The Turning of The Wheel: Or, An Amateur's Contemplation Of The Pulp Revolution

revolution
rɛvəˈluːʃ(ə)n
noun

1. a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system.
"the country has had a socialist revolution"
synonyms: rebellion, revolt, insurrection, mutiny, uprising, riot, rioting, rising, insurgence, insurgency, coup, overthrow, seizure of power, regime change

2. an instance of revolving.
"one revolution a second"

Those who were kind enough to read my last article will know that I am in absolutely no position to say anything at all about the Pulp Revolution. I am a newcomer, and have very little history with the movement - if anything, everyone has been incredibly patient and accommodating to me.

I hope I will be allowed, then, to presume a little more with this, my two cents' worth.

Recently, @cheah and our very own Jesse Lucas posted two excellent articles in response to a certain chain of comments on the blog of the good Jeffro Johnson. This incident, deemed Groffingate by Mr. Lucas himself, essentially centered around the accusations of the eponymous Groffin, who claimed, among other things, that the Pulp Revolution co-opted the legacy of the literary giants of the past - Howard, Tolkien, Burroughs, Anderson, Lewis - without equalling their written accomplishments. That for all our talk of grandeur and glitz, we were more akin to children playing in their grandfathers' suits and calling it business.

That we, the PulpRev, nay, the entire literary movement whose stated aim is to counteract the counterculture, roll in the graves of the long-dead greats and call it resurrection.

I will not press the matter, nor will I dispute it. There are more informed minds than mine on this subject, and at any rate, what I say has little value. I have added absolutely nothing to the canon, after all, save a single novella to a single anthology; and, might I add, pre-accepted to boot. If Mr. Groffin wishes to prove his case for insularity, he need do nothing save look at me, a small-time writer who got into a PulpRev anthology simply by declaring his intention to get in.

However, I do not believe that there is anything strictly wrong with insularity as such - at least, not in this context. The Swords of St. Valentine anthology is unpaid. The writers cast their fate on the tides of Steemit. Some were rewarded amply, some were not. Like the ocean, the blockchain is a fickle mistress, and has absolutely no conception of objective quality. The anthology is a song in the shower, not a piano concerto - a whim made real in the heat of the moment, simply to sound out the room.

That said, I do have a question. Several, as a matter of fact.

If, as Mr. Groffin and many other fine souls assume, the Pulp Revolution is a real revolution with a real goal of destroying and replacing a real enemy, the cultural Left, then what exactly is there to condemn about so-called nepotism? Isn't the entire point of a Revolution to change the world with a band of brothers?

And if, as Mr. Groffin and so many other wise minds have said, the Pulp Revolution is in fact a real revolution with a real aim of winning and maintaining a real victory, the revival of entertainment, then when exactly do we know we've won? Who is our leader, the great comrade who will lead us all to our bright tomorrow?

To wit, is the Revolution a Revolution, or not? And if not, could it actually be a Regression?

What is the bright tomorrow?

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This is not an answer by any means. I do not presume to have even the slightest grasp of the situation as it stands at present. However, I would like to humbly submit my opinion: half of the kerfuffle is over a confusion in terms and preconceptions, and the other half of the kerfuffle is over things that were out of anyone's control to begin with.

Take, for example, actual revolutions.

History has shown us that revolutions almost invariably result in two things: unparalleled bloodshed, and a complete bifurcation of society. When the Revolution comes, no man is neutral. He is either an ally or an enemy, a comrade or a traitor, and he will either die in the struggle or immediately after it. Save for the highest echelons of the Committee or Party, there is no place for the individual in the Great Cause. There is only the Cause.

In that sense, the Pulp Revolution is not a revolution. It is plain, to me at least, that a good number of us are not inclined to hurt or harm anything. We're peaceable, law-abiding, very likable folks. We don't go around screaming KILL THE CLASS TRAITOR at every opportunity, or forcing self-denunciations, or even annoying our enemies all that much. Even our mischief is tongue-in-cheek. We have people from the Right and the Left among our number, Christians and Buddhists and atheists, people of every color and almost every creed.

Because we do not chop society in half, we are not, in that sense, a Revolution. The fact that some of our number believe that the chopping was done for us is immaterial.

History has also shown us that revolutions almost always have at least one figurehead. Robespierre, Mao, Lenin, Castro - the shrieking mob may kiss your neck one day and take your head the next, but most of the time it requires a shining light to focus its fury. It requires a despot with an iron will and a vision as clear as the end of days, with enough power to crush his enemies and enough charm to persuade his followers. There may be many leaders, but at the bloody end, there is only one Great Leader.

