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ideological migraine
I'm still reading Cryptonomicon, and on lots of levels I'm still enjoying it: it's full of lots of fun geeky bits, and just sentence for sentence it's snappily written and acutely observed. I've read over two-thirds of the book now, and I intend to finish.
But one thing keeps bothering me, and that's the ideological difference between Stephenson (or Stephenson's characters) and myself. This isn't a new problem for me: even when I read Snow Crash, I thought to myself "this book has some problematic subtexts." But in Cryptonomicon they're not really subtexts anymore, they are the text, and attempting to ignore or gloss past those passages of the book gives me a sort of low-level migraine.
So I might as well just grapple with them directly. Premises put forth in the book that I'd take issue with include:
that the work of female cultural critics is primarily motivated by issues they're having with their boyfriends
that "post-modern, politically correct atheists" are essentially socially retarded because they have lost their "instruction manuals"
that the Nelson Algren notion of "hard work = success" is the most valid way to think about the American class system
that racism is primarily a matter of intent (that you cannot be unintentionally racist)
that couples who talk about their feelings with one another have boring sex
that women control the world through a conspiracy designed to control and monitor male ejaculation
Admittedly the book presents that last premise in a pretty tongue-in-cheek fashion, but at best it is the kind of joke that a lame stand-up-comic would make, and at worst it is the kind of statement that helps to justify the paranoia of the really hard-core anti-feminist types. (Stephenson should know this: he is, almost above all else, a writer who has a keen sense of the way ideologies and beliefs can travel virally from mind to mind.)
If he could hear me raise these objections, Stephenson would probably accuse me of being one of those emasculated, feelings-oriented, sensitive males that are so easily offended. But it is wrong to take offense when someone basically insults you or the people you care about over and over again? Labels: book_commentary, rants |
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
9:39 AM
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