The government is not to be trusted. Government involvement in anything whatsoever is dangerous and should be prevented at all costs. Corporations, on the other hand, are trustworthy and should be left alone to do whatever they want without interference from the government, because free, unfettered capitalism is the American way. If a corporation does do something blatantly harmful to the public, then it is the government's fault.
The current US deficit is the greatest menace to the future of the United States ever seen. It is an unbearable burden that will bankrupt the nation and destroy its power forever. The only thing as bad as the deficit is taxes. So we should eliminate the deficit and cut taxes. Cutting taxes will help eliminate the deficit, because everyone knows that if companies and the rich have a few extra dollars, they aren't going to save it or pay it out in dividends, but are absolutely guaranteed to invest it or spend it in a way that will stimulate the economy, and stimulate it so much that government revenues will magically increase by the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to offset the tax cut. Spending by the government, on the other hand, never stimulates the economy. All money spent by the government goes into the Twilight Zone, not back into the economy.
The government should not be involved in health care, because it is untrustworthy and secretly wants to kill off all free-thinking Americans by putting them in front of death panels. Private health insurance companies, on the other hand, are perfectly trustworthy. They won't deny anyone coverage, unless they are a lost cause, or are too poor to pay for it. Likewise, America already has the world's best health system. You can ask all the wealthy foreigners who come here to take advantage of it. Their compatriots may have better life expectancies than the average American, but they have to stand in line for it. And who wants to live that long anyway if you have to live in a socialist country?
We believe in small government. The federal government should be shrunk down as small as possible and should be involved in as little as possible. The government shouldn't restrict businesses from making money any way they can, prevent oil companies from extracting oil from anywhere in US territory, tell coal companies they can't decapitate mountains and dump coal ash in rivers, or stop people from hunting or buying guns of any kind. It shouldn't be involved in education, funding art, or subsidizing unimportant energy industries like solar or wind (though it should keep giving huge tax breaks to oil companies so they'll drill more oil wells). We also believe in a strong defense, so we don't believe in cutting military spending, which in any case does not even make up quite half of total discretionary spending by the entire government. You can't have too many stealth bombers, nuclear weapons or missile defense systems. But other than maintaining a mighty military, the government should keep out of the people's lives, except to tap people's phones and check their library records in case they might be terrorists. And to make sure people don't smoke marijuana (regardless of whether their doctors recommend it), homosexuals don't marry, women don't get abortions, and scientists don't do stem cell research. And to search for, arrest, and deport illegal immigrants. And to spy on adherents of suspicious religions like Islam. Otherwise, we expect the government to leave everyone alone.
Global warming is a hoax, concocted by scientists, who are no more to be trusted than the government is. And anyway, the Earth is warming because of the sun, or volcanic activity, or some other natural cause. Or it would be, if it was warming, which it isn't. The only scientists that can be trusted are those who say that global warming is not being caused by humans (even though it's really a hoax). The word of these scientists should be accepted without question, at least as long as they are saying there is no anthropogenic global warming. If you learn of any such scientists (regardless of their actual field of expertise) beyond the few dozen we know about, be sure to send word.
Since global warming isn't real, there is no need to spend any money on less developed energy industries like solar power. Let other countries like China develop those industries; we don't want to have the government encouraging new ventures of that sort on the off chance it might generate jobs and make the US a leader in a growing field. It probably won't amount to anything anyway. Besides, we don't like or trust anything new. We'll just stick to good old fossil fuels. As mentioned above, we want oil companies to receive billion dollar tax breaks to drill for oil in our seas and wildlife preserves, and we don't want their hands tied by regulation. We're happy to take our chances with oil spills and exploding rigs as long as we can drill, baby, drill. Coal companies likewise should be allowed to extract coal any way they can. We aren't worried about any minor pollution from fossil fuel consumption; as long as our economy is strong, we don't mind living in a smoggy wasteland. And there are enough fossil fuels to last forever, or at least until most of us are dead, after which it'll be someone else's problem.
We believe that evolution is just a theory, and it should not be taught to children as if it were not questionable. The theory of intelligent design should be treated equally in biology classes, regardless of any shortage of so-called "evidence", which is the kind of thing those untrustworthy scientists are always going on and on about. By the way, if you can find any scientists (or anyone that can pretend to be scientists) who are willing to speak out for intelligent design, contact us immediately.
Illegal immigrants are a menace to our society, and should be treated like the criminal scum they are. Let's face it; sneaking into our country in search of a better life is a crime, just like murder, rape and assault. Anyway, illegal immigrants commit lots of those crimes too. Or at least so we hear, and since sounds like the sort of thing we'd expect of them, it must be true. But even if they are law-abiding, we don't want all these immigrants coming here; we were here first, and we don't want to share the country with any latecomers. In particular, the government should build a Great Wall of America from Texas to California to keep all the Mexican riffraff out of those states; after all, we robbed Mexico of that territory fair and square.
We believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution is a perfect, flawless document, because the Founding Fathers were perfect human beings and didn't make any mistakes. Look at that clever three-fifths rule for example. If you lived in a state with 100,000 free citizens and 500,000 slaves, the state would have as many representatives as a state with 400,000 free citizens. That means each of the free men would get have the equivalent of 4 votes in selecting members of the House of Representatives. Cool, huh? Not that we think slavery was good or anything. No, of course not. But a lot of the Founders had slaves, so it can't have been that bad either.... Anyway, the federal government should not do anything that was not spelled out in the Constitution, and we should interpret what is in there the way the Founders intended, which we can easily do because we can go back in history and read their minds. For example, when they wrote about a right to bear arms, they obviously meant that anyone who wanted to should be able to walk into a store and buy automatic weapons with armor-piercing bullets. When they said that a citizen's freedom of speech may not be abridged, they clearly meant that corporations are people and their right to spend millions of dollars on elections cannot be restricted. They also meant that anyone should have the right to call the President a communist Islamic fascist, if the President is a liberal. The Founders would have thought it was okay to compare our current President to Hitler, because we know they would have disliked him too. But they did not mean that people could say anything critical about our military involvement in a foreign country or the conservative government that took us into it to save us from the possibility of our tough guy image being damaged. The Founders clearly would have held such criticism to be unpatriotic and borderline treason.
We also believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. They did not mean to create a separation of church and state when they wrote the First Amendment, only intending that the government should not favor one Christian denomination over another. The Founders were all devout Christians who would never have thought of questioning Jesus' divinity and were suspicious of Muslims, Jews and atheists. We can prove that the Founders were fundamentalist Christians (and that they were pro-business, anti-regulation capitalists) through a number of quotes that we found somewhere and have attached their names to (The Right's Library of Fake Quotes By Steve Rendall: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4053).
As mentioned above, we believe in the right to bear arms. And we're not talking muskets here. Assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons, armor-piercing bullets, silencers and so forth are all obviously protected by the Second Amendment. Anyone who wants to should be able to get a gun, without any waiting period or licenses, even if they are foaming at the mouth and muttering about the people who are going to get it as they do so. What's more, they should be allowed to carry their guns, openly or concealed, anywhere they go. That way if someone starts shooting, everyone else can pull out their guns and start shooting too.
We firmly believe in judicial restraint. Judges should not legislate from the bench. They shouldn't try to protect people who might possibly be terrorists from torture. They shouldn't make any rulings unfavorable to business. They shouldn't try to protect the interests of minority groups if the majority decides to deny the latter their rights by democratic vote. If they want to declare corporations to be people, however, that's okay, since as explained above that's what the Founders intended.
Marriage is between a man and a woman, and any attempt to allow same-sex couples to marry will completely destroy the family unit. The mere existence of same-sex marriage will cause heterosexual unions to disintegrate. Normal families will disappear. And as stated above, the courts should not defy the will of the people and give gay couples the right to marry. If the people of a state vote specifically to deny homosexuals the right to marry, the courts cannot go against that. It's just like segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. Everyone knows the courts had nothing to do with ending those things; they ended because the people of those states were against them. You can ask any of the older Southern members of our movement; they'll tell you they were all anti-segregation, because like the rest of us, they all love black people and all other minorities (except gays and Muslims).
The current US president is a socialist, a communist, a Muslim, and a fascist, and he is bent on destroying America. He wasn't even born in the US, so he is not legitimate. Sure, liberal liars claim that all their so-called "evidence" proves that none of these things are true, but why should we believe any "facts" if they come from liberals. We don't need any "evidence" supporting what we say about him, since we have plenty of rumors and innuendo, and that's good enough for us. In fact, we're beginning to think he might be the Anti-Christ. The fact that he is part black has absolutely nothing to do with our hatred of him, since, as stated above, we love black people (at least as long as they stick to suitable activities like rap and sports).
If you, like us, are a patriotic American who wants to take our country back from the tax-happy, anti-business, tree-hugging, gay-loving, peacenik hippie communist terrorist sympathizers, come to join our movement. Together, we can turn back the clock to a time when America was strong, corporations were unrestrained by regulations, taxes were low, we prayed to God in school, we weren't being overrun by illegal immigrants, homosexuals were considered mentally ill, everyone was a good White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or was kept safely locked away in a ghetto, and we felt free to blow any foreign country that gave us trouble to hell. Together, we can restore American greatness!
[Edited 2010/10/02]
I wonder, should I have more confidence in the ability of most people to see the blindingly obvious, or (if this should somehow end up being read by a significant number of people) should I expect people to be quoting from it with a straight face? Just in case, for anyone uncertain of my real opinions, I'd suggest that you read a few of the other entries in my blog.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
What I've Been Reading – 2010, Part 4
Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
Last month I read Samuel R. Delany's novel Dhalgren, which is a very strange and yet fascinating work. Science Fiction – The Illustrated Encyclopedia characterized it as "perhaps the most difficult SF novel that has still sold in large numbers". While I have read a few other SF novels that I recall taking a similar amount of extra effort, such as J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (the latter in particular being well worth the effort), it’s certainly true that Dhalgren is not an easy read – not to mention the fact that it is considerably longer than most other novels, science fiction or not. It begins with a bizarre, dream-like sequence (indeed, later in the novel it's made clear that the protagonist half believes it to have been a dream), followed by the protagonist's entry into Bellona, the weird city that serves as the setting for the rest of the novel. Bellona has suffered an unexplained disaster that has caused most of its population to abandon it and prevents any radio or television signals from getting in or out. Most of the rest of the country has forgotten it, but it has attracted a number of free spirits, army deserters, and social misfits, who live there along with the remaining original inhabitants. But as eventually becomes clear, there is much more to the city's oddness than simply being half empty and inhabited by strange characters. Weird, impossible phenomena occur, like two moons appearing in the sky – and in different phases. Space and time themselves seem to be distorted, though to what degree is not always clear, due in part to the issues the protagonist from whose perspective we see things has.
