For the conscious mind can be set aside and subdued by the emotions, but in a dream world all is logic.
— Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

One can hardly reproach a reader entranced by the stories of David Mitchell, sold on his aesthetic games and primed for every fresh display of his metafictional tricks, for failing to suppress a squeal of delight on cashing in a ticket for the oldest of loyalty rewards: the recognition of a familiar face. Or in Mitchell’s case, notorious as he is for threading his characters along a washing line of transmigration, not a face but a dislocated name, a clue to a persistent mind and memory. “Fifteen pages into The Bone Clocks,” Kathryn Schulz says of his latest novel (which begins in 1984), “I sat up so fast I clocked my own bones—skull against ceiling, in the low nook where I was reading. [The protagonist Holly Sykes] had just mentioned that, as a child, she had been cured of the strange voices in her head by a visit to one Dr Marinus. Mitchell fans will recall that Marinus is also the name of the doctor in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. When we meet him in that book, it is 1799.”

The recurrence of characters across a writer’s oeuvre is nothing new; Schulz acknowledges Shakespeare’s Falstaff as a precedent, and we could say the same for Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym, the other patrons of the Boar’s Head, whose encounter with the titular king of Henry V is all the more reverberant if you recall from earlier plays their rapport with the young Prince Hal. But Mitchell’s signature devices, the transmigration of souls and the porousness of the border separating narrative from lived reality, dramatically expand the range and flexibility with which a character occurring in one story can be thought of as identical to a character in another, joined by a continuous sense of self.

This is a trick he plays both within his novels and across them. Often our only clue is a name, but as with the early Soviet cinema, the meaning is in the cut: we are ever only who we are in the instant we are living now, and our past or future selves are not the same embodiments of drives and experience, yet we find it intuitive to think of them as part of the same coherent personhood, its growth implicit in the abruptness of difference from one discrete stage to another.

How did you get from there to here? This is what Mitchell entices us to wonder about his players at every turn, and when Neal Brose, the neurotic financial lawyer in Ghostwritten, shows up a school-aged popularity racketeer in Black Swan Green, where we first meet the avatar of adolescent peer pressure Hugo Lamb, who returns in The Bone Clocks as a sociopath making his way up the Cambridge elite and is soon recruited into a secret society of predatory immortals by Elijah D’Arnoq, a rifler from the Chatham Islands implied to be the descendant of a churchman in Cloud Atlas who meets with the crew of the Prophetess, whose first mate Boerhaave sails into Nagasaki as a young midshipman in The Thousand Autumns aboard the Profetes—presumably the same vessel, though you will have to ask the staff of the museum ship preserved in a Californian harbour espied in Cloud Atlas by Luisa Rey, the crime writer who calls into Ghostwritten’s Bat Segundo Show (not to be confused with the literary podcast by Edward Champion where Mitchell has appeared as a guest several times)—you see his method at work, lapping waveforms on top of each other in search of an emergent resonance, a drone. The people, the families, the sailing ships—they are the same, yet not the same, and we read into their histories from not only what we see but what we don’t.

It sounds like a grand conspiracy, a whiteboard of mugshot Polaroids and arrows scrawled in felt—remember, this is a writer who takes epigraphs from Don DeLillo—and it is a testament to Mitchell’s breadth of imagination that more often than not, his web of recurrent elements defy the typical mistake of conspiratorial thought in adding complexity rather than subtracting it, in creating mysteries instead of collapsing them into easy solutions, in persistently dangling the question of how one gets from A to B. This positive equilibrium is the mark of the best practitioners of the “systems novel”, and while Mitchell is rarely as overtly concerned with conspiracy as DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, for whom the very point is how networks escape the reach of any individual agency, the entirety of his published work reads as a bid to capture the propulsive magic of the baseball in Underworld or the rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow. (In this he is not alone: in the growing catalogue of novels-of-shorts that deliver vast yet vivid casts in glancing collisions and momentary glimpses, the retention of identity from one snapshot to another is explicitly taken up as a central theme in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—a novel that spawned a companion Twitter story, “Black Box”, that predated Mitchell’s own foray into the format and was in my estimation a good sight better.)

Whatever Mitchell is aiming for, his constellational approach to character has only invited his champions to keep a scorecard, as Kathryn Schulz did in the table below:

To Schulz’s chart we can add another column. The fifth part of six in The Bone Clocks, a section set in 2025 entitled “An Horologist’s Labyrinth” that has proven to be the most divisive in the novel, is narrated by Dr Iris Marinus-Fenby, a middle-aged black woman from Toronto who is the latest incarnation of the Dutch surgeon Lucas Marinus from The Thousand Autumns and the Chinese psychiatrist Yu Leon Marinus who cures Holly Sykes earlier in Clocks. (Another book involving the character has reportedly been mapped out as a future project many volumes down the queue, rounding out a trilogy we can only imagine will be informally referred to as the Rime of the Ancient Marinus.) The entity Marinus, who dates his or her birth to 640 AD, belongs to a league of natural-born immortals, the Horologists, locked in a centuries-long conflict with Carnivores (among them the villainous Anchorites, the society of Elijah D’Arnoq and Hugo Lamb) who sustain their eternal lives by harvesting mortal souls. Iris Marinus has shown her face before, albeit not anywhere Schulz would have thought to look. So has her manservant Sadaqat, whose services she retains in full awareness of his defection as an enemy spy. Of Sadaqat, Marinus says:

Sadaqat owns very little not earned from or given by Horology. How could he? He spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital outside Reading, England. A freelance Carnivore had got herself employed as a secretary in the hospital, and had groomed a psychovoltaic patient who had shared confidences with Sadaqat before the poor woman’s soul was decanted. I disposed of the Carnivore after quite a strenuous duel in her sunken garden…

Dedicated followers of Mitchell’s work who keep abreast of the English National Opera—not the most populous intersection, I admit—will have no trouble spotting this passage for what it is: a summation of the novelist’s collaboration for stage and screen with the Dutch composer and video artist Michel van der Aa, Sunken Garden, which premiered at the Barbican in April 2013 and runs until 20 March at the Théâtre National Populaire in Lyon. (This was Mitchell’s second libretto: I am not in a position to say whether The Bone Clocks pays any tribute to his first for Wake, an opera composed by Klaas de Vries about the Enschede fireworks disaster.)

Sunken Garden is no ordinary stage experience. The production calls for three live performers and several others who appear only on video, first in a shifting lattice of video screens and later, as we venture through a portal into a projected 3D environment shot in one of the geodesic biomes of the Eden Project, as life-sized holograms. The performers sing in counterpoint across the divide while the conductor directs the orchestra with the aid of a click track to remain in synchronization with pre-recorded voices and electronic cues in the score. In its original run, to enter the foyer of the Barbican Theatre was to be greeted by ushers who distributed stereoscopic glasses in zippered cases, with a special batch set aside to fit over prescription spectacles—an aspect of venue management that is in no way within the province of the librettist, though I struggle to think of a more concise encapsulation of Mitchell’s place in contemporary literature, his synthesis of special-effects bedazzlement with meticulous care for presentation in pursuit of what we might call artisanal kitsch.

Written in 2011 as an interlude between The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks (Mitchell described it in 2013 as “an early offshoot of what my next novel might have been”), Sunken Garden is an Oz-like portal fantasy where a protagonist from our quotidian reality finds himself solicited as a pawn in the agendas of a good witch and an evil witch, the latter making the first overture—a dynamic that occurs again in Clocks in the trinity of Holly, Marinus, and Immaculée Constantin. In the opera this protagonist is Toby Kramer, a filmmaker played by Roderick Williams, an enigmatic baritone I had last seen attired as a dodo in the courtyard of Oxford’s Story Museum leading thirty choir girls in a musical adaptation of the Caucus Race in Alice that he had himself composed in the early nineties.

Toby is approached by a generous benefactor, Zenna Briggs (Katherine Manley, soprano), who funds his documentary about the missing software developer Simon Vines (Jonathan McGovern, high baritone on video) to cover for her own complicity as the “freelance Carnivore” who lured both Simon and the “psychovoltaic patient” Amber Jacquemain (Kate Miller-Heidke, mezzo-soprano on video) to her soul-decanting lair, a garden defined by the entrancing feature of a towering vertical pond.

Sadaqat Daastani, played by Stephen Henry, appears in a batty, temperamental speaking role exclusively on film.

Toby and Zenna are two of the live singing parts; the third belongs to the good witch Iris Marinus, and from her scant physical description in “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”, which takes place five years after the events of Sunken Garden, one gets the impression Mitchell wrote the character on the page with the soprano Claron McFadden firmly in mind.

Her section of the novel makes the smallest mention of a New York bookseller named Toby, but the author’s acuity for coincidence notwithstanding, there is no reason to believe this is the same person as the English documentarian in the opera. For one thing, when Toby emerges from the sunken garden at the end of the show he is played by Katherine Manley; some connivance on the part of Marinus has transplanted him into Zenna’s body. The libretto is a wordy one, as you would expect from a writer known for his loquacious style, and if you are not paying attention the transferral of souls is perplexing and easy to miss. Still, keep an eye out for Toby in the novels to come. One doesn’t know where he might show up next—or who he will be when he does.

The atlas and archipelago

Recognition is a transitory thrill that comes and goes; the real durability of Mitchell’s work is found in resonance. As Paul Kincaid observes, “David Mitchell does not write stories, he writes patterns.” The substance is in the structure: one occurrence of a pattern gives us the context for the others, and the more iterations you see, the clearer the fabric becomes. number9dream and Black Swan Green are set in motion by the telephones of absent fathers; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks close with the arrival of ships from Cloud Atlas. As I read Clocks I was on alert for traces of Sunken Garden well before Iris Marinus or Sadaqat arrived on the scene, as the central incident of the first section is the disappearance of Holly’s brother Jacko, who vanishes into a phantasmagoric underpass, evoking the urban portal of a climactic sequence in the opera where a panoramic aerial shot dives into a nest of flyovers: as the camera zooms into a pillar, Roderick Williams puts on his stereoscopic glasses to signal that the audience should follow suit, then steps through the glowing incision in concrete that leads to Super Marinus 3D World.

Thus it is galling to find that in all the critical response to The Bone Clocks—and my, is it ever voluminous, thanks to Mitchell’s status as one of the few active writers of fiction in our fractured landscape whose publications are major events for several literary traditions at once—hardly anything said of its more controversial elements has properly attended to his structural machinery (a lacuna most conspicuous in the pieces claiming to do exactly that). Most everyone agrees that for better or for worse, it marks a significant point of transition where the subtextual undercurrents of his earlier books have now been brought to the fore; the cosmology once obliquely suggested is in full flower. It is here that the author fully commits to pulling the disparate threads of his loosely unified suites of novellas into the weave of a single übernovel. To acknowledge this is to merely point out the obvious, and it provides little insight into why Mitchell’s familiar strategies of genre pastiche and networked maximalism feel qualitatively different from his earlier efforts at the same.

My own appraisal of The Bone Clocks is not far removed from those of Nina Allan and Laura Miller, both keen observers of disturbances along the crumbling literary/genre border who have historically been more than friendly to Mitchell’s output, and both dismayed to find that his latest opus so thoroughly bungles its venture into the conventionally fantastic that the rest of the edifice collapses around it. Humpty Dumpty came tumbling down, and he was not more than the sum of his parts. Oh, the parts are largely sound enough; the energetic buzz of the prose is as present as ever, as is the sense of peering into an abyss of deep time as you behold the weathered age of the activity of storytelling itself, here conveyed with the folkloric richness of the middle chapters of Ghostwritten and the telescopic ambition of Cloud Atlas in the figure of Esther Little, a soul of Noongar extraction who enumerates her remembered lives with over two hundred pebbles. Mitchell’s modus operandi has always been to fire everywhere at once, and his hits are such palpable hits we can forgive the sporadic miss. And indeed there is a miss: so much of the action in The Bone Clocks is ultimately driven by a Secret Wizard War between the Horologists and Anchorites that falls short of the author’s usual standard of craft or human interest, the rest of the novel suffers for it.

The tenor of the critical conversation about the book would have you believe that to set the Secret Wizard War in opposition to the Muggle world of runaway strawberry pickers, war-addicted journalists, and petty literary rivalries is to commit to a wider conflict over the seriousness of the fantastic, and the temptation to enlist is not abated by soft targets like James Wood—always a pleasure to read for his unfaltering consistency in stubbornly holding every book that crosses his desk to a unitary standard of Flaubertian psychological realism, no matter how myopic it may be, and whose jab at Mitchell’s indulgence in “the demented intricacy of science fiction” is the very definition of bait. I see no pressing need to defend the honour of genre; my investment is strictly in good literature and not in any speculative ideal, and it suffices to reply to Wood as Nina Allan does, that “one bad book is no proof of anything, and he doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in putting a rocket up The Bone Clocks for the direness of that fantasy section.”

The clunkiness of the Secret Wizard War is not in itself all that dispiriting; the real disappointment is in its implications for where Mitchell wants his unfurling series to go. The proponents of his emerging fantasy plot have embraced this direction, and their words of praise are telling. James Smythe: “The genre elements […] do more than they could: they drag every novel he’s published into the same world, changing the existing texts, shining new light upon them.” Brian Finney: “Like globalism, [his evolving macronovel] attempts to encompass everything […] Each new novel of his causes all its predecessors to shape-change.” Kathryn Schulz: “Mitchell’s novels share the same past, future, events, ethos, laws, problems, causes, and consequences. They are an archipelago of islands.”

The unquestioned assertion beneath all this enthusiasm is that the coagulation of a unified Mitchellverse is straightforwardly enriching; that every new development on whatever scale—chapter, novella, 3D opera-film—adds resonance, never interference, to all the stories that have come before it. It makes no allowance for the many ways in which a story that draws on its precursors might undermine them, and it fails to acknowledge how the Wizard War plot of The Bone Clocks differs in kind from Mitchell’s other excursions into the not-so-real in a manner that proves to be an encumbrance. Fantasy is the least of its vices; its worst offence is disambiguation.

To understand this we must turn to the archipelago, a motif that evokes another living master of supercolliding fiction, Christopher Priest. Many of the structural gestures pervading Mitchell’s work can be found in Priest’s: they share an interest in a form of emergent storytelling that calls to mind the illusion of swarm intelligence in a colony of ants, where meaning coheres for the reader as only the reader has the omniscience to follow the pattern of interaction among local, microscopic flecks of narrative. Central to their aesthetic are elements of the multifarious traditions of science fiction, fantasy, and whatever we want to call the metaliterary inheritance from Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. (The estimable jazz historian and critic Ted Gioia lumps them all under the umbrella of “conceptual fiction”, a scheme I am not convinced is specific or rigorous enough to be informative even as I see it as suggestive of a coherent value system.)

Priest’s toolkit is more thoroughly worked out: he has after all been writing for much longer, and his Dream Archipelago, a recurring shadow reality where his fascination with illusionists, explorers, and Rashōmon effects is extruded towards a nearly abstract purity, is not only an absorbing playground for the imagination its own right but a strong conceptual foundation for thinking about the narrative mechanics of fractured fiction, far more precise than the anachronistic catch-all of “postmodernism” as applied to every variant of literary bricolage. His speciality is architecture; in style he is the Steinitz to Mitchell’s Nimzowitsch, more methodical than dynamic. Mitchell’s prose is slippery, propulsive; the characters are all so thrilled to be alive, the sentences so well lubricated that a reader accustomed to fording knee-deep rivers of nutrient-rich verbiage may find the lack of resistance suspect, a thin film to be approached with caution and mistrust. Priest reads as stolid and uniformly cold, a texture that stands out in jarring contrast to his characters’ exuberance in the act of legerdemain. There is good reason to believe this dissonance is the desired effect: The Prestige explicitly contemplates how the apparent absence of spectacle or obfuscation is itself a method of misdirection, a way of rolling up one’s sleeves to assure the audience there is nothing hidden so as to make them search elsewhere. The beholder must see a hint of the rigging to believe the illusionist fallible and thus let down their guard.

The wonder of the Dream Archipelago, an idea cultivated in over thirty years of novels and short stories and most concertedly developed in The Islanders, principally arises from its embrace of uncertainty. A gazetteer of vignettes reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, The Islanders opens with an introduction that firmly declares, “There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago.” The reasons given for this are ostensibly practical, but maplessness is the defining mark of the novel’s sense of place. The archipelago is never stable; it is always in flux, occluding the surveyor from any objective grasp of consensus reality. Every island has only the most tenuous knowledge of its neighbours (yes, even the ones whose economies rest on burgeoning IT industries), mediated by the mercantile transactions of penfriends and intrepid travellers whose names show up from place to place in hazily remembered incidents, many of them mutually contradictory.

William Faulkner revelled in the multiplicity of unreliable accounts, while Terry Pratchett understood absurdity went hand in hand with geographical ineffability (“You can’t map a sense of humour,” he said)—but maps of Yoknapatawpha and Discworld did, in the end, exist. It is doubtful Priest would ever capitulate likewise; to map the archipelago would be to undermine its very ethos, the systematic mistiness that circles around a truth both invisible and presumably concrete. You know there is a common thread but you can never quite get a grip on it.

What is so refreshing about a book like The Islanders is where it stands in relation to the culture of popular fiction in which it was released—an environment of encroaching seriality, consolidation of intellectual property, and “canons” tracked on wikis, where genre tropes have been shackled to a fetish for continuity, for definiteness, in the public imagination. When you witness the purely contractual achievement of Marvel Studios’ dugout of Hollywood stars diving into each other’s pictures in post-credit bit parts to prepare an exercise quite as tepid and banal as Marvel Avengers Assemble (which I refuse to call by its title outside the United Kingdom as a matter of principle, for if ever there was a time when Mrs Peel was needed, it is now), the giddiness of recognition is all there is; sameness is the name of the game, and the point is expressly not for the recurrence of a character to add some truly unexpected dimensionality or generate a mystery of growth and change, but for the audience to see the figures they already know. There is a goon squad here, but it sure isn’t Jennifer Egan’s.

Now, continuity has its uses; in a detective story we call it fair play, and I could hardly claim it detracts from a series like Harry Potter, perhaps more triumphant as a cascading whodunit than as anything to do with magic. A game must have its rules. But the pleasure of reading Priest is in his open revolt against the notion that the monotonic accumulation of data makes a world more real, a generic assumption in the reigning conceptions of the allegedly fantastic that M John Harrison memorably dubbed “the great clomping foot of nerdism”. Priest sees the continued vibrancy of harnessing the instability of oral tradition, the innocence, as one way back into the folkloric quality of the really mythic.

The same instability lies at the heart of the love of storytelling so pervasive in David Mitchell, and it is what elevates the best of his intertextual webwork above the cynical business of avenging and assembling. Consider his sophomore novel number9dream, which conditions us from the first chapter to regard its protagonist, Eiji Miyake, as a compulsive fantasist prone to disappear into his cyberpunk virtualizations of life (flagged by precisely the allusion you would expect: “In lieu of a fantasy Walther PK […] a box of courtesy matches from a bar called Mitty’s”). In the fourth chapter, “Reclaimed Land”, Eiji finds himself stuck in a blood-soaked yakuza thriller where gangsters execute their captives by lopping off their heads with bowling balls, and his first regret as he thinks he is about to die is that he never finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—fitting, if a tad obvious, for a book that never bothers to conceal its true purpose as an effort to stamp every square on the Haruki Murakami bingo card. It is all a little too garish to be taken any more seriously than the Phildickian replicant hit job that fades to white in chapter one, and here the coda is another vanishing. A leather-jacketed mercenary, the last man standing, leans over the huddled Eiji and considers sparing his life.

“Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?”

I nod, and sneeze. When I look up, smoke swallows up the night.

It was all a dream, you might say—if you have never read Ghostwritten. For what gives the mercenary substance in the eyes of the reader, what makes him impossible to dismiss as a figure out of reverie, is his previous appearance in the Mongolia and Saint Petersburg chapters of Mitchell’s earlier novel. We cannot contain him as a figment of Eiji’s subjectivity, bottle him up in a story within a story. Suhbataar, angel of death, is not so easily locked away.

