A Yarn: The Burden of Proof (Unlimited Story #1)

[This is the first story generated by the now finished Unlimited Story Deck (beta version). The underlined words refer to the cards played.]



I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.

Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.

The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!

Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.



After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck's beauty: anything truly can happen!

Now to play it with more than one person...

Academicia

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).

On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

Adaptive Fictions

This is an interesting look from evolutionist Erin Johnson at the adaptive role fictions play in helping humans survive (from an article on Atheism as a Stealth Religion), not just in religions' use of gods, but in any thought or belief, that is expression as mythology:

This leads to a crucial distinction between what I call factual and practical realism. Consider Hans and Igor, who are mortal enemies. Hans understands that Igor is much like himself, even to the point of competing for the same square of ground. Igor regards Hans as an inhuman monster, completely unlike himself. If Igor's belief makes him fight with greater determination, then it counts as practically realistic, even if it is factually incorrect. Now imagine similar contests among beliefs--and the brains that create beliefs--taking place over thousands of generations of genetic and cultural evolution. Voila! We arrive at a conception of human mentality that is far more nuanced and interesting than the black-and-white cartoon of atheism vs. religion.

Factual and practical realism are not always at odds. To pick an obvious example, a hunter needs to know the exact location of his quarry. The point is that the relationship between the two is complex and that our minds are prepared to massively depart from factual realism, when necessary, in ways that motivate effective action. This is not a sign of mental weakness but a time-tested survival strategy. Moreover, adaptive fictions are not restricted to religions. Patriotic histories of nations have the same distorted and purpose-driven quality as religions, a fact that becomes obvious as soon as we consider the histories of nations other than our own. Intellectual movements such as feminism and postmodernism are often shamelessly open about yoking acceptable truths to perceived consequences. That's what it means to be politically correct. Scientific theories are not immune. Many scientific theories of the past become weirdly implausible with the passage of time, just like religions. When this happens, they are often revealed as not just wrong but as purpose-driven. Scientific theories cannot be expected to approximate factual reality when they are proposed, but only after they have been winnowed by empirical evidence.

These and other belief systems are not classified as religions because they don't invoke supernatural agents, but they are just like religions when they sacrifice factual realism on the altar of practical realism. The presence or absence of supernatural agents--a particular departure from factual realism--is just a detail. It is humbling to contemplate that the concerns typically voiced about religion need to be extended to virtually all forms of human thought. If anything, non-religious belief systems are a greater cause for concern because they do a better job of masquerading as factual reality. Call them stealth religions.

Questioning Socrates through the Socratic Method

In my religious studies class on Wisdom we have been reading Plato's dialogues, and were asked to write a dialogue in that style on whether or not we thought Socrates was actually wise (meaning of course that we had to actually state what we though wisdom is, something Socrates was loathe to do). I'm posting the results as part of my ongoing inquiry into human value(s). Interestingly, my take that wisdom should be some sort of heuristic or useful way of determining how to live in the world seems to be answered in our next class reading, Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics."


The Sophia

SOPHIA: My dear, thank you for being able to meet with me, I know that you have a lot of work to do this weekend.

TAIT: It is my pleasure. If I can I will always be available to you, and besides, it is a wonderful day out along the river, and I desperately needed a break from my writing. Now what was it you wanted to discuss?

SOPHIA: Wisdom, of which I always have so many questions, and as you know am in sore need of these days.

TAIT: I agree with that for my own sake. Did you not read Plato’s Five Dialogues that I lent to you? Did you not find Socrates to be wise?

SOPHIA: Well, they say Socrates is the wisest man there was, at least in the Western tradition, but I had a hard time understanding just what he thought wisdom is.

TAIT: How so?

SOPHIA: Well he talks in circles, always confounding any clear point he might make by loosing me in a labyrinth of language, and then when each dialogue is over he rushes off without giving any clear answer to what he’s getting at, like when discussing piety or virtue. It seems disingenuous; the wise should at least be able to make a clear statement of what that means, so that others might understand, if not follow them.

TAIT: I agree with you, wisdom should be articulable if anything is, but perhaps Socrates doesn’t know what wisdom is enough to state it clearly? As he admits in his Apology, he alone knows that he does not know anything, and perhaps this makes him wiser than others who do think they know.

SOPHIA: Perhaps, but if this is wisdom, he is not using it to help others become more wise. As he states, his project is to prove if others are wiser than him or not, and finds them all lacking. It seems that if we were to listen to him we would all become confused fools unable to even say that we know our own names!

TAIT: That would be tragic if it was true! He also says in Phaedo that his purpose is that others may agree with him, which I’m not sure whether to take seriously either. One clear point I do agree with is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and clearly he wants us to examine our lives on this subject, and by throwing out what we think we know perhaps we can come to a better understanding of what we don’t. I think he says some things about wisdom that it would be hard not to agree with as well.

SOPHIA: Such as?

TAIT: Let us spell them out directly, as you and I are both inimical to Socrates’ circular arguments, and perhaps we can make some sense of this subject. Reading through the dialogues, Socrates variously states that wisdom relates to the following: deciding what is right or doing and believing in what is right, piety or duty to obligations and agreements, justice, a preference for the truth, not prejudging knowledge, striving for such positive abstractions as Beauty or Goodness, courage or not fearing death, obeying the state or one’s superiors, caring for one’s virtue or excellence of the soul over the body or material concerns, examining our lives, finding what is right in oneself rather than in popular opinion, not doing wrong when others wrong you, moderation, directing our actions towards goodness, a true opinion from the gods (or from dreams and omens), a rejection of the body to prepare us for death, a cleansing or purification of the soul, following reason and truth rather than the senses, and a harmony of the soul.

