6:05 a.m. - 2024-04-04
books w/in books
The idea of a fictional work contained within (and conceived in service of) another work of fiction is quintessentially post-modern, no? A concept that lends itself to schizophrenic inter/intra-textual dialogue; that exploits convention and turns the medium inside out? The subject was on my mind yesterday, and gave me pause to regard my own bookcase--to consider the works nested neatly within...
Take for example the mysterious, apparently misprinted, encyclopædia entry in Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which describes a fantastic country and culture from a parallel reality whose borders begin begin to bleed into the author's own. Two stories later, in the same collection, we encounter Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, wherein our title character has “written”, word-for-word, select fragments of Cervantes’ opus...a work to be (re)read and re-appreciated, our lit-critical narrator posits, in the context of Menard's dedication to the original text, and the circumstances under which he (re)wrote it.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a fictional work of alternate history central to the plot of The Man In the High Castle by P.K. Dick...itself a fictional work of alternate history. One in which the Axis powers won WWII, and Germany and Japan have divvied the former United States up between them.
(I'd elaborate further here, but I'm still bummed out over a recent cable series based on this book...based too-loosely in my opinion, and devoid of everything that made the novel uncanny and brilliant. Resulting in yet another misses-the-point adaptation of Dick's work to throw on our cultural slag heap.)
I won't attempt to summarize Italio Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, except to say that it's a book about trying to read a book, w/an Escher-esque structure that speaks to the singular mind of its author. I'd only known Calvino's writing through his (deceptively) forthright short stories; but this work bears the mill-marks of a restless and irrepressible intellect.
And then of course there's de Selby.
A widely published “theorist” on multiple subjects, de Selby's ideas obsess the narrator of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman to the point that he murders a man during a robbery in order to publish his own work of critical response. At least four of de Selby's publications are referenced in extensive footnotes throughout the novel, as are two separate biographies of the man; all expounding on his theories...which are patently mad. This subtext provides incessant nonsense-counterpoint to a narrative that goes from odd to curious to fantastic, and the result is compelling. If Calvino was an origami artist in the example above, folding lit-structure into swans, O'Brien is a birthday-party magician; nipping whiskey behind the poolhouse perhaps, but his tricks always leave me giddy w/childlike wonder.
There are other examples in my humble collection, but these sprang to mind first. Unfortunately, my occasion to consider this idea of books within books wasn't to praise a novel, but to disparage it...
~ ~ ~
I found myself back amongst the musty (musky?) stacks of Books To Share the other day and, against my better judgment, took a flier on a sci-fi paperback by one of the original “cyberpunks”...I know, I know.
Was it was less than a year ago that I wrote a sweeping criticism of the genre in my Mirrorshades review? Where I itemized the stylistic affectations that render 90% of Cyberpunk's collective corpus an unreadable drag? Yeah...this was that. Exemplified.
Ever hook-up w/a girl who has a lot of tattoos? Somebody inked beyond like, an anklet of daisies, or their kid's names scripted on a shoulder-blade? Inked beyond a Rolling Stones logo sassin' crassly on a sunburnt patch of titty...I'm talkin' someone who, when they disrobe, looks like she could be ex-Yakuza? Like she used to play bass for Mötley Crüe? I personally find this distracting. It's an aesthetic preference of course; I just happen to be a big fan of natural lady-skin (there's gotta be a less creepy way to phrase that...), but I think this tenuous analogy will hold, so indulge me and imagine that: not only is your potential-lover's body canvased w/lowbrow illustration, but that she insists on explaining the “significance” of every tattoo.
That, my friend, can kill a hard-on.
Which is kinda what this novel does.
Because the “body” of the story is intriguing. It's told from multiple POV's by a diverse cast of narrators, it's set in my beloved Los Angeles1 twenty-four years from now (fifty-eight years from the original publication date), and centers around a lady-detective's pursuit of a mass-murderer. I mean, it's a murder-mystery...so page-turning intrigue should be baked into the recipe, right? The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. In a relentless, relentless, dogpile of details.
We get it dude, it's the future. Shit has changed.
