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.

Wild Things

Taking a break from such heavy cosmological topics as the Universe ending in heat death sooner than anticipated and a new translation of the Bible that shows God did not create heaven and earth but merely separate what was already there, Sophie and I went out last night to check out the opening night of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Despite reviews claiming the movie is too depressing or frightening we both found it highly charming, particularly the stellar acting of child-star Max Records, the intricate costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and upbeat soundtrack from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O [Found link, for preview purposes only, buy here]. It was interesting to note that the audience was primarily comprised of young adults, who probably were raised on Sendak's masterpiece and are perhaps the intended target demographic of Dave Egger's script (the whole movie really capturing the indie spirit of the times).


[Potential Spoilers Below]

The thing that really stuck out for me though was what this movie says about the human imagination. Despite our cultural love of monsters and fantasy, the imagination here is presented in its rawest or most primal. Shaggy monsters dance and tear up the woods and throw clods of dirt at each other. Everyone howls and growls. Certainly the monsters possess some amount of adult-like self-reflection (enough to come off as rather depressed), but no more than Max himself. In fact, one could take a psychological perspective that the monsters and their land are all projections of Max's own fears and desires, for friendship, against alienation and being young and misunderstood if not ignored.

But what is interesting was the choice of not stating whether the events of Max's journey really took place or not. The final return scene has no dialogue, so we aren't asked to chose with Max over what really happened, even if with all the day to night transitions he must have been gone for several weeks. This draws on elements of the Fantastic in art, that supernatural events are left ambiguous as to their reality. This is a necessary move because the audience, instead of being asked to decide what is real here, can instead suspend their disbelief and let the monsters be real. They are reflections of ourselves. Of course, this in turn adds more weight to what both Sophie and I decided was one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, when the monster Carrol rips the bird monster's arm off, and the camera focuses on a stream of sand spilling out. Up till this point, Max has taken the monsters as real, but they are shown to be not real, and he starts feeling the need of returning home to his flesh and blood family.

What this says for me is that despite how primal and raw we sometimes need to express our imaginations as children, this rawness sometimes tears holes in the stories we make up and tell ourselves, and shows us what is more importantly real in our lives. For another example, in a school scene at the beginning of the movie, Max is told that one day the sun is going to die, which when he tells the monsters makes them even more depressed and desperate (to tie this in with the links at the beginning of this entry). I think we are encouraged to equate those kinds of predictions of science with the imagination as well, as something that must ultimately give way to the reality of the present and the more immediate significance of our families and loves.

Mild-Mannered Physicist or Interplanetary Hero?

"This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of "strange and adventurous" science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. The protagonist shared his name, and eventually the physicist started thinking he really was the character. But he was still able to maintain a dual identity -- he sort of "astral projected" into that fantasy world while keeping the appearance of a skinny-tie wearing physicist." [via boingboing]

What strikes me as incredible is that this man brought to his court-ordered psychiatrist over 12,000 pages of painstakingly detailed stories, histories, architectural and sociological facts, all gathered from what, if not madness, was the product of an immensely hyper-active imagination. The physicist actually lived in that sci-fi world, to the extent that his psychiatrist feared curing the delusion might kill him. As someone who has intentionally created a complex and interwoven internal reality/story from dreams (which leads me to say that I have lived twice as much as those who don't dream, and the second life much wilder), I am fascinated and a little horrified, knowing very well the danger that lies in taking your fantasies to be more real than the normative reality, just as real, yes, but when our ability to take care of ourselves or others is threatened by just not paying enough attention, or acting out from the wrong attention: that way does lie madness. But not because you see things, that's still a real experience, communicated as best it can be.

I am reminded of the outsider artist Henry Darger (best depicted In the Realms of the Unreal), creating an elaborate mythology of armies of little girls till he died unknown in his attic and his neighbors found the bizarre 15,000 page illustrated manuscript. Talk about tomes. To some degree great works seem to take actually existing in these fantastic other places for extended periods of time, whole lives, yet we still have to do what we have to to be here, because living is a great work as well.

