As part of the current process of integrating my various creative works onto the Internet, I've decided to post some of the more interesting academic papers I've written over the last several years for school (backdated to when they were written, including a couple pieces of fiction, not including any work from the current semester):
Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings, 10.6.07
Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbol for Indigenous Australian Life, 11.3.07
Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science, 11.20.07
Dreams of Identity in Everett's Erasure, 11.28.07
Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance, 12.10.07
The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, 1.30.08
Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 2.15.08
Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 4.16.08
The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”, 4.24.08
The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”, 9.11.08
Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland", 10.2.08
Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville, 11.2.08
Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, 11.18.08
Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 2.20.09
The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, 2.22.09
Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner, 4.13.09
Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere, 4.8.09
Cyberpunk and the Magical Power of Language, 4.21.09
Please feel free to cite these papers and ideas if of interest and use. I would prefer not to be plagiarized. Thanks!
A Personal Myth (fiction), 10.1.07
The Death of the Author as a Young Man (autobiographical fiction), 2.27.09
I've also gone back and updated tags for all entries on this blog and transferred the posts from my old blog True Names to here (but haven't gotten to their tags yet).
Showing posts with label Borges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Borges. Show all posts
11.25.2009
9.07.2008
Review: "Nostromo" by Joseph Conrad
The most important of Joseph Conrad's novels, Nostromo (full online text) is probably one of the densest stories I've ever read (Joyce's writing aside). Detailing the history, landscape, political struggles, and desperate citizens of an entire imaginary South American country takes a lot of attention on the part of the reader, but is was well worth it for intricate plot and brilliantly written characters (although it offers a rather bleak picture of human nature in which every major protagonist fails due to their internal flaws). Written in 1904, Nostromo was ahead of its time, addressing issues of colonialism and psychological depth, but also made more complex by several almost post modern literary techniques. The story is told in a bizarre folding of time that circle around one main event, a failed revolution on the town of Saluco and the fate of its infamous silver mine that hangs like a weight around the characters' necks. Similarly the whole novel begins with a folk tale about buried treasure and the foreigners who were cursed trying to find it, a legend that not only finds symbolic repercussion in the significance and danger of material wealth, but also gets reenacted by characters within the plot. Conrad also claimed his major source for the country was a book called "Fifty Years of Misrule," fictitiously written by one of the characters in the novel. These projections of myth, alternative and lavish timelines, and the breaking of the facade of reality are techniques that predate, but are later much used by the Latin American magical realist writers such as Marquez or Borges, lending one to wonder if there is something in that land itself that breeds such labyrinthine histories.
4.30.2008
Library of Unique Experiences
As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
4.17.2008
Rewriting Reality
Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.
Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.
According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?
This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.
Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.
According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?
This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.
4.16.2008
Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Borges claims that art “requires visible unrealities” (Borges, 207). Of all the combinations of words that might resemble the universe, there are some stories that seem to be the real world in which we live. Yet however real we think these fictive worlds are, Borges argues that there are structural weaknesses that show them as false. Like the paradox of infinity, these “crevices of unreason” (Borges, 208) allow the reader to refute the existence of the world, or worlds, within the text. Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can serve as an example of this creation and refutation of the fictive universe. Though Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius are clearly the visible unrealities within the story, their presentation through a narrative device of magnified or distorted reflections allows them to become crevices of unreason, through which the “reality” in the story is shown to be equally fictional.
At the beginning of the story the narrator states that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (Borges, 3), that is, to a reflection of language. This phrase is immediately reflected in a quote the narrator’s friend had found in an encyclopedia article on the imagined county of Uqbar, and then reflected again when we learn that his friend had misquoted the text: “The visible universe was an illusion… mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe” (Borges, 4). It seems characteristic of Borges that this quote within the story refers to the narrative device at work in the text as a whole. We are told that this quote is the only interesting passage in an otherwise boring, which is to say believable, article, fortuitously found in the back of a single copy of a reprint of another encyclopedia. Here we see the mechanism at work: the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is a reflection in which is found the unreasonable crevice of the additional pages. The pages on Uqbar are a reflection of a believable country in which is found the dubious quote. The quote is reflected in its misquote and in its peculiar significance is found the possibility of an imagined country. What might have been an otherwise realistic evening is now cast under the question of Uqbar’s existence.
One could imagine this movement of reflection and distortion being carried on to infinity, but it seems that Borges settles on three reflections as enough to convey the effect. This narrative device achieves a paradox similar to the argument of the third man presented in “Avatars of the Tortoise:” If two men are placed in an archetype, “one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth…” (Borges, 203). By positing multiple fictional realities in his story, Borges manages to suggest that the number of possibly created worlds is endless; a set that includes and invades what seems to be the conventional reality.
