The Sociology of Jack Vance

Vance’s musings always remind me of the 18th century … he shares some interests, strengths, and limitations with the Enlightenment philosophes. Would’ve written that up into a paper, if I’d ever gotten that Ph.D. instead of going to law school.

VII – Chasch, Dirdir, Pnume,Wankh: Kopad Nopplegarth & Pharems Iocunu.

I’m excited by this news, Henry. Very much looking forward to seeing what you have to say.

Vance is nearly one hundred years old. It is a bit ignorant to expect him to hold modern views about gays, etc. I never did understand this. He is a product of his time and environment.

@11: “Wyst” has an obvious anti-welfare state message, but it certainly isn’t “hysterical”. It’s one of Vance’s best tales, with that eerie mix of ironic black humor and understated horror that only he can pull off.

Vance’s sci-fi tends along the lines of “self-sufficient macho man outwits universe”, but Cugel seems to exist as a sufficiently amoral vehicle to showcase fantasy musings without getting hung up on higher causes.

I like Vance’s work, but “the stories are about people” (comment #5) is just not true. All of the people in Vance’s books are one person — maybe 4 at most, if you assume that those 4 basically share the same outlook on life but have modified it according to their body type (Vance’s model robots come in handsome man, ugly man, thin attractive girl, not-thin pushy woman varieties, although “handsome man” does get a good or evil switch).

They’re books of style. All of Vance’s books and characters inhabit the same style, and if you like it, you like it. The right comparison is probably to James Branch Cabell.

The bit about feminism being absent is not quite enough. There’s a lot of rape fantasy in these books.

I think people tend to forget that Vance’s ‘macho’ heroes tend to look remarkably silly at frequent intervals because they persist in over-estimating their charm and sexual attractiveness. There’s a pretty fine line between say Cugel the Crafty and Mangeon the troll from Lyonesse. I think there might be a rather good paper to be written on the sexual comedy of Jack Vance, but you’d have to remember that Vance doesn’t seem to greatly admire masculine stereotypes either.

@ NickT: yes.

Isn’t there a festival on a planet in one of the Demon Princes books where women go around raping men?

I would love it if someone had asked Norma Vance on the q.t. about some of these passages.

@25

“That is pretty close to being Vance’s manifesto on the subject of male-female relations.”

And Natasha’s dance is Tolstoy’s manifesto on the quadrille. Seriously, taking one short story and ignoring the total way that Vance views his sex-obsessed, often buffoonish male heroes is preposterous. Look at how Ildefonse the Preceptor is presented in that story and then tell me that Vance isn’t writing sexual comedy that mocks both sides of the equation. I do wish people would stop trying to turn literature into these trivial exercises in political correctness and actually think about things like context and irony.

@23

Well heavens above, why shouldn’t Vance create amoral societies? Should we hope that literature is reduced to nice people having tea with nice people and saying nice things? Now that’s fantasy literature – call it Fifty Shades Of Delicatemindedness – and it would be far worse, morally, than creating an amoral world and populating with amoral, legalistic, pompous, self-obsessed caricatures. Hell, I’d argue that Mitt Romney and Jamie Dimon ought to be Vancian characters – and yet, here they are solidly part of our reality. I think Vance deserves credit for facing the reality of what someone like Cugel is and the way he behaves when he can get away with it.

NickT’s comment above is a perfect example of why I don’t like Vance fandom, even though I like Vance. He can’t even describe what Vance writes accurately, but has to instantly fall back on clichés about political correctness and conservative theories about how human nature is just the same everywhere so we’re supposed to be seeing “the reality of what someone like Cugel is”(!) This defense of Vance’s work goes like this: “Sure, the women are raped — but the men are presented as buffoons, so it’s just an even-sided sexual comedy.” Vance has the excuse of being, as someone else wrote, a hundred years old now. Non-centenarians don’t have this defense.

Vance’s work is read because of its style. No one is saying that writers have to write moral worlds. But readers don’t have to follow apparent authorial belief in the moral characteristics of those worlds.