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

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Every quest has a goal, but sometimes these goals contain subtler, more far-reaching effects than their stated purpose. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the explicit goal is to save the world of Middle-Earth from the evil of Sauron by destroying the One Ring. While this act certainly rids the world of evil, it also serves another purpose for its inhabitants, cultures, and environment: that of allowing this reality to continue into the future. In this sense, ‘saving the world’ preserves or records what has come before for those who are yet to come. And though we do not find ourselves slaying evil warlocks in our daily lives, we too can participate in this quest through the symbolic applicability of the ideals in The Lord of the Rings to our modern life. This paper will examine the ways in which this preservationist sense of ‘saving the world’ is illustrated in the history of Middle-Earth, in the early stages of the ring quest, and in the writing and reception of Tolkien’s masterpiece in our own reality.

If the whole world is at stake in the quest, we must first understand what that world is before it can be saved. The epic story told in The Lord of the Rings is only the tip of the iceberg, or the dénouement, of a long and winding history stretching back thousands of years before men, much less hobbits, were even conceived. In many places in the text, references are made to historical persons and events that, while not bearing directly on the tale, are still an integral part of that reality. In a letter to his publisher, Milton Waldman, Tolkien discusses this history, suggesting that Middle-Earth grew out of or was invented to house his imaginary languages of the Elves (143). Already we can see this world as a kind of record, moving from creation myths to the histories of the Elven people, respectively recorded by Tolkien in the Music of the Ainur and the Silmarillion (146). Middle-Earth is a world created by the gods (who imagined it as a story), but it is incomplete. In order for the world to be fully made it has to be made for someone: the Children of the Gods, who are the Elves, and later Men (147). The world is made in order to pass it on, like a grand inheritance, including all the cultures and ideals that world contains.

As the history of Middle-Earth deals primarily with the Elves, it is necessary to look at how Elven culture helped shape the Middle-Earthian ideals of preserving the world. Elves are immortal, and thus concerned with, “the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change” (146). Elven magic is a sub-creative art rather than a dominating power, and they desire to use magic to “benefit the world and others,” including the environment, through the “adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts” (146, 151). Tolkien similarly points out that Elrond’s house represents Lore; the art of the Elves includes, “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful” (153). If the elves have a flaw however, it is in wanting to preserve this beautiful world around them as it is, despite the passage of time. But as the world inevitably changes, their art eventually becomes ineffectual, “a kind of embalming” (151). The main purpose of the Rings of Power stems from (and perverts) this Elven desire: “the prevention and slowing of decay” (152). This brings out another facet of ‘saving the world,’ that we can only safeguard reality for those who come after us, and not for ourselves.

While the Elves are First-born, it is their duty in turn to fade like the gods, and to pass Middle-Earth on to the Followers, Men. Having no magic of their own, Men are not as concerned with the preservation of goodness and beauty in their world, and they more readily fall prey to the dark forces at work in Middle-Earth. The elves however passed on to Men a “strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance” on which the art and poetry of man depends (149), that is, the ability and desire to pass on their own ideals through the art of cultural transmission. This is highly significant, because unlike Elves, Men are mortal. In his article, The Quest Hero, W.H. Auden suggests that quests serve as “symbolic descriptions of our personal experience of existence as historical” (33). The telos, the goal or end point, of any life is in death, and as such the quest is always in some way an attempt to defy death, which is attempted in two drastically different ways. The Men in the Second Age of Middle-Earth are denied immortality, but still act out of the received Elven ideals of preserving themselves, by desiring either more time in life or to escape death altogether (Tolkien Letters, 154-5). This desire for eternal life unfortunately results in the aligning of the kingdoms of Men with Sauron against the gods in a terrible and world-twisting battle (ibid, 156). On the other hand, Men can face death by saving the world: by both defeating the evil forces that encourage destruction and by leaving behind cultural records for the benefit of the world that follows. At stake in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in which The Lord of the Rings takes place, are not only the world itself, but also the ability to continue to save the world through the preserved legacies of mankind.

