Unseen Academicals
Spoiler Alert – This post assumes you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals.
Unseen Academicals is ostensibly named after the football team from Unseen University [as also the many unseen academicals among the university’s faculty, as A. pointed out] but I believe there is another set of characters the title could be referring to.
Vetinari, the shrewd, populist Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and Lady Margolotta, the vampire politician from Überwald, are the unseens directing much of the happenings of the book. It is Margolotta who creates Mr Nutt. Vetinari is the one who causes the football game, around which the later half of the book is woven, to occur. That they are both fantastically manipulative actors is obvious; what is even more interesting is their ambition in all this.
For you see, Vetinari and Margolotta are not merely unseen, but also academicals in their own way. Like physicists, they prefer a frictionless universe. Vetinari and Margolotta are both involved in grand schemes of social hacking to clear the air in their chaotic, unpredictable mess of a universe and bring to it structure and certainty. To them, all of it is an intellectual game, and people are just so many pieces on a board – to be coerced, cajoled, or conned to move in the desired direction.
Vetinari adopts the plebeian pastime of football and gentrifies it, adding pomp and prize to what used to be a hassle and a tussle. He tames its rowdy cheer and makes of it a domestic, homely spectacle, a version even Trev Likely’s mum could not be entirely against. This he does quietly, obsequiously deferring to suspiciously convenient history in form of the urn and the dubious authority of the sport’s leading figures in form of the captains. He affects a sincerity so absolute that even the reader is left wondering whether football to Vetinari is merely a tool of power, panem et circes, or a genuine personal passion. He assassinates football, the game that makes casual violence an acceptable practice in the Shove, and creates in its place football, a game that firmly reinforces the middle-class values of rules backed up by punishment and reward. In this way, he introduces to his subjects a new metaphor for life and a new guide for their behaviour. Like Lee Kuan Yew encouraging home-ownership in Singapore to stabilise society [or King Candy accessing the mainframe in Wreck-It Ralph], Vetinari is unafraid to reach into the core of what it means to be Morporkian, and heave at the heaviest levers in sight.
Margolotta’s projects is even wider in its scope. While Vetinari’s focus is class, Margolotta’s is race. She is the co-founder of the Temperance Movement, created to encourage her fellow vampires to abstain from drinking blood, thus removing the main point of friction between her people and the humans that vastly outnumber them. In this way, she ensures their survival [indeed, prosperity] by challenging the central act that defines a vampire. She and Vetinari are involved in efforts to finalise the Koom Accords, a peace treary between dwarves and trolls. Like Vetinari, she recognises that peace among the various races of Discworld is necessary and desirable. She opts to start at the highest level by attempting to rehabilitate orcs, one of the most feared and hated races in Discworld, and she does so by focussing all her efforts on a single orc to act as a signal example of what that species can aspire to and achieve. Mr Nutt, who is the focus of her actions, single-handedly earns recognition and acceptance for orcs after his performance at the football game. Vetinari questions her style, but admits and admires its effectiveness in the end. Personally, he prefers a quiet word and fishnet-veiled threats. He is not exactly a wet blanket, but a wet banquet and dry humour is definitely more his style than dramatic pronouncements and rhetorical questions to a crowd. But in this Margolotta shows her inner demagogue. She gets it. She gets the all-importance of The Moment, the single-mindedness of the mob, the pull of public opinion. She uses it to great effect to make peace between orcs and humans imaginable in one masterstroke, while opening minds to even greater tolerance of the less objectionable ‘outsiders’, like dwarves, trolls, and of course, vampires.
Unseen by all except Mr Nutt and [in Vetinari’s case] Glenda, these two leaders are on the way to create a New Discworld Order, one where the anger and resentment of the deprived is channeled expertly into regulated sport that creates the illusion of classlessness without the inconvenience of accomplishing it, and racial tensions are diffused by creating heroes that transcend parochial labels. In this, they demonstrate what may charitably be called noblesse oblige and cause the less charitable to shudder at the scope and audacity of their sneaky social engineering.
Vetinari adopts the plebeian pastime of football and gentrifies it, adding pomp and prize to what used to be a hassle and a tussle. He tames its rowdy cheer and makes of it a domestic, homely spectacle, a version even Trev Likely’s mum could not be entirely against. This he does quietly, obsequiously deferring to suspiciously convenient history in form of the urn and the dubious authority of the sport’s leading figures in form of the captains. He affects a sincerity so absolute that even the reader is left wondering whether football to Vetinari is merely a tool of power, panem et circes, or a genuine personal passion. He assassinates football, the game that makes casual violence an acceptable practice in the Shove, and creates in its place football, a game that firmly reinforces the middle-class values of rules backed up by punishment and reward. In this way, he introduces to his subjects a new metaphor for life and a new guide for their behaviour. Like Lee Kuan Yew encouraging home-ownership in Singapore to stabilise society [or King Candy accessing the mainframe in Wreck-It Ralph], Vetinari is unafraid to reach into the core of what it means to be Morporkian, and heave at the heaviest levers in sight.
Margolotta’s projects is even wider in its scope. While Vetinari’s focus is class, Margolotta’s is race. She is the co-founder of the Temperance Movement, created to encourage her fellow vampires to abstain from drinking blood, thus removing the main point of friction between her people and the humans that vastly outnumber them. In this way, she ensures their survival [indeed, prosperity] by challenging the central act that defines a vampire. She and Vetinari are involved in efforts to finalise the Koom Accords, a peace treary between dwarves and trolls. Like Vetinari, she recognises that peace among the various races of Discworld is necessary and desirable. She opts to start at the highest level by attempting to rehabilitate orcs, one of the most feared and hated races in Discworld, and she does so by focussing all her efforts on a single orc to act as a signal example of what that species can aspire to and achieve. Mr Nutt, who is the focus of her actions, single-handedly earns recognition and acceptance for orcs after his performance at the football game. Vetinari questions her style, but admits and admires its effectiveness in the end. Personally, he prefers a quiet word and fishnet-veiled threats. He is not exactly a wet blanket, but a wet banquet and dry humour is definitely more his style than dramatic pronouncements and rhetorical questions to a crowd. But in this Margolotta shows her inner demagogue. She gets it. She gets the all-importance of The Moment, the single-mindedness of the mob, the pull of public opinion. She uses it to great effect to make peace between orcs and humans imaginable in one masterstroke, while opening minds to even greater tolerance of the less objectionable ‘outsiders’, like dwarves, trolls, and of course, vampires.
Unseen by all except Mr Nutt and [in Vetinari’s case] Glenda, these two leaders are on the way to create a New Discworld Order, one where the anger and resentment of the deprived is channeled expertly into regulated sport that creates the illusion of classlessness without the inconvenience of accomplishing it, and racial tensions are diffused by creating heroes that transcend parochial labels. In this, they demonstrate what may charitably be called noblesse oblige and cause the less charitable to shudder at the scope and audacity of their sneaky social engineering.
