Obviously: SPOILERS and speculation for The Second Apocalypse.
Though be warned; this is going to get ugly and it'll be very hard to digest without a receptive attitude.
In a few words: this is about the rape of, violence against, dismissal and suppression of the female characters, and the treatment of women as a whole in the Three Seas society.
-----
I'm not talking about the acts of the Inchoroi here. I've made mention of why they are as vile as they are in the 'Personal: Road of Faith and The Second Apocalypse' post (number three). There's no need to address that here. Even so; something worth mentioning; in the scenes where they are in the picture, they tend to focus more on men than on women.
Regardless, they are not in the picture here in this post. They fall squarely under the religious aspect of the series and everything they do must fall under the 'Damnation' explanation. They are the orcs, as unmitigatedly dark as even Tolkien would not make them, but, dark without being a byproduct; they are dark, because they are the heart of the matter.
-----
For the longest time, I looked at these scenes in Scott Bakker's Philosophical Fantasy series with a kind of puzzled fascination.I couldn't quite understand why Scott Bakker, who in every other way seemed to have a reason for doing what he did, and who seemed so self-aware everywhere else, would so monumentally fuck up when it comes to so volatile a subject. The mistreatment of women is a topic that tends to blow up in this day and age, regardless of whatever the context, or even regardless of who touches on the subject. There's an overexposure to it that tends to raise the hackles of even the most progressively-minded bystander, an immediate knee-jerk response, and don't deny it: you felt it too just now.
So, why would Bakker endanger his magnum opus by putting this troubling element into it, and more than that; make it such a prominent element of his fiction?
There is of course a reason for it (apart from hubris and a pathological need to be as exacting and all-encompassing as possible, of course).
From the get-go I've looked in utter bewilderment at Bakker's claims that the Second Apocalypse is pro-feminist at heart.
Usually this statement receives a rather subdued response, as people don't really want to tackle that particular line of conversation, but more often, I've seen it unthinkingly dismissed in furious, frothing scorn, followed by the throwing of bile and vitriol on his work and character.
Obviously that's the wrong action to take.
But I've also seen people outright dismiss these claims of misogyny, and discard them as fantasy fiction or bury them beneath labels, or beneath the merits of the rest of his work. And that's also a strange response to have, because there's obviously some really problematic elements here.
In these novels, women are mistreated. This is depicted and I needed to understand why, why this element is here. There needs to be a reason for it, a goal it's ultimately working towards. Because I am me, I couldn't let this go, and, in general, books who can not give me an ultimate reason, an absolute coherence, for all of its elements will be deemed as failures in my eyes. I'm looking at you American Gods...
Of course, after doing the Road of Faith Post, well along the way actually; I came to the conclusion that Bakker's books were not as I previously had thought; a reaction to Tolkien like the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but that, like Pullman's Dark Materials, it was in fact a reactionary work to the Bible.
Specifically; to the Bible's archaic rules and tenets, to its indoctrination, to its... yes indeed: its treatment of women, to the sidelining and to the punishments: Women can't be eldest/leaders in the church, stone an adultress, but don't kill the man, submit to your husband...
The tenets that show that in this patriarchic society women are viewed as second-class citizens.
And all of a sudden. Bakker's claims of pro-feminism start to make more sense.
Do understand that feminism is not the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter, besides being a look at the power of faith, is shining a light on the hypocrisy of the basis underlining Judeo-Christian values as the Bible lays them out to be; the idea of salvation and exaltation for a chosen minority, and everlasting pain for humanity's ultimate majority; those who choose wrong.
Bakker looks at religion, a society built on this type of religion, and only along the way hits on the side-effect; that all these things are influenced by a work written, if not by the minds of, then at least by the hands of men, and with all the inherent bias that goes along with that.
So here we go.
The status Quo
Of course in the Prince of Nothing trilogy, things start out this way as well: Women as second-class citizens. But the further we get, the less it actually remains so. Granted, it takes a while to get there.
Bakker, for starters, explores the role and position of the woman in the Three Seas society by the use of three female archetypes; Maiden, Mother and Crone.
More than that, he also goes a step further and also makes of them; Virgin, Whore and Succubus.
These archetypes exist at the heart of the characters of Serwe, Esmenet and Istriya.
These three beautiful women are also endowed with notable variations in intelligence.
Serwe
Serwe is the most problematic of these.
Maiden. Virgin. Slave.
But virgin as in untested, naive, innocent, and dumb.
Serwe, unfortunately, is the least gifted of all the female characters. She has looks, but little in the way of cunning or knowledge, nor if she had, the tools to use them, and because of this she suffers the worst abuse that the world throws at women. She is fresh off the destruction of her former owner's home and she is raped repeatedly before we've even met her. And this will continue to happen for a while, but as a tool of manipulation between two men.