Sauron is not defeated until the end of the third book of The Lord of the Rings, but the ways in which the story’s heroes can save the world through cultural legacy are already suggested early on in the quest, in The Fellowship of the Ring. The history of the One Ring itself highlights some of the personal challenges reflected in this theme of inheritance. As Elrond recalls the story during the Council of Elrond, the Ring was taken from the hand of Sauron and then lost by the human Isildur (320), who wanted to keep its power for himself. Isildur’s heir, Aragorn, inherits the Sword of Elendil, the broken blade of which symbolizes Aragorn’s duty to mend the damage caused by his ancestor’s greed. Aragorn does this by first protecting the peoples of the North, and then joining the quest that will restore him to his inherited place on the throne at Minas Tirith. While the One Ring passes from Isildur to Golem, these characters loose the ring because they want to preserve themselves and not their world. The next inheritor though, Bilbo Baggins, chooses to give up the ring to his nephew Frodo on his own accord (79). Frodo is Biblo’s heir, for his property, wealth, and stories. But it is the act of being given the Ring freely that allows Frodo the ability and desire to want to, “save the Shire” (96), and by extension, the rest of the world of Middle-Earth, which he does by going on the quest to destroy the Ring. The Ring is passed on for the sake of the future.

The quest to resolve the inheritance of the Ring is not the only way that the inhabitants of Middle-Earth in the Third Age are attempting to save their world. One might even say from the amount of stories, songs, and knowledge recorded in the text that the chief pastime of the Middle-Earthian races is the preservation and transmission of their cultural realities. Beyond the large-scale histories preserved through their retelling by Gandalf and Elrond, other historical events are recorded in the Elf-songs to Elbereth, Gil-galad, and Eärendil (117, 250, and 308), sung not just by Elves, but also by Samwise and Bilbo. Though the Elves are fading into legend their history is preserved in song, and more importantly their language is also being preserved, as Bilbo teaches Frodo the Ancient Tongue of the Elves (119). And it is not just the high culture of the Elves that is preserved; Glóin reounts the Dwarven attempt to reclaim their own cultural heritage by excavating Moria (316), and even Hobbit history is recorded, as in the legend of Gorhendad Oldbuck and the school song about trolls (141 and 276). Beyond these cultural inheritances, knowledge of the land itself is preserved in the stories of Tom Bombadil. The ancient Tom not only knows the secret stories of the trees and environment of Middle-Earth, but also willingly shares these with the Hobbits, so that they too can pass on the full history of their world (181). As we see from the Notes on the Shire Records that opens the text, Frodo’s three Hobbit companions go on after the quest is finished to record information on the legends, names, languages, calendars, and herblore of Middle-Earth (37), effectively preserving everything that has come before for the future ages of their world.

While these introductory Notes on the Shire Records bodes well for the result of the quest, they are only possible by the quest being both completed and recorded. And these are achieved through two instances of the intersection of individual inheritance and cultural legacy that highlight the theme of saving the world in The Fellowship of the Ring. The first of these instances is Gandalf’s search through the libraries of Minas Tirath for proof of the One Ring: a scroll written by Isildur that accounts for the inscription on the Ring. Despite Isildur’s desire to keep the ring for his own inheritance, he leaves this account, “lest a time come when the memory of these great matters shall grow dim” (331). Even the caretakers of the library had forgotten this scroll, and if Gandalf had not had the knowledge to find these memories of the past, the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would have been condemned to repeat their forefathers’ desire to hide or use the One Ring. It is the finding of the record of the inscription that ends Gandalf’s quest and begins Frodo’s journey. But once the journey is finished, how are the future inhabitants of the world supposed to remember the quest, much less we the readers, unless better records are left behind? To this end, Bilbo wants to record Frodo’s story as a book, and even asks him to bring back any old songs and tales he comes across on the way (327 and 364). Bilbo is already recording Middle-Earthian cultures and legends; a selection of his Red book of Westmarch has been published (in our own world) as The Hobbit (20). As such, Bilbo’s act of recording Frodo’s journey ultimately saves their world, as it becomes for us the books of The Lord of the Rings.

