A-Z 2021 P - The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Jan Potocki, 1815)

 

OK, let's see if you can follow along with me, here.

This is a novel written by a Polish nobleman.  He wrote it in French, working on it over a span of roughly twenty years, and its final form isn't necessarily his final draft, as the author committed suicide while still crafting it.  There is no known extant copy of the complete novel in the original French, so roughly 20% instead only exists as a Polish translation of the missing original.  That 20% was later translated back into French, so that the novel could exist in something at least close to its original form.

With me so far?

The novel itself purports to be a manuscript found in a locked safe and written in Spanish.  The finder, a French soldier, is taken prisoner by the Spanish army and discovers that the commander in charge of the unit that has captured him is a descendant of the writer of the manuscript, and proceeds to translate it into French to share the stories within.  The manuscript's writer, one Alphonse von Worden, is a Walloon (read: French-speaking Belgian) soldier who, through a series of misadventures, finds himself stuck in a small valley in Andalusia, traveling around and meeting those who live there, and hearing stories they tell about themselves and their families.  He records the stories being told in his diary over the 66 days he spends in the Andalusian countryside.  Those stories may include other stories within them, which may contain further stories within them...

Yeah.  This is possibly the most intricately-nested set of stories I've ever read.  There are several times that the narrative ends up five layers deep.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a difficult book to sum up.  I'd suggest that it's unfilmably so, except that a film exists (albeit one that is three hours long).  In fact, I actually have it on DVD, somewhere.  It's tempting to directly compare this work with the Thousand and One Nights and the serialized storytelling of Scheherazade, but there's a significant difference between the two sets of stories, primarily in the way that the whole collection of stories is working toward a single unified tale.  There's a whole tapestry being woven here, where multiple of the characters have linked backstories, and especially toward the end of the work, people who figure in one story appear in others, from a different perspective.

The central thematic concern is the mystery of the Gomelez, a Moorish clan of sorts that possesses untold and seemingly endless wealth, living in the ruins of a castle and a network of hidden caves under the valley that Alphonse's narrative takes place in.  For much of the book, it's unclear just what the full nature of the events that befall Alphonse might be; the existence of the supernatural is treated as a matter of course, with several stories dealing with magic or ghosts.  Characters appear and disappear in different guises, and the longest of the tales, that of the gypsy chief Pandesowna, involves repeated instances of changing his appearance and identity in order to navigate his world.

The book reads surprisingly modern; while part of that may be due to its position as a somewhat recent work in translation (and re-translation, as it were), it equally has a sort of out-of-time quality to it, where even though the characters refer to historical figures that were active and that they might have encountered in their adventures, there is little knowledge of the political climates of 17th and 18th century Europe necessary to understand what's going on.  Rather, the far more interesting aspect to this work is the way that it shifts so cleanly between genres, as the various tales take shape, and the way that every narrator has a noticeably different voice, but with everything being in service of Alphonse's journey, each of the twenty or so individual tales is able to possess a completely different feel without being utterly jarring.

It's a fascinating piece of literature, to be sure.  Perhaps the only truly disappointing thing I can say about it is that the end felt rather rushed, though that may be a function of the author's cutting-short of his own authorship.  Even so, the vast majority of questions were answered, and few loose threads were left over.  If nothing else, that serves to show how carefully-crafted this work is.

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021)

So, here's something I didn't expect.  A dystopian novel where the dystopia not only isn't a focus, but also isn't actually spelled out at all.

The titular narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is an Artificial Friend, a robot specifically manufactured to provide companionship to lonely children.  The world on display is largely our own, though the presence of functional human-like robots should be the first indication that we're firmly in sci-fi territory.  The first 40 pages or so concern Klara's time at the store she is eventually purchased from, where her specific gifts become clear.  Klara is particularly adept at observing details and putting them together, which leads to some combination of insightfulness and surrealism in her interactions with the larger world around her.  She comes to believe, for example, that the Sun (as in the incandescent orb in the sky) is alive, has his own will (and yes, the Sun in Klara's mind is gendered), and is capable of performing acts of miraculous healing.  She also believes that the Cootings Machine, a piece of construction equipment which never has its purpose spelled out but which emits so much Pollution that it can blot out the Sun in its immediate surroundings, is obviously the Sun's great foe (and therefore the villain of Klara's story).

