April is the Cruelest Month

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon

– T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

The more I read genre fiction, the more I realize that I'm not so much drawn in by any genre per se as by certain styles and artistic visions. One writer will click while another leaves me frustrated with myself for not enjoying what so many others esteem so highly.

One thing I find myself drawn to is the attempt on an author's part to make their invented world out of whole cloth. I don't mean that I like vivid descriptions and attention to detail, though these are fine when called for. What I mean is, I don't much like works that rely heavily on genre conventions, that bank on the reader's familiarity with common settings and tropes rather than building up an independent vision. My eyes just glide right over stuff like that. It's not that conventions are bad. All writing has abbreviations and shortcuts. But not much of truth or beauty, of strangeness or wonder or epiphany, is going to be found in an insubstantial tissue of borrowed elements.

I was recently introduced to the works of M. John Harrison through Fletcher Vredenburg's Black Gate reviews of the Viriconium books. What he had to say made me eager to read them, and an insightful older post by Matthew David Surridge at the same site piqued my curiosity even more. Thus far I've completed The Pastel City (1971) and A Storm of Wings (1980).

Here are stories that make their world out of whole cloth.

They're dying earth tales, it is true, and as such have something of a heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery "feel" while remaining what many people would call science fiction. That's what I like about the genre; that, and its peculiar blend of hopelessness, ennui, and hilarity, which the Viriconium books certainly embody. They paint their own picture, however, and it's a picture that's vivid to the point of painfulness but almost aggressively lacking in nuts-and-bolts world-building. About which more in a moment.

China Miéville has called it an injustice that Harrison hasn't received a Nobel Prize. I'm not competent to comment on that, as I rarely read the work of Nobel laureates. I do have to admit that I enjoyed the earlier and less ambitious Pastel City more than A Storm of Wings. I suppose I just gravitate toward the concrete, and A Storm of Wings is rather nebulous, with a weirdly drifting narrative and long passages describing the characters' perceptions and motivations.* I don't object to a book's being elliptical, mind you, and The Pastel City is certainly that. But it also kept me turning the pages to see what the resolution was going to be, and it's hard to think of a fantasy novel that's had that effect on me recently.

I think Mr. Vredenburgh puts the differences between the novels very well:

Despite sharing a similar structure with its predecessor, A Storm of Wings, is a more potent book, filled with headier feats of prose and narrative gameplaying. While The Pastel City remains an excellent heroic fantasy tale, I'm now able to perceive it best as the template for Harrison to build on and spin off from mad, wild, meta-fictional constructs. In an interview, Harrison said: "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself," he says. "Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that." Too much heroic fantasy relies on a lazy adherence to simple tropes – the hero, the obvious enemy, etc. In this book, he is clearly taking it to task for that, and while you may agree with that, or not, it's hard not to hear and engage with his argument.

Both books are rather beautiful and rather melancholy. They revolve around ineffective protagonists who don't rightly know what they're doing or why. The tone isn't jocular like the Cugel stories, but there's some humor to go with the sadness and horror of slow decay. The style is broad, full-bodied, and poetic, with a painter's sensitivity to color. There are echoes of Jack Vance and The Dying Earth, but I think the books owe the greater debt to "The Waste Land," itself formed (like the world of Viriconium) of the incomprehensible detritus of ruined civilizations.**

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

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In his first review, Mr. Vredenburgh links to two thought-provoking essays by Harrison: "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" and this essay on world-building.*** The latter begins with the following assertion, with which I wholeheartedly concur:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Amen to that! Harrison goes on to say a number of other things with which I sharply disagree, however, including this rather dumb statement:

The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It's a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world's a watch & God's the watchmaker.

Why is that dumb? (1) It employs the pejorative BS blanket term "fundamentalist Christian" and (2) it calls the watchmaker analogy a "fundamentalist Christian" view when it's actually more of an already-secularized Deist view. I mean, the history of the analogy is complicated, but I would hardly call people like Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton "fundamentalist Christians." Still, Harrison might have a point about watchmaking and world-building. Unfortunately, he goes on to this even dumber statement:

Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it's a game, and have installed their "secondary creation" concept as an aggressive defense of that position.

Tolkien resisted the idea that it's a game? In "On Fairy-Stories" he practically defines secondary creation as a game. Actually – and I suspect that this is the sticking point – it's defined as something of a divine game. Tolkien viewed fantasy much as his contemporary, the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini, viewed the liturgy of the mass, that is, as play. The self-deprecating yet gentle and hopeful tone of his essay's companion myth, "Leaf by Niggle," makes it pretty clear how he regarded his own world-building and its cosmic (in-)significance. His philosophy of fantasy bears little resemblance to the flattened caricature subjected to Harrison's procrustean bed.

Of course, it's arguable that Tolkien's "game," being in earnest rather than metafictional, isn't the kind of game Harrison likes to play. Still, I don't see how anyone could see Tolkien the author as some sort of demiurgic control freak. Is Middle Earth really such a closed system? If that's so, where do elements like Tom Bombadil fit in? Not even the characters of The Lord of the Rings are certain.

I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already "invented" him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an "adventure" on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. [Tolkien, in a draft of a letter that wasn't sent ("it seemed to be taking myself too importantly"), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 187-196]

The same letter contains a number of other interesting admissions. E.g.,

The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. Thus the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e., as if it were a report of "real" times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly to others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy. [ibid.]

Is that very different from the things Harrison has said about his Viriconium books? Actually, Tolkien's impatience with certain kinds of fans is familiar to anyone who's read his correspondence. In Tolkien's view, there is a broad difference between secondary creation and the kind of commercial world-building represented by this handy-dandy SFWA tips sheet, two approaches that Harrison appears to conflate.

Curiously, however, I believe that the other essay, "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium," gets it exactly right from beginning to end.

The commercial fantasy that has replaced [the great modern fantasies] is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else's metaphor, or realise someone else's rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, "Yes, but what did Sauron look like?"; or, "Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?"; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien's images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.  Literalisation is important to both writers and readers of commercial fantasy. The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes – their appearance of being a whole world – is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over "Tolkien's World."

With far greater concision and profundity than my skills allow, this says something I've been trying to get at since I started this blog, and perfectly expresses my attitude toward commercial fantasy. The provenance of