SOPHIA: Well, that is indeed a motley list, what are we to do with it? Surely these are not all different kinds of wisdom?

TAIT: Hardly. Socrates likes to point out that we should not seek the particulars but the generalized Forms behind them (though that might only be Plato putting words in the wise man’s mouth; I’m not convinced these Forms aren’t some abstraction we have made up). But as such these would all be aspects of wisdom.

SOPHIA: And wisdom would be something that contains or expresses them all?

TAIT: Assuming they are all necessary for wisdom. There are perhaps a few I am not sure are so wise, namely where he equates wisdom with servitude, being death-driven, and god-granted. But first let’s get at the Form before throwing out the particulars, otherwise how would we have a definition or standard by which to judge the parts?

SOPHIA: That seems like a sound approach. What do they suggest?

TAIT: Let’s see… it seems that Socrates is suggesting that wisdom is a kind of thing that allows humans to direct their actions towards good or true ways of being in the world in order to prepare their souls for death. Does that sound correct?

SOPHIA: For now let us say wisdom is that. But what kind of thing is wisdom that it allows us to do this? Surely it is not a virtue itself like courage or justice, for as we said those are parts of wisdom, which wisdom helps us direct ourselves toward or with.

TAIT: Socrates does not say. Personally I am inclined to say that in our definition wisdom is a heuristic, a method or strategy for thinking or deciding our actions in an optimal manner.

SOPHIA: Ah! So that those who have wisdom have a method of living more virtuously than those who do not. That would be nice to have. How could I find such a way of directing myself?

TAIT: Socrates does not say that either. In fact, he is inclined to believe that we cannot learn wisdom at all, only recollect it from an earlier life, like virtue in Meno, or find it in ourselves as a true opinion granted by the gods.

SOPHIA: But if that is the case, how is it possible for some people to be wise and others not?

TAIT: Perhaps we are to think that some people do not recollect as well as others, or do not listen to the opinions of the gods as clearly. Others may not even believe in the gods, but that doesn’t seem to mean that they cannot also be wise, or that wisdom should not also be for the forgetful. These are the ones who might need wisdom the most!

SOPHIA: And surely Socrates would want them to have it, even if, as an Athenian, he was privileged with a certain kind of education and lifestyle that allowed him to go around questioning everyone else’s assumptions. He does seem concerned with people in general.

TAIT: He does, but doesn’t say much about them when discussing wisdom. Perhaps then our definition of wisdom is not wide enough, and other attributes are necessary for wisdom to be clearly stated. – Such as?

TAIT: Well, from what we just discussed, it seems that wisdom must necessarily be teachable, to anyone. Perhaps more specifically, this means to me that wisdom must be both practical and practicable, for without clear and direct methods or guides for directing our actions toward rightness or goodness, how are we to know if we are doing the correct thing? This is particularly the case in today’s world, which as we know is often very confusing. It is difficult to tell what is right, and often times we have to make choices between doing what we need to in order to survive and doing things in a virtuous manner. I know that sometimes going to work feels like it is not a right action, especially when it adds to the total amount of material consumption in the world, which I for one do not find virtuous. Yet I have to work in order to live. Whatever wisdom is, it should be practical enough to allow us to know what is the right way to act in morally ambiguous or paradoxical circumstances, not only directing us towards virtues in the abstract but also establishing them as a practice in our everyday lives.

SOPHIA: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that, but it is true. Do I drive my car to see my mother, or not see my mother because driving is bad for the environment? Socrates seems sure that the right action is generally a pretty clear thing, given by the gods, and now it is not the case at all!

TAIT: And it gets more complicated than that, I’m afraid. As we said before, wisdom should also be for those for whom it is hard to come by. I would go further to say that wisdom should be for everybody, in any place or time, regardless of upbringing or cultural values. For though Socrates’ wisdom is most clearly applicable to the society of ancient Greece, it would only be a part of the Form of wisdom if it were not also applicable to any situation in which it is beneficial to act with rightness, goodness, or truth.

SOPHIA: That does follow, and it would indeed be a great wisdom if all people could follow or practice it. But you said this was complicated?

TAIT: Yes, unfortunately. The thing Socrates neglects, perhaps in thinking of his particular culture as the apex of civilization, is that not everyone in all places and times has the same perspective on what is right, good, beautiful, or true. Even we in one place and time don’t know what is always right, and people raised under vastly different circumstances may come at what is right from entirely different directions. Consider beauty as an example. Though there is a Form of the Beautiful, particular things we encounter may be beautiful to one person but not to another, or, depending on our moods or experiences may appear variably beautiful to us or not. The other virtues are no different in being thus subjective. Certainly Socrates in Phaedo warns against finding arguments true at one time and not true at another, but what I consider true, and even feel to the depths of my soul to be true, may not seem at all that way to you, otherwise everyone would always be in agreement, and that is clearly not the case. Perhaps then there are greater truths that everyone could agree on, or greater rightnesses and beauties, and maybe wisdom could lead all people toward these specific, perfect forms.

SOPHIA: But that would be boring.