Klara's narration has a strange, somewhat disjointed quality to it; there's an almost child-like diction, with a marked tendency toward referring to others in the third person, even when they're the only person she's speaking to.  Her observations can be somewhat unsettling at times, and she has far from a full understanding of emotions, leading her to say and do things that are perhaps not the best choice at the time.

Most of the book is focused on Klara's interactions with Josie, a sickly adolescent girl who chooses her from the store.  From the start, there's something a little off about the whole situation; Josie's mother directly asks Klara to show her imitation abilities off in the store, after a few encounters across the shop window, and the relationship between the Mother and Klara is anything but normal, as the story progresses; the reason for this becomes clear, but the implications are decidedly chilling.

The world on display is a sort of light dystopia, plausible but thankfully not something currently feasible.  Robots have largely replaced even some highly-trained and creative-thinking workers (referred to as "substitution"), and colleges are actively refusing entry to new students who haven't been "lifted", a process of gene-therapy that yields higher intellect (though in Josie's case, also led to significant health issues).  The stresses that this puts on the system are obvious, and appear generally to be exactly what one might expect increased unemployment on that sort of scale to become.

Klara's place in all of this is initially confusing to her, but as she begins to realize what the purpose of bringing her into the household actually is, she finds herself divided in how best to act.  She believes the clear solution is to requrst assistance from the Sun and his miraculous healing, going so far as to accept a quest from him to kill the Cootings Machine at any cost.

It's a delightful read, and the way that the shape of the dystopia creeps in slowly, only as Klara herself becomes aware of each aspect, is amazing.  The way that Klara sees the world is inherently different than the way humans do (details broken out into boxes, shapes abstracted into primitives when she isn't focusing on them specifically) and this comes out perfectly, though it is a touch jarring at first.

I find myself wondering how similar Ishiguro's other works might be.  I know for sure that he has written other, more overt dystopian literature that deals with rather darker themes, though I have little interest in reading it at this time (so soon after Nineteen Eighty-Four).  Even so, though, he's definitely going on my list of authors I need to read more of.

A-Z 2021 O - Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948)

...I don't think I was ready for this.

There's two directions I could take this post.  There's the one where I take an objective view of Nineteen Eighty-Four and look at the book in a vacuum, digging into the narrative and the writing style and not much else.

That direction is boring.

There's also the direction where I take a very much subjective view of the book, look at the politics and messages in the text and the warnings that are present here, and dig into the relevance that the book has to the modern world.

That direction is uncomfortable and could potentially put all of my own political and sociological views on display if I'm not careful.

That direction is also the one I have to go in, because this book was an uncomfortable read and I need to unpack things a bit before I move on to my next read.  There was never any other option, I was always going to go down this path in writing this piece.

So, we really have to start with the general idea of what this book is.  The phrase 'Big Brother is watching you' has entered the popular consciousness, to the point that there's a whole global long-running franchise of reality shows called Big Brother.  This comes from a partial understanding of the nature of Big Brother and the general form of the police state that is Oceania and more specifically London under the control of Ingsoc.  Yes, it's a surveillance state; nothing can be done that isn't potentially being watched.  But there's a lot more to it than just the surveillance.

The central idea that is at work in Ingsoc London is so much worse than merely being a surveillance state, though.  For one, this is where the idea of "thought police" comes from.  Any ideas that are a deviation from the party line, even memories, are considered to be thoughtcrime and are understood to be a crime that carries the death penalty.  This isn't entirely accurate, but it's very close.  There is no evidence allowed to exist that supports the idea of there being an objective reality other than what the Party wants the population to believe there to be.  This is so ingrained into everyone that at one point in the book, during a vast celebration of patriotic xenophobia that includes posters and banners stating that the foe of Oceania is Eurasia, the foe changes abruptly to Eastasia in the middle of a speech and the whole population spontaneously remembers that they've always been at war with Eastasia, so clearly all these posters vilifying their ally Eurasia were placed by rebellious agitators who want to destroy Ingsoc and thus everything needs to be pulled down and destroyed.

It's that abrupt.  The orator changes the direction of his speech in response to a note handed to him, without even missing a beat, and the whole population just turns on a dime.

A big part of this is because of the nature of the society in question.  Ingsoc is a shortened form of 'English Socialism', though in practice it's precisely as much of a socialist party as the National Socialists in Germany were; indeed, this is what Orwell, a socialist himself, was trying to illustrate.  The most insidious part of Ingsoc is not the surveillance state, or even the organized rewriting of the past to fit the present (an act which is the job of protagonist Winston Smith).  It's how language itself is used as a weapon, wielded like a scalpel to shape thoughts themselves.

