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.

Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 1/2)

 

I think it says a lot for the quality of a book when I can plunge through the whole thing in a matter of hours.  I mean, sure, I'm a fan of well-written utopian/dystopian literature anyways, when a great deal of time is spent exploring the world with some considerable depth, but being able to plunge through a whole novel, even when it's perhaps somewhat short, in a single day, even with interruptions?

Herland is one of the few instances of true utopian literature that I've actually read; the closest thing I can think of is H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", in that the ramifications of the cultural change have been fully explored.  Usually, there's some clear drawback to the society explored; what is Utopia to one is Dystopia to another.  There is some aspect of that in Herland, where one of the 'outsider' characters definitely finds it to be anything but paradise for him, but, well...  I'll get to that.

The central conceit in Herland is that there is a hidden country high in the mountains of... Somewhere; the narrator specifically says he has no intention of making it clear exactly where this country is, but it's about the size of Holland and impossible to reach except by air.  A combination of volcanic activity, slave uprising, and self-defense killings resulted in the complete cutting-off of this land, along with the utter destruction of the entire male gender.  Spontaneously, one of the young women left behind turns out to have the ability to reproduce parthenogenically, which is also passed on to her daughters, and their daughters as well, eventually leading to the country being entirely populated by what is essentially one big family.  Without any outsiders to contend with, the women are able to instead focus on improving the land and their culture for future generations.

Genetic diversity is somewhat handwaved here, but we're in some light fantasy territory so let's just see where this goes.

It's probably most useful to take a moment to consider the author.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a socialist leaning in her philosophies, and a particular focus on the inequalities created by capitalism and the tendency for women to have to rely on men instead of being fiscally independent.  During the early part of the 20th century, she even wrote and published her own magazine from 1909-1916, "The Forerunner", in which she expressed her views to her readership. 

This comes out quite clearly in the all-female culture we see in Herland.  The women have no money, few personal belongings, and little need for anything in their lives.  The population, stated as being around 3 million, is kept steady simply through each woman being allowed one child (with certain exemplars being allowed to have a second if others are considered unsuitable), and once a baby is able to leave her mother's side, her upbringing is in a communal child-rearing environment much like a 24/7 Montessori school where all activities are designed to be educational without the child realizing she is learning.  There is an intense focus on lifelong learning in the culture; while children are expected to choose a profession by which to better the land when they reach their teenage years, this is purely based on their interests.  

This way of choosing a calling is exemplified by the character of Ellidor, one of the first women met in the narrative.  At one point, she describes how she brought a moth she had caught to an "insect teacher" to ask what it was, learned that it was a pest that threatened a particular variety of nut tree and that was actively being eradicated as a result.  The ensuing course of education as she dug deeper and deeper led her to decide to devote her life to forestry.

Spirituality is somewhat passive; the belief is that the Deity lives within everyone, expressed as the feeling of motherhood that drives the culture as a whole, with no afterlife, everything instead being focused on the betterment of society for future generations, with little reverence for the beliefs and laws of the past if they can be made more just and equitable.  Those whose callings lead them to be able to serve as counselors to those who need psychological help spend part of their days in the temples located in each town, so that someone is always there to listen and offer guidance to the troubled.

Into this idyllic country, where the focus of everything is to make the land better than it was before, come the three outsider characters: Terry, a swaggering alpha male sort who is convinced that the legendary "Land of Girls" that they are searching for is sure to make him king because obviously they're all going to fawn over him; Jeff, a romantic sort of man who believes that his one purpose in life is to worship and serve a woman who loves him; and Vandyck, the narrator, who holds a view somewhat in the middle.  All three come in with an essentially androcentric worldview, and while they exoect to find a patriarchal society, they very much don't expect to find a complete lack of the Y chromosome.

The three reach the plateau where this country exists via a biplane, but find themselves quickly captured, imprisoned in decidedly comfortable surroundings, and forced to simultaneously learn the native language (streamlined and made elegant over time so that it is easy to teach and learn) and teach English to the inhabitants (who show little difficulty in learning).  This is quite fine with Van and Jeff, but Terry quickly grows frustrated by the captivity and the fact that the teaching staff and guards are all middle-aged, and talks the others into engaging in an escape.  This works well enough, and they manage to make it all the way back to the plane, only to discover that it has been seen into a gigantic cloth bag to protect it from the elements, and also that their entire escape and flight into the forest has been observed without their knowledge.

The book progresses from there as the three learn about the culture they have dropped into (which all three men find disappointing in certain ways, though only one is unable to come to terms with it), teach the women about the outside world, and slowly find love, of a sort.

And then Terry tries to get overly macho about his unchanged notion of gender roles, attempts to force himself on the woman he loves, is thoroughly and physically rebuffed, and gets himself thrown out.  The last chapter deals with this final part, and the preparations for a return to the outside world.  Van will come along to make sure he gets back to the outside world safely, and Ellidor won't allow Van to leave without being by his side.  Jeff has no intention of leaving; his lover is pregnant with the first two-parent child the country has seen in 2000 years, and he wouldn't dream of leaving her side.

Throughout the book, the injustices and inequalities of the outside world are shown to be problematic, not only when Van is forced to consider them, but also through the reactions when the women are told about them.  The final chapter includes a lot of foreshadowing about how Ellidor reacts when faced with these injustices up close, but only that; it ends with the three who are leaving, well... Leaving.

Herland was originally published in a serialized form in "The Forerunner".  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next month she began serializing the sequel, With Her in Ourland.  Unfortunately, the volume I'm reading from doesn't include that novel, instead following Herland with a selection of short stories and poetry from the whole of Gilman's career.  I find myself rather disappointed by this; I rather want to read the sequel now just to see where she chose to look for the contrasts that would surely be offered.

Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

...wow.

For a thin volume like Passing, which is all over in a mere 120 pages, there's a lot of stuff to chew on, and I know from the start that I'm probably not especially qualified to talk about much of what's going on here.  There's this thing called white privilege, you see, and, well...  Yeah.

It's probably best to start with the title, "Passing".  I became most familiar with this particular definition of the verb through the trans* context, where it refers to the act of looking enough like your correct gender that a stranger wouldn't know you're trans*; the term is used here in the earlier racial context, specifically in terms of pale-skinned Black folk who are able to "pass" as being White.  Even people like me, who have no experience of being on the receiving end of racism, can see what the point of that would be, especially in the 1920s, but also, well...  motions at the need for the Black Lives Matter movement to exist

The lead characters in Passing are Irene, a pale Black woman (her skin is described as "olive") who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Harlem; and Clare, similarly pale-skinned, who grew up alongside Irene until her father died, then was shuffled off to live with a couple of White aunts until she got herself married to get out from under their thumbs.  Her husband has no idea she's not pure White, which seems to be rather playing with fire on Clare's part, given that he is incredibly racist.

The book follows a three-act structure, with sections titled "Encounter", "Re-Encounter", and "Finale".  The first is largely a flashback to Irene and Clare's first time encountering each other as adults.  Irene is in Chicago to visit her father and old family friends, and happens to encounter Clare while taking tea at one of the higher-class hotels (choosing to "pass" for that moment).  Clare is so far into her façade that Irene doesn't recognize her, while the reverse is anything but true; it takes a minute of trying to figure out where she might have met this White woman who knows her childhood nickname, and in fact Clare laughing, for Irene to figure it out.

