Clifford D. Simak: The Architect of a City of Myth

Let’s talk about myths, in a broad sense. Wikipedia, that vast conglomeration of human brain tissue and arthritic, keyboard-pecking fingers, has this to say about myths: “A myth is defined as a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form, within the field of folkloristics.” I’m sure there are plenty of scholars that would debate the subtleties of this definition versus others, but I’m not concerned with specifics here. Generally, myths can be said to bridge past and present. Not the past like last month or last year or last century. Rather, an unknowable past, a past so distant and unfathomable that it looms like midnight mountains that cradle giants, like ravens as big and forever as the horizon. Myths take us from point A, a place of which it is impossible to know all the details, to point B, the here and now that is, if not totally understandable, at least substantial and immediately relevant. 

But what of the future? Like the past, we cannot grasp it and feel out its shape, whether it stands just beyond the fingertips out of reach or at the end of Infinity Road. For the first few centuries of civilization, most people set their sights no further than the immediate future, and as time wore on looked a bit further ahead—a year, maybe five at the most. This was because technology arose that made even more advances possible, and human beings, endlessly curious and inventive, made it a point to foresee those possibilities and make them reality. But as technology becomes even greater, the potential for the future becomes greater as well. Now at the start of the 21^st century, humankind is looking further and further down the road of time, so monumental is the potential inherent in the new science. As human concern catapults from the present decade or century to millennia in the future, we find a mirror image at the end of infinity of that same blackness that shadows our and our universe’s beginnings. Faced again with the unknowable, it becomes necessary and expedient to create a new set of myths, one that connects point B, the present, with point C, the future, whether that future has a finite end or endures ceaselessly. 

In his 1952 novel, City, Clifford D. Simak writes myths for the future. Myths that are urgent, not for the future they spell out, but for the implications for humanity: the beauty and danger of man’s aspirations, the decisions man makes when faced with epic prospects. Myths that are haunting, because even if man did endure into infinity, in our secret hearts we know that even this would suggest the ending of something that is essential to life as we know it right now—even if we continue on, we will die to our old homes, loves, and relationships as the universe evolves and forces us further and further away from what we know, with nostalgia alone left to cloud the in-between spaces of stars and thoughts. 

Both in structure and in tone, City reminded me of something by Isaac Asimov. Structurally, the novel is more of a short story collection with continuing themes rather than a novel, which is true of Foundation and I, Robot. There are eight tales that each present a time further and further in the future. The tales are told by dogs sitting around campfires in a bizarre and unexpected future, one in which dogs evolve to inherit man’s position on earth. The stories they tell are legend: humanity’s future is the dogs’ past. The canine myth-weavers tell of the Webster family and Jenkins, their loyal robot servant, they tell of the fall of the city as humans abandoned the huddling places for the countryside. They tell of Jenkins's life as he moves down through one generation of Websters to the next, until the Websters and the rest of humanity have retired from Earth to a new weird, weird destiny on Jupiter. They tell of the first dogs learning to talk, of the first experiments that led to ants becoming creatures of great intelligence and malice. They tell of the cobblies, the boogeyman-like beings that travel between parallel worlds. They tell of the ultimate fate of all involved, of humans, robots, dogs, and the industrialized super-ants.

Each story is preceded by commentary that explores the origin of the myths, the ambiguity surrounding them, and the various scholarly approaches to the historicity of them. From these stories and the commentary they are placed in like bubble wrap, arises a narrative of meditation and adventure. Simak deftly melds deep wells of wisdom with a sense of child-like wonder that again brings Asimov to mind. It occurs to me that City is really a story about apocalypse. Maybe so, but the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it sure is fun when an imagination like Simak’s is the one reporting the myths from the edge of infinity back to us.

Books About Books!

So what could make a reader like me happier than books? Books about books!

Such is the nature of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. This novel puts the reader in the front seat with a second person narration that opens up to a meditation on reading as a process and personal experience. A novel with one character would hardly have any plot to speak of, and, thus, you the Reader are accompanied on your journey through the corridors and anterooms of fiction with an Other Reader. You and the Other Reader become acquainted at a bookstore where both of you are trying to exchange defective copies of Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. You both had been looking forward to the novel for some time and were disappointed to find that only about thirty pages in cycles of the same pages begin to repeat themselves, a printing mistake that leaves you hanging just when the narrative has hooked you. You and the Other Reader exchange information, and you go home to delve back in to your new, non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler. But immediately you realize it is not the same book, but rather a novel called Outside the town of Malbork. 

And so begins a strange odyssey through literature, the publishing industry, and visions of apocalypse hinged on truth and falsehood. You and the Other Reader set out on a quest to find a complete and non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler, but every time you think you’ve found it, you’ve only found a portion of an entirely different novel which also trails off without finding its end for one reason or another. Things become more complex because you grow engrossed with the novels masquerading as the original one you seek. You become so engrossed that you must track each of these broken novels back to their original source so you can find a satisfactory sense of closure. 