A useful thought experiment comes in the form of considering how one generates their words when writing.  If you're thinking about an object that can be described in concrete terms (say, an elephant), you first picture an image of the object, then find the words that match it.  If you think about the feel of the elephant's skin, you have to picture the texture before you can attach the word 'rough'.  But if you're thinking about an abstract concept, such as 'democracy', what image can you attach that properly serves as a base?  You have to start from the words.

Ingsoc is actively working to create a new version of the language, called Newspeak, that will eventually replace modern English, referred to as Oldspeak.  One of the hallmarks of Newspeak is that vocabulary is very precisely defined, so that most basic words have a single meaning; additionally, when two words are opposites, one can be removed and replaced with the other, just with an 'un-' prefix added.  Doubleplus ungood if you're a fan of language, though equally an incredibly insidious way of controlling thought.  One can't think about freedom if the definition of 'free' only allows for its use in the sense of 'sugar-free'.  One can't think about general equality of people as a whole when 'equal' is defined as 'precisely the same', so that all people being equal would require that everyone be, essentially, clones.  If you don't have the words for complex abstract thought that goes against the Party because all such concepts have been imprecisely bodged together into the single term 'crimethink', well...  I'm sure the implications are clear.

Nineteen Eighty-Four goes farther, though, than simply explicating these ideas in a narrative form, however.  It goes so far as to show just how such a ruling class will go about maintaining that power, and how they 'fix' anyone whose thoughts are unable to conform.  Winston Smith spends the last part of the book being tortured and systematically stripped of his ability to maintain his badthinking ways, training him in the art of doublethink, having two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in his head and believing only the one that is suitable, so that he can be a productive, obedient and goodthinking member of society.  This begins with a sequence that was absolutely being referenced when Star Trek: The Next Generation did their torture episode, where Smith is told that when a man holds up four fingers in front of him, he is supposed to know instinctively, to truly believe that there are five fingers being held up.  By the end of the book, he genuinely does, willing and eager to accept without a moment's hesitation or doubt that if the party says 2+2=5, then 2+2 couldn't possibly be 4.

This may be the one thing that's the most chilling about this book, in fact: there is absolutely no hope on display here.  This is possibly the most pessimistic dystopia I've ever encountered; through the whole book, Smith is telling himself repeatedly that he knows exactly how the road he's traveling ends.  He knows that his doubt of Big Brother's benevolence and the Party's rightness will inevitably lead him to the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, and from there, eventually, to execution.  We don't see this last part in the book, but even in his newfound place as a truly obedient Party member, he knows it's eventually going to come.  That's the point; Ingsoc doesn't just kill dissidents; it re-educates them until they've truly repented and can't do anything less than go perfectly with the Party line, before eventually killing them when it's the most appropriate timing.

For a long time, I've seen a bumper sticker on cars now and then, which reads "The answer to 1984 is 1776."  To me, this indicates that the person who has that sticker on their car hasn't ever actually read the book.  Leaving aside that the appendix on the methods of Newspeak explicitly spells out how the words of Jefferson could never survive the work of those like Smith who rewrite everything to match Party thought, let alone be translated to Newspeak, the book goes out of its way to lay out exactly how Oceanic society has been stratified, how the education system is designed to turn children into good little agents of the Party who are eager to turn in even their own parents for thoughtcrimes, how even the most minor indiscretion will get even the most enthusiastic Party member turned in.  The masses are kept uneducated, the Party members are caught up in infectious hyper-patriotism, and all dissent is rapidly dealt with.  The constant state of war means that even with mechanized production, goods are kept rationed and everyone is left in a state of want, because everything can be sent off to the battle fronts, effectively removing resources and keeping everything in a permanent state of rationing and austerity.  The Party is even going so far as to ensure that future generations will be ever less able to effectively resist, by stripping them of the very words they would need in order to build a resistance, by changing the meaning of words to mean different things than they used to mean...  In short, by building a society designed around the sole purpose of keeping those in power, well... in power.  Objective reality ceases to exist, replaced by the world that the Party and its mouthpieces want those who are subject to its power to believe exists.

Replaced by the world where 2+2=5.

