All the usual preoccupations of Priest on display: surveillance, obsessive behaviour, doppelgangers. But this is an exquisite novella.What happens when the Gaze is turned back on you?
I read about the gaze in my last semester during pursuing a Masters degree in English. It's not as if I hadn't known about it before; it's just that knowing about something and understanding all the little intricate details that surround its logistics is quite another. Personally, I've been shy all my life. Questions concerning gazes and voyeurism were understated but present, throughout my childhood, existing in the borderlands between maturity and adolescent curiosity. The thrill, and the guilt associated with the Gaze is not something that adolescents need to be told of, unless your parents have been unusually open with you about these things,
In Priest's novella, the gaze starts off as a sexual one, but is soon revealed to be something more. One can sense a love for isolation in the protagonist, a love that finds an empathetic resonance in the natives that he is studying. Slowly, the need to study them himself takes over, and the study becomes a microcosm of everything around him.
We are in a sense veering close to that age old SF motif of the folly of finding oneself in everything you choose to study. Heidegger had some interesting things to say about the nature of technology, not the least of which is how it helps him attain a false sense of grandeur by considering himself in control, and by consequence, separate. Our protagonist suffers from that same folly. He mistakes control for omniscience.
The almost Derridean inversion that takes place by the end of the story cannot simply be reduced to a pat explanation of 'the watcher becomes the watched'. On the contrary, there is little in the story to suggest that what does happen by the end is not entirely due to the protagonist's own volition. The supreme fact that story seems to be suggesting is that Reason seems unable to extract itself from its own framework even when it cannot explain anything with any amount of certitude. If the rational man gives in to the gaze of the other, he has it in himself to rationalize even that surrender, thus completely missing the point.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Read in: The Dream Archipelago
Bears comparison to: Snow, by John Crowley, and perhaps, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, by Ted Chiang, (in the sense of gauging man's relationship with technology that aids and accentuates, rather than the kind that helps transcend)
I read about the gaze in my last semester during pursuing a Masters degree in English. It's not as if I hadn't known about it before; it's just that knowing about something and understanding all the little intricate details that surround its logistics is quite another. Personally, I've been shy all my life. Questions concerning gazes and voyeurism were understated but present, throughout my childhood, existing in the borderlands between maturity and adolescent curiosity. The thrill, and the guilt associated with the Gaze is not something that adolescents need to be told of, unless your parents have been unusually open with you about these things,
In Priest's novella, the gaze starts off as a sexual one, but is soon revealed to be something more. One can sense a love for isolation in the protagonist, a love that finds an empathetic resonance in the natives that he is studying. Slowly, the need to study them himself takes over, and the study becomes a microcosm of everything around him.
We are in a sense veering close to that age old SF motif of the folly of finding oneself in everything you choose to study. Heidegger had some interesting things to say about the nature of technology, not the least of which is how it helps him attain a false sense of grandeur by considering himself in control, and by consequence, separate. Our protagonist suffers from that same folly. He mistakes control for omniscience.
The almost Derridean inversion that takes place by the end of the story cannot simply be reduced to a pat explanation of 'the watcher becomes the watched'. On the contrary, there is little in the story to suggest that what does happen by the end is not entirely due to the protagonist's own volition. The supreme fact that story seems to be suggesting is that Reason seems unable to extract itself from its own framework even when it cannot explain anything with any amount of certitude. If the rational man gives in to the gaze of the other, he has it in himself to rationalize even that surrender, thus completely missing the point.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Read in: The Dream Archipelago
Bears comparison to: Snow, by John Crowley, and perhaps, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, by Ted Chiang, (in the sense of gauging man's relationship with technology that aids and accentuates, rather than the kind that helps transcend)
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