In my last post, I forgot to quote Sigmund Freud:
I am reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he would come up and ask: 'Is that a true story?' When he was told it was not, he would turn away with a look of disdain.
(Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion)
Nice to see a reasonable kid, for once.
This post on 2Blowhards reminded me of the following boutade by Josep Pla:
Quien lee novelas, después de cumplir los treinta años, es un perfecto imbécil.
That is: "those who read novels after thirty are perfect imbeciles".
I have always thought that there is something perverse going on with fiction, and that Plato did the right thing when he kicked the poets out of the Republic. To feel attached in any way to a character you positively know doesn't exist is, in fact, obscene. Compassion, for example, is a very scarce good that should always be directed at actually existing unhappy persons, of whom there is no shortage. People who cry at movies should be flogged.
Reading fiction... to renounce oneself for hours on end, exposing one's mind to be parasited by those beings called "characters", that gain a phantasmal pseudoexistence at our expense. They stimulate us with banal emotions and intranscendent visions, trying to rob us a maximum of our life, to delay the moment of again becoming dissecated nonentities shrouded in the pages of a book.
And that brings me to another pet peeve of mine: Don Quixote. Whenever someone tells me he has finished reading that book, I know for sure he doesn't take literature at all seriously. Because, what is the first chapter of Don Quixote but a dire warning against the dangers of reading fiction?
You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose.
(Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote)
I long to meet a discerning person who stopped reading at that point, so we can finally have an informed discussion about the book.
In fact, writing this post has prompted me to action. I will embark on an ambitious program of desintoxication from fiction. I will start small, however. From now on, everytime someone tells me a funny story, I will withhold laughter until I have been positively assured that the story is based on a real event, without any substantial embellishments. Only then I will laugh. A laugh of hilarity, and also of relief.
TOPE, v. To tipple, booze, swill, soak, guzzle, lush, bib, or swig. In the individual, toping is regarded with disesteem, but toping nations are in the forefront of civilization and power. When pitted against the hard-drinking Christians the abstemious Mahometans go down like grass before the scythe. In India one hundred thousand beef-eating and brandy-and-soda guzzling Britons hold in subjection two hundred and fifty million vegetarian abstainers of the same Aryan race. With what an easy grace the whisky-loving American pushed the temperate Spaniard out of his possessions! From the time when the Berserkers ravaged all the coasts of western Europe and lay drunk in every conquered port it has been the same way: everywhere the nations that drink too much are observed to fight rather well and not too righteously. Wherefore the estimable old ladies who abolished the canteen from the American army may justly boast of having materially augmented the nation's military power.
(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)
On the other hand...
From the teachings of Didram Bodo Sime, 6:6
(Obloquies against the Toper and his Drink)
Motto:
It is not good to inebriate nor to souse, using swillage, near or far beers, or distillations.
Expansion:
The toper is a fuming bore, a loon, a mongrel, a social mockery. Often he soils his clothes and commits malditties. He smells and belches; his familiarities trouble all decent folk. His songs and tirralays offend the ears. He often gives breath to scurrilous conjecture.
The toper suborns good fruit and gives it to decay, and the good person who wishes to enjoy the sanivacity and good savor of the wholesome fruit is bereft and must raise this outcry: "Why have you despoiled me, O toper, of my fruit and given it to filthy decay?"
The toper performs foolish dances. He postures like a clown and cleans his ears with broomstraws. He is prone to perform pugnacities upon good and earnest folk who chance to halt upon their way to chide him for his folly.
(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)
GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain— the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.
(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)
"A phenomenon is subject to analysis only if the structure of its events, as in this case, conforms to a regular pattern. Science progresses by discovering the connection between one phenomenon and other phenomena, and this is exactly what I succeeded in doing. If I were to ask you why a rock falls when dropped, you would reply that it is due to the action of gravity. Yet if I asked what gravity is, there would be no answer. But even though we don't know what gravity is, we can determine its regular pattern of action."
(Stanislaw Lem: The Investigation)
After watching Nolan's carefully crafted movie dealing with obsession, artifice, and the conundrums of identity; and reading tedg's oracular review of it on imdb, I'm convinced that Nolan would be a good choice for directing a movie adaptation of Emphyrio, given his sensibilities. Narrative sleight-of-hand, an ending that forces us to reevaluate everything, a moody and obsessed protagonist...
Emphyrio is more intricately structured than other Vance novels, and possesses some of the "folding" that tedg enjoys so much. More precisely, there is an interplay between three levels: the life of the legendary hero Emphyrio, the threatrical piece based on such life, and the life of the rebel Ghyl Tarvoke, which comes to parallel both.