Memory leaks and segmentation faults

Metalepsis is a word Kathryn Schulz correctly glosses as “the transgression of the boundaries of a fictional world by an object, idea, or character”, although she explains it within a limited conception of what those boundaries are, restricting her examples to intrusions on presumptive genre conventions or natural laws. Certainly this perspective applies to Mitchell, but it understates the form and extent of metalepsis distinguishing him from the countless other practitioners of surrealism or genre evaporation. For the operative expectations are not merely those conditioned by forces outside the text, assumptions we bring in with us about the rules of a history as opposed to a fairy tale. It is not the case that Mitchell is simply stitching heterogeneous materials into the quilt of a neat and linear universe, and indeed his penchant for connecting dots would be as insubstantial as his detractors charge if this were so. (Besides, remember who we are talking about. Read any novel of his, read half a novel of his, and in no time at all it should be clear pastiche is the expectation.)

The conventions are as much a product of how the texts themselves are internally organized. The fanciful episodes in number9dream pass for neatly embedded stories within a story, easy to shut and forget about with little to no causal consequence after the fact, not because they feature bioborgs and manned torpedoes but because they follow a pattern of disappearance. We are led to believe they are self-contained, and when the assassin Suhbataar steps in—a figure Eiji could not have come up with himself, though only the returning Mitchell reader knows it—it is a disruption of the established form.

No account of Mitchell’s technique would be adequate without a proper grasp of how his stories are contained—how his characters break containment—and this is no truer for anything than his magnum opus, Cloud Atlas. A dystopia wrapped in a caper inside a voyage, Cloud Atlas is commonly described as a Matryoshka doll. Less commonly does anyone follow the analogy to its conclusion and consider how Mitchell sets up his sequence of nested figures for the purpose of knocking them down.

It is illuminating to compare his strategy to another recent entry in the annals of Matryoshka fiction, Christopher Nolan’s heist film Inception, where the heroes excavate successive layers of dreams within dreams. Nolan, who once outbid the more established Sam Mendes to direct the adaptation of The Prestige by sending Christopher Priest a motorcycle bearing a videocassette of his debut Following, is a popular target for the same calibre of detraction typically fired at Mitchell; his reputation is that of an audacious cerebral gamesman who cannot seem to strike a balance between coming off as crafty to the inexperienced and thunderously obvious to the literate, landing squarely in the realm of the middlebrow where his cleverness drops off sharply in its capacity to pose a challenge.

In Nolan’s case, lacking as he does the technical virtuosity in his own medium that Mitchell brandishes everywhere in his, the criticism sticks: his narrative construction is motivated by an obsessive neatness and attention to cause and effect befitting the mechanisms of a mystery plot, with the unfortunate repercussion that the lapses in logic (and there are many) stand out as failures of puzzle design and not, as one might allow of Gilliam or Fellini, a playful departure into the oneiric. (It speaks volumes that Nolan’s greatest creation, Heath Ledger’s Joker, is an agent of chaos whose agenda is to blow up the coherence of the film he is in. The Dark Knight is so replete with disruptions of perspective and space that as Scott Eric Kaufman has shown, whatever the director’s precision or control, the disorientation of the form suits the content to such great effect that the intrusion of nonsense is not only welcome but thematically responsible.)

Inception, a film purportedly about dreaming, is conspicuous for its fealty to mystery logic over dream logic. There is a storied lineage of cinema devoted to the problem of emulsifying the two—think Vertigo or Mulholland Drive—but Nolan has no such conciliatory ambitions. The dolls in their Matryoshka sequence are very neatly nested; causality only flows one way and there is never any confusion which layer you are in. Nor is there any room for subjective discrepancy or anything else to impede communication between minds, as the participants in a given dream share a common perceptual reality without any trouble. Every layer of Inception is a common physical space in a rigid box; you are in when you are in, you are out when you are out. This is a requirement for the foundational premise of the film, that environments postulated by a solitary mind are open to visitors. The entire scenario hangs on a presumption of accessible objectivity. Nolan’s is a world of maps.

Cloud Atlas, meanwhile, revolves around a pervasive consciousness of texts as artefacts, stories as undependable testimony. When Robert Frobisher peruses Adam Ewing’s diary, the second chapter consuming the first, he remarks, “Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?” The prime suspect must surely be David Mitchell, who offers here a winking apology for any deficiencies of style as are inevitable when spanning a range of idiom from the age of sail to the distant future, while concurrently underlining the provisionality of recorded truths. Ewing is as much a fiction to Frobisher as Frobisher is to Luisa Rey, and so on all the way up the crescendo to the apex of the sextet, where the narrator, Zachry, simply instructs, “Sit down a beat or two. Hold out your hands. Look.”

Mitchell is a collagist here as everywhere, and the manoeuvre of tugging on the spyglass until it breaks apart is not unique to him. One precursor can be found in the closing words of Toni Morrison’s Jazz:

[…] I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.

But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are now.

Reader, look who’s talking.

But let us not forget about the metalepsis. For the Prophetess finds its way from Adam Ewing in the Chatham Islands to Luisa Rey in California a century later, a ghost ship out of a diary out of a letter. (In the lingo of programmers trained to think in stacks and function calls, for whom all of this should be intuitive to the point of self-evidence, we might describe the novel’s central mechanic as the violation of variable scope.) And just as the shadows of stories hang over the successive realities of the novel’s ensemble, Cloud Atlas hangs over ours. Follow the trail of induction and the characters, genre devices as they may be, seem to walk among us.

Whether this amounts to anything more than a game for its own sake is a separate matter. James Wood:

Cloud Atlas offered an impressive narrative parquet, but what else was it? In that novel, to take an example, Robert Frobisher, a composer working in the nineteen-thirties, is writing a musical piece called “Cloud Atlas Sextet”; later in the book, in the pulp-fiction tale set in nineteen-seventies California, a character named Luisa Rey listens to this piece in a record store; she had discovered the music in a series of letters written in the nineteen-thirties by this same Frobisher. Cloud Atlas is made up of intricate replications like these, but what do they amount to? Does Cloud Atlas do much more than announce and adumbrate a universal, and perhaps not very interesting, interconnectedness?

Wood at least concedes the novel’s ebullience. Others quick to slap Mitchell with the charge of superficiality are not so kind: his readers, for Richard Cooper, are “the enemies of good fiction—those for whom the main object of a work of literature should be for it to feel literary, for whom difficulty and scattergun idiosyncrasy are desirable in themselves rather than as a way of achieving something else, for whom good books are instantly recognisable rather than confounding or shocking, and for whom the delight in narrative is a vulgar concern.”

This would be a good place to reflect on the attitude whence any pleasure in the formal or ludic is excluded from the palette of human experience, were the prejudice against the sentimental qualities of symbol manipulation not already so familiar, so washed out. No, it is self-defeating to pretend a book as arresting as Cloud Atlas demands a surrender to shallow formalism as a condition for dispensing its treasures. Cooper is right to suggest that Mitchell’s games are ultimately easy; their delights unfold with an immediacy uncharacteristic of fiction that would rather plant its greatness unannounced as a parasite that slowly envelops the mind. But where the vectors of greatness are concerned we can afford to be pluralists, and in any case, Mitchell’s apparent simplicity performs the entertaining function of deterring his critics from giving their own questions serious thought. He looks simple, they say, so we must read him simply.

Alternatively, if we permit ourselves the simple delectations of structural elegance—should we think our way into the novel musically—we can listen for the exquisite chromatic ripples of content recapitulating form. We can search for harmony, not just melody, and discern how when a message from one island in the archipelago floats in its bottle to another, it is something more than point-to-point communication. For every story in Cloud Atlas is a prison story, a tale of escape from captivity, and as the senders inscribe their testaments, they are, like the nemeses of Myst, preparing a jailbreak to an outside world.

And what of the receivers, who ever so briefly escape the other way? The fictive personas they read about or watch are not quite real; many of them are expressions of types in the way that frustrates readers like Wood who prize the simulation of natural psychology. Nevertheless, the receivers find themselves absorbed. They are all David Mitchell characters and they are all David Mitchell readers. In his interview with The Paris Review, Mitchell pins the impetus for writing Cloud Atlas on a desire to resolve the incomplete trajectory of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller; that same desire for closure, for consummating a narrative seduction, is a drive his characters inherit as a central passion. Like Eiji Miyake in number9dream, who frets about dying before he is through with Murakami, what the protagonists of Cloud Atlas want most of all is to find out how a story ends.

It almost seems calculated to flatter people who read, particularly those who read the likes of Mitchell and see in his finest yarns a profound expression of the love of stories, the very romance circumnavigated by his progenitor Calvino and so many others before him in the heritage of parsing the repentance of Quixote as tragedy, not as triumph. Cloud Atlas is a book for worms, and nobody should be surprised it plays as trite to critics suspicious of the pleasures in which the characters indulge along with the reader.

Yet the powder of metalepsis that blasts the novel’s hierarchies into adjacencies makes a case for the potency of literature as something more than escape. Dualism, as we know, is intractably hamstrung by its inability to account for how mind acts on matter. For Mitchell, a composer of dualistic fictions involving the transfer of souls, it is a matter of considerable interest to track how figments of imagination exert causal power on the corporeal domain. Narrative is his way in. As a story breaks out of its containing prison of words and slithers into our minds, so it works its way into our actions, our systems of guidance by which we understand the world and the self. Stories from a universe safely bounded by the terms and conditions of fiction possess a certain agency in our own. (Nowhere will you find this more vividly portrayed than in the Mongolia chapter of Ghostwritten, where the narrator is a story—an anthropomorphism of thought distinctly in the spirit of 1999, when memetics was at the peak of its ascendancy as a seriously considered hypothesis and not just the reigning monster in the swamp of Internet pop psychology we know today.)

And perhaps the infectious desire to discover what happens next, see how it all goes down, is merely empathy. We need not believe the self-styled Darwinian critics, for whom literature reduces to a survival adaptation, to think of stories as catalysts for empathy; and what distinguishes the reader-protagonists of Cloud Atlas is their openness to foreign subjectivities alien to their home tribes, their willingness to treat with others as they would with textual entities. Mitchell’s broad thematic strokes of savagery or civilization look platitudinous, yes, so long as one does not attend to form. But the aspect of civilized being he renders with the utmost joy is the humanity of literary experience. What, if not this, is metafiction’s calling, the humanistic promise of jeux d’esprit?

Clocks right twice a day

Crucially, stories that leak into the world offer guidance but never exert domination. We are free-willed agents who synthesize our sensory experiences into perceptions uniquely our own, not passive carriers of viral meme-complexes. We do with our cultural influences what we will. The six realities of Cloud Atlas bleed into each other in pinpricks, not in gushes, and ultimately its players are responsible for their own decisions. That their actions are consequential in spite of their naked fictitiousness in the eyes of external observers is why the novel on the whole remains compelling. Past the halfway mark, the reader knows precisely how the chips are going to fall, but the inertia of structural collapse as we zip backwards in time (there is our friend Nolan again, with Memento) in no way undercuts the lingering curiosity in whatever there is left for the characters to do. The foreknowledge of Zachry’s distant century does not leave Timothy Cavendish impotent in ours.

It is in forgetting this essential predicate of human agency that The Bone Clocks goes awry. On the surface it replicates all the furnishings that made Atlas so perceptive as a book about the place of literature (and frankly, so downright fun). But it ascribes so much of its internal causality to the machinations of the Secret Wizard War that the purportedly fantastic elements are just explanatory, and from over the horizon you can hear the ominous sound of clomping feet. It almost looks as though Mitchell finally wrote the novel his admirers and detractors alike were convinced he had written several times already, an unsystematic cyclone of global connectedness indifferently whipping up every ramshackle genre in its path and dumping them on an unlucky estate in Oz.

Others have already danced around the diagnosis. James Wood is at his most astute regarding the symptom, if not the cause:

[…] these happenings, which occur over hundreds of pages, feel a bit empty, because they are not humanly significant. What occurs in the novel between people has meaning only in relation to what occurs in the novel between Anchorites and Horologists. A struggle, a war, is being played out, between forces of good and forces of evil, although how humans behave with one another appears to have little impact on that otherworldly battle. Mitchell has written a theological novel of sorts, and just as certain kinds of theology threaten to rob human life of intrinsic significance—since theology exists to convert worldly meaning into transcendent meaning—so Mitchell’s peculiar cosmology turns his characters into time-travelling groundlings, Horology’s dwarves.

Wood’s application of humanism and his concomitant aesthetic blinkers are well known to his readers, and one might initially suppose the behaviour of novelists who work in other modes will never make a dent in his otherworldly battle. To Nina Allan this was so clearly the latest provocation in a pattern of disparaging the fantastic that she penned an excoriating riposte before she read the novel and discovered that whatever her differences with Wood on values, he was right on the facts. The passivity of the characters is suffocating indeed: “Far from being a brilliantly realised creation,” writes Allan, “Holly is something of a cipher, acting out the roles Mitchell requires for her rather than taking on any discernible life of her own.” Other protagonists with sections of the novel to themselves like Hugo Lamb and the writer Crispin Hershey (instantly recognizable as an analogue to Martin Amis, as vigorously as Mitchell protests this is a coincidence) fare better in Allan’s estimation as well as mine; they are full of the magnetism peculiar to those who make judgements, answer temptations, act on principles, and live with consequences, even as they are locked in systems beyond their control.

Not that this is a hard requirement for fiction; there is plenty of interest to be found in representing the truly powerless who live reactively and, in trying to express their individual nature under the thumb of communal forces, only flounder. But the trouble with Holly Sykes, who from pole to pole is the wire upon which the novel is suspended, is that her route through the novel is not even comprehensible without reference to the abrupt intrusions of supernatural forces. They lurk in the background as an absent cause, shoving her this way and that, making her who she is without giving her much of a chance to make anything of herself. In sheer abundance of longitudinal data points she is the David Mitchell character we would expect to know the most about, the only one we have ever seen grow in a life completely lived, but the sense of mysterious discrepancy that graces his recurring players with the illusion of depth is missing. For as often as Holly finds her way back into the story, it is rarely compelling to ask how she got from A to B, since we always have a fallback answer: magic.

The Bone Clocks conjures like nothing else a Muggle’s-eye-view of the Potterdämmerung, a sequence of befuddling calamities punctuated by disappearances and memory wipes. Mitchell presents this in a gambit liable to amuse the loyal reader with its irreverence: his most audacious feat of narrative acrobatics is to walk straight ahead in time. One minute you see Holly caught in the crossfire of duel between meddling immortals with too much time on their hands; the next she is going about her carefree way, picking strawberries, with no recollection of the scene she just recounted—a first-person omniscience of sorts that renders her account suspect while paradoxically convincing the audience it is privy to everything.

To the extent Holly manages to wrest a sliver of control from the forces propelling her life, she does so in keeping with Mitchell’s predominant motif of literature as a conduit for self-actualization, a concern as pervasive in his most conventional novels as in his atlases of clouds. Jacob de Zoet finds his footing in Dejima with the aid of a smuggled psalter; Jason Taylor of Black Swan Green, like Mitchell in his youth, nurtures a mastery of poetic language to circumvent a stammer. True to form, Holly Sykes shows up in middle age at a literary festival as one of those bestselling purveyors of confessional schlock that ambitious thinking men look down upon (a sympathetic gesture from a perennial Booker contender towards the real lowbrow, not fantastical escape but the ersatz reality of coffee-table inspiration). In the absence of any insight into the fate of her brother Jacko, all she can do is broadcast her distress and pray someone is listening.

One of the listeners is Marinus, and it is in her section of the novel that the reader’s access to the perspective of immortals cements itself as a liability. Chief among the problems with Mitchell’s new cosmology of Anchorites and Horologists is its urge to literalize and explain, as when we learn that Magistrate Shiroyama and Abbot Enomoto, the main political players in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, were all along in thrall to the interventions of the Horologist Xi Lo. What should be a cute cameo sets a disenchanting precedent, for this is not the same manner of intertextual tribute as what we have seen from Mitchell before: far from adding a new dimension to familiar names and faces, it overrides them with a retroactive motivation. The stories are no longer adjacent; one dominates the truth of another. We know this because The Bone Clocks concertedly posits the actions of immortals as the final word on cause and effect within its own pages, and while we remain free to read The Thousand Autumns however we wish, one dreads the implications for Mitchell’s future work should he continue to pursue the course of flattening the complexities of his audacious early novels into a single pancaked chronology.

By the end of The Bone Clocks, this commitment to total unification is already so burdensome that as soon as we learn the final section is set in Ireland, the experienced reader expects to see Mo Muntervary return from Ghostwritten and number9dream and her appearance right on schedule, while welcome, looks forced. When finally, a certain vessel sails into view and draws the distant apocalypse of Cloud Atlas into uncomfortable proximity, there is no denying that Mitchell has placed his chips on a wiki-friendly consistent universe that threatens to diminish the best of his work.

Much of this despair, it must be said, hails from the observation that his Secret Wizard War is well beneath the standard of execution displayed not only in his earlier works but elsewhere in the same book. If JK Rowling had one conspicuous lapse of technique she never managed to correct, it was the incoherence of the magical combat she habitually described in trailing ellipses and vague jets of light (action choreography being perhaps the only respect in which the later Potter films by David Yates, which consistently mistook the grim for the wholly joyless, improved on their source). In the course of evoking Rowling’s work, Mitchell inherits her worst deficiencies, and Nina Allan finds herself baffled at the consequent smattering of tropes “so hackneyed and two-dimensional they would feel out of place and old hat even in a more conventional core genre urban fantasy.”

Brian Finney addresses this complaint in a sustained defence of The Bone Clocks that exhorts us to read “An Horologist’s Labyrinth” as a deliberate burlesque. Mitchell, he contends, is “parodying the genre he is simultaneously employing to thrill the reader. While offering the excitement of a well-told piece of science fiction, he is distancing himself from the genre’s overstatement, cliché, and escapism.” The verbs of the Wizard War (“superkinetic”, “superlasso”) are so unabashedly preposterous they can only be a jab at the commercial fantasist’s resort to neologism. That this is the optimal reading, Finney argues, is only reinforced by Mitchell’s lifelong immersion in fantasy and science fiction that we have already seen him put to use elsewhere.

I sympathize with Finney’s exasperation at the duty of spelling out the obvious while everybody else seems intent on missing it; that is precisely the exercise I am here to conduct myself. In fact, there is much we can add to his body of evidence. We may note, for instance, that Mitchell has a demonstrated record of tongue-in-cheek hyper-fantasy most visible in the unrestrained splatter of number9dream; that as Holly learns about the Anchorites she compares them to Sauron and Lord Voldemort by name, and when she bellows in capital letters at a melodramatic climax where she settles a bloody score (“NOBODY THREATENS MY FAMILY!”) it is impossible for a Potterhead not to see Molly Weasley; that for Ed Brubeck, a reporter for Luisa Rey’s old magazine more at home in the outskirts of Fallujah than in Kent, the most delirious war zone of all is a Brighton comic-con of “Supermen, Batmen, Watchmen; Doctor Spocks, Doctor Whos, Doctor Evils”—parodies stacked on parodies.

Unfortunately, it does not follow that reading the Marinus section in the style of Tarantino, as a screwball rehabilitation of B-list tropes with A-list production values and ironic loquacity, makes it seem any less out of place in the novel; nor does it deflect the charge from Ron Charles that it amounts to a “knock-off version of Harry Potter”.

Let us transpose Finney’s argument to where it belongs. If there is one thing that is reliably overlooked by critics who use Harry Potter as a convenient punching bag for the vogue in adolescent heroics that has conquered the literary market and spun off into a self-sustaining ecosystem of its own, it is the fact that Potter parody is inherently second-order; Rowling was already engaged in conscious pastiche, self-aware of tropes and arbitrary rules governing the use of magic. The magnetism of the series was never in the clichés of broom-riding witches and wand-waving wizards but in what manner of institutions they might construct to find a place in their own society—the schools, the banks, the cryptofascist cults—and how, in navigating a world of stifling typologies, children might acquire the proportion to distinguish structural inconvenience or mild bullying from real evil.