Being dumb and only pretty, she can only be used. She can not dig herself out of the mess she's ended up in. She has only her charm and so tries to use it on her tormentor. But as it is Cnaiur who claims ownership of her, the same Cnaiur who is obsessed with and aware of any and all attempts at manipulation due to his own tormented past, this backfires. And he in turn escalates the hardship when he attempts to use her to rebel against the manipulations of Kellhus. And it is only when Kellhus steps in, to see how far he can go with his manipulations, and to experiment with how much he can influence people, that she is put in a better situation. There is stuff that happens along the way, but in the end, she is sacrificed on the altar of Kellhus' ambition.
Ostensibly, Serwe is the ultimate victim of the patriarchy. Hitched as she is to Kellhus and his fate, her death comes with a whole sheaf of raw symbolism, most clear of which are Example, and Martyr.
The punished wife, joining the transgressing husband in death. Woman in flames. Woman above her station...
One could argue that Kellhus, with all his capabilities, could have stopped the events that lead to their joint crucifixion.
But events had already spiraled out of control, and in the Prince of Nothing trilogy at least, it is his greatest gamble and the one to lead him nearest to death in his whole life. It is also the one to gift him with immediate status and followers... and the thing which will alter everything that comes after.
But in any case, it is wrong to label Kellhus as a man, as he is not governed by the male mindset, impulse, or even anything resembling human pathology.
Kellhus is other, one who is outside of humanity, and its inherent bias.
Serwe is the most problematic of these three female characters, and was always going to be, because she was always meant to be.
Innocence personified, she was always meant to die as an example, without cause and unwarranted, as the symbol for the worst fate a woman can have in a male-dominated society.
Raped, abused, manipulated, murdered, sacrificed. All of these.
Istriya
Istriya is, for me least, uninteresting, and the least problematic of the three.
Crone. Empress. Succubus.
I use the term Succubus here because of what it implies, as in Wrong/Immoral/Unclean and Seducer, not because Bakker uses this actual creature in his story.
Istriya was once a powerful ruler that at the start of the trilogy had already been marginalized by her son. She is intelligent, but realized when her son was born, that the only way for her to hold on to power was by manipulating him. This fails in the end, because she settles on a clumsy and overt manipulation, using her sexual wiles in order to make him do her bidding.
But with age comes insight and as her son levers her hand off the scales of power definitively she is more than ever marginalized.
She meets her end alone and unwitnessed in her son's palace at the hands of a skin-spy assassin.
Representative of an intelligent woman in a world of men, she latches on to power and, for a while at least, builds something for herself, cleanly, on her own merit.
But this is before we know her, and the Istriya of the trilogy is a character built on compromise, and steeped in manipulation and immorality.
As I said; unproblematic, because she is so very easy to denounce.
Esmenet
Now here we come to the most interesting one of the three and the one through who we will follow Bakker's pro-feminist designs.
Whore. Mother. Lover.
Esmenet is second only to Kellhus in intelligence out of all the characters in the Second Apocalypse.
And then only because Kellhus is somewhat of a walking Deus Ex Machina, though this is incredible dismissive of the concepts and ideas at the heart of Kellhus' character, he is the lynchpin, after all, for this story to work. He is a meta-protagonist in a world of normal characters, able to see, literally, behind the facade of the world and the faces of its inhabitants, and able to act on what he sees, as he is the hand from outside, reaching in.
The mother in the system of three archetypes, Esmenet has some obvious history behind her: I won't touch on that here.
Literally marked by the snake tattoo, symbol of the whore, in mock imitation of the goddess of love's tattoo (covert female empowerment), which gives men the license to subjugate her at will, but for a price, and if she's without a man to back her up, it occasionally means she won't be paid, as the physically strong take what they can get away with, after all.
The relationship of Esmenet and Achamian is the emotional heart of the trilogy.
Esmenet loves Achamian, for who he is, for the comfort he brings and because of the natural chemistry between them.
But also, and crucially important: Because he is a direct line into the games of power played in the Three Seas. Achamian is a Mandate Schoolman, one of the most powerful sorcerers in the Three Seas, and more than that; he is one of their spies, and as such; he is intimately in the know.
Via him, Esmenet is able to glimpse and ponder on the moving of power in the world of men, her eyes and ears on the shifting of balances and the politicking. It is this that she loves most of all.
And then of course comes the climax of the Prince of Nothing trilogy; the emotional slap in the face that Bakker delivers on its very last page: Esmenet's Choice.
It is Esmenet's story finally coming to a place where she is able to choose the thing she had desired all her life; to be at the center of power. And though she loves Achamian, she still chooses to remain at Kellhus' side. Because if she were to choose to go with her former lover she would be outcast once more, and this time irredeemably distant from that position that she craved, in fact further away from power, and even society, than ever before as she would have to follow him into the wilderness, and become a pariah along his side.