With the Other Reader at your side, you discover a conspiracy of vast proportions with the translator Ermes Marana at its center. Marana started up the Organization of Apocryphal Power, the purpose of which was the dissemination of false books. Over time, the members became divided in their ideals and turned against Marana, forming the Archangels of Light and the Archon of Shadow. The Archangels of Light believe that supreme truth can spring from the crisis of falsehood, while the Archon of Shadow are obsessed with the idea of ultimate falsity in literature as being ultimate knowledge. 

As you and the Other Reader cautiously undertake this epic quest, If on a winter’s night a traveler becomes a multiplicity of books in one: every novel you track down that is completely different from the manuscript you seek (there are 10 altogether), as well as the story of your quest and the conspiracy you become enmeshed in. Fiction layers fiction, and it is difficult to discern where the story ends and reality begins.

This novel is fantastic: a reader’s dream. What reader wouldn’t want to read a book about books? There are so many things here to marvel at. There’s the structure, which alternates chapters between the many novels and the Reader’s outer world of conspiracy, uncertainty, and personal reflection, all of which gives rise to a metafiction that rivals Pale Fire in its complexity and brilliance as a mode of storytelling. There are the novel fragments themselves, which transport you the Reader into worlds that are somehow at once both mundane and magical. There’s the conspiracy of false books, which is as beautiful and sinister an idea as I’ve ever heard. And then there are the Borgesian gems that pop up regularly: the Homeresque Father of Stories that tells tales without end, narrating away every minute of eternity (at times he’ll narrate an entire novel years before it has even been written or published); the computers that can effectively “read” books by tallying up the words that appear most frequently in the text and making logical connections as to the plot and style. And so on.

Prior to this novel the only thing I’ve read of Calvino’s is Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities was wonderful, and I think If on a winter’s night a traveler tops it.

On Finishing V.

I could say that Thomas Pynchon’s V. is about two men—Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil. I could say that V. is in part the story of Profane yo-yoing from one bar/party/group of friends to the next in 1950s New York. I could say that V. is also in part the story of Stencil searching for a mysterious woman, a woman he knows only from his late father’s documents, interviews, and inference. All Stencil knows concretely of her is her initial. 

I could say V. is about this stuff and more and another reader would attack me saying it ain’t that at all. The surface story is entertaining enough—a weird detective story and a romp with a schlemiel through sewers hunting alligators, through midnight drunks and shitty apartments. But that’s the surface.

V. is really a narrative representation of history. On Profane’s end of things, the reader gets a voyeuristic peek at a particular time and a particular place from the average down-on-his-luck guy’s point of view. Through Stencil’s story, a cyclical representation of history emerges, in which the enigmatic V. is not a single woman, but a multitude of women (all of their names start with the same vexing letter, of course). There’s Veronica, a rat turned nun by a priest that’s exiled himself to the city sewers. There’s Victoria, caught up in revolution and intrigue. And so on. I don’t want to give it all away.

The interesting thing about Stencil’s story isn’t just the recurrence of the V. figure, but the fact that each reincarnation seems to coincide with some major historical event. Thus, V. becomes not only Stencil’s holy grail figure, but the feminine representation of history itself—always moving forward in time yet persistent in many themes.

It is difficult to find a satisfactory meeting ground between these two stories. At first it seems as though they have nothing to do with each other. Profane and Stencil are completely separated in plot and personality, though they perhaps run parallel to one another in a subtle way. By the novel’s close, however, the two stories collide in Malta when Profane accompanies Stencil through time and space to the culmination of the V. mystery.

One of the best novels I have ever read.

Nothing is true; everything is permitted: Illuminatus!

Robert Anton Wilson’s and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy picks up with a literary chess game that has already been in play for centuries, perhaps millennia. When New York detective Saul Goodman lands “the heavy case he’d always dreaded,” the board is set, and checkmate is only a few moves away. It is not easy to determine just what the Illuminati are after, but one thing is for certain: the only way they’re going to get it is by ushering in apocalypse to the unsuspecting people of planet Earth. Black masses convene in upscale apartments and conspiracies run amuck. Not only is it nearly impossible to ascertain the Illuminati’s final aim, it is also a mystery as to who the Illuminati are. The ancient organization seems to have connections with religious, economic, social, and political groups of all kinds, some of which would seem to cancel out the likelihood of others. Nothing is certain. In fact, the illuminated seers may hail from the days of Atlantis. But, of course, there is no saying that for sure.

The Illuminatus! trilogy--The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan--are not just Saul Goodman’s story. There are literally hundreds of characters, each of which gets a chance to project events for the reader’s pleasure from their particular point of view in the whole situation. Stylistically, a stream-of-conscious narrative arises that is at first difficult to follow. After a few pages, however, the reader falls into the mindset demanded of the books. The result is that the reader is completely submerged into this dark and mysterious world of conspiracy and apocalypse. Another thing that emerges is the blurring of the lines of truth and opinion. There is no way to determine how reliable a narrator is or is not. This serves to heighten the sense of paranoia that dominates the books.

