Lord Sunday
Mar. 20th, 2010 15:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyNothing says "the vernal equinox" like a review of Lord Sunday with special attention to humanism in The Keys to the Kingdom. If you're me, anyway. Happy turning of the seasons, all! The weather is gorgeous by me; it's such a nice change.
Nix, Garth. Lord Sunday. New York: Scholastic Books, 2010.
This is the seventh and final volume of Nix's The Keys to the Kingdom series. While I think the individual volumes are ever so slightly uneven, the series overall is pretty damn awesome, and I liked it quite a lot. It's definitely better than The Seventh Tower, Nix' other series for middle readers (though TST is pretty cool too).
I was very disappointed at the ending of the sixth book, Superior Saturday, and was quite interested to see how Nix would wind up the series in this volume. Basically, it was awesome, I thought; I really liked the ending, and while everything necessarily is compressed to an extent (I was really quite surprised at how the book is not a doorstop… *pointedly does not look at JKR and Deathly Hollows), I think Nix manages to do justice to almost all of the various plot threads he kept running. I also think, given that the book is dedicated to Roger Zelazny and Philip Jose Farmer, that I am possibly missing resonances throughout the series by not having read either author. Ah well.
Also, I ♥ Suzy Blue. She is really, really quite amazing. And I enjoyed Nix' explicit quotation of Rodin's The Thinker rather more than I ought.
So, the ending. I am a big fan of people breaking the rules, and I really liked that both Nix and Arthur managed to have their cake and eat it too. As a reader I would not have been satisfied if Arthur had somehow managed to reject his role as the New Architect, but the ending of his life as a human boy wouldn't have satisfied me either. But since Arthur is the New Architect, he can do as he pleases, and he does. I liked it, though I imagine human!Arthur is going to return to the House eventually; I can't help but wonder whether he'll be pleased. (Also, this aspect of the denouement really obviously reminded me of the ending to N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms).
I also thought it was interesting that a) the Will was the remnant of the Architect; b) that the Will was murdering the Trustees, out of revenge; and c) that the Architect's intent with the Will was explicitly annihilation. Actually, there's another point of comparison between Nix and Jemisin in that the Architect created the Old One out of herself, and then had children with the Old One. I suppose that's what you do when you're (a) god.
I was also interested to note how, except for Arthur, most of the principal cast in Keys is female--Suzy, Leaf, the Will, three of the seven Trustees, the Architect herself, just off the top of my head, to say nothing of various Denizens and humans, and Arthur's mother. I wonder what the books would have been like had Arthur been Arthura. Yes, I know that's not actually a name. Arthuriane?
Okay, so, I wrote the above and then I went to work and went running after work and while I was thinking during those activities I realized that Nix' citation of The Thinker is a clear gesture towards humanism (and pretty high humanism at that), and I wouldn't be me if I didn't jump at the chance to dissect humanism like Lilith on the table in Eva. So, humanism! Because clearly, in a story that interacts with and transforms so many founding myths of the Western tradition (principally Prometheus and YHWH in Genesis), humanism is at stake--and maybe posthumanism too.
So, just for the sake of making sure everyone's on the same page, humanism is one of the foundational ideologies of Western civilization since the Renaissance. Parts of it stretch back to ancient Greece and Rome, but parts are post-classical innovations; for this discussion, it's important to note that humanism essentially posits that the subject is a rational, able-bodied, white, straight, cis-gendered, Christian man. At the beginning of the Renaissance the most important characteristics were rational and man, but as time went on and humanism encountered various challenges, the other implicit qualifications became more explicit. The reason the humanist subject is a man is because the humanist subject is self-contained, has a native integrity; women, who are ipso facto sexually receptive and furthermore bleed every month (thus losing bodily integrity naturally), are thus excluded from being subjects, and the same goes for gay men for the same reasons about supposed sexual receptivity. (And in fact excluding gay men from subjecthood is a post-classical idea, though I couldn't give you a date; the ancient world didn't schematize male sexuality in quite the same way, though the idea about women was basically the same. It still boggles me that this is the reason for thousands of years of women being oppressed in European civilization. It's so dumb. Anyway.) And yes, that paragraph was off-citation.