Each of these visible unrealities is reflected and distorted from the one before, and even their manner of discovery functions through a similar telescopic mechanism. Tlön is first mentioned in the article on Uqbar as an example of the kind of literature from that imagined country, literature that “never referred to reality” (Borges, 5) but to other imaginary realms. However, beyond being just a reflection of the vaguely believable Uqbar, Tlön is magnified into a reality where the entire language, aesthetics, and philosophies are vastly different from our own. Similarly, the discovery of Tlön reflects that of Uqbar in being in an encyclopedia discovered by a friend. But what was a mere four-page article in a conventional encyclopedia has now become an entire volume in a set all related to the imaginary world, and what was Bioy Casares’ hazy recollection of Uqbar becomes the mysterious book mailed to Herbert Ashe after his death, and fortuitously discovered by the narrator.
We find another set of distorted reflections in Orbis Tertius, literally the third world created in the text. At first only referenced on a seal in the front of the Encylcopedia of Tlön, a letter from one of Herbert Ashe’s friends reveals that Orbis Tertius was created by the secret society who constructed Tlön, but was a whole planet written in one of the imaginary languages of that already imaginary country. Though little detail is given of this third world, besides that it is in a language consisting only of either verbs or adjectives, the device of distorted reflections used in the story might lead us to try and imagine a world infinitely more unlike our own than even Tlön.
It is at this point that reality breaks down in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Having been presented the first crevice of unreason in the form of Bioy’s misquote, the world in the story is now confronted with a potential infinity of counterfeit realities that threaten to enter into that world. As the narrator relates, artifacts from the imaginary Tlön make there way into the “real” world, followed by re-editions of the imaginary encyclopedia and the teaching of its languages and history in “real” schools. “The world will be Tlön” (Borges, 18), the narrator states, and in a world where such visible unrealities are able to exist from distorted reflections of reality, it is perhaps impossible for the universe to be anything but another fictional construction of language.
Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Avatars of the Tortoise.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edit. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007. Pp. 3-18, 202-208
[I am posting this essay due to James Gyre's excited comments over this masterful story from Borges. Everyone please go out and read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."]
In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Borges claims that art “requires visible unrealities” (Borges, 207). Of all the combinations of words that might resemble the universe, there are some stories that seem to be the real world in which we live. Yet however real we think these fictive worlds are, Borges argues that there are structural weaknesses that show them as false. Like the paradox of infinity, these “crevices of unreason” (Borges, 208) allow the reader to refute the existence of the world, or worlds, within the text. Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can serve as an example of this creation and refutation of the fictive universe. Though Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius are clearly the visible unrealities within the story, their presentation through a narrative device of magnified or distorted reflections allows them to become crevices of unreason, through which the “reality” in the story is shown to be equally fictional.
At the beginning of the story the narrator states that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (Borges, 3), that is, to a reflection of language. This phrase is immediately reflected in a quote the narrator’s friend had found in an encyclopedia article on the imagined county of Uqbar, and then reflected again when we learn that his friend had misquoted the text: “The visible universe was an illusion… mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe” (Borges, 4). It seems characteristic of Borges that this quote within the story refers to the narrative device at work in the text as a whole. We are told that this quote is the only interesting passage in an otherwise boring, which is to say believable, article, fortuitously found in the back of a single copy of a reprint of another encyclopedia. Here we see the mechanism at work: the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is a reflection in which is found the unreasonable crevice of the additional pages. The pages on Uqbar are a reflection of a believable country in which is found the dubious quote. The quote is reflected in its misquote and in its peculiar significance is found the possibility of an imagined country. What might have been an otherwise realistic evening is now cast under the question of Uqbar’s existence.
One could imagine this movement of reflection and distortion being carried on to infinity, but it seems that Borges settles on three reflections as enough to convey the effect. This narrative device achieves a paradox similar to the argument of the third man presented in “Avatars of the Tortoise:” If two men are placed in an archetype, “one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth…” (Borges, 203). By positing multiple fictional realities in his story, Borges manages to suggest that the number of possibly created worlds is endless; a set that includes and invades what seems to be the conventional reality.