So, though it wrenches her heart, she stays where she is.
She can only look on in silent pleading as the man she loves demands that she gives up her dream; her ambition; to be at the center of things, and to waste all her talent, talent perfectly suited for this new position for her in a world that is on the cusp of revolution. She would have had to give that up. And so, even if there's a choice, it isn't much of one and she can really do nothing else. It would go against her very nature. So, even though it seems as if she's choosing between two men, she is in reality choosing for herself.
And then... 19 years pass.
Evolution
Almost two decades later, the revolution has well and truly come to pass and the entire Three Seas society has altered completely.
When Kellhus came to power, he reformed virtually every strata of Three Seas society, and one of the things he completely revolutionized is the acceptance of Witches.
In a world where Sorcerers are denounced by holy writ, as blasphemous, because of the ruling patriarchy; witches are deemed even lower than them. A woman in possession of literal world-altering power is a huge threat to the patriarchy after all.
Look at what the Bible says about sorcery: Exodus 22:18 "Do not allow a sorceress to live." (Schofield Study Bible) Stated colloquially: Burn the witch.
This was indeed a common practice in the three seas. The writings of the Tusk state it, verbatim, as if one needed more proof for the ideas at the heart of this series. And though not a lot of attention is brought to this in the Prince of Nothing Trilogy, as, really, there was already enough fuel for the fire, it was left by the wayside. But in the Aspect-Emperor cycle, things are a bit different. We are introduced to the idea that this was indeed ruthlessly done, once upon a time.
And look at her finally revealing what she is in the disturbing incest scene. It's not her brother who takes the lead, it is her; fully in power, in control, showing Sorweel her ultimate disdain for him. she is not yet another weak woman needing help, no, she wants this, she is this. He is the one who does not belong. Part Dunyain arrogance, part woman's disdain for the puffed-up, self-important machismo of a young man.
5 books in and the Swayal Sisterhood is the most powerful school, the religious underground is led by a woman who is directly empowered by the gods, Mimara is the one who forces Achamian out of his hiding hole, and Esmenet, in effect, rules the empire.
The books start out with women subjugated and frequently debased, in imitation of what is still our own mess of a society. Then the series graduates to man and women equal under the rule of the Aspect-Emperor.
Only possible because this new state is delivered by one who looks from outside of humanity, and who wishes for the most capable in it to attain his goals. True equality, delivered from a source outside of it, because humanity will never attain it on its own.
Future...
And then ultimately, somewhere down the line, when Kellhus, the hand on the scales of equality, is gone, Three Seas society will backslide yet again into one gender subjugating the other; artistically ideal would be to let the scales slide the other way, with who was previously the subjugator becoming the subjugated. And there are already seeds of this in the Aspect Emperor, with the power being pooled onto those women who work from either behind the throne or from in the shadows, presumably those who won't be consumed by the calamities to come.
But maybe not. Because I haven't even read the Great ordeal or the Unholy Consult yet.
I should've jumped into those by now, and its a miracle I've not been spoiled by anything yet. That certainly can't last, and I'll admit, I've even been tempted to just go ahead and spoil it for myself, see if am right about both the religious and the feminist aspects. But for now I've held off on that. And as for reading... well, there's always something else first, huh?
In any case: When I finally do get round to it there'll be another write-up (or 2), where I'll revisit the Faith and Feminist themes, and you'll either get a triumphant 'I told you so', or a whole bunch of annoyed swearing.
-----
Small note: This initially went out unedited, and it's the worst write-up I've ever posted online.
It has since been edited. Quite a bit. The ideas are the same, though they have been re-structured, rephrased and built up more where necessary.
The problem here was that this post was very much a case of getting it out there, because this idea had been stewing around for such a long time but, since it's such a volatile subject, I didn't really want to broach it, and so get that attention on myself. But it needed doing, as I didn't see anyone defending the series like this anywhere else, and I had made a desultory and half-hearted attempt of it in a previous post; so, to get myself going, I did a rough draft, and proceeded to slowly edit it every once in a while.
Then, on a day of not much food, nothing immediately to hand, in temporary forced isolation, boredom and loads of coffee, I posted it without too much thought and in the throes of hopeful idiocy.
Then, after I had exercised and eaten properly, reviewed what I had put out and, in prompt desperation, went to work.
Esmenet and the Evolution part of the write-up do not have enough yet; as that story and aspect is not done, and I am vague on the themes of the second set of books as I've only read it once.
I'll only be able to revisit this when I re-read the Aspect-Emperor cycle, though I don't have immediate plans for that yet. Likely it'll just jump to the front when I'm feeling discontented with reading in general.
But for now, this is pretty damn done.
No comments:
Post a Comment