I'm going to be honest here... I look at the world today and it makes me feel decidedly less than optimistic.  An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that freedom has responsibilities attached, and are more than eager to believe whatever their demagogues of choice spout out, regardless of how those beliefs reflect objective reality.  Words get twisted, so that 'socialism' has over the decades become a political buzzword for 'whatever the political Right doesn't like at the moment, even if they liked it a whole lot just a couple of years ago', and some kind of ridiculous doublethink has people claiming the Newspeak-esque term 'Antifa' (short for anti-fascist) indicates that someone is, in fact, a fascist.  Critical Race Theory, an educational concept that rarely appears outside of post-grad law school, has somehow become something that is taught in Kindergarten, at least if one listens to the mouthpieces.  And far be it for anyone to even suggest that slavery was a problem outside of the American South in the time of the Civil War (which wasn't about slavery, it was state rights! to have legal slavery) and that racism isn't inherently baked into everything that European culture has ever touched.

This book messed me up.  I can't honestly look at Ingsoc and its methods and think of anything other than what I've watched the political landscape turn into over the last decade.  Populism, isolationism, militarism, blind patriotism, the last administration's attempts at a willful rewriting of history to make it reflect what they wanted rather than objective reality, the resulting uncontained crazy that was the January 6th insurrection...

I would have gotten something totally different out of this if I'd read it 20 years ago when I was in high school instead of now.  It probably wouldn't have hit me nearly as hard.  But then, the world was different then.

For one, people generally agreed about objective reality.

A-Z 2021 N - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda, 1924)

I've never really read a lot of poetry.  Part of that is that I've often gone through spells where I don't read anything but non-fiction, but equally, it's simply that I've often leaned more into novels (and usually genre stuff at that) than into shorter works, let alone works where the whole thing might be over in a matter of lines.

I may have decided that I don't much enjoy reading Keats, but that absolutely isn't the case with reading poetry in general, as I've learned with this small volume of Pablo Neruda's verse.  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a small volume (Penguin's edition comes out to 112 pages, and that's with an 18-page introduction, every poem being bilingual on facing pages, and about a dozen Picasso illustrations with blank facing pages), but it packs a punch, to say the least.

The title isn't 100% accurate; the 'Song of Despair' is absolutely a love poem as well, simply one that's more about the pain of love ending than about adoration of the woman Neruda is devoting the words to.  So what we have here is a small collection, just twenty-one poems, most only a page long.  And yet, there's a very good reason that this was chosen to have not just a whole volume to itself, but one in bespoke Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition styling, making it stand out just that little bit more on the shelf, despite having the lowest spine height of the whole bunch.

The poems here are quite unlike the Romantic poets, with their tendency toward placing the object of affection on a pedestal of sorts, as if the lovers were Greek goddesses.  Rather, there's a sort of raw, earthy quality to Neruda's writing, his lovers a part of the world, creatures of sensuality who inspire both words of love and of lust.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

I mean...  That's definitely a form of worship toward one's lover, but not in any kind of remotely chaste sense. There's a sense of unbridled eroticism to every poem in the collection; the most common metaphors compare the lover to the ocean's depths, to the weather, love as something more akin to a force of nature that cannot be resisted or controlled, rather than anything that could be captured in stone and placed in a museum.

It's difficult to say that this slim volume gives a solid idea of what Neruda's poetry was like over the course of his life, however; this was one of his first published works (composed when he was only 20), while his career lasted until his death in 1973.  That said, given that it is still, a century on, the highest-selling poetry collection in the Spanish language, their timeless quality ensures that Neruda occupies a solid position among the acknowledged masters of poetry.

Picking up the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 certainly doesn't hurt, though.

A-Z 2021 M - The Crucible (Arthur Miller, 1953)

If there's one thing that my country is really, really good at, it's attacking itself.  All you have to do to see evidence of that is look at the news; we're always divided, often with at least one side quoting Bible verses as justification for their hatred of the other side.  I've actually seen Leviticus quoted as a pro-face-mask argument in recent days, which, on one hand, good on whoever found that for locating something that speaks the right language, but on the other hand...  Ugh.  I'm not going to get into the theory and practice of using historical religious documents as a guiding principle in the modern world, that's just not what I'm here for, and it would probably just turn into a crazed rant anyways.

What I am here for, right now, is Cold War/Red Scare commentary disguised as a play about the Salem witch trials.