Each of these visible unrealities is reflected and distorted from the one before, and even their manner of discovery functions through a similar telescopic mechanism. Tlön is first mentioned in the article on Uqbar as an example of the kind of literature from that imagined country, literature that “never referred to reality” (Borges, 5) but to other imaginary realms. However, beyond being just a reflection of the vaguely believable Uqbar, Tlön is magnified into a reality where the entire language, aesthetics, and philosophies are vastly different from our own. Similarly, the discovery of Tlön reflects that of Uqbar in being in an encyclopedia discovered by a friend. But what was a mere four-page article in a conventional encyclopedia has now become an entire volume in a set all related to the imaginary world, and what was Bioy Casares’ hazy recollection of Uqbar becomes the mysterious book mailed to Herbert Ashe after his death, and fortuitously discovered by the narrator.
We find another set of distorted reflections in Orbis Tertius, literally the third world created in the text. At first only referenced on a seal in the front of the Encylcopedia of Tlön, a letter from one of Herbert Ashe’s friends reveals that Orbis Tertius was created by the secret society who constructed Tlön, but was a whole planet written in one of the imaginary languages of that already imaginary country. Though little detail is given of this third world, besides that it is in a language consisting only of either verbs or adjectives, the device of distorted reflections used in the story might lead us to try and imagine a world infinitely more unlike our own than even Tlön.
It is at this point that reality breaks down in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Having been presented the first crevice of unreason in the form of Bioy’s misquote, the world in the story is now confronted with a potential infinity of counterfeit realities that threaten to enter into that world. As the narrator relates, artifacts from the imaginary Tlön make there way into the “real” world, followed by re-editions of the imaginary encyclopedia and the teaching of its languages and history in “real” schools. “The world will be Tlön” (Borges, 18), the narrator states, and in a world where such visible unrealities are able to exist from distorted reflections of reality, it is perhaps impossible for the universe to be anything but another fictional construction of language.
Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Avatars of the Tortoise.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edit. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007. Pp. 3-18, 202-208
[I am posting this essay due to James Gyre's excited comments over this masterful story from Borges. Everyone please go out and read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."]
4.15.2008
Synchronicity of the Fantastic
As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
4.11.2008
The Art of Inscription
"To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic. The instrument of that magic, language, is mysterious enough. We know noting of its origin. We know only that it divides into diverse lexicons and that each of them comprises an indefinite and changing vocabulary and an undefined number of syntactic possibilities. With those evasive elements I have formed this book."
-Jorge Luis Borges, 1985
-Jorge Luis Borges, 1985
4.10.2008
Clockwork Texts
I have to admit that I often feel like some what of an impostor writing literary critiques. Not that I couldn't tell you what is going on in a given story, but as a writer I am often more interested in unveiling an author's techniques, so that I can learn to use them (or not) in my own work. I am currently working on a critique of the use of mythic narrative forms in Beckett's "The Calmative," which while interesting in what it has to say about the literary use of mythical themes, is less fascinating then what seems to have been Beckett's implicit literary goal: to point out all of the conventional expectations about how narrative works, and then roundly demolish any chance that his stories will follow these conventions. Throughout the height of his prose career in the '50s, spanning from this story across his "trilogy," Beckett routinely looks at the typical narrative devices, plot, setting, characters, action, narrative voice, and then strips them away, so that by the "Texts for Nothing" there is literally no recognizable place where these elements can exist in the text. Certainly I could try and write a paper on this authorial move, but I find myself almost fascinated by the way these works have laid literary devices bare, so that I can hardly read any piece of writing without saying, oh here's where the author is using x expected device... It is like suddenly stumbling into the backstage of writing, the pulleys and costume changes of storytelling, and I almost want to hoard these techniques like they are some occult secret. The other day I was talking with my fiction teacher about the early authorial move of apprenticing yourself to a few authors, writing your own versions of their work in order to collect a "bag of tricks" that can be later dipped into in your own writing. While I haven't ever exactly written someone else's story I am always on the look out for these mechanical underpinnings of fiction.
More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.
More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.
1.06.2008
Review: Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest"
Last summer, watching me struggle through the symbolisms of my dreams, Sophie recommended that I look into the work of Mircea Eliade, who she had heard of in reference to a class on narrative she was taking. I immediately picked up a copy of "The Sacred and the Profane," which while presenting some interesting theories struck me as being somewhat meandering in tone and content. In the fall, during my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, I had a greater chance to look into Eliade's writing, and began to appreciate the depth of his scholarship and research into the field of comparative mythology and symbolism. However, as my teacher pointed out, while Eliade is known in America primarily for his work as the "founder" of the study of the history of religions, in Europe he is perhaps better known for his novels. In fact, some of his critics argue that Eliade's academic work is marred by a rather literary mindset, in which he seeks to present his material like a labyrinthine narrative more befitting of the magical realism of Marquez or Borges, and that his theories on mythology, and in particular the idea of the eternal return and the terror of history, were highly shaped by Eliade's youth in Romania between the World Wars. All this somewhat delighted me, and I was quite pleased to find in the school library a copy of Eliade's fictional masterpiece, "The Forbidden Forest."
