Glamour Lessons (5)

Now, of course, looking back on what I’ve written about Flesh and Stone Yard Devotional, I wonder if perhaps I’m the one bamboozled by a glamour. Maybe the worries I’ve expressed so far are really nothing more than old worries in new garb. Maybe, fundamentally, these worries aren’t so much about the discursive effects of LLMs, but rather about what LLMs are fuelled by: received ideas.

What I’m noting, I suppose, is an abrogation of thought, or a short-circuiting of thought processes, and a corresponding habit of defaulting to readymade ways of thinking. It’s there, it’s perceptible, in a reluctance to think from the ground up when populating the discourse with responses to new literature, and when populating literature with new articulations of experience. There’s a readiness to cede the terms of engagement to the culture at large, rather than contesting or circumventing them: a readiness, that is, to take so much as given and not to break with it, but to say “Yes” to it and to write towards it.

This readiness is ultimately what I see in Stone Yard Devotional, because the novel offers a character who embodies an alternative to the given and then traduces her. She is, at best, an object of distant regard, occasional disgust, frequent irritation, and her function is to flatter the fantasies of withdrawal that Stone Yard Devotional trades on. Indeed, the novel is one that wants more of the given, less of the daunting responsibility that comes with breaking away from it: after all, the narrator seeks a home within discursive structures that pantomime the expression of individual consciences, and within behavioural structures that absolve her of having to think about what to do and how to be.

Where is the substance of contemplation in a novel whose tone and tenor amount to a contemplative garb? I don’t know; I can’t see it. I am Glámr from Grettir’s saga. I’m perceptive of the veil—and the costumed performance it entails—but frustrated by the sense that what lies beneath it is bodiless, without weight or gravity: pure confirmation of the priors the culture has fed into it. If I’m worried, then, I’m not so worried that the words I read aren’t of human origin, not even in the age of the LLM. I’m worried, rather, of a state of affairs in which literary words, even when written by real people, only cast a veneer of humanity over a mechanistic style of thinking that insinuates itself into otherwise human arts.

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