Within the pages of these three books wonders await you: rock festivals, Lovecraftian entities, a race of dolphins more intelligent than humans, a yellow submarine, sea monsters, sexual forays, magical forays, sexual-magical forays, lots of LSD, and commentary on nearly every aspect of what we refer to as consensual reality. In the maze of shifting perspectives and the branching avenues of conspiracy theories, the one character that seems to have it all figured out is Hagbard Celine, lawyer, pirate, and fearless architect of reality. The thing is, Hagbard seems awfully benevolent and awfully sinister at the same time. Beneath every action there are hundreds of shifting motives that could place Hagbard in any of a number of positions in relation to the elusive Illuminati. Either way, Hagbard is captaining the trip all the other characters are homing in on, and his true intentions will only be revealed in the smokestacks of apocalypse.

There are probably dozens of ways to approach these novels, but the best may be in terms of Wilson advocating agnosticism on every level of a society, not just as related to religion. Every potential answer or solution to the Illuminati conspiracy seems to give way to only more conspiracies--labyrinthine conspiracies within conspiracies. The authors seem to be suggesting that there is no final answer to anything, that skepticism is the only sane response to every piece of reality fed into the human body via the senses. I personally am not one for cynicism, but I’ll say this: reading these books has changed my perspective on the world, and, I think, for the better. Hell, if there’s no information to be gleaned from the books that can be applied to the world in a practical way (which I actually think there is), at the very least it is an incredibly entertaining ride through the cultural backwaters of the 1960s.

Highly recommended for persons who:

- Enjoy the paranoia-driven plots of Philip K. Dick
- Enjoy novels about conspiracy theories but have a sneaking suspicion Dan Brown is a total idiot.
- Are interested in cultural revolution.
- Aren’t afraid of questioning their own sanity.

Words Worth Quoting: Hermann Hesse

"...and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands."

"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand of flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all that he imputes to "man"! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean--while to the wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master, is set down all that is strong and noble."

- from Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

The Hawkline Monster

I think The Hawkline Monster ties with In Watermelon Sugar for my favorite Brautigan novel so far. Brautigan’s gothic western masterpiece follows the exploits of Greer and Cameron, two Oregon hitmen hired to kill a monster that lives in ice caves beneath a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere. Their employers are the strange Miss Hawklines—twin sisters as eerily hard to pin down as the house itself. The sisters spend their time trying to perfect The Chemicals, their father’s unfinished experiment he was working on when he went missing, which presumably has something to do with the monster beneath the house. If Greer and Cameron can take care of their little problem, they might be able to get along nicely without any more distractions.

Surreal, dark, creative, and wonderfully sinister, The Hawkline Monster makes me want to time travel back to the beginning of the 20^th century, name myself Magic Child, and see the world through eyes acquainted with the strange.

Words Worth Quoting

“Everybody was lying to the FBI and CIA, sir. They were all afraid of punishment for various activities forbidden by our laws. No variation or permutation on their stories will hang together reasonably. Each witness lied about something, and usually about several things. The truth is other than it appeared. In short, the government, being an agency of punishment, acted as a distorting factor from the beginning, and I had to use information-theory equations to determine the degree of distortion present. I would say that what I finally discovered may have universal application: no governing body can ever obtain an accurate account of reality from those over whom it holds power. From the perspective of communication analysis, government is not an instrument of law and order, but of law and disorder.”

- from The Golden Apple, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Trout Fishing with Richard Brautigan

How to describe Trout Fishing in America? How to describe any of Richard Brautigan’s works? The closest working definition I can come up with is this: the mutant offspring of a booze-swilling novel and a poem strained through a mystic’s pajamas with the dark and sunny side of the American Dream alternating days as nanny. And that still isn’t sufficient. 

Brautigan is brilliant. When I say that I’m referring to all of his books, but, for now, I think I’m better off to take each one individually, and right now Trout Fishing in America gets to enjoy the attention. It’s so short. And simple. And while an occasional plot appears from one fishing trip to the next, there largely is no plot. Every chapter is a short, simple, fragmented view of a particular moment or train of thought that in some way reveals a truth of America.

There is no way to sufficiently describe what the book is about because of its experimental style and resistance to categorization, but I’ll try to light a match over it so we can at least make out the outlines. Trout Fishing in America is mostly about just that, trout fishing in America. Brautigan gives accounts of various trout fishing trips he’s gone on throughout his life, some when he was young, and some once he is older, married, and has a child. I don’t know to what degree these accounts are fictionalized, but, at least from my perspective, they seem to have some basis in real life experience for the author. There’s the quick story of the Kool-Aid wino. There’s the character, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, probably the funniest character in all the novel. And there’s mayonnaise.

These are the kinds of things that pop up from one chapter to the next. If the exceedingly short length of each chapter (typically around two pages) and the beautiful employment of language did not already give it away, perhaps the jump from one topic to another as one chapter closes and the next begins (with the only thread of unity usually being the voyeuristic peek into America’s cognitive outhouse) will make it clear: each chapter is a prose poem.

Altogether, Trout Fishing in America is Richard Brautigan’s meditation on America—what it is, where it’s going, and how it’s not just a place but a buddy that’s along for the ride with each and every person. Whether he intended it as a main focus or not, Brautigan also managed to simultaneously undermine and reevaluate the novel form, and not in a bad way.