Rowling imports the crudest archetypes and always takes care to push them one step further: a werewolf on medication, a servant elf in want of a sock, a revolving door of Monty Python bureaucrats. Moreover, by the time Rowling sets off her battle royale, she has six-and-a-half hefty volumes behind her to prepare a modicum of sympathetic interest in all but the most incidental redshirt thugs. Mitchell does not have this luxury; in contrast to his recurring characters, the villains of The Bone Clocks appear for the first time, and scarcely at that. The irony is that at first glance this looks like a problem best solved by more intertextual connectivity, not less. One would be a lot more receptive to the climactic firefight at the Dusk Chapel, and to the novel’s grand initiative to unify the Mitchellverse, if any of the soul-sucking Anchorites had a fraction of the development lavished on Hugo Lamb. (Then again, the Anchorites are by deliberate selection sociopaths; there is only so much in them to humanize.)

There lies the crux of the novel’s predicament: to mimic the captivating qualities of Wizard Wars at their best, it must jam the archipelago back into a Pangaea. The true discordance is not between fantasy and reality, a distinction Mitchell has never observed; it emerges instead from the struggle of the plural against the monolithic. Here what works for Rowling is not so suitable. The Potter saga, for all its Gilliamite devices, is more Inception than Brazil—a detective plot, not a dream plot. It makes sense for it to take place in a world of encyclopaedic detail and totalizing explanation, and its intricacy actively benefits from the scrupulous touch of an author who, if asked to specify the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, would recall exactly where she filed them. (This is a lesson lost on the clomping footmen who think it suffices to design an encyclopaedia and neglect to repurpose the data within towards a well constructed mystery.) For Mitchell, a specialist in dream plots to rival his idol Murakami, a reversion to the neat linear causality of encyclopaedic worlds (however ironic) presents a contradiction of purpose. The trifling inconsistencies that to a detective story are flaws are the lifeblood of Mitchell’s work. In Cloud Atlas it is implied that the characters in each era who bear a comet-shaped birthmark are a single soul perpetually reborn—but only implied, and undermined by the circumstance that two of them, Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish, must have been concurrently alive. Yet these minutely peppered dissonances, intentional or not, support the air of indeterminacy so critical to the spirit of the book.

To be fair, The Bone Clocks beats a hasty retreat from its misguided conventional war in its final section, which depicts an ecological collapse indifferent to the Manichaean skirmishes of immortals who have ceased to matter. The Anchorites and Horologists are few in number and theirs is a petty war. But as Laura Miller notes, this admission of inadequacy only detracts from all of the events, natural and supernatural, that have come before. One sphere of the novel’s cosmology, pick your poison, must be inconsequential for the other to have meaning.

Perhaps it is advisable to read The Bone Clocks on its own terms, not those imported from previous experience with its author. However, this undercuts Finney’s interpretation, which largely depends on situating the book in the context of everything else we know about David Mitchell. To knowingly take it in isolation is also not very tenable given the unprecedented density of its ties with the earlier novels. Yet to passively capitulate to the cohering solidity of a contiguous übernovel, as we may be obliged to do to follow it any further, betrays the delicate balance of Mitchell’s most vivid stories, where the events of dreams or fictions may have limited causal force but, whatever their impotence in the palpable currents of history, never feel any less significant in human terms. These are neighbourly stories, their collisions more enriching than mere connective trivia, their conflicts synthetic and far from zero-sum. They defy any clean divisions between the surface world and the master explanation. They are best in symbiosis, in adjacency.

Slipping out of mirrors

No contrivance of the Anchorites, however, is about to take credit for the war in Iraq. David Mitchell may have a reputation for an unbounded conception of reality, but he has a carefully considered respect for the historical novelist’s challenge of carving out a space for invention. “Writer’s motives are as varied as criminals’,” he wrote in 2010 while promoting The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, “but I suspect that the historical novelist’s genetic code contains the geeky genes of the model-maker—there is pleasure to be had in the painstaking reconstruction of a lost world.” Mitchell embraces the complexity implicit in rendering a time or place beyond recall, which in turn demands a subtle appreciation of political dynamics. Inasmuch as The Thousand Autumns is a samurai romance that foreshadows the Anchorites, it is equally a measured study in the particulars of eighteenth-century diplomatic translation, and no supernatural motives ascribed to its action by The Bone Clocks can take that away.

The conflict in Iraq is still in close proximity and within living memory; there is less to reconstruct while the standards of accuracy are more stringent or at least easier to enforce. Nevertheless, the demands on a writer’s delicacy towards the complexity of historical causation remain in place, and the crass reduction of global conflict to the shadowy manoeuvres of a few big players is the signature of a Dan Brown, a trap that a novelist with a capacious perspective on genre tropes knows well enough to avoid. This is not to say Ed Brubeck’s chapter of The Bone Clocks, “The Wedding Bash”, provides any stunning insight on the siege of Fallujah or the particulars of the conduct of the war; as a character study it is a reprise of the war-zone addiction examined in Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker, only transplanted from a combatant to a journalist. Mitchell’s strengths are what we would expect: his ear for idioms of speech among soldiers and displaced civilians alike—stylized past the point of naturalism but not at the expense of the ring of truth—and, recalling Jacob de Zoet’s travails in Japan, his perspicacity for the negotiation of language barriers. History and current affairs, with which the novelist has never been more openly engaged, are mainly a serviceable buffer against romantic simplicities best kept in moderation.

As is so often true of the median Mitchell fragment (if not his best), the significance of the Iraqi episode is less invested in any self-contained ingenuity of its own than in its place among all the others. I defer to Paul Kincaid:

[…] I have seen comments to the effect that the scenes in Iraq during Ed’s chapter are an irrelevance, an excuse for Mitchell to express his opposition to the war but really play no significant part in the overall novel. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Iraq scenes are there because they provide a necessary mirror to the overall war that is going on behind and underneath everything else in the book. Without Iraq, all the book would present is the ongoing, ahistorical war of the immortals that is vague and at best esoteric; with Iraq we see all war as cruel and dehumanizing to both sides in the conflict. So we see that what the immortals do is not detached from what we know, and we get a way of measuring the human cost.

Elsewhere in his response, Kincaid rejoins the main line of Mitchell enthusiasts who assume the contraction of connections within the pattern is purely additive and not, as I would have it, a potential reversal of philosophy; but here he is on the mark. To revisit a scene where Ed’s photographer Aziz recounts his struggle to make a future for his daughters amidst the chaos and incompetence left by Saddam and America alike is to notice a reflection of mortals like Holly who, in a world of open cosmic strife between combatants who are not their concern, just want their families to get by. It may not be very subtle, but it does lead one to think the powerlessness of mortals in the novel has a point.

Further to this, the hyperreality of war as a conduit for escape is a motif that calls attention to the place of The Bone Clocks in the emerging pattern of literary response to twenty-first century geopolitics, and specifically to the interminable psychological trauma of its origin myth, the 11 September terrorist attacks.

The spark of recognition Mitchell ignites when he invokes recurring signs and symbols is a momentary pleasure with a dark antithesis. It brings with it the threat of misrecognition, of mistaken identity. If you could be anyone, anyone could be you. We are only able to see Yu Leon Marinus in Iris Marinus if we equally open ourselves to believing Jacko isn’t Jacko, and indeed this is the very crisis that presents itself to Holly. As a family matter, it is a crisis of recognition in its purest social form. A coherent sense of family, and from it the higher-order kinships—tribes, nations, ideologies—relies on a dependable apparatus for threat assessment, for knowing when to let down your guard. In an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion threat assessment goes haywire; our capacity for distinguishing friend from foe resorts to the indiscriminate profiling of potential enemies, and we no longer trust our fight-or-flight response.

Mitchell is no stranger to the dramatic possibilities. It bears remembering that one of his foundational texts, as pervasive a presence in his thematic architecture as Calvino, Murakami, and Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock’s sublime meditation on reincarnation and recurrence as echoes of trauma is an expressive distillation of the psychological rudiments that inform Mitchell’s fantastical iterations on the same ideas, and the novelist acknowledges the debt in the third story of Cloud Atlas, Luisa Rey’s. (I am sorry to report these connections fall short of a closed loop; Wilder’s contribution to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt has no great bearing on Atlas.) The entire chapter is a Hitchcock tribute, as it flags early on when Luisa recalls an interview with the director for her magazine:

I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s… the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe… but only our toes.

But it is Vertigo, more than Psycho or Charade (not a Hitchcock thriller but a Stanley Donen picture designed to look like one, mentioned in keeping with Mitchell’s love of mimicry), that courses through the coastal Californian setting of Luisa’s partition and beyond. The most overt allusion to it comes later, when Luisa meets a contact in an art gallery and finds her sitting on a low bench, gazing at a portrait of a lady.

It is actually a little disappointing that Mitchell’s cinematic tribute does not survive into the film of Cloud Atlas by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings. Tykwer, a director who put his name on the map with another exercise in recurrence, Run Lola Run (and who, like Sunken Garden’s creator Michel van der Aa, doubles as a composer), shoots Luisa’s segment in a fluid contemporary style with little resemblance to Hitchcock’s meticulous configurations. Nevertheless, the essence of Vertigo survives in the adaptation through the latter’s notorious theatrical conceit, in my view a successful one, of iterating a single cast over multiple identities, slathering on everyone a garish layer of makeup that looks contrived to draw attention to the players, not disguise them. The delight in spotting the actors comes packaged with a necessary attitude of suspicion towards the characters they are portraying, who, the film conditions us to presume, are never who they say they are. And there is question at the heart of paranoia: who are you, really?

Misrecognition is a mythic device and not by a long shot anything new to fiction. The frictionless reassignment of names, the slipperiness of the signifier and signified as their bonds dissolve in sleep, has always been a defining element of dream logic. Prior to The Bone Clocks Mitchell drew on it extensively with minimal reference to any crisis of the recent past more proximate than the Falklands War, with the telling exception of the first chapter of his very first novel, Ghostwritten, which opens with an incident based on the 1995 Tokyo subway attack. On his first page of published fiction he announced himself as a correspondent from the demilitarized border of dream and terror.

What is new for the logic of misrecognition, in our present century, is its subject matter: warfare in the age of ubiquitous spectacle. Not for no reason does 9/11 fit so snugly into the pattern of what David Auerbach, in his taxonomy of Thomas Pynchon’s moral universe, calls a “decoherence event”—a catastrophic detonation of our models for comprehending the world that drives us to scramble for any reassurance that reality is coherent. “That gaping void of anti-paranoia—the loss of all sense in the world—is not only what drives conspiracy theories, but also the conspiracies themselves,” writes Auerbach. “Both are attempts to exert control over the world and provide linear explanation where none exists.” The cunning of Pynchon’s contribution to the literature of 9/11, Bleeding Edge, is simply in behaving as a Pynchon novel. Life imitates art.

One detects a shadow of Pynchon’s scheme in the final third of The Bone Clocks, where the conspirators on all sides do exactly as Auerbach says: they impose an unwelcome linearity upon the Mitchellverse, and in this very pursuit of coherence they stare over the abyss that separates life from death and unravel into incoherence. Finally, they subside into inadequacy and leave a new void to be filled.

The juxtaposition of genre spectacle with terror, a twinning that led so many to see the first footage of plane-struck towers and immediately think of Tom Clancy or Michael Bay, occurs in The Bone Clocks as the latest incarnation of a wider trend. Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent, published a year earlier, follows a similar tack: a fractured novel that begins in a near-future Islamic Republic of Great Britain (it is treated more delicately than it sounds) where incomprehensible forces thought to be superweapons carve triangular slices out of space itself, it too is a quest to recover someone beloved who was snatched away into a phantasmagoria of names dissolved from faces. Lavie Tidhar’s Osama, a reformulation of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle where the alternate-historical Osama bin Laden is a figure out of pulp paperbacks, wraps its illusions around the nucleus of a dissociation from personal bonds, the trigger for a loss of self.

Central to all of these novels is a disorienting sense of prosopagnosia, face-blindness. In searching to recover a coherent reality, detective plots yield to dream plots. Faces come unanchored from identities, and the ensuing failures of recognition compound an atmosphere of mistrust. (From this perspective Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, released in 1985 in a climate punctuated by the bombings of the Provisional IRA, is an outstandingly prescient urtext.)

The most literal presentation of prosopagnosia as the operative metaphor for post-9/11 dissonance, and also the best, is in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. The novel, set in 2002, concerns a man who suffers a brain injury that leaves him with the unshakeable conviction that his sister is an impostor. As it progresses, however, a picture emerges of an America that is itself the victim of cognitive dislocation. A science writer buckles under a backlash to his lack of empathy with his subjects and the fictive licence he takes with stringing their stories into a narrative; young men in Nebraska enlist to exact vengeance on an unseen enemy that struck a side of the country they have never known; a reporter collapses under the weight of desensitization to violence and fear. Misrecognition, the novel tells us, is the organizing crisis of our times.

The Echo Maker securely resides in our quotidian reality, but it provides us with a robust vocabulary for grasping the political insight of writers who work in dream-space. Together they have a strange synergy: Margaret Atwood makes a persuasive case that the archetypal mythology of Powers’ novel is a text we encountered here at the start, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I would go further and submit that it gives us the master key to what we might call the prosopagnosic novel. We can see developing before us a specific and consistent approach to blending science, fantasy, and conspiracy into a concerted response to the new paranoia of the twenty-first century. It is something too exact to be reductively described in terms of simple genre-mashing or complex systems transcending human control, although its players are, in their own way, heroes of a thousand faces.

As for David Mitchell, as a long admirer of his work I remain optimistic. No petty theoretical discomforts with his growing tendency to linearize what is better left a labyrinth make me any less curious about what he will do next, or leave me any less watchful for the next appearance of Toby Kramer (if in the guise of Zenna Briggs). It would be so like him to rewrite what The Bone Clocks has just rewritten. If the totality of his work is to form a single saga, then at least there will always be more room for ecstatic contradiction. We would do well to remember the epilogue of The Thousand Autumns, when Jacob visits the dying Marinus. “The doctor joked that he was a grass-snake, shedding one skin.”

(Images from Michel van der Aa’s film-opera Sunken Garden are sourced from trailers, publicity photographs by Mike Hoban, and Lucas van Woerkum’s documentary The Making of Sunken Garden.)

On Saturday I attended the London Chessboxing Championship, which was more or less what it said on the tin. For those unfamiliar with the emergent hybrid sport, there is chess, and there is boxing. Every bout alternates between successive rounds of speed chess and boxing until one of the contenders secures a checkmate on the board or a knockout in the ring (along with the usual victory conditions for resignation or time).

It should be no surprise that chessboxing’s promoters sell it as a perfect biathlon of mind and body. Chess has an ancient mystique of intellect about it even among those who barely know the game, and boxing is far and away the most story-rich of sports. Both activities stand as cultural paragons of some indefinite struggle of individual mastery. And the combination is hardly arbitrary: the boxing forces the chess to be played under conditions of high adrenaline and extreme physical fatigue, imposing a test of mental stamina quite unlike any other.

Not so clear is whether the chess takes a toll on the boxing. Andrea Kuszewski has argued that the most cognitively taxing part of the game is the rapid task-switching, which demands superb emotional control; indeed, chessboxing may prove to be exceptionally well suited to training one’s aggression management. In theory, a good chessboxer has to box with the ability to play chess very shortly in mind. (In practice, as we will see, this is not necessarily the case.)

The London event at the Scala was reportedly the world’s biggest night of chessboxing to date, with five bouts on the card drawing a capacity crowd of 1000. Before the first match, my own estimate was 400-500 spectators on the floor with many more in the balcony and VIP lounge, but the audience swelled as the night wore on and the official count became more plausible. One of the organizers called it the largest live audience on record for a game of chess, though I believe Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky drew similar numbers in the Piatigorsky Cup (Santa Monica, 1966), and that’s only the record in the United States.

Nevertheless, the sport shows signs of rapid expansion, filling a former cinema palace kitty-corner to King’s Cross that doubled the capacity of its previous venue in Tufnell Park. There are rumblings that talks have begun to bring chessboxing to Royal Albert Hall next year, presumably to catch some of the Olympic spillover, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Pressboxing

All of this you can already gather from the press—and for years now, there has been a lot of press. The Guardian covered chessboxing as early as 2005, when the sport was not too far removed from its inauspicious modern beginnings as a novelty act by the Berlin performance artist Iepe Rubingh, who just so happened to win his own inaugural world championship in 2003. The London club was founded in 2008 with an initial membership of seven, although it is now arguably the most prominent of the multiple international clubs that have sprung up outside of Berlin. London, too, handed its first title of British Heavyweight Chessboxing Champion to the club’s founder, Tim Woolgar.

Put this way, one might come away thinking the whole activity’s integrity was suspect—and a few observers have said as much. Justin Horton, who writes for the Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog (which, incidentally, is running an outstanding series of posts on tracking down the chess players in a 19th-century painting), has repeatedly taken journalists to task for reproducing the promotional claims around chessboxing without further corroborating research. Horton calls chessboxing a “circus” and a “swindle”, marking as his prime targets the sport’s alleged popularity and the chess competence of the predominantly unrated participants. Private Eye has similarly attacked the coverage of chessboxing as a case of media hacks being suckered by a small-time carnival-standard affair.

So one does have to be careful not to overstate chessboxing’s reach. It undeniably has a bit of a weird-news appeal that makes every event a renewable story, but this also means that in every article, quite a lot of space is wasted on gawking over the novelty of the affair (or treating it with prepared derision) instead of seeing it for what it is.

My impression was of a sport where the growth of spectator interest is far outstripping that of participation—and it shows. It is indeed impressive that Saturday’s event drew the audience it did when only three years ago, the London club boasted of attracting the highest turnout for a chess match in the United Kingdom since Kramnik/Kasparov in 2000—an estimated crowd of 150. That is a clear promotional success. But good publicity and a firm conceptual foundation aren’t enough for a game to thrive; the players and their tactics have to be interesting enough to be worth following long-term, or there’s no incentive for a one-time curiosity seeker to return. There needs to be a recognizable sense of expertise, of nuances open to appreciation—and that depends on a base of participation vast enough to propel the standard of competition skyward.

If chessboxing is like any other competitive club activity I’ve seen, be it Scrabble or parliamentary debate, doubtless there’s a great deal of involvement behind the scenes that never makes it into the ring in front of a paying audience—trainees and casual fighters who fall back to logistics when it comes to the big events. (Kat Sark’s report on the Berlin/London chessboxing summit in June, which cast an eye on gender equality, suggests this is the case.) This is normal and expected, but until there is a deeper competitive pool, I doubt we will see a true escalation of skill towards the game’s natural ceiling—which, it must be said, looks very high.

But enough of the ringside theory. Let’s have a look at the fights.

The fight card

1. Chris Levy (white) vs. Mike Botteley (black)

The opening bout on the undercard was advertised as having the strongest combined Elo rating in a chessboxing match. (Justin Horton has found this to refer not to the FIDE Elo, but the ECF equivalent; I think the term ‘Elo’ has been sufficiently genericized to include Elo-like rating systems that the implicit conversion is fair.) Despite an interesting start from the Réti Opening, Levy fell far behind on the clock, exiting round 3 of chess down by a knight with 1:13 remaining. Unable to secure a knockout in the boxing round, Levy whittled the endgame down to a dance between king and king-pawn until he ran out of time. (The endgame itself was difficult for the audience to follow, as the display board couldn’t keep up with the action.) Win for Botteley in chess round 4.

2. Emma Richardson vs. Kath Dodson

Billed as the first women’s chessboxing match, this was a bout where the boxing clearly took its toll on the chess, with plenty of material thrown away on both sides. The decisive moment came when Richardson gave up her queen in the third round of chess, after which Dodson missed a mate but quickly recovered to trap the white king. Richardson couldn’t find a way out of the impending mate and ran out the clock. Win for Dodson in chess round 3.

3. Ben Robinson vs. Richard Kavanagh

As a fellow spectator next to me exclaimed, “They’re not even the same size!” Kavanagh replaced Mark Lech on the ticket at the last minute and surely set a new record for the most heavily tattooed figure to grace a board. The chess turned out to be a formality: after Robinson spent much of the first boxing round looking well out of his weight class—at one point Kavanagh picked him up off the ground with one arm before the referee waved off the hold—he landed a devastating right hook from the corner that knocked his opponent down flat, scoring an unexpected TKO. Win for Robinson in boxing round 1.

