Discworld Reread #6: Pyramids

Or, in the kingdom of stopped time

Pyramids cover art by Josh Kirby.

Teppic is a young man in Ankh-Morpork the process of taking his final exam to become an Assassin. He has it all down: the wall-scaling, the traipsing over rooftops in moonlight, the breaking and entering more silently than a black cat’s footstep. He has mastered all the weapons, from the blowgun to the rapier to the plethora of blades and knives and daggers he has secreted all over his person. Poisons? Got ‘em cold.

And on top of that, he looks great in black.

And while he passes his exam (whose failure often entails fatality), he knows in his heart that he is unable to carry out that most basic of the assassin’s tasks, the one indeed for which assassins exist: the inhumation of a person (for money, of course). Fortunately—or unfortunately, as it turns out—he has a backup career waiting for him in the family business.

“Teppic” is short for Pteppicymon, and upon news of the death of his father, Pteppicymon XVII, Teppic has become Pteppicymon XVIII, the new pharaoh of the small but ancient kingdom of Djelibeybi. But as the old song goes, How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down in the Ancient River Valley (After They’ve Seen Ankh-Morpork)? Upon returning to assume the throne, Teppic can’t help but feel suffocated by the Kingdom’s obsessive adherence to tradition—which means eschewing such new-fangled modern fripperies like sewage and plumbing, sleeping on mattresses rather than rock slabs, and not bankrupting the kingdom to pay for lavish tombs for dead pharaohs in the form of ever-larger pyramids.

So, Teppic is having a bit of a rough time. So too is the ghost of his father Pteppicymon XVII, who mournfully watches the embalmers do their work on his corpse and anticipates with dread being entombed for eternity underneath the pyramid being constructed for him—a pyramid that, as per the order of the cadaverous, vulpine head priest Dios, will be twice as large as any yet built.

But as it turns out, a pyramid of that size has very odd qualities (which one might even call quantum) and is giving the architect Ptaclusp and his two sons—Ptaclusp II and Ptaclusp IIa—no end of grief.

Add into the mix the fact that Pteppicymon XVII’s favourite handmaiden Ptraci has refused to be entombed with the dead king. Head Priest Dios cannot allow such blasphemy and so sentences her, in Teppic’s name of course, to be fed to the sacred crocodiles. In spite of the fact that she is to be executed on his authority, Teppic dons his assassin’s garb and sneaks out to rescue her.

And then the fun really begins.

1. You Can’t De-Nile¹ How Funny This Novel Is …

Pyramids is book #7 in the Discworld series and is the first standalone novel—by which I mean, it’s the first novel that isn’t part of the various “clusters” comprising different subsets of characters, locations, and circumstances like the Witches, the Watch, Death, Rincewind, and the development of modern technologies by magical means.²

It is also, notably, one of the few non-YA Discworld novels that is divided into titled sections. Sir Terry was famously disdainful of chapters,³ only including them in his YA novels at the insistence of his editors; in two of his three Moist von Lipwig novels, Going Postal (#33) and Making Money (#36), he has chapters with 19^th-century style synopses (why? I don’t know, but will ask again when we get there), but otherwise he wrote in a generally free-flowing narrative with breaks indicating shifts in focus and perspective. Why the divisions in Pyramids? No idea, and I have no useful theory. I just raise it as a point of curiosity.

Pyramids is also, to my mind, one of the funniest of the Discworld novels. Given that there’s no such thing as a non-funny Discworld novel, this is a high bar: and while I would never put myself through the mental agony of ranking them, I will say that Pyramids is easily in the top five. The scene in which Teppic encounters the Sphinx and lawyers his way past the riddle (more on that below!) is pure comic genius. So too is our first introduction to the city-state of Ephebe, analogue to ancient Athens and very specific antithesis to the cultural and societal stasis of Djelibeybi. Oh, and the very name “Djelibeybi” (say it out loud!) is a piece of art unto itself (a helpful footnote informs us it literally means “child of the Djel,” the river that is the kingdom’s lifeblood).

But there is also of course the camel, named You Bastard, who is the greatest mathematician in all of Discworld. All camels, it is stipulated, are mathematical geniuses,⁴ a fact of which no human is aware because camels go to great lengths to disguise their brilliance:

The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it. (207-208)

Our window into the mind of You Bastard, who alternates between Stephen Hawking-level mathematical calculations and wondering WTF the humans are doing, is one of the highlights of the novel. As is Sir Terry’s description of how camels gallop, “by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to catch up.”