While the world of Middle-Earth began as a linguistic exercise, Tolkien suggests in his letters that he wrote The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to conclude and encapsulate all the histories and themes of his imagined world (159). There was however another goal at stake in Tolkien’s invention of Middle-Earth: the creation of a mythology which would fill a lack of that kind of story in his own country (144), if not in our whole modern world. Though there is no agreed upon definition of mythology, contemporary myth-theorists like University of Pittsburgh’s own Fred Clothey might argue that myths are symbolic narratives that order a people’s experience of reality and serve as paradigms for how that reality is to be lived. The reality in which Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings was a chaotic and rapidly changing one. The world was involved in a second global war, new technologies were destroying the environment, and cultural transmission was being devalued by the new medium of movies into mere entertainment. Tolkien stresses in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that while his story is not allegorical for the real world it is certainly applicable. The war over the Ring serves as a symbol for the dangers of global warfare; the concern of the Elves for the environment of Middle-Earth, and the living desires of that landscape itself, serve as symbols for the need to preserve our own respect of nature. The focus on acts of remembering and recording the past serve as a strikingly paradigmatic symbol for us to not forget our own histories and cultural traditions.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills its author’s intention of being written as a myth, but it cannot fully become one until it too is passed on, and is accepted as myth by the people whose reality it records and symbolizes. While it was relatively unread during the first decade of its publication, Tolkien’s story eventually became the second most read book after the Bible. During the ‘60s, “Frodo lives!” was graffitied in New York subways, a suitably mythic response to that decade’s need for new cultural explanations. What really attests to the books’ power as myth is that they continue to hold such fascination and relevance for our contemporary century. These stories were recently made into a series of critically acclaimed and high-grossing films that seem likely to continue to pass on Tolkien’s vision and ordering of reality for generations to come. As such, the stories of Middle-Earth, in their history, text, and modern relevance, serve as Tolkien’s own inheritance to us. The Lord of the Rings literally saves his world and its cultural values so that we in turn will remember to keep saving our own world.


Bibliography

Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” Understanding the Lord of the Rings. Eds. Rose
Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston: 2004

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Ballantine Books. New York: 1965

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton
Mifflin Co. Boston

"to wound the autumnal city"

Early thursday morning I took the train down to Virginia for various family occasions (littlest brother graduating high school, parents' 40th anniversary, father's 60th birthday, helping them pack to move to a new home). I spent most of the trip looking out the windows, listening to the new Sigur Ros and Bill Frisell albums (along with several symphonies), and reading what is now one of my favorite books, "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delaney. Written in the 60s it reads like a sci-fi Pynchon or Joyce, about a mid-western city where some mysterious catastrophe took place and into which people arrive, looking for freedom. Many reviews tout the book's labyrinthine incomprehensibility along with its almost shocking questioning of issues of race, gender, and sexuality, which are certainly more than enough reason for anyone to pick up this tome. What really impressed me however were the masterful use of psychogeography and the fantastic, which rarely get enough play in modern literature. The entire city in the book shifts to correspond with the characters' moods and emotions, especially with the nameless protagonist, who thinks he is going mad. This plays into the element of the fantastic, in the sense used by the critic Todorov- that a potentially un- or hyper-real situation is presented and then doubts are established in the character and readers' minds (madness, dreams, drugs, etc) as to whether the event was real or just a fault of perception. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm not sure whether he will reveal just what happened to the city (I hope he doesn't!), but combined with its stellar discussions on artistic meaning and viscerally rendered sex scenes, "Dhalgren" is one of the most enjoyable, epic, and important books I've ever read. (Ironically enough it was hated within the sci-fi community, especially by Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison...which I suppose says something about its attempt to rise out of the genre).