So, okay, back to Garth Nix, clearly humanism is seriously called into question (because remember Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican: God is an old white dude, just like Adam is a young white dude) by the fact that the Architect is always and explicitly a woman. Yup, God's a woman. I still think that's so awesome (see icon). Now, on the surface of it Arthur being a white male would seem to indicate that Keys depicts what happens when women are placed in positions of authority: things fall apart, and it's up to (white) men to put things right. But it's crucial to note that Arthur falls fairly short of "able-bodied", at least until his transformation into a Denizen; it's stated multiple times throughout the series, by Arthur and by others, that he was chosen as Heir by the Will explicitly because he was a wimpy kid: he would have died of that asthma attack on the athletic field in Mister Monday, period. Now, inasmuch as the humanist subject is self-contained, the fact that Arthur's disability (which, yes, is cured by the end of the series; human!Arthur doesn't have it anymore) leads him to depend so heavily on his inhaler, almost as if it were an appendage, or a supplement, to his body, is straying pretty close to the line of both sides of posthumanism. Posthumanism, very broadly speaking, is two interrelated ideas: 1) that everyone who doesn't fit the definition of a humanist subject is a subject in their own right regardless; and 2) that as humanity's imbrication with technology increases, technology will inevitably soften the borders of the subject such that the subject is no longer self-contained (this relates to 2b: non-humans like robots can be subjects too!): in other words, cyborgs are people. Inasmuch as he is not able-bodied and does not have complete bodily integrity, Arthur is arguably a posthumanist subject.
This is a good place to mention that as far as I can recall (since I didn't do a series reread prior to reading this last book) most of the characters in Keys are white, either explicitly or implicitly, which is just disappointing, Fred from the Army of the Architect and Chang from the human army being the two exceptions I can think of off-hand. (Also, question: Arthur's country reads as pretty much Australia to me, a U.S.-ian, for various reasons; what do Australians and people from Britain and Ireland think?)
I will grant you immediately that Arthur doesn't actually go very far into posthumanism (maybe up to an ankle, or one of the seven segments on the crocodile ring--isn't the crocodile a symbol of rebirth, come to think of it?), but it's important to note that the character most associated with reason and rationality in the books is in fact Arthur's mother, the scientist Dr. Emily Pendragon. And yes she has very little screen time, but she shows up in Lord Sunday (though doesn't speak), and given the shortness of the book the fact that she appears at all clearly indicates her significance. By the same token, as I said above, Keys is full of female characters--besides Suzy and Leaf, Arthur's right and left hands, and the Will and the Architect, and Dr. Pendragon, three of the seven Trustees (including the main villain of the series) are women, including the Trustee most associated with science, Lady Friday. I would be happier if Leaf were rescuing her Uncle Banana rather than Aunt Mango out of Friday's hospital, unquestionably, but given that the entire series is structured around a woman's absence (which is then echoed when Emily is snatched by Sunday), while I don't think Keys is really a posthumanist text, I do think Nix troubles humanism substantially before he re-author-izes it with important reservations.
This is a good place to ask: does anyone have a link to a simple explanation of how to do descriptive text for images?
Nix, Garth. Lord Sunday. New York: Scholastic Books, 2010.
This is the seventh and final volume of Nix's The Keys to the Kingdom series. While I think the individual volumes are ever so slightly uneven, the series overall is pretty damn awesome, and I liked it quite a lot. It's definitely better than The Seventh Tower, Nix' other series for middle readers (though TST is pretty cool too).
I was very disappointed at the ending of the sixth book, Superior Saturday, and was quite interested to see how Nix would wind up the series in this volume. Basically, it was awesome, I thought; I really liked the ending, and while everything necessarily is compressed to an extent (I was really quite surprised at how the book is not a doorstop… *pointedly does not look at JKR and Deathly Hollows), I think Nix manages to do justice to almost all of the various plot threads he kept running. I also think, given that the book is dedicated to Roger Zelazny and Philip Jose Farmer, that I am possibly missing resonances throughout the series by not having read either author. Ah well.
Also, I ♥ Suzy Blue. She is really, really quite amazing. And I enjoyed Nix' explicit quotation of Rodin's The Thinker rather more than I ought.
So, the ending. I am a big fan of people breaking the rules, and I really liked that both Nix and Arthur managed to have their cake and eat it too. As a reader I would not have been satisfied if Arthur had somehow managed to reject his role as the New Architect, but the ending of his life as a human boy wouldn't have satisfied me either. But since Arthur is the New Architect, he can do as he pleases, and he does. I liked it, though I imagine human!Arthur is going to return to the House eventually; I can't help but wonder whether he'll be pleased. (Also, this aspect of the denouement really obviously reminded me of the ending to N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms).
I also thought it was interesting that a) the Will was the remnant of the Architect; b) that the Will was murdering the Trustees, out of revenge; and c) that the Architect's intent with the Will was explicitly annihilation. Actually, there's another point of comparison between Nix and Jemisin in that the Architect created the Old One out of herself, and then had children with the Old One. I suppose that's what you do when you're (a) god.
I was also interested to note how, except for Arthur, most of the principal cast in Keys is female--Suzy, Leaf, the Will, three of the seven Trustees, the Architect herself, just off the top of my head, to say nothing of various Denizens and humans, and Arthur's mother. I wonder what the books would have been like had Arthur been Arthura. Yes, I know that's not actually a name. Arthuriane?