TAIT: It would indeed. Perhaps wisdom then necessarily has to embrace and respect a multiplicity and diversity of perspectives as to what the aims and means of wisdom are. Instead of believing that your truth is the best truth, it would be wiser to compare it with someone else’s truth and perhaps find a larger perspective in which they are both true. If there is any way of really knowing these Forms, it is through that aspect of wisdom. At the very least it would ease many of the tensions and arguments between people, who fight for not seeing eye to eye and from holding their own truths as absolutely true. As we said, wisdom must direct us to living right in the world, and peaceful resolution of conflicts along with human understanding seem to be right, if we can say anything is. Socrates suggests wisdom is a harmony of the soul, and I would say that when we say rightness or right action, it means being in such harmony or balance, with ourselves, with other people, and with the environment of our world.

SOPHIA: So then, wisdom must be a practical, teachable, and multiple-perspective embracing method of directing our actions towards good or true, that is, harmonious, ways of being in the world? That seems a fairly clear and useful definition.

TAIT: Yes, though you forgot that we also posited from Socrates’ statements that wisdom is not for the living, but to prepare us for death. In fact, Socrates makes clear he does not think it possible to really gain knowledge of wisdom until after we are dead.

SOPHIA: But that is preposterous. Why would we need wisdom after we are dead? How can that help us now, when we most need it?

TAIT: Well, Socrates believed that we are reborn, and can recall that wisdom in our lifetimes, but it seems an assumption to state these as if they are known, true things, when clearly, and even reasonably, we can not know anything while alive about what it is like to not be alive, regardless of what you, or Socrates, wants it to be like. And yet there is still this thing called wisdom, and there is still the need for us to live in harmonious ways while actually living. If it were only for death, why shouldn’t we just kill ourselves, or, like the Christians, do terrible things while alive knowing that what really counts is the afterlife? Certainly it seems wise not to fear death, and to prepare ourselves to meet it gracefully, but it seems even wiser not to fear life, with all its contradictions and material impulses. Any wisdom that I would truly call wisdom must necessarily be directed at directing our actions in this world, for it is only in this world, while alive, regardless of if there is an afterlife or rebirth, that our actions have effects and can achieve a greater harmony, not only in ourselves or in our time, but for all peoples and times to come.

SOPHIA: Amen. Wisdom then must not be some abstract philosophical pursuit, but a real lived concern with real results in this world.

TAIT: If it were not, would people still be discussing Socrates?

SOPHIA: Academics do love abstractions though… but wait; you had another disagreement with Socrates’ specific descriptions of wisdom, something about obedience or servitude not being wise.

TAIT: Yes, thank you for reminding me. I do disagree, not that obedience is necessarily bad, sometimes other people who hold authority over us do have better or more wise ways of doing things than we do, and contrariness for its own sake often achieves little (though I, like Socrates, seem to find some pleasure in questioning everything). My problem is that Socrates seems to suggest that one must always obey, in particular the State, and must continue to obey even if those in authority do something wrong to us or others. Socrates reasons that we have made an agreement and must follow it, but I say, those in authority have also made agreements that they must follow without doing us wrong, and if they did not make such agreements, why are we obeying them? Socrates suggests that if the state does wrong then we can try to convince them to do otherwise, but as we see with individuals who do wrong, they are not prone to listening to wise advice. And where does that leave us, except with that paradoxical choice to do the more right thing, either continuing to serve or rejecting servitude. Neither is wiser and both may be necessary. But the deeper issue is, can any situation where one person or group holds power or authority over another, especially through the threat of violence, ever result in the kind of harmony of the world that we have stated wisdom is directed towards?

SOPHIA: I… don’t know.

TAIT: I don’t either, but it’s not like history has given us that many opportunities to find out. The world is still a violent and disrespectful place, even if pierced by moments of levity. But it seems that if our definition of wisdom includes a respect for a multiplicity of perspectives, this must hold also true across divisions of power. Perhaps a wiser world would not have such divisions, or, when they are necessary, would not place the greater value on those with the greater power and might.

SOPHIA: But what if those with power know best what to do? And if they don’t, who else will teach us? Can we decide for ourselves how to act harmoniously or learn some other way? I feel we’ve created circles around this without even meaning to!

TAIT: Yes, wisdom is not so clear, nor is life. But that is why we must strive for it. I will try to answer by refuting another of Socrates’ points, and hopefully end it at that. In Phaedo, Socrates suggests that wise men cannot look after themselves when free, that their wisdom is god-given in this prison called life, which is to say that they have placed the higher authority, and the burden of making responsible choices, on some force that no one can see and may or may not actually exist. The only agreements made by the gods were in the stories we made up about them, and you would have to look very far to find a deity who was truly wise and harmonious in the world. – But…

TAIT: Yes, I know you believe there may be some higher force than the gods that is truly wise and in such harmony, but such a thing is beyond our immediate kin and rationalities, and any entreaties we make toward it are perhaps only a reflection of our own inner sense of the harmony of the world, which when projected outwards becomes more clear to us. I do not know, but don’t think we even need to posit such a thing, as reassuring as it may feel, in order to live wisely. If we can not turn to the gods, or other wiser men for knowledge of wisdom, then what do we have to turn to but ourselves, that is, our experiences, which when we allow ourselves to perceive, understand, and believe in, seeking always to balance them against our senses of harmony, do seem to grant us better ways of living in the world. That being the case, those most free to experience the world would by necessity be the wisest. That is what I strive for, though admittedly, I have experienced relatively little of what the world has to offer.

