tarot person on astrology podcast, expressing that of course you should run tarot like a business and charge charge charge. Doesn’t matter if you have a spiritual gift. Would you go to a doctor and expect them to consult with you for free??? We Don’t Do That!
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one time I was talking to a social justice type person – the type you will probably develop a picture of as you read on – about the witches in the Discworld books and how I thought they were a very clear example of a reactionary element being treated sympathetically by Pratchett — many such, in fact, but he worked his way into the hearts of a lot of floofy liberals qwho never noticed this.
The witches are clearly three types of old world confidence tricksters and predators on the agrarian poor, and there is nothing subtle about them – Nanny Ogg is a bullshitter who oppresses the hell out of her daughters-in-law and manipulates her family constantly, Granny Weatherwax is a sociopathic broker and sin eater, and Magrat is married to the local boss.
Pratchett makes you sympathise with these people by making their flattering self-images integral to the texture of the whole story, and works on making people who “don’t go along with the story” stand out — either within the story by being foreigners, or naughty peasants who break the moral code defined by the witches.
Pratchett was not stupid and he knew this, even if the fluffier fans didn’t realise. The metatextual theme of “the characters believe the world is fundamentally made out of stories, and they are right because they are literally characters in a story which Pratchett is writing” is in every novel. He keeps probing the theme of “how do I show what Granny Weatherwax’s self-justification looks like” which is difficult for this reason: The reason Weatherwax is right is simply because Pratchett has started with the premise she is, and because the Discworld works on the basis that the basic reality is the story, she must be. In-story there is nothing deeper to it, but because the witches are basically defined as being characters who do not believe in the basic reality of stories – i.e. the root of existence – they are fundamentally nihilist characters and are therefore forced onto a project of transvaluation. One should therefore expect to find examples of master morality leavened eith an old but “dangerous fascination” at work.
Which is also to say, in reality, they are puppets that Pratchett was using to do his own little work of transvaluation in a real world that he, too, clearly believed was beyond good and evil. Pratchett really got some rather nasty stuff out under a fluffy guise, and I think they will never be able to cancel him for it.
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tarot reader wondering why people were telling her tarot had scammy vibes, because she was always Professional about it – talks about how when giving readings she just wears a normal professional class woman costume with one (1) mystical scarf as her concession to Boffo. she goes to New York, discovers “neon light” fortune tellers. immediate disgust reaction – disgust deepens when she finds out the people there are standing outside making mystical passes, hawking for trade, charging hundreds of dollars for remedies. Vulgar! No wonder people think tarot has a scammy vibe! It’s Not Ethical. But here we have this professional organisation and isn’t it nice and clean?
[…interlocutor redacted…]
I agree that the text is very clear about this — Pratchettian heroes consistently take this view of “I do not believe in doing Good, just in being Right, and also I am Right”. Well, if they say so they must be! I am getting a good mark at understanding Pratchett by saying I can understand Pratchett.
I think I have also failed to put my point across to you, which is that there is much to say that goes beyond a simple reading of the text, and some fun can be derived by doing so:
Here’s Colin Wilson on The Right Man, on people who are Right, of not Good:
The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.
Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length,…
'the violent man' or the 'Right Man' [...] is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem -- to feel he is a 'somebody'. He is obsessed by the question of 'losing face', so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong."Wilson multiplies examples in his book to show that being a Right Man is not the right way to live — it makes tyrants who are useful most for cancelling out other Right Men. it makes criminals who just hurt people. Families that do not have Right Men in them are happier. There is no law of physics or society that says you have to have Right Men.
Another ruder name for Right Men is that they believe they are the Protagonist of Reality. In the real world, they are very wrong about this because there is no physical basis for “being a protagonist”, and they cause unjustifiable suffering by living as though they are.
But in the Discworld, where physics is based on “narrativium” — an in-world alchemisation of the out-world fact that “Everything here is imaginary, and Pratchett is making this up”, not only is ‘protagonist” a fundamental physical property, but it is one that a character can be right about. Granny Weatherwax believes she is the protagonist of reality and, well, she is. She is right.
Here’s the funny part: not only is she right, but she is Right. You can easily write, and postmodernist writers have mined this seam to exhaustion, a story about a character who knows she is the protagonist, but who has many different attitudes towards this — curiosity, playfulness, absurdity, wish-fulfillment, religious yearning… Granny Weatherwax, though is Right. She is Right in the way that the familiar Right Man is right. She has a self-righteous sense of her own authority, is right about what other people need to do with their lives, and has a self-concept of Being A Person Who Does The Right Thing.