Pyramids is, as one will glean from the title alone, a parodic riff on Ancient Egyptian culture.⁵ Rereading it put me in mind of my requisite fascination with Egypt when I was in grade school, when I obsessed over its history and mythology and took out all the books our school library had on it. More recently, by which I mean four or five years ago, I listened to a series of lectures by Egypt scholar Bob Brier of Long Island University (available from The Great Courses), which offered a quite comprehensive history. One of the aspects of Ancient Egyptian culture Dr. Brier emphasizes, and which Sir Terry takes as central to Pyramids, is how profoundly conservative a culture it was. By which I mean, it was resistant to change in almost any manner, believing that the past was invariably superior to the present. Sir Terry uses the comparable sensibility in Djelibeybi to great comic effect, as Teppic—habituated to the comforts and conveniences of Ankh-Morpork—has to make do with sleeping on a stone slab and eschewing indoor plumbing. At one point when he’s doing a bunk on his kingly duties by dressing up in his assassin’s togs, he reflects that his knives, which he brought with him, were “possibly the only steel in the country; it wasn’t that Djelibeybi hadn’t heard about iron, it was just that if copper was good enough for your great-great-great-great-grandfather, it was good enough for you” (166-167).

2. The Sclerotic Kingdom

As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the most interesting parts of doing this reread of the Discworld novels in order of publication is seeing the evolution of Sir Terry’s thematic preoccupations. Seven novels in, and that world continues to take shape. These early iterations often feel like rough drafts—not because the novels themselves are rough or half-baked, but because I have in my mind a broader sense of the Discworld philosophy as developed over forty-one novels, and it’s fascinating to see its early workings-through. Often this is manifested in the way the characters evolve from their initial sketches, like Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites and Death in Mort; it is also present in emergent key concepts, like headology. Pyramids introduces the theme of societal stagnation by way of religion, which will be something more thoroughly and subtly explored in Small Gods (#13). Indeed, speaking of first drafts, Pyramids appears on revisiting it as very much a first draft of Small Gods—a theocratic ancient kingdom resistant to change presided over by an absolutist religious leader who brooks no deviation from holy writ.⁶

The greatest concrete manifestation of this resistance to change are the pyramids themselves. Simply taken as we know them here on Roundworld, they are monuments to ancient memory, the literal tombs of the pharaohs who ruled the Nile millennia ago. They perform the same symbolic function in Pyramids, but in Discworld have qualities that Ptaclusp IIb would probably call quantum.

“Pyramids are dams in the stream of time” (188) we learn. Pyramids’ mass and geometric properties, “with the proper paracosmic measurements correctly plumbed in,” along with their great mass of stone, creates a “temporal potential” that can then be “diverted to accelerate or reverse time over a very small area.” So basically, pyramids in Discworld can be used “in the same way that a hydraulic ram can be induced to pump water against the flow” (188-189).

What is brilliant about this description is not just that it offers a lovely parody of the sort of SF mumbo-jumbo that gets inserted into Star Trek scripts whenever the plot demands technical reasons for why the warp drive won’t work; it also replicates precisely the kind of mystical pseudoscience that has attached itself to the actual Roundworld pyramids. It’s not hard to imagine the dude with the weird hair from Ancient Aliens⁷ repeating verbatim the passage I just quoted.

The temporal properties of pyramids, however, are less significant in and of themselves than what they reveal about the culture and history of Djelibeybi—and in one deeply significant way, what the people of Djelibeybi have forgotten about the temporal properties of pyramids:

The original builders, who were of course ancients and therefore wise, knew this very well and the whole point of a correctly-built pyramid was to achieve null time in the central chamber so that a dying king, tucked up there, would indeed live forever—or at least never actually die. The time that should have passed in the chamber was stored in the bulk of the pyramid and allowed to flare off once every twenty-four hours.

After a few aeons people forgot this and thought you could achieve the same effect by a) ritual b) pickling people and c) storing their soft inner bits in jars.