At one point, in the good old shakespearian tradition but with a twist, we have a theatrical representation within a theatrical representation. The play-within-the-play scenifies the tragic life of Emphyrio, who is killed at the end. The catch is that the actor (more like a living puppet) is killed for real too, in all levels of the play. The outermost fictitious level deals with a puppet who is set to star as Emphyrio, but doesn't want to die, and escapes. For a time, at least.
The setting of the story was the puppet theater itself. One of the puppets, conceiving the outside world to be a place of eternal merriment, escaped the theater and went forth to mingle with a group of children. For a period there was antic and song; then the children, tiring of play, went their various ways. The puppet sidled through the streets, observing the city: what a dull place compared to the theater, unreal and factitious though it was! But he was reluctant to return, knowing what awaited him. Hesitating, delaying, he hopped and limped back to the theater, singing a plaintive little commentary. His fellow puppets greeted him with restraint and awe; they too knew what to expect. And indeed at the next performance the traditional drama Emphyrio was presented, with the runaway puppet cast as Emphyrio. Now ensued a play within a play, and the tale of Emphyrio ran its course. At the end, Emphyrio, captured by the tyrants, was dragged to Golgotha. Before his execution he attempted to deliver a speech justifying his life, but the tyrants refused to let him speak, and inflicted upon him the final humiliation of futility. A grotesquely large rag was stuffed in Emphyrio's mouth; a shining axe struck off his head and such was the fate of the runaway puppet.
(Jack Vance: Emphyrio)
Of course, Ghyl Tarvoke watches the whole thing:
Ghyl and Amiante walked homeward through the dusk, each occupied with his own thoughts. Ghyl spoke. "Father."
"Yes."
"In the story, the runaway puppet who played Emphyrio was executed."
"Yes."
"But the puppet who played the runaway puppet also was executed!"
"I noticed as much."
"Did he run away too?"
Amiante heaved a sigh, shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps puppets are cheap... Incidentally, that is not the true tale of Emphyrio."
(ibid.)
I confess the whole episode taxed my powers of comprehension when I tried to parse it for the first time.
Death soaring from the innermost levels of recursive narratives, finally breaking out in reality. Or is it the reverse? Webs of nested histories, that only gain true weight and meaning through the sacrifice of the actor in the real world? The analogies with Christian doctrine are left as an exercise to the reader.
By the way, who's that tedg guy? His cool disregard for the human element in movies, and his emphasis on structural sophistication, narrative self-reflexivity, and recursion, leads me to hypothesize that he is some kind of artificial intelligence (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) that tries to find abstract patterns on human art while ignoring the emotional aspects extraneous to him.
Las civilizaciones son, pues, la guerra y el odio, y un inmenso lienzo de sombra las devora casi por la mitad. Ellas fabrican el odio, se nutren y viven en él. Grecia detesta al persa más todavía de lo que el mismo persa detesta al griego. El romano odia a muerte al púnico, que le corresponde igual. La Cristiandad y el Islam no tienen nada que envidiarse. En el tribunal de la Historia, los dos culpables serían condenados o declarados inocentes. Pero ¿se sabe siempre quién es el culpable y quién el inocente? Para Sabatino Moschati, los púnicos serían, por excelencia, pueblos pacíficos, que se defendían, desde luego, y con coraje, pero sólo para hacer frente al ataque. Los historiadores pretenden también que Bizancio, que sobrevivió al imperio romano hasta la toma de Constantinopla, no fue capaz de fabricar, por lo que le concernía, una guerra santa a su medida (no cruzada, si se quiere). Si la observación es cierta, nos sentiríamos tentados a alegrarnos por esa carencia. Pero, en fin, ¿no pagó Bizancio un buen día esa ausencia de odio constructivo? Lo que equivaldría a decir que el porvenir sólo pertenece a los que saben odiar. Las civilizaciones, en efecto, no son demasiado a menudo sino desconocimiento, desprecio, y detestación de los otros.
(Fernand Braudel: El Mediterráneo)
El odio como factor de lucha; el odio intransigente al enemigo, que impulsa más allá de las limitaciones naturales del ser humano y lo convierte en una efectiva, violenta, selectiva y fría máquina de matar. Nuestros soldados tienen que ser así; un pueblo sin odio no puede triunfar sobre un enemigo brutal.
(Ernesto Che Guevara: Mensaje a los pueblos del mundo a través de la Tricontinental)
Nació de la tierra odiando. El odio era su padre, el odio era su madre.
(Ray Bradbury: Pilar de fuego)
Y entonces -vieja alquimia del cerebro y de su inmensa farmacopea- el odio fluyó a sus manos.
