally (not so much War and Peace, but anyway…) So if someone said “I’m not reading Tolstoy because he treated his wife like crap,” I’d probably say, well, Anna Karenina is good and has a complicated portrayal of female characters; you might enjoy it. I wouldn’t say, by not reading Tolstoy for those reasons, you are contributing to the decay of civilization and violating all the tenets of literary criticism. Because to me that seems unnecessarily polemic and apocalyptic, and also possibly kind of desperate, especially considering that Tolstoy (or Pound, or Alan Moore) are quite established in the canon, and probably can mostly take care of themselves at this point.

    I’d also be curious to hear your response to my point about Alan Moore. People say he’s misogynist because of what he does in his comics, not because of his biography. By your lights, that should be fine methodologically, right? (And, again, fwiw, I actually don’t think Moore is misogynist most of the time, though he has his moments I guess.)

  46. To try to reduce this a little further: “because he was an asshole” is not an aesthetic judgement. Everybody, of course, is entitled to his or her own opinion but a wider critical judgment has to at least make sense to someone who doesn’t share your specific experiences, even if they disagree with it. You find Pound “mostly arrogant, unpleasant, and intolerable as a writer”—”unpleasant” is extremely broad, and accusations of authorial arrogance stick a lot closer to Eliot than to Pound (seriously, only one of those guys wrote his own footnotes). You’ve said that his assholery is wrapped up in his fascism, but your example is pretty weak. If you’re going to slam Pound for interpolating blatant fascism into his poetry, you’re going to have to do a lot better than “In a Station of the Metro.” Here is the entire poem:

    *****

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
    Petals on a wet, black bough .

    *****

    Yes, you can practically HEAR the goose-stepping. Is fascism a bad idea? You bet. But you’ve said above that you like work that is problematic in other ways, so are you privileging racists over fascists? Or, since you’ve said that bad people can produce good work, does your objection to Pound lie somewhere else than in his fascism? Sounds a lot like the latter to me. You would have a stronger argument here if you were right when you said that “fascism and anti-semitism are really central to his work.” Fascism and anti-semitism are *incidental* to his work, at best. You can’t reasonably treat him like, to bring all of this home to “BioShock”, Ayn Rand, because one person wrote ignorant jeremiads defending a stupid political idea, and the other person subscribed to stupid political ideas and wrote “The Cantos.”

    I worked as a customer service cube monkey at a symphony at one point; one of the constant complaints we got was that our subscribers really wanted to hear Wagner and Leonard, our conductor, wouldn’t put him on the season. Leonard was Jewish and older; the music had terrible associations because of what the last generation of his family had been through. That is purely an expression of personal experience and taste, not a criticism of the quality of the music, or even of Wagner, who was a horrible anti-semite. Of course it’s not WRONG to hate Wagner because his music was a tool of the Nazis, it’s just not a point of view that lends itself to a particularly deep reading of Wagner.

    “I’d also be curious to hear your response to my point about Alan Moore.”

    Likewise!

  47. I think my objection to Pound is in the fascism…but I react to other things too. That is, the particular way he uses his fascism I find pretty uncongenial and irritating.

    “That is purely an expression of personal experience and taste, not a criticism of the quality of the music, or even of Wagner, who was a horrible anti-semite.”

    The thing is, it’s really, really not at all clear how you separate personal experience and taste from a criticism of the quality of music. Objective and subjective readings of art are notoriously difficult to unwind.For example, you could certainly talk about Wagner’s music in purely formal terms — but why should purely formal terms form the basis for aesthetic judgment?

    As to how central anti-semitism and fascism are to Pound’s work…that’s an interpretive question on which I think reasonable folks can disagree.

  48. It is certainly hard to separate personal experience and taste from criticism but the word I was trying to emphasize was “purely.” If there’s no engagement with the form of the music at all, it’s kind of useless.

