But if there's one thing I've been doing, it's getting deeper and deeper into Look to Windward; the details are irrelevant for now, but delving into it, it struck me that I should really try to figure out why that particular novel really gets to me in the way that it does. And, having thought about it for a couple of weeks now, one other novel keeps popping into my head as some kind of comparison or explanation or whatever you want to call it, and it's quite unexpected, at least to me.
That novel is Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.
See, Windward is probably my favourite Banks novel, as far as one can have a favourite Banks novel overall, and out of that my favourite passage is probably that which I quoted in the last entry (you know, the No Still part, the one I chose for a title to this one?). But what really hooks me there is something I'm tempted to call a Yossarian mentality.
It's hard to really explain what I mean by this. Probably the best example is towards the end of Catch-22:
"From now on, I'm thinking only of me."
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."
"Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"
What I'm trying to get at here is a common refusal to think... ordinarily? Well, it's not only that. At its core, it's an obstinate refusal to fit into some sort of standard narrative; it's an almost masochistic desire to face the consequences of not slipping into a business-as-usual, routine mode of thinking. When the Lasting Damage records all the people it kills on those three Orbitals - "I didn't want them to be faceless, I didn't want to be able to forget" - it's pulling kind of a Yossarian, as well as a reverse-Yossarian, at the same time. The refusal is key.
If a "Yossarian" were to be defined as anything, really, I think it would be the insisting on holding a view or thought that is at the same time perfectly reasonable and yet completely untenable. Now, it could be untenable just by not fitting in with any sort of outside structure upon which one is entirely dependent, or it could be untenable through the wear and tear it inflicts on the mind itself; this is certainly a distinction, but not one that I find more interesting than the connection itself.
Of course, as far as Banks's fiction in general and his Culture novels in particular goes, this isn't really that surprising; I mean, the Culture in itself represents a refusal to acquiesce to anything less than the most perfect utopia possible, no matter how boring that idea might sound or how unfashionable it might seem, contrasted with this dystopian universe or the other.
In fact, it's probably a large part of the reason you can get away with writing stories about Minds "close to gods, and on the far side" and still get some drama in there.
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