Historical Materialism & the Baru Cormorant Novels

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. But— (…) when the joining is done there will be a sea for you to swim in.”

Historicist writing may be rigorous, or it may be complete on its own terms, but usually not both. We should consider ourselves very lucky, then, that Seth Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant series is releasing quickly and on-schedule.

On its face, the Baru Cormorant series appears familiar to fantasy veterans. A precocious young prodigy must navigate cruel hierarchies to attain power in a series of abusive institutions and change them for the better, become history’s greatest monster in the attempt, or both. The titular protagonist is quick-thinking and decisive, but so are her older, smarter foes. The books clearly focus on characters more than worldbuilding, so it may sound strange to claim they offer a granular and rigorous theory of history as a force in the world, but that is exactly what they do, and they do it with the whole history of critical theory as a ready-made tool. More specifically, in these essays I will argue that the Baru Cormorant series applies the classically-Marxist method of historical critique to contemporary bourgeois science, but with the whole arsenal of developments and additions in critical theory since the time of Marx & Engels (although it certainly makes use of Marx’s favorite critical tools just when they’re needed, too). Dickinson uses current scientific knowledge on behavioral psychology, game theory, and evolution to establish a self-consistent & granular model of history, integrating multiple levels of social organization from individual behavior, to larger institutions, to the evolution of cultures as totalities. At the same time, he critiques his own model of history, producing a critical theory that evolves in and through the characters’ revolutionary practice.

Historicist literature grows and fills like weeds. Marx’s Capital begins with abstractions, developing by criticism of its prior models but never fully shedding them. The work proceeds by knitting skin and sinew for its ‘characters’, gradually transitioning from an economic analysis to an argument that, sooner or later, the properties that allowed individual capitalists to get rich by the most ruthless competition, that allowed the capitalist mode of production to grow and cover the world with no less ruthlessness, will also produce, incentivise, and allow the revolutionary proletariat to ultimately abolish it. This conclusion, aptly titled ‘the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation,’ is mirrored in the text. As a history of the accumulation of capital, Capital itself progresses by accumulation. Marx furiously forces apparently-obsolete problems and concepts from earlier in the text into new contexts, picking up and integrating data from government commissions, medical science, food prices, immigration records, the rise and fall of certain industries, the statisical aggregation of defeats and victories in class struggle. The reader is meant to experience all the world at once, but never become lost within it: Instead, they ride atop the polluted katamari of history, crashing through obstacle upon obstacle and subordinating all that may some day take place to the unimaginable mass of everything that’s ever happened.

It’s not so strange that Capital was never finished. Spurred on by the massive work involved in volume 1, Marx continued to work on the rest of Capital until the end of his life, incorporating an ever-growing variety of subjects from new developments in soil science, growing anti-colonial movements, ethnological research on native american societies, the historical evolution of banks and banking…

There are similar dynamics and problems in the writing of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin’s books begin with a wide set of rather-archetypal fantasy characters who, left to their own devices, begin to pile up constraints and patterns. One can almost touch the bloody ribbon of natural selection in Martin’s books—not in the sense that a lot of people die (although plenty do), but that the story gracefully, confidently, determines its characters’ behaviors and destinies through the Janus-faced measuring stick of chance and necessity. Martin’s characters develop by symmetry breaking: a certain choice, made at a certain time, cuts down degrees of freedom. They become forced to make choices available from their prior ones, even (and especially) when walking down a line that may result in their demise. In so doing, they definitively change the world of Westeros, constraining other characters, or sometimes giving one an unexpected burst of freedom. Just like Marx, however, this writing process necessarily grew in scope & complexity geometrically. Martin wanted to take a 5-year time skip between A Storm of Swords & A Feast for Crows in order to hasten the plot along, but abandoned this plan upon realizing how much skipped-over character history in the interstitial period would still have to be explained and clarified. It’s now been about a decade since A Dance With Dragons released. (No surprise the post-book seasons of GoT had such a dive in quality here.)