Clare's separation from the Chicago neighborhood (and in fact all of Black culture) is so complete that it has become a sort of forbidden desire to get news, to attend gatherings, to surround herself with the Blackness that she very intentionally left behind.  This becomes particularly problematic when Irene is introduced to Clare's husband, a truly unlikable character who makes it clear that he so proud to have no N-----s in his family and he knows the whole race better than they know themselves because he only believes the negative things he's heard or read.  Irene holds her tongue, but only barely, and decides to cut off contact with Clare altogether.

This would work fine, right up until Clare shows up at her door in Harlem.

The second half of the book deals with Clare's increasing insertion of herself into every Black cultural event she can manage while hiding it from her husband, and the increasing irritation and outright anger that this causes Irene to feel.  Everything builds to a breaking point as Clare's intrusions start to appear to include an illicit romance with Irene's husband... And then Clare's husband encounters and recognises Irene shopping with another Black woman, and, well...  Things do not end well.

Clare is almost a sort of Icarus figure, here.  She has, through a combination of happenstance and pluck, a way to escape the racism inherent in the system; she's unable to resist the temptation to go beyond the safe limits of that escape, though, to try to safely get back the heritage that she has left behind. Ultimately, that hubris, her playing with fire and disregard of the warnings that Irene initially gives her, ends up destroying her.

Irene, meanwhile, knows her limits.  She's playing a somewhat dangerous game of her own, using her children as a way to hold back some of her husband's ambitions, but she's much more careful about it, keeping within her means and only starting to act in less than well-thought-out ways than Clare has pushed her to the breaking point.  The growing resentment in Irene is quite obvious in the narration; while the novel is told in the third person, everything is through Irene's point of view, her head the only one we ever inhabit.

I'm going to admit, there is a lot that I'm sure I missed here.  Even with the usual Penguin Classics introduction and endnotes, I'm about as far from having an understanding of the cultural politics here as it's possible to be.  I can look at what's in the text, and draw my own conclusions, and it does give me some understanding of the author's own viewpoint (Larsen herself being pale-skinned Black), but I'm ultimately not going to be able to appreciate this in the way that a Black reader, or indeed a reader from any outwardly visible minority group, is going to be able to.

My own first-hand experiences as far as "passing" goes are limited to situations where my neurodivergent mind has gotten in the way of what might be considered "normal," and that's usually situations where I'm failing to "pass".  Not having even realized that I'm not neurotypical until relatively recently didn't help, of course.  It does give me at least a little insight into why someone would want to hide aspects of themselves for the sake of making life easier, but it's still not the same experience.

I'm glad that I read this, though.  All too often, the "classics" are overwhelmingly things written by white guys in Europe, and this was a marvelous change of pace, even if it's nowhere near a "feel-good" book.  But then, how many of the books that are really worth reading are?

The Councillor (E.J. Beaton, 2021)

 

It might be rather less than a surprise to anyone who reads what I have to say, but I like books that give me something to chew on, mentally.  There's a lot to be said for conspiracy themes, then; they're like a literary puzzlebox, where the clues are there if you know what to look for, but you might miss them easily.  It's the same idea as fair-play mysteries, where the reader can see all the pieces after the end, and could perhaps have figured it out before the characters do, just with rather larger stakes for the characters.

As such, it takes a deft hand to not only write a compelling conspiracy thriller, but place it in a fantasy setting that has to be built at the same time.  It says a lot for E.J. Beaton that she managed to pull this off so effectively in her debut novel, The Councillor.

The titular character is Lysande Prior, a scholar in the employ of Sarelin Brey, the Queen of Elira.  We're dealing with a generally low-fantasy setting in this book; medieval technology rules, and what fantastical creatures explicitly existed (such as the chimera seen on the front cover) are established early as having been killed off.  There are 'elementals' referenced as part of the population, who are capable of manipulating the elements at will (we see examples of wind, water, fire, and mind-control is alluded to) but this is a decidedly downtrodden group, forced to live in hiding because their mere existence is considered criminal.  Hello, civil rights issues.

Elira itself is a nation made up of five city-states, each of which has its own leader.  There are significant cultural differences between the states, but in all cases, there's a strong degree of social stratification.  The leaders of all five states are largely hereditary, with a clear aristocratic class ("silver-bloods") maintaining power over the commoners.  There is significant poverty in some parts of the nation, and vigilantism is rampant against elementals, whether or not they have done anything to deserve it, given the state-sanctioned illegal nature of their existence, regardless of whether they even choose to be that way.

The first chapter ends with the assassination of Sarelin, apparently at the whim of Mea Tacitus, the White Queen (who attempted to lead an elemental coup some twenty years prior) and the discovery that, in the event of her death, as she has no heir, she has tasked Lysande with selecting the next person to wear the crown, from among the remaining city-state rulers.  However, an important question remains before the scholar: nobody knows who was able to execute the assassination, and it's important to ensure that the new ruler won't be a puppet of the White Queen.

From there, we're introduced to the leaders of the four other city-states, and Lysande starts trying to decide who would be the best ruler.  This initially seems like it is going to be a selection of 'tests of worthiness', but when further disasters start to threaten the potential rulers (a piece of metal specifically-sized to be a choking hazard hidden in food, a vicious wolf let free in the coliseum when it's not supposed to be... yes, there are blood sports in this setting), she decides that the best option is, instead, to put off selecting a new monarch until the threat of Mea Tacitus is sorted out, placing the four leaders as a ruling council, instead.  She herself is added to the group at the urging of one of the four, as a representative of the fifth city-state, despite having no claim to any throne, and in fact being "low-born".

With this new governmental structure in place, the narrative then shifts to a larger question, that of what the apparently unprovoked attacks on trade ships and attempts on the lives of the council itself might mean.  This is complicated by the introduction of international politics to the mix; one of the two bordering kingdoms believes that their ships are being attacked by Eliran vessels and wants things to be made right, while mercenaries apparently paid by that same country are causing problems.  Lysande's knowledge serves her well, helping her to figure out what's going on, but not quite quickly enough to prevent a diplomatic incident, and not the last one in the narrative.

So, we have a book that's working on several levels.  The primary narrative deals with this conspiracy, where the question of who the traitor in the midst of the council is drives the story forward.  While this makes for the puzzlebox level of the narrative, what drew me to the book in the first place, I found that the far more interesting level was Lysande's development over the course of the work.  She starts out as a devoted servant of Sarelin, who uses the fallen queen's words as a guide for how she should act and how she should lead.  Even at the start of her time as Councillor, while she sees where social ills can be sorted out easily, she's unable to bring herself to take anything more than the smallest steps toward sorting them out.  Her background as a low-born orphan who had it drilled into her head that the appropriate way to express herself is to "restrain, constrain, subdue," anything to keep from getting too many thoughts into her head of acting above her station.  This motto or mantra appears throughout the book, as she grapples with her desire to enact real change to make the lives of all Eliran citizens better, despite her social status.  Her development over the course of the narrative into a genuine leader who is able to easily win the hearts of the populace is interesting to watch, and her slow realization that her low-born status is more a boon than she ever realized.