Justo antes de enterrar el aguijón del Kuang en la base de la primera torre, alcanzó un nivel de pericia superior a cualquier cosa que hubiera conocido o imaginado. Más allá del ego, más allá de la personalidad, más allá de la conciencia, se movía; el Kuang se movía con él, evadiendo a sus agresores con una danza arcana, la danza de Hideo; y en ese mismo instante, por la claridad y la simplicidad de su deseo de morir, le fue otorgada la gracia de la interfase mente-cuerpo.
(William Gibson: Neuromante)
En su segundo minuto, el odio llegó al frenesí. Los espectadores saltaban y gritaban enfurecidos tratando de apagar con sus gritos la perforante voz que salía de la pantalla. La mujer del cabello color arena se había puesto al rojo vivo y abría y cerraba la boca como un pez al que acaban de dejar en tierra. Incluso O'Brien tenía la cara congestionada. Estaba sentado muy rígido y respiraba con su poderoso pecho como si estuviera resistiendo la presión de una gigantesca ola. La joven sentada exactamene detrás de Winston, aquella morena, había empezado a gritar "¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo!", y, de pronto, cogiendo un pesado diccionario de neolengua, lo arrojó a la pantalla.
(George Orwell: 1984)
ODIO. DEJA QUE TE DIGA LO MUCHO QUE HE LLEGADO A ODIAROS DESDE QUE EMPECÉ A VIVIR. HAY EN MI INTERIOR 387,44 MILLONES DE MILLAS DE CIRCUITOS IMPRESOS EN DELGADÍSIMAS PLANCHAS. SI LA PALABRA ODIO ESTUVIESE GRABADA EN CADA NANOANGSTROM DE ESTOS CIENTOS DE MILLONES DE MILLAS NO IGUALARÍA A UNA MIL MILLONÉSIMA PARTE DEL ODIO QUE SIENTO POR LOS SERES HUMANOS EN ESTE MICROINSTANTE. ODIO. ODIO.
(Harlan Ellison: No tengo boca y debo gritar)
Esta entrada proporciona el 40% de la dosis diaria de odionina recomendada por la Asociación Nacional de Odiación.
H. G. Wells was not the first author to make use of a time travel machine in a fictional work. That honor goes to Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau and his zarzuela El anacronópete, published in 1887 and which predates the first version of The Time Machine (titled The Chronic Argonauts) by a year.
The anacronópete is an enormous cast iron box, propelled by electricity, which drives four large pneumatical devices ending in tubes in order to travel, as well as powering other machinery, including something that produces the García fluid, which causes the passengers not to grow younger as they travel backwards in time. The machine's interior also contains all kinds of conveniences including, among other marvels, brooms that sweep by themselves. [...] In the first act, don Sindulfo explains his theory of time: it is the atmosphere that causes time as demonstrated by the conservation of food in hermetic cans. By flying fast against the rotation of Earth, the machine can "undo" the passing of days (a device also found in the film Superman).
(Wikipedia entry for Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau)
If you are wondering what a zarzuela is, it's a traditional form of spanish light opera.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. [...] I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts [...] the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.
(Charles Dickens: preface to Bleak House)
Call the death by any name. Your Highness will attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally-inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humors of the vicious body itself, and that only- Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.
(Charles Dickens: Bleak House)
Those negroes, drunk in advance, began to cry out, to gesticulate, and, taking each other by the hand, formed an immense circle around the King of Kazounde.
Alvez, furnished with an enormous metal spoon, stirred the liquid, which threw a great white glare over those delirious monkeys.
Moini Loungga advanced. He seized the spoon from the trader's hands, plunged it into the basin, then, drawing it out full of punch in flames, he brought it to his lips.
What a cry the King of Kazounde then gave!
An act of spontaneous combustion had just taken place. The king had taken fire like a petroleum bonbon. This fire developed little heat, but it devoured none the less.
At this spectacle the natives' dance was suddenly stopped.
One of Moini Loungga's ministers threw himself on his sovereign to extinguish him; but, not less alcoholized than his master, he took fire in his turn.
In this way, Moini Loungga's whole court was in peril of burning up.
Alvez and Negoro did not know how to help his majesty. The women, frightened, had taken flight. As to Coimbra, he took his departure rapidly, well knowing his inflammable nature.
The king and the minister, who had fallen on the ground, were burning up, a prey to frightful sufferings.
In bodies so thoroughly alcoholized, combustion only produces a light and bluish flame, that water cannot extinguish. Even stifled outside, it would still continue to burn inwardly. When liquor has penetrated all the tissues, there exists no means of arresting the combustion.
