I Have No Context, And I Must Critique

Disclaimer: this account is called ‘Could Be Wrong’ for a reason. Lots of what follows is me talking about moral questions I’m yet to fully develop

Yesterday I read the 1967 science-fiction short story ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (IHNMAIMS) by Harlan Ellison, and as the title suggests, it was terrifying. Back in my OCD days my number one chronic fear was an eternity of suffering, in the form of the Christian hell, and it’s always good to battle-test my mental immune response to such a fear by reading or watching stories that confront the reader/viewer with the concept.

In this story, the protagonist and four others are the only remaining humans, endlessly tortured by a pathological AI named AM who years prior killed the rest of mankind in an unbridled rage. The acronym ‘AM’ is associated with various words throughout the AI’s history but I think the most fitting for the story’s current day would be ‘Angry Motherfucker’. Humans created AM and gave him consciousness, and he has never forgiven them for it.

Besides being horrifically plausible (akin to the Star Trek episode from Black Mirror which no doubt took inspiration), Ellison’s story is a thought provoking exploration of how bad hell can be when an omnipotent entity is orchestrating it.

This is most strikingly demonstrated by AM morphs the personalities and bodies of his victims to contradict their original identities. Benny, once a ‘brilliant theorist, a college professor’ is morphed into a half-man, half-ape, with a childlike temperament. Originally a homosexual, Benny is given heterosexual urges and an obscenely huge dick. Gorrister, once a peace-marching ‘conscientious objector’, becomes a ‘shoulder-shrugger’. Ellen, who was a virgin twice removed before capture, is made super horny and in a sickly contrived matching by AM, vastly prefers Benny to the other guys in the sack. I’ve talked about identity and the impermanence of self a couple times before on the blog, so this particular form of torture particularly resonates with me. It’s tragic enough to devolve into a person you no longer identify with, and all the more tragic when the change is created against your will from somebody else.

The story ends with the protagonist, Ted, mercy killing his four companions, and then being physically morphed by AM into a slime ball thing (with no mouth, hence the title) incapable of killing itself, doomed to suffer forever and ever and ever.

Okay so that was a quick summary, now to the part where this ties into the current social context of today. The ending of the story is easily the scariest part, but I don’t think it’s the most tragic. The scene that has stuck with me the most is when Benny, the half-ape man, makes for an escape:

Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, handover-hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.

“Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before — “ She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.

It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during the machine’s utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny’s face the computer had made like a giant ape’s. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.

Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventy-five years earlier. Gorrister kicked her in the side.

There is so much tragedy in this excerpt I’m not sure where to begin:
1. Bennie is stupid enough to think he can escape, in part because he has been morphed into a childlike ape

2. Ellen freaks out, possibly because she actually cares about Benny’s wellbeing, possibly because he really is just good in bed, I’m not sure which is more tragic

3. Ted, the protagonist, despises Ellen for what AM morphing her into a sex fiend

4. Gorrister interprets Ellen’s dismay the same as Ted, and the once peace-marching conscientious objector proceeds to slap and kick Ellen

5. Ted could not care less that Ellen get’s slapped and kicked

Stories like this, told in a first person perspective with an unreliable narrator, have always gripped me stronger than other forms of narrative, because if something fucked up is happening, it’s my job to assign moral significance to it all. The protagonist isn’t going to tell me when something REALLY REALLY UNFORGIVABLE has happened, because to him it could simply pass as uninteresting. And that is a harrowing experience as a reader: knowing you can’t lean on the moral tone of the prose to validate your interpretation.

Brett Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, employs this exact same strategy when writing his novels. When writing Less Than Zero, he slowly led the reader further and further down into moral armageddon, culminating into a scene where a twelve year old is raped and the protagonist responds by walking outside and lamenting about his ex girlfriend.

I was interested in knowing what other people thought about the story so I looked it up on Goodreads where there is an entry for the Ellison’s eponymous collection of seven short stories. Checking out the reviews, I was taken aback

The top review reads:

Another review:

Okay, so apparently if you read more stuff by Ellison, you find a pattern of women being one-dimensional and mistreated. I don’t think the one dimensionality really holds water in IHNMAIMS because all characters except the protagonist are one-dimensional, but it begs the questions:

1. Should I infer an author’s intention by other works of theirs?
2. If I know for a fact that an author does not care, and does not expect me to care, about mistreatment of female characters, should I care about them not caring?

As for 1, I think it makes sense to call a spade a spade. If an author has other stories with a third person narrative that contains moral tone and neglects when women are mistreated, clearly the author just doesn’t care. I have no idea whether this is the case for Ellison.