The protagonist of the story is almost as strange as the city it takes place in. Though he remembers quite a bit of his past, he doesn't remember his name, or the names of his parents. After arriving in Bellona he gets the nickname Kid (or Kidd or the Kid), which is what he is known by through most of the novel. He wears only one sandal (later a boot), and his other foot is always bare. He has spent time in a mental institution and still seems to have some mental problems. At times he seems to hallucinate, and at other times he blacks out on the passage of time (to him it seems only a day has passed, while others tell him it's been several days). However, though he himself often questions his sanity, it is not always clear whether some of these problems really are in his own mind, or are caused by the city itself. For instance, early in the novel there are several instances where a door he remembers being on one side of a street seems to shift to the other side the next time he encounters it. It seems that this perception on Kid's part might be a hallucination, but later his friend Tak, who for the most part is one of the most clearheaded people in the city (despite his penchant for taking men who have just come to Bellona home and seducing them), tells Kid that he often finds that things in the city seem to have shifted around. Even Kid's problems regarding the passage of time may not be entirely in his head, as I'll explain below.
Soon after arriving in the city, Kid obtains a battered notebook which someone has filled with slightly disjointed observations. He starts using the blank left hand pages to write poems, which he is continually polishing and rewriting. He meets a girl named Lanya with whom he starts a relationship, and he spends a period of time working for a dysfunctional middle class family, with tragic results. He meets a famous visiting poet, and through him ends up having his poems published in a book, which becomes the most widely read book in town (in part because it's the only book to be published in the town, though also because many feel the poems capture the feel of Bellona). The book of poems is published by a man named Calkins who has a large house up in the better part of town. The somewhat mysterious Calkins (who we never actually see) is the publisher of the town’s newspaper, which he dates idiosyncratically (one day may be dated Tuesday, February 12, 1995, and the next might be Saturday, April 1, 1919).
Eventually Kid falls in with the scorpions, who are gangs of young people that wear a type of chain that, when turned on, create a light image of a creature like a scorpion, dragon, or spider that envelops the wearer. Though they have a rather dangerous reputation among the other residents, the scorpions are not quite as fearsome as they seem, for the most part living peacefully and communally in abandoned houses – though they do occasionally engage in violence. Kid forms a relationship with a young scorpion named Denny, with the two of them and Lanya forming a ménage à trios. As a side note, there is a lot of sex in this book. Though I've read one or two books that might have as much, I don't think I've read any that had quite so much variety, often described fairly graphically (Delany himself is supposedly bisexual, which I can well believe).
The first six sections of the book, covering the first 620 pages, are told in third person narration from Kid's point of view, and while certain passages, especially those reflecting Kid's notebook, are similar to stream of consciousness, for the most part the narrative is reasonably straightforward. The events occur and are described in an apparently linear fashion, though the events themselves are often strange and as mentioned there are occasional disjointed passages. The seventh and last section, covering the remaining 150 pages, is purportedly a typescript someone made from Kid's journal. It takes up more or less where the previous section left off, but as many of the pages in the notebook had come loose and the typescript was seemingly made from a bunch of pages that were somewhat out of sequence, with some missing, the episodes described are no longer in their proper order. As Kid used the margins of the notebook to add extra thoughts, this section is full of marginalia, usually but not always connected with the main text it appears beside. As the writing on the original pages often continued onto subsequent pages that were missing when the typescript was made, many passages are cut off in the middle of a line. Descriptions of some events are missing entirely, though we know they took place because of references elsewhere. In a few places Kid lapses into gibberish.
Finally, in this section it becomes clear that not only are the descriptions of events not in order, but time itself is out of joint. There are contradictory indications of the sequence of certain events, and ultimately the novel is circular. This is made obvious by events at the very end of the book. Without going into precise detail, I will describe one event which gave this away to me (though there had been other clues that I noticed when I looked back). When Kid enters the city at the beginning of the book, he encounters a group of girls leaving and talks to them briefly (though in the dark he doesn't see them clearly). One gives him a bizarre weapon called an orchid (made of seven blades curving forward from a wrist band) that he carries throughout much of the story. At the end of the story, a group of people, mostly male, leave the city and meet a girl going in. They have a conversation almost identical to that between Kid and the girls at the beginning. In flipping back to the latter to check this, I realized that the group of girls Kid meets going in are a group that are described as disappearing from the city in the last section of the book.
What's more, many of the passages that Kid reads out of the notebook that he gets at the beginning – passages that were already in the notebook when he first got it – appear word for word in the last section of the book. In other words, it seems as if Kid himself wrote the original passages in the notebook. The book begins in the middle of a sentence; "…to wound the autumnal city". It ends with "…I have come to…", and in one passage of gibberish in the last section of the novel the entire sentence ("I have come to to [sic] wound the 'autumnal city") appears. So the novel ends as it begins (as supposedly James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which I haven't read, does), making a loop. Indeed, one critic has said it acts as a Moebius Strip.
Unsurprisingly, Dhalgren (which ultimately sold in the neighborhood of a million copies) elicited a wide range of opinions. Many critics both inside and outside the science fiction praised it highly, and it has received far more critical attention from people attempting to explain various aspects of it than the average science fiction book gets (comparable instead to the attention given to some of Ursula Le Guin's work, or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut). Others hated it, among them prominent writers like Philip K. Dick. Even its fans often admit to not understanding it; William Gibson wrote a forward to one edition in which he said: "I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it... Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its 'riddle' was never meant to be 'solved.'"
