Enemies

Apropos of nothing, where are those supposed backsliders? We heard a lot about them early on. Do they not exist, or did they just turn out to be incidental to the plot?

Anyway, Chapter 36. That's Enemies done and dusted, I guess. And it only took me, 150 days, give or take. How in the name of Christ do people read this series so quickly?

Oh I stayed up until 5 AM for 4 consecutive nights and am on chapter 43

Anyway, this time around I read "In From the Cold". So, uh, light spoilers for The Spy who Came in From the Cold until after the next 2 h2s or so.

Coming in From the Metaphorical Metaphorical Cold

Naturally, I think of spy movies with that title, so it has both concrete plot implications and suggests a genre-shift. It implies a potentially fatal risk hanging over Val's head (and/or Frankie's) at the end here. A good little meta-cliff-hanger. It's an elegant choice, I think, if for no other reason than for hanging that sword of Damocles going into Untitled Dorley Project. Val works as, in effect, the Liz to Bea's Leamas, so the question is, is that just a feint or is it a doom? For that matter, Frankie faces, let's say an uphill climb, to gain these people's trust. It also sort of works, metaphorically, for Trevor darling, who has been under cover as a false "defector" of sorts, to femininity. That last is a stretch maybe. So the title could be about coming in from the cold for each of them in the manner of the spy-fiction-trope. Or it could refer to The Spy who Came in From the Cold specifically.

Anyway, "Cold." Enemies. It makes sense as a book about coming out (which someone pointed me towards in DMs); the escapes from various prisons, the choices of new prisons, all support that well enough that I can see it once it's been shown to me. "Coming in from the cold" works well as an ambivalent double-entendre here. My mind jumps first to the espionage trope. To come in from the cold is to return to your true allegiance. So that of course describes Trevor if he chooses, and maybe Val, although it's not entirely clear what she'll think of the new Dorley (I mean, everyone ends up loving Dorley in Dorley, to a frustrating extent, so presumably she will too.)

The question of Frankie's "true allegiance" is, too big for me to tackle honestly, so I'll just sketch it. Frankie, we get that sense, originally signed on to Dorley because it was an opportunity for retribution against evil men. So her first allegiance is, by that token, to women. Over the course of her career she began to realize that what she was doing was not retribution in any real sense, but just carrying out violence against women. So in a sense, her returning to Dorley from Stenordale is both nominally a return to her roots and a return to Dorley. Of course, the simpler argument is just, "Frankie betrayed Dorothy." And the simplest argument is, "why are you talking about the title as it applies to Frankie specifically, she's like, third or fourth in line for getting this treatment and it makes more sense for Val or Trevor?"

Coming in from the Metaphorical Literal Cold

But aside from that, there's also the basic metaphorical underpinning of the spy-trope, based in hospitality.

Diana comes in from the cold to find a safe haven in West-Chesterton-by-Sea-ontheBorderfordshire. The parts of this chapter that really worked, for me, were mostly the Diana perspective passages. I think Greaves captures a more overt, more extreme version of the "who's talking?" phenomenon from earlier on with Diana's mental break. And that kind of lens-based identity perspective is different than e.g. mine. And, obviously this is all heightened, it's a fiction about horrific torture, &c. But that process of fully-grown identity reformation isn't something I have to grapple with ever. I've kind of leaned on similarities with disability sometimes, or with the idea that a lot of things have a reversed-polarity for trans vs cis people. But you can determine where the sun is from a shadow, those opposites are chiral. A lot of the drives that the characters of Dorley have, chapter to chapter, are basically universal. For Diana, Future-Will, Beth, even sometimes Christine, they're dealing with a problem that is harder to analogize for me. In a very, very attenuated sense, maybe you could say that each new environment (job, residence, whatever) gives everyone an opportunity to create a new self, but I don't want to bullshit. It's really not the same, I don't think. When I read Hume it's like, "Oh yeah, I guess 'me' is kind of invented." But I didn't have to do that invention self-consciously, and the degree of my own active invention has always gotten to be a continuity.