4. Andrew McGregor vs. Hubert van Melick

For the heavyweight main event, the time constraints on the chess were relaxed to 12 minutes per player from the 7:30 that was allotted to the preceding bouts, and the audience was told to expect up to 11 rounds of chess and boxing apiece. There was an audible hush as the 6’11” bearded ‘Man Mountain’ McGregor strode into the ring, draped in a scarlet cape and looking like he’d just come back from lugging Harry Potter off to school.

The match opened into the Italian Game and a defensive pawn structure on both sides, suggesting a more measured game than the others, but this never came to fruition. The first round of boxing was by far the most ferocious of the night, and van Melick chased McGregor around the ring until McGregor’s cornerman threw in the towel. The disappointed audience erupted in boos as Tim Woolgar and the other officials took the stage to award van Melick the Bobby Fischer Belt. (Yes, there was a gaudy championship belt emblazoned with the image of Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who felt exploited by something as innocent as the title of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, would have been furious.)

Keith Kolb, who fought in the final match (and who, like McGregor, flew over from Los Angeles to compete), later revealed that McGregor had only met his cornerman that night and was very upset with the call. He was on the back foot and van Melick was driving him into the corner, yes, but the letdown of seeing the main event end so abruptly cast an unfortunate shadow over the whole evening.

5. Charlie Hayter vs. Keith Kolb

The final bout, which wasn’t listed in the original advertising and was no doubt added late, followed a course that paralleled the main event: once again, the chess looked to be one of the more promising and defensive games of the day, and once again, we never got to see the middlegame owing to an early knockdown by Hayter. Kolb’s cornerman threw in the towel, only this time it was clearly the appropriate call. Win for Hayter in boxing round 1.

Check, please

With three of the bouts finishing before we could see the boxing’s effect on the chess, it’s safe to say that the London Chessboxing Championship fell short of exhibiting the promise of the game. This was apparently anomalous; the summaries of the last event in March suggest that matches do tend to go longer, one of them (the middleweight fight between Svein Clouston and Alan Riley) being decided on points after the full 11 rounds.

I’m not sure what can be done to ensure more consistently entertaining bouts, but one possibility is to have the fighters wear headgear, which Andrew McGregor already requires at his club in California. Purists will say this takes away from the visceral pleasure of boxing—nobody ever imagines it with headgear—but it could have the effect of being more welcoming to new competitors as well as limiting the risk of an early exit in the boxing segment. A quick and dramatic knockout is fun to watch in boxing, but in chessboxing it trivializes the chess completely. (Then again, nobody complained when Robinson landed his hit on Kavanagh—easily the boxing highlight of the show.)

Less tractable is the problem that the sport favours boxers new to chess over chess players new to boxing. Unless you fall into an obvious opening trap, it’s much easier for a neophyte chess player to survive four minutes of chess than it is for an inexperienced boxer to make it through the first round of boxing, even when the opponents are well matched. The skill curve in chess rises astronomically at the higher levels of play, but its minimum standard of fitness isn’t nearly as stringent as that of the boxing half. Furthermore, chessboxing is by its very nature designed to produce poor play on the board, full of mishaps that are visible to the audience but not so perceptible to someone who has just shaken off the gloves. It may never be a game that is open to producing quality chess, which limits its appeal to audiences that don’t take the game seriously either. But in another way this flaw may be an asset: the liability of the players to make mistakes encourages them to wriggle out of theoretically lost positions and play their games through to the bitter end.

Going by what I saw on Saturday, there is a lot of minor tidying that can be done with the production. Aside from the problem of the computer display of the board, which was not ideal for tracking endgame patterns at blazing speeds, the audio for the chess commentary was not very clear. As such, the chess was difficult to follow. It didn’t help, either, that much of the commentary was aimed at an elementary crowd. The commentator was International Master Malcolm Pein, chess columnist for The Telegraph and the voice of Fritz, who indisputably had the knowledge and experience for the job; but from the moment he announced 1. e4 as “Bobby Fischer’s move! That’s Bobby Fischer’s move!” it was clear I wasn’t the target audience—and I’m someone who hasn’t held down a tournament rating since junior.

I’m not saying that the commentary should dive into book jargon without much in the way of explanation, but I would have liked more insight into the positions and their strategic shapes. Commentary has the power to add exceptional spectator value for audiences with only a passing idea of tactics and strategy without talking down to their level. Witness this video of a blitz game from 1994 between Vassily Ivanchuk and the current World Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand.

This is perhaps a bit hopeful. Bundled with an awkward breakdancing pre-show, Frankensteinian mimes, and a frustrated hula dancer whose music kept cutting off, chessboxing was first and foremost packaged as a grand night out in London. And yes, while entertainment is where all spectator sports begin, I do feel as though the tackiness of the packaging underserves the game itself. For one thing, it sets the audience apart from the competitors like visitors from animals at the zoo: one is there for the detached amusement of the other. It’s worth remembering that for all the titanic reputation of Muhammad Ali or Lennox Lewis, boxing has always made for great stories because it creates such identifiable struggles. It’s the everyman’s sport, the same sweet science that gave us Terry Malloy.

As someone whose favourite spectator sport happens to be StarCraft II, and who recently joined thirty others to watch a professional tournament broadcast in a 19th-century pub (along with a hundred thousand others worldwide, hundreds of them in bars), the concept of chessboxing wasn’t outlandish to me at all; besides, I’d been aware of it for years. I’m certainly not one to judge a sport that, past its novelty, has the genuine potential to be great. What was alienating was everything surrounding it, this mysterious metropolitan ‘nightlife’ I’d heard of only in the urban legendarium. But when Iepe Rubingh brought chessboxing to the fore eight years ago, the game picked its target audience and committed to its peculiar cultural veneer. I’d say the strategy is working out pretty well, but I’m not so sure it’s ideal for inviting new contenders into the ring.

(The photographs in this post come from galleries of the event by James Bartosik and Ray Morris-Hill.)

Over the past week I’ve been attending a number of sessions at the London International Animation Festival. The LIAF has been around since 2003, but this is its first year in the Barbican Centre, where it comes at the tail end of a summer celebrating the art of animation.

July at the Barbican saw a retrospective of Studio Ghibli’s films, which I was shocked to discover never made it to British shores until 2001. Being a kid who remembers precisely two films from his toddlerhood, one being the Cantonese dub of My Neighbour Totoro (the other was The Land Before Time), it continues to astonish me that the childhoods of my peers were Miyazaki-free until Spirited Away. Also running at the Barbican Art Gallery until 11 September is Watch Me Move: The Animation Show, a gallery exhibition spanning 150 years of global animation history that I’ll have to write about another time. My readers in Canada will be happy to note that the exhibition’s next destination is the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where Watch Me Move will run from 8 October through Christmas Eve.

All digressions aside, I really must commend the LIAF’s outstanding curation. In the out-of-competition programmes alone I’ve found some classics I had hitherto missed like the Russian masterwork Hedgehog in the Fog, which grounded a session dedicated to cut-out animation past and present, and discovered some new and instant favourites. Two that stood out for me, both selections from last year’s SIGGRAPH conference: Mobile by Verena Fels, a crowd-pleasing shuffle of animals on wires reminiscent of Pixar’s For the Birds; and The Wonder Hospital by Shimbe (Beomsik Shim), a surreal descent into what I’d best describe as a funhouse of cosmetic surgery.

The piece that I want to draw attention to here, however, is Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries). It was presented as the fulcrum of a session dedicated to the oeuvres of its director, Theodore Ushev, and its subject, the 1960s Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Ushev himself was in attendance as one of the LIAF’s featured guests this year and told the audience of the many coincidences behind his latest project. Here’s one: when Ushev moved from Bulgaria to Montreal, where he has been based since 1999, he stayed in the same building that housed Lipsett for most of his life—until the latter committed suicide in 1986, aged 49.

Now that the National Film Board has digitized most of its treasures, you can see Lipsett’s films for yourself. His breakout work, Very Nice Very Nice, attracted the notice of Stanley Kubrick, who asked him to cut the trailer for Dr Strangelove. (Lipsett declined.) As an aficionado of the history of science and technology and the future as imagined by the past, my personal favourite is A Trip Down Memory Lane. Subtitled as “additional material for a time-capsule”, it features newsreel footage of everything from airships to chemistry experiments to wartime munitions, which were already nostalgic miscellanea in 1964, when the film was made. It’s an early work of retro-futurism, if you will.

As you can tell, Lipsett’s signature style involved the rapid-fire juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, often extracted from other documentary material, and his speciality was sound collage. The effect is one of funnelling our perception of the visuals through contrasting audio, although in truth, Lipsett typically began with the soundtrack first and set the images second. The technique is comparable to what William S Burroughs was doing textually with cut-up books like Nova Express, only Lipsett got there first. (I’m certain Marshall McLuhan must have written about Lipsett—how couldn’t he?—but not having my McLuhan volumes handy I’m not in a position to check.)

Lipsett Diaries is not a biography of its subject, but is closer to a work of historical fiction, diving into the recesses of a mind we only know by the trail of creations it left behind. It incorporates many of Lipsett’s own techniques and splices imagery from his films, although everything is rendered in Ushev’s painstakingly hand-painted frames. In terms of process, Ushev and Lipsett were very well matched. “For me to animate something, I have to hear it first,” Ushev explained at the session’s close. An illustrator and graphic designer by training who came to animation relatively recently, he confessed that he did not have a natural facility for timing, and preferred to assemble his work to the rhythm of existing sounds. “If the text is not recorded,” he said, “I cannot do the film.”

The voice-over narration comes not from Lipsett’s actual diaries, which have never been found, but is a reconstruction of what he might have been thinking as he hurtled through successive phases of his troubled life. It was written by Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and well-known chronicler of Canadian animation history, about whom I’ll have more to say in a moment. First, here’s a brief video where Ushev and Robinson talk about the film in the very corridors of the NFB that Lipsett used to scrape for clippings.

At its heart, Lipsett Diaries stands as an intensely moving effort by one Canadian animator to revive the profile of a once-prominent predecessor who has since fallen into obscurity. If this sentence doesn’t ring a bell, it should. It also describes one of the first films that gripped my attention when I started to take a serious interest in contemporary independent animation: Chris Landreth’s Ryan.

Ryan, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2005, was Landreth’s depiction of his encounter with Ryan Larkin, a former animator who was once of some renown thanks to his film Walking, and who was rediscovered at the turn of the millennium as a panhandler on the streets of Montreal. After Landreth’s film sparked a renewal of interest in Larkin’s work, it looked as though he would recover from his long spell of homelessness and substance abuse and return to animation once more. Sadly, this was not to be: Larkin died in 2007.

At the end of the LIAF screening I asked Theodore Ushev about whether Ryan had any influence on the conception of Lipsett Diaries. There was a very direct connection, he answered. For one thing, Arthur Lipsett and Ryan Larkin were contemporaries and rivals at the NFB of the 1960s—both of them Oscar nominees at the vanguards of experimental forms, both of them turfed in the 1970s. Their acolytes set them in opposition to one other: they would say, for instance, that Larkin was a monster and Lipsett was the true genius. “You were for Lipsett or for Larkin,” said Ushev, referring to their competing legacies.

Even more relevant is the involvement of Chris Robinson. Robinson, after all, was the one who rediscovered Larkin on the tip that a homeless man who claimed to be an animator was panhandling on the Main. It was Robinson who brought Larkin back to the attention of the animation community in a profile he wrote for Animation World Magazine in November 2000, and who ultimately introduced him to Chris Landreth.

Indeed, I recall how the most indelible piece I read about Larkin upon his death was the extremely ambivalent remembrance Robinson penned for The Ottawa Citizen and Cartoon Brew, where he lamented the undue sanctification Larkin received in the wake of Ryan‘s success. An excerpt:

After [OIAF 2000], an animation co-op in Calgary was all set to invite him to get back into animation. But Ryan refused. He said he was worried about losing his welfare cheque. In truth, Ryan was scared that he didn’t have anything to say anymore and frankly, the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he didn’t want to be saved. He’d lived this flaneur existence for so long, he couldn’t turn back. Initially I respected this, but I quickly soured towards him because I could see that he had a routine. He convinced many people before and after me into thinking they could save him when all he really wanted was some smokes, beer and chicken wings.

Ryan returned to Ottawa in 2004 to accompany the screening of Ryan. It would be a homecoming of sorts. I even arranged to have Ryan’s film Walking shown in the cinema (Ryan hadn’t seen the film in 35mm in thirty years). My excitement faded fast though. Ryan had changed. His drinking had reached the point of no return. Ryan needed constant supervision. We kept feeding him with beers and smokes to keep him happy, anything to stop him from flipping out. Of course, by late afternoon, he’d be a mess anyway. As much as I enjoyed watching Ryan piss on the streets in broad daylight, I wanted to grab him and slap some sense into him, tell him to stop being a child and take some responsibility for his life.

It was too late though. The winds of success blew Ryan into mythological status. Young animators made pilgrimages to Montreal to pay tribute to their hero, the flawed genius.

What I didn’t know until I dug up that article again today was that Theodore Ushev drew the accompanying illustration. In fact, prior to Lipsett Diaries, Ushev collaborated with Robinson as an illustrator for his Larkin biography, Ballad of a Thin Man; you can view Ushev’s artwork for the book on his website. To see Ryan as a direct precursor of the Lipsett film was more accurate than I knew.

Two years ago, when the NFB celebrated its 70th birthday, The Walrus published an article questioning the film board’s future vitality. It’s a flawed piece, and another Walrus contributor correctly noted that the NFB remains a pervasive fixture of Canadian culture even if people don’t know it by name, but never mind all that. I wish to attend to one particular passage:

The Memories of Angels, like another recent NFB film, the Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, looks back at NFB history. Memories is a reconfigured collection of shots from films by such masters as Denys Arcand, Arthur Lipsett, Michel Brault, and Claude Jutra. Ryan is an exploration into the work and life of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Larkin, a former wunderkind who was found, a quarter century after his work had essentially stopped, homeless and broken. These films’ success begs an obvious question: is the NFB an institution that has nowhere to go but to look back to the glory days of its golden age?

Not surprisingly, the NFB’s new commissioner, Tom Perlmutter, takes umbrage at the suggestion. Ushering me into his office at the NFB’s Montreal headquarters, he makes the distinction between empty nostalgia and creative renewal. “It’s interesting, to me; that’s precisely the way not to be a slave to the past. Those films are an homage, and they’re both entirely original in their own ways. The editing in The Memories of Angels is amazing—it’s a tribute both to the city and to the history of filmmaking. It’s not simply a recycling, but rather a reimagining of those images.”

Like Perlmutter, I view artistic reflection on the past as a sign not of stagnation, but of maturity. Some of the most pivotal works in any medium are the ones that recapitulate their genre’s history and trace a lineage back to their forebears. Look at Billy Wilder’s resurrection of Gloria Swanson from DeMille’s silent Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard; Maurice Ravel’s post-WWI reconstruction of the Straussian Viennese waltz in La valse; Charles Mingus’s tributes to the big-band orchestration of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in Mingus Ah Um; Cervantes twice over with his grand parody of the Spanish chivalric romance in Don Quixote, which goes on to swallow itself when Part II of the novel makes history out of Part I.

The interwoven network of Canadian animation is well past coincidence, particularly in Montreal’s history-steeped community. Films like Ryan and Lipsett Diaries are not so much acts of reverence as they are cases of artists exploring the uncharted crannies of their own studios. This, I think, is how culture motivates the definition of an identity, a distinctive local stamp. What we may see in retrospect as gestalt movements are, in reality, a scatter of new visions finding their place in the halls of their ancestral inspirations.

I’ve been aware of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard for a long time, but only in the past few days have I decided to try the layout for myself. Like any cognitive realignment pushing against the momentum of a lifelong habit, the initial adjustment process has been slow and occasionally punishing. When you are acccustomed to the fluidity of the keyboard as an invisible extension of the mind, it’s terrifying to find it amputated and clumsily reattached. I expect this overwhelming self-consciousness to be the norm someday when future generations willingly trade in their limbs for more dynamic cyborg substitutes.

Up to now, the closest I’ve come to this awkward stumbling was when I attempted to train my left-hand dexterity on Charlie Parker melodies I would normally play with my right. A kind of impotence, really: I was willing myself to do things that I was used to executing at dizzying velocities with ease, but my body just wouldn’t respond. The trick, I discovered, is to force yourself to slow down, clean up the suddenly naked particulars, and not rely so much on your established ‘chunks’ of muscle memory. My left hand is still a shambles, mind you, but as the lesser automaton it invents the more colourful passages.

That’s why I’m still plugging away in Dvorak. It may be slow-going at first—this post you are reading now is taking an eternity to punch in—but within minutes of playing with it, you begin to perceive all sorts of qualitative pleasures that simply don’t exist in QWERTY-land. It’s like switching to an Apple Macintosh, complete with the moment of epiphany where the cultishness of the already indoctrinated looks reasonable all of a sudden. (Or so I’ve heard. Having been a Mac user on and off since the age of five, I can’t really say.)

Patented in 1936, the Dvorak keyboard was designed around a handful of basic principles. High-frequency characters reside on the home row (middle row) to minimize squashing and stretching. Vowels and common punctuation marks sit together on the left, encouraging the alternation of hands from one character to the next; one hand presses keys while the other hand repositions. Finally, synergistic pairs like the digraphs ch and th are packed in close proximity. (In the original design, the arrangement of the number row fell on the axis of an outward spiral, reading 7531902468 from left to right. Even Dvorak’s adherents conceded that was silly, and it has largely been dropped.)

Dvorak users will often tell you two things. The first is that the layout’s ergonomics are a vast improvement on QWERTY, allowing you to push your typing to record speeds without incurring nearly the same risk of repetitive strain injuries. I can’t verify this myself; as someone who pulls a respectable 120 wpm in QWERTY, it’s unlikely that I’ll see efficiency gains in my typing habits anytime soon, and RSI has never been a problem for me thanks to my exclusive preference for lightweight, shallow keyboards.

Intuitively, the claims about Dvorak’s top-speed advantage sound plausible. Although the credibility of the original pro-Dvorak study has been questioned, notably in the 1990 paper “The Fable of the Keys” by SJ Liebowitz and Stephen E Margolis, the fact remains that the QWERTY layout was specifically “anti-engineered” by its inventor, Christopher Sholes, to split digraphs and spread common letters apart and thus avert key-jamming. In other words, it was designed to slow you down.

The second thing you’ll hear is that the Dvorak keyboard has nothing to do with the most notable figure to bear that name, the great romantic composer Antonín Dvořák. The keyboard’s designer, the Seattle-based educational psychologist August Dvorak, was a distant cousin at most—and that, we’re told, is all there is to the story.

This is where I disagree.

Key Largo

Most of the conversation you will find about the Dvorak layout portrays it as a case study in economics. If mass commercial standardization precludes the adoption of a considerable improvement in design, the argument goes, do free markets really foster innovation? Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover, “The Curse of QWERTY”, is a classic of the genre. Liebowitz and Margolis, in contrast, stay on the tack that QWERTY has remained triumphant simply because the alternatives aren’t discernibly better.

In either case, the way people tend to talk about Dvorak is invariably utilitarian, balancing the costs and benefits of adoption in the quantifiable parlance of character frequencies, finger mileages, relative activity by row, and above all, words per minute. Rarely will you hear specifics about the intangibles of the overall Dvorak experience, even among the few who swear by it. My impression is that many who praise Dvorak on principle don’t actively use it themselves—”I wish I knew how to qwert you!” rings the cri de cœur on Backspace Mountain—and testimonials among those who do typically say a few words about speed and comfort and leave it at that.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a lucid experiential observation is this article by Nicholas Thompson, in which he says:

Using a Dvorak after a lifetime of banging on a Qwerty is like removing a tiny pebble from your shoe. Writing a word such as “the” gives me a buzz as I roll my fingers to the left in a fluid, natural motion. The the the the.

The the the the. Thompson couldn’t have picked a better example; ‘the’ is the word that sold me on Dvorak. It rolls off your fingers like the spoken word rolls off your tongue as you flick it against the back of your teeth. Teeth teeth teeth teeth. But then he blunders:

For musicians, think about trying to play “Blowing in the Wind” starting with a B-flat ninth. That’s a Qwerty board. Now think about starting on a G chord. That’s a Dvorak board.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Were you to play “Blowing in the Wind” with a ninth on the initial tonic, the chord would reduce to a F6 or Dm7 over a B-flat root. Easy, comfortable, and far better than G on many instruments. I suspect Mr Thompson was a guitarist.

