The Ascian language

In The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe imagined a language called Ascian. Its speakers have very little grammatical leeway when producing speech. In fact, they may only choose from among a limited list of possible utterances which have been "approved" by a ruling, crushingly totalitarian camarilla. Those are the only valid utterances in the language. Some examples:

The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.

One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.

The citizen renders to the populace what is due to the populace. What is due to the populace? Everything.

It's like Orwell's Newspeak carried to the ultimate limit. Not only particular words and concepts are prohibited, but linguistic creativity itself. Still, the novel recounts how an ascian captured in battle is able (with the help of an interpreter) to tell a story that criticizes the ruling camarilla. Gene Wolfe seems to be rebuking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: even in the most restricted of languages, you can find workarounds to communicate (or at least insinuate) any idea you want. On the other hand, the story may have been more the product of the interpreter than of the ascian himself...

I was reminded of the Ascian language when I read the Wikipedia page for Lexis. Apparently, we too employ formulaic language most of the time:

The major finding of this research is that language users rely to a very high extent on ready-made language “lexical chunks”, which can be easily combined to form sentences. This eliminates the need for the speaker to analyze each sentence grammatically, yet deals with a situation effectively. Typical examples include “I see what you mean” or “Could you please hand me the …” or “Recent research shows that…”

Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made chunks do not fulfill the speaker’s immediate needs; in other words, a new sentence is about to be formed and must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar rules have been internalized by native speakers, allowing them to determine the viability of new sentences. Language usage might be defined as a fall-back position when all other options have been exhausted.

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

The song that plays in the trailer for Watchmen is "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins, which is a slower, moodier version of another song of theirs called "The End Is the Beginning Is the End".

That inversion in the titles reminds me of a pair of Gene Wolfe stories, "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" and "The Death of Doctor Island". I wonder if that trope has a name, and what are other examples of it.

Hoarding ebooks

We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose pages are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings of a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here -though I can no longer tell you where- no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books that the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear as an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.

(Gene Wolfe: Shadow of the Torturer)

Inconspicuously lodged among my books, there is a CD box which is slowly being filled with content downloaded from places like the Internet Archive and Google Books. I'm pretty sure the box holds more books than my "real" library, if that's not the case already, it will soon be.

I know that having permanent local copies of all that content is stupid. Why don't just create some bookmarks, and download each text just before reading? But some primitive part of my brain with an atavistic penchant for hoarding wants it that way.

Reading a book from the screen is always a painful experience, but I've found that reading DJVU files is slightly better that reading HTML or plain text. These latter formats seem strangely unsubstantial and fragile, the letters ready to scatter like fallen leaves and the merest stirring in the electronic ether. Raster formats like DJVU feel more weighty, less impermanent. Some books from the Internet Archive even have scribbled marginalia, which goes a long way to give the feeling of a real book. (Supposedly, this digitized copy of Amiel's journal has notes and marginalia by none other than Herny Miller.) Some recent finds:

• Sir Henry Layard: Early adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia. part 1. part 2.
• Baron de Tott: Memoirs.
• Rafael Cansinos-Asséns: Salomé en la literatura.
• Trollope: Domestic Manners of the Americans. part 1. part 2.
• Oliver Wendell Holmes: The autocrat of the breakfast-table.

A wildness more vicious

We are accustomed to think of the beasts of the forest and mountain as wild, and to think of the men who spring up, as it seems, from their soil as savage. But the truth is that there is a wildness more vicious (as we would know better if we were not so habituated to it) in certain domestic animals, despite their understanding so much human speech and sometimes even speaking a few words; and there is a more profound savagery in men and women whose ancestors have lived in cities and towns since the dawn of humanity. Vodalus, in whose veins flowed the undefiled blood of a thousand exultants - exarchs, ethnarchs, and starosts - was capable of violence unimaginable to the autochthons that stalked the streets of Thrax, naked beneath their huanaco cloaks.

(Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor)

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

(Walter Benjamin)

See also here. I don't know if Wolfe and Benjamin are right.

El Lobo y el Cordero

Traduzco un pasaje de Gene Wolfe sobre Jesucristo. La cita original se puede encontrar en este artículo sobre Wolfe en First Things (recomiendo leer el original, porque mis habilidades de traductor no son para tirar cohetes.)

