| | Two things have been occupying a good deal of my time and imagination, lately: The Faerie Queene, and Battlestar Galactica.
Both are exceedingly long, rather challenging works of imaginative fiction that delve fearlessly (okay, Battlestar Galactica does pull some punches, unlike Spenser) into the mind and heart of society and civilization. And both are, or have been seen as explicitly political, and concerned with the question of empire and the amount of viciousness a government is allowed in order to procure peace and justice.
Traditionally, the two are read as polar opposites.
BSG is, of course, like "all Hollywood" (as long as you exclude Pixar, Mel Gibson, and a number of other outliers) trends liberal. And of course the beginning of season 3 is one high point of their liberal focus. Humanity is colonized by cylons, who themselves want to institute a new, more humane and cooperative regime, but are willing to face just about any death toll to form the wastes of humanity into a governable civilization. The good guys, of course, are with humanity and against the cylons....
....and, of course, in desperate times a subgroup decides that their most effective strategies are to use suicide-bombers and target cylons and sell-outs alike. Coming during the current war, the allegory has been read as pretty straightforward: resistance fighters and suicide bombers are humans too, and are driven to such methods by desperation and military oppression. Bush bad terrorists good.
Spenser is, of course, the reverse. His book on "Justice" involves the expected allegorical personification of justice, who solves moral quandries with intelligence and grace. It also involves his pet iron robot Talus, who slaughters men, women and children by the thousands (and with absolutely no hesitation or regret.) Talus isn't a hero, exactly, but in some way he is a superego--it's fine and good for justice to be set out, and in fact it is necessary. But unless you're willing to go through the practical injustices of slaughter and unrestrained force, no one is ever going to follow your program. It is (as has often been put out) not insignificant that Spenser was an Englishman in Ireland--shortly thereafter he wrote a erudite and intricate analysis of foreign policy recommending the decimation of the Irish (through both slaughter and starvation) in order to civilize Ireland. Justice good, peace is obtained through superior firepower and the willingness to follow through with an invasion.
But I wonder--are both readings really getting at what is going on? Can we convienently group authors into "hawks" and "doves," and relegate the rest of their writings to the support of their independent ideologies?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is "yes." As art distributed in the public forums of their perspective times, both the creators of BSG and Edmund Spenser knew damn well what sort of effect their writings would have. That is, the former humanizes an enemy and therefore weakens our national resolve to kill them for their own good. And the latter shoves the reader up against the impotence of any form of justice that is so bound by its own conscience as to never respond to inhumane violence with inhumane violence. As Spenser later wrote, "better is a mischief [a purposeful evil done by a government] then an inconvenience [a situation in which the rule of law is prohibited because of civil unrest.]"
The answer, as well, is "no." Read in their entirety, the two works offer resistance to simplistic interpretations of their prima facia position.
In BSG, of course, both the political (former Education Secretary and now President Roslyn) and military (Admiral Adama) leadership are repeatedly forced to live in a darkly Spenserian world--from the very first episode, when thousands of civilians are killed at Adama's command, simply because that is the only way to ensure the survival of the human race (they are on a nuclear-powered ship hijacked by Cylons and headed towards the fleet.) Ethical lines are constantly blurred, enemies are arrested, tortured, and executed without trial, all simply because civilization must be maintained if human survival is to continue. The fact that such atrocities are never treated as commonplace or above reproach is besides the point--contrary to the Bush-bad-terrorists-good impression, BSG is constantly in dialog with the way in which liberal debates about human rights are only possible in a place kept safe by military and executive violence.
Nor is Spenser less complicated (in fact, he is quite a bit more subtle--but then, he had the benefit of a better rhetorical education and more time for composition and rewriting.) Talus, notably, is neither human nor noble; it is an impersonal force, whose vicious slaughter of enemies nearly always exceeds the immediate mandate that unleashed his power. His scenes are uncomfortable to modern readers not because we have progressed but because they are intended to be uncomfortable. Throughout the rest of the text Spenser valorizes knightly combat, aliging it with St. Paul's description of the armor of God and the abstract allegory of Christian-as-soldier. But Talus is something else entirely. Talus doesn't seek quarter, he doesn't use a Shield of Faith or the Sword of the Lord. Talus harvests bodies with a giant flail, leaves them in bleeding masses on the ground, and continues slaughtering people until reigned in by a horrified justice.
So what, then, do these stories have to say about Guantanamo Bay, about the continual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, about the possible invasion of Iran, about the nature of surveliance in wartime? Nothing, perhaps, since they're escapist fantasies. And everything. Both texts offer a remarkably similar entrance into the issues, and a remarkable stubbornness to stay comfortably in the realm of easy and clear decisions. If you pay attention, they should make you think twice about the way you vote, the way you talk, and even the way you think about political issues. But in both cases, I'm not sure that the statement "the author would vote for resolution X" is all that relevant to the way we understand the text--or even the way the creator(s), working in the playground of our civilization and its ideas, want us to understand their creations. |
| | Posted 3/20/2009 2:15 PM - 6 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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