    A good piece of criticism that defends the work without defending the fascism and includes the fascist parts of the work in the defense (Louis Menand is one of the few literary critics I have use for these days): http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_menand

    Incidentally, I quite like Alan Moore. His polyamory is an interesting facet of his own life and there are plenty of odd moments in his work when he puts a weak male hero into a polyamorous relationship that goes badly wrong (he does, after all, have a hero named Allan who has a wife-equivalent and a sexy girlfriend/boyfriend), and the odd confessional passage in “A Small Killing” where he basically describes his own marriage self-destructing is certainly worth looking at. I think there’s stuff in, say, Neonomicon that’s totally inexcusable but I still admire the structure, which is the danger of his work—you can get so caught up in modernist pyrotechnics that you excuse or avoid some of his totally bonkers notions about romantic love and sex (Sophie Bangs and her creepy relationship with Jack, ugh).

  49. I haven’t read Neonomicon; everybody says its crap and I think I’d just rather pass.

    Did I confuse your comments on Alan Moore with someone else’s upthread? if so, my apologies…I’m not operating on as much sleep as I should these days.

    One interesting thing about Moore’s polyamory, potentially, is that it’s a kind of queer identity — or, at the very least, an identity which gives you a very close identification/involvement with queer people (especially bisexual women, in the case of Moore and William Marston.) You can definitely see this in Marston’s work (he’s hyperaware of female/female bonds, and for that matter of lesbian audiences, throughout his work.) I think it’s there in Moore to, at least to some extent.

    “If there’s no engagement with the form of the music at all, it’s kind of useless.”

    See, for me, it depends. Formalist criticism can be great, but it’s not necessary for me to enjoy the criticism.

    There’s something of a self-refuting circle in rejecting all criticism which doesn’t engage formally with the work being criticized, isn’t there? After all, criticism itself is an art form (with a much longer and more illustrious pedigree than comics, fwiw.) Yet you’re rejecting the criticism based entirely on ideological content. Shouldn’t you have to engage with the form of the criticism by your own lights?

  50. I don’t think “Neonomicon” is total shit, I just think it’s a really good short story idea stretched out by Moore over, what 96 pages that includes some of the most upsetting and vile sexual content I (and, I suspect, he) can imagine. What was annoying about it was principally that he’s usually intensely thoughtful and recursive in his use of sexual violence, even when it disturbs me so deeply that I ultimately opt not to even have the book in the house (see also “Lost Girls”). In “Neonomicon” it’s just a crummy meta-commentary on sexism in Lovecraft, which you could accomplish just as easily by saying, “There’s sexism in Lovecraft.” But the punchline is pretty good, even though it’s kind of loudly telegraphed.

    “There’s something of a self-refuting circle in rejecting all criticism which doesn’t engage formally with the work being criticized, isn’t there? After all, criticism itself is an art form (with a much longer and more illustrious pedigree than comics, fwiw.) Yet you’re rejecting the criticism based entirely on ideological content. Shouldn’t you have to engage with the form of the criticism by your own lights?”

    No, man.

  51. I think the way Lovecraft uses (and or is used by) sexism is pretty fascinating, and central to his work. Same with his racism…but maybe that’s another discussion.

    “No, man.”

    Why not? Again, criticism seems way more established as an art form than comics does….

  52. Go ahead and read “Neonomicon,” then, by all means. His project in that book is to put a psychologically troubled, abused white woman and a black man into contact with the Lovecraft creatures, human and non-, and see how things shake out. The personalities are fairly interesting and well-drawn and the rape scene goes on for page after page after page. I enjoyed the complexity of the gloss on Lovecraft overall but with specific reference to the sex, I thought it did not justify the depths of depravity, human and otherwise, to which it sank with a disturbing zeal.

    I’m not “rejecting the criticism based entirely on ideological content,” as you assert above. I’ve explained this several times, I think.

  53. I have to say that I’m impressed that this page contains such lengthy discussions and yet no one has been severely insulted.

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