Because we have no leaders, official or otherwise, we are not, in that sense, a Revolution. The fact that we take our cues from luminaries in both the past and present is irrelevant.

Last but not least, history has shown us that most revolutions destroy, swarm, and then shrivel. The Sexual Revolution wrecked the Christian traditions of family, chastity and marriage, then became in itself a sixty-year prison for its unwanted, aging beneficiaries. The French Revolution destroyed the monarchy and the Catholic Church, tried in vain to do away with the months of the year, then ate itself alive, only for an Emperor to spring from its corpse. The Communist Revolution in its many guises pretended to free the workers, then more or less killed all the workers. If the stated aim of a movement is to undo tradition and graft in the new, it invariably ends up being crushed under the entire rotting tree. It works at cross-purposes to itself.

Because we do not seek to destroy our enemies, we are not, in that sense, a Revolution. We are not rabid. I cannot recall a single serious author, advocate or associate of the PulpRev who has actually stated that we should go out and undermine our ideological foes with campaigns of targeted harrassment, shaming, or even overt interference. The fact that some of us believe that our enemies are destroying themselves in their efforts to destroy us is insignificant.

So, if we are not a Revolution in three senses of the word, if we fail in three senses of the term, what are we?

Why, a Revolution, of course.

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Allow me to explain. A revolution, in one sense, is a violent and hate-filled scramble towards an imaginary future. It is the destruction of the old because it is old, and the enshrinement of the new because it is new. The PulpRev is in no way one of these. We do not destroy the old, we cherish it. And we do not enshrine the new, we question it. We take nothing for granted. Our calls for loot and pillage are completely in jest.

But a revolution, in another equally valid and possibly deeper sense, is a rotation, a turning of the wheel. A wheel does not break when it is turned. You can still see every part of it, whole and entire, and without any of its spokes the thing would fall to pieces. It is in this sense that we speak of the Copernican, the Newtonian, the Einsteinian Revolutions. These scientists did not destroy the stars - rather, they transfigured them. And I think that we would do best to think of the Pulp Revolution in this sense.

Consider the literary history of the past hundred years. A worn-out wheel, etched with stories, spinning forever in an empty room. Our ideological opposites, the SF-SJWs, claim that before a certain point in the unspecified sixties almost everyone was old, white, racist, misogynist, male, and therefore not worth reading - fit, in essence, only to be mocked and replaced by people of other sexes and colors and ages. Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, G.K. Chesterton, Robert A. Heinlein, even Edgar Rice Burroughs - all these corpses must be exhumed and thrown to the mob, to be laughed at and torn apart in the name of enlightenment.

They broke the wheel into a million pieces, threw the spokes away, and call it progress. Naturally, they can see their one piece with perfect clarity. They can rub in in their hands, and pass it from person to person, and tweeze out each and every splinter with the utmost care. But it is no longer, in any possible way, shape, or form, the whole wheel. By venting their anger at the notches and bumps on the well-worn rim, they destroyed the thing entire.

We of the Pulp Revolution want to take each piece of the wheel, consider it, and put it back in its proper place. We do not want to turn the clock back. We do not want to kill or subjugate those who broke the wheel. We simply want the wheel to turn again, and the only way to do that is by reclaiming each piece and restoring it. If this involves carving models or making mock-up bits, so be it.

Mr. Groffin cannot slight us for not being great enough to etch our names on the wheel, because that was never something any of us presumed to be able to do in the first place.

It is not the Modernists we admire, who wanted to make all things new, but rather those who were determined to state old truths in new ways. Chesterton, whose paradoxes turned the mad world on its head, and thus the right way up. Howard, who reaffirmed the elemental power of the natural man, even against all the meaningless universe and all its horrors. Lovecraft, who stood dispassionately in the face of the eldritch maw of time and space.

There are those who seek to destroy the memories of these men, but we will not forget. Anti-Semites, xenophobes, bigots? Names cannot hurt the dead. The only way to destroy a dead man is to reduce him to a name.

We will not do that. We have more than their names.

We have their spirit. We do not have their greatness. We do not have their insight, their eloquence, their unshaking dedication, their fearless drive and vision...

But we have their writings. We have their pieces of the wheel. Their lives and works are in our hearts, as they are in the hearts of so many others. The desire to give to others what they gave to us burns like fire. We have their spirit.

And one day, the Revolution will begin anew.