From: Richard Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2001 9:33 PM Twenty-eighth post (Conclusion) _The Bridge_ is a fantasy about unrequited love. I say fantasy because it is one by the classic definition: "imaginative fiction featuring especially strange settings and grotesque characters" according to a rather unsatisfactory Merriam-Webster, or even the alternate definition "the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need ; also : a mental image or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created". I noted at the beginning that this was a basically optimistic book, and so it is, no permanent harm is done, and the protagonist keeps his lover -- really, she's likely to come back to him eventually, the crisis with Gustave won't last forever. The symbolism is generally excellent, the writing occasionally inspired, the formal structure interesting. So what is the book about, really? This is a complicated enough book so that this question could be answered differently by different people, but I'm going to address a couple of the general themes that I see: 1. The modern style of unattainability In previous times and other places, there were many ways in which people fell in love but could not be with each other. The whole idea of Western romantic love started, according to Joseph Campbell anyway, with the medieval troubadours, who celebrated those who loved each other outside the formal economic business of marriage. Lovers historically were kept apart by class, clan, previous engagement, distance ... with the crowning problem, of course, being that one of the people did not love the other, and had the power to resist the other's desires. Note that many fantasy writers, such as America's best, James Branch Cabell, seem to have believed that unattainability is a necessary part of romance in fantasy. In general, when a couple in romantic fiction finally get together, the book is over. Now we come to modern Britain. Is Andrea unattainable? Why, how could that be, clan, class, previous engagement, distance present no problems -- she has sex with the narrator quite often, doesn't she? And she likes him, doesn't she? What more is there to attain? By a curious poverty of thought, the narrator can't even *understand* what the problem is. First of all, he's obsessed with sex, and her imagined use of sex to control him; in some strange way he seems to think that the problem of her not being with him is sexual. Of course it isn't. He has sex with other people when she isn't there, which he seems to find quite satisfactory. Sex with her can't be so much different than sex with his other partners that that is what he misses so much when she isn't there. No, this has to do with love. It is his love that gives her power over him, because she is not replaceable to him, while he is replaceable to her. So she gets to decide how much time they spend together, and he doesn't. This is the real source of all of his hunger for power and fear of being trapped. The truth is that he's in love with her, he wants her near all the time, he isn't really happy without her. But these seemingly simple statements can not be expressed in the tired ideologies that he's grown up with. If he wants her to always be with him, then he must want power over her -- bad. If he isn't happy without her, he's not being independent -- bad. And if he's in love with her, and wants *an exclusive, life-long committed relationship*, well, that doesn't bear even thinking of. In a sense, this is a curiously politically conservative book, because it makes it seem as if leftism constitutionally can not deal with these questions -- which is not really true. But back to Andrea. So, what can she give him? She obviously doesn't feel in quite the same way about him, she likes him, but she's content enough to spend half her time with other people. He can't even express what he's feeling without an ironic shrug. She might come to think about him in the same way if he really expressed his feelings, but he can't. Normally, sheer proximity and its concomitant intimacy would cause her to eventually fall in love with him, but she doesn't stay in one place long enough for that to happen, and by the time they do get really used to having each other around, she's also used to having Gustave around. She may not be fickle or selfish, but she does seem somewhat blind to her effect on him. One can imagine that some elements of their relationship were set when she was a slightly older, sophisticated, upper-middle class woman and he was a lower class young guy just in the big city and looking to move up in the world. Things might have settled down with him remaining content with half a loaf, rather than none, but then humanity strikes. Suddenly he discovers that people need other people for more than just sex and occasional companionship, that they actually *depend* on other people, and that maybe that's part of why people keep inexplicably getting married. And guess what, he can't depend on Andrea, because other people have claims on her that are as great as his claim. Since he, according to his politics, can't possibly admit to being in a jealous rage, he can't do anything about it when he falls into a jealous rage, and he goes for an gesture matched in its adult brilliance of execution with its adolescent poverty of conception -- she doesn't want me, so I'll hurt myself and make her feel bad, then she'll come back. I've written far too much about this. To say what I should have said from the start: what Banks does is create a love that is unattainable *because the lovers have no valid way to interpret their emotions*. They are free to say anything they like to each other, but they have no acceptable concepts that would communicate what must be said. 2. The fantasy of demiurgy A lot of the book is about a common fantasy: what if I could create the world as I liked? The word Demiurge means artisan, and is probably most well known from its use in Gnostic Christian thought. The Gnostics thought that the world was created by a Demiurge, a sort of inferior god, whose bad workmanship explained all the problems in the material world. The word also has the meaning of "one that is an autonomous creative force or decisive power". The fantasy of creating a world is often referred to as the fantasy of Demiurgy. The Demiurge is generally not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. In this book, the narrator creates a world -- an interior world, it is true, but one with apparently complete and coherent existence. He rejoices in his supposedly complete control over this world. But, we see that in fact his power is not complete. It can be broken by external events -- such as when his body is moved or treatments are tried -- and it also can be the subject of a sort of competition between different parts of his mind. We see this in the scene where the narrator's alter ego is being cast down in social class; part of the narrator's mind evidently wants this to happen, part does not. But there is a more interesting problem with his created world. It shares his mental as well as physical limitations. The narrator is a political leftist who would like to see a classless society. Yet, when he creates a world seemingly from his desires, it is a Victorian, class-bound society. The narrator's power fantasies might be seen as a major reason for this; what that part of him really wants is a power structure with himself at or near the top. Yet he didn't create a Roman Empire with himself as Emperor; the society is still recognizably modern. Basically, his subconscious seems to have been limited to the creation of a society of a type that he thoroughly understood. This, again, is rather a discouraging, conservative idea -- the idea that we carry an image of our society around with us, even into our most creative endeavors, and that we really can't transcend the cultural values that we've grown up with. But there is a curious subtext at work. Writing a work of fantasy is a form of demiurgy. The author creates an imaginary world that they generally try to make complete and coherent, or at least interesting. So the problem faced by the narrator in this book is a metaphor for the general problem faced by the fantasy author. Banks, as we know, is an author who, in books published after this one, *did* create a well-known, coherent fantasy of a classless society. In fact that fantasy bubbles up in all sorts of places in this book -- the bit of narration by the barbarian, where he talks about magic getting so prevalent that the lower class is no longer needed, the knife missile, the intelligent machine, even some scattered images that recur in later Culture books. So this book is sort of a precursor to the Culture, a demiurgy that fails to express Banks'/the narrator's (the two are interchangeable in this instance) politics. As such, it falls apart by the end of the book, while the Culture continues. The Culture is a second demiurgy, once that transcends the limitations of the Bridge. But I'd have to say that the Culture shares, more subtly, some of these problems. In particular, the creation of a world in this kind of fiction requires drama, Banks once commented about something like needing to find the Culture's dark side (presumably, to make it interesting). So we hear very little about the presumed daily utopia of the Culture and a lot about the presumedly rare cases where things go wrong. The Culture starts to slip from classless utopia to dystopia just because Banks has to keep finding things wrong with it, or the readers will get bored. The classic Christian problem of evil is perhaps best explained, if you're looking for theological explanations, by the need to make the world dramatic to whoever is watching the show. That's about it, I think. I could go on about what a multivalent symbol the Bridge is -- between life and death, the narrator and Andrea, youth and adulthood, the lower class and the upper, reality and dreams -- but this is long enough. One last note about love and power, vaguely applicable to the problems in this book. I'll leave you with a highly out-of-context quote from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."