I also haven’t read any Vance in a while. Maybe if I reread them now I’d see them with new eyes?

Jack Vance, RIP.

http://www.jackvance.com/jackvance_05262013/

That’s a literal gang rape within the events of the book, but it’s also a rape fantasy, because of its lack of consequence. The older women are played for moderate amusement: one said her attacker was almost courteous, and implicitly she must have kind of enjoyed it, and the other is a snob who seems just as angry that the man smelled badly as she is about what happened.

It’s been a while since I read this, but I think you misss the point Vance is making about the society to which the women belong. Rape is no more important to them than to the Darsh. What bothers the women is that they were constrained to associate with lower class individuals.

Shortest hope ever, then.

“It’s been a while since I read this, but I think you misss the point Vance is making about the society to which the women belong. Rape is no more important to them than to the Darsh. What bothers the women is that they were constrained to associate with lower class individuals.”

That reading isn’t supported by even the short excerpt that I quoted. But you can argue it with NickT if you want — it can’t both be the case that Cugal is just a trans-societal, human eternal template of how guys will be guys, and that in some societies there are women who mysteriously don’t mind being raped as long as there’s no social differential. Strangely enough — or perhaps, not strangely at all — both of those assertions tend to minimize the recognition of what Vance is actually writing.

RIP Vance, it’s really too bad. The bad ways in which his writing interacts with contemporary readership doesn’t detract from its strengths.

@37: Thanks, Anderson. That was very well done.

Isn’t that rape scene a pretty straightforward leftist political critique? Aunts Eustacia and Mayness are Methlen; the rapists are Darsh. The Methlen are the exploitative, racist, status-obsessed overclass, the Darsh are the manual laboring underclass. The book even has racist neighborhood covenants as a key plotline!

So the rich aunts on holiday go out to spectate on the native mating rituals and get attacked and gang-raped. Rational people would be traumatized, angry, scared, whatever. Given their class advantage they could certainly try to get extrajudicial revenge. Instead they maintain composure, complain about the low status of their attackers, and decide to tell no one to avoid loss of face.

Not because rape is somehow not bad, but because their society is deeply fucked up.

I don’t see anything better in rape fantasy as leftist political critique than I do of it as “sexual comedy” or whatever.

Here’s another one, from _Night Lamp_, which Henry on the Vance RIP post recommended as a late work with more gentle politics:

Wilbur Wailey, after a stint as a locator, began to conduct enterprises of a questionable sort. […]
To this world, which Wailey named Safronilla, he brought bevy after bevy of handsome young women, whom he recruited by a variety of tactics. To some he paid generous bonuses; others he kidnapped, from convents, colleges, holiday camps, beauty pageants, spiritual improvement groups, and the like. On one occasion he captured an all girl fife, bugle, and drum corps, along with their instruments. […] their indignation went for naught. One by one, methodically, assiduously Wilbur Wailey got each of them with child — not once, but several times. Fifteen years later he made the rounds again, this time inseminating his daughters with neither prejudice nor favoritism, as he did his grand-daughters in the sunset of his life.
When anthropologists gather for a gossip or an excursion into shop talk in the lounges of their clubs, […] someone may make a reference to Wilber Wailey and his career. After a few moments someone else will say: “They don’t make men like Wilbur Wailey nowadays!” And for a time the group is quiet, while everyone thinks his or her own thoughts, and wonders how it goes now on far Safronilla.

(pg. 215 in my edition)

I can already hear the rationalizations about this one — how it’s physically impossible and was intended as a tall tale to begin with, is as an absurd comment on the anthropologists’ reaction, etc. But basically Vance likes to write rape fantasies. The specific bit about abducting an entire girl’s musical group was also done in one of the Demon Princes books.

Rape fantasies are power fantasies. Whether or not Vance found them titillating to write, Wilbur Wailey sounds like his stock all-powerful male character who, I presume (having not read the story), is outsmarted by a weaker but smarter protagonist.