So I'm eager to see where Diana's path takes her. She's set up fairly well to at least sort of trace Bea's steps, as I see it, and I could see that being a bit of an empathy time-bomb (for Bea, for Diana.) I'm eager to see the reunions of next chapter, and I hope that Frankie ends up okay for some value of the term.

On the downside, I'm a little unnerved of the implication that we're going to be doing a Slow Horsies for the next book. I hope this series doesn't go full spy thriller, to be frank. I like a spy story, and I trust Greaves to write a good one. I just also know that these chapters get up to roughly novel-sized, and I don't know if I have the energy to read The Flashman Papers of Dorley Hall (incidentally, I'm staking out the position that canonically Harry Flashman was basemented. It is written.) I have a worry that my kind of on-again off-again slow-reading is going to boil down to me going "huh?" once a month by the end of Untitled if that's the case.

Transing the Atlantic

Something I note most in this chapter for its conspicuous inclusion is was the increasing American footprint. I'm still imagining that the American reverends are nondenominational Lakewood types (#justice-for-the-compaq-center):

• Southern but not new-South but not old-South either. Neither Dixie nor Tidewater, but certainly of the South.
• Rich.
• Prone to tripping over an airport bathroom stall divider into a GOP congressional intern's sex dungeon.
• Spiritually materialist in the Rinpoche/Johnston senses of the term.

So, you know, a charming lot. I don't have any direct background in nondenominational spaces, because I, uh, don't have any doctrinal respect for them? It's not like AME or the Quakers or the UUs where, yes I have some strong differences of moral opinion but also they have an okay organizational track record. I have known people who were nondenominational and they had dumb bad ideas for stupid people to have. They'd like, act like denominations didn't exist, and also have a rhetorical shrug that defaiths Catholics and Orthodox Christians, all of which is strange. Underpinning the anti-clerical thing is, I assume some actual anti-(insert PIIGS country) sentiment. Real old-timey micro-greens racism. Also, frankly, I have now thought more about their weird little creed in writing this than about 99% of them ever have. So I don't know much about the history of contemporary nondenominational evangelicalism in the UK, but I have a hunch that it was an American export? Could be wrong, I know we imported Methodism (spits semi-ironically) from perfidious Albion. And, reciprocally, the recent backsliding on trans-inclusivity in America, I think has to be taken as a British export.

Old money and new money, together at last.

Anyway, Road Dawgz (bowowow,) that wraps book 3. 75% of the series done, which leaves only the remaining 75% of the series.

I mostly liked this chapter, had a hard time making anything coherent of my thoughts about it. Took forever and a half to get to this.

What Actually Happened, Again?

Honestly checking my notes it's mostly a quiet domestic drama:

• Two gals and a nice young man go on a road trip to scenic St Almsworth.
• Dorothy goes wintering in Aberdeen.
• Diana gets a job by the sea.
• One of the Smyth-Farrow children talks about the weather with a parson.
• A freak gasoline-fight accident leads to the tragic destruction of a heritage building.
• Bea drops a treasured mug!!!

Basically one of the more laid-back episodes of Call the Midwife.

Unfreedoms

I'm sorry, Bethany, but have we given you the run of the place?

I want to talk a little broadly about freedom in Enemies. It's about four or so prison breaks, three completed and one refused. Aaron escapes from Aaron, Bethany doesn't need to escape, Diana breaks out of... at least one prison, and Val prosecutes hers to the extreme. Right there I think that suggests a level of importance when Greaves writes about freedom.

Last chapter Faye described some minor doofuses (I think they were doing a "jerk-off" motion at her?) as pathetic for not knowing how it feels to be free. Jane described the sense of constriction she felt as a, I wanna say soccer hooligan?

Under what conditions is life endurable?

So, why freedom, then? Am I just stuck on it because I'm a little bit of a Civil-War-dad and an American? Postulated. When I asked about the British connotations of the word, people said, in aggregate, something like "Americans * George W Bush * a balance of choice and social safety * the film Braveheart." So I think it's more or less open ground in the context of Dorley, and there are several kinds of freedom-seekers here. I think there's a lot to be had in looking how they fare.

Development as Freedom as Development as

Achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people.