So would I recommend it? It depends entirely on the taste of the individual reader. Certainly those who dislike anything other than a straightforward tale, expect to have all mysteries (or even most of them) explained or have a problem with sex that is not heterosexual or monogamous would do well to steer clear. I personally found the book very intriguing and somewhat frustrating (I do generally prefer to have all the mysteries cleared up at the end of a book). I'm glad I read it, and I may read it again someday, but I wouldn’t want to read a lot books like it, certainly not on a regular basis. There's no doubt, however, that it's an unusual reading experience.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The next novel I read was a well-known classic, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. This novel superficially has very little in common with Dhalgren, but there are a few points in common. The most obvious is that they were both controversial, and sex was a primary reason for this. There are no graphic sex scenes in Madame Bovary, but she commits adultery, which was something of a taboo topic. What’s more, there is confusion, if only in the mind of Madame Bovary herself, between spiritual and physical ecstasy, resulting in accusations of blasphemy. In fact, Flaubert was prosecuted for "immorality" and "irreligion", though he was ultimately acquitted.
Madame Bovary is far from an admirable figure, and in fact there are no truly admirable characters in the novel, at least among the main characters. Madame Bovary is shallow and self-centered, and is unable to separate fantasy (as represented by the romantic novels she reads) from the reality of mundane everyday life. She believes she cannot be happy unless she is swept off her feet and carried off to exotic lands, and as a consequence she is almost constantly unhappy, except early in her affairs when she is able to convince herself that what is happening is like the stories she has read. In fact, as I read the novel, she made me think of Don Quixote, and later when reading the critical supplement at the end of the book I learned that several critics have made the same comparison. She is not delusional to the point of obvious mental illness like Don Quixote, but the result is nearly the same. She despises her husband because of his ordinariness and lack of competence, and while not unintelligent, she has no self-control, spending extravagantly to gratify her various impulses. She doesn't even truly care for her lovers, just for the way they can satisfy her desires.
Madame Bovary is not a cheerful book; it's full of not very lovable people, and the end is not a happy one, at least for most of the characters. But Flaubert's skill as a writer is what makes the book a classic, and while I can't claim to be able to fully appreciate his stylistic ability, especially in translation (that's not a criticism of the translator, just recognition of the inevitability of something being lost in translation, particularly in the case of a writer like Flaubert), there were many standout passages, making it obvious why many admire the book. Flaubert himself once wrote that "there is no such thing as a beautiful idea without beautiful form, and vice versa." He was said to constantly write and rewrite passages, searching for the perfect combination of words (in this, if nothing else, he is like Kid in Dhalgren). Despite this, he was cynical about the ability of words to really convey anything properly; in one passage in Madame Bovary explaining the inability of her lover to truly understand her, he says: "…no one can every express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars." From the descriptions of him in the critical supplement, including ones by people who knew him personally like Emile Zola, Flaubert was a somewhat obsessive and occasionally contradictory character, but nonetheless widely admired, and Madame Bovary was the main foundation for much of that admiration.
Leiber, Cherryh and Moorcock
After reading two relatively "heavy" books in a row, I wanted some relatively light reading for a time. Accordingly I decided to return to Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by reading The Swords of Lankhmar, the first book included in the omnibus The Second Book of Lankhmar. As I have discussed Leiber's tales previously, I will just make a few observations here. One is that The Swords of Lankhmar is unusual in that it is a full novel rather than a collection of stories gathered in chronological order (internal chronology, that is). Also, though he is writing fantasy, Leiber makes a commendable effort to provide scientific explanations for fantastic things. When the Gray Mouser shrinks due to a magic potion, he leaves a puddle of slimy pink liquid on the ground, bordered by a gray powder, corresponding to the matter that he has lost from his flesh, clothing and weapons. Likewise, Fafhrd quite intelligently asks a female Ghoul (a human-like creature with flesh and organs that are entirely transparent, making them look like living skeletons) he meets and becomes romantically involved with how she can see, given that light passes straight through her eyes. Whether her explanation, or Leiber's explanation for the geology of the Sinking Land, is completely sound scientifically I couldn't say, but at least he makes the effort. The episode with Fafhrd and his Ghoul lover is also notable for Leiber's aside that the sight of them together was "one to touch the hearts of imaginative lovers and enemies of racial discrimination in all the many universes". And once again his heroes stand in contrast to characters like Conan in that they are less superhuman (though the way they are able to fight off a crowd of people out for their blood at the beginning of the novel is almost Conan-like); they are occasionally foolish, usually lustful and greedy, somewhat sexist (though unlike nearly all of Conan's lovers, their lovers are often a match for them, mentally and in the case of Fafhrd's Ghoul lover, even physically) and yet prone to generous impulses. All in all, they make a pleasant if not always politically correct diversion.