That’s not a defence of any sort, just an observation.

Sometimes the practical and/or dream-like tone of Vance’s writing makes it hard to tell if he’s going the full De Sade or just treating rape like a stubbed toe because it moves the story along.

@44
“I can already hear the rationalizations about this one”

I can already hear the shallow grinding of axes by people who do not appreciate irony and who have never stopped to ask themselves why Vance writes of rape in so dry and factual a way.

@38
” it can’t both be the case that Cugal is just a trans-societal, human eternal template of how guys will be guys, and that in some societies there are women who mysteriously don’t mind being raped as long as there’s no social differential. Strangely enough — or perhaps, not strangely at all — both of those assertions tend to minimize the recognition of what Vance is actually writing”

And why shouldn’t it be both? And no, Vance isn’t saying that guys will be guys. He’s saying that given the sort of sex-obsessed egomaniac grifter that Cugel is, yes, Cugel is going to behave as he does. There’s a pretty obvious difference between the lazy (and unsurprisingly unspecified) generalization and the acts of an individual character created by a novelist. You might note that Cugel’s rapes are never presented with approval, much less salacious detail. Vance doesn’t suggest that Derwe Coreme or Marlinka enjoy being raped, far less that they don’t mind it. If you are looking for an old-school conservative bigot arguing that women secretly want to be raped – which is where too much of the sanctimonious “discussion” on this thread is headed – you aren’t going to find him in Vance. Nor can you ignore the consistent presentation by Vance of his male characters making fools of themselves – and generally vastly over-estimating their own prowess and attractiveness. To do so is to radically misunderstand what Vance is getting at – which is hardly an admiring vision of the male of the species as a sexual being with women being cast as legitimate and grateful prey.

So I read The Dying Earth and I found it charming and evocative in an old-fashioned sort of way, so that was fine, but then I turned to Eyes of the Overworld, and…holy shit. The protagonist was just so utterly repellent in every way. It was really, really unpleasant reading, and I didn’t, and still don’t, even understand the point. It’s not like your protagonist has to be likable, but this ain’t Lolita; it’s still pulpy fantasy adventure stuff…only with a central character who’s more or less completely intolerable. Why? I mean, I was never under the impression that he was meant to be a great guy, but I am at a loss as to what Vance thought the point of this exercise was.

Well, I could be completely wrong, but I got the impression that we were meant to in some way admire Cugel’s cleverness/resourcefulness–that he was meant to be an at least partially likable anti-hero of sorts. But to me, the idea that anyone could react to him in that way is…terrifying.

See, this is what I just don’t get. Sure, he’s clever and resourceful, but cleverness and resourcefulness are not traits with any moral weight one way or the other. He’s also a murderer and a rapist and he sells that one woman into (presumed sexual) slavery ’cause it’s convenient at the time and he never feels any remorse whatsoever about any of this. I can’t “admire” a character like that–doesn’t matter how “clever” he is. Sure, seeing him fail is preferable to seeing him succeed, but the magnitude of his awfulness is so much greater than that of his failures that they’re not really comparable, and it just seems perverse to try to claim there’s some kind of implicit karmic balance here.

In The Dying Earth everyone is either an egomaniac sod, an obsessive or a fatalist. After all, the earth is dying, the sun is about to go out, and everyone is spending their last moments. Most of the people who attempt to get the better of Cugel are no better than he is.

Re: Cugel in Eyes of the Overworld, he IS repugnant. But I would argue the end of the book is poetic justice that he richly deserves. He’s a no-good rogue whose occasional successes are balanced by the even lower nature of his opponents. Other than the leader of the pilgrims, who brings out as much moral decency in Cugel as we ever see from him in that book, I can’t recall a single admirable character.

Okay. It’s been years since I read them, so I’m wrong on the evidence.

And here’s a final bit of textual evidence in support of what I’m writing. This one is from the Demon Princes series, _The Book of Dreams_. It’s an exchange between Gersen, the hero, and a minor but wholly sympathetic character named Mayneth. There are absolutely no future plot points mentioned: the episode is in the book for its own sake. Mayneth and Gersen are discussing the young girl, one of the local natives, who Mayneth keeps as a servant.