SOPHIA: I like the sound of it though. It feels true, or harmonious if you want to put it that way. And what we need then may not just be more of our own experiences, but other people’s experiences, a community of experiencers, sharing our different understandings and harmonies, which can add up, like our conversation here, into some greater sense of wisdom for the whole world! – I like that very much, and hope we may find such a community one day soon.

SOPHIA: But where? Who else here will listen to these wise words?

The Rational Fallacy (or, in the future noone can hear you dream)

Several rather unsettling potential futures have been trickling across the aether the past several days: the Semantic Apocalypse (or the evolutionary dead end of human consciousness), the death of free will (as the last grasp of the unenlightened), and what really makes me sad and/or laugh, the need(?) to get out of the narrative fallacy, that our evolutionary ability to make meaning out of sense-events by stringing them into recognizable narratives is perhaps no longer necessary, and from the sound of the article all rational beings ought to immediately stop telling themselves stories. The irony being that these are all stories that speak of both a need for control and meaning, and more so indicate to me some peculiar postmodern desire to no longer be human, to escape from the weird impulses of our bodies and all our non-linear reasons for doing what we do. As if in a fully rational world we can all finally be sterile passionless robots or programs, rows of ones and zeroes doing nothing unexpected, nothing out of bounds, a dystopia predicted long before 1984 in Zamyatin's "We." As if just because the Universe is a mysterious ungraspable place, on the largest and smallest scales, the only way we rational beings can bear its unfathomableness is by killing off our own mysterious uncertain selves. This is a future in which art, magic, even love would no longer be possible, because the rational fallacy seeks to do away with the fact that just as much as we are analytical beings we are also batshit crazy, I mean, that we crave meaning and find value in our lives from novelty and personal experience and not from predictable routines or the scientific rigor mortis of western materialism. What is the point of learning how the Universe works if not to better understand how we exist in it, or could better exist. What is the point of knowing if our knowings don't add up to a larger picture, and who would be looking at the picture? As PK Dick asked, do androids dream of electric sheep? We are still, and hopefully will remain, more than just our neurochemical programs, our biological probabilities.

Besides allowing us to learn how to evade saber tooth tigers, or even get up in the morning, stories always have and continue to serve a vital human function, that of allowing us to express how we are or should be in the world. What this means to us, individually or collectively, and where we are going next. Even prior to ethics or mythological taboos, without a sense of narrative there is literally no future, no reason to believe in the consequences of our current actions. Logic divorced from muthos will not allow us to better exist on earth tomorrow, let alone two minutes from now. Science for science's sake, without a grander story to guide its research and invention, produced the atomic bomb and conditions for global warming (though to be very clear, it was the rather fucked up stories of those in power that allowed such atrocities to happen), and without finding a balance, the solely rational mindset could produce further horrors. If our dreams can't become reality there will cease to be one. This is rather similar to how I see the contemporary atheist movement, cultishly trying to kill the religious impulse when it is impossible to prove or disprove whether or not gods exist, without even trying to understand what purpose they, their worship, and belief in general might still serve in helping people determine how to be in the world and with each other. The greatest irony is that any argument for atheism ultimately relies solely on faith, that there is stubbornly not more on heaven and earth than can ever be dreamed of in our philosophies. Personally I believe that everything is real or has the potential to be real, tangible or intangible, anything ever conceived of, no matter how surreal or unfathomable, exists. As Pablo Picasso put it, "everything we can imagine is real." To believe otherwise is to close your mind, or dare I say soul, to all that is beautiful, marvelous, or deep in what it is to be human, in what it still could mean to be human. This is my fear of arguments for such rational post/trans-humanism: that if we don't learn to accept, or even revel in, all the psychotic, creative, baffling irrationales with which humankind has always struggled, than any transcended intelligent being may find these repressed instincts come back to haunt them more so... assuming we have stories, consciousness, and the will to get us that far first.

On the total reaction to life

"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have?"

[William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902]

Manifestoes from Beyond the Real

Artists from all times have attempted to escape or transcend the constraints they saw in the culturally constructed realities in which they found themselves, often through the penning of manifestoes as statements of purpose for the new realities they wanted to instead create. I have also often struggled with this desperation against the day, in this age against the quotidian, the snarky, the postmodern, the realism that is "just this," when clearly there is so much more to living that can not be contained by pale reiterations of last century's visionaries whose words and worlds no longer apply, at the edge of the future, the crumbling edge of what may be left for us, the necessity of human survival let alone all the possibilities of the imagination, which are vast and untapped except by scattered madmen and genre writers. Despite the beauty of the manifestoes given below though, I have been trying to formulate a new perspective, not against reality or realism, because obviously we do live in the real world, if a limited constructed one, but a sense of reality that contains all that, all the horror and wonder, all the magic, dreams, the future, alternative histories and galactic alignments with the stars spiraling out of all expected orbits, the sense that every day, every moment, is an ultimate moment, reality being pushed to the furthest edges of where we have been, with the realization that we are only now barely learning just how far and fantastic we can go.


"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]

"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]

"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]

"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]

"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto

Punctuation and Post-literal Communications, or the curious life of !

Recently I have become more involved with sending text messages as a useful and quick form of communication. Usually I prefer face to face communications, or if that is not possible, then long monologuous letters (in an attempt to keep alive that dying art form). I absolutely loathe the telephone, mainly because it gives the illusion of having a real conversations, except that all you get is someone's disembodied and ghostly voice in your ear, but not all the gestures, non-verbal cues, pheromones, that make real live communication so intricate and exciting. The issue of course is the level of mediation between the conversants, which, as our technology and ability to quickly communicate through little boxes increases, destroys the necessity of those heightened modes of articulation inextricable from the meat.