However poorly he may have worded it, Thompson had the right idea. Dvorak’s layout is more than a mere ergonomic reconfiguration. It proposes an entirely different way of thinking about typing. It makes the activity of typing musical. Dvorak, in a word, is like Dvořák.

Major Major Major Major

Experienced pianists have a way of detecting whether a composer is catering to their needs. In this respect, Frédéric Chopin comes up most often as the model composer for the instrument. Playing Chopin is like revenge: it isn’t easy by any means, but everybody covets the satisfaction of pulling it off. It’s easy to see why once you practice his works—his chords and patterns have an uncanny knack for fitting in the curve of your hand like a volley of fastballs perfectly aimed at the palm of a catcher’s mitt. The fingerings by and large suggest themselves. In the jazz world, Duke Ellington is the same way: construct the chords under a tune like “Mood Indigo” or “Prelude to a Kiss” and you find yourself pulled towards brilliant, open structures with voice-leading that magically clicks.

One neat little morsel of trivia about Chopin is that he liked to start new piano students on B major, which has the most idiosyncratic fingerings of any major scale if you learn the instrument according to the common pattern of starting with C major (no sharps or flats, and therefore no black keys) and adding accidentals as you get better, spreading out along the circle of fifths. In the usual progression, B major with its five sharps is introduced relatively late, and thus it has developed a reputation for being difficult.

Chopin, who frankly knew better than everyone, taught C major last. It’s the easiest key to read, he reasoned, but the hardest key to play. C-oriented thinking creates obstacles in the long run in real-world performance scenarios; better instead to begin with B, which develops the proper contour of the hand. This won’t seem like a big deal if you are anything like Eva van Crommelynck from David Mitchell’s novels and “couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major,” but believe me, it is.

For Chopin, training for the eventual practicalities of expressing real ideas took priority over taking advantage of conventions that happened to be convenient now. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The Dvorak keyboard, you may notice, was conceived along similar pedagogic lines. It is a system where to work on fundamentals is to prepare yourself to tackle practical scenarios efficiently. Learn a few neighbouring characters at a time, starting with your hands in the rest position, and within minutes you already have the building blocks of words and phrases.

But it’s the clever arrangement of digraphs where Dvorak truly shines. This is something you pick up right away: drum the right hand on its natural resting place and you instantly glimpse the potential of legato typing. The t in nth is a passing tone; the s in sh, a colourful appoggiatura.

Even as a Dvorak novice, you don’t hunt and peck a character at a time. Instead, as you practice the layout you rapidly come to visualize phonemes and syllables, hammering them out in clumps. Strings like ‘Schubert’ feel like five keystrokes, not eight, but acronyms like QWERTY remain a nasty pickle. Pronounceables skip like stones on a pond; abbreviations are minefields daring you to tiptoe across. In essence, the rhythm of Dvorak imitates the rhythm of speech. Rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm.

QWERTY has a rhythm of its own once you’re fluent, but as you accelerate you converge on the uniform staccato of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. There isn’t a way around this, either, as your pace is bounded by your fingers’ travel time. Typing in QWERTY is atomic at heart, decomposing into a succession of meaningless independent characters—quite unlike Dvorak, where vowels and consonants are demarcated by their very placement, and the phoneme reigns supreme.

We could almost think of the QWERTY map’s decentredness as twelve-tone serialism over a wider alphabet of possible notes, none of them privileged, no combination outwardly consonant or dissonant. By this analogy, switching to Dvorak is akin to witnessing music history play out in reverse, returning to a classical pianistic scheme of vowels in the left hand harmonizing a punctuated melody of consonants in the right.

And in tactile terms, that’s really how typing in Dvorak feels, only all the letter-chords are broken down sequentially. There are many obscure alternatives to QWERTY in the keyboard ecosystem, but perhaps why Dvorak has endured as the representative champion is its essential musicality. It’s the romantic keyboard, reminding us that beneath every typewritten palimpsest sleeps a sound.

It reveals an odd kind of poetry, too, when you first practice it in fridge-magnetic increments. “The idea that nineteen studious Dadaists assisted Einstein is asinine,” reads the cryptic aphorism of a home-row exercise. “This session is tedious on the tendons,” reads another.

There’s a passage in Generosity: An Enchancement, Richard Powers’ novel about genetics and creative writing, that transports us to a prominent talk show from Chicago:

It’s less a show than a sovereign multinational charter. And its host is, by any measure, the most influential woman in the world. Her own story is a remarkable mix of motifs from American creative fiction, from Alger to Zelazny. Say only that she has grown from an impoverished, abused child into an adult who gives away more money than most industrialized nations. She has the power to create instant celebrities, sell hundreds of millions of books, make or break entire consumer industries, expose frauds, marshal mammoth relief efforts, and change the spoken language. All this by being tough, warm, vulnerable, and empathetic enough to get almost any other human being to disclose the most personal secrets on international television. If she didn’t exist, allegory would have to invent her.

Powers calls his daytime doyenne Oona, but we all know he’s talking about Oprah. Here we find our scientific-literary novelist in the fine, familiar predicament of engaging with an outside world where corporate global brands are king. Allegories of real folks are tacky things, but when you pen a Chicago novel about finding the genetic basis of happiness in the anaesthetized age of mass media, there’s no detour around the Oprah problem: you’re writing her into your damned book.

(I’m not sure how well it goes. Generosity is eminently likable, and its Clarke Award nomination earlier this year is one of many reasons why you should pay attention to the Clarke Awards, but there’s an overall sense of Richard Powers for Beginners about it next to the depth of his earlier work.)

Here in the telly-impervious literary fortress of Nick’s Café Canadien, we don’t pay much attention to Ms Winfrey. My impression of Oprah has never been terribly positive: as a consumerist behemoth that uncritically promotes junk science and bad medicine while throwing its financial weight behind the overweening cult of self-help, it has often come off to me as a malignant alien presence from another world. I’m reliably informed, however, that as of last week the twenty-five-year gravity well of The Oprah Winfrey Show has finally pocketed itself into its own precious singularity.

Days earlier, Jonathan Franzen delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College that has since appeared in The New York Times (best read alongside Edward Champion’s notes on the abridgment), the latest variation on Literary Man’s perpetual anxiety over technology’s commodification of human passions. Franzen’s argument—that the casual comforts of the Facebook “like” and the easy requital of our device relationships have inoculated us from experiencing true and hurtful love—came bundled with the delicious irony that we’ve come to expect from everything involving the reluctant superstar of American letters. Scarcely a month ago, The New Yorker ran a magisterial essay of his about scattering the ashes of David Foster Wallace on the island of Robinson Crusoe only to hold it hostage behind the paywall. “Like” The New Yorker on Facebook, said the ransom note—or else.

The timing may be coincidental, but the parallel—rather, the perpendicularity—isn’t lost on those of us who absorbed everything about the Winfrey-Franzen feud of 2001 with unhealthy fascination. Here’s the story: ten years ago, Oprah Winfrey selected Franzen’s outstanding novel The Corrections for the Book Club segment of her programme, something that even her most bitter critics have to admit has been a marvel for moving volumes of contemporary fiction. Shortly after, Franzen voiced his discomfort with being marketed under the Oprah sticker, leading Winfrey to rescind the book selection along with Franzen’s invitation to the show.

You can imagine the media frenzy. High-profile literary scuffles are like classical music riots: we don’t see enough of them these days, and when we do, it’s comical yet reassuring to discover that other people care about this stuff. And here we had, in one corner, an inspirational figure of tremendous accomplishment and national renown; in the other corner—well, Oprah Winfrey.

Naturally, Franzen found himself stuck with the unfortunate reputation of a highbrow snob, a characterization that seems utterly bizarre if you’ve read his work and are aware that he’s a straightforward, accessible, and completely absorbing entertainer with an immaculate ear for everyday turn-of-the-millennium speech. Winfrey named Freedom to her Book Club in 2010 and Franzen accepted, finally appearing on the show (footage here), but that hasn’t stopped the flap over The Corrections from dogging him everywhere he goes. Read some of the grumbly backlash to the Kenyon College address and you don’t have to scroll very far down to find a jab at the incident.

The Kenyon speech got me thinking, anyway. In light of Franzen’s output, particularly as an essayist, he really does seem at odds with the value system of The Oprah Winfrey Show. This is the same programme that was peddling buy-me-to-be-happy crap like The Secret, yes? Isn’t the pre-cooked panacea of “positive thinking” the very emblem of everything Franzen writes against? There’s a deep contradiction embedded in the Oprah enterprise: Winfrey’s brand is a front for packaged, sterilized inspiration designed to sedate a passive audience of the already powerless, but through the Book Club she makes an effort to cultivate her audience, and not merely in the sense of growing its ranks. (Daniel Kaszor puts it well: “I think my biggest issue with Oprah is that she strikes me as the kind of person who would be ashamed to watch Oprah,” he says.)

Ms Winfrey is undoubtedly clever enough to be in on her own game. One doesn’t blindly invite guests like Jonathan Franzen or bizarrely, Cormac McCarthy, whose Oprah interview is only rivalled in the annals of shattered reclusion by Thomas Pynchon’s Simpsons cameo. Yet these are precisely the writers for whom literature is a refuge from the cacophony of mass-cultural unreality, and who know better than most that embracing the depths of human misery rather than buying or drugging them away is the key to preserving our sense of self.

Despite our privileged first-world comforts, we need to reassert our right to be miserable, lonely saps. That’s the Franzen paradox: through solitude, we can recover empathy. In the long conversation about whether there is a place for literature in a culture saturated with disposable entertainment and projected façades of human contact—an anxiety we can trace back to Franzen’s Harper’s essay from 1996, David Foster Wallace’s meditation on television at its zenith in “E Unibus Pluram”, or most presciently in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—the printed page is a conduit for recovering humanity, not for retreating away from it.

This is a major concern for Richard Powers, too. Compared to Franzen, Powers is more of a technological optimist (we’re talking about the fellow who dictates his novels into a tablet computer, remember), but he also considers the social effects with the warranted ambivalence. Russell Stone, the protagonist of Generosity, forms preconceptions of someone he hasn’t met based on her profile picture and upends a psychiatric diagnosis with a term he picked up on Wikipedia—and he’s far from the only one in the book to behave in accordance with how he’s wired. The novel centres on Russell’s incomprehension of someone who has every reason on paper to feel worse than he does, but doesn’t. Powers’ earlier novel Galatea 2.2 tackles the problem of humanity-via-fiction head-on, reimagining Alan Turing’s imitation game as an exercise in understanding literature.

Where the notion of the literary refuge runs into trouble is when we consider market dynamics—the production and promotion of books. The trick to understanding how literary values mesh with Oprah values may lie at this junction, I think: long-form reading provides an outlet from the commodified morass, but it’s sold and distributed as a commodity itself. It may be strange to think of a big cerebral novel as falling into the fiscal category of an entertainment product, but where accounting is concerned, publishing is publishing and books are merely books. In the end, everything gets the covers stripped and pulped.

This isn’t to say that Oprah’s Book Club is all about the money: the books have more to benefit from it than the show, and Winfrey’s taste is honestly not too shabby. But its project is to direct consumer behaviour, and the objects held up to the audience, as complex as they may be inside, are promoted as consumable remedies like anything else. Better literature than quack medicine, I’d say.

More worrisome is how market conditions may transform or limit, going forward, the kind of literature we see produced. We’ve all witnessed in the past x years (five, ten, thirty, pick your frame) how a market-driven, consumer-dictated approach to cultural production has driven popular cinema and music into the ground, while a good chunk of television has never gotten off the ground. If good books of richness, depth, and intelligence are sold on shallow terms, do we really get any closer to developing a culture of interpretive independence and nuanced thought? Or by selling the novel as a typical entertainment medium, are we just asking for it to be replaced?

Here’s what Katherine Pratt Ewing has to say in her review of Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon:

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. […] One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids. Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world.

By integrating quality fiction into her audience’s existing way of life, the argument goes, Winfrey strips away the class-boundary stigma that isolates literature as a highbrow domain, cut off from everyday consumer society. Admirable enough, to be sure, but I think there’s a catch: some novels simply want to be apart. (Glenn Beck, who prefers to champion military thrillers for boys, doesn’t have this problem.) Ignoring for a moment the ocean of work-to-order books that are written to fill market needs and meet bottom lines, which entertain readers suitably enough and exist to be liked, not loved, it’s in the nature of the novel to resist its own commodity packaging.

I’m aware that I am cribbing from Franzen here:

The striking thing about all consumer products—and none more so than electronic devices and applications—is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

The double nature of a book like The Corrections is that it functions equally well as a serious novel and as salable commodity entertainment—maybe even with a tilt towards the latter. In any case, this sheds some light on how we’ve since ended up with Jonathan Franzen, Ironic Celebrity.

It’s not just Oprah, either. Consider this: Lev Grossman, the former tech-gadget journalist who has somehow remained employed as the senior book critic at Time in spite of the trendspotting, early-adopter triteness that infects his cliché-ridden drivel—got Franzen on the cover of the magazine last August, making him the first novelist to sit inside the big red box since Stephen King in 2000 (for a story about King’s online strategy, not his books). The literary cover gallery tells a vivid story of the decline of novelists in American popular consciousness, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that for all the welcome benefits of mass exposure, Time wasn’t doing Franzen’s reputation any services with its insipid, off-the-shelf, the-way-we-live-now hype.

The attitudes to literature on display could not be less compatible. Take a look at Grossman’s screed in The Wall Street Journal, “Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work”—still one of the most heinous acts of attempted criticism to grace a major publication in recent memory, in which the sentence “This is the future of fiction” is actually, earnestly said. Now compare it to Franzen’s post-Oprah essay on the subject of accessibility, “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books”. Grossman opts for snap judgments, populist scapegoating, and bad history; Franzen makes a serious effort to sketch ideologies of the author-reader relationship. Yet look who’s connecting with the wider public.

It’s reassuring, at least, that some reluctant celebrities weather their own promotion and manage to keep their secret integrity intact. Don’t ask me how. Just ask DC Comics superhero Green Lantern, who spoke to Oprah Winfrey in 1988:

He does resemble Franzen, doesn’t he? I have this theory…

It is hard to imagine a world without maps.

Now stop—and diagram that sentence. Break its syntax apart. You can parse it in at least two valid and meaningful ways:

• It is hard | to imagine | a world without maps. The use of maps is so embedded in our daily lives, so essential to our normal functioning, that the idea of a pre-cartographic society is as alien as the thought of a pre-literate one. On top of this, our idea of what it means to be a mapped society is itself confined to our familiarized expectations of what maps are like. How did people get by without maps—or rather, without the sorts of maps we know and understand?

• It is hard | to imagine a world | without maps. Maps govern the way we think about space, and that extends to imaginary or hypothetical spaces. Without a graphic representation on paper or in our heads, our plans for things not yet built—homes, roads, electric circuits—may be cloudy and ambiguous. They may lack precision in the same way we have trouble with describing things that are outside our linguistic abilities. This is a negative definition of maps as a form of language: to be without a map is to be without language, and it impedes us from communicating ideas in the mind—to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

In both of these senses, maps of fictional places are remarkably challenging texts.

One of my chief interests in fiction, along with art in general, is how it presents itself as evidence of the way people receive the existing cultural data around them before they process it and spit it back out. (In literary criticism you will encounter words like allusion and intertextuality, but I think of them as subtypes of a broader cognitive activity.) When an author plans out a story’s setting in place, or when a reader attempts to reconstruct it from the words alone, the maps they produce tell us not only how they imagine the depicted geography, but also how they imagine the idea of maps. Furthermore, the author/audience distinction isn’t always sharp: some privileged readers, such as the illustrators at a publishing house or manuscript historians like Christopher Tolkien, participate in the interpretive stage as well as the official construction of the space for everyone else.

So when we open up a novel to find a map, we can think of the map as an act of narration. But what kind of narration? Is it reliable narration or a deliberate misdirection? Is it omniscient knowledge, a complete (or strategically obscured) presentation of the world as the author knows it? Or is the map available to the characters in the text? If it is, then who drew up the map, and how did they have access to the information used to compose it? If it isn’t, then through what resources do the characters orient themselves in their own world? And finally, does anyone even bother to think about these questions before they sit down to place their woodlands and forts?

In the post that follows, I am going to informally sketch out a theory of fictional maps, which is to say that I will put up a lot of pretty pictures from novels and talk about why they are neat. There is likely some academic work on this somewhere—I would be astonished if there weren’t—but I’m not aware of any, and certainly nothing that has accounted for modern critical approaches to the history of cartography. Map history and the comparative study of commercial genre literature are niches within niches as it stands, and my aim is to entwine them together.

Perspective

Let’s begin with something familiar.

Depending on how you look at it, this map is one of the following:

• The map that J.R.R. Tolkien drew up for The Hobbit, which appears in the endleaf of the original 1937 edition as well as most (if not all) of the English editions still in print today.
• A map drawn by the dwarvish king Thrór depicting the environs of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Elrond deciphers the runes in Chapter III (“A Short Rest”).
• A reproduction of Thrór’s map, copied and translated by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
• A reproduction of Bilbo’s copy of Thrór’s map, received and delivered by one J.R.R. Tolkien from There and Back Again, the first part of the discovered manuscript known as the Red Book of Westmarch.

The complexity of the document is that it serves as all of these things at once. As Tolkien’s map, which we recognize to be a fictitious construction along with the rest of the text, the map is a device to orient the reader in an imagined world. But if we dive inside the fiction, the map is also Tolkien’s way of reporting to his readers what Bilbo and Thorin were looking at—no different than if your copy of the book came bundled with a replica of Bilbo’s sword, Sting.

What’s more, in style and technique the map is fully believable as something put together by the dwarves (apart from the lettering in English, which we can think of as Bilbo’s translation if we wish to suspend disbelief). Notice that rather than being a high-fidelity communiqué of how Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth, the map is a minimalist sketch of the world according to the dwarves. The sparsely chosen landmarks appear in relative (not absolute) position, the illustrations are abstract, and the inscriptions allude to people and events that would have been known to Thrór. Scale doesn’t even enter into the equation. (Tolkien’s original draft, which I’ll say more about later on, was even sparser: aside from the runes and text, its only graphic elements were the Running River and a top-down outline of the Lonely Mountain.)

Not to be neglected, of course, is that the map also functions as a two-layered riddle. In The Hobbit, we learn that while the runes on the left (in red above) are directly visible—”five feet high the door and three may walk abreast,” they read—the runes in the centre only reveal themselves when Elrond holds the map up to the light of the moon. (This custom-made replica demonstrates the effect.) The moon-runes provide a further clue: “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.”

To complicate things further, when the dwarves first lay out the map in Chapter I (“An Unexpected Party”), Tolkien makes an authorial interjection in the text:

“There is one point that you haven’t noticed,” said the wizard, “and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune on the West side, and the hand pointing to it from the other runes? That marks a hidden passage to the Lower Halls.” (Look at the map at the beginning of this book, and you will see there the runes in red.)

Not only that, but it will say this in the text whether your edition has the map printed in red and black or not! (Now that we’re in the age of paperback dominance, it’s unlikely that this is the case for you.)

So the multifaceted nature of the map isn’t limited to its plurality of authors, each at a different level of absorption into the fictional world; also in play is a plurality of potential readers. Tolkien’s real-world readers aren’t expected to go in knowing how to decipher the runes (though nowadays, you’d be surprised at how many of them do). But the further concealment of the moon-runes tells us that within the narrative, the mapmaker had a restricted audience in mind.

If the map is an act of narration, what kind of narration is it? We have a good system for answering this type of question with respect to prose. First, there is the distinction of person—first, second, or third—which is largely a question of using pronouns to position the narrator and reader in relation to the action. The concept of person doesn’t map neatly onto cartographic works, however, unless there are pronouns involved. A better apparatus for distinguishing between the possible authors of a fictional map is what literary scholars call levels of diegesis—a technical way of delineating whether something is outside the text, inside the text, or inside a text within the text.