While sorting through boxes to make more room to pack, I came across several fun books, a bestiary by T.H. White, a novel by Lord Dunsany and another by H.G. Wells, and a collection of literary ghost stories by many of the famous sci-fi and fantasy writers that should be a scream to flip through. I also just found (via Neil Gaiman's blog), that for its 85th anniversary issue Weird Tales magazine has released a list of the 85 weirdest storytellers of the past 85 years, including not just the expected authors but a wide selection of musicians, directors, and artists as well (Delaney is on the list for "Dhalgren"). It's a goldmine for anyone interested in the outré and peculiar, especially since they set up a permanent page for readers to share their own selection of weird storytellers, which I imagine will quickly become a rather interesting resource.

Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

Dream and Dementia

"From that moment on I devoted myself to trying to find the meaning of my dreams, and this anxiety influenced my waking thoughts. I seemed to understand that there was a bond between the external and internal worlds: that only inattention of spiritual confusion distorted the outward affinities between them, - and this explained the strangeness of certain pictures, which are like grimacing reflections of real objects on a surface of troubled water." -Nerval, from "Aurélia"

In 1854 Gérard de Nerval, the French Romantic poet most famous for walking a lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris, was ordered by his doctor to record the series of fantastic visions and hallucinations he was having during a bout of mental insanity caused by his obsession with an actress he called Aurélia.



This document of dreams, dementia, and spiritual longing, subtitled "Life and the Dream," was considered foundational by such artists and writers as the Surrealists, Marcel Proust, and Joseph Cornell, and was hailed as a masterpiece of fantastic imagery. In his critique of the fantastic as a literary genre, Tzvetan Todorov continually turns to Nerval's "Aurelia" as exemplary of both syntactic and semantic techniques for articulating the essential ambiguity (near magic) of our perceptions of reality. Throughout this mostly autobiographical story, Nerval or the narrator finds himself and other people doubled, causality is called into a synchronistic question when putting on a ring begins a mass and throwing that same ring away stops a ferocious storm, and hosts of angels and gods recreate all of reality before the narrator's eyes. In order to stress the utter subjectivity and ambiguity of these scenes, Nerval uses a literary device that anyone who writes down their dreams may be familiar with: sentences are modified by phrases like "it seemed that," "I imagined myself," "I felt," "for some reason," each time putting into question the reality of what seems to be occurring for the narrator. This ambiguity is further intensified by the narrator's use of dream sequences, which he not only claims help explain the visions he just had, but further become seemingly real experiences in their own right. In particular the narrator dreams of an angel, first sculpted out of the actress he desires, who in turn gets projected onto every other woman he meets in the story, each of whom he thinks is that now dead actress.

While these scenes and devices certainly make for a magical read, and if they were actually dreamt by Nerval then a rather fantastic experience, but I'm not quite convinced that they add up to a full narrative, or that they produce the fantastic effect of a hesitation on the reader's part as to whether the events may actually be happening. Though the narrator seems slightly unsure that what he dreamt may be true, and despite the lucidity of the narration, he is much more likely to tell the reader that he is dreaming, that he is indeed going crazy. Several times throughout "Aurélia" the narrator is locked up in mental institutions, which frames the fantastic events in such a way that we are never led to believe that they are anything but the workings of a demented (although spiritually romantic) mind. These visions may spill out into the narrator's life and interactions with other characters, but never in such a way that these other characters are also led to believe the visions are true, which would make them much more believably ambiguous. Similarly, the narrative chooses to focus so much of its attention around the bizarre content of the visions that we loose what may have been the more important story behind them. We are told briefly about the narrator's obsession with Aurélia, but the rest of the manuscript is solely dreams and madness, through which the reader might look at their watch from time to time saying "well you're dreaming and mad, so what?" What might have been more interesting, and possibly more gripping, would have been to document that decline between sanity and insanity, how these visions played off against the normal content of a man's life. This draws on another important aspect of fantastic or magical literature, which is that they have to establish a stronger reality first before stepping out of that reality. Nerval however assumes that his readers know the world he lives in and the everyday content of his thoughts.

