Thoughts on Speculative Fiction

Happy New Year, everyone!

 

Over break I ended up sitting in a waiting room for a very long time. As much as I enjoy waiting rooms for people-watching, people get a bit suspicious if you stare at them. Instead, I decided to read the one novel I got over the holidays. It's the sixth in a series I like called the Thursday Next series. The books are quite silly and enjoyable. They are quick reads; I read the entire book while sitting in the waiting room.

They belong to a category that I would call "metafiction"-- i.e. fiction about fiction-- but that the author himself places in a category called "speculative fiction." Inside the book fiction is a continent divided into countries such as "Racy Novel" and "Science Fiction" with surrounding islands like "Vanity" (i.e. self-published). The story centers around the politics in the fiction landscape and parodies modern day England.

I very much enjoyed One of Our Thursdays is Missing. It was entertaining and kept my mind off of other matters. I would recommend the series to anyone who enjoys Douglas Adams style humor with a literary bent (although make sure you've read a reasonable chunk of classics otherwise its not very funny). The one problem with the series is that the mythology is inconsistent. Fforde does not seem to care about consistency, sometimes even from chapter to chapter, e.g. how to book jump, the process of writing (interfacing author and ideas in the well of lost plots), generics, etc. However, there is something so charming about the writing style and something ridiculous enough about the world that it really doesn't seem to matter that much even to me (mythology is the big thing that excites or bothers me in a novel). I think part of it is the humor; the audience appreciates the joke more than the mythology.

I will attempt to post more regularly as my schedule gets back to normal.

An Uncertain Masterwork

I am apprehensive to write a review of The End of the Affair. This discomfort occurs for two reasons: first, although I found it extremely powerful and engrossing, I am not quite sure what to make of it, and second, it provides a contemplation of the Catholic faith on which I hesitate and have little ground to judge it. So, as usual, I will give it a partial review, but I would be happy to discuss it with anyone who has read it.

I cannot remember who recommended The End of the Affair to me, but the recommendation (and subsequent purchase of the book) came sometime in my senior year of high school. That year, like everyone, I spent a lot of time writing college application essays as well as trying to improve my general approach toward writing. Over and over I heard the mantra "show me, don't tell me." This, of course, referred to the ability to convey meaning not through simply passing along information to the audience, but causing them to see, to hear, or to feel your meaning through literary devices. The End of the Affair, and the opening especially, does precisely the opposite; the narrator tells, showing almost nothing. At the time, I put the book down, annoyed at what I deemed to be "bad writing." However, something must have struck me, because a few years later I opened one of the many partial novels I have written with a similar style [1].

About a week ago, I happened upon The End of the Affair when I was looking for a moderately short piece of fiction to read. As I reread the first few chapters, the writing style took on new meaning. The narrator was a mid-level late 1930s-early 1940s author just on the verge of becoming popular; the "tell not show" style made a lot of sense. This narrative style also provided something that I think is really artful: it gave me, as a reader, the sense that the perception of the world that the narrator related was flawed without showing what exactly was flawed about it. There were moments where I cold peer around Maurice Bendrix (the narrator), but most of the time I felt like I was wearing Bendrix-colored glasses-- forced to see the world through his eyes.

(Small spoiler alert for the next few paragraphs)

The story itself is about Bendrix's quest to make sense of an affair he had with the wife of a friend, which Sarah (the woman in question) had ended abruptly without explanation. The story begins as Bendrix's story, the record of his hate, as he calls it, but it quickly morphs into Sarah's story. To me, The End of the Affair was much like The Awakening or "To Room 19" told from the other side, i.e. the perspective of the lover or someone else watching the social forces that lead to the trapped woman's ultimate destruction. In this case, it is not simply social forces, but also religious forces that lead to Sarah's demise. Her desire to be Catholic overwhelms her with guilt for her affairs and for her love for a man other than her husband and self-hatred and ultimately destroys her.

Whether Greene attempts to redeem the Catholic faith in the novel, I cannot tell. Some potentially miraculous things happen, but my interpretation of these events might be either (or both) atypical or against the grain of message one is supposed to gain from the story. You must determine for yourself. The book is engrossing and fascinating. It's also short, so it is well worth the time one would invest in it. I recommend it.

Endnotes

1. Amusingly enough, this was not intentional. I did not realize my imitation until I reread the beginning of The End of the Affair.

Fiction: The End of the Affair

I just finished Graham Green's The End of the Affair. Although I will write a review, I must finish reacquainting myself with the Μήδεια passage I am going over tonight.

Fiction: James Joyce's "The Dead"

I spent a while procrastinating doing my Horace early this morning reading James Joyce's "The Dead" from Dubliners. As I mentioned before, it has been a long time since I have read much fiction. Since my favorable re-acquaintance with the super-genre upon Corinna's recommendation of Invisible Cities, I decided to follow the recommendation of another old friend and read "The Dead," as I was recently given an Amazon gift certificate and a nice annotated version was $0.99. This friend and I have extremely limited overlap in our literary taste, but some incomprehensible inclination drew me toward the story. So I read it-- and I was absolutely shocked to discover I genuinely liked it.