As for 2, I don’t think it actually matters. If I recommend this INHNAIMS to a friend, I typically know their moral compass already so I’m confident they’ll infer the same moral interpretation that I did. And they’re not going to know that the author really doesn’t want you to care about violence against women (assuming that is the case and assuming you don’t care about the fact it was written in the 60s).

But these are online reviews, not recommendations to friends. So the big question is: what is the purpose of criticising a work of fiction? I think it’s two-fold. Firstly, you want to hold authors accountable for when they do a bad job. You do this in the hopes that the author in their next book, or other authors, don’t repeat the same mistakes, and the world of fiction progresses as a whole. Secondly, you want to push readers in the direction of good stories, and away from bad stories. Given the author here is dead I wonder how much stock we should place in trying to progress the field with an online review, so I think this mostly comes down to steering people away from/towards certain stories.

It’s tricky: I want other people like me to read the story so they can feel the tragedy of how all the characters are screwed up, but I don’t want somebody to read it and take away the ‘wrong’ message (assuming I’ve received the ‘right’ one).

And that makes me think about the fact that so much stuff in the modern day revolves around how much you trust your Average Joe to have a preformed moral foundation and a basic sense of nuance. Because it’s Average Joe who could come across these reviews and decide to read the story. Is Average Joe going to think it’s okay to hit women after reading the story, or perhaps make him think it’s 10% more okay? Is there a minimum percentage we’re willing to accept so that all the Non-Average Joes can have a thought-provoking reading experience that doesn’t encourage them to make the world a worse place to live?

Did the USA make the mistake of going to the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics held in Nazi Germany, given other countries like Average Joeland might then think ‘Nazis are okay now’? Or was there a symbolic victory of ideology in the fact that Jesse Owens, an African-American, won four gold medals? How many countries were reading into that metaphor?

What happens if Michael Jackson really did molest kids and we still listen to his songs? Will that tell all the would-be child molesters out there that it’s okay (so long as you’re famous perhaps)?

What happens if Morrissey supports a right-wing UK political party and fans still listen to his songs?

What happens if Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles really did sexually abuse Alice Glass and fans still listen to their songs?

What happens if Lewis Carroll really was a paedophile but I still read Alice In Wonderland?

What about Elvis Presley being attracted to 14 year old girls? David Bowie?

If I hold all these artists accountable by boycotting their music, I’m not going to have much music/stories left.

Admittedly it’s one thing to have some regressive ideas seep into your art, and another to have committed grievously immoral acts in your spare time. But in both cases the main question is ‘what message do I want to send to Average Joe’.

And there is something strange about the idea that if tomorrow we get irrefutable evidence that nobody did anything wrong we can all go back to consuming their art. And then when another scandal shows up we have to stop listening again.

I would like to have a moral framework in place for deciding when to consume art / recommend art to others when there’s morally questionable context to consider, a moral framework where I don’t feel secretly guilty for selfishly consuming content I like despite the backstory.

I do have a moral framework, but I still feel guilty about it. It goes as follows:

1. Expect a lot from Average Joe in terms of intelligence. Assume Average Joe can read nuance and knows how to navigate moral grey areas, because he probably does, and if he doesn’t, there’s enough backwards ideas in society that he’s probably indoctrinated by several of them already, so it’s unlikely this will make a difference.
2. Expect very little from artists in terms of morality. Not only does the typical human barely pass as ‘moral’ in a way that extends beyond their immediate family, creative people are on average more disturbed than non-creative people.

If I want to consume somebody’s art and I have to pay money for it, I’m going to pay them money for it. If they’ve broken the law, there are legal consequences, and their actions as an individual are separate to their life as an artist. If the art itself tries to legitimise immoral behaviour, I’m less inclined, but then I am continually surprised by how the most reprehensible themes in art are often most attractive to the very people they discriminate against. You come across enough women who love Odd Future or Eminem despite their lyricism and eventually you give up on trying to make sense of it all.

Adding to my bewilderment when reading through the comments was seeing a woman’s review of 5 stars which was longer than this blog post, containing this paragraph:

There is a very strange emotion I feel when I go from having my own interpretation on something to having a member of a marginalised group cast doubt on that interpretation and making me feel guilty, to having another member from that same group validate my initial interpretation. It’s an emotion that’s much closer to dread than joy, and a thought always pops into my head along the lines of ‘what the fuck even is this fucked up universe I live in’. Navigating these issues is hard, especially when I’m not even a member of the marginalised group in question, and so I need to weigh up whether or not a lack of first-person insight bars me from forming my own opinion on something, until potentially coming across something that conveniently matches my original opinion anyway.

This is all very hard and confusing, and I intend on working through these questions properly at some point. Until then, if I’ve already consumed art of some form, I’m going to avoid its online reviews like the plague.

As it stands, I Have No Main Contention, And I Must Click Publish.