Definitely an interesting book, and given that the author is already working on a sequel, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.  The specific conflict that I spent much of the book expecting to see never quite materialized, but it's clearly still on the horizon, and two of the five city-states haven't been explored on a cultural level yet, so there's plenty of worldbuilding and narrative to see in the future.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas père, 1844)

 

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. 

 --Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 

Revenge is one of those things that shows up a lot in literature.  Character is wronged, character doesn't feel justice can be served without retribution, character exacts revenge.  It's a common plot, and what determines how worthy of a story it is comes down to the execution.  Thankfully, Alexandre Dumas père did an excellent job of building an incredible revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo, enough so that despite the sizable tome (Penguin's edition, without counting the introduction and cultural notes, is 1243 pages long), you would be hard-pressed to find a list of the best revenge novels that doesn't include it.

So, what is it that makes this particular classic stand out so effectively?  I would argue that its secret may be the level of mastery on display in the vengeance exacted by Edmond Dantés upon the men responsible for his life being ruined.  The Count of Monte Cristo is largely taken up with the description of an elaborately-planned plot, designed to force those men past a despair event horizon so that they might know what it's like to have their lives destroyed so utterly... and even beyond that, it's important to him that in the end, those who are destroyed by him are aware of who has brought about their downfalls.

Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of.  He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves.  However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France.  Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.

Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell.  This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value.  Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.

Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics.  They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape.  Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.

At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany.  While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster.  In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.

At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book.  What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments.  And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.

This is a long book.  Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line.  Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible.  But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations.  A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.

That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss.  The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters.  Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.

It's not a difficult read, it's just long.  The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing.  And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace.  We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.

The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 3/3)

 

And here we come to the third of Kenneth Grahame's major works, the one that he's perhaps best-known for now (and unfortunately the only one that Penguin currently publishes), The Wind in the Willows.  I was rather looking forward to reaching this, actually, I have a lot of vague memories of watching the 1980s television series, and of course Disney's take on the novel.  I know I attempted to read this once as a child, though I kind of bounced off of it.  Reading it now as an adult, I can see what went wrong at the time; I was looking for Mr. Toad's Wacky Adventures, and that's absolutely not what this is (mostly).

This is a decidedly different sort of work entirely from Grahame's two previous works, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its departure from the realism, albeit wonder-tinged, of The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Instead, we're in a world where certain animals dress and act in the same manner as people do, where the size of those animals in relation to humans seems to be based purely on what the narrative requires at that moment, and where an amphibian in a rather poor disguise can be easily mistaken for a human.

The first place to look for differences is simply in the nature of the work.  During the ten-year gap between Dream Days and this work, Grahame became a father, which significantly changed the shape of his audience.  Rather than writing for an ostensibly adult audience, as his newspaper columns were, The Wind in the Willows began as a series of tales that he was telling to his son.  This doesn't change his diction or his writing voice, but it does make this work rather less introspective.  Instead, it allows a shifting of perspectives between the characters to match the tone of each story.

There are three primary characters here, who are used as 'narrators' (though the whole work is told in the third person), though a fourth is generally considered a main character and has been included as a major character in all of the various adaptations over the years.  The character we spend the most time in the mind of is Mole, a simple but determined fellow who follows through on anything he's set to doing and tends to be easily drawn into other folks' activities.  Mole feels a sudden urge at the start of the book to leave his underground home, digs up to the surface, and is immediately overwhelmed by everything that is Springtime.  We're in a similarly pastoral setting to what was seen in The Golden Age and Dream Days, though without any time spent interacting with the nearby village.  Instead, the world of the animals is the wilds, with meadows, a river, a nearby forest, and beyond, the world of humans, which the animals prefer to steer clear of.  Mole quickly discovers the River, which is mindboggling to him, given that he's never seen anything of the sort.  At the same time, he meets Water Rat, a relaxed sort of fellow with a love of everything that has to do with the river and a taste for poetry.  Mole quickly decides to move in with Water Rat after the two share a picnic; the two will rarely be apart for the rest of the book.

Toad appears as a minor character, just spoken of, in the first chapter; he doesn't become a primary character until the second chapter, where a visit to Toad Hall results in him dragging Mole and Rat into his latest fixation, a horse-drawn caravan which he intends to go traveling the countryside in.  The characters are hesitant to get too involved, because Toad has a tendency to fixate on one thing until it loses some degree of charm for him, before moving on to something else; his exuberance for the idea of life on the road is able to push through his friends' reticence so that they end up going on his journey with him.  This goes well until the two rodents force Toad to actually do some of the work involved in this sort of travels, which quickly sours him on the prospect, aided by the caravan being run off the road and wrecked by a motor-car driving by at speed.  This sets up Toad's overall plotline (and the only actual ongoing plotline for the book), as he becomes obsessed by cars instead, and by the following morning has placed an order for one of his own.

We next meet Badger, a gruff sort of country gentleman of the sort who doesn't particularly care for society but is most welcoming to those in distress, who lives in the middle of the Wild Wood.  Mole and Rat come to his home during a snowstorm that leaves them stranded in the forest, and he gladly lets them in to stay the night and warm up.  He's a kind but stern fellow, whose biggest desire seems to be for there to be a certain degree of civility and stability to the countryside.  He's the sort that nobody particularly wants to cross, as well; Mole and Rat were somewhat threatened by the weasels and stoats who also live in the forest when they were caught after dark, and Badger makes it clear that they'll not see any further issues once it's known that they're his friends; after all, a badger is rather larger than most other mustelids.  At the same time, we learn that the Wild Wood is in a place where humans used to have a village; Badger's home is built in what is apparently a former basement.  This doesn't mean humans are gone, just they're not in that particular spot right now.

The small plotlines that continue in the book are similar small pastoral adventures, with Rat and Mole encountering a forest god (implied to be Pan) in one chapter (though they promptly forget, a gift from the god stated as being a way to ensure that their lives won't be seen as never reaching that peak again), and another having Rat be tempted toward running off to sea, until Mole returns him to his sanity.

The largest plotline, though, is Toad's misadventures as his arrogance and lack of common sense gets him in trouble, repeatedly; this is what the Disney film dealt with, and what the youthful me was expecting.  His fixation with motor-cars refuses to be sated even after he has wrecked six of them, and landed in the hospital three times; when Rat, Mole, and Badger attempt a forced intervention, he flees out the window, runs halfway to the human village nearby, steals a car, gets himself arrested, and winds up thrown into jail.  The subsequent escape (thanks to the warden's daughter who takes some pity on him because he's an animal) involves cross-dressing, sneaking aboard a train under false pretenses, stealing a horse, hijacking the same car again and driving it into a lake, and finally being swept up in the River's currents and delivered to Rat's door, across several chapters.  This leads to the revelation that the weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood have taken over Toad Hall, and finally a nighttime raid by the four friends to retake the manor from the invaders, and Toad finally learning a little bit of humility in the process.

It's obvious just why Toad is so beloved; children are obviously going to be amused by a goofy character who gets into all manner of slapstick scrapes.  But while his plotline may be the lion's share of the novel (six of the novel's twelve chapters deal with the Motor-Car fixation and its results, from beginning to end), the overall feel of the piece is far more in line with the lifestyles of Mole, Rat, and Badger.  These three are content with their lots in life; Mole may get homesick for his burrow, but he knows where it is and can easily stop by, and in fact does, and a more dependable fellow simply can't be found.  Rat may be swayed easily by a bit of storytelling, but the small pleasures of riverside life are more than enough for him if he just spends a bit of time writing.  And Badger stands by his friends, even if he's a bit of a scary old codger at times.  They serve to ground things against the rampaging id that is Toad, and where Toad is apt to give up at a small setback and rarely seems to think beyond a few moments ahead, the three of them together are more than able to offset Toad's shortcomings.