So, because it's absolutely not existing in a vacuum, the first place to start any discussion of The Crucible has to be with the political background to its writing, specifically the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its intersection with the entertainment industry.  If someone pointed a finger at you and said 'Communist!', you got dragged into Congress where you had to answer whether you were a Communist, and if you knew anyone else who might have been a Communist, and if you say no, they're not going to believe you, and if you say yes, you'd better have names to give, and if you plead your First or Fifth Amendment rights, well, that's just proof that you're a Communist, because nobody has anything to fear if they're innocent, right?

So basically, anyone who got pulled in was either guilty or had to point fingers.  Refusal wasn't an option.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible's author, saw all this happening, saw his friend Elia Kazan actually pointing fingers in 1952, and then went to research in Salem, Massachusetts, because, well...  we've seen this kind of kangaroo court situation before, in this country.  And the result is a Tony-award-winning play that ended up perfectly describing how he was going to end up acting when he got dragged in front of the HUAC himself in 1956.

The play itself does a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with history, but the general form of the narrative follows what actually happened.  Some of the girls of Salem Village get caught doing stuff they shouldn't be, decide to blame it on witchcraft, and when they suddenly have everyone's ears and become celebrities of a sort, which isn't helped by everyone being willing to go with their argument and go into a state of paranoia.  With the courts deciding that since supernatural evidence by definition lacks a physical presence, the situation ended up that the only way out was to lie and say you were guilty of witchcraft, repent before the Lord, and name names.

There's a lot to unpack in the real events, particularly in the political underpinnings; I'm far from an expert, but I can point at the podcast Remarkable Providences as a source of good background information (in particular, the political and economic motives are only glossed over in The Crucible).  Miller provides several short essays in the midst of Act One, in order to give some historical background for the characters, though he does leave out where his inaccuracies lie.  It would be difficult to argue that he wasn't aware of what he was doing, but given that he was making a statement about the nature of guilt in the middle of an uncontrolled moral panic, his messaging through the lead character, John Proctor, requires a bit of that.  In particular, the personal conflict in the play revolves around a past illicit dalliance between him and Abigail Williams, the primary instigator of the witch panic, and ringleader of the group of girls pointing fingers at everyone around them.

In real life, this almost certainly never happened, given that Proctor was in his 60s and Abigail a pre-teen, but in the play, these ages are changed to mid-30s and 18 respectively.  The main reason Proctor gets involved in the proceedings is that Abigail points a finger at his wife, in what is all but directly stated to be an attempt to render Proctor a widower so that she can marry him, but his attempt to talk some sense into the court instead results in him being declared a witch, himself.  In true kangaroo court style, he's essentially declared guilty without anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, and the play ends with his execution after perjuring himself in an attempt to get some real justice for the innocent, an act which he very forcibly recants after it becomes clear that no such justice is present.

In the end of the play, we're told that Abigail stole her uncle's fortune and hopped on a ship; the epilogue suggests that she was later seen as a prostitute in New York, a somewhat poetic ending based on the play's version of her.  It's unclear where Miller got this from, however; Abigail Williams doesn't seem to exist in the historical record after (or, indeed, before) the witchcraft scare in Salem.

So, what are we to take from this?  That paranoia is bad when it results in a bit of face-spiting?  That using scripture and religion to determine what is or isn't a sign of guilt results in the innocent being punished?  That trusting the accuser with no actual evidence is a really, really stupid idea?

That people are really, really good at putting their brains into coast and just going along with whatever the loud voices shouting in their ears tell them?

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy (admittedly, not part of HUAC, but very much of the same political moment) made the ill-advised move to turn his anti-Communist attentions toward the US Army.  The resulting proceedings were very much public, and led to his popularity and approval spiraling downward, and eventually a formal censure by the Senate, effectively ending his political career.

In the script he wrote for the 1996 film version of the play, Miller added a scene, just before the final day, where Abigail is directly confronted by Reverend Hale, one of Proctor's allies, who has come to realize how he's been used over the length of the story, and exactly what his expertise in finding apparent witchcraft and devilry has been used for.  In response, Abigail declares Hale's wife to be a witch, an act which results in her being largely discredited due to having accused a preacher's wife, considered beyond reproach, of being a witch.  While this doesn't get those previously accused off the hook, it's the point where she decides to make her escape, ahead of any repercussions landing on her head.

One has to wonder what the tipping point in our culture's current moment of paranoid self-harm and self-destruction is going to be.