This seldom works. (189)

To return to my earlier point, the trajectory described here—from practical application to empty ritual—anticipates the core theme of Small Gods and indeed comes to comprise a key element of Sir Terry’s broader philosophy. Djelibeybi, we glean from its first few descriptions, is a society mired in its own past for reasons primarily tautological. We adhere to tradition. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way. Why? Because it’s tradition!

The flaring-off of accumulated time, like the gas flaring that occurs during oil and gas extraction, is the visible burning of unused energy—controlled wastage, in other words, as in both cases the flare comprises unused potential. Both are a necessary release: in fossil fuel extraction, gas flaring occurs to prevent dangerous buildups; in the second half of Pyramids we see what happens when a huge buildup of time goes unreleased. As Teppic and Ptraci flee on You Bastard,

behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space. (212-213)

The ”something perverted,” as it happens, is to remove the entirety of Djelibeybi from this reality and deposit it in a pocket universe that conforms literally to its cultural myths, in which the sky is a giant blue woman and the sun is rolled across the sky daily by a giant dung-beetle.

Time-flaring (as it were) is a poignant and pointed metaphor for the sclerotic kingdom: temporality is not productive or a measure of progress, but something to be burnt away as excess to the kingdom’s principal function, which is to make the present as much like the past as possible, and plan a future that will not deviate from the present. Though time does of course pass in the standard way, i.e. people age and die (with one notable exception), the kingdom itself remains unchanging, with only the Necropolis across the river growing as each passing pharaoh’s pyramid is added to the sepulchral city.

Presiding over this static, backward-looking kingdom is the high priest Dios, who is an early sketch of what will become Sir Terry’s worst sort of villain: a person (or entity) so convinced of the rightness and/or righteousness of their vision for a perfect world that they subject others—for their own good and betterment—to the Procrustean bed of their utopian strictures. Dios most specifically anticipates his closest analogue, the Head Quisitor Vorbis in Small Gods; but we will see his spectre in the fairy godmother Lilith in Witches Abroad, the sociopathic Captain Swing in Night Watch (#29), a whole host of disgruntled Ankh-Morporkian nobility yearning for the good old days of monarchy, and most significantly in the recurring figures of the Auditors of Reality.⁸

Dios, like Vorbis to come, is High Priest and thus the ultimate arbiter and final word on all matters doctrinal, right down to things one might otherwise assume were outside his remit:

“That is the last case, sire,” said Dios.

“I will retire to my quarters,” said Teppic coldly. “I have much to think about.”

“Therefore I will have dinner sent in,” said the priest. “It will be roast chicken.”

“I hate chicken.”

Dios smiled. “No, sire. On Wednesdays the king always enjoys chicken, sire.” (161)

It is by the diktat of Dios that the will of the gods is enacted and observed. Teppic finds himself more or less helpless,⁹ especially in a cultural context where dogma is sunk so deep that his people literally cannot think outside it, as he discovers when he obliviously shakes the hand of a labourer working on his late father’s pyramid. The man screams and runs off. Dios informs him that because the king is a god, it is not for mortals to touch him, and thus any ordinary use the man put his hand to would defile the king. Therefore, it would have to be chopped off. Teppic, horrified, forbids it—but Dios informs him that the man would do it himself, would in fact have already done it had he not been restrained by his fellow workers. “I am a stranger in a familiar land,” Teppic thinks (139).

The absolute rigidity of doctrine and adherence to ritual has evolved to a point where the original tenets of faith and worship of the gods have become more or less irrelevant to the practice of religion. In case that wasn’t obvious from the austerity of palace life as enforced by Dios, the High Priest’s reaction to the literal appearance of the gods makes it plain. When the un-flared temporal energy in the unfinished pyramid causes Djelibeybi to fall into a pocket universe, the many various-headed gods of the valley appear, which causes all the priests to have hysterics, like unsupervised children when the teachers suddenly appear. But Dios isn’t panicked—he’s enraged that the gods should so rudely intrude on the carefully ordered society he has created in their name. “Coming here as if they own the place,” he huffs. “How dare they?” (250). When one of his priests tentatively points out that, as gods, they do in fact own the place, Dios hisses at him, “They’re our gods … We’re not their people. They’re my gods and they will learn to do as they’re instructed!” (251).