The one thing that is perhaps the most perplexing about this piece as a whole is the question of just what an 'animal' is within this context.  There are a number of characters who are apparently of similar size to one another despite being far differently-sized in nature (particularly Badger alongside everyone else), and Toad in particular interacts with a number of clearly human artifacts, including his motor-cars and the washerwoman's outfit that he 'borrows' in order to escape from jail, and that's leaving aside the question of the manor-house that is Toad Hall, and, well, the success of the washerwoman disguise.  On the other hand, Rat's temptation toward the seas comes from encountering a Sea Rat on the road, who has apparently made a habit of sneaking aboard ships by climbing into rowboats or up ropes, and likes to bunk in the captain's cabin, which implies that he's, well... rat-sized.  Songbirds are kept in cages by both people and animals alike, but Rat is able to have conversations with migratory avians on the subject of why they go south for the Winter rather than sticking around closeby.  Toad's caravan is pulled by a horse, who clearly isn't the same kind of animal as the other folk; the horse he steals during his escape from the law is likewise little more than a pack beast.  And the warden's daughter apparently likes animals as pets, but knows better than to mention that to the captive Toad.

It's a strange dichotomy that is far from clearly-delineated, and serves to give a sort of dream-like quality to the work, that makes it a wonderful chaser for Grahame's other two major works.  It's the only one of the three that really felt like it had a fully-satisfying ending, though; where The Golden Age and Dream Days both ended with a sort of eulogy for childhood, The Wind in the Willows wraps up with the promise that while Toad may be a little less conceited and devoted to his impulses, the four of them are going to continue in their lives with the status quo re-established.  All has been brought back to the way it should be, and the pastoral life remains, a little slice of Arcady within the English countryside, complete with the god who mythologically lived in the Greek region.  It's a version of the world seen in Grahame's earlier works that can go on in adulthood, where there may be some strife between residents but existence is largely harmonious, and where the line between nature and 'civilized' life is blurred to the point of nonexistence.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883-1885)

Nietzsche. It’s one of those names that gets thrown around whenever someone wants to ‘explain’ a particularly potent case of sociopathy, someone who thinks they can get away with doing things with impunity. The two murderers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, inspired by real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, use his writings as an excuse for why they choose to hold a dinner party for their victim’s family, with the body in a trunk in the same room. It’s proof that they’re übermenschen, Supermen, they say. They even invite the professor who introduced them to Nietzsche’s writings because they think he’ll be impressed that they’ve taken to his teachings so well.

That… really isn’t what Thus Spoke Zarathustra is trying to do, though.

Admittedly, I’m not certain precisely what it actually is trying to do, but I think I’ve at least managed to suss out the general shape of it. This might be the toughest read I’ve yet encountered in here, just from a sheer ideaspace standpoint.

---

A good starting place might be to address the writing style. Nietzsche is generally known for a certain succinct quality to his writing, choosing words to make his thoughts as plain as possible. This is very much not that; rather, we’re looking at something akin to the writer channeling Walt Whitman’s mindset and “sounding [his] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Zarathustra is exuberant in his desire to sound his ideas and opinions, to teach his philosophy to the people, to make sure that everyone knows that “God is dead,” and that the age to come will be the age of the Superman.

That Zarathustra’s ideals are laughed down by the masses, saying that they would rather become like Zarathustra’s “Ultimate Man,” who lives a life of luxury and relaxation without any strife or anything to trouble them, and which stands opposed to the Superman. Despairing, he goes in search of people who will be more receptive to his ideas.

Reading this right after The Time Machine, I couldn’t help but think that the Ultimate Man feels like the predecessor to the Eloi, but I doubt the two are related. However, the idea that the Ultimate Man represents the, well… ultimate endpoint of human desires for comfort and relaxation, leads directly in that direction.

The work as a whole is separated into four sections, each being one of the four volumes that Nietzsche published in the 1880s. The first gives the initial explanations of the Superman/Ultimate Man dichotomy, explains the differences and gives the general shape of the Superman; the second features Zarathustra expanding on his teachings to his disciples; the third is Zarathustra’s journey to return home after leaving the disciples, and commentary on the world and cultures as he travels; and the fourth concerns a group of pilgrims searching for Zarathustra because they are ‘Higher Men’ who believe themselves to be in a position to become somehow better.

The most important takeaway may be the specific way that Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, suggests that we get to the world in which the Superman can exist. Multiple times throughout the book, he describes Man as being a bridge of sorts, between the animal and the Superman. Man has, through sheer force of will, what is described as will to power, ascended to be the pinnacle of what animals can be. This will to power is defined as one of the primary characteristics of the Superman, that he is more interested in shaping his world than in even his own life. The Superman has no fear of self-injury, no outside influence shaping what he wants to create, nothing stopping him from pursuing the challenges he desires, or what he wants to do with himself. He is above all but his own desire to rule himself, living selfishly above all else.

The aphorisms offered as ways of explaining what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for the Superman’s world are perhaps a little hard to wrap one’s mind around, on first glance. We are told that pride is a great sin, but vanity isn’t. Charity is bad, because it is giving in to other people’s desires; in the world of the Superman, there are no beggars, even if some might be wealthier in certain ways than others. Chastity is bad, because it in fact inflames lusts. Conventional wisdom as to what are Good and Evil are turned on their heads, because those ideas are tied in with religion and, after all, “God is dead.” He brings this up repeatedly. God is dead, and will be replaced with the new Superman, who makes his own choices about what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s Superman, though, is the concept of what happens after life. Zarathustra very openly decries any belief in an afterlife, instead preaching the concept of the eternal recurrence, where one’s entire life repeats infinitely, forever, such that if one hopes for a particular moment to come repeatedly, they must accept the entirety of their life doing such. The Superman, by Zarathustra’s explanation, lives a life such that every second of their life, both the high points and the low points, is a moment that they would gladly experience again, eternally. They have no regrets.

Zarathustra teaches that no man can become the Superman. It’s something to aspire to, to reach for, but not to attain. Rather, the goal of all people must be to create the world in which the Superman can exist, and this requires a tearing-down of religious thought, a complete rethinking of conventional morality, and apparently a great deal of solitude and living in the mountains as hermits, as any life surrounded by others invites the thoughts and desires of others, and the potential desire to submit to others’ needs. This is a big point: there is no submission of any sort for the Superman. The Superman is thus almost a sort of mythic hero, doing what he desires for the sake of doing it, rather than because he was told to. Even the powerful Hercules was not a Superman, because he feels remorse for what he did in a drunken rage and submits to complete the impossible labours assigned to him.