At minimum we are always dealing with three layers of reality, though they are not always separate: the author, the narrator, and the characters. In non-fiction, for instance, we observe no distance between the author and the narrator, and we assume that the inhabit the same plane. In the most basic form of first-person narration, we assume that the narrator is among the reality of the characters, even if he or she is far removed from the action. If we think about maps in diegetic terms—if we ask whether the documents and their authors belong to the world in the book, or if they come from outside—we unlock two of the most powerful concepts for thinking about perspective: omniscience and reliability.

Diegesis

What’s the appeal of a fantasy map, anyway? I doubt too many would disagree when I assert that maps add to the sense of immersion. If they come directly from the author—keeping in mind the intermediaries of the publisher and illustrator, too—a map tells the reader that the creator of the fictional space has really thought this place out. Storytelling always happens in façades, but evidence of the author’s forethought fills out the setting’s illusion of depth.

If we see a map of an imaginary land, we feel like we know more about the place. Like any supplementary material—timelines, family trees—it satisfies our latent curiosities. Also present, I think, is an element of bowing to the world-builder’s authority: by looking at a map we don’t simply know more about the world—we know more about how the author imagined the world to be.

But here’s the trap: the attitude of wanting to know more about a world—and moreover, believing that a map can draw us closer to it—leads the audience to default to a certain passivity. To a certain extent this is the criticism that has always been made of illustration, cinema, or any kind of embellishment beyond mere words alone: that when something is imagined on our behalf, we are robbed of our duty to reconstruct the textual reality for ourselves.

It’s strange, for instance, that the Yoknapatawpha novels of William Faulkner are notorious for compelling readers to cobble the logic and action together from jumbled scraps of unreliable narration, but with the right edition in hand we get the geography delivered to us on a plate:

From the perspective of literary history, I very much admire Faulkner’s maps: as you can see from the University of Virginia’s collection of Faulkner manuscripts, his sketches were instrumental in developing the sense of overlaying his novels on top of each other like an eternal palimpsest. And I don’t have a problem with sitting back and letting a provided map do some of the work for me, myself. The real danger lies in the assumption that authors’ maps can do this for us at all.

Regardless of whether a map depicts a fictional or real-world space, we always have to ask ourselves whose knowledge the map represents. This notion is intuitive when we think of real-world maps, where we really never have access to an omniscient perspective that lies outside our own reality. All that we have to work with are the source materials and surveying techniques that are known to us, and the rest is speculation. Increasingly, scholars of cartography now recognize that maps embed our political dispositions and socio-economic practices like any other texts: even in the satellite-enabled age of Google Earth and GPS, we start out from inside the world and set specific agendas for what we wish to represent, and how. Only superficially are maps ever “objective” views of the land.

Fiction throws a serious wrench into the way we think about maps because of our familiarity with omniscient points of view. In narration, we typically think of omniscience in terms of the narrator’s godlike reach into the interior experience of the characters, but the notion also applies to whether the narrator has access to information that the people within the fictional world do not.

In the case of an extradiegetic map, a map explicitly outside the text that serves as a direct conduit from author to audience, we tend to assume that the information it communicates is a sort of objective truth. We don’t mind so much if the liberties taken with the style of illustration—the medium, the lettering, the colour—would not have been available to the people who inhabit the imagined setting; if anything, such extravagances add to the romance and mystique.

But with maps that purport to speak from within the tale—maps with here-be-dragons blanks that delimit what the people in the fiction perceive or care about—we run into the same paradox that authors who deal with far-flung places frequently encounter with language. The author feels a certain duty to communicate to the reader with maximal precision, but the higher the fidelity of the message, the more it draws on our present-day idioms and conventions, and the more it strains plausibility.

A truly plausible map is one that we could imagine being created with the techniques and materials available to the people within the world; one where we could see the world’s cartographers as having the inclination, purpose, and skill to create something that looks like the product in front of us. Thrór’s map in The Hobbit is a classic example. Jim Hawkins’ map in Treasure Island is another:

The depth soundings, the rendering of the coastline, the dated handwritten addenda, the note that this copy is a facsimile (thereby accounting for its tidy, finished look)—everything about this illustration plays the part of an authentic nautical chart.

Then again, Treasure Island has the benefit of being set in a recognizable culture and time period, and we have a historical point of reference by which to gauge its illusion of authenticity. This can’t be said of secondary-world fantasy, the stories that take place in lands that have little to no geographic relation to the planet Earth we know.

The fictional cartographer’s paradox of perspective is more apparent in a map like this:

This illustration comes from Star Wars spin-off novel Vector Prime. Published by Del Rey when they first acquired the license to the tie-in books, it was the first officially sanctioned map of the galaxy depicted in the merchandising empire that has grown out of the George Lucas films. It’s an attractive design: the simple spiral arms and the dashing lettering recall the retro-futuristic pulp-serial aesthetic that inspired the Star Wars series. (Far better, at any rate, than some of the soulless pseudo-3D charts that followed it.)

Yet you can see how its heart is in two places at once. It’s a two-dimensional printed work depicting a universe where there isn’t a shred of print anywhere to be found: Star Wars, you will remember, is famous for projecting any and all visual information into a hologram or wireframe schematic. There are no illusions here that this map originates from within the galaxy, as it clearly doesn’t. But the map also situates itself in a limited heroic point of view. It’s the world according to the protagonists, with its hyperspace trade routes and dotted-line expansion frontiers, its Unknown Regions and Wild Space—all of it condensed and flattened into the pancaked realities of the twentieth-century printed page.

In a way, the map’s abstraction of the galaxy reminds us that we are dealing with a comic-book reality, albeit a thoroughly developed one. It has the omniscient privilege of sitting outside the text, but instead of filling in the blanks it elides them with the flair of escape.

Materiality

As it turns out, the pragmatics of publication have a noticeable effect on the kinds of maps we see in fictional works.

If we return to our first example, Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain, notice the orientation. The Iron Hills to the east are somewhere up top; the spiders of Mirkwood out west are down at the bottom. Now, as readers receiving The Hobbit as a freestanding text divorced from history, it’s easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for why the map is east-side-up. We could say that it’s a cultural peculiarity of the dwarves. We could even say that it befits the direction of Bilbo’s quest, upwards being the way forwards. But if we delve into how the book ran its course from manuscript to first edition, a different story emerges.

Tolkien’s original concept for Thrór’s map was a page in portrait orientation, with north on top and south on the bottom as we would typically expect. As we know from Tolkien’s correspondence of January 1937, the plan was to have the map inserted into Chapter I at the point where Gandalf first shows it to Bilbo and Thorin. In the original unpublished map, the moon-runes were inscribed in reverse on the back of the page so the reader could reveal them by holding the map to the light, just as Elrond does in Chapter III of the novel. (I unfortunately don’t have a picture of Tolkien’s original manuscript map at hand, but it’s in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Tolkien drawings 33); I believe it also appears in The Annotated Hobbit.)

The orientation of the map was rotated into its present form when Tolkien’s publisher, George Allen & Unwin, refused to produce it in the form that Tolkien intended, primarily for reasons of cost. Thus the map was redrawn as an endleaf in landscape orientation, with the dimensions of two pages side by side.

Where the plot thickens is when you look at The Hobbit in translation. Here is Mikhail Belomlinsky’s map from the Russian edition of 1976:

The illustrations in the Soviet Hobbit have a very distinctive look; Gollum, in particular, is fantastic. As for the map, Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps has already written an excellent analysis of its Slavic character, which I will not repeat here.

One thing to notice, however, is the map’s use of space—specifically, its complete spread over the page. Rather than adhering strictly to the canonical geography of Middle-Earth, which was by then widely known (outside of Russia, anyhow) thanks to The Lord of the Rings, Belomlinsky tucked something interesting in every nook and cranny. Look at how Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains snake along with the rivers. Spanning the whole adventure from Hobbiton to Smaug, west to east, bottom to top, one almost forgets to catch that the directions on the compass rose are wrong.

Observe: с, в, ю, з—северо, восток, юго, запад—north, east, south, west. By preserving the orientation of Thrór’s map in the English edition but not adjusting the compass directions to match, we end up with an erroneous map where Hobbiton is to the south and the Lonely Mountain is to the north. Preposterous! Yet we arrived here at the first place because of a series of publishing decisions across multiple editions that determined if the map would be printed on one page or two.

Flipped cardinal directions are hardly unique to The Hobbit, mind you. For a very long time, maps of L. Frank Baum’s Oz had the Munchkins to the left and the Winkies to the right, despite how clear it was to every Oz reader that Dorothy landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and made her way westward to Winkie country:

If we think of fictional maps as a study in the medium constraining the message, where it gets interesting is when you consider the maps that exist as documents within the story. Publishing considerations have the power to shape the reality of the imaginary place. Thrór’s map in the narrative plane of The Hobbit is oriented east-side-up because Tolkien’s map had to be so.

Stepping inside the fiction, we may ponder if the material constraints on mapmaking play a part in the story. In the context of these imaginary worlds, is there any suggestion of how maps are produced, transported, and preserved? Does their content spring forth from an overriding purpose or utility? These are considerations that buttress the depth and plausibility of a map, much as how Tolkien’s meticulously crafted languages and folkloric songs carry the impression of a bottomless history—the sense that this world and its people weren’t born yesterday.

Indeed, one of the finest touches in the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings is the scene at the exact midpoint of The Two Towers: Faramír, having captured Frodo and Sam and returned to his refuge at the Window to the West, goes over a map with his lieutenants. It’s a minor but effective embellishment on the book that sums up the various troop movements on the board while providing a brief visual treat for the Tolkien enthusiasts—and rather than displaying the map as an animated overlay with voiceover narration, it’s presented as a thoroughly creased parchment over which Faramír runs his finger. The map isn’t any old god’s-eye-view: like a real-world map, it’s a strategic instrument on the field. As a study in condensing an immensely challenging work for the screen, this subtle directorial decision stands out as a masterstroke.

Verisimilitude

One crucial point to take away from what I’ve said thus far is this: the coherence of a map with respect to the fiction it represents is not necessarily the same as its realism or level of detail. As much as we may desire to imprint an author’s vision onto our own with the utmost fidelity, I do not believe this ought to be the aim of fantastic cartography. As anyone who has been following the brief history of computer animation would know, verisimilitude isn’t at all the same thing as immersive reality. It is not the case that maps draw us closer to a believable fictional space with greater topographical accuracy or ever more lifelike terrain.

Take, for example, the six-book series by William Horwood that begins with Duncton Wood. The Duncton books revolve around communities of moles that worship the ancient stone circles of Great Britain, and some of the moles are capable of inscribing things in writing with their claws. One of the characters, Mayweed, is a talented navigator who sketches a map that appears (in translation, of course) in the third volume, Duncton Found:

Now contrast the deliberate, playful simplicity of this map with the one below, which appears in the second Duncton trilogy:

The second map looks substantially more attractive at first, thanks to the naturalistic depiction of terrain features. Unlike the original sketch, it looks like the sort of work that only a professional illustrator could pull off, and so it has the air of being the more polished, artistic piece. But it is also indisputably drawn from a human’s overground point of view—odd for a series where the moles largely keep to their burrows and humans are barely present apart from the odd occasion where they zoom along in their “roaring owls” (automobiles). And we might be fine with taking it as an omniscient artistic rendering from the publishing house, but the claim in the caption—”Based on Mayweed’s map found in Seven Barrows”—so brazenly contradicts the perspective of the map that it only serves to throw us off.

So as readers, we may appreciate the second map of Moledom as the superior illustration purely in terms of artistic merit—but it’s not clear at all that this map is better suited for the books. To the contrary, it presents a greater impediment to our ability to suspend disbelief.

The gravitation towards realistic detail in maps is especially remarkable if you remember that maps are inherently abstractions. The whole point of a map—of any variety, not solely the geographical kind—is to pack the chaos of information into a selectively delimited and instrumentally efficient container. Short of the 1:1 scale maps of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, cartography is a form of compression.

In terms of utility, the value of going from abstractions back to high-fidelity detail lies in how distinguishing visible landmarks—coastlines, mountains, fortresses—is useful for navigation. Before the proliferation of contour lines and coloured heat maps as methods for representing elevation, solutions for shading peaks and valleys led to the maps we now look back to fondly as exquisite in their artistic finesse. Satellite photography, which offers the highest fidelity of realistic representation we can achieve, is an excellent general-purpose tool because for a clientèle as diffuse as Google Earth’s, one never knows which topographic peculiarity might be useful at any given time.

Contrast that with maps of imaginary places, which are like their real-world kin in that all of them are works of art, but differ in that not all of them have a targeted function beyond serving, somewhat vaguely, as guidance for the reader (and often the author, as architect and city planner). Beyond looking pretty, framing the action, and setting the scene, the stylistic decisions often seem to lack any functional rationale.

Have a gander at this:

This is Ellisa Mitchell’s much-admired painting of the lands of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, which for some reason is held up by some as one of the gold standards of fantastic cartography. When the up-and-coming fantasy novelist Saladin Ahmed called on Internet artists to produce a map for his forthcoming book, one that would outstrip the “very serviceable, basic, black-and-white line map” that his publisher could provide and “move beyond utility”, Mitchell’s map was one of the exemplars he had in mind.

Now, it’s obvious why Mitchell’s map is well received. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that inveterate fantasy readers like Saladin Ahmed admire its colour and natural gradients, things you would never find in a mass-market paperback for reasons of cost alone. And embellishment for purely aesthetic reasons is certainly nothing new: back when printed atlases were engraved, colourists would fill in rivers and trace political borders on individual copies by hand. But look at how the version above compares to the black-and-white paperback map:

At first glance it seems like Mitchell’s painting is simply a more expensive and lovingly crafted reimagining of its monochrome counterpart. What it actually does, however, is emphasize topography at the expense of features that are more narratively functional, like political borders and roads. By foregrounding the terrain, the linear elements of the map recede.

(Doubly fascinating is that for all her good intentions, Mitchell unwittingly captures the trappings of the Robert Jordan series—indulgent top to bottom, muddled to the point of being unreadable, and plastered with a faux-medieval ethos that screams inauthenticity. I know, I know; I’m being much too harsh. Comparing the map to the books is incredibly unfair to the map.)

So here’s the question we should ask: why is it so attractive to conclude that the painted poster is the superior piece of work?

In part, this has to do with the realities of the mass-market fiction industry. Considering the practical limitations in the age of desktop publishing and (in many cases) direct-to-paperback, it’s uncommon that books will come with endpaper maps printed in multiple colours like the first edition of the The Hobbit. You’ll certainly never see historically accurate engravings in the mode of Treasure Island. In this environment, it isn’t altogether surprising that readers would treasure maps in other media for their relative rarity—even though in truth, maps for the flagship fantasy brands (particularly those adapted to film) are issued and sold en masse.

What this explanation doesn’t address, though, is why topography is the element that takes precedence to everything else in receiving what you might call the artistic treatment. In all probability, this is grounded in the desire for immersion; read any encomium for fantasy mapmaking and the first thing you’ll hear is that maps make the world more real. But realism is really just a code for saying that something is more in line with our embedded assumptions about what it means to perceive the world, and in the cultural value system we live in today—empirical, literal, photographic—it refers to the imagined experience of seeing the physical terrain with your own eyes.

Weltanschauung

The most striking thing about fantasy maps as a whole, especially the sort that dominates the industry of doorstopper mythopoeia that claims to be descended from J.R.R. Tolkien, is how rigidly they stick to convention. No matter how nice they look, structurally they reduce to orthogonal landmass drawings. Rarely, if ever, will you find visualizations of an imagined cosmology like the commonplace depictions of Midgard and Asgard wrapped around Yggdrasil in Norse mythology—and you would think high fantasy in secondary worlds is the genre that could use them most.

This is a problem that plagues much of the fantasy genre in its modern form, and why it has yet to fully escape the unfortunate stigma of juvenilia. The more you learn about history, and the more you are able to see through the anachronistic façades, the less imaginative conventional fantasy seems. We see this in action with language all the time: it’s almost expected these days to see gratuitous apostrophes as a desperate grab for an illusion of foreignness, not to mention unquestioning adherence to the “glottals ugly, labials pretty” phonetic valuation that Tolkien laboured to design. The same applies to maps.

(Ironically, children’s books are rather good at averting the implausibility trap, thanks to their embrace of figurative thinking. Witness the chart from The Phantom Tollbooth, featured at the top of this essay: like the novel it accompanies, it takes the abstractions of interior experience and projects them into real space.)

Indeed, as fantasy has entrenched itself in a self-propagating commercial set of norms, it has developed a reputation for being extremely conservative in form and politics. Jonathan McCalmont explained it well in his breakdown of the norms and values of “fat fantasy”: accessibility, immersion, and (less obviously) the safe escape of a reactionary aesthetics. All of this put together, along with the commercial considerations of how the publishing industry works, accounts for why a genre that benefits so much from cartography yields maps that are so extraordinarily literal.

For the commercial market, officially published maps are passive documents that serve as the easily readable evidence that the author thought things through. The maps embed our familiar expectations and unquestioned ideologies because the novels they accompany do the same. Perfectly content to assume that a map is the world, these fictions ignore the map as an instrument for grasping the world. Even if we step back from lofty cosmology and into functional lay-of-the-land geography, it is shocking how rarely fantasy maps explore the notion of the map as a visualization of a subjective and contingent worldview, a picture of an imaginary people’s collective weltanschauung.

Just to pluck one example out of thin air, in all of modern fantasy fiction, you will perhaps never find a map as fantastic as this:

The map contained in this 18th-century print by the Dutch publisher Pieter van der Aa is Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s Planisphere terrestre of 1696, which was meticulously assembled on the floor of the Paris Observatory from the most ambitious global survey of the time. (Working for Louis XIV assuredly had its benefits where funding was concerned.) The azimuthal projection centred around the North Pole looks warped to us today, accustomed as we are to the distortions we get from Mercator. But get past the initial unfamiliarity, and we can unpack all sorts of information from the structure of the map. We can see how it reveals its own construction in standard longitudinal slices, made possible by advances in astronomy and observational logistics; how the South Pole encircles the rim as the outer limit of human exploration.

Given the quiet proliferation of challenging fantastic fiction that is conscious of literary nuances in prose, one would hope that the cartography eventually catches up. Maps could do a lot more to dive into the perspective of an imagined land’s inhabitants, revealing how the people see their own world as well as their techniques and motivations for piecing that picture together. There is much room for subtlety in made-up maps, just as there is in lexicons, timelines, and family trees, and authors who do not feel bound to mainstream fat-fantasy conventions are in a unique position to explore the possibilities.

That said, it’s understandable why this hasn’t happened yet, and it has much to do with the specialization of labour along the pipeline of publication. With the rise of the e-book, prose content has become increasingly divorced from the totality of the book as an object, and authors are prose-module specialists more than ever.

One of the stories about Tolkien that has gotten a bit lost these days, I think, is the considerable control he exercised over his own work as a book designer who drew up his own cover art, runes and all. This isn’t to say that he had the visual talents of, say, William Blake, who remains the supreme English example of the all-in-wonder author/artist, but Tolkien’s relationship to his publisher is continuous with that tradition. This is the precondition that allowed a quirky thing like Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain to make it into the public sphere.

Outside of the vanity presses, this level of control is practically non-existent these days. Probably the best solution towards opening up the variety of maps we see is to develop the kind of author/artist collaboration for cartography that you see for graphic novels, where the writing doesn’t exercise any peculiar authority that confines the illustration to a secondary, supplemental role.

Authority

The question of authorship is a fascinating issue all to itself. Where exactly does a map (or indeed, an illustration of any sort) cross over from narration to interpretation? Is this solely a question of who is officially licensed to participate in the world-creation of an intellectual property? We can tear down the intentional fallacy all day from a theoretical point of view, and insist (quite reasonably) that the author has no better say than anyone else in the interpretation of the text; but in practical terms, reader communities who crave immersion derive their sense of a “canon” from officially sanctioned materials.

Consider this quandary: how would we mediate a discrepancy between Christopher Tolkien (who has privileged access to his father’s manuscripts and the legal authority of the Tolkien estate, and who delivered most of what we “know” about Middle-Earth in posthumous publications) and Barbara Strachey’s essential interpretive atlas, Journeys of Frodo? Do we rule in favour of the archival drafts, or do we side with the charts that are directly inferred from the final published text of The Lord of the Rings?