"The Dead" tells the story of a quaint and well-mannered dance and dinner with a group of eccentric Irish characters. The drawing-room comedy reminds me of a toned-down and more realistic version of Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen with a slightly less delicate language and more focus on the men. There is also a sort of disturbing and melancholy undertone that focuses on the thoughts and reminiscences of the characters much of which is involved in propriety, politics, and those who came before. No character is entirely at peace with their lot, their world, or their place in history and this manifests most clearly in the existential discomfort of the main character.

I kept meaning to stop reading the story and return to my Horace, but I could not put it down. Even across time, the characters were so familiar. I was expecting Joyce (as he is in the excerpts I have read) to be meandering and odd for its own sake. In my prejudice, I expected him to write those novels that made me stop taking English classes-- the ones where horrible characters suffer mercilessly at the whim of the author and make (me) the reader miserable because I am subjected to simultaneously hating them and gaining no joy from their demise. It so pleasantly surprised me that this was not the case. I highly recommend "The Dead" to anyone with a spare hour or so. Presumably it can be found for free in the public domain version of Dubliners.

Happy reading, everyone!

Fiction, Postmodernism, and the Philosophy of Travel

"...and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route that he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places" (Calvino 28-29)

When I first met Corinna, two years ago, we exchanged book recommendations. I told her about The Shadow of the Wind, which may be my favorite work of literary fiction. She told me of a book called Invisible Cities, that she said I could read in an afternoon. I was intrigued. It has been a long time since I regularly read fiction, and I missed it. Although I wanted to enjoy it, as with every other fiction book at the time I picked it up and put it down over and over again, never able to maintain my attention, despite the eloquence and visual beauty of Calvino's writing.

My review, to accurately depict my thoughts on the fragmented novella, would have to be a meandering pastiche of sorts. I decided to read it this afternoon because I am inside with little to do (still being too ill to go out for a walk) and to little coherence of mind to read Horace or Mήδεια. The story drew me in and wanders just ahead of my mind, making sure my thoughts never stray too far from it's path. In short, I really enjoyed it.

 

The novella tells of a young Marco Polo relating to an old Kublai Kahn descriptions of the different cities in his empire. Most of volume is taken up by short remembrances of "cities" which employ fabulous rich descriptions of fantastical features. In some ways this is almost a Parmenidean thought experiment. There is a line in Parmenides somewhere that says that humans can only imagine what already exists. My thoughts on what he means by that is that we can only conceive of elements that exist already and recombine them to create fantastical non-existing things [1]. Calvino essentially remixes reality into wonderful images, sounds, and smells for the reader.

Aside from this Parmenidean aspect, there is also a Baudrillardian twist. Kublai Kahn is trying to understand his empire, see a pattern in it, learn of it. He has maps and hears the stories of merchants, but that elusive global comprehension constantly slips out of his grasp. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard relates a fable from Borges in which there was a great empire. A map was created of this empire, so detailed that it actually covered the empire inch-by-inch. The map was supposed to grow and crumble with the empire. In Baudrillard's version (if I remember correctly), the terrain under the map begins to rot and decay along with the map itself. The people in the empire, living on the map, try to recreate the empire from the map, which now has no original, and they instead create pure simulation-- a hyperreality [2]. Kublai Kahn seems to try to be resurrecting his decaying empire in his mind-- creating some rational explanation for it. Marco Polo's stories, complex and fantastical, always slip just beyond his grasp. They allow him only to build pure simulation, which does not and cannot reflect his empire.

I really enjoyed the novella. It was sort of meandering and associative. I probably missed a lot of the point, being sick and not as able to concentrate as I would like, but tangentially it reminded me of the way that I travel. I cannot see a city for the whole of it, but rather find the little things that I enjoy or that bother me. I also find that I see a slightly different version of myself in each city-- sometimes more independent, sometimes more cautious, sometimes more open to embracing the world, and sometimes threatened by the general atmosphere. The quote at the top spurred this line of thought.

Since Cerinthus is traveling in Italy, I told him that he should find a copy of the book. Although the book centers around Venice rather than Florence, there is something, I imagine, very Italian in the writing (and it was originally written in Italian). I would hope he likes it, but I cannot be sure...

Endnotes

1. I will have to beg the readers' pardon for not citing this properly. I have no idea where this is in Parmenides or even if it is entirely accurate, but it is what I remember.
2. I may have not quite represented the Baudrillard correctly. It has been a while since I read it, but I tried to represent it how I remember. I hope my Lit Theory professor will not think to poorly of me if he were to see this attempt at explanation. I would be happy for corrections.