Dorley is a high-modernist project of hubris and compromised motives. It's susceptible to the same legibility traps as any other centralized ontological system. That's my favorite thing about this series except for the people I've met because of reading it. Hypocrisy is the vice that pays tribute to virtue, though, and Dorley does have virtues. It's an institution that aims at least in part towards human development. So, when Sister-conceptions of freedom in the prison-escape dungeon-book recur, it feels like more than just dramatic irony. It's also worth spending some good faith time on why, I think.

Enemies is really frank about masculinity as a prison. And I think that's like, kind of table stakes from an author and for an audience for whom that was true. Like, pretty obviously, a lot of people experience it as a prison more than as a dwelling. But, getting out of the man-dungeon doesn't actually fix everything for anyone in Dorley, and that I find really compelling. The ascent has to be endless because you're still unfree, so it's best to keep breaking out. And there gets to be this question, "can you even be socially free?" that I think the series raises. Bea isn't even free; she's in hoc to aristos and in some kind of twilight struggle. Everyone is at the mercy of situational power dynamics, often with shadowy off-screen figures -- some horribly real, others partially imagined.

And, ah fuck it fine, so Amartya Sen (drink!) talks about five freedoms as constitutive components of human development in Development as Freedom:

• Freedom of participation within, and criticism of, power.
• Freedom of access to social goods (health, schooling, transit, nature, &c.)
• Freedom from corruption / to information
• Freedom to participate economically
• Freedom from abject material poverty

I really truly love this framework. It's for community and economic development but I think it's also a pretty decent measure of justice. These freedoms are all woefully insufficiently provisioned in the world today. I'm not going to inventory the failures, there are too many. But since I'm going to talk about the unfreedoms in Dorley, I don't want it to come across as, like, a comparative policy criticism between Elladine's wild ride and the carcass of the post-war order.

"Freedom" means accessibility. It's not enough for there to be an NHS, it needs to serve your needs in kind and in capacity. It's not enough to have the right to vote, you need a plausible polling place, &c.

Why on Earth am I talking about this? Because Enemies is a book about freedoms and a book about poverty and a book about community development (even if it's a small, secret, community.) Also I get a kickback for every copy of the book that sells, so click my affiliate link please, a fellow's gotta wet his beak. Critically, within Development as Freedom freedoms are the actual and nominal goal of development, and the opposite of poverty.

Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers, perhaps even the majority of people.

Dorley, if for no other reason than its origin as a shadow of the NHS, inverts and twists instead of just pummeling or purely inventing. The aristocracy are still weirdly prone to having their own PMCs and are still obsessed with trans people, but they keep starting forced-transition blacksites instead of/as well as starting moral panics about it. Getting access to HRT happens literally before realizing you might be trans. Getting out of the closet takes years and a subjective, retrograde, preferential graduation from an opaque system. Prisoners of an aristocrat's PMC who live in a literal dungeon are so free that they look down on their vitamin-D blessed counterparts on the outside. Noone touches grass. But even though the Anglosphere is kind of a huge train wreck, it's not literally Hell. And the inverse of a partially fallen world isn't Utopia. It's a different fallen world. So Dorley raises a question. Which unfree world would you live with? And that comparative unfreedom suggests a starting point for understanding which injustices are the really urgent kind and which are the tolerable.

In other cases the unfreedom links closely to the lack of public facilities and social care.

It's great that Dorley fails so differently in this task. Obviously, as a private concern, it's not public. It's well-supported in the text that being public would destroy Dorley, and fine, fair enough. I think it's also clear from Elladine's whole deal that that wouldn't scratch her particular itch, she wants/needs the basement part of it. I think a key insight for me to take away here is that Dorley can't be free until the world is free. It can survive, and maybe even make progress, but it genuinely can't prosper. There are carve-outs and accommodations and ways of getting by, but all of them are invariably marked by a poverty.

Aside from that limitation, the privacy leads to the the institutional incapacity to protect its charges from, e.g. Karen, or from Stenordale for that matter. So the quality of care is compromised, indirectly, by the poverty/unfreedom of the world. And directly by another institutional failure; the failure of participatory power. Karen's hiring was a truly unacceptable decision, and obviously so. The fact that Dorley manages without her after the incident implies that they would have managed without her.