The one thing most explicitly described as a sin, and indeed the greatest sin in Zarathustra’s mind, is pity. Taking pity upon others is against the ideal of the Superman, because if you take pity, you are submitting your feelings to those of the misfortunate, feeling shame because of the shame they feel for themselves; this is even stated to be the cause of God’s death, that he felt pity for the entire human race and shamed himself to death. The entire fourth book is devoted to this topic; Zarathustra walks the forest because he has heard what he believes to be a cry for help, and encounters a number of “Higher Men” who have come to seek his teachings. Over the course of the book, he guides them all to his cave, where they share a meal together and listen to his teachings, an event directly compared to the biblical Last Supper. During the evening, however, these men show that even where they claim to have cast off their shackles, they are unable to maintain this mindset for even the full evening; every time Zarathustra steps outside for a little fresh air, they relapse in some way, culminating in the entire group starting to worship an ass because a proper replacement for the God would have to be someone who is slow, stupid, and never says ‘no’.

Seriously, they start worshiping a literal pack-ass, because its braying sounds like ‘Ye-a’.

That Zarathustra is disappointed in them makes for quite an understatement; he verbally tears into the whole group, until they renounce the false idol before them. The ass, for its part, doesn’t seem to much care, though someone got it drunk so when the Dionysian revelries that ensue during the night begin, it dances right along with everyone else.

The work as a whole ends on a cliffhanger; apparently Nietzsche planned it out as six volumes, but only wrote four of them. Zarathustra spends the whole work talking of the pride of his eagle and the wisdom of his serpent; they are joined in the last few pages of the book by a lion who, in the prophet’s estimation, indicates that the time to return and preside over the noontide for his followers is at hand. The book simply ends there, though; what would have come is lost to time. We can only wonder what the creation of a world that follows the ideals of Zarathustra might have been, to bring about the Superman.

In any case, by the end of reading, I had a very specific idea of what the Nietzschean Superman looks like in mind, and it’s certainly not what the Nazis were trying to create when they got done reading this book in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

I see the Superman, as described here, as being one of those off-the-grid sorts, living out in the mountains, off the land, not because it’s easy, but because it’s a perpetual challenge for them. The only rules are those they make for themselves, because nobody else is around to enforce anything. They just live a solitary existence, enjoying their life to the fullest and answerable to nobody, because they’re above everyone, figuratively but also literally, living at the high altitides offered by, well… a mountain.

Basically, what I’m getting from all of this is that Nietzsche’s ideal Superman is a doomsday prepper.

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

 

This is not science fiction.

I know everyone thinks it's science fiction.  It's cited as an early entry in the genre.  H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.

(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)

The thing is, though...  This is barely a science fiction book.  If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959)

 ...well, that was certainly an unexpected ending.

So, I watched Netflix's adaptation (for lack of a better term) of The Haunting of Hill House back in October/November.  Enjoyed it a lot, thought some of the directing decisions were brilliant, but also knew pretty quickly that it was going way off-script.  Years and years ago I remember having seen the 1990s film version, and thinking it was... less than great... but not really having a way of articulating why.  However, it was pretty clearly a haunted house movie.  The Netflix version spends very little time with the adult characters in the titular house, which is a big change from the previous plot.  Now, though, having read the book, I think I can explain what's so wrong with the 1999 version, and the trailer I linked there does a very good job of spelling it out exactly.

"There once was a house. A bright happy home. Something bad happened. Now it sits all alone."

Yeaaaaaah, no.  Hill House is not at all supposed to be a happy home.  Or have a villainous scientist doctor going on, or crazy Winchester House-like bricked-up doors, or...  any of the weird stuff that you see in that trailer.  But then, that's what you get with a 1990s action film director doing a haunted house thriller, right?

Let's instead look at what Shirley Jackson had to say about the house, hmm?  A passage that she not only starts the book with, but also ends with.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

That does not sound like a bright happy home, to me.  And indeed, the house seems, by the descriptions given in the book, to have been purposefully designed to be unsettling to those inhabiting it.

The first thing that's really worth noting, though, is that at no time do we actually see a ghost in the text of the book.  Suspenseful scares, sure, but never anything visible.  Instead, it's a series of ways that the house is just subtly deranged.  Now, that may be anthropomorphizing, to suggest that the house itself suffers some mental instability, but... well, Mrs. Jackson helpfully established that in the second sentence of the book, and the house itself is almost as much a character as any of the leads.

Our primary protagonist in the book, and presumably the 1960s film version (the only one of the three adaptations I haven't yet seen; I wanted to read the book first, as it's apparently also the only one of the three that actually follows the book at all), is Eleanor Vance.  Those who have seen the Netflix version may know Eleanor, Nell, as the youngest of the Crain children, who was the most affected by the strangeness of the house, and who spends most of the series, well... dead.  Other than the first two chapters (about six pages which serve to give some general background for the characters as a whole, and set up why they all find themselves together in Hill House) and the last chapter (half a page giving a very trim epilogue of 'Here's what happened after all that just went down,' we spend the entire book in Eleanor's head.  Very much so, in fact; every little flight of fancy that her mind wanders down is spelled out for us.  She lives a very active fantasy life, perhaps understandable as she has spent her entire adult life, up until three months prior to the events of the novel, taking care of her invalid mother, who was apparently equal parts needy and abusive; she now lives on a cot at her sister's house, generally aimless, unemployed, and seemingly still subject to a certain amount of verbal abuse.

Eleanor is joined in our insane manor by Theodora (just Theodora), an artist with a generally lackadaisical view of cultural norms or even generally planning ahead; Luke Sanderson, a character somewhat in the vein of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in that he's got all the advantages being in a rich family brings, but somehow manages to be a bit of a roguish sort nonetheless, and who stands to eventually inherit Hill House; and the three have been brought together by the invitation of Dr. John Montague, a psychologist by training who is trying to bring some scientific credibility to the study of the supernatural, primarily through a method of 'Get some people who have been even tentatively associated in the past with some kind of paranormal occurrence into the house, and have everyone take notes while we stay here for the summer.'

Note: Luke is there because the family that owns Hill House wants a member of the family there; Theo is apparently clairvoyant or something but it's never actually something that plays into the narrative; and Eleanor's house was apparently bombarded with rocks for three days when she was a child, for no apparent reason, though she believes it to have been a prank perpetrated by the neighbors.

Eleanor is a likeable character, though shows signs early on of having a rather less than firm grasp on right and wrong, or even adult life.  In order to participate in Dr. Montague's research, she has to steal her sister's car (telling herself that it's OK because "it's half hers," but also not bothering to actually tell anyone where she's going), and consistently lies to everyone she meets once she's started her drive down the road about who she is and what she has waiting for her back at home.  It's only in the final pages of the book that anyone finds out the truth about her life, and by then... well, the house has done its damage.

It's very well established from the early pages that, in the small nearby community of Hillsdale, everyone knows precisely what the house is, and knows to stay away from it.  We only see the little community long enough for Eleanor to stop in, buy a cup of coffee, and have a very brief exchange asking about how often they get visitors (never).  The groundskeeper at the gate to the house is surly, wary of letting anyone in, and once she talks her way past the gate and gets up the driveway, her first impression of the house itself is, well...

The house was vile.  She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

If only she had listened... well, then the novel wouldn't have happened at all, but such is the way of things; many horror and suspense novels wouldn't happen if the characters listened to their gut.