Also destroyed however is any pretense at actual emotion, particularly when you are limited to a miniscule number of character spaces and want to communicate something of such vast importance, or even with an element of friendliness, etc. I find that when I write a text message (and this I'm sure applies to Twitter, though I have no desire to get caught up in that ephemeral epiphenomenon), that if I don't include punctuation and read it back to myself before hitting send, it often reads to me as somewhat dour, or at least, mechanical. How could these few typographical symbols convey anything of the complexity of what I am actually feeling? The easiest solution I have found is simply to tag an exclamation mark at the end of the message, which, though it conveys perhaps even less of what I mean, also conveys (for me, and this is important) a sense of immediacy and positivity that allows me to know that my message will not be read in a negative light.

An article on the history and contemporary use of the exclamation mark suggests that: "The origin of the exclamation mark is uncertain. The first one appeared in print around 1400. The exclamation mark, it has been argued, derives from the Latin Io (which means joy). One day (we hypothesise) somebody wrote a joyful upbeat sentence and to clinch that sense, they concluded it by putting the second letter of Io under the first."

However, "Shipley and Schwalbe are right when they say a sentence without exclamation marks is less friendly than one with at least two. When, though, did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: "I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!" The point is they didn't. They were being IRONIC."

Sure too much of anything makes it meaningless, but personally, I don't find anything ironic about the exclamation mark, for me it is still a symbol expressing io: excitement, epiphany, agreement. But then again, I don't care much for the emotional irony that hallmarks our postmodern age. When I text for example "I love you!" I don't mean that ironically. I mean it more emphatically then just "I love you", where the lack of punctuation is like a cliff you can fall off of into all the ambiguity and sadness of the contemporary world. Granted, there is much good poetry, fiction, etc. that intentionally dis-uses punctuation in order to convey that uncertainty of effect, but once punctuation marks no longer signal what they are supposed to (imagine a period meaning &, or to skip a sentence), then the doors are open for every typographic symbol to become unattached from its accepted meaning or phoneme, with the possibility that any letter in this sentence could actually refer to something else. Granted, this might not be such a bad thing, as that is the basis for cryptographic transmutations, but the whole point of language, particularly written language, is that it is a commonly understood means of communication, without which none of this would make any sense at all!

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.

True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).

In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).

According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.

This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.

Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).

Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).

Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).

For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.

Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.

In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.

If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).

Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.

As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.


Works Cited

Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976

Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998

Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984

Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000

Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001

Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Pastiche, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction. According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, these terms often appear in relation to the writings of Thomas Pynchon, as techniques of literary postmodernism. Pynchon is heralded as a forefather of American postmodernist literature, which raises certain problems in interpreting his texts, namely that postmodernism is itself a “weasel word;” as a cultural theory or perspective it seems to have no clear or unified definition. Searching through numerous books and articles on the subject left me even more uncertain as to what postmodernism might actually mean, so I took recourse in the general opinions of my cultural milieu and cobbled together a hazy understanding from the apocryphal heart of the internet: en.wikipedia.org. Postmodernism then “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, or interreferentiality,” and is often characterized by a lack of belief in absolute truth along with the corollary notion that reality is therefore constructed from our perspectives and use of language . At least that’s how I took what I read.

It may seem irrelevant, or just bad scholarship, to refer to Wikipedia, postmodernism, or my own process of grappling with this material, but, I would argue as a writer attempting to learn from contemporary literature, that these are all performances of what Pynchon does in Slow Learner (as well as in the rest of his oeuvre, though we unfortunately won’t get to that) by use of the techniques mentioned in the first line of this paper. Through the engagement of his early stories’ characters, readers, and the author himself with a hodgepodge of texts, cultural references, and modes of storytelling, Pynchon creates what might best be called apocryphal or alternate realities, which in turn trouble the conventional notion that reality is absolute in favor of contemporary models of reality production.

As a literary technique, pastiche is the combining of diverse elements in a text, from styles and genres to cultural levels (such as the blending of high and low culture). We can see this pastiche of cultural levels in Pynchon’s short story The Small Rain, where the staff sergeant Rizzo “would lie in his bunk and read things like Being and Nothingness and Form and Value in Modern Poetry, scorning the westerns, sex novels, and whodunnits that his companions kept trying to lend him” (36). This placing together of various cultural references does not only serve to represent the intellectual climate of the army, but also signifies the protagonist “Lardass” Levine’s conflict in the story. Even though Levine is a “college graduate, [with the] highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33), he still finds himself attracted to artifacts and situation of low culture, as in the sex novel Swamp Wench. Pynchon illustrates this cultural conflict further by displacing the action onto a college campus, and then having Levine encounter a girl in the exact swamp-shack situation described in the pulp he’s reading, whom Levine treats with the “same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels or for the burned out but impotent good guy ranchers in a western” (50). While this attitude might come off as poor characterization, it also shows that it is the characters themselves who are pastiched together in The Small Rain, as representations of the cultural attitudes they espouse.

We see a similar use of pastiche on the walls of Dennis Flange’s room in Low-lands, “walls covered with photographs clipped out of every publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression” (67). This juxtaposition of high and low culture historical figures into a “rogues’ gallery of faded sensation fragile as tabloid paper, blurred as the common humanity of a nine-day wonder” (68), effectively flattens out modern culture into the very newspaper on which it is printed as an example of the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of the postmodernist style. In other words we are shown that reality is something that is constructed through being represented.