To return to what I said about omniscience early on, perhaps the demarcating factor that defines fictional cartography—what sets it apart from pictorial representations of real spaces—is the presence, however provisional, of the author as God. When we read non-fictional maps, we can perform a kind of analysis similar to what I’ve walked through here, looking at means of production, political agendas, and underlying worldviews; but it’s fairly unambiguous which plane of existence the cartographers reside upon.

Fictional maps introduce the complication of having, at minimum, two layers of authorship: the layer outside the text that has the power to dictate and reshape the world, and the layer that belongs to the reality of the world. It’s clear that the author is in the first and the characters are in the second, and that having the first speak for the second passes for a kind of ventriloquism or free indirect discourse. But these are not the only stakeholders in play. The “narrator” of the map, if it’s discernible as a separate voice, can belong to either layer or both. And once we introduce the other living participants—the readership and the publishing apparatus—determining who influences our perception of the fictional space becomes considerably trickier.

For one thing, it isn’t safe to take it for granted that immersion in a world means the same thing as immersion in the author’s mind, as if the goal of literature were some sort of telepathic telos of lossless communication. Among other problems, this attitude towards literary immersion as a matter of filling in the blanks has no way of dealing with deliberate ambiguity.

To see what I’m getting at, take a look at this:

This is the fold-out from The Discworld Mapp, a companion book to the Terry Pratchett series designed to the instructions of Pratchett and Stephen Briggs. It’s a fascinating map in view of what I’ve said thus far, not because of its superficial resemblance to the Cassini planisphere if you zoom out far enough, but because it achieves the look of an azimuthal projection via being a fiercely literal map in a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system. Much of this, of course, is due to how the Discworld was conceived to be exactly that—a world where an azimuthal projection is a one-to-one circle-to-circle mapping, and therefore no transformation at all.

As far as companion publications go, The Discworld Mapp sounds par for the course—that is, until you look into how the map came into being. Stephen Briggs was a playwright who made a name for himself as an amateur Pratchett loremaster who adapted several books for the stage (and who, unlike Steve Vander Ark, knew better than to publish derivative works without legal sanction). When Briggs first decided to map the Discworld novels, beginning with The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, he did so with Pratchett’s support; but the project went against the author’s original insistence that Discworld was a fluid, aleatoric wander of the imagination that could not and should not be mapped.

Terry Pratchett’s opinion on cartography still appears on his official website:

There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

This is a very sensible position, and as much as I love cartography I am somewhat inclined to agree. There is something completely bounded about maps. We all know that the data they present is highly selective, as is also true for prose, with strategic omissions and gaps left for future exploration. Yet the boundedness of maps commits to an illusion of having reached a roughly finished state, as if everything inside has already been fixed and everything outside is still untouched and malleable.

From the perspective of someone involved in creating a world, particularly in a series that continues to emerge over time, a map intended to serve as an aid may also be a suffocating constraint. Mapmaking does not seem to permit carefully targeted ambiguity with the same flexibility as prose alone. With other forms of book illustration, one always gets the sense that the visual depictions could always be replaced or re-envisioned some other way. Maps exert a stronger form of authority: any improvements or revisions by readers or in future editions take place within the author’s borders as if they were immutable, objective truths.

It is a strange twist indeed that we are less liable to accept in fiction than in reality that cartography is a form of language: a medium for our perception of place, not to be confused with place itself. If there is a remedy for this, it may resemble the solution we developed for language, and take the form of self-conscious experimentation with maps as narrative voices—subjective, perspectival, and often unreliable. Literary writing deserves a literary map.

As for the alternative, let’s defer to what Lewis Carroll said in The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Bellman to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”

Further reading

I am certainly not the first to gush over fantasy maps in the blog format. The most thorough look at fantastic cartography that I found while researching my post is “Beyond the Aryth Ocean”, a four-part series (1, 2, 3, 4) by Jason Denzel, who manages the biggest Robert Jordan community online and who therefore holds opinions that differ substantially from my own. He knows a lot of genre fiction I don’t, however, and his series on cartography is definitely worth a look.

Brian Sibley, who co-authored several map books with the eminent Tolkien painter John Howe, wrote a post about fictional maps with an inside perspective on the community of artists who work on these kinds of projects.

Of the dedicated cartography blogs on the Internet that cover fictional maps from time to time, two in particular stand out. The first is Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps, which you probably know about already if you’ve followed some of the links in this essay or are interested enough in cartography to have made it this far down at all. (I also recommend the book.) The second is Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room, which devotes equal attention to historical geography and modern surveying, and features an extensive subsection dedicated to imaginary places.

The Tumblr site entitled Fuck Yeah Fictional Maps really speaks for itself.

The Map History site maintained by Tony Campbell is an extremely comprehensive resource, mainly directed at serious scholars but certainly useful for enthusiasts of early maps.

For those of you with academic journal access through JSTOR, Imago Mundi is the history of cartography’s inexhaustible resource par excellence. The journal dates back to 1935, and skimming the tables of contents alone will give you a picture of how cartographic scholarship has developed over the past century.

Speaking of academic map history, one name to look out for when it comes to the literary turn in cartographic studies is J.B. Harley, best known for his collaboration with David Woodward on a compendious multivolume history of cartography that remains to be finished. (Harley and Woodward are both now deceased.)

Late in his career, Brian Harley became the radical subversive postcolonial deconstructionist of map historians, but he isn’t nearly as scary or loopy as that iconoclastic description makes him sound. In fact, the sort of critical theory that literary scholars overworked to the point of Sokalian fashionable nonsense seem positively fresh and sensible when applied to maps (see for yourself), and it’s rather puzzling that in the twenty-year history of the literary study of maps, fictional cartography has remained largely untouched.

When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it. Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was far more helpful this time around.

As with any old story, mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the mural in a flash of lightning and thunder.

The wonderful thing about fables is the discordance of what they say—typically a blunt moral lesson, delivered as the payload of a cruise-missile punch line like a Feghoot minus the funny—versus what they do, which is leave innumerable gaps for diverse interpretations to take root and flourish. Stories are not reducible to definite lessons. Fiction is a space for debate, and a fable is an open meadow for all and sundry to frolic. (“I don’t believe in stories with morals,” says the man with the childish fantasy of teaching Lolita in schools.)

So what can we make of the tale of the painted dragons?

Is it a statement of sumi-e aesthetics?

This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of impressionistic art that captures the unseen.

Or is it about attention to detail? Here’s one reading of the story and the proverb it spawned:

The idiom 画龙点睛 “draw a dragon, put in pupils” could be translated “finishing touch” in English. In Chinese it describes a key or emphatic phrase to a speech or in writing to drive home a point, giving the work more power.

And here’s another:

Based on this fairy tale […] the last touch in a masterpiece is the most important part of a drawing, or any other important business.

Here’s a take on the story as it pertains to the tradition of dotting the eyes of dragon boats. It differs from the others in attributing the dragon murals to the fourth-century painter Gu Kai-Zhi (顧愷之), who left them unfinished until Zhang Seng-You was asked to complete them a century later:

[Gu Kai-Zhi] had a strange habit of leaving the eyeballs out for several years after the rest of the painting was finished. When he was asked why, he said, “The most life-like strokes of a subtle portrait come from the eyes.” He was actually implying that even a single stroke should not be done casually.

Nowhere have I read an interpretation that captures the essence of what I always thought the story to mean. Only the last one above comes close to grasping the part of the tale I find most resonant: the artist’s reluctance to finish the eyes until ordered to do so by somebody else.

In English, there’s a motto that art is never finished, only abandoned. It’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—who wouldn’t have said it in English, of course—but good luck sourcing it. One imagines that Leonardo, who filled in the most iconic eyes in the history of western art, derived the expression himself from a nugget of wisdom that arrived in the Italian Peninsula by way of Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Orient. But the insight resonates with anxieties of creativity everywhere, no matter which culture you’re in, and I lean towards believing it cropped up in many places independently.

What is perfectionism, really, but the avoidance of declaring something finished? Leaving out the pupils of the dragons, the way I see it, captures like no other parable the reluctance to put the lid on something magnificent. Once you’re done—once you’ve published—you’ve released your monster into the wild where it no longer bows to your command. The desire to create something magnificent conflicts with the compulsion to retain control over every detail. If the dragon flies away, it’s no longer within your power to polish the scales.

This is the perfectionist’s paradox: what if the creative apotheosis is only attainable through the loss of control? Here we’re not too far from the thematic stomping grounds of the most visceral film of 2010:

In the age of digital media we’ve grown accustomed to perpetual self-editing. It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing that with instantaneous editorial revision at our fingertips, we now have the freedom to publish first and ask questions later. For many, this is true, and it’s why they propel the Internet’s flux of content at a pace that is nothing short of torrential. But in the other direction, there flows a strange inhibitor. Many now fear that substantial blog content is drying up, squashed in the middlebrow sandwich between personal intimations in social networks and the impersonal platform of paid journalism (where long-form is already on life support).

We’ve discussed some of these matters before, but I think they are worth revisiting. The dwindling of journals like this one has nothing to do with the terror of public scrutiny. What the decline really comes from, I believe, is an anxiety of impermanence. Good content—the transcendent stuff that rises above the encroaching tides of what Philip K. Dick called kipple—has a reputation for sticking around. This is a reputation the Internet does not share. It’s not just because online content is liable to be edited or outright wiped: it’s also because the connectivity of hypertext inherently carries a poison pill of long-term decay. Links break with time, and their container vessels get dragged into the undertow regardless of their independent eloquence.

I have before me a draft box overstuffed with nearly painted dragons. Many of them will never take flight. They will die in captivity.

Don’t even ask about my offline albatross.

There was an essay in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about writers who abandoned their novels—beginning, as it should, with Michael Chabon’s Fountain City, which consumed a good five years of his life before he left it for Wonder Boys. And it’s worth remembering that the novelists in the essay—American titans like Chabon, Updike, and Harper Lee—had all already knocked something out of the park. Spare a thought for the failures-to-be who haven’t even made it that far; the roster must be endless.

If you think about it, it’s miraculous that anything of lasting power ever sees the light of day. I wonder sometimes if this is achievable without coercion, or if you really do require an external agent to flick the creative-inhibition switch to off. It takes a special force of will to abandon one’s baby on the river.

So whether it’s helpful or not, it’s worth remembering that even the best things in life aren’t finished. Like the serpents on the temple walls, they just get released.

A few weeks ago, Colby Cosh—a friend of a friend of sorts who ordinarily writes reasonable things for a chap who still thinks the Edmonton Oilers are a real sports team—penned an article in his Maclean’s blog about Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing machine (“I’ll take ‘Cheap Publicity Stunts’ for $1000, Alex”, 16 January 2011), that I found to be dreadfully uninformed. The thrust of his argument is that Watson is a corporate “gimmick”—a fancy plea for media coverage by the faceless villains at IBM, with nothing of scientific interest going on underneath. Keep in mind that by the standards of this article, nothing in the “perpetually disappointing history of AI” will ever be interesting until we’ve graduated from tightly delimited objectives to Big Problems like the Turing Test:

Every article about Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing device, should really lead off with the sentence “It’s the year 2011, for God’s sake.” In the wondrous science-fiction future we occupy, even human brains have instant broadband access to a staggeringly comprehensive library of general knowledge. But the horrible natural-language skills of a computer, even one with an essentially unlimited store of facts, still compromise its function to the point of near-parity in a trivia competition against unassisted humans.

This isn’t far off from saying that particle physics will be perpetually disappointing until we’ve observed the Higgs boson, or that manned spaceflight is merely an expensive publicity stunt that will never be scientifically interesting until we’ve colonized the Moon: it leans heavily on popular culture as the ultimate barometer of scientific achievement, and it requires both ignorance of methodology and apathy towards specifics.

Colby and I had a five-minute skirmish about the article on Twitter, which as a format for debate is unwieldy as piss. I promised a proper response as soon as I cleared some other priorities off my plate. Those other priorities are still, to my annoyance, on my plate; but having finally paid good money to register my copy of MarsEdit, I’m thirsting for a scrap.

This topic will do as well as any. Reluctant as I am to swing the pretentious hammer of “I know what I’m talking about,” this really is (as the idiom goes) a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality. Computational linguistics happens to be my onetime research area, popular misunderstanding of science happens to be one of my favourite bugbears, and Kasparov’s anticomputer strategies against Deep Blue happened to make a cameo appearance in the meandering slop of my master’s dissertation. None of this matters a great deal, mind you. One should never be dismissive of journalists from a position of relative expertise; they’re the ones people actually read, and it’s vital to engage with what they say.

(It is a little game we play: they put it on the bill, I tear up the bill.)

When simplifications attack

What concerns me is not so much Colby’s perspective as a non-expert (invaluable), his resort to the familiar hand-waving sophistries of Dreyfus and Searle (expected), or even whether I should call him Colby when I don’t really know the fellow and haven’t gotten around to amending my unwritten style guide to arbitrate matters of semi-personal address (pedantic). The bigger problem, one that is endemic in journalism about science, is his exclusive reliance on popular simplifications by corporate PR, other journalists, and cherry-picked philosophers for pictures of what AI research is all about.

Surely it wouldn’t have hurt to consult a real computing scientist; there are plenty of those to choose from the public sector with no vested interest in the fortunes of IBM. The only thing this would have jeopardized is a premeditated thesis founded on dismissive assertions about the entire field of research. Why talk to someone credible when they’re unlikely to agree with you?

Here, there are several bad assertions in play—all of which are traceable to the selective consultation of sources.

Let’s consider this one paragraph alone—the crux of Colby’s entire argument that nothing terribly fascinating is going on inside the box:

Jeopardy!, after all, doesn’t demand that much in the way of language interpretation. Watson has to, at most, interpret text questions of no more than 25 or 30 words—questions which, by design, have only a single answer. It handles puns and figures of speech impressively, for a computer. But it doesn’t do so in anything like the way humans do. IBM’s ads would have you believe the opposite, but it bears emphasizing that Watson is not “getting” the jokes and wordplay of the Jeopardy! writers. It’s using Bayesian math on the fly to pick out key nouns and phrases and pass them to a lookup table. If it sees “1564″ and “Pisa”, it’s going to say “Galileo”.

Now let’s put some numbers beside the assertions:

1. Jeopardy! is a trivia game, and all there is to trivia is looking up keywords. We know computers can do that.
2. When Watson handles wordplay, it doesn’t do it like humans do. It isn’t really thinking; it doesn’t really understand the puns. Furthermore, this somehow matters.
3. IBM would like us to believe that Watson really gets the jokes. If Watson doesn’t really get the jokes, the project is a hollow exercise in corporate self-promotion.

The first assertion vastly understates the complexity of what Jeopardy! demands. The nature of the game—a time-constrained, multi-agent affair—radically alters the straightforward problem of answering a question (or in this case, questioning an answer). Even simple pattern-matching is far from trivial when every millisecond counts.

Let’s run with Colby’s caricature for a moment. With a database of facts as gargantuan as the one Watson requires, looking up “1564” in conjunction with “Pisa” is a surprisingly time-consuming task, never mind the inference to Galileo’s date of birth. This isn’t something tractable via faster processors or larger memory banks: there are theoretical lower bounds on the efficiency of searching and sorting algorithms in proportion to the dataset’s size. Exhaustive traversals that perform perfectly on small scales are out of the question here. The algorithms have to take shortcuts and make approximate guesses. Semantic associations must be efficiently structured in the software’s abstract maps as well as the physical database in order to best distribute searches in parallel. When you consider these factors, drawing semantic inferences from the natural-language clues becomes a heuristic necessity if the approximate search queries are to be any good.

Crucially, the time constraint on a response is not a static value, but a dynamic one that depends on the performance of the other competitors. This is why a match against the most successful Jeopardy! players in history is an essential proof of concept. Every contestant who appears on the television show has to pass a solo audition first, and any of them could tell you—particularly if they meet with little success—that in a competitive setting, the game becomes a different kettle of fish.

This is to say nothing of the other decisions Watson has to make in order to be competitive in a live test. It has to assess the risk of answering a question, considering not only its confidence in its own correctness but the standing scores of both itself and the other players. It has to set wagers for Double and Final Jeopardy, which requires an assessment of confidence based on the category title alone; in the case of Double Jeopardy, this will also have to consider the money still up for grabs on the board. One of the reasons Ken Jennings had such an astonishing run on the show was that he was able to make excellent strategic wagers on the fly.

Contrary to what Colby suggests, if the structured decomposition of the process of taking a Jeopardy! clue all the way from answer to question is able to match and surpass the blazing speed of human intuition at its best, that would be a tremendous accomplishment indeed. Without the capacity to parse natural language in terms of meaningful semantic chunks—a task well beyond mere symbol manipulation—Watson wouldn’t have a prayer of displaying a fraction of the competence that it has already shown.

Trapped in the Chinese Room

The second assertion is a real howler, and one that has become downright boring to swat aside over the course of the past thirty years. That’s right, folks: say hello to John Searle and the Chinese Room. The Chinese Room objection to AI is this: a computer translating between English and Chinese is like an English speaker who knows no Chinese, but who sits in a room looking up symbol tables and matching the syntactic elements correctly. Even if the translation looks perfect to the outsider, argued Searle, you couldn’t say that the symbol-manipulating translator (i.e. the computer) understands Chinese.

In a general sense, the Chinese Room stands for a whole class of arguments that boil down to saying, it doesn’t matter how well the computer performs—it’s not really thinking because on the inside, it’s not processing information in the same way humans do. Colby makes an argument about Watson identical to the Chinese Room when he says that the system doesn’t “get” the jokes and puns in Jeopardy!‘s more puzzling clues. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if Watson solves the clues correctly: it still isn’t behaving like a human inside the box, so the whole shebang is all just smoke and mirrors.

The logic of the Chinese Room is spurious in many respects, and I won’t go through all of the embedded fallacies here. For those of you new to the debate, here are two of the more serious ones. The first is that the analogy is false. The appeal of the argument comes from how it personifies a particular component of the system to highlight its dissimilarity to real human understanding. This fallacy endures unchecked because its proponents are free to move the goalposts however they like: no matter how robust the system is, the critics can isolate a piece of the syntactic machinery, put a human face on it, and complain about the absence of high-level, humanlike semantics. The second fallacy lies in the deceptive assertion that the syntactic internals of a computer are completely unlike the internals of the human mind. In truth, we still know next to nothing about how the latter works. Our understanding of how we get from the low-level operations of neuroscience to the high-level processes of cognitive psychology is at least as discontinuous as our best notions of how semantic structures might emerge from the symbolic structures of computer systems.

I alluded to this in my initial salvo on Twitter:

Shockingly poor article by @colbycosh on Watson, IBM’s #Jeopardy AI. Apparently, Chinese Room fallacies never get old. http://t.co/VHzLzTX

To which Colby offered this astonishing reply:

@Nicholas_Tam It’s got nada to do with the Chinese room. The Turing test is the one most everyone agrees on & there’s NO progress toward it.

Completely apart from the fact that one of Colby’s objections was precisely the Chinese Room, there’s a logical contradiction here along with a factual error. (Not bad, all in all, for 140 characters or less.) The contradiction arises from the failure to distinguish between external behaviours and internal thought processes. Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the goal for whichever AI system we’re talking about is to pass the Turing Test—that is, to be misidentified as the human being in a double-blind question-and-answer test where the questioner knows that one respondent is human and the other is a machine. If you read the original paper in Mind where Alan Turing introduced his “imitation game”, Turing’s whole point was to black-box the internals and take them out of the picture. The premise of the Turing Test is that if you can’t tell the difference between man and machine in terms of external behaviour, then functionally there may as well be no difference at all; this suffices as intelligence.

The Chinese Room argument, on the other hand, is a direct attack on the validity of the Turing Test. It seeks to establish that thoughts don’t supervene on actions: that is to say, identical external behaviours do not imply identical internal machinations.

Turing’s and Searle’s positions are more or less incommensurable. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t hold up the Turing Test (which is entirely about exterior performance) as the standard of achievement while griping, as Searle does, that even in a successful performance that passes for humanlike, symbol manipulation doesn’t really count. Contrariwise, Turing ventured that if a machine’s behaviour is indistinguishable from a human’s, it’s pointless to squabble over whether it qualifies as intelligent; from the available evidence, we might as well treat it as such.