Dickinson shares the breadth & depth of Marx’s and Martin’s vision, but he knows this level of detail is fraught with danger and so takes pains to mitigate it. Even then, the methodological homology is betrayed by the increasing length of each book in the series: Traitor is a flat 400 pages, Monster a respectable 450, but Tyrant is a formidable 650. Nevertheless, all these books are far shorter than any volume of Capital or ASOIAF.

Dickinson’s genius is in how he waits and hides his ambitions away for part of the series. The Traitor Baru Cormorant stands in relation to Monster & Tyrant as the first 6 chapters of Capital do to the rest of the book. This first book is written solely from Baru’s perspective, and the themes and symbolic content appear individualistic at first. Baru herself is from Taranoke, a country recently colonized by Falcrest, the scientific, “progressive” ‘empire of masks’, and because Falcrest seems far too vast and powerful to fight and overthrow, her plan is essentially to gain power through the system and change it from the inside. Baru forms this plan in opposition to her mother, Pinion, who decides to organize insurrection on Taranoke after her husband (one of two, the convention on Taranoke) was disappeared by the colonial power. The bulk of Traitor takes place in Aurdwynn, another colonial periphery, neatly divided into a dozen squabbling duchies the empire unhappily relies upon (for now) to rule. Baru is officially sent there by Falcrest to dictate Aurdwynn’s monetary policy, but (so she eventually learns) secretly to destroy the dukes, break the people of Aurdwynn’s revolutionary spirit, and determine her worth as a prospective candidate for ‘exaltation,’ admission to the ranks of the empire’s power elite.

Over the course of the book, a very rigid behaviorist psychological outlook is seemingly revealed. Specifically, Baru is repeatedly faced with dilemmas where her goals and ability to progress are frustrated… but could potentially overcome this restriction by sacrificing the life of someone close to her. The very first time she faces this dilemma, she chooses to save her relative Lao, a classmate and fellow Taranoki suspected of lesbian inclinations (Falcrest’s punishment for that involving physical mutilation & conversion therapy) by her Falcresti tutor. A few years later, just before she is set to leave for Aurdwynn, this seemingly-forgotten choice is brought back into her world, and she loses the confidance of another friend and potential lover as a result. Baru Cormorant, herself a lesbian and desperate to win, is thrown into the deep waters just as she is punished for solidarity: solidarity with her family, with her country, with someone who shares her sexuality. The next time a similar choice comes up, Baru doesn’t hesitate long to sacrifice them. That sacrifice rewards her, so the next time another such dilemma recurs, she again chooses to sacrifice, and again gains power and prestige as a result. As this behavior is reinforced again and again throughout the book, we begin to see the governmentality of Falcrest take shape.

It is no accident that Baru’s job in Aurdwynn is conducting monetary policy: As William Greider argued in his great book Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, the major function of a central banks is to operate a program of behavior modification on a national scale, rewarding and punishing the American people (consumers, small businesses & industrial capital alike) in turn as they used their money in ways the Fed approved or disapproved. Baru uses this same power to manipulate Aurdwynn, suppressing it from rebellion when the still-doubtless revolutionary failure would leave hope for the future, then, re-enriching the country, giving them the confidence to rebel on a rational, game-theoretic basis (more on that in the next essay!), with herself as the face of the revolution… just to yank their hopes out from under them at their zenith, and implant in Aurdwynn the fear that any future rebellion will also be a trap organized and set by Falcrest.

These elements give us the first major part of Dickinson’s historical system: individual behaviors are the cell-form of history, the basic unit of which larger systems are composed. As such, The Traitor Baru Cormorant represents, in-universe, a sort of revolutionary epiphany in Falcrest’s science of empire: a culture can be trained to obey, in the same ways individuals can. However, this is not the whole picture: it is ideological, and the study of history provides a basis for critique. Such a historicist ideology-critique, however, only develops in book two, The Monster Baru Cormorant. My next essay will detail the nature of this critique.