What we come to find out is that the house was designed by Hugh Crain as a sort of...  experiment, almost, in making things purposefully unsettling.  There are no right angles in the house; everything is off by just fractions of a degree, perhaps one or two at most.  The end result ends up being that doors like to shut themselves if not propped open, rooms feel just a little bit off, and it's easy to think that the house is differently shaped than it actually is by looking out a window.  This isn't helped by a floor layout in which there are a great many rooms with no windows to the outside, halls that seem to go just a little too far, a kitchen with three doors out onto the veranda...  But not any secret passages or completely hidden rooms, we're assured.

The house is relatively benign by day.  Mrs. Dudley, who takes care of the house and cooks for the guests, is very curt, not talkative at all, and very open about how she does not stay there after dark, under any circumstances.  In fact, it's stated early on that leaving the house at night is a poor idea; there's a history of people not actually making it down the driveway if they attempt it.

The first part of the novel, then, is taken up with the characters getting to know each other, exploring the house, and Eleanor forming a close friendship with Theo.  This becomes a sort of safety mechanism for Eleanor, particularly after the strange events begin at night.  Banging on doors, doorknobs jiggling, and so on, with sounds coming from too high up on the door for any of the people present to make them.  You know, haunted house stuff.

This starts to change, however, after the house starts directly going after Eleanor.  Or maybe not.  It's hard to say what's really going on.  The first directed occurence is a chalked message along the length of an entire hallway, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME.  Whispered voices, seemingly only heard by Eleanor.  A scene where Theo's room is vandalized with what seems to all those present to have been blood, the message HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR on the wall in the red paint-that-isn't-paint.  This particular incident is perhaps the most perplexing in the novel; all four of the primary cast see the way the room has been left, and the room is locked up afterward, to preserve the evidence for Dr. Montague to later sketch for the book he plans to write about all this, but later, when it's opened up again by Dr. Montague's wife, who shows up in the last part of the novel to "helpfully" offer her skills as a medium, everything has been returned to the way it was, as if nothing had happened.

The vandalism in Theo's room drives a wedge between the two women, and Eleanor spends the second half of the book gradually becoming more and more paranoid, convinced that everyone is talking about her when she's not around, that they all know she's a fraud, that none of them are actually her friends at all.  This builds to a point where she has a complete psychotic break, in a scene that was very much channeled in the Netflix series during Nell's return to the house, though with a very different endpoint.

The biggest thing that stands out in the novel, really, is that most of the events could, theoretically, be explained on a purely scientific basis.  The chalk message could be Luke pranking everyone (though he denies it).  The banging on doors could be the house settling.  The shadows and unsettling feeling, well, that's explained by the unsettling architecture of the house itself.  Eleanor becoming convinced that she belongs in Hill House, that it's her home now and she won't leave, she's going to stay here forever...  she's got a less than coherent grasp of reality, as it were.

Theo's room, though, remains the biggest question.  What really happened there, and how did it get returned to the way it was?  The characters establish early on a rule that nobody should go anywhere alone, and indeed, until Eleanor's breakdown, nobody goes anywhere on their own.

All the same, there is never any indication that there's a real ghost in Hill House.  Mrs. Montague may argue that her planchette told her there's a nun bricked up in the walls, or a defrocked monk, but nobody pays her claims any credence.  Rather, the implication given by the text is that it is the house itself that is doing the haunting.  A mass hallucination seems somewhat unlikely, given the detail of the episode in Theo's room, but seems the only other potential explanation, short of the house being, well...

not sane.

Jólabókaflóð 2020 (2): XX (Rian Hughes, 2020)

Let's talk about the I for a moment.

Not the letter, but the concept.

The self.

Consciousness, sapience, the awareness of one's own existence.

What is it that makes me, me? You, you? Is it simply being aware that you exist, that you are thinking, that you have the proof of your own identity? As Descartes put it, "Cogito, ergo sum"? Or is it something more than that?

---

Descartes himself worked within a somewhat more nuanced framework than simply that brief statement; there is more to it than just that one thinks.  Rather, Descarte's philosophical construct was based on a more thorough question, the question of what we can be sure exists.  He begins by doubting everything.  The one thing he can be sure of, at that point, is that he is, in fact, doubting.  Even if he assumes that all other things are a deception, logically, he must exist in order to be deceived, must be able to interpret and consider the deception, to doubt or believe if he wishes.

You doubt, therefore you are thinking.  You are thinking, therefore you know yourself to exist, because you cannot be deceived about that, even if everything else is nonexistent.

Descartes' demon may be crafting the world we know; the Matrix may be a simulation, but you're a real entity nonetheless.

So, what does that mean about the self, if everything else can be doubted?  If every bit of input we receive can be disbelieved?

It means, for one, that the self isn't necessarily dependent on its vessel to be defined.

Let's expand outward, now.  Our conception of I, our definition of ourselves, is more nuanced than simply existing, after all.  We are more than just that one thought.  We consider our bodies to be part of ourselves, for example.  All of the beliefs we carry, all of the knowledge, all of the lived experiences that form our memories and skills, those are part of the self, as well.  Are those part of the I?

Your heart beats on its own.  You can't consciously control it.  Would you want to?  Having to think, dozens of times per minute, thousands of times per day, whether awake or asleep, 'OK, ventricles, it's time to contract now.  OK, now you can relax.  OK, time to contract again.'  But if it runs on automatic, if you can't control it, is it part of the self?

Is Jean-Luc Picard less of a person because he has a mechanical heart?

Has a heart-transplant recipient become a blend of two people?

If your leg is amputated, are you still the same person?

...is the body part of the self at all?

---

Knowing that one exists is fine, of course, but you can't define yourself against yourself.  If the self is all that exists, then how can you see the self?

Instead, we define ourselves by drawing a line, between the I and the not I.  You know what you aren't; the dividing line between the things that you are and the things that you aren't becomes the barrier that protects you from dissolution.  We proclaim our existence by shouting "I am" at the blinding, deafening volume of sensory and semiotic input that makes up our world.

As humans, that dividing line can be seen as coterminous with the shape of our bodies.  We extend our influence outward from there, into the great not I, through hands, tools, voices, words.  A skilled carpenter's tools are like extensions of their body; the carpenter knows where the tools are, what they can do, how they can influence the shape of the materials being used for the project.

Where does the project come from, though?  Where did the plans for the house come from, originally?

Before the carpenter starts work, an architect must design the house.  But where did the architect get the design?

Before the nail can be driven into the board, the hammer must be in the carpenter's hand.  But where did the hammer come from?

Where, in the time before hammers, did the thought, 'Og tie rock to stick, make hit things strong' come from?

---

Let's take a little different view, then.  What if we define the I as the sum of the experiences, lessons, and beliefs that create us?  It becomes, then, a bundle of ideas.  A self-aware idea, perhaps.  An idea, set aside from the whole like an oxbow lake, able to define itself by its separation from the sea of ideas that pass by.

An idea that, itself, births new ideas.  Fleeting thoughts, which may or may not be set free.  The earliest ideas may have been simple by modern standards, but even so, they were ideas that we still use.  That rock rolls down the hill when you toss it.  What if you put things on the rolling rocks?  What if you used the rolling rocks to help you move things?  What if you made better-rounded rolling things?  Perfect circles, even?

That water pushes things when you stand in it.  What if you put a rolling thing partway in the water and attached it to something else, so that the water pushes it but it can't be moved from its spot?

Age-old ideas, still in use today.