I followed this with C. J. Cherryh's novel Merchanter's Luck, a story set, like the other books of hers that I’ve read, in her Alliance-Union universe. This is a far future where humans have expanded into far into space, settling in space stations and eventually habitable worlds strung out among the stars, with their ties to Earth eventually loosening to the point that contact is minimal. The routes between the stars are traveled by merchant spacers who carry goods from station to station. Cherryh has written many books in this series, but the only ones I've read previously are the much longer Downbelow Station and Cyteen, plus the more distantly connected Chanur trilogy. Downbelow Station is an action-packed adventure tale featuring complicated political maneuvering, ending by creating the balance of power that serves as the background for many of the later tales. Cyteen takes place on the eponymous central planet of the somewhat fascistic Union, and is an interesting account of an attempt to replicate a genius, not only by creating a genetic clone, but also by recreating the environment and events of her childhood. The Chanur trilogy takes place in a more distant area of the galaxy inhabited by intelligent alien races. It centers on a ship which ends up taking on a refugee alien of a hitherto unknown race that calls itself “human”. This series is notable not only for creating believable alien races, but for making them the focus of the story (we only learn what the human thinks from the little he is able to convey as he slowly learns their language). Merchanter's Luck, which takes place soon after Downbelow Station and includes appearances by some of the characters of that novel, is less of an epic tale than any of the above, but is gripping nonetheless. It also has some psychological elements, as one of the two protagonists is a young man whose family were massacred when he was a boy, except for two others who died subsequently, leaving him the sole owner of a starship, often flying it completely alone when he is unable to find temporary crew, accompanied only by his ghosts and the voice of his cousin, programmed into the ship's computer. When he has the opportunity to take on a more trustworthy crew, his solitary habits and deep-seated distrust of others creates problems. The story is fairly short (around 200 pages) but fast-paced. Basically, it's an entertaining way to spend a few hours.
Next I read The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock, which is the second book (by internal chronology) of the Elric series. Elric is the rightful emperor of Melnibone, a land inhabited by race of beings similar to humans, but more powerful and almost completely lacking in human emotions like regret and compassion (they quite casually inflict very barbaric tortures, and rarely show any concern for others, even of their own race). Elric is exceptional in that he does feel such emotions to some degree. He is also an albino, and physically weak without special drugs. Despite this, he is a powerful sorcerer and a skilled swordsman. What's more, he wields an extremely powerful sword called Stormbringer. This black blade is semi-sentient and often seems to murmur to itself. It sucks the souls out of those it strikes, consuming them and transferring energy from their souls to Elric. However, it sometimes gets out of Elric's control, striking those he does not wish to strike, with tragic results.
In this novel, Elric has recently left Melnibone to travel in the human kingdoms, as he believes that understanding the up and coming human powers is necessary if the decadent, decaying realm of Melnibone is to have any chance of surviving, and also because his unusual (for a Melnibonean) ability to feel human emotions made him restless at home. When feeling hostile humans, he meets a mysterious ship that sails between worlds, on which he meets several individuals who, like he himself, are incarnations of a being known as the Eternal Champion. It seems that virtually all the heroes featured in Moorcock's fiction are incarnations of the Eternal Champion, despite superficial differences. In this book, Elric meets Erekose, Hawkmoon, and Corum, all of whom feature in other Moorcock novels (though other than Elric, the only one I’ve read any stories of is Corum, when someone lent them to me in high school – my impression at the time, accurate or not, was that they were grim and depressing). After facing a pair of beings that threaten all the worlds that they come from, Elric parts company with the others, and has further adventures in attempting to return to his own world, the last ending in misfortune.
As might be guessed with his sinister sword, his unpleasant antecedents, and his ill-starred life, Elric is a much grimmer hero than Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan. There is no question he is a very memorable character, but his adventures are much bleaker and so not as much fun to read about. Also, while Moorcock's scope is broader than many other fantasy writers in that his tales of many different worlds are all in a sense tied together, his individual worlds don’t seem to be quite as detailed as those of Leiber and Howard, not to mention Tolkien (though to be fair, I haven’t read as many of his books – even in the case of the Elric stories, I’ve only read the first three books, all of which are on the short side). However, despite these downsides, anyone interested in fantasy should read at least some of the Elric stories, as they are sure to make an impression.
Last month I read Samuel R. Delany's novel Dhalgren, which is a very strange and yet fascinating work. Science Fiction – The Illustrated Encyclopedia characterized it as "perhaps the most difficult SF novel that has still sold in large numbers". While I have read a few other SF novels that I recall taking a similar amount of extra effort, such as J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (the latter in particular being well worth the effort), it’s certainly true that Dhalgren is not an easy read – not to mention the fact that it is considerably longer than most other novels, science fiction or not. It begins with a bizarre, dream-like sequence (indeed, later in the novel it's made clear that the protagonist half believes it to have been a dream), followed by the protagonist's entry into Bellona, the weird city that serves as the setting for the rest of the novel. Bellona has suffered an unexplained disaster that has caused most of its population to abandon it and prevents any radio or television signals from getting in or out. Most of the rest of the country has forgotten it, but it has attracted a number of free spirits, army deserters, and social misfits, who live there along with the remaining original inhabitants. But as eventually becomes clear, there is much more to the city's oddness than simply being half empty and inhabited by strange characters. Weird, impossible phenomena occur, like two moons appearing in the sky – and in different phases. Space and time themselves seem to be distorted, though to what degree is not always clear, due in part to the issues the protagonist from whose perspective we see things has.
The protagonist of the story is almost as strange as the city it takes place in. Though he remembers quite a bit of his past, he doesn't remember his name, or the names of his parents. After arriving in Bellona he gets the nickname Kid (or Kidd or the Kid), which is what he is known by through most of the novel. He wears only one sandal (later a boot), and his other foot is always bare. He has spent time in a mental institution and still seems to have some mental problems. At times he seems to hallucinate, and at other times he blacks out on the passage of time (to him it seems only a day has passed, while others tell him it's been several days). However, though he himself often questions his sanity, it is not always clear whether some of these problems really are in his own mind, or are caused by the city itself. For instance, early in the novel there are several instances where a door he remembers being on one side of a street seems to shift to the other side the next time he encounters it. It seems that this perception on Kid's part might be a hallucination, but later his friend Tak, who for the most part is one of the most clearheaded people in the city (despite his penchant for taking men who have just come to Bellona home and seducing them), tells Kid that he often finds that things in the city seem to have shifted around. Even Kid's problems regarding the passage of time may not be entirely in his head, as I'll explain below.