“She’s fascinating to look at,” said Gersen. “Is she, well, affectionate?”
“It’s been tried, with generally poor results,” said Mayneth. “Are you curious? Touch her.”
“Where?”
“Well, to begin with, on the shoulder.”
Gersen approached the girl, who swayed back, blinking her great grey eyes. Gersen reached out his hand; she uttered a quick spitting hiss and sprang back, mouth open to show sharp teeth, hands raised and fingers curled.
Gersen drew back, grinning. “I see what you mean. Her opinions are very definite.”
“Some of the local lads use a bait of molasses candy,” said Mayneth. “They like it and while they’re eating they can’t bite…. Well, here’s our lunch. She’ll go away now, because she can’t tolerate anything but lettuce and occasionally a bit of boiled carrot. Such is the dark side of vegetarianism.”

Again I await the various forms of justification. But try imagining a society in which a new visitor asks of a young girl servant “Is she affectionate?” And the vaguely aristocratic host says that oh, the local human-but-not-like-us girls generally defend themselves well enough, except when the local lads manage to bait, overcome, and rape them. But what about the dark side of vegetarianism, hmm?

Vance is a conservative writer whose work is largely colored by 19th century U.S. attitudes. He’s not just writing from his time and place, he’s writing behind, and in opposition to, his time and place. That’s what all of the Vancean bits about heroes breaking up societies fossilized by rules are about — those same rules that say that you have to treat it seriously when some of the local lads have fun with the lesser human girls. That doesn’t make him any less of a great writer. But readers who can’t hold it in their heads that he can be a great writer and also write these kinds of scenes are in for some weird justification.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to lawyer out here, Rich. As you say, they’re Vance’s creation, and Vance wrote them sexually violent. He also wrote them into situations that treat their sexual violence lightly.

No one’s suggested it’s something that should be ignored, but I’m puzzled that it’s become the focus of the discussion. I don’t think anyone ever picked up a Jack Vance book for the rape scenes, and maybe there’s something more to his work than them.

It’s okay to say that Cugel does something clever, then does something abhorrent, without melting down over some sort of cognitive dissonance because the story doesn’t stop for six-month rape trial. And that’s my point with Ghenghis Khan: if someone said that he was a genius at directing mounted soldiers, would you scream back that he also killed children?

Maybe people aren’t bad for not getting hung up on rape in Jack Vance novels.

I think Rich could have put that much, *much* better re: disagreeing with Rea, but rape really is pervasive in Vance’s work. What’s the Alastor book with the shierl, basically a mascot who gets raped at the end of the game by the winning team? I don’t know what to make of that — whether it’s meant to highlight the strangeness of the culture or to imply that we exaggerate the reprehensibility of rape — but it’s definitely all over the place.

Possibly Rich, who enjoys arguing about texts, can offer Henry a guest post on the economy of rape in Vance’s works.

“Possibly Rich, who enjoys arguing about texts, can offer Henry a guest post on the economy of rape in Vance’s works.”

If the discussion was going to go that way, I’d point out how little, comparatively, outright prostitution figures in Vance’s work. There’s temple prostitution, as with the women who pay “taxes” in _The Palace of Love_. But if I had to guess about the function of the fantasy scenes in Vance’s work, I’d guess that it’s about the absence of rules. The Wilbur Wailey story above is about a man breaking a good number of social taboos in order to systematically get all the sex he wants, a straightforward conflict of unrestrained id with superego. So it’s ritualistic, or fetishized, but decidedly not a market economy thing. The market economy is characterized by scarcity, and for Vance it seems to be a way in which men break free from social restrictions of scarcity into excess.

The reason that it’s anti-feminist isn’t because Vance is a cartoon misogynist — it’s because in order for men to have this excess, women have to be treated as objects. The conservative sees the encroachments of other people’s rights to be treated as people as rules.

