The Big U by Neal Stephenson
Jan. 11th, 2023 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretFerret's Grand Unifying Theory of Dystopias is that a dystopia is likely to be uninteresting to me if its basic premise is the evil at the core of humanity, and likely to be interesting to me if it's about the way that social structures conspire to make people do evil things.
The Big U is a mostly failed novel, Neal Stephenson's first (Stephenson's own judgement of the novel: "If the book were judged on its own intrinsic merits, it would not attract such a high price or engender such curiosity. The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."). Nonetheless, I deeply adore it because it is so good at being the second kind of dystopia, an examination of how big social systems fail. It was famously out of print for many years, and copies were going for hundreds of dollars on ebay, so that Stephenson himself told fans to pirate it. He may even have linked to a pirate copy, I don't recall, but I definitely first read it as the grey-pirated e-version. Eventually Stephenson allowed the book to be republished, and I had a hankering to reread it so I picked up a physical copy for the reread.
It is such a joy to read, and IMO it has survived the attack of the suck fairy way better than it ought to have. Maybe because it always sucked? But it's a book from the early 1980s by a white dude who became famous for writing dude novels, and yet its narrator is a complicated, dynamic African American man, its deuteragonists are a female English major and a lower class Polish immigrant, it engages deeply with the consequences of rape culture on college campuses, it engages with ideas like what we would today call 'cancel culture' in a thoughtful and complicated way... in many ways it feels like a novel of today, still, in its moral and narrative preoccupations, rather than a 37 year old novel.
Also it is manic and chaotic and hysterically funny in a dark way and I love all of those things.
But the Big U as a dystopia... One of the secrets that make The Big U continue to work for me is that there are lots of larger than life characters, but there are no stereotypes. Not in the sense that there aren't characters who fall within a certain stereotype, but they are never JUST the stereotype, Stephenson always takes the time to twist or modify the character so they have some dynamic that defies stereotype. The Airheads, Sarah's ditzy hallmates, are perhaps the best example of this. It would be so easy for Stephenson to just write them as dumb women who are obsessed with image and with being loved, and that's how Sarah sees them most of the time, but one of the most gutting moments in the entire book is the time they sexually assault Sarah and she is able, just for a moment, to get through to them and get them to realize that what they did was wrong. It's a moment that, structurally, shouldn't be possible. These characters mostly don't have names, they're just background details who exist to interact with our main characters, yet even the background noise gets character motion from Stephenson.
And because of this secret, the Big U's social structures are dynamic structures that we see move as we continue to read. It's not, This evil system was established by Old Ford, there's nothing we can do about it now, it's... This evil system is a confluence of factors and innocent decisions and ambitious moves made without anticipating consequences, and it makes it harder for people to do the right thing but they still have choices. But every choice they make itself influences the system, sometimes in unpredictable ways, so the system sometimes lurches toward greater constraint and pressure toward evil. That's the narrative arc I most appreciate over the course of the novel, not Casimir's story and not Bud's story and not Sarah's story, though I do like all three of them, but the narrative arc of The Big U itself as an institution changing from an annoying and mildly evil bureaucratic system into something where unexpected feedback loops conspire to apply enormous pressures on all the people inside it.
There are perhaps flaws in this posture. I am, for example, maybe overly generous in desiring stories where humanity is not evil. Stephenson seems to me in this reading to be at times overly sympathetic to the Terrorists, the frat-boy rapists who harass women and weaker men across the Plex, in that he accords them any humanity at all. [On the other hand, there is a constant, aching awareness throughout the novel that people who receive the kind of collegiate education that the Terrorists do are the ones who are likely to end up collecting large paychecks once they leave the university. Stephenson undermines this awareness ironically in his conclusion- the Terrorists who died in the fighting will never leave the Plex. If things go too far, even the powerful suffer, though not as much as the weak.] Is my attraction to stories where humans are morally complicated itself a moral weakness on my part, a refusal to acknowledge the place of genuine evil in the world? In any case, in further evidence of this being a way less Suck Fairied novel than you'd expect, the Terrorists hit a moral event horizon and they do not return, and Stephenson makes no effort at redeeming them but simply chronicles their further descent into the abyss, for the mordant pleasure of readers.