While Entropy continues this use of pastiche through its almost constant barrage of classical and contemporary musical allusions, this story extends the technique beyond the mention of references into the intertextual use of borrowed texts from various scientific and historical discourses. Callisto, for example, discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in a third person, autodiegetic, stream of conscious monologue): “He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases” (87). By displaying this scientific discourse alongside other discourses of socio-political power (such as those of Henry Adams and Machiavelli), the character is able to find in the concept of entropy a “metaphor to apply to certain phenomena of his own world” (88), a concept made only more real when we see it played out in the party scene on the floor below. This intertextuality of “real world” dialogues in a fictional world allows the characters to engage in what we generally consider to be the world outside the text. At the same time however, these integrated texts require the reader to engage both with the real texts themselves as well as with their presentation in the story, forcing us to collude with the characters in treating the world in the story as a real world.

Pynchon seems highly aware of this interactional nature of storytelling, so much so that he has his character Dennis Flange in Low-lands muse on the very subject in relation to the telling of personal sea stories as a function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things” (69).

This metafictional foregrounding of the art of fiction within the story itself troubles whatever illusions we might have left that reality is not something created through our uncertain observations and utterances. As Flange finds in the story, his strongly recalled memories of himself as a rogue sea-dog actively screw up his perspective as existing in a normalized suburban reality and plunge him instead into an equally real subterranean adventure. So to might we find that our engagements with and observations of our own lives and historical realities are what create the worlds we live in. Any historian is ultimately a storyteller writing from his or her own perspective.

In Under the Rose, Pynchon continues this metafictional technique by having the spy Porpentine mention that another character could have gotten his information on the state of affairs of Egypt “from any Baedeker” (115). Pynchon himself admits in the introduction to Slow Learner that Baedeker’s “guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major ‘source’ for the story” (17). This fictionalization of historical events or settings, called historigraphic metafiction , serves several purposes in the story. By presenting a wealth of historical detail, Pynchon manages to suggest an actual historical reality in the text, which is troubled by the anachronistic inclusion of the android Bongo-Shaftsbury, who, with similarly realistic description, has a “miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin [of his arm]” (121). This writing of a seemingly accurate historical reality from a point in the future also allows Pynchon’s characters to comment, somewhat prophetically, about the future of their own historical period. Porpentine, for instance, muses: “history was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (107).

This last comment of Pynchon’s on the act of writing, that history is becoming written by “man in the mass,” does indeed seem to be our current cultural reality. Anyone can edit the articles of Wikipedia, anyone can posit a definition of cultural theories like postmodernism, and anyone can tell a story. Pynchon’s apocryphal style of writing, which re-presents reality as something that we construct, suggests that this new, democratic model of writing historical or theoretical documents is perhaps more “truthful” to the way our reality is actually produced: through our engagement with texts, cultures, and our experiences of these things, new realities can be created beyond what we imagined was only possible on the pages of storybooks.


Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Postmodernism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postmodernism (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pastiche,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Pastiche (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Metafiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopdia, s.v. “Historigraphic Metafiction,” http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiographic_metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere

After many adventures in a magical realm beneath the city of London, Richard Mayhew, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, is faced with the harrowing ordeal of the key: the possibility that he has actually spent the last week as a crazy homeless person rather than a fantasy hero, and that by realizing this he is now, “starting to edge a little closer to sanity” (243). If he believes in the everyday reality suggested by the phantoms of his real-life friends, then Richard will edge not only closer to “sanity,” but to the suicidal edge of a subway platform. He also has the seemingly impossible choice of believing in the primacy or immediacy of the magical world, and in doing so go on to win the key, complete his quest, and become the greatest warrior in London Below.

At the crux of Richard’s ordeal is the necessity of belief in the magical or otherwise non-real reality in which he’s found himself. This question of belief is also at the heart of the reader’s quest through the book. If we approach the ordeal cold, that is, without already having read and believed in the magical world of Neverwhere, then we are likely to agree that Richard is mad, and instead side with his friend Gary, who claims of London Above that, “this is reality. Get used to it. It’s all there is” (368). Only the most unimaginatively adult readers seem likely to chose this interpretation of the text, but what allows the rest of us to so willingly believe in this world of angels, warriors, and rat-speakers? By applying certain Romantic and Fantasy theories of belief to the story – Coleridge’s concept of the suspension of disbelief, Tolkien’s thoughts on the consistency of Secondary Worlds, Blake’s Contrary Method, and Todorov’s notion of hesitation in the face of fantastic events – we can see how Gaiman has not only managed to create a compelling magical world in London Below, as well as inclined the reader to identify with his protagonist’s quest of believing in Neverwhere, but also questioned our belief in the primacy of our everyday reality.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Like most people since the rational Age of Enlightenment, it is unlikely that you live in a world convincingly inhabited by faeries, witches or other creatures of fancy. The new sciences of the Eighteenth Century led to a general disbelief by the educated classes in real supernatural agents, which led to a decline of their use in the poetry and fiction of the period. The Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose focus on the powers of the imagination made him one of the forefathers of the genre of fantasy, struggled with this question of how to include non-realistic elements in his and his contemporaries’ writings. How could he convince readers to overlook the implausibility of such fantastic narratives, as with the undead sailors in his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

In chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, Coleridge suggests that supernatural stories can be framed, “so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief… which constitutes poetic faith.” This ‘suspension of disbelief,’ as the term has found purchase in contemporary culture, also requires for Coleridge: “the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real,” and is the power of imagination that “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (a phrase that echoes the Contrary Method of William Blake, another Romantic poet-philosopher whose ideas we will consider as an undercurrent to the more theoretical mechanics of believability).

