Further things
Jul. 22nd, 2007 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerStill processing HP7....one thing i can say is that, of all the possible wrong answers to the question of Snape, she came up with the least wrong. (i don't think she could have done anything with him that would have seemed "right" to me at this stage. The answer she finally produced will do, though.)
i have also read a book called "The End of Mr Y" by Scarlett Thomas. Once again a standard sf trope, the "inner landscape" of consciousness and its invasion by other minds, is deployed as though the author had only just invented it. It's quite well done in its way, but i had a few problems with it. For one thing, i hate stories that end "And then I understand" when i haven't the foggiest notion what the protagonist understands, or why, or what just happened. (Yes, it's told in first person present tense, which is all right as long as the narrator/protagonist doesn't spend the whole book being tired, scared, hungry, cold, afraid, angry, guilty, and back to tired without a noticeable break. Yes, she does.) To be fair, my lack of understanding may be down to me, because an awful lot of this story depends on one's understanding of the theories of Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida.
i have problems with Derrida, specifically, because i've seen a number of quotes from his work which have been cited as something incredibly meaningful and significant, and i couldn't make them be anything more than nonsensical cod-philosophy, wordplay for the sake of it, ideas about writing that actually made me angry with the untruthfulness of them. (i'm not saying he was wrong or lying or that i know more than he did...i *am* saying that i found his ideas to be at variance with my experience of the truth, and in a way which i found unpleasant.) It isn't my field, of course, and maybe if i had started at the beginning and come to Derrida by the usual route i would find nothing unacceptable in his ideas at all. Like a little medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle, as the song says. But my prejudice against him is deeply rooted enough, i think, to have got in the way of my understanding some of the core concepts of this story. It also didn't help that i picked up a completely non-existent set of clues at the beginning and spent most of the book waiting for a plot twist that never materialised. Duh.
Anyway...there are some nice bits in The End Of Mr Y, enough at any rate to keep me reading through to the unsatisfactory epilogue. i like the idea (whether it's valid or not) that quantum theory, rigorously applied, leads inexorably to one of two conclusions: either god exists (as the outside observer necessary, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, to collapse the waveform of the primary particle and cause the Big Bang) or the multiverse exists (in all possible states of bangedness, unbangedness, and whatever lies in between). Or, of course, both. It all gets a bit studenty in places, with waffly speculations about thought being matter being time being distance being this being that being the other, but that i think comes with the territory (or the Derridary, possibly).
There are, i am sure, people on my flist who will enjoy this book much more than i did. If they didn't know about it before reading this post, my work here is done. :)
i have also read a book called "The End of Mr Y" by Scarlett Thomas. Once again a standard sf trope, the "inner landscape" of consciousness and its invasion by other minds, is deployed as though the author had only just invented it. It's quite well done in its way, but i had a few problems with it. For one thing, i hate stories that end "And then I understand" when i haven't the foggiest notion what the protagonist understands, or why, or what just happened. (Yes, it's told in first person present tense, which is all right as long as the narrator/protagonist doesn't spend the whole book being tired, scared, hungry, cold, afraid, angry, guilty, and back to tired without a noticeable break. Yes, she does.) To be fair, my lack of understanding may be down to me, because an awful lot of this story depends on one's understanding of the theories of Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida.
i have problems with Derrida, specifically, because i've seen a number of quotes from his work which have been cited as something incredibly meaningful and significant, and i couldn't make them be anything more than nonsensical cod-philosophy, wordplay for the sake of it, ideas about writing that actually made me angry with the untruthfulness of them. (i'm not saying he was wrong or lying or that i know more than he did...i *am* saying that i found his ideas to be at variance with my experience of the truth, and in a way which i found unpleasant.) It isn't my field, of course, and maybe if i had started at the beginning and come to Derrida by the usual route i would find nothing unacceptable in his ideas at all. Like a little medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle, as the song says. But my prejudice against him is deeply rooted enough, i think, to have got in the way of my understanding some of the core concepts of this story. It also didn't help that i picked up a completely non-existent set of clues at the beginning and spent most of the book waiting for a plot twist that never materialised. Duh.
Anyway...there are some nice bits in The End Of Mr Y, enough at any rate to keep me reading through to the unsatisfactory epilogue. i like the idea (whether it's valid or not) that quantum theory, rigorously applied, leads inexorably to one of two conclusions: either god exists (as the outside observer necessary, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, to collapse the waveform of the primary particle and cause the Big Bang) or the multiverse exists (in all possible states of bangedness, unbangedness, and whatever lies in between). Or, of course, both. It all gets a bit studenty in places, with waffly speculations about thought being matter being time being distance being this being that being the other, but that i think comes with the territory (or the Derridary, possibly).
There are, i am sure, people on my flist who will enjoy this book much more than i did. If they didn't know about it before reading this post, my work here is done. :)
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 07:21 pm (UTC)But the solution given, in which Snape was forced to go against his natural inclinations (which never changed) by a power he was never equipped to understand, but which in other circumstances might have saved him, lent him a little complexity. He was never a hero, anti or otherwise, but he wasn't the clichéd villain either.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 05:35 pm (UTC)