If you accept the Chinese Room argument—and you really shouldn’t—the only function of bringing up the Turing Test at all is to set up a straw man. It has not escaped me that this may have been the intent.

Acting inside the box

Unfortunately for this transparent rhetorical tactic, the Turing Test is not the accepted benchmark for artificial intelligence research, nor is it even a commonly desired objective. AI is not one monolithic project that either has or hasn’t been achieved.

The goals of AI research have historically diversified along two separate axes (a schema for thinking about AI that most students of intelligent systems pick up from Russell and Norvig). The first key distinction is between acting (what a system does on the outside) and thinking (how a system gets there on the inside). The second distinction is between performing like humans and performing rationally or optimally (which may be entirely unlike humans, but may provide solutions to well-defined problems that outstrip the capacities of human agents).

This yields four quadrants that loosely circumscribe your garden-variety intelligent agents: systems that aim to think like humans, act like humans, think rationally, or act rationally. (Think of these categories more as design goals than as discrete kinds of agents, which in practice lie all over the map.) The first quadrant, systems that think like humans, is the area of interest for much of cognitive science. This is the type of system that the Chinese Room argument contends will in principle never succeed; Hubert Dreyfus’s objection, the thesis that human thought is fundamentally unformalizable, applies specifically to this category as well. The second quadrant, systems that act like humans, is the one where the Turing Test applies.

It must be said that the Turing Test is relevant here with specific reference to the indistinguishability of external behaviours—not to the requirement of aptitude in natural languages, as Colby seems to believe. Turing’s original imitation game was framed purely in terms of language, which remains an overwhelming challenge to this day, but it has since been expanded to other problem domains. (Jeopardy! is one of them.) To pluck out one example, natural language is hardly suitable as a test for computer vision, the branch of AI concerning how computers can perceive objects in photographs or positions in 3D space from the raw data of images. It would be preposterous to say that a robust system in computer vision fails as AI or marginalize its significance as a scientific accomplishment simply because it can’t pass for a human on the telephone.

Natural language is a particular problem domain—indeed, an umbrella category for all sorts of subproblems that are fascinating in their own right. It is not the essence of the Turing Test, nor is there any consensus that linguistic aptitude is the essence of intelligence.

It’s convenient for our discussion, however, that Jeopardy! involves natural language to the extent that it does. It should attract comparisons to Turing’s imitation game, and it has. Yet it bears mentioning that whether a system is really thinking is a completely incidental consideration for the vast majority of practical work in AI, just as it was for Turing. Nobody says, “Let’s build a system that possesses general intelligence.” What they actually say is this: “Let’s identify a chunky, intuitive problem that demands high-level thought and see if we can’t build a system to break it down and tackle it.”

Watson’s aim is clear: perform well enough in Jeopardy! to defeat the best human players. Any consequences for our beliefs about the nature of human intelligence is a byproduct and not the ultimate goal. That said, it is perfectly valid to speak of a Jeopardy! Turing Test. Watson would clearly fail the test not if it fell short of champion-level play, but if it ventured solutions to clues that don’t even make sense as guesses. (Consider the early test at about 1:50 into this video. The clue, from the category on I Love Lucy: “It was Ricky’s signature tune and later the name of his club.” Watson: “What is song?”)

But if indistinguishability from human-level performance is what we are looking for, Watson is already doing fairly well. There is a very important difference between defeating humans in Jeopardy! and passing for a human player, although the goals are intertwined. There is an even wider gulf between passing for a human Jeopardy! player and passing for a human being in toto. Everybody knows the latter goal is as far off as colonizing Mars, and nowhere in the promotional materials does IBM suggest otherwise.

Colby has a problem with this:

So why, one might ask, are we still throwing computer power at such tightly delimited tasks, ones that lie many layers of complexity below what a human accomplishes in having a simple phone conversation?

And one might also ask, why study nuclear physics when we seem to be no closer to harnessing fusion power than we were fifty years ago? First of all, in both cases, we are substantially closer in terms of how we understand the problem, even if our estimates for when the endpoint will show up on the horizon haven’t necessarily shortened. The achievements that scientists think of as the most significant may not be fixtures in popular culture, but that doesn’t mean they were pointless. Far more importantly: computing science, like nuclear physics, is inherently interesting. Designing AI systems for delimited problem spaces is an activity that leads us to all sorts of discoveries about the nature and structure of those problems, and of the minutiae of problem-solving processes in general. We learn all sorts of things about comparative strategies for structuring, representing, and manipulating information—and how they measure up to the relatively black-boxed processes of human minds.

So to answer Colby’s question:

@Nicholas_Tam So we can’t test AI by scrutiny of interior process OR the curtained-black-box Turing test? What’s left, religious revelation?

We “test” AI in the context of its performance with respect to well-defined goals. Those goals could certainly involve a Turing Test, be it for answering natural-language questions or some other specified task. Whether an artificial system has a human-like mind of its own, along everything that implies—consciousness, self-awareness, semantic understanding—is a problem we leave to the philosophers; and no, it’s not empirically testable. But neither is the problem of whether other humans have minds.

The inverted pyramid scheme

Now let us turn to the third assertion: that IBM is making outlandish promotional claims that oversell Watson in the name of fuelling a publicity blitz.

What does it mean to say that something is a “gimmick”? We mean to accuse it of being all dressing and no salad. We mean to expose its failure to accomplish what we are told it does on the surface. We mean to insist that we will not be duped into believing that something humdrum is, in truth, extraordinary.

The trouble for Colby’s argument is that Watson is extraordinary—just not in the way that he thinks IBM has misled him to expect. “AI researchers have arguably the highest conceivable standards to meet when it comes to thinking about thinking,” remarked one commenter at Maclean’s, “and it’s hard to fault them for failing to live up to the naive expectations of science fiction.” Colby replied: “By ‘the naive expectations of science fiction’ I presume you mean ‘the naive expectations deliberately created by IBM promotional materials and employees’.

I received a similar response:

@Nicholas_Tam Maybe you should look at the IBM ads. Your claims for Watson are a LOT more modest than theirs.

At the time of our repartee, I was admittedly only familiar with IBM’s own materials in passing; most of what I knew about Watson was from sources that discussed it in greater detail. I found it odd that Colby’s point of engagement was exclusively with the advertising and not the technology itself, but this was understandable: he was making a statement about hype, after all, and it’s very common nowadays that the implications of scientific accomplishments are exaggerated in the public sphere. (Refer to Jorge Cham’s excellent illustration of the science news cycle, which concerns university research but applies equally as well to corporate and governmental laboratories.)

By and large, this is a product of two sets of behaviour—one on the part of journalistic reporting, the other on the part of the research organizations. Let’s begin with the journalists.

The dominant template for journalistic narrative is the inverted pyramid: begin with the most important information, and continue to points that are less and less essential on the assumption that the reader could stop at any time. (Before the age of desktop publishing, this also made it easy for newspaper editors to literally snip away the last paragraph or two when assembling the columns on the page.) The trouble is the gulf between what journalists deem most relevant to non-expert readers and what scientists consider to be important contributions to their field.

The end result is sensationalism—and too many articles about science wind up looking like Martin Robbins’ parody. They begin with far-reaching implications that may or may not be related to the research at hand, and work their way down to the specifics that matter most. This is a narrative framework that is seriously divorced from the reality of research, which operates on the level of local challenges and goals. (This post by Greg Lusk on the inverted pyramid and the conflicting priorities of journalists and scientists is highly relevant here.)

Because long-term, big-picture implications like the performance gap between artificial and human intelligence (in Watson’s case) become the centrepiece of the story, they become the focus of media attention and debate, often with no consideration of the specifics of what has been accomplished. And this is why we see casual expressions of dissent like Colby Cosh’s criticisms of Watson: wildly off the mark, selectively researched from Wikipedia with an a priori verdict already in mind, and laced with a sprinkle of pseudo-expertly mumbling about Bayesian combinatorics that are far more involved than the author makes them out to be. Criticisms like these respond to the news stories, not to the science.

Of greed and gimmickry

Colby is convinced, however, that his projected misunderstandings of what Watson claims to achieve are fundamentally IBM’s fault. And it’s no use pretending that IBM isn’t a self-interested organization: like NASA in their recent fiasco over arsenic-based lifeforms (a discredited paper, but one that was widely misreported when people still thought it looked shipshape), if people take their promotional materials and statements to the press the wrong way, they have no incentive to correct anyone so long as their project is still in a positive light. Watson is a proof of concept for IBM’s enterprise hardware and the DeepQA question-answering system, both of which the company intends to license and sell.

Not all of the problems with science journalism is the fault of journalists: research laboratories, public as well as private, are often complacent about inaccuracies in secondary reporting because the attention (and the concomitant prospects for funding) are too attractive to throw away.

Let’s be very clear about one thing, however: IBM’s profit motive as an organization does not negate the intellectual interests of its researchers. As fashionable as it is these days to appeal to the trope of corporations that are only responsible to their shareholders and therefore can’t be interested in anything but the bottom line, the truth is that corporate laboratories in private industry are invaluable centres of research. Projects like Watson attract contributions from university scientists not because they all want to see IBM succeed, and not even necessarily because the pay is so much better (though it is), but because they provide access to hardware that enables large-scale work. Computing scientists in industry are taken every bit as seriously as their compatriots in the university world, and the two regularly cooperate on grand initiatives.

But what does that say about the marketing? Complacency aside, is IBM actively making Watson sound like a much bigger deal than it is?

I have now combed through IBM’s promotional videos, articles, and FAQs, and I would like to retract my earlier concession that their claims may have gone too far. IBM’s statements about Watson are fair reflections of what AI can realistically achieve and what a successful performance by Watson will demonstrate. About the most outlandish thing they say—the one that treads the furthest into the minefield of the philosophy of AI—is that Watson performs well in Jeopardy because it understands natural language. And strictly speaking, it does. The clues in Jeopardy! are undeniably in natural language, and differ from formal or heavily restricted sentences by a significant degree of complexity. About the only restriction on the clues is length. Discard the puns and puzzles and you still have challenging problems like binding indefinite pronouns to objects (or classes of objects) that fit.

Whether Watson’s “understanding” of natural language is analogous to that of humans doesn’t figure into the discussion here. Nobody is saying that Watson actually has a conscious mind; AI researchers don’t think on those airy-fairy ontological terms when they are designing systems for specific tasks. They participate in the debates over the philosophy of artificial minds, yes, and they’re usually on the optimistic side, but everyone is aware of the separation between that conversation and the immediate challenge of defeating humans on a robust, open-domain answer-questioning game show.

We are not even remotely in Dreyfus territory. Still, I can understand why layperson readers might think we are when they read the story in The Globe and Mail and come across a juicy quotation like this:

“We can use computers to find documents with keywords, but the computers don’t know what those documents say,” Dr. Ferrucci says. “What if they did?”

People whose notions about AI come entirely from Battlestar Galactica could easily misread Ferrucci’s statement as referring to sentience or consciousness. But anybody who knows a thing or two about AI can read this and correctly interpret it to refer to semantic-level knowledge representation—concepts on a larger scale than string matching or keyword search. It’s entirely agnostic on the problem of whether artificial minds can exist. I’m not deliberately reading this as a modest apologist: this is actually what Ferrucci is obviously saying.

If you get all your science from Hollywood and you think cloning has to do with developed bodies and selves rather than the raw data in your genes, it’s not the responsibility of geneticists to clarify their work for you every time they speak. Similarly, you can’t expect scientists and engineers in AI to explicitly backpedal from the philosophical question of conscious machines every time they talk about their work.

Or can you? What we desperately need is a greater public understanding of what scientists do, and what they mean when they use everyday words to talk about their fields. Readers dive into news stories about science with popular preconceptions that are often wrong, but nobody takes up the responsibility of correcting them until the discourse goes seriously awry. We’ve seen this before with how the hysteria over genetically modified foods or embryonic stem cell research obfuscated the real issues deserving of policy attention. There are even some dark corners of the world where creationists are wreaking havoc on schools because they still think evolution by natural selection is some kind of affront to their god.

Sooner or later, this will happen with AI: we’ll explore the possibility of delegating something big and very public to an autonomous system, and legitimate policy concerns will drown in a sea of hysteria about machines taking over the world. If scientifically knowledgable people do not shoulder the burden of sober clarification, that role will become occupied by contrarian journalists who don’t really know what they’re talking about, but still take pleasure in posturing as the voice of reason in the room.

If you are going to take the position of someone who sees through the publicity and understands the underlying science, you have to understand the underlying science. No matter how bombastic IBM’s promotional claims are, or how submissively the media repeats the press releases with a dash of unchecked sensationalism on top, Watson is more than a “gimmick” if it’s computationally interesting—and by any informed and reasonable standard, it is. Watson is a nontrivial system, and Jeopardy! is a nontrivial pursuit.

You can find Naden’s writings online in the posthumously published The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden (1894), a volume that includes translations of Schiller and Goethe, among others. It seems as though she was something of a polymath.

My introduction to Naden’s work came by way of this audio podcast of a lecture delivered by John Holmes at the Royal Society, who spoke on Charles Darwin’s influence on the ideas and concerns of Victorian English poets. (This is the subject of Holmes’ recent book, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution.) In the lecture, Holmes speaks briefly on “Natural Selection”, a playful comic poem about a palaeontologist who is scientifically delighted to find that his beloved has been whisked away by an all-singing, all-dancing “idealess lad”. This poem belongs to a quartet entitled Evolutional Erotics (1887), in which Naden explores the collision of love and the scientific mind. Another poem in the set, “Scientific Wooing”, brings science into the register of high romance in a manner that might be construed as ironic (but then again, might not be):

At this I’ll aim, for this I’ll toil,
And this I’ll reach—I will, by Boyle,
By Avogadro, and by Davy!
When every science lends a trope
To feed my love, to fire my hope,
Her maiden pride must cry is “Peccavi!“

I’ll sing a deep Darwinian lay
Of little birds with plumage gay,
Who solved by courtship Life’s enigma;
I’ll teach her how the wild‐flowers love,
And why the trembling stamens move,
And how the anthers kiss the stigma.

I am reminded here of the tensor algebra pastoral from one of the great masterworks of science fiction, Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad:

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Many of Naden’s other poems are more subtle in their use of science, or at least not as liable to wink at the reader. “Solomon Redivivus”, from the same collection, imbues Solomon and Sheba with a fathomless sense of deep time by turning their story into a macroevolutionary tale, from amoeba to fish to highly developed mammal. Even this one feels a little forced, though, in our retrospective eyes—not unlike the sense we get when we read Cold War writing about atomic power, that this particular strand of science is so dominant, it is all anyone seems to talk about.

The best of Naden’s science poetry, of the selections I’ve read thus far, are to be found among the sonnets. Consider “The Nebular Theory”, which begins with a ruthless, particulate materiality, then bursts into the cosmological plane in line 9 with “raptures of keen torment”:

This is the genesis of Heaven and Earth.
In the beginning was a formless mist
Of atoms isolate, void of life; none wist
Aught of its neighbour atom, nor any mirth,
Nor woe, save its own vibrant pang of dearth;
Until a cosmic motion breathed and hissed
And blazed through the black silence; atoms kissed,
Clinging and clustering, with fierce throbs of birth,

And raptures of keen torment, such as stings
Demons who wed in Tophet; the night swarmed
With ringèd fiery clouds, in glowing gyres
Rotating: æons passed: the encircling rings
Split into satellites; the central fires
Froze into suns, and thus the world was formed.

Or “Poet and Botanist”, which reads like a statement of Naden’s thematic centre of gravity:

Fair are the bells of this bright‐flowering weed;
Nectar and pollen treasuries, where grope
Innocent thieves; the Poet lets them ope
And bloom, and wither, leaving fruit and seed
To ripen; but the Botanist will speed
To win the secret of the blossom’s hope,
And with his cruel knife and microscope
Reveal the embryo life, too early freed.

Yet the mild Poet can be ruthless too,
Crushing the tender leaves to work a spell
Of love or fame; the record of the bud
He will not seek, but only bids it tell
His thoughts, and render up its deepest hue
To tinge his verse as with his own heart’s blood.

The emphasis on the masculinity of Poet and Botanist alike is a curiosity worthy of an essay in itself. Constance Naden’s position as a highly educated woman who crossed both disciplines—one who sometimes masked her gender under the pseudonym “C. Arden” in her philosophical and scientific papers—is of intense interest to scholars of her work. Naden’s double identity figures heavily into this paper by Marion Thain, which offers a comprehensive look at how Naden’s concerns about science and poetry were informed by her materialist philosophy of “Hylo-Idealism” as well as the surrounding context of the Thomas Huxley/Matthew Arnold debate over the value of the classics. (Naden was educated at Mason Science College in Birmingham, where the Huxley/Arnold argument was ignited by Josiah Mason’s edict that the college he founded would not provide its students with “mere literary instruction and education.”)

In our time, the divorce of science from poetry has become so engrained in popular consciousness as a blind assumption (irrespective of the exceptions—and believe me, there are many) that Naden’s poems may stand out for conjoining them at all. I would say, however, that Naden’s poems are insightful because they take the closeness of science and poetry as a given, and seek to explore how that relationship works; sometimes sincerely, other times with a smirk. Science is part of our lexicon, after all, and to sidestep it is to restrict ourselves to a fraction of the palette available to us.

Yesterday, Apple launched the Mac App Store, the latest interface refinement capitalizing on the observation that increasingly, Mac OS X is not likely to be a new user’s first Apple product. Just as we saw iTunes navigation features such as Cover Flow migrate over to the OS X Finder, now we are seeing OS X take after the iPhone/iPad user experience by delivering software via one-click installations. Click on the button to purchase or download an app, and the App Store dumps it in your Applications folder and on the Dock.

OS X veterans will note that this is, in theory, a 200% improvement on what was formerly a three-click installation: download the DMG, drag the app into the Applications folder, and optionally dump it on your Dock as well if you are still oblivious to the eldritch wonders of Quicksilver.

And in theory, one would think this is one of the best features yet to arrive on the Mac for users and developers alike. The end-user software culture for Mac users has always been very distinctive: unlike the unfortunate bifurcation in the savage lands of Windows, where software is often either a) homegrown and free or b) professional and exorbitantly priced with corporate site licenses in mind (and therefore often pirated), Mac software for the individual consumer is pretty much where it was in the early 1990s: practically anything that Apple didn’t hand you with the system comes from independent development houses, usually in the form of try-now, buy-later shareware, their products reasonably priced. Compared to other platforms, good free software is much harder to find.

(Incidentally, the Mac App Store has already delivered a 1990s time-capsule feeling of its own, raising the hungering corpses of products long believed dead. I mean, StuffIt Expander? Kid Pix?!)

For this model, digital distribution was a dream come true from its inception, and it would make sense to believe that a centralized distribution channel for downloads and updates only improves on it. In practice, however, there is no advantage to using the Mac App Store for anything that is already available directly from the developers.

Apple’s approval process effectively ensures that software updates through the App Store will lag behind the automatic updaters that already exist. Buying directly from the developer relieves them of Apple’s 30% cut for products sold via the App Store. There is also no support for time-constrained shareware trials, which are far and away the best way for developers to demonstrate why their software is worth paying for.

Product licenses, thank goodness, are bound to your Apple account instead of your machine; if something disastrous happens to your computer, you can always download your purchases again later, and there is no limit to the number of machines you can install them on. This is still more annoying than the DRM-free status quo of “punch in your product code and we’ll trust you the rest of the way,” but at least with a centralized ID you don’t need to worry about losing your product code.

In any case, informed users accustomed to hunting for quality Mac software that didn’t come pre-installed have no incentive to use the App Store at all except for software that is otherwise unavailable. The App Store’s function is to inform everyone else that third-party software even exists. Developers are effectively compelled to push their products onto the App Store in order to remain exposed and competitive, but if they make their products available directly, it’s hard to think of a reason why one wouldn’t obtain them that way instead.

Postscriptum. Speaking of third-party Mac software, I am presently composing this post in MarsEdit and finding it wonderful. I may end up blogging more frequently again purely for the pleasure of using it. Daniel Jalkut, the man behind MarsEdit, wrote an informative FAQ about the Mac App Store and what it means for his product. It confirms most of my sentiments above.