The first ideas had to be self-evident.  'Og is Og.  Thog is not Og.'  Once you're past that, you can start exploring your environment.  'Rock is hard.  Stick is long.  Other rock is hard.  First rock harder than other rock, break other rock, make other rock sharp.  Sharp rock good at cutting things.'  You could watch someone demonstrate these things, remember them, show other people.  But the spread of ideas was limited.  You had to be right up close, able to watch.  If it was dark, you couldn't trade ideas at all.  There was something else important that needed to exist.

Language.

The earliest languages made ideas mobile.  No longer did ideas have to remain as what could be physically shown, but instead they could be transmitted, by voice, to more people at once.  And from there, more complex thought, more complex ideas could be crafted.  It was possible to explain that 'Scary stripey death cat' had to be approached differently than 'Big stompy nosey thing' without needing either of those things present.  Even without words as we might understand them, the symbols can be deciphered.

With language and the ability for more complex ideas, more complex questions started to arise.  Why does the hot sky glowy thing move?  Where does it go when it disappears below the horizon, before it reappears on the other side?  What is the cold sky glowy thing that changes shape and doesn't keep the same time?

Why does it get hot some times of year and cold others?

Where did all of this come from, anyways?

Before we had the tools to examine the world, the systems of thought to allow us to find the explanations, there were stories.

Enki brought water to the land of Dilmun, allowing plants to flourish and life to take hold.

The sun is pushed across the sky by the dung-beetle god, Khepri.

The seasons change because Demeter is sad that her daughter has to spend time away from her in the underworld.

When we seek answers, in the absence of available explanations, we shape ideas into myths, pantheons, gods.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

When we seek entertainment, stories can provide that, too.  When we have a shared basis of stories, we can form a culture.

When we have a culture, we can do great things.  Vast constructions, shaping the land to our needs, if our culture values such things.  Writing develops, perhaps first as a tool for commerce, but then as a way to record our stories and lessons, so they can be transported from place to place, without the writer having to travel with them.  And in this way, they can survive even beyond the death of an entire culture.

The ideas, then, can outlive their creators, can spread using minds as incubators and vectors, can shape even those minds, as they pass through them.

Writing also introduces a complication, however.  An idea, once written down, is largely immutable.  This copy of Descartes' Principia Philosophiæ may be differently translated, but the contents will still be the same as any other copy.  It's only when those ideas come in contact with other ideas, within the seedbed of a thinking individual, that new ideas, syntheses, can be formed.  And those are then written down, passed on, built upon further, and the cycle continues.

Ideas themselves promote this.  The idea for language came from the need to communicate ideas.  The idea for written language came from the need to communicate ideas over longer distances.  The idea for printing came from the need to communicate ideas to more people, more efficiently.  The idea for telecommunications came from the need to communicate ideas across longer distances, faster.

The idea for the Internet came from the need to communicate more ideas across potentially global distances as close to instantly as possible.

With the internet, though, the medium is no longer immutable.  Ideas can be expressed that change themselves over time, that reshape themselves based on new data.  Wikipedia lurches forward, an up-to-the-minute encyclopedia written by a million authors, changing to become more accurate and better-researched through this wide distribution.

When we combine so many ideas in an effectively limitless space and give them the ability to shape themselves, though, it raises an important question: how dense can ideas become, before they start to actually think?

---

OK, so after all of that, where am I actually going with all this?  It's a long introduction, but it's the basic underpinnings of XX, by Rian Hughes.  This is... a doozy of a book.  992 pages in total, not even bothering to keep to the normal format of a book.  The inside of the dust jacket is made to look like a small shelf of books, which are then excerpted within the text (some real, some not), while the endpapers of the book feature a selection of covers from various printings of Ascension by F. Herschel Teague, a made-up 1960s sci-fi novel from a made-up author, but which is included in its entirety, in its 'serialized original printing,' within the text of XX.  The book's actual content begins literally as soon as you turn the endpaper, a stream of 1s and 0s, a binary data stream, taking form across a few pages before leading into exactly what those 1s and 0s represent, a brief discussion by a few British astronomers of just what they're supposed to do with this stream... because it's a very clear, and very obvious radio signal from deep space, clearly the work of intelligent beings.

That link, just there?  That page is directly referenced in the book, in this first set of pages.  Quoted directly.  That's not something Hughes made up, that's real.

It's only after this first chapter finishes that we get what would normally be expected in a book, the colophon and the title page.  This is followed by a brief poem about the origin and nature of ideas, then the novel proper.  The main character is Jack Fenwick, a probably-autistic (he himself considers this in-text) AI programmer at a small tech startup in London.  He's one of those folks who is very good at noticing patterns in the visual noise that surrounds us, perhaps to the point of obsession.  This tendency of his, to find patterns, means that when the astronomers at Jodrell Bank who picked up the "Signal from Space" need help figuring out a way to coax meaning out of it, they go to Jack, who (helpfully) set up some of the software their systems are running on.

As he's just starting to dig in, though, the Signal gets leaked onto the internet.  This democratization of the attempts to find a way to sort through it results in a vast array of multimedia explorations that are examined in the book, from dropping the Signal into a generative graphics program and letting it draw patterns on its own, to making music from it (complete with actual LP available to download; there's a QR code in the book that leads there).  While all this is going on, though, Jack comes to the conclusion, based on looking at repeating fragments of the Signal's code, that it's not a message from aliens, but instead is the aliens, transmitted digitally.

With this idea in place, that the Signal is itself carrying alien minds in it, combined with the Signal being out on the Internet, where the idea farm is percolating away, he comes up with the idea for the Oxbow, a digital device a little like a one-way valve, where a mind in the Internet could slip in, and still see out, but be separated from the whole, able to see the I and the not I.  This is then hooked up to a 3D printer (for visual representation) and a text output engine (for communication), turned on, and he and his two coworkers, Nixon (the money and business sense) and Harriet (a master programmer), sit back to see what happens.  What they get is decidedly not what they expect, though, as instead of grabbing an alien, they get the Twentieth Century incarnate, the titular XX.

Shouty machine head (whose preferred appearance is as a dazzle-striped mechanical monstrosity seemingly inspired by the factory set design in Metropolis crossed with WWII battleships) is quickly joined by The 19th Count (a tall, thin Victorian gentleman in pure alabaster white, both clothing and skin, with absolutely no other coloration anywhere, whose speech comes in the style of vintage playbills) and Girl 21 (a manga-influenced goth girl who uses a constantly-changing flipshow of selfies and animated .gif images to show facial expression, who talks by tweeting with a smartphone), avatars of their respective centuries.  These three characters, only visible in their avatars through Augmented Reality glasses hooked to the Oxbow software, serve as secondary protagonists, allowing ideas to be bounced off of them as Jack, Harriet, and Nixon explore what lurks within the Signal in an attempt to discover what it actually is, how it works, and what its inner meaning is.

At the same time, a second plot dealing with Dana Normansson, an astronaut working at Daedalus Base on the far side of the Moon, is running, dealing with an object that flew in from outside the solar system at a significant fraction of the speed of light, pierced through Europa entirely, whipped around the sun, and promptly embedded itself in the Moon's surface.  Venturing out to investigate, she finds that what turns out to have been a ship has fired an escape pod, and a single alien has survived, though injured.  Her plotline, at least at first, deals with trying to work out how to communicate with a being who, while intelligent, shares few sensory inputs and no language with humans.