I do want to be clear that I am not saying, as Stephenson sometimes has characters suggest, that it is the geography of the Plex itself which engineers evil. Rather, the geography of the Plex is one factor interacting with a number of other factors. Some of those factors are normal, mundane, if troubling facts of life in our world, like the ambiguous utility of the college experience. Other facts are surreal and absurd, like giant mutant rats the size of Great Bernards. Stephenson writes each with equal seriousness, and all of them interact with the dynamic system of the Plex.
And as I was reading this book and enjoying all of this complexity I was wondering why Stephenson hates it so much, and why I remembered it as a flawed novel, and then... I got to the end. What The Big U really ought to have been was a book as long as Anathem. There's a whole missing middle and in Stephenson's frantic and desperate march to his ending, through a thicket of plot a mile deep, he loses so much of the character complexity he's developed. Sarah and Hyacinth in fact disappear without resolution, I reread the last dozen pages three times to figure out what happened. One is left to suppose that after arguing with Ephraim three times about whether to destroy the Plex, and three times ending up disagreeing, in the end they came around to his position and sacrificed themselves for the sake of bicameralism. It's an unsatisfying conclusion and not satisfyingly unsatisfying either. The novel reaches its intended moment of climax and that climax drowns out everything else.
But the problems with the book do go deeper than a botched ending to a well executed novel. The botched ending is consistent with a number of sort of irrelevant themes that move through the book. In later Stephenson, the eclectic philosophical subject matter is sometimes a nuisance and sometimes a valued contributor to the chaos. Here, it's almost an irrelevance. If bicameralism is supposed to mean something to the story, as it of course does in Snow Crash, it's vague and unclear and yet it's the source of several long monologues from characters who would be better deployed doing something else for the story. The Big U would be a better story if it moved more efficiently, though I might love it less. One of the things I love about The Big U is its attachment to the cycles of the academic calendar. It meanders because the dictates of its plot come from something other than the dictates of what make a good story, and that creates a startling sense of the movement of time.
I'm not good at wrapping up posts like this, which is sometimes why they don't get posted. The Big U is a weird book that perhaps shouldn't get too much attention, but I always have fun when I revisit it, and I always find myself thinking.
The Big U is a mostly failed novel, Neal Stephenson's first (Stephenson's own judgement of the novel: "If the book were judged on its own intrinsic merits, it would not attract such a high price or engender such curiosity. The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."). Nonetheless, I deeply adore it because it is so good at being the second kind of dystopia, an examination of how big social systems fail. It was famously out of print for many years, and copies were going for hundreds of dollars on ebay, so that Stephenson himself told fans to pirate it. He may even have linked to a pirate copy, I don't recall, but I definitely first read it as the grey-pirated e-version. Eventually Stephenson allowed the book to be republished, and I had a hankering to reread it so I picked up a physical copy for the reread.
It is such a joy to read, and IMO it has survived the attack of the suck fairy way better than it ought to have. Maybe because it always sucked? But it's a book from the early 1980s by a white dude who became famous for writing dude novels, and yet its narrator is a complicated, dynamic African American man, its deuteragonists are a female English major and a lower class Polish immigrant, it engages deeply with the consequences of rape culture on college campuses, it engages with ideas like what we would today call 'cancel culture' in a thoughtful and complicated way... in many ways it feels like a novel of today, still, in its moral and narrative preoccupations, rather than a 37 year old novel.
Also it is manic and chaotic and hysterically funny in a dark way and I love all of those things.
But the Big U as a dystopia... One of the secrets that make The Big U continue to work for me is that there are lots of larger than life characters, but there are no stereotypes. Not in the sense that there aren't characters who fall within a certain stereotype, but they are never JUST the stereotype, Stephenson always takes the time to twist or modify the character so they have some dynamic that defies stereotype. The Airheads, Sarah's ditzy hallmates, are perhaps the best example of this. It would be so easy for Stephenson to just write them as dumb women who are obsessed with image and with being loved, and that's how Sarah sees them most of the time, but one of the most gutting moments in the entire book is the time they sexually assault Sarah and she is able, just for a moment, to get through to them and get them to realize that what they did was wrong. It's a moment that, structurally, shouldn't be possible. These characters mostly don't have names, they're just background details who exist to interact with our main characters, yet even the background noise gets character motion from Stephenson.