There is however a rather touching and realistic moment at the end of the story, which more then, or almost, makes up for the dérive of the narrator's visions. While locked in a hospital the narrator befriends a man in a torpor or coma who slowly awakens seemingly because of the narrator's attention. When asked why he won't eat, the man says that he is in hell, which causes the narrator to reflect on his own thought processes and outlandish beliefs throughout the rest of the story. Though the narrator ultimately refuses to give up his own convictions, this scene raises that subtle point that each of us can contain such bizarrely subjective worlds of dream and dementia, which we must articulate in whatever manner we can.

Synchronicity of the Fantastic

As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.

In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.

There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.

And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.

Clockwork Texts

I have to admit that I often feel like some what of an impostor writing literary critiques. Not that I couldn't tell you what is going on in a given story, but as a writer I am often more interested in unveiling an author's techniques, so that I can learn to use them (or not) in my own work. I am currently working on a critique of the use of mythic narrative forms in Beckett's "The Calmative," which while interesting in what it has to say about the literary use of mythical themes, is less fascinating then what seems to have been Beckett's implicit literary goal: to point out all of the conventional expectations about how narrative works, and then roundly demolish any chance that his stories will follow these conventions. Throughout the height of his prose career in the '50s, spanning from this story across his "trilogy," Beckett routinely looks at the typical narrative devices, plot, setting, characters, action, narrative voice, and then strips them away, so that by the "Texts for Nothing" there is literally no recognizable place where these elements can exist in the text. Certainly I could try and write a paper on this authorial move, but I find myself almost fascinated by the way these works have laid literary devices bare, so that I can hardly read any piece of writing without saying, oh here's where the author is using x expected device... It is like suddenly stumbling into the backstage of writing, the pulleys and costume changes of storytelling, and I almost want to hoard these techniques like they are some occult secret. The other day I was talking with my fiction teacher about the early authorial move of apprenticing yourself to a few authors, writing your own versions of their work in order to collect a "bag of tricks" that can be later dipped into in your own writing. While I haven't ever exactly written someone else's story I am always on the look out for these mechanical underpinnings of fiction.



More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.

Spring Cleaning

I generally dislike posting only links, but right now all my original content is wrapped up in school and in other creative pursuits. Thankfully the end of the semester is soon, and I'll have more time to write some of the curious pieces that have been floating around my head this last month or so. But until then...

Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy' [via Boingboing]
Where angels no longer fear to tread: science's search for God [via The Daily Grail]
An upcoming lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on ritual and the spectator
The continued battle between atheism and magic and between science and religion
The mythology of eucatastrophe (that sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist’s well-being )
Living Monsters and dead ones from the deep
D&D Character Alignment as a child's introduction to moral philosophy [via Technoccult]
The Fantastic in art and fiction[via Technoccult]
The Art of mazes
R Crumb's 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick'
Myth and Science Fiction [via Technoccult]
Art made from Books



And lastly, this video of Korean Shamans from youtube, in order to encourage me to finish writing my paper on the subject for class :

Jodorowsky on Life

I wanted to write something about psycho-spiritual crises, about my reasons for dreaming, studying myths and literature, about what I am looking for in myself, in the world...

...but Alejandro Jodorowsky's words (from a recent interview) might have to suffice.

"Do you pray? And if so, to who or to what?"

No, I don’t believe in praying to an external god, but I think in the interior of ourselves, we have what I call the interior world. A world which is a clear point of light, which is not you, but it is the fountain of life within yourself. When they discovered America, there was a fountain where you wash and get young – the fountain of youth. The fountain of health is inside you. And every night, I try to approach there. That for me is to pray, to make emptiness and to come to the centre of yourself, to try to go there.

...

You have no fear of death?

Not anymore. I am completely prepared to die – spiritually, not corporally. My body wants to live. The body always wants to be immortal, not to die. And the soul accepts death - that is good. But it’s not good if my body wants to die, because my life is shorter. You menace me with a knife, and I will defend myself, I will ask somebody to protect me, no? Even if I say [to myself], “I can die.” I understand that.

Do have any beliefs about what happens afterwards?

Why? Why be curious about what will happen, it will happen anyway, it will happen! Either I’ll go there or there – everything will happen. It’s fantastic – the future is fantastic! Anything that will happen will happen!"