Fathers and Sons and Science

Beyond all the commentary on generational relationships, what struck me from the beginning is the presentation of a "science nerd" at the center of this novel. There is some rather convincing details of medicine, heck, even more than any Chekhov I have read.

The medical student Bazarov, sitting in an awkward social position between aristocrats and peasants, is surprisingly modern. He could be a computer geek, a silicon valley dude, or a climate change scientist in today's novels: smart and blunt and egocentric, probably somewhere "on the spectrum." His wholesale rejection of "romanticism" and his cold rationality stood alone among the poetic and heroic characters of the time. The irony vibrating beneath the clashes between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich sometimes threatens to become overt satire. Of course, Turgenev isn't necessarily endorsing a lack of all delicate feelings and social grace, but it is obvious that he feels, like Bazarov, an impatience with the sentimentality and histrionics in Russian literature.

I don't know whether Turgenev was aware of The Origin of Species, the book that shocked the world in 1859, but I have a suspicion that he had at least heard about it. He was fluent in English, German, and French and chose to stay out of Russia for many years. He was known to be skeptical toward religion, which was uncommon for his generation. Beyond the sympathetic portrayal of Bazarov, the novel is permeated with an attitude of mild distain for the traditional Russian culture and social conventions. Turgenev is looking at his motherland with the eye of an expatriate who has digested and excreted much of the nationalistic cool-aid. 

It was said that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy did not get along with Turgenev in real life. Who would have guessed?!

Fathers and Sons and Duels

 

So I have finally gotten around to read Turgenev. The impetus was seeing on Kindle's list how short Fathers and Sons is --- Are you sure it is not a thousand pages?! Now I can claim to have read classical (translated) Russian literature without breaking a sweat. I can hardly believe it! 

OK I kid. That's a bit of exaggeration. I have read Chekhov's plays and they too were easily accessible to plebs like me. They even made me laugh. There is something similar between Turgenev and Chekhov. Perhaps it's the restrained sarcasm and satire, largely on the "Russian national character" itself. 

My feelings about Fathers and Sons aside, one episode in the novel gave me a real jolt. Around 80% of the novel, the main character, Bazarov, a medical student, was challenged to a duel by an aristocrat of an older generation (people who are now fashionably referred to as "Boomers") on a provincial estate. Turgenev narrated the episode with barely concealed contempt. Nevertheless it was a shock for me to realize that duels between men were commonly practiced and socially accepted less than 200 years ago. Well, you know, men from the civilized, educated class (unlike the unwashed illiterate peasants and craftsmen) would ceremonially fight and kill each other in public to resolve personal disputes ranging from extramarital affairs to political differences. 

I mulled over what it must have been like living in a society like that. It's not like I have never heard of duels before or was unaware that Pushkin was killed in a duel. I grew up reading Alexandre Dumas' adventure novels. As recent as a few years ago, the popular musical Hamilton depicted not one but two duels for blah blah blah reasons. It was a damned normal social interaction. Although the formalized and ritualized practice of duels was specific to European cultures, individual male humans have been brawling with each other since the dawn of society. Nevertheless, I have never thought about the general state of social norms for everyone else, if high-class men could kill each other legally in duels. Surely, women and lower class men in such a society would also have a more relaxed (? for lack of a better word) attitude about violence and death compared with today.

It is nearly impossible for a person to imagine living outside of his or her current life. The modern society, in which violence is heavily centralized and regulated, is only in existence for less than two centuries, and that process is shorter in some places than in others. I wonder whether that is long enough to habituate all men in a life without frequent and intimate bloodletting activities. A few days ago the internet is abuzz with a video of a man shooting and killing another man on his front yard in Lubbock, Texas.

In the grand scheme of history, a duration of one to two centuries is but a blip, probably insufficient to obliterate a ubiquitous culture of bloodthirst. What is the future of human violence? Will it go the way of legal duels, abandoned and forgotten, or will it revive itself in new methods and appearances? 