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that Dios is not wrong—gods on Discworld exist because of mortals and their belief, not vice versa, which theoretically entails a sort of ownership—his reaction makes perfectly clear that his religious armature has little to do with the gods whose worship it ostensibly serves. It is of a piece with the pyramids themselves, whose original purpose has been lost to the empty ritual of monumental commemoration of the long dead.

That Dios himself has lived for millennia—is in fact the original high priest who turned the ignorant nomads who settled in the river valley into the self-regarding kingdom of Djelibeybi—is the capstone¹⁰ on the novel’s over-arching conceit. He has, we learn, been using the very first pyramid’s capacity to not just dam time but reverse it to maintain his (relative) youth. He has almost literally frozen a kingdom in time in the name of his singular vision of the perfect society, held in stasis by the endless repetition of his daily routine.

3. Generic Djelibeybi

To consider all this from a more meta perspective: the sclerotic adherence to form with no real thought to reason also reflects the broader project of Discworld as a critique of genre. As I’ve noted a handful of times in prior instalments in this series, Discworld begins with Sir Terry gleefully taking the piss of fantasy, which by the late 1970s/early 1980s had largely fallen into a derivative rut¹¹ mimicking the conventions and elements of medieval romance and myth as refracted through Tolkien’s prism, but without any real innovation or critique, usually layered in with contemporary sensibilities that, in combination with the genre’s stylized medievalism, at times introduced bizarre and even absurd elements.¹²

This reduction to form and convention is not, of course, limited to fantasy but is a tendency of genre more broadly. Again, this is a subject I’ve nibbled at before (and will certainly nibble at again): genre shares structural traits with both mythology and cliché insofar as it is an example of overdetermined expression.¹³ Sir Terry is often preoccupied with overdetermination, especially where story and custom are concerned, and indeed the relationship between story and custom. The novel that most specifically engages this point is Witches Abroad (#12),¹⁴ but it is present in most (if not all) Discworld novels to a greater or lesser degree. Story, after all, is the basis of the rituals to which Dios—and by extension, all Djelibeybi, on pain of death by crocodile—adheres, as religious ritual recapitulates the mythical narratives of the gods.

In The Political Unconscious (1981) Fredric Jameson likens the creation and evolution of genre to the process of sedimentation. At its inception, genre isn’t yet genre, as it represents a new and possibly revolutionary form of expression. Imitation of the revolutionary form by subsequent artists repeats its principal tropes and conventions like the silting of a riverbed until the layers of sediment calcify.¹⁵ Genre in this process becomes ultimately more concerned with form and expectations than with the diegetic logic of the elements within the story. An example I always give my students when unpacking this analogy is how the film Scream (1996) works by parodically highlighting all the absurdities of the slasher genre—people splitting up rather than staying together, running upstairs rather than outside, pausing for a bit of sex in spite of the bodies piling up—all of which are exemplary of narrative conventions that serve a generic formula rather than the actual story itself. The particular brilliance of The Cabin in the Woods (2011) was to identify such conventions as ritual, performed for obstreperous old gods who are of course a metaphor for genre audiences.

In this respect, the meticulously scheduled religious observances in Djelibeybi are themselves representative of sedimented practices that have long since lost their connection to the originating exercises of faith. The form of the rituals themselves are an expression not of worship but of theocratic power—per Jameson, the form comprises an ideology in an of itself divorced from the rationale at its emergence.

4. Coda: Ephebe and the Sphinx

I have, as per usual, run long with this, but I can’t go without addressing a couple of things that make Pyramids one of the funniest Discworld novels.

First, Ephebe: if Djelibeybi is Ancient Egypt, Ephebe is Ancient Greece—specifically, Athens during its golden age between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. It will also appear in Small Gods in a similar capacity, as counterpoint to a sclerotic and dogmatic theocracy. Where Djelibeybi is static and ritualistic, Ephebe is chaotic and improvisational—something exemplified by its food and drink. “Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket,” Teppic notes to himself, “and ate anything that couldn’t climb out of one” (270). Teppic makes this observation at a riotous lunch with a group of philosophers he and Ptraci run into on the dunes, two of whom are conducting an experiment to see if tortoises can outrun an arrow shot from a bow (spoiler: they can’t, though Xeno is certain the arrow should never be able to reach the unfortunate testudinoid). Philosophers, Teppic grasps, are men whose “brains must be so big that they have room for ideas no one else would consider for five seconds” (255).