Those poverties reinforce one another just like freedoms do: Will inflicts harm on Maria because of the unfreedom in Will's background. Karen is only even allowed in the building because of the secrecy of the whole affair, and the disastrous moral failure of the people running the place. Bea's unfree past and then material poverty keep her tied to the aristocracy. On the other side of the ledger, Steph's free choice infects Beth with her own freedom. The second years go rollerskating for goodness' sake. Will starts healing. Adam is diverted from whatever grim end towards which he was pointed. Martin does, whatever it is that Martin does with his spare time.

As a device, Steph's the reader's way in, and maybe most trans readers' audience proxy in the story, at least in the first book? And honestly, her gambit, in her case, works out for the best. She relatively quickly gets expanded privileges. She escapes her supposed bloodguiltiness. Critically, she gets the expanded freedom to access medical and social resources, and freedom from abject poverty.

• For Steph, Dorley is a place where good things can and do happen.
• For Beth, Dorley is a place where bad things stop happening.
• For Will, Dorley is a place where the deepest trauma can start to unwind.
• For Martin, Dorley is a place to dry out and start over.
• For Adam, Dorley is a place to be deprogrammed.
• For all of those, it's a place where institutional incapacities and a culture of violence intrude on those new freedoms.

Honestly, as far as the other recruits go, I just don't think they matter much in the spirit of the series right now, or else we'd hear from them. That's kind of dismissive, but I can either read the series or worry about the basement-abuses, and one of those things is just more interesing to me, frankly.

We don't like wasting people.

Contra the pastries, cuddle puddles, and chipper "let's put on a show!" community spirit, this is quite grim underneath things. A prickly little phrase for the development scaffold I liked so much. It comes up now and again in Dorley and it always reminds me of this JP2 fragment talking about Dorothy Day:

[T]he person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.

What is a person, really? Is it just a bias? Hume would say yes, JP2 would say no. I think a large part of Christine's recent progress lies in recognizing her continuity as a person. In integrating her life. Maybe my words are just insufficient to the question. Words from when bodies feasibly changed less and died younger. Is a person the body? Is it the same body as yesterday? What about if it does different things, it has different capabilities, if different identities become feasible?

Since I'm quoting Catholics though, here's another, from Day herself (real nice lady mostly, don't talk to her about birth control):

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

And that sums up many of the women in Dorley's progress. Leaving aside my general sense that the graduation requirements are subtle control nonsense, there is an emergent community spirit, often centered around Christine despite her social misgivings. So there's a deep contradiction planted in Dorley. How can the fundamentally cut-throat attitude congeal into a liberated community ethic?

It can't. The washouts (what was supposed to happen to Diana? Would it have, in the end, been better or worse than what did happen to her?), the willingness, even in extremis, to hire Karen, the fact that this is Bea's and Elladine's project, all spell out the doom.

It did. The younger Sisters care deeply for their charges and work to expand their freedoms. Steph takes a human interest in Beth's recovery and even Will's.

Freedom as Not That, Actually

So. The development and the freedom are inextricable, existent, and impossible. Endlessly ascending indeed.

To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.

All of Dorley is about unfreedom, in a well-trod way. The basement is explicitly not free, you may note. Stenordale? Somehow even less free. Manhood, per Faye, or less-explicitly Jane? Would it shock you that it's unfree? Graduates? Still not free.

Has she been doing everything wrong?

So almost all that's left is submission to something.

But you can escape Stenordale. You can bend Dorley towards your own aims (maybe; maybe the very idea of subversion is just another facet of subjugation?) There are ways to break the systems of unfreedom within Dorley, even if they extract a price in blood. But maybe no way to get a system that's genuinely prosperous, genuinely free. What's striking, going back to the very beginning again, is how Steph throws a wrench in the state-like project of legibility, even in Dorley. How Will does, too, for that matter. Why did it take so long for anyone to ask Will? How Val and Trevor escape inevitable death. How Bea in effect came back from the dead to topple Dorothy in the first place.

Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.