Obsessive “worldbuilding” is the kind of nerd-porn that made cyberpunk popular of course, and I'm generally here for it. But the great writers manage to immerse the reader without showing their work; without letting the milieu eclipse the story. I mean, do we care how a light-saber works? We just know that Darth Vader is havin' a swordfight w/Luke Skywalker...just like Hamlet dueled w/Laertes in Shakespeare's day, or Errol Flynn crossed steel with Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood. The song remains the same; and the balance between context and conflict should inevitably favor the latter. Unfortunately, in the pages of my latest paperback purchase, this balance feels out of whack.
The author's vision of life in 2048 is exhaustive, in every sense of the word. Technology, politics, and entertainment; fashion, art, and architecture...social mores, the ecology, food and drink...language even2; dude's speculation is manifold. (None of the narrators have used a future-toilet yet, but I've no doubt it would warrant a lengthy paragraph.) The problem isn't his breadth of imagination, which is enviable, it's that every action becomes an excuse to illustrate yet-another novel aspect of the paracosm, regardless of plot significance. An excuse to “explain” every tattoo, if you will. Countless (self-driving) car rides, walks through smart-building interiors, high-speed elevator trips, etc occur for this sole purpose; leaving the reader to slog through a pace-killing preponderance of “shoe leather”.
(Shoe leather, for the unfamiliar, is a screenwriting term used to describe expository tedium that doesn't advance the narrative. The name comes from once-typical exterior scenes where a character would walk towards a building, turn a key, walk upstairs, enter their apartment etc...scenes where nothing “happens”; where you're just wearing down an actor's shoes.)
Anyway, it wasn't my (ultimate) intention to slag-off some forgotten paperback here, I just mention these shortcomings because I had an odd book-within-a-book experience involving this very novel...
The murderer in the story, it turns out, is a famous writer. And each chapter begins w/an italicized excerpt from one of his books (his “LitVids” rather...because you know, the future). Now I have to admit; I tend to skip this sort of thing. Always have. You know all those hobbit songs and poems and shit that Tolkien worked so hard on? Little Ernst would see those italics and start flippin' pages until somebody was stabbing an orc again. But for some reason (perhaps because I found the non-italicized text such a chore) the intro to chapter six caught my attention:
~ ~ ~
Moses came down from Horeb, hair on fire with God, God's soot around his lips where he had eaten the greasy leaves of the burning bush, his humanity blasted from him, leaving him like carbon steel touch him he might ring, and contemplated his future. A leader of men. And women. He sat near his dear wife Zipporah in the dark and cursed his misfortune.Men didn't know what they wanted, or how to go about getting it. They did whatever was in their minds first. They hated at the drop of a hat and spurned love because they feared being taken advantage of. They leaped into violence before an angel could blink, and then called their murder and destruction valorous, and boasted of it and wept while drunk. And women! Did not carbon steel deserve something more?
“Give me a glorious task, Lord, away from this rabble.”
And that was when God descended and was sore vexed with him, making the land outside their tent quiver. Zipporah daughter of Jethro said, “Moses, Moses, what have you done now?”
“I have thought unworthy thoughts,” Moses said, hoping that was enough to mollify God, but the landscape turned bloodred and the sky filled with bloody clouds. Moses, even carbon steel, was afraid.
Zipporah came upon the clever expedient of lopping off their poor son's foreskin, touching Moses with the blood, and then the door frame.
“Stay away from my husband!” she cried. “He's a good man. Take my son but not my husband!”
Moses hid behind the daughter of Jethro and understood clearly the weakness of his people.
~ ~ ~
A stark and lovely bit of writing, that. 180 degrees from the tedious context in which I found it. A passage that led me to ask, “Where is the rest of this novel? How can I read more from this author within an author?”
1 A lot of familiar locales are mentioned, including a whole chapter set in the gutted future-ruins of the Hotel Bonaventure...which I know well, because the revolving lounge on the 33rd floor was a payday-date-night spot for me and Pidge. So all I could think of while I was reading this was her nickname for the joint: Spin-ee Bellini
2 There's an extensive vocabulary of future slang used liberally throughout the text...an annoying (and I'll say it--gimmicky) affectation whose novelty wore off for me forty years ago, halfway through A Clockwork Orange.