This is why Pratchett is clever. It’s not an accident, and he develops the character of Granny Weatherwax with this coincidence of right and Right in mind. He takes the fantasy of every Right Man and asks “well, what if he is right as well as Right? What would the world have to be like to be like that?”. Disc-shaped.
Here’s the next level of fun: Granny Weatherwax’s self-righteousness is such that she is an arch-blasphemer. She famously knows gods exist, but doesn’t believe in them because it “would encourage them” (to what?). She has not to believe in them, despite the evidence of her senses, to keep up the primacy of herself as being a Right Witch, because she cannot allow Good and Evil to exist. But she is a created being, created by a divine entity in a celestial realm above her, and the entity’s name is Pratchett. This has two consequences: first, Granny Weatherwax is right not to believe in the gods as being the source of Good and Evil, because they really are very secondary characters. Secondly, one common understanding of the Good is doing that which the divine creator wants you to do, and Granny Weatherwax cannot do anything else but what the divine creator wants, because she is a fictional character entirely composed of letters typed by Pratchett. From the Discworld point of view, Granny Weatherwax is Good, and she is wrong about this.
The above part is a little pedantic, but I justify it by adding another fun point that I haven’t used yet — Granny Watherwax is a magician and the whole point of magic is to attain knowledge of the Higher Realms. Granny Weatherwax, we may assume, since she is the most accomplished witch on the Disc, an ipsissima, (who turned down a mystical union with someone who turned out to become the most accomplished wizard on the Disc) knows everything there is that it is possible for a Disc magician to know, and so she must have some understanding of her true nature as a fictional entity. This doesn’t make sense, but this is normal for magic.
I also withheld something in the previous – the whole point of magic is not just to attain knowledge of higher realms, but also to gain power over them. If Granny Weatherwax is a supreme magician then she is not only aware that she is a fictional entity in a world of real entities, but that she can fuck around with the real entities.
This is not as crazy as it sounds once you remember that the Higher Realms are not full of devas and Great White Brothers, but just people who write and read fantasy novels. Granny Weatherwax is a character created by Terry Pratchett, primarily I would say to fuck with himself and play with the idea of “someone who is Right and right”, but also to fuck with other people, who now have Ipsissima Weatherwax fucking around with them and changing the way they see the world she lives in.
I repeat my claim that Pratchett was doing a lot more than his public image as a harmless scribbler would suggest.
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I forgot to mention Vimes because lacking any magic proficiency as he does, he is a more simple kind of thug, and as we are living in this Year of Our Floyd 2, the problems with “He’s a working class cop…. who doesn’t believe in good and evil… just doing what he thinks is Right… and knows what he Has To Do… and is never passed up for promotion…” are obvious even for liberals, but it’s easier to miss with the witches.
The theme of the Vimes storyline is “Certain character flaws leave you open to being easily groomed and manipulated by the powers that be”. Vetinari knows that Vimes has a very grand and flattering idea of himself. At every stage in his social advancement from thug to commander-in-chief, he bitches and moans that he is going unwillingly, and that each step is an offense against what is Right, but he very clearly relishes every promotion once he gets it, and finds that it’s Right for him to occupy this higher level of authority after all. He could very easily say “no”, but never does- the implication being that the street arab at the beginning had within him the character of a duke all along, and all it took was someone to recognise hia inner worth and draw it out for him. Not only does he have a flattering self image, but he is practically a Disney princess. You know, I hope, what happens to Disney princesses in real life.
[…interlocutor redacted…]
I was careful to say that Vimes has a “grand and flattering” self-image, and that at each stage in his promotion he rises to the occasion of being Right. I do not say he has a “good self-image”. it is slightly galling to be accused of not having read or not understanding the books by people who show evidence of not even having read or understood my posts.
Vimes “knows he is bad” is not quite right. Vimes not actually that bad a man. As Pratchett says, “Vimes is fundamentally a person”. At his worst, he was a cynical self-pitying drunk with a bad temper that came out occasionally, and not unjustifiably. He has a “grand and flattering” self-image, but he is too perceptive to be able to decieve himself he is perfect, and this is the motor for the inner conflict. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, everyone notices things that should not be mentioned, everyone notices their flaws and failings, and in everyone it invokes a little pain, but for someone with a “grand and flattering” self-image, the pain is tremendous.
“I have done that’, says my memory. I cannot have done that—says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally—memory yields.Vimes is aware of this Nietzschian maxim and sees it at work at every level from petty criminals he arrests (Incidentally, there are very few instances of normal police brutality being shown in the Watch books, do you notice? Everywhere in the world, it’s quite usual for police to jump on suspects and beat them black and blue but not in Ankh-Morpork, and then mostly by the Other Lot) to his ducal peers. He sees it in himself and does not like it. What is his solution? Fortunately, as well as being, I repeat myself, “grandiose and flattering”, his self-concept is also about “being Right” which he calls “justice”. What he does is recruit his tremendous pride to the service of memory, and creates talismans like the whiskey bottle in the drawer.
