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Speculative historical fiction is cool because it enlivens the setting so much...gives it a depth and richness and believability. I'm basically in parity with your posts Vaarna, I've been away from home for a few days so haven't been reading, about half way through the big book.
I love the pentagram map sequence, and of course the 'flashes' of foresight into the future he has as his work 'matures'. Creepy, interesting stuff. I like how Moore touches on the mystical, but doesn't transgress over belief systems or explain how these things are happening...he leaves it to the reader. The opposing hemispheres of the brain, the old gods of the sun and moon, and other dipoles are a path leading towards something unexplainable.
It's also cool how you can cheer on the villain of the story because by identifying with him, we too want to see and experience the truth he's seeing...experience the culmination of his efforts. Guilty pleasure reading...but well researched, and well written.
How exactly can you identify with a madman like Gull?
And as for his visions, that's where the pamphlet comes in: Going by the supposition that time is not linear but only our perceptions of it. The idea is that as Gull's sanity momentarily erodes completely at the height of his murder phase, so too does his normal perception of time and space, which is how he has visions of the past and future as he is seeing them at once like they are without normal perception.
I guess it speaks to our relationship with the medium that, at least as digital images, I got through it without too much horror. It is, after all, difficult to truly recoil from the violence which is several dimensions away from anything you've ever seen in life.
So I guess the whole inauguration of the new century and new times comes through here, though I wouldn't mind anyone spelling out for me what it is about Gull's actions or being that is actually seen as epochal.
As for violence, a lot of people do react more strongly to it. Words can frighten people, and images often have a much more vivid effect on them. It would be more accurate to say that posters here are more used to the concept of graphic violence than most people.
That's rather vague, however. Tigranes's question was actually very interesting for me: I picked up on the earlier jab at JtP leading society forward, but I took it on the word of the author rather than try and elucidate what exactly they're proposing.
To claim that he would be an important catalyst towards accelerating societal change means there's some kind of observed factual something which is not made immediately clear. Given that I know very little on the topic (and have devoted less than fantastic efforts towards broadening my understanding), what springs to mind is that the idea of a man from the highest echelons of society resorting to this kind of brutality - perhaps then only thought possible of some savage - had some sort of shattering impact on the perception of class. Were such the case, however, there'd be some observable ripples that would allow us to draw this conclusion. Maybe they're presented later, or maybe they appear in the appended notes?
Even if I'm way off on the particulars of the answer there should be some further insight into this.
That's rather vague, however. Tigranes's question was actually very interesting for me: I picked up on the earlier jab at JtP leading society forward, but I took it on the word of the author rather than try and elucidate what exactly they're proposing.
To claim that he would be an important catalyst towards accelerating societal change means there's some kind of observed factual something which is not made immediately clear. Given that I know very little on the topic (and have devoted less than fantastic efforts towards broadening my understanding), what springs to mind is that the idea of a man from the highest echelons of society resorting to this kind of brutality - perhaps then only thought possible of some savage - had some sort of shattering impact on the perception of class. Were such the case, however, there'd be some observable ripples that would allow us to draw this conclusion. Maybe they're presented later, or maybe they appear in the appended notes?
Even if I'm way off on the particulars of the answer there should be some further insight into this.
Basically, the brutality of the murders and the inability of the Metropolitan Police to find the killer led to an unprecedented media frenzy, which also brought widespread exposure to the social issues in East End through the stories run on the kind of life the victims and people like them were leading (meaning no-way-out poverty in horrible overcrowded conditions). Most people didn't know how things were in the slums until 1888. Following the murders, reforms and reconstruction were done on a large scale, and you could say the squalid position of the lower classes in the age of industrialization ended there. Most of the 19th century Whitechapel was condemned or renovated after investigation into conditions there. Some Briton can probably tell more about this subject.
The whole idea of Jack the Ripper changing the course of British society isn't a new one either, it goes way back to 1888, a quote from a letter to a newspaper by George Bernard Shaw:
Now all is changed. Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism.
Basically, the brutality of the murders and the inability of the Metropolitan Police to find the killer led to an unprecedented media frenzy, which also brought widespread exposure to the social issues in East End through the stories run on the kind of life the victims and people like them were leading (meaning no-way-out poverty in horrible overcrowded conditions). Most people didn't know how things were in the slums until 1888. Following the murders, reforms and reconstruction were done on a large scale, and you could say the squalid position of the lower classes in the age of industrialization ended there. Most of the 19th century Whitechapel was condemned or renovated after investigation into conditions there. Some Briton can probably tell more about this subject.