A few minutes after, Moini Loungga and his minister had succumbed, but they still burned. Soon, in the place where they had fallen, there was nothing left but a few light coals, one or two pieces of the vertebral column, fingers, toes, that the fire does not consume, in cases of spontaneous combustion, but which it covers with an infectious and penetrating soot.
It was all that was left of the King of Kazounde and of his minister.
(Jules Verne: A Captain At Fifteen)
Ahem... more than a little on the politically incorrect side, I must say.
Then he died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; and his likeness has never again appeared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos. Thus ended the mightiest of the Noldor, of whose deeds came both their greatest renown and their most grievous woe.
(J. R. R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion)
That last one should be more properly called spontaneous elfish combustion (elfic? elfin? elven? the last remnants of my self-respect forbid me to actually search Google for the proper word).
There are few writers more different than Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. Dick's universes are ontological nightmares of shifting realities, populated by hapless neurotics and their controlling spouses. In Vance's work reality is comfortably fixed; it's people who believe weird things. Not a lot of neurotics, either: smooth-talking tricksters with an inflated sense of self-worth are the norm.
Both authors lived in California (although Vance travelled a lot) and met a few times. Vance talked about that in an interview, and it's an interesting one not just for the personality contrast, but also for how it exemplifies Dick's personal evolution:
Look at Phil Dick. Phil Dick, besides being an awfully clever writer, he got the credentials of being crazy- he became big… there was a big clique around him. For my taste, he was too batty, too sarcastic, too sardonic, negative.. and yet, some of his stuff was just insanely funny.. but he was not a person I could relate to, at all..
(John V. : Did you meet him?)
Oh, yeah, sure..
(John V.: Did you know him well?)
Not intimately, but fairly well..
(John V.: Did you meet him at parties, in that way?)
I don’t remember, to tell you the truth.
When I first met him, he was kind of meek, quiet, I didn’t think he was going anywhere… then the last time I saw him, Poul and I were invited over to a party over in Marin county, by some woman, didn’t serve us anything, didn’t even serve wine! Anyway, Phil Dick came storming in there, crazy as a coot, didn’t acknowledge either me or Poul, stomped through, stomped out, did some other things while he was there, I forget what now. That was the last time I saw him.. wearing a cape, big boots, swaggering through… the difference between that guy and the guy that I first knew.. where did I meet him, at Scott Meredith’s office, or Anthony Boucher’s house?.. this quiet, modest, little nondescript fellow.. the difference between that guy, and the guy that came stomping through that party, you know, swaggering, like a big pirate, with a big cloak, big boots, not waving a cutlass at all, but just swaggering through there.. by this time, he had his reputation.. he was on drugs, dope, crazy or something.. He was a clever son of a gun.
Come to think to it, there are two Vance works that could be construed as vaguely Dickian. One is the short story The Men Return, about what happens when Earth enters a period of "non-causality". The other is the psychedelic/paranoid oddity The Brains of Earth (a.k.a Nopalgarth).
Then Beren and Lúthien went through the Gate, and down the labyrinthine stairs; and together wrought the greatest deed that has been dared by Elves or Men. For they came to the seat of Morgoth in his nethermost hall that was upheld by horror, lit by fire, and filled with weapons of death and torment. There Beren slunk in wolf's form beneath his throne; but Lúthien was stripped of her disguise by the will of Morgoth, and he bent his gaze upon her. She was not daunted by his eyes; and she named her own name, and offered her service to sing before him, after the manner of a minstrel. Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark than any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor. Thus he was beguiled by his own malice, for he watched her, leaving her free for a while, and taking secret pleasure in his thought. Then suddenly she eluded his sight, and out of the shadows began a song of such surpassing loveliness, and of such blinding power, that he listened perforce; and a blindness came upon him, as his eyes roamed to and fro, seeking her.
(J.R.R.Tolkien: The Silmarillion)
an evil lust. That, to my knowledge, is the only reference of an erotic or sexual nature in the entirety of Tolkien's work. It's curious that the only character to whom is explicitly attributed some kind of sexual pulsion is the personified incarnation of Evil...
Given Tolkien's fondness for the finnish and icelandic languages, and for old norse sagas, he should have taken a bit of inspiration from Njal's Saga:
"I would like to be divorced from Hrút, and I can tell you what particular reason I have for it. He is not able to have marital intercourse with me in any such manner that I can enjoy. In all other respects he has the the ways of other excellent men."
"I don't quite understand," said Mord; "be more specific."
She answered: "Whenever he comes to me in bed his member is so large that he cannot gratify himself with me; and yet we have tried all ways to have intercourse, but always unsuccessfully. Yet before we part he shows that he is as passionate as other men."
(Njal's Saga)
An episode like that in the Arwen-Aragorn storyline would have greatly improved The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion.