I keep repeating “flattering” as one of a pair because this is shown in another talisman he has created. He has created a “beast”, one might say a “Great Beast” that is situated within him, that is capable, in fantasy, of doing “such things – what they are yet, he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the Disc”. I do not think Vimes really has it in him any more than any man of his capacity to commit great horrors. I think he is flattering himself by extrapolating from the evidence of his senses that he has a deep and unusual capacity within himself for great evil.
Thud! and Snuff I think are bad books and part of their badness is how they reify this grandiose self-image. They are a little comical in their orientalism even. A White-coded aristocrat, on mission to solve an ancient crime/war/political crisis among East-coded dwarves and trolls, whose native holy men impart a secret to him – you are not delusional, you are not spinning tales about yourself. No, padawan, this Beast within you is real, and it is an Ancient Terror!!! Why, yes, we are trying to refound the basis of our respective religions on an irenic basis to fit the new liberal Ankh-Morpork world order, and yes it seems you, the representative of the city at the head of that new world order now have a deeply personal stake in the whole thing! And “cynical” Vimes swallows it whole. Thus the Orient seduces the Occidental cynic, who becomes as a trusting child among such wise children.
At the very beginning of Guards! Guards!, Vimes’ groomability is made clear in the text. I will quote it at length and perhaps this will help me beat the duck allegations:
He always felt uneasy in the presence of Lupine Wonse. Come to that, he felt uneasy in the presence of Lord Vetinari—but that was different, that was down to breeding. And ordinary fear, of course. Whereas he’d known Wonse since their childhood in the Shades. The boy had shown promise even then. He was never a gang leader. Never a gang leader. Hadn’t got the strength or stamina for that. And, after all, what was the point in being the gang leader? Behind every gang leader were a couple of lieutenants bucking for promotion. Being a gang leader is not a job with long-term prospects. But in every gang there is a pale youth who’s allowed to stay because he’s the one who comes up with all the clever ideas, usually to do with old women and unlocked shops; this was Wonse’s natural place in the order of things.
Vimes had been one of the middle rankers, the falsetto equivalent of a yes-man. He remembered Wonse as a skinny little kid, always tagging along behind in hand-me-down pants with the kind of odd skipping run he’d invented to keep up with the bigger boys, and forever coming up with fresh ideas to stop them idly ganging up on him, which was the usual recreation if nothing more interesting presented itself. It was superb training for the rigors of adulthood, and Wonse became good at it.
Yes, they’d both started in the gutter. But Wonse had worked his way up whereas, as he himself would be the first to admit, Vimes had merely worked his way along. Every time he seemed to be getting anywhere he spoke his mind, or said the wrong thing. Usually both at once.
That was what made him uncomfortable around Wonse. It was the ticking of the bright clockwork of ambition.Vimes and Wonse were in the same gang all along – they both graduated from the Cockbill Street gang to the Ankh-Morpork civil service. We don’t know who groomed Wonse, but we do know who groomed Vimes: Vimes was groomed into the civil service by a distinguished aristocrat with military and intellligence connections under cover. As in many cases, the aristocrat was, in fact, a family relation of Vimes, and the only unusual thing about this nepotism is that that relation was one of identity. In genealogical jargon, that is called “Ego”, by the way.
What happens to Wonse is the plot of the whole book, but briefly, Wonse has a “grand and flattering” image of himself as a power broker who… summons a Beast. How interesting! It is in the aftermath of this beast-summoning incident, and the subsequent loss of Wonse that the Palace first notices the capacity of Vimes, and he begins the “upward” phase of his career. Vimes is clearly a superior model of Wonse from the same factory – he is biddable, and has a very similar gangster “grand and flattering” ego that can be played, but unlike Wonse, Vimes can be trusted to act basically pro-socially because he thinks that being a little rude to his betters and having a substance abuse problem (rather than eg. attempting to overthrow the government with magic) satisfies his dark dream of “proving a villain”.
Wonse’s problem was trying to summon a beast to physical appearance rather than keeping it inside his head once evoked. This is why I don’t like Thud! – Vimes is corrupted by the oriental equivalent of the occultists in Guards! Guards! into externalising the beast, which weakens his character (again in a non-moral sense, but here meaning “having an aesthetically coherent view of a psyche”) and makes him a half-Wonse, but maybe you could be dialectical with it if you think Pratchett’s late books are worth rescuing.
The Disney Princess comparison was very bad and I regret making it, but perhaps you will like the “Victorian Occultist Civil Servant” better?