Soon after arriving in the city, Kid obtains a battered notebook which someone has filled with slightly disjointed observations. He starts using the blank left hand pages to write poems, which he is continually polishing and rewriting. He meets a girl named Lanya with whom he starts a relationship, and he spends a period of time working for a dysfunctional middle class family, with tragic results. He meets a famous visiting poet, and through him ends up having his poems published in a book, which becomes the most widely read book in town (in part because it's the only book to be published in the town, though also because many feel the poems capture the feel of Bellona). The book of poems is published by a man named Calkins who has a large house up in the better part of town. The somewhat mysterious Calkins (who we never actually see) is the publisher of the town’s newspaper, which he dates idiosyncratically (one day may be dated Tuesday, February 12, 1995, and the next might be Saturday, April 1, 1919).
Eventually Kid falls in with the scorpions, who are gangs of young people that wear a type of chain that, when turned on, create a light image of a creature like a scorpion, dragon, or spider that envelops the wearer. Though they have a rather dangerous reputation among the other residents, the scorpions are not quite as fearsome as they seem, for the most part living peacefully and communally in abandoned houses – though they do occasionally engage in violence. Kid forms a relationship with a young scorpion named Denny, with the two of them and Lanya forming a ménage à trios. As a side note, there is a lot of sex in this book. Though I've read one or two books that might have as much, I don't think I've read any that had quite so much variety, often described fairly graphically (Delany himself is supposedly bisexual, which I can well believe).
The first six sections of the book, covering the first 620 pages, are told in third person narration from Kid's point of view, and while certain passages, especially those reflecting Kid's notebook, are similar to stream of consciousness, for the most part the narrative is reasonably straightforward. The events occur and are described in an apparently linear fashion, though the events themselves are often strange and as mentioned there are occasional disjointed passages. The seventh and last section, covering the remaining 150 pages, is purportedly a typescript someone made from Kid's journal. It takes up more or less where the previous section left off, but as many of the pages in the notebook had come loose and the typescript was seemingly made from a bunch of pages that were somewhat out of sequence, with some missing, the episodes described are no longer in their proper order. As Kid used the margins of the notebook to add extra thoughts, this section is full of marginalia, usually but not always connected with the main text it appears beside. As the writing on the original pages often continued onto subsequent pages that were missing when the typescript was made, many passages are cut off in the middle of a line. Descriptions of some events are missing entirely, though we know they took place because of references elsewhere. In a few places Kid lapses into gibberish.
Finally, in this section it becomes clear that not only are the descriptions of events not in order, but time itself is out of joint. There are contradictory indications of the sequence of certain events, and ultimately the novel is circular. This is made obvious by events at the very end of the book. Without going into precise detail, I will describe one event which gave this away to me (though there had been other clues that I noticed when I looked back). When Kid enters the city at the beginning of the book, he encounters a group of girls leaving and talks to them briefly (though in the dark he doesn't see them clearly). One gives him a bizarre weapon called an orchid (made of seven blades curving forward from a wrist band) that he carries throughout much of the story. At the end of the story, a group of people, mostly male, leave the city and meet a girl going in. They have a conversation almost identical to that between Kid and the girls at the beginning. In flipping back to the latter to check this, I realized that the group of girls Kid meets going in are a group that are described as disappearing from the city in the last section of the book.
What's more, many of the passages that Kid reads out of the notebook that he gets at the beginning – passages that were already in the notebook when he first got it – appear word for word in the last section of the book. In other words, it seems as if Kid himself wrote the original passages in the notebook. The book begins in the middle of a sentence; "…to wound the autumnal city". It ends with "…I have come to…", and in one passage of gibberish in the last section of the novel the entire sentence ("I have come to to [sic] wound the 'autumnal city") appears. So the novel ends as it begins (as supposedly James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which I haven't read, does), making a loop. Indeed, one critic has said it acts as a Moebius Strip.
Unsurprisingly, Dhalgren (which ultimately sold in the neighborhood of a million copies) elicited a wide range of opinions. Many critics both inside and outside the science fiction praised it highly, and it has received far more critical attention from people attempting to explain various aspects of it than the average science fiction book gets (comparable instead to the attention given to some of Ursula Le Guin's work, or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut). Others hated it, among them prominent writers like Philip K. Dick. Even its fans often admit to not understanding it; William Gibson wrote a forward to one edition in which he said: "I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it... Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its 'riddle' was never meant to be 'solved.'"
So would I recommend it? It depends entirely on the taste of the individual reader. Certainly those who dislike anything other than a straightforward tale, expect to have all mysteries (or even most of them) explained or have a problem with sex that is not heterosexual or monogamous would do well to steer clear. I personally found the book very intriguing and somewhat frustrating (I do generally prefer to have all the mysteries cleared up at the end of a book). I'm glad I read it, and I may read it again someday, but I wouldn’t want to read a lot books like it, certainly not on a regular basis. There's no doubt, however, that it's an unusual reading experience.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The next novel I read was a well-known classic, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. This novel superficially has very little in common with Dhalgren, but there are a few points in common. The most obvious is that they were both controversial, and sex was a primary reason for this. There are no graphic sex scenes in Madame Bovary, but she commits adultery, which was something of a taboo topic. What’s more, there is confusion, if only in the mind of Madame Bovary herself, between spiritual and physical ecstasy, resulting in accusations of blasphemy. In fact, Flaubert was prosecuted for "immorality" and "irreligion", though he was ultimately acquitted.