@68 Is the shierl really raped in hussade? As far as I can recall, and various reviews and summaries agree, she is denuded after her team runs out of ransom money, which is bad enough, I guess, but not rape.

The whole “hussade” thing in Trullion: Alastor 2262 always seemed to me a transparent satire of American football sports-craziness.

I find perusing his works for the purpose of finding offenses to modern sensibilities rather a pointless exercise. If you find that they make the books unreadable, then don’t read them.

Talking of _Trullion_ (best line in which is the mention of the magazine “Interesting Activities Of The Elite) and the Dying Earth stories (but especially ‘Lianne the Wayfarer’), why haven’t we noticed the torture? There’s lots of torture. Did Vance approve of it?

I am re-reading _Eyes of the Overworld_ right now: once I’ve finished I think I’ll fast forward to _Lyonesse 3_ and see if it’s possible to read Madouc as a strong female character. Here’s hoping that a Vance thread is still open when I have finished the crit.

And another thing: what about the political economy of capitalism, debt and usury in _Emphyrio_? Surely that’s worth a CT thread?

There’s lots of torture. Did Vance approve of it?

Liane the Wayfarer seems pretty clearly anti-torture. The torturer is a horrible person, witnesses are horrified, innocents are killed, and no useful information is gained. And – trying to avoid spoilers – the torturer does not escape consequences. Maybe if Liane started off as an upstanding person who became corrupted by the act of torture it would be even more clearly anti-torture, but that’s asking a bit much.

@ rich, isn’t the main reason that they are late books? Catching up with the times? He must have been getting blind already in those years, Madouc and the Araminta Station seem to be basically last books he could still tackle in a productive health.

Vance also wrote in other genres. Just some: The View From Chickweed’s Window has a strong female as the central character, the House on Lily Street deals sympathetically with welfare and race, The Man in the Cage takes a dim view of sexual abuse. All mid period Vance, first two set in San Francisco/Berkeley.

I’m surprised that everyone is rah-rah for Madouc but nobody has mentioned Suldrun yet. Yes, she’s a sad character who never gets to do very much and ends up killing herself. But she’s a POV character who has an active inner life, which right off the bat is noteworthy. (Few of Vance’s characters pause amidst the action and intrigue to contemplate; part of the reason the last paragraph of the Demon Princes is so striking is because the hero has hardly had time to be contemplative up until then.)

Suldrun doesn’t get to wander around having picaresque adventures, no. But for the first 100 pages of the book she’s pretty much the only voice of reason and decency in an environment where pretty much everyone else is stupid, evil, obsessed with status and advancement, or simply loathsome. Her liaison with Aillas fits a classic fairy-tale trope — of course the lonely captive princess falls for the shipwrecked prince — but at the same time, Vance makes it perfectly plausible: other than her late tutor, Aillas is the first man — almost the first human — she’s ever met, who isn’t ghastly in one way or another.

Also, while she never gets to go roving across the high moors, her choices in the first third of the book (rejecting Carfilhiot, embracing Aillas, concealing her pregnancy and hiding the child) are what drive the rest of the book, and indeed the entire trilogy. That book has a lot more plot than most Vance, and it’s Suldrun who sets the plot in motion.

Which is not to say that everything about Suldrun is great. Oh mais non! She’s problematic character in various ways. But she’s a thoughtfully rendered, has an active inner life, and makes the choices that drive the rest of the book. She deserves a place on the short list of interesting Vancian female characters.

Doug M.

David: Last I heard, the Vance Integral Edition project (q.v.) was trying to make all of Vance’s work available as e-books…so the mysteries might be available in that form.

That said–don’t expect too much. I am a longtime fan of Vance’s SF/F work and read all of the mystery books when they were re-published in the early 2000s as part of the VIE. The Joe Bain books and “Man In The Cage” are, if undistinguished, at least readable, but reading his other work in the genre is like eating a bowl of cold oatmeal–the wit and imagination of his fantasy writing is completely absent.