Second: the Sphinx. It stands to reason that if Teppic is going to be traveling between a Grecian analogue and an Egyptian one—the former who gave us the Sphinx narratively, and the latter in sculpture—he’s going to be confronted by a monster whose “body of a lion, bosom of a woman and wings of an eagle” has given it “a serious identity crisis” and “doesn’t need much to make it angry” (315). Hence, its notorious Riddle, which “had provided [it] with considerable entertainment and innumerable meals.”

“What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening.” Any one of us who has studied Oedipus Rex in first-year English knows the answer, but Teppic, alas, has not had the benefit of Roundworld schooling. So he is stymied: but on hearing the answer, he then proceeds to lawyer his way through a more literal understanding of the Riddle, until he gets the Sphinx to rewrite the wording to: What is it that walks on four legs (metaphorically speaking) just after midnight, on two legs for most of the day (barring accidents) until about dinner time, when it continues to walk on two legs with any prosthetic aids of its choice?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is unde-Nile-ably funny.

REFERENCES

Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. Faber & Faber, 1932.
Jameson, Fredic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981.
Pratchett, Terry. Pyramids. Corgi, 1989.

NOTES

1. Totally channelling my dad here.

2. For which I again refer you to this helpful reader’s guide with all the clusters mapped out:

3. In an interview with Gavin J. Grant, Sir Terry said “Life doesn't happen in chapters … I can see what their purpose is in children's books ("I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep") but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.”

4. I just recently reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for something I’m thinking of writing. I had forgotten about the hierarchy of intelligence on Earth that Douglas Adams imagines, with humans being only the third-most intelligent creatures. Dolphins are #2, and make their own way off-planet just before it is destroyed by the Vogon Constructor Fleet; and of course mice are the most intelligent species, pan-dimensional beings who create the Earth as a giant computer to figure out the question to the answer of 42, which was itself the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.

When Sir Terry first started writing Discworld, he did so in part because it occurred to him he could do the fantasy version of Hitchhiker’s Guide. Oddly, he and Douglas Adams never knew each other, and never even properly met—the closest they came was shouted greetings at a distance when they (almost) crossed paths at an event of some sort.

5. It’s interesting to note that, while there is a vast amount of historical fiction set in Ancient Egypt—of varying degrees of fidelity to the actual history, and which at times includes supernatural and fantastical elements—I am not aware of much fantasy world-building based on Ancient Egypt in the way that Middle-earth and Westeros are based on medieval Europe. It’s a question I can’t really begin to explore or address here, principally because I’m coming at it cold and it lies somewhat outside my area of expertise. The only thing that leaps to mind is N.K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology, The Killing Moon (2012) and The Shadowed Sun (2012) (which is excellent and was my initial introduction to Jemisin’s fiction). What am I missing? If you have any recommendations, please share in the comments.

Assuming I’m not entirely wrong and there’s a dearth of Egypt-inspired fantasy as compared to historical(ish) fiction set in Ancient Egypt, I wonder if it’s because Ancient Egypt already feels like fantasy, especially to the Western sensibility. So much of Egypt in the cultural imaginary is twisted up in two centuries of Egyptology and the exoticization of its mythology, history, and aesthetic. It is indeed a veritable case study in imperialist appropriation, as it begins with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to deny Britain’s land route to India. While there, Napoleon became fascinated with the relics of the ancient kingdoms and assembled a team of scholars to come and study it all. When the Napoleonic wars finally ended with Britain’s victory, the French were permitted to retain all their discoveries, except the antiquities themselves—most important among those being the Rosetta Stone.

Hence, “Egyptology” was born, and proved a source of nigh-obsessive fascination in Europe and America throughout the century. The remoteness in time, vagueness of certain parts of the historical record, code-like nature of hieroglyphics, exotic aesthetic, and robust mythology are all elements that almost can’t help but fire the imagination and inspire speculative invention. (The role played by Ancient Egypt, the pyramids, and hieroglyphics in numerous conspiratorial fantasies is a whole subject unto itself.)

All of which is by way of saying: perhaps Ancient Egypt comprises enough of its own fantasy that few authors feel the need to venture into Egypt-adjacent world-building. But again, please let me know your thoughts in the comments, I’m now madly curious to think more about this.