Madame Bovary is far from an admirable figure, and in fact there are no truly admirable characters in the novel, at least among the main characters. Madame Bovary is shallow and self-centered, and is unable to separate fantasy (as represented by the romantic novels she reads) from the reality of mundane everyday life. She believes she cannot be happy unless she is swept off her feet and carried off to exotic lands, and as a consequence she is almost constantly unhappy, except early in her affairs when she is able to convince herself that what is happening is like the stories she has read. In fact, as I read the novel, she made me think of Don Quixote, and later when reading the critical supplement at the end of the book I learned that several critics have made the same comparison. She is not delusional to the point of obvious mental illness like Don Quixote, but the result is nearly the same. She despises her husband because of his ordinariness and lack of competence, and while not unintelligent, she has no self-control, spending extravagantly to gratify her various impulses. She doesn't even truly care for her lovers, just for the way they can satisfy her desires.
Madame Bovary is not a cheerful book; it's full of not very lovable people, and the end is not a happy one, at least for most of the characters. But Flaubert's skill as a writer is what makes the book a classic, and while I can't claim to be able to fully appreciate his stylistic ability, especially in translation (that's not a criticism of the translator, just recognition of the inevitability of something being lost in translation, particularly in the case of a writer like Flaubert), there were many standout passages, making it obvious why many admire the book. Flaubert himself once wrote that "there is no such thing as a beautiful idea without beautiful form, and vice versa." He was said to constantly write and rewrite passages, searching for the perfect combination of words (in this, if nothing else, he is like Kid in Dhalgren). Despite this, he was cynical about the ability of words to really convey anything properly; in one passage in Madame Bovary explaining the inability of her lover to truly understand her, he says: "…no one can every express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars." From the descriptions of him in the critical supplement, including ones by people who knew him personally like Emile Zola, Flaubert was a somewhat obsessive and occasionally contradictory character, but nonetheless widely admired, and Madame Bovary was the main foundation for much of that admiration.
Leiber, Cherryh and Moorcock
After reading two relatively "heavy" books in a row, I wanted some relatively light reading for a time. Accordingly I decided to return to Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by reading The Swords of Lankhmar, the first book included in the omnibus The Second Book of Lankhmar. As I have discussed Leiber's tales previously, I will just make a few observations here. One is that The Swords of Lankhmar is unusual in that it is a full novel rather than a collection of stories gathered in chronological order (internal chronology, that is). Also, though he is writing fantasy, Leiber makes a commendable effort to provide scientific explanations for fantastic things. When the Gray Mouser shrinks due to a magic potion, he leaves a puddle of slimy pink liquid on the ground, bordered by a gray powder, corresponding to the matter that he has lost from his flesh, clothing and weapons. Likewise, Fafhrd quite intelligently asks a female Ghoul (a human-like creature with flesh and organs that are entirely transparent, making them look like living skeletons) he meets and becomes romantically involved with how she can see, given that light passes straight through her eyes. Whether her explanation, or Leiber's explanation for the geology of the Sinking Land, is completely sound scientifically I couldn't say, but at least he makes the effort. The episode with Fafhrd and his Ghoul lover is also notable for Leiber's aside that the sight of them together was "one to touch the hearts of imaginative lovers and enemies of racial discrimination in all the many universes". And once again his heroes stand in contrast to characters like Conan in that they are less superhuman (though the way they are able to fight off a crowd of people out for their blood at the beginning of the novel is almost Conan-like); they are occasionally foolish, usually lustful and greedy, somewhat sexist (though unlike nearly all of Conan's lovers, their lovers are often a match for them, mentally and in the case of Fafhrd's Ghoul lover, even physically) and yet prone to generous impulses. All in all, they make a pleasant if not always politically correct diversion.
I followed this with C. J. Cherryh's novel Merchanter's Luck, a story set, like the other books of hers that I’ve read, in her Alliance-Union universe. This is a far future where humans have expanded into far into space, settling in space stations and eventually habitable worlds strung out among the stars, with their ties to Earth eventually loosening to the point that contact is minimal. The routes between the stars are traveled by merchant spacers who carry goods from station to station. Cherryh has written many books in this series, but the only ones I've read previously are the much longer Downbelow Station and Cyteen, plus the more distantly connected Chanur trilogy. Downbelow Station is an action-packed adventure tale featuring complicated political maneuvering, ending by creating the balance of power that serves as the background for many of the later tales. Cyteen takes place on the eponymous central planet of the somewhat fascistic Union, and is an interesting account of an attempt to replicate a genius, not only by creating a genetic clone, but also by recreating the environment and events of her childhood. The Chanur trilogy takes place in a more distant area of the galaxy inhabited by intelligent alien races. It centers on a ship which ends up taking on a refugee alien of a hitherto unknown race that calls itself “human”. This series is notable not only for creating believable alien races, but for making them the focus of the story (we only learn what the human thinks from the little he is able to convey as he slowly learns their language). Merchanter's Luck, which takes place soon after Downbelow Station and includes appearances by some of the characters of that novel, is less of an epic tale than any of the above, but is gripping nonetheless. It also has some psychological elements, as one of the two protagonists is a young man whose family were massacred when he was a boy, except for two others who died subsequently, leaving him the sole owner of a starship, often flying it completely alone when he is unable to find temporary crew, accompanied only by his ghosts and the voice of his cousin, programmed into the ship's computer. When he has the opportunity to take on a more trustworthy crew, his solitary habits and deep-seated distrust of others creates problems. The story is fairly short (around 200 pages) but fast-paced. Basically, it's an entertaining way to spend a few hours.