Fathers and Sons is a novel about a transitional time, when serfdom had just been abolished in 1861 (almost the same time as the slave emancipation in the US in 1863) and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen to the social order. The past is not dead and much of it is not even past, but still changes keep happening, casting human tendencies into their new incarnations. There is a pervasive feeling of despair and resignation in the 19th century Russian literature that the Russian people and the massive imperial bureaucracy would always remain the same, despite all the talks of ideals and reforms by the intelligentsia. The subsequent events have supported this feeling through today. Russia remains the same in spirit if not on the surface. 

Not only Russia, of course. 

Xenocide

 

I was so so about Ender's Game, really liked Speaker for the Dead, and the third book of this series, Xenocide, has left me with mixed feelings. 

Orson Scott Card is a sophisticated science fiction writer and has built a detailed and reasonably logical universe with 3 intelligent species as well as various technologies. Given that these novels were written during the early days of the internet, some of the connectivity-related elements are fairly prescient.  

There is an issue that has bothered me from the start, but it is not easy to pin down. On the surface level, the problem is the main character, Andrew Wiggin, who never seems human or possesses distinctive human qualities. Rather, he is the embodiment of the omnipotent fantasy, also known as a "superman" figure. Supporting characters are given human flaws and traits amidst family secrets, which worked better in Speaker for the Dead but becomes an intractable squabbling mess in Xenocide. It seems to suggest that the author is not incapable of delving into humanity but is clearly not all that interested in it.

The problem becomes clearer as we are introduced to a genetically enhanced subspecies of humanity on the planet Path, who are presumably Chinese. From the start, Orson Scott Card has always been more interested in superhumans than humans. In his world, a small group of individuals with superhuman intelligence determine the fates of a planet, many planets, the universe, and other species of organisms. The story is always centered around their superpowers, but we never see the consequences and implications of these superpowers to the masses on the ground level. Actually, the only consequences we see are consistently favorable to Ender. There is no animosity between the Hive Queen and her species' "ender"; in fact the text suggests that she loves him. It does not make sense but hey she's alien so I guess it's all OK then. 

The masses of humans and pequeninos are presented as stupid and mindless mobs who cannot be told the true causes of their extinction or survival. No, they are all too stupid to understand and must be kept in total ignorance for their own good. The masses are also presented as the evil bureaucracy of Starway Congress. Even though there is one character in Xenocide who appears to have risen from the proletariats to be of equal intelligence as "the chosen ones," she is later revealed to be also genetically destined to be superhuman. 

It appears that Orson Scott Card is very much aware of his elitism and reluctant to put it on full display. Nevertheless, the theme is that we have to trust in the benevolence of a small group of superhumans, who are superior to and the rightful rulers of the faceless masses. As such, the scale of these stories are both grand and puny, with handful of persons across the universe controlling the life and death of supposedly millions of people and nonhuman organisms, although they exist as more or less an abstract notion. In a way the sequels remain true to the video-game nature of the original Ender's Game. They are supposed to be about real lives and real stakes of the universe but remain on paper or in cyberspace, floating above the earth of each of the planets.

One could argue that the vast majority of people in the world believe themselves to be superior to others, or at least more special than others. Perhaps not as many indulge in his own world-savior fantasies, but the prevalence is particularly high in the sci-fi/fantasy circles. In that sense Orson Scott Card is not that special. And some readers no doubt identify with the god-like patriarch that is Ender. 

So the flip side of the superman power-trip fantasy is its patriarchal subtext. The most disturbing portrayal of an intelligent life form is a character known as Jane. She (yes, the character, who is a "ghost in the shell", is deliberately given a face of young Caucasian female) is the worst kind of male fantasy of an ideal female. The author has enough self-awareness to refrain from creating an all-submissive, boot-licking human female character with absolute devotion to one man, but he lets himself go all-out on the "artificial" female character, because he can always disclaim her humanity. Clever and, in a way, honest. The character itself (I would not call it "her," which is neither credibly human nor logically computational) though is pretty nauseating.