Let's claim, for at least a moment, that the British are a sovereign people (several sovereign peoples?) The Sovereign uses Steph's unwanted pseudo-boyhood to torture Steph at the start of the series, and her bid for freedom lands her in, more or less, a prison. Instead of punishment written on her body, she gets discipline imposed by observation. Dorley allows for community formation and personal development and burgeoning freedom and reform. But all of those are happening in no small part because the fact of a trans woman's existence (Steph's) flummoxed the prior system entirely. For that matter, what undid Old Dorley? Bea and Val. What undoes Stenordale? Val, with a little help from her friends. What undoes Jake? Diana. What endangers Maria? Will, or at least her repression. The difficulty in neatly sorting nascent trans people seems to cause every system-wide-failure in the series so far.

The clearer dichotomy in all this is Stenordale vs Dorley I guess: a literal chaotic aristocratic torture lounge versus a panopticon in which the inmates ultimately motivate themselves. Uh, serving "the roast beef" is inherently a ceremonial torture for a half-assumed guilt, as opposed to the, uh, juridical discipline of Weetabix and oat-milk.

I'll be curious to see Val's ultimate reaction to the nouveau regime.

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced feminization, its authorities of surveillance and Discipline registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality?

Nobody Promised You Perfect Justice

With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help eachother. They need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs. There is, indeed, a strong rationale for recognising the positive role of free and sustainable agency, and even of constructive impatience.

Maybe I'm just seeing a persistent mirage. But I can't shake the idea that Dorley has to go through another renaissance or perish entirely, and that Steph will be at the crux of that.

Di-a-na

Back to Diana for another few words. Her chapter made sense enough to me. I think, in paperback-novel-land (as opposed to serialized-fiction-land), Diana is in her own novel. Escaping from, more or less literally, her self. I'm guessing she's not done working through it.

Digression, but we used to slaughter and butcher roosters, I think I've said that? Anyway, you have to disembowel them and if you do it wrong their testes burst in your hand. It's not a pleasant sensory experience. I mean, the whole thing is unpleasant, but you end up with roosters if you keep a flock, and there are, frankly, excess roosters because they try to murder each other and also you. So you end up in a pickle. Your options are "inhumane captivity", "impromptu informal cockfighting ring" or "I kill and eat roosters now" once you go down that path. None of this is exactly not an endorsement for veganism, but IANAVegan so take it with a grain of salt. Anyhow, back to the testicular ruptures. I think that must be what it's like to gouge someone's eyes out. I, uh, don't keep poultry any longer.

So, that's my closest vector to empathy with Diana. Unpleasant tasks that had to be performed. A grim rebirth for her, a morally questionable chore for me.

I don't think the Diana story fits cleanly in with a lot of the rest of Dorley, tonally, but I don't give a shit, her perspective scenes in this chapter rocked. I just liked them a lot, I'm sure there's way more to say about her but I don't know what it'd be. Her story is like, David Markson levels of weird, and I sincerely hope it doesn't loop back in on Dorley's A-plot.

There might be a man called Declan, and he might be part of her, and he might be her

To have done wrong and repented and then been wronged and to have survived. Such a good confluence of events to write about. I heard, but don't know if it's true or not, that the Iron Man comics were based around the idea that if you could convince hippies to like an arms dealer, you'd really told a story. Diana is almost surely going to end up back at Dorley Hall, but I hope she doesn't. Seeing her make her way in a world learning to take care and take care of could be such a quiet story by the sea. What does that look like for her? How does a person make a life without so many impossible supporting documents in the contemporary world?

Declan was too busy fucking drowning

Interesting that the water motif that was earlier for femininity and self-acceptance has kind of changed timbre.

Rachel Part Three

Jeezum crow I really hope that we're done with Rachel after this.

Her whole deal bothers the ever-loving shit out of me. We have this whole multi-chapter arc of a woman who makes very little sense on the concrete level (to me, which, fine. IANAWOman, IANTrans, IANEnglish, there's gonna be some shots I just miss.) But then, on the allegorical level, she's kind of a stand-in for that oft-cited-by-the-Guardian 15% of cis lesbians who hate trans women? There's something I'm missing, I can't figure it out, and for once I'm pretty sure it's not like "voice training exists" or something purely pig-ignorant like that. It's ok, not everything is going to work for everyone in a series that is 86 gajillion words long. But Rachel's plot-line didn't work for me, and I kind of wish it weren't there.