While it may be difficult to untangle Coleridge’s centuries-old language it is still possible to apply his ideas to contemporary supernatural fictions such as Gaiman’s Neverwhere. At heart of our ability to suspend disbelief is the representation of the supernatural, not only as something really happening, but also as containing some relevance to everyday human affairs. At the beginning of the novel, Richard Mayhew is presented as an “everyman,” inhabiting a reality that, like for most of us, consists solely of: “work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life;” a description tempered by the very real question, “is that all there is” (364)? Like many people in the contemporary world, Richard has problems at the office, problems in his relationship, an inability to hold his liquor, and a penchant for material goods (such as mass-produced trolls), “in a vain attempt at injecting a little personality into his working world” (12). By his sheer normalcy it would be impossible not to believe that Richard contains a “semblance of truth;” he represents each of us, more than we might comfortably like to admit.

It is not just Richard Mayhew’s ordinariness that we identify with (if so we could do away with the supernatural altogether and confine ourselves to the social realism of a Charles Dickens novel), but also his uncertainty about the world in which he lives. After being told his fortune in the opening scene, Richard is, true to a realistic emotional response to the situation, “a little unsure how to treat information of this nature” (3). This uncertainty deepens when he moves to the city of London, which Richard at first finds to be “fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map… giving it any semblance of order” (8). Who has not been lost in a new city, or even in a familiar city stumbled upon, as Richard does in a taxi ride home, “an unlikely route involving streets… never before seen” (19)? Richard is uncertain about the world, but that world itself is also uncertain. London’s chaotic history and growth, as narrated by Gaiman, allow an unexpected place for more than just everyday experiences to occur.

But what kind of extraordinary circumstance might a typical man encounter in a presumably real city? If, as Coleridge suggests, the imagination works through the balance of opposites, or, as Blake asserts in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries [there] is no progression,” then the only believable encounter is with a supernaturally powered woman from an assuredly fantastic otherworld. Just as Richard is at his wits end in dealing with the real world, a blank wall opens, and Door appears from London Below. By reacting with true human kindness to the hurt girl at his feet (as opposed to the caricatured blindness of his fiancé Jessica), Richard saves himself from the mundanity of dinner with the boss, and allows the reader to suspend their own disbelief, following our hero into the infinitely more exciting realms of the imagination.

The Inner Consistency of the Secondary World
In the century following Coleridge’s concept of the willing suspension of disbelief, supernatural elements once again became more common in literature. Many of these magical worlds however only seemed half-realized, or worse, were merely allegories for real-world events and religious doctrines (for example consider the realm of the seven dimensions in George MacDonald’s Lilith, which is only fully explicable in light of Biblical narratives). In 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings stands as the first major work in the fantasy genre, delivered a lecture entitled On Fairy-stories, which attempts to make clearer the mechanics of successful make-believe. Tolkien disagreed that the reader suspends their disbelief in a supernatural world, if so they are merely going along with it for sentiment’s sake. The burden of belief instead resides with the author, who can make “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world” (37). While difficult to achieve, such fantasies require “the inner consistency of reality” (48), that is, there are rules to the way a successful Secondary World operates.

Discovering the rules of a new magical reality is one of the great joys of reading good fantasy, and Neverwhere is no exception. As an added bonus, Richard Mayhew’s quest is often comprised of this need to discover how the Secondary World works. In his first foray into London Below, Richard “realized that he did not know very much about what went on beneath London” (47), but he will soon discover that his very survival depends on finding out! This paradoxically leads to the first rule of Neverwhere: the more you learn about London Below the less likely you are of being able to return to the real world of London Above. After he rescues Door she tells Richard it wouldn’t do him any good to know what happened to her, and the Marquis de Carabas forbids Richard not only from asking questions but also tells him not to “even think about what’s happening to you right now” (47). Though these characters are trying to save Richard from getting trapped in their world, Richard (and the reader along with him) can’t help but wonder about the little bits of magic we see, and consequently are drawn deeper into London Below.

The true magic of the novel, and what makes finding out the rules of London Below both an enjoyable and believable experience, is that this Secondary World works through puns and juxtapositions, so that we see familiar elements of our world in an entirely new light. This use of Blake’s Contrary Method is first hinted at in the Prologue to Neverwhere, when, after looking at a map of the London Underground, “Richard found himself pondering… whether there really was a circus at Oxford Circus” (4). Whenever a Tube station is mentioned it becomes increasingly more obvious that the station’s title will be taken literally: there is a bridge at Knightsbridge, an earl at Earl’s Court, shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush, black friars at Blackfriars. Though not every Tube station is visited in the course of the novel, the inclusion of the map in the front of the book leads the reader to continue filling out the world of London Below in their imagination through application of this rule of the metaphor made literal. Eventually Richard, and the reader, stops questioning the rule: “the longer he was here, the more he took at face value” (161).