There's obviously several layers of narrative working on top of each other here, several plots that initially seem divergent-if-parallel, but eventually come together.  There's a few plot holes here and there, one of which bugged me upon noticing it about 20 pages later and one of which I didn't really realize until after finishing the book but then it kind of lingers like an unanswered question but which may be somewhat by design.  Most of the concepts at work are well-explained before they actually come up in the narrative, through the many "ephemera" that are included in the hefty page count, along with showing the effects of the Signal on culture as a whole.

Rian Hughes is a published author, but this was his first novel; his earlier works are all nonfiction on the topic of graphic design, and he himself is a graphic designer with a wide array of fonts, a portfolio full of book and album packaging, and a number of comic book title designs to his name.  This history shows very clearly; every page of XX is carefully designed, so that it looks as much like the source he's attempting to emulate on each page as possible.  He uses type as an artistic medium, stretching it to its absolute limits and using words to form images even while using that same text to tell the story.  The only places that tend to be difficult to read are when XX is talking; the typeface chosen for its normal speech takes a little extra work, though not usually for pages upon pages after its initial, 18-page soliloquy about itself, but it is given two other typefaces later that are also difficult.  But then, it would be rather difficult to talk to an anthropomorphized incarnation of the spirit of automation in any way that isn't 'loud and clanky'.

I came into this expecting something in the same vein as House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel.  There, as here, an author with no previous fiction to their name dropped a massive experimental piece on the market, a tome that, for someone willing to put in the time and effort, is a very rewarding experience.  (Full disclosure, I have never actually gotten all the way through House of Leaves, to my shame.  In my defense, it is a very tough read.  Maybe I'll actually properly tackle it this year.)  This book isn't quite as unapproachable as Danielewski's, but definitely operates in the same space.  Where Danielewski's work was very much engaging with the 20th century media landscape and ability to spread ideas, XX is absolutely at home in the 21st century, titular character notwithstanding.  Wikipedia, Twitter, and even online meme culture make appearances, and while I perhaps felt that the primary narrative was a little rushed at the end, the author's stated desire to keep it under 1000 pages meant that had to happen, especially given the coda at the end, after the epilogue, where the whole piece is brought full-circle in an amazing bit of speculative science fiction that ties everything off in a downright brilliant manner.

Yes, there's an epilogue, then there's an additional 60 pages of story.

---

Jólabókaflóð 2020 (1): The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Michael Zapata, 2020)

Those who have known me for a long time, who have really gotten to know me, know that I have a deep-seated love of story. Not a preference for fiction or nonfiction, not a preference for the medium that it exists in, but for the way that it progresses, the way that the viewpoint on display interacts with the events being discussed to create a unique narrative. The best authors, in my opinion, are the ones who can tap into that aspect of story, who can display an understanding of how to craft a viewpoint as well as a narrative sequence.

Michael Zapata shows a skill in this ability in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, a book that I went into with an expectation that it was going to be science-fiction flavored, but instead found something much more interesting. While nothing in the book exists anywhere outside of realism, there's an almost dreamlike, magical-realist quality to the way that the story's characters drift through the events on display. At the same time, however, this is a story about trauma, about loss, about exile, about moving forward after losing someone irreplaceable, after losing your home and the safety it represents.

At its core, this novel is about storytelling. Jumping back and forth between events in the 1930s and 2005, the core narrative deals with the titular "lost book". Adana Moreau, a character whose literal presence ends less than a fifth of the way through the book, is a Dominican refugee living in New Orleans after escaping the conflict that took her parents during the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. While she speaks no English when she reaches Louisiana, with the help of her husband (a literal pirate whose name is never given), her son Maxwell (an avid reader with a severe case of wanderlust), and a librarian, she is able to teach herself the language, becoming quite fond of the early science fiction that would have been available at the time (specific examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and some of the works of H.P. Lovecraft).

After finding a newspaper article about Percy Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for an ancient lost city that he believed to exist in the Brazilian rainforest, Adana gets the idea to write her own science fiction novel, Lost City, which is described and summarized as being an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced in large part by her own life story and what she had read of Fawcett's story, dealing with the search for lost cities and eventually with parallel universes. She is tapped to write a sequel, A Model Earth, but after completing it, she becomes ill, and decides to destroy the manuscript before it's published. Her son has read the unpublished novel, though, so it lives on through him.

After Adana's story ends, the narrative jumps forward to late 2004, and the viewpoint changes to Saul Drower, an Israeli living in Chicago who cares for his grandfather, and who immigrated to the United States in his childhood after his parents were killed by Fatah militants in the Coastal Road massacre. After his grandfather's death, he is given a package that he's instructed to send to Maxwell Moreau, a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of parallel universes at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. However, Moreau has retired, left Santiago, and did not leave a forwarding address, so the box is returned. Opening it to see what the heavy package was, Saul finds a 926-page manuscript for A Model Earth by Adana Moreau.

Enlisting the help of his lifelong friend Javier Silva, a journalist who has been reporting on protests and human rights issues in South America and Mexico but returned for a new job at the Chicago Tribune, Saul is able, after a number of months, to track down Maxwell's new address in New Orleans. Packages to New Orleans are not being shipped, due to events in August 2005, decides that he needs to hand-deliver it.

From there, the book shifts back and forth between the stories of Saul and Javier's search through the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina for Maxwell, and Maxwell's childhood experiences growing up in New Orleans and Chicago. At the same time, the underlying story of where Saul's manuscript came from is slowly revealed, only becoming totally clear when everything finally comes together at the end.

If the book was just about these characters, it would be interesting enough... but there's more to it. Saul's grandfather was a historian who showed a particular ability to get people he interviewed to open up and tell their stories, always nudging them on with a "Tell me more" sort of prompt. Throughout the novel, there are brief interludes, always several pages long, where a character tells a story about their history, about how they came to be where they are, about who and where they have lost and how they have coped with those losses. These stories range from a man who was a translator for the Bolsheviks in 1910s Petrograd fleeing to America, to a Sicilian WWII soldier's long-buried wartime memories, to a Chilean widow in the early 2000s searching for evidence of the fates of her family members who were "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.

The theory of parallel universes appears commonly as well, with Saul in particular thinking about all the worlds where things happened differently, where he was with his parents when they were killed, or where they had taken a different bus and he grew up in Israel, or where Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla suffered a brain injury as a child and never rose to power... all the possibilities that can be explored but which we can never know the full ramifications of, as they didn't happen in our universe, our timeline.

That, then, becomes the true message of the book: we can't know or experience how things might have gone differently, but dwelling on that makes loss meaningless. We can move forward after a loss, though. We can learn from the past, and remember our losses, but we can also make new lives, and make the most of what we still have, even in the face of the unimaginable. Just as New Orleans, in the fifteen years since the hurricane, has bounced back from that destruction and reclaimed its heritage as the thriving cultural center it was, we as people can do the same.

A very strong work to come out in the Year of Covid, to say the least. The entire world is being reshaped by loss on a scale unseen in most lifetimes, whether or not people want to admit that it's real. This has been the year that showed what damage ignoring an impending disaster, an ongoing disaster, can wreak; the way we move forward from that is to learn from the experience, to let it shape but not stop culture, and to remember.