And if you know that’s going to happen, and if you know there’s no way the police or social services can possibly step in because blah blah legal adult, blah blah no probable cause, blah blah

I mean, they don't know, is the thing that undermines this line of reasoning, of course. I'm fine with Beth believing this stuff; Dorley really did work from her perspective. But Rachel has like, no compelling reason to accept this line of argument from a person who she's still wrongly half-convinced is a violent criminal.

Recidivism

And on that note, I have such a hard time getting into Rachel's head here. I think that part of it is, our first entrypoint to Dorley Hall is the Hall just hijacking an innocent and faking the evidence. So despite the "cracking bad eggs" implicit mandate of the organization, to me it's still "that place that kidnapped Steph for like, no fucking reason and fabricated something to justify it internally and also got really lucky that she wanted to stay." We see Steph have her freedom offered immediately. We see Beth offered freedom eventually. But they're just the cases least likely to actually leave. And here Rachel is like, worried that they're going to start a gang and do knife crimes.

We have a habit here of dropping the world’s craziest bomb on people and… expecting them to field it like an effing baseball.

Pippa, to Rachel. And, yeah, weird expectation to hold. Why do the organization hold it? Why did the organization actually need to disclose to Rachel? What is this character doing here?

I thought that just happened. Hormones, and all.

Hey! Someone in the book didn't know a thing I know from reading the book!! I'm a goddamn sophisticate over here.

I didn't know she was trans. I don't know what you know about how she came to be here, but she found out about what we do here, sort of, and she faked being one of us so we'd help her transition. And she was so bad at it. I was trying so hard to see bad things in her, bad things I had to help her break out of, and they just... weren't there. And, Rachel, I hated what I was doing to her. I had nightmares. I was a mess. I bit my lip to shreds, I'd be half out of my room and realise I hadn't done my hair or my face or even gotten out of my pyjamas. I lost count of all the times I wanted to just open all the locks and let her go.

Again, from Pippa.

The retributive urge attached to the altruistic justification is going to be the absolute ruin of this place. It so clearly undermines the Sisters' lives, and they keep carrying it forward to the next cohort, rinse and repeat. I cannot wait to see how this series ends.

Errant Fragments

Trevor and Val

Being looked at is easy.

I like this little miscommunication between a trans character in Dorley and a cis one. So much of the time when there's a misunderstanding in this series, it's like, "you're a bunch of evil rapists oh wait never mind this is all fine," and it's a nice change of pace to have a little case of theory-of-mind-failure instead. It's Dorley so it's still reversed from how I've experienced this dynamic evolve in my life (recall: I have IRL trans dude friends, some of whom have expressed the horror of being perceived to our mutual friends to their utter shock) but it's just a cute little thing.

Hell Yeah Madonna Rules

Madonna is important to the last 10k of my "very-long-races" playlist. Shit goes hard, "Like a Prayer" obviously included. I believe her music is the thing that got our trio over the line in this chapter.

But... Frances, I am a child. I am a fifty-three-year-old child

Val has been locked up for so long. I'll refrain from commenting too much on the total psychic breakdown I think would be realistic for someone in Val's position because it's boring, and focus on what is a very set up to comment on contemporary Dorley, and on the slipperiness of time for someone who has changed her relationship to the world. Great job there.

What's in a Name?

Sure is a whole lotta of Bible going on in here. Do we have any Judiths lying around yet?

Ruth

The, ah, gleaning lady? Seeks protection/ownership (if we're being cynics, which,) from Boaz? Surely no symbolism there.

Esther

Prevented the slaughter of the Jewish people by revealing her Judaism, queen of the Persians, don't remember much else. $20 says she's a stealth-mode trans woman?

Rachel

Jacob's favorite wife. Not to overdo it, but the sort of TERF-analog being named after the bride of the patriarch of the whole of-the-book-cluster seems pretty apt.

Trevor Darling

I'm really happy Trevor made it out. Maybe it's not too late to finish up at the Open University.