It is not just the landscape of London Below that plays off the familiar; the characters and events follow these rules as well. Though the villains Croup and Vandemar “did not look like anything Richard had seen before” (33), their and Door’s clothing calls to Richard’s mind “the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum” (29). Old Bailey’s rooftop lair reminds Richard of a theatrical performance of Robinson Crusoe. The feast served to our heroes by the Earl at Earl’s Court is “Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate,” and an antique goblet “filled with Coca-Cola” (160). We are led to believe that the Secondary World of London Below is internally consistent because, through these juxtapositions with and references to the familiar, we see where the supernatural fits inside of or coexists with our everyday reality. The lack of contradictions to our world makes London Below seem like it could really exist! This is a testament to Gaiman’s powers of sub-creation; like Richard perhaps we too can go “beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are” (307).

Hesitation in the Face of the Fantastic
Though London Below is presented as a consistent Secondary World where Richard “was at least learning to play the game” (102), in order to believe in Neverwhere ourselves we must more fully explore the significance of the supernatural events of London Below existing along side the familiar, mundane world. As Coleridge suggests, in order to suspend our disbelief the character must react as if these events were actually happening in the real world. The Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov, in his 1970 book Inroduction á la littérature fantastique (The Fantastic), presents what seems to be one of the truest literary responses to a confrontation with the extraordinary: uncertainty or hesitation. “In a world which is indeed our world… there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world… the fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Because “the fantastic implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated,” and so “the character wonders (and the reader with him) whether what is happening to him is real” (31 and 24). The fantastic works through presenting a supernatural event along side a series of potentially rational explanations – drugs, madness, dreams, tricks, illusions, and coincidences (45) – that never quite account for what happened, thus urging the character and reader towards belief in the supernatural.

Throughout Neverwhere, Richrad Mayhew is essentially characterized by this response of hesitation; he is constantly positing unlikely explanations for the fantastic events he encounters. When Door asks him to apologize to what seems to be a talking rat, Richard considers that “maybe he was the one who was going mad” (42). Our hero has a similar need to rationally account for his sudden invisibility to the real world when he returns from his first encounter with London Below: “whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank” (61). Because nothing he is experiencing makes rational sense, Richard also finds recourse in the possibility that he “walked into a nightmare” (126). The Ordeal itself essentially catalogues Todorov’s explanations, as being potentially a dream, a figment of Richard’s imagination, or a break in his sanity (242). In order to pass the test however, and not consider one of these explanations as real, Richard must already have established a belief in the primacy of the supernatural world of London Below.

At certain key points in the story, Richard and the reader realize that we cannot explain away the marvelous events that seem to be happening. Upon meeting the angel Islington, Richard realizes that “it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name” (197). No rational explanation can account for this direct encounter with the supernatural. On the other hand, after “experiencing the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things” (133), the party reaches British Museum Station, which Richard finds to be “one oddity too many” (164). This turns the hesitant reaction to supernatural events on its head, because it turns out this Tube station really did exist; it seems fantastic merely because Richard does not know everything that exists in the real world of London Above. “He wondered how normal London – his London – would look to an alien” (112). Eventually Richard, and the reader, learn to accept that “the simplest and most likely explanations for what he had seen and experienced recently were the ones that had been offered him – no matter how unlikely they might seem” (201), but without total knowledge of the real world or an objective frame of reference, who is to say what seemingly marvelous events aren’t equally as real?

Belief Beyond the Cavern of the Real
This question of whether or not supernatural events could actually occur seems to be a central concern of Neil Gaiman’s novel. That we feel the need to posit rational explanations for seemingly unreal circumstances merely belies a human preference for the primacy of the everyday world with which we are most familiar. As Blake however suggests in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” When Richard rescues Door at the beginning of Neverwhere, “a normal, sensible Richard Mayhew… was telling him how ridiculous he was being” (25), or, when returning to what he considers to be the primary reality, Richard believes that “the events of the previous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely” (56). These expectations about what is real form the narrow chinks of Richard’s cavern, which are progressively widened to encompass a much broader worldview. How could something like the fantastic Night’s Bridge exist “beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing” (100)? The answer occurs later when the guests at the museum, exemplary of this realistic mindset, are confronted with the supernatural opening of the Angelus: “ having dealt with something entirely outside their experience, agreed, somehow, without a word, that it had simply never happened” (196). Our belief in the primacy of the everyday reality is merely a social or cultural convention based on a familiarity with what we expect is possible, and is a much more recent modern invention compared to the age-old belief in invisible spirits.

Blake might argue through his Contrary Method that, like good and evil, reality and fantasy necessitate each other. How can we know what is real unless the unreal also exists? In Neverwhere, we can only really see Richard Mayhew as a real and identifiable character in his interactions with the internally consistent magical reality of London Below. And given a choice between these two realities on his return to London Above, Richard claims that “if [the real world] is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane” (369). At the end of the story, Richard creates a door and chooses to return to the magical world of London Below, clearly favoring his belief in the primacy of the supernatural. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem clear whether or not this last supernatural event occurs (though in our imaginations we can continue the story and “find out”), so it is left up to the reader and our own preferences between reality and the supernatural to choose whether we too believe in Neverwhere.

Works Cited

Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake Digital Text Project. 2003.
University of Georgia. 12 Apr. 2009.

Colerdige, Samuel Taylor. “Biographia Literaria.” Michael Gamer: Home Page.
University of Pennsylvania. 12 Apr. 2009


Gaiman, Neil. “Neverwhere.” Avon Books. New York: 1998

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” Trans.
Richard Howard. Cornell University Press. Ithaca: 1995

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-stories.” The Tolkien Reader. Ballantine Books. New York:
1971