Ha sido dicho miles de veces que Cristo murió bajo tortura. Muchos the nosotros hemos leído tantas veces que él fue "un humilde carpintero" que sentimos un atisbo de náusea al ver esas palabras de nuevo. Pero nadie parece darse cuenta de que los instrumentos de tortura fueron madera, clavos, y martillo; que el hombre que construyó la Cruz fue indudablemente un carpintero también; que el hombre que clavó los clavos fue tanto un carpintero como un soldado, tanto un carpintero como un torturador. Muy pocos han percibido incluso que aunque Cristo fue un "humilde carpintero", el único objeto que se nos dice específicamente que contruyó no fue una mesa o una silla, sino un látigo.

Y ya que estamos hablado del aspecto más, digamos, "severo" de Jesús, aprovecho para enlazar al post Did Christ Ever Laugh? de Laudator Temporis Acti.
Wolfe es un católico con una teología un tanto particular. En una de sus entrevistas, menciona lo siguiente:

Uno de los lugares donde me diferencio de la doctrina Católica convencional es en que creo que los dioses del paganismo eran reales. No creo que fuesen merecedores de la adoración que recibían de los paganos. Creo que lo que muchos de los autores bíblicos están diciendo es: "Sí, esos son poderes verdaderos, pero es equivocado que les des los honores que son debidos solamente a Dios." Y creo que eso es exactamente correcto.

O sea, que Wolfe es un henoteísta, al menos en lo que respecta a los antiguos dioses olímpicos.

Todo lo anterior se refleja en su obra. El protagonista de El Libro del Sol Nuevo es una figura mesiánica, y un torturador de profesión (aunque esto último no se retrata de manera especialmente positiva). El Latro de Soldado de la Niebla es un mercenario romano utilizado como peón por los dioses griegos (su nombre es apropiado: "Latro" significa tanto "mercenario" como "peón" en latín). Y en El Libro del Sol Largo (del que sólo he leído el primer volumen), un sacerdote abandona progresivamente su culto politeísta para abrazar al dios "verdadero".

Mirror, mirror

(NOTE: This is an old post from February 23, 2007 that mysteriously dissapeared when I upgraded to the new version of Blogger. Exhumed from the Google cache.)

This post on Centauri Dreams describes an extremely interesting propulsion technology called "Photonic Laser Thrusters". It works by bouncing photons betweeen two confronted mirrors thousands of times, so that the mirrors are pulled apart by radiation pressure.

It reminded me of a rather more fanciful method of transport involving confronted mirrors, imagined by Gene Wolfe in The Shadow of the Torturer:

Father Inire drew the wall of the octagon closed behind them. It was a mirror in which she could see his face and his arm and shining infinite robes reflected. Her own form too [...] but there seemed to be another girl -her own face peering over her shoulder; then another and another and another, each with a smaller face behind it. And so on ad infinitum, an endless chain of fainter Domnina-faces.

She realized when she saw them that the hall of the octogonal enclosure through which she had pased faced another mirror. The light of the blue-light lamp was caught by them all and reflected from one to another as boys might pass silver balls, interlacing and intertwining in an interminable dance.

A bit of technobabble follows, explaining how the mirrors work as a teletransporter (there's also a homage to Borges). Quite enchanting, really; though I hope the theory behind the "Photonic Laser Thrusters" is a bit more solid...

El Libro de Oro

Al parecer, la Fundación Paul Allen posee un cierto número de Ediciones Integrales de Vance, que está dispuesta a donar sin coste alguno para los recipientes. Detalles aquí.

Creo que la Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina debería solicitar esa donación. El por qué es evidente...

En un capítulo de La Sombra del Torturador de Gene Wolfe, se narra el encuentro del protagonista con un bibliotecario ciego y anciano llamado Ultan, responsable de la biblioteca real en la ciudad de Nessus. El bibliotecario le habla de un método para reclutar aprendices propio del gremio: El Libro de Oro. Es éste un volumen tan absolutamente fascinante que, cuando se lo presentan a un niño, queda totalmente embelesado por él, y a partir de entonces orienta su vida al servicio de los libros.

Ultan es claramente Jorge Luis Borges; la inmensa biblioteca que supervisa se podría considerar un trasunto de Biblioteca Nacional Argentina en Buenos Aires, de la que Borges fue director durante 18 años. (Al parecer, Wolfe da indicios en su novela de que la ciudad de Nessus es una versión futura de Buenos Aires. Aunque a mí se me escaparon, la verdad.)

Ahora bien: Gene Wolfe ha mencionado en entrevistas que, para él, el Libro de Oro que leyó en su adolescencia fue... La Tierra Moribunda de Jack Vance. Por lo tanto, ¿qué mejor método de asegurar que el Libro de Oro se encuentre en la biblioteca de Ultan que solicitando la donación?

Obvio, ¿no?

Meanings, symbols

everything, whatever happens, has three meanings. The first is the practical meaning, what the books calls, 'the thing the plowman sees.' The cow has taken a mouthfull of grass, and it is real grass, and a real cow. [...] The second is the reflection of the world about it. Every object is in contact with all others, and thus the wise can learn of the others by observing the first. That might be called the soothsayer's meaning [...] The third is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion with him, so all must express his will -which is the higher reality. [...] The book is saying that everything is a sign.

(Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer)

Everything of which we are conscious…has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.

(Oswald Spengler, quoted in Jack Vance's The Star King)

There were four categories of allegory used in the Middle Ages, which had originated with the Bible commentators of the early Christian era. The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning. The second is called typological, which is connecting the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life with the stories of the Old Testament. The third is moral (or tropological), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story". The fourth type of allegory is anagogical, dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies.

(Wikipedia entry for Allegory in the Middle Ages)

Not only for reading

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them.

(The Great Unread)

I have no problem with that. Books can be beautiful objects, even books consisting exclusively of advertisements, like this one spotted at Design Observer.

Plus, sometimes the practice can have unexpected and delightful results. When I was a teenager, my parents bought a batch of books in order to fill an underpopulated shelf in the living room. They were part of the complete collected works of Camilo José Cela, noted spanish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. They had sober and nondescript covers; when at last I got to inspect them, I found out to my delight that most of the lot consisted in a multi-volume dictionary of erotism edited by Cela, which I proceeded to read exhaustively in the next few weeks, with adolescent eagerness (no Internet then).

I am reminded of the character in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler who never reads books, but uses them as material for his strange sculptures. And also of the blind librarian (a clear stand-in for Borges) in Gene Wolfe's Shadow Of The Torturer:

I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.

(Gene Wolfe: Shadow Of The Torturer)

Gene Wolfe on the Spartans

Yes, The Spartans were the most totalitarian people that I have ever come across. They made the Nazis look like Boy Scouts and they really did it, and they did it for it for a hundred years and they were so totalitarian as to be almost unbelievable. One of the strange things about Sparta was they had the two kings and I am sure you realize. [...] One of the strange things is that the kings really represented the good past in Sparta. They were relics from the time when Sparta was a Greek state much like other Greek states. They were slowly being constricted and crowded out by the totalitarian ethic.

(Gene Wolfe, in an interview)

I would like to hear Wolfe's opinion on Frank Miller a Zack Snyder's 300...

By the way, in that same interview, a bit after the passage I quoted, Wolfe mentions a very nasty thing the Spartans did after Thermopylae (warning: it's a bit of a spoiler for Soldier of the Mist):

when the Spartans were fighting the Persians, they were fighting them with their light infantry, and their skirmishers and so forth were bands of armed Helots. At the end of the war they said, we are going to reward you Helots by giving those who did most in the war their freedom. And they will be not equals __________who would be able to run for office and vote and so on and take part in the government but they would be free individuals living in Sparta and free as such people were. And so you are to name for us those Helots who were your leaders in the late war who should be rewarded like this. Then they held a ceremony which I described in detail, exactly as it was and they gave each Helot who was to be awarded his freedom as a climax of the ceremony a young Spartan as his companion to lead him through the ceremony. And at a given signal each companion killed that Helot that he was responsible for. And they were all killed [...] and all of [...] them who had gone in the ceremony were butchered. And they really were, this took place.

What classical sources mention that episode? I don't remember reading about it in the works of Herodotus or Thucydides.

Fuligin

A few days ago, I blogged about a new technology that reminded me of a passage from Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer. Well, here comes another (also via Centauri Dreams):

Scientists have created the world’s first film that casts practically no reflection. A vast improvement over current nonreflective materials, the new technology could revolutionize solar cells, intensify light-emitting diodes, and possibly help solve mysteries in quantum mechanics by mimicking a “black body,” an object that absorbs all light.

If I understood correctly, that film has properties similar to that of Severian's fuligin cloak ("the color that is darker than black").