Well, I'd argue it's debatable. Systematic demolition of the slums and rookeries across London, and in Whitechapel itself, had been underway for years before the Ripper came along. There were already plenty of reformers working to combat the East End's problems, most famously the Salvation Army, and plenty of journalists writing exposes about the horrendous living conditions. Dickens' novels about social concerns in those parts of the city, obviously, had been incredibly popular for decades. Like Shaw said, the murders seem to have been one theatrical event that helped to form a thrilling penny-dreadful narrative and grip the imagination of the populace, almost mythologising the poverty and depravity of the area, speeding up an ongoing but essentially dull reformative process that already had a lot of decent people, money, and weight behind it.
the idea of a man from the highest echelons of society resorting to this kind of brutality - perhaps then only thought possible of some savage
I think this was perhaps even more important, looking back, a sort of gradual re-appraisal of the depths of man and the hypocrisies of 'civilisation' and imperial industrial Britain as a light set against the darkness (I mean, the Ripper pretty much invented the modern concept of the pathological sexually-driven serial killer, complete with the notions of 1) sending taunting notes to the authorities and 2) building to a climax of violence as if the individual deaths are just stages of some kind of larger effort. He's informed fictional killers in every shite thriller and real-life lunatic murderers alike). While, obviously,
William Gull wasn't Jack the fucking Ripper
there was definitely, at first, a recorded, repeated, refusal to believe that any properly civilised Englishman could be committing the crimes, a statement that Moore puts in the mouth of Abberline when he goes to visit the American troupe. This belief caused a swelling of violent anti-Semitic feeling against the local East-European immigrant population and accusations against the likes of poor old Jack Pizer, a sort of revival of Little St Hugh of Lincoln blood libel, until the stories began to spread that the murderer must have been a trained surgeon, and gradually suspects became more and more respectable and entrenched in English society; Montague Druitt, eventually Sickert and Gull.
Still, I'm not sure Moore's interested in all of that grounded societal stuff, actual quantifiable changes, as much as the symbolic power of the Ripper and the psychogeography of London, which shows itself most obviously in the overlap with the work of his longtime pal Iain Sinclair. Like the Hawksmoor churches, like all the Aleister Crowley stuff Moore is fascinated by, the murders are presented as something between a scientific formula and an occult ritual, a personal act that sends out psychic ripples across not just the city or Western society, but into time itself, prefiguring (what he sees as) the horrors of the 20th century, symbolically giving birth to them, but also freezing the Victorian East End in time. As Gull tells the corpse of Mary Kelly, the Ripper and his victims will be immortalised, transcending their own sorry, squalidly political motives; Whitechapel itself, no matter how radically it evolves into just another part of a technologically-advanced and multicultural city, will always be imbued with the power of those murders, will always be defined by night, and fog, and prostitutes, and knives, in the collective imagination of the entire world.
Still, I'm not sure Moore's interested in all of that grounded societal stuff, actual quantifiable changes, as much as the symbolic power of the Ripper and the psychogeography of London, which shows itself most obviously in the overlap with the work of his longtime pal Iain Sinclair. Like the Hawksmoor churches, like all the Aleister Crowley stuff Moore is fascinated by, the murders are presented as something between a scientific formula and an occult ritual, a personal act that sends out psychic ripples across not just the city or Western society, but into time itself, prefiguring (what he sees as) the horrors of the 20th century, symbolically giving birth to them, but also freezing the Victorian East End in time. As Gull tells the corpse of Mary Kelly, the Ripper and his victims will be immortalised, transcending their own sorry, squalidly political motives; Whitechapel itself, no matter how radically it evolves into just another part of a technologically-advanced and multicultural city, will always be imbued with the power of those murders, will always be defined by night, and fog, and prostitutes, and knives, in the collective imagination of the entire world.
We'll have more on Moore's views regarding the subject at the end of the LP when I post Dance Of The Gull-catchers, AKA The Inane History Of Ripperology And The Inanity Of Whudunit.
Nice. Couple of zingers there in the appendix from the author, and I like the comment about the 'excess' around the murder. Which, of course, is the entire content of the comic, not only for the paupers' death but Gull's himself.
I look at the stories the Victorian age produced about itself - JTR, Holmes, Dickens, etc - and wonder what kind of centennial our times would receive. Though we are giving the 90's its own memorial already.