And because of this secret, the Big U's social structures are dynamic structures that we see move as we continue to read. It's not, This evil system was established by Old Ford, there's nothing we can do about it now, it's... This evil system is a confluence of factors and innocent decisions and ambitious moves made without anticipating consequences, and it makes it harder for people to do the right thing but they still have choices. But every choice they make itself influences the system, sometimes in unpredictable ways, so the system sometimes lurches toward greater constraint and pressure toward evil. That's the narrative arc I most appreciate over the course of the novel, not Casimir's story and not Bud's story and not Sarah's story, though I do like all three of them, but the narrative arc of The Big U itself as an institution changing from an annoying and mildly evil bureaucratic system into something where unexpected feedback loops conspire to apply enormous pressures on all the people inside it.
There are perhaps flaws in this posture. I am, for example, maybe overly generous in desiring stories where humanity is not evil. Stephenson seems to me in this reading to be at times overly sympathetic to the Terrorists, the frat-boy rapists who harass women and weaker men across the Plex, in that he accords them any humanity at all. [On the other hand, there is a constant, aching awareness throughout the novel that people who receive the kind of collegiate education that the Terrorists do are the ones who are likely to end up collecting large paychecks once they leave the university. Stephenson undermines this awareness ironically in his conclusion- the Terrorists who died in the fighting will never leave the Plex. If things go too far, even the powerful suffer, though not as much as the weak.] Is my attraction to stories where humans are morally complicated itself a moral weakness on my part, a refusal to acknowledge the place of genuine evil in the world? In any case, in further evidence of this being a way less Suck Fairied novel than you'd expect, the Terrorists hit a moral event horizon and they do not return, and Stephenson makes no effort at redeeming them but simply chronicles their further descent into the abyss, for the mordant pleasure of readers.
I do want to be clear that I am not saying, as Stephenson sometimes has characters suggest, that it is the geography of the Plex itself which engineers evil. Rather, the geography of the Plex is one factor interacting with a number of other factors. Some of those factors are normal, mundane, if troubling facts of life in our world, like the ambiguous utility of the college experience. Other facts are surreal and absurd, like giant mutant rats the size of Great Bernards. Stephenson writes each with equal seriousness, and all of them interact with the dynamic system of the Plex.
And as I was reading this book and enjoying all of this complexity I was wondering why Stephenson hates it so much, and why I remembered it as a flawed novel, and then... I got to the end. What The Big U really ought to have been was a book as long as Anathem. There's a whole missing middle and in Stephenson's frantic and desperate march to his ending, through a thicket of plot a mile deep, he loses so much of the character complexity he's developed. Sarah and Hyacinth in fact disappear without resolution, I reread the last dozen pages three times to figure out what happened. One is left to suppose that after arguing with Ephraim three times about whether to destroy the Plex, and three times ending up disagreeing, in the end they came around to his position and sacrificed themselves for the sake of bicameralism. It's an unsatisfying conclusion and not satisfyingly unsatisfying either. The novel reaches its intended moment of climax and that climax drowns out everything else.
But the problems with the book do go deeper than a botched ending to a well executed novel. The botched ending is consistent with a number of sort of irrelevant themes that move through the book. In later Stephenson, the eclectic philosophical subject matter is sometimes a nuisance and sometimes a valued contributor to the chaos. Here, it's almost an irrelevance. If bicameralism is supposed to mean something to the story, as it of course does in Snow Crash, it's vague and unclear and yet it's the source of several long monologues from characters who would be better deployed doing something else for the story. The Big U would be a better story if it moved more efficiently, though I might love it less. One of the things I love about The Big U is its attachment to the cycles of the academic calendar. It meanders because the dictates of its plot come from something other than the dictates of what make a good story, and that creates a startling sense of the movement of time.
I'm not good at wrapping up posts like this, which is sometimes why they don't get posted. The Big U is a weird book that perhaps shouldn't get too much attention, but I always have fun when I revisit it, and I always find myself thinking.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-12 02:18 am (UTC)Anyway, I need to read this one, despite its weaknesses, I've always meant to since my friend told me that story.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-12 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-12 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-13 04:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-28 10:42 am (UTC)My biggest complaint wasn't the ending as such, but seeming to miss out several important connections (also a flaw in later books). Like the take over by actual terrorists seemed to happen off screen somewhere, I think. And there were things that were clearly supposed to be thematic connections but seemed rather out of context to me.