6. There is a more than reasonable chance I will be obliged to do more than one post on Small Gods.

7. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos is his name. I figured I should do the minimum and check out his Wikipedia page. I’ve never actually watched Ancient Aliens, I’ve just seen the memes. It did occur to the first time I saw him however that this guy’s obviously so obsessed with aliens because he himself isn’t human but is a Centauri like Londo Mollari on Babylon 5. Though it’s possible he’s unaware of his heritage, and his entire career as a ufologist proceeds from some nagging drive he’s never understood—really, he’s just seeking his own people without knowing it.

8. These last baddies are ethereal entities who task themselves with policing the boundaries of acceptable reality. In their conception, “acceptable” entails the purely empirical. As far as the Auditors are concerned, “for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space” (Thief of Time [#26]). “They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell,” but become quite stroppy about anything stepping outside the strictly quantifiable. As such, they’re antipathetic to pretty much all forms of life, which tend to be messy and unpredictable. Humanity is the worst, the source of their greatest ire and angst, as it “practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief.”

We’ll have a lot to say about them, as they appear as antagonists in Reaper Man (#11), Hogfather (#20), and Thief of Time.

9. When Teppic dons his assassin’s garb and slips out into the night to rescue Ptraci, he reflects that the “freedom of a sort up here on the rooftops” was “the only kind of freedom available to a king of the valley.” When he reflects that the peasants of the river delta had more freedom than him, the king, “the seditious non-kingly side of him said, yes, freedom to catch any diseases of their choice, starve as much as they wanted, and die of whatever dreadful ague took their fancy. But freedom, of a sort” (191).

10. See what I did there?

11. Again, as always, there are exceptions. I’m speaking in broad generalities.

12. The chain mail bikini worn by such characters as Red Sonja is exemplary of this tendency. I mean … I guess it’s technically armour, but how much protection does it actually offer?

13. Roland Barthes boils down mythology to the simple assertion that “myth is a type of speech” [his italics] (107). Which is at once painfully obvious—what else is a spoken/verbal/written system if not speech?—and counter-intuitive, insofar as our intuitive understanding of “mythology” defaults to ancient myth and its associated symbolic and epic qualities. (“Mythology” in this respect becomes something mythological.) What Barthes’ basic assertion does is remind us that as a “type” of speech, mythology shares the same structural basis as cliché. Which, perhaps, is why he felt the need to italicize the assertion.

14. Like Small Gods, Witches Abroad will almost certainly necessitate a two-parter. Given that the former immediately follows the latter in the order of Discworld novels, that will be a long time spent dwelling (quite gleefully, I predict) on those two key properties.

15. I am, to be perfectly candid, embroidering somewhat on what is essentially a single sentence that implies this conceit within his larger argument. What Jameson essentially asserts is that generic form comprises an ideological expression that persists independently of the originating artwork(s). I’m not going to inflict Jameson’s, uh, idiosyncratic prose on my casual readers, but for the nerds who read the footnotes, here you go: “genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right.” He goes on to say, “The ideology of the form itself, thus sedimented, persists in the later, more complex structure as a generic message which coexists—either as a contradiction or, on the other hand, as a mediatory or harmonizing mechanism—with elements from later stages” (141).

Got all that? What I take (in part) from the foregoing, and the chapter of The Political Unconscious in which it appears, is that generic repetition becomes a signifier of the originating text(s), evoking, say, the idea of Romanticism through the reiteration of its tropes and conventions while entirely eliding or domesticating the revolutionary spirit of a Blake or Keats. This dynamic is perhaps most perfectly expressed in T.S. Eliot’s famous characterization of Alfred, Lord Tennyson as “the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist" (295), which encapsulates Tennyson’s brilliant recapitulation of Romantic sensibilities, which coexists his own indelibly late imperial capture within Victorian culture. Similarly, one can point to the variety of ways in which J.R.R. Tolkien articulates a number of Romantic preoccupations—especially as regards nature and his antipathy to modernity’s depredations—while simultaneously articulating a profoundly religiously conservative worldview.

This last seeming contradiction within Tolkien’s work has been a nagging thought bordering on obsession since the essay title “Romantic Sediments” occurred to me.