Next I read The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock, which is the second book (by internal chronology) of the Elric series. Elric is the rightful emperor of Melnibone, a land inhabited by race of beings similar to humans, but more powerful and almost completely lacking in human emotions like regret and compassion (they quite casually inflict very barbaric tortures, and rarely show any concern for others, even of their own race). Elric is exceptional in that he does feel such emotions to some degree. He is also an albino, and physically weak without special drugs. Despite this, he is a powerful sorcerer and a skilled swordsman. What's more, he wields an extremely powerful sword called Stormbringer. This black blade is semi-sentient and often seems to murmur to itself. It sucks the souls out of those it strikes, consuming them and transferring energy from their souls to Elric. However, it sometimes gets out of Elric's control, striking those he does not wish to strike, with tragic results.
In this novel, Elric has recently left Melnibone to travel in the human kingdoms, as he believes that understanding the up and coming human powers is necessary if the decadent, decaying realm of Melnibone is to have any chance of surviving, and also because his unusual (for a Melnibonean) ability to feel human emotions made him restless at home. When feeling hostile humans, he meets a mysterious ship that sails between worlds, on which he meets several individuals who, like he himself, are incarnations of a being known as the Eternal Champion. It seems that virtually all the heroes featured in Moorcock's fiction are incarnations of the Eternal Champion, despite superficial differences. In this book, Elric meets Erekose, Hawkmoon, and Corum, all of whom feature in other Moorcock novels (though other than Elric, the only one I’ve read any stories of is Corum, when someone lent them to me in high school – my impression at the time, accurate or not, was that they were grim and depressing). After facing a pair of beings that threaten all the worlds that they come from, Elric parts company with the others, and has further adventures in attempting to return to his own world, the last ending in misfortune.
As might be guessed with his sinister sword, his unpleasant antecedents, and his ill-starred life, Elric is a much grimmer hero than Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan. There is no question he is a very memorable character, but his adventures are much bleaker and so not as much fun to read about. Also, while Moorcock's scope is broader than many other fantasy writers in that his tales of many different worlds are all in a sense tied together, his individual worlds don’t seem to be quite as detailed as those of Leiber and Howard, not to mention Tolkien (though to be fair, I haven’t read as many of his books – even in the case of the Elric stories, I’ve only read the first three books, all of which are on the short side). However, despite these downsides, anyone interested in fantasy should read at least some of the Elric stories, as they are sure to make an impression.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The Sea (1994)
When I first visited the Philippines in 1994, I took a passenger ferry from Manila to Cebu, an island in the middle of the country. The voyage took about a day. This was the first time I'd been on a boat out of sight of land (with the exception of a much shorter trip in Thailand), and as I sat on the deck looking out over the sea I was inspired by the experience to write the following in my journal of the trip. I generally have great difficulty writing lyrically; this is one of my few attempts at doing so. Whether it was successful is another matter. Perhaps it just proves that I should stick to what I'm good at.
The sea is a vast rippling plain, stretching out endlessly to the horizon. Above it hang clouds in their myriad shapes; ephemeral, delicate islands in their own sea of blue. Occasionally a boat skims its lonely way across the surface, leaving a faint trail like that of a sidewinder moving through the desert or like a man moving through time. For though trails are left in their wake, sometimes narrow and almost indistinguishable, sometimes broad and powerful, in the end all fade away, swallowed by the trackless sea. So, too, do all of our lives and the traces of our passage we leave behind eventually dwindle into nothing as if we'd never been. Sometimes the sea rages, ravaging all before it, just as in the passage of time there occur cataclysmic events which wipe the slate clean, leaving little or nothing of what had been, no matter how imposing.
In the distance rises an island, immobile and unfading, just as our world remains after we go. Or is it truly permanent? No, one day the island and the whole world will crumble to nothing, worn down by the waters of time.
Soon it will be time to go back in, back to the world of humanity, back to reality. Or perhaps that is not reality after all. Perhaps reality lies not in the human world of passion, pain, and endless striving for things that will not last, but with the endless sea.
The sea is a vast rippling plain, stretching out endlessly to the horizon. Above it hang clouds in their myriad shapes; ephemeral, delicate islands in their own sea of blue. Occasionally a boat skims its lonely way across the surface, leaving a faint trail like that of a sidewinder moving through the desert or like a man moving through time. For though trails are left in their wake, sometimes narrow and almost indistinguishable, sometimes broad and powerful, in the end all fade away, swallowed by the trackless sea. So, too, do all of our lives and the traces of our passage we leave behind eventually dwindle into nothing as if we'd never been. Sometimes the sea rages, ravaging all before it, just as in the passage of time there occur cataclysmic events which wipe the slate clean, leaving little or nothing of what had been, no matter how imposing.
In the distance rises an island, immobile and unfading, just as our world remains after we go. Or is it truly permanent? No, one day the island and the whole world will crumble to nothing, worn down by the waters of time.
Soon it will be time to go back in, back to the world of humanity, back to reality. Or perhaps that is not reality after all. Perhaps reality lies not in the human world of passion, pain, and endless striving for things that will not last, but with the endless sea.
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