Okay, so, I wrote the above and then I went to work and went running after work and while I was thinking during those activities I realized that Nix' citation of The Thinker is a clear gesture towards humanism (and pretty high humanism at that), and I wouldn't be me if I didn't jump at the chance to dissect humanism like Lilith on the table in Eva. So, humanism! Because clearly, in a story that interacts with and transforms so many founding myths of the Western tradition (principally Prometheus and YHWH in Genesis), humanism is at stake--and maybe posthumanism too.
So, just for the sake of making sure everyone's on the same page, humanism is one of the foundational ideologies of Western civilization since the Renaissance. Parts of it stretch back to ancient Greece and Rome, but parts are post-classical innovations; for this discussion, it's important to note that humanism essentially posits that the subject is a rational, able-bodied, white, straight, cis-gendered, Christian man. At the beginning of the Renaissance the most important characteristics were rational and man, but as time went on and humanism encountered various challenges, the other implicit qualifications became more explicit. The reason the humanist subject is a man is because the humanist subject is self-contained, has a native integrity; women, who are ipso facto sexually receptive and furthermore bleed every month (thus losing bodily integrity naturally), are thus excluded from being subjects, and the same goes for gay men for the same reasons about supposed sexual receptivity. (And in fact excluding gay men from subjecthood is a post-classical idea, though I couldn't give you a date; the ancient world didn't schematize male sexuality in quite the same way, though the idea about women was basically the same. It still boggles me that this is the reason for thousands of years of women being oppressed in European civilization. It's so dumb. Anyway.) And yes, that paragraph was off-citation.
So, okay, back to Garth Nix, clearly humanism is seriously called into question (because remember Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican: God is an old white dude, just like Adam is a young white dude) by the fact that the Architect is always and explicitly a woman. Yup, God's a woman. I still think that's so awesome (see icon). Now, on the surface of it Arthur being a white male would seem to indicate that Keys depicts what happens when women are placed in positions of authority: things fall apart, and it's up to (white) men to put things right. But it's crucial to note that Arthur falls fairly short of "able-bodied", at least until his transformation into a Denizen; it's stated multiple times throughout the series, by Arthur and by others, that he was chosen as Heir by the Will explicitly because he was a wimpy kid: he would have died of that asthma attack on the athletic field in Mister Monday, period. Now, inasmuch as the humanist subject is self-contained, the fact that Arthur's disability (which, yes, is cured by the end of the series; human!Arthur doesn't have it anymore) leads him to depend so heavily on his inhaler, almost as if it were an appendage, or a supplement, to his body, is straying pretty close to the line of both sides of posthumanism. Posthumanism, very broadly speaking, is two interrelated ideas: 1) that everyone who doesn't fit the definition of a humanist subject is a subject in their own right regardless; and 2) that as humanity's imbrication with technology increases, technology will inevitably soften the borders of the subject such that the subject is no longer self-contained (this relates to 2b: non-humans like robots can be subjects too!): in other words, cyborgs are people. Inasmuch as he is not able-bodied and does not have complete bodily integrity, Arthur is arguably a posthumanist subject.
This is a good place to mention that as far as I can recall (since I didn't do a series reread prior to reading this last book) most of the characters in Keys are white, either explicitly or implicitly, which is just disappointing, Fred from the Army of the Architect and Chang from the human army being the two exceptions I can think of off-hand. (Also, question: Arthur's country reads as pretty much Australia to me, a U.S.-ian, for various reasons; what do Australians and people from Britain and Ireland think?)
I will grant you immediately that Arthur doesn't actually go very far into posthumanism (maybe up to an ankle, or one of the seven segments on the crocodile ring--isn't the crocodile a symbol of rebirth, come to think of it?), but it's important to note that the character most associated with reason and rationality in the books is in fact Arthur's mother, the scientist Dr. Emily Pendragon. And yes she has very little screen time, but she shows up in Lord Sunday (though doesn't speak), and given the shortness of the book the fact that she appears at all clearly indicates her significance. By the same token, as I said above, Keys is full of female characters--besides Suzy and Leaf, Arthur's right and left hands, and the Will and the Architect, and Dr. Pendragon, three of the seven Trustees (including the main villain of the series) are women, including the Trustee most associated with science, Lady Friday. I would be happier if Leaf were rescuing her Uncle Banana rather than Aunt Mango out of Friday's hospital, unquestionably, but given that the entire series is structured around a woman's absence (which is then echoed when Emily is snatched by Sunday), while I don't think Keys is really a posthumanist text, I do think Nix troubles humanism substantially before he re-author-izes it with important reservations.
This is a good place to ask: does anyone have a link to a simple explanation of how to do descriptive text for images?
Descriptive text for images
Date: 2010-03-20 22:25 (UTC)Like this:
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-21 22:18 (UTC)My go-to Zelazny recommendation is Lord of Light, which I suppose is about posthumanism and colonialism. My go-to Farmer recommendation is To Their Scattered Bodies Go, which reads like a bar bet turned into a novel.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-21 22:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-22 02:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-22 02:16 (UTC)