Set in Romania and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to and through the second World War, this is the story of Stefan Vizeru, a man who desperately seeks to escape from the clutches of time, as his county and life are destroyed around him. Eliade presents this through startling psychological portraits of characters who all desperately attempt to live in their own personal mythologies, while furthering his own specific theories of hierophanies, the eternal return, etc. The Romanian title of the novel roughly translates as "The Night of Saint John," and the tale opens with Stefan meeting a young woman Ileana, named after a princess in Romanian folklore, who he searches for throughout the next twelve years until he meets her again on that same night in the same forbidden forest. Stefan is obsessed with finding experiences that are more real than real, such as a car that he believes the girl arrived in, or the mysterious woman Zissu whose name is mentioned while he is listening through a wall. Again and again, Stefan returns to the same characters and places, so that the whole novel, and all the historic events that take place in it, feel that they are really a dream lived between the two meetings in the forest. While many modern (or post-modern) novels try to make use of mythology, they often end up using stale tropes, whereas Eliade's exhaustive work on the subject is instead woven masterfully into his character's lives, so that they end up living out their own versions of the classic myths. Similarly, Eliade seems aware that he can only fully depict someone trying to escape from time by accurately depicting them in a historical setting, and the places where that "real world" seems to stop functioning and another time breaks through. On the whole, this novel bespeaks of a masterful grasp of symbols, storytelling, and a desire to break through the real world into a time that may indeed seem more real to those who seek to live it.
Set in Romania and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to and through the second World War, this is the story of Stefan Vizeru, a man who desperately seeks to escape from the clutches of time, as his county and life are destroyed around him. Eliade presents this through startling psychological portraits of characters who all desperately attempt to live in their own personal mythologies, while furthering his own specific theories of hierophanies, the eternal return, etc. The Romanian title of the novel roughly translates as "The Night of Saint John," and the tale opens with Stefan meeting a young woman Ileana, named after a princess in Romanian folklore, who he searches for throughout the next twelve years until he meets her again on that same night in the same forbidden forest. Stefan is obsessed with finding experiences that are more real than real, such as a car that he believes the girl arrived in, or the mysterious woman Zissu whose name is mentioned while he is listening through a wall. Again and again, Stefan returns to the same characters and places, so that the whole novel, and all the historic events that take place in it, feel that they are really a dream lived between the two meetings in the forest. While many modern (or post-modern) novels try to make use of mythology, they often end up using stale tropes, whereas Eliade's exhaustive work on the subject is instead woven masterfully into his character's lives, so that they end up living out their own versions of the classic myths. Similarly, Eliade seems aware that he can only fully depict someone trying to escape from time by accurately depicting them in a historical setting, and the places where that "real world" seems to stop functioning and another time breaks through. On the whole, this novel bespeaks of a masterful grasp of symbols, storytelling, and a desire to break through the real world into a time that may indeed seem more real to those who seek to live it.
7.24.2007
borderlines of the imagination
I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.
I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.
Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.
Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.
I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.
Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.
Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.
7.11.2005
on the books
and just because I approve of this meme going around, the 20 books that have most impacted my life (in no particular order):
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
1.13.2005
true names and the opening of the collective conscious
Yesterday I read Vernor Vinge's "True Names," and was inspired into finally using this blog account. This short story is perhaps one of the the key science fiction tales in shaping the vision and direction technology has taken over the last several decades as the first accredited depiction of cyberspace. Though that term didn't come about until later, from another sci-fi author, William Gibson, Vinge's "the Other Plane" essentially sets the foundation for the technological interface of humanity's information flows that we know of as the internet. It was a pretty good prophecy, as far as that goes. The interesting thing though was Vinge's choice to encode the story in terms of magick, the technological processes spelled out in terms of interpreting symbols and its most knowledgable users as warlocks. Which in a sense they are, the times not yet gone when working the complex code capable to craft a program, or even use a computer, seems to some a magical act. I personally know next to nothing about programming languages, but then again, I've been known to believe in magick.
The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.
There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.
We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.
One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.
The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.
All that being said, welcome to True Names.
The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.
There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.
We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.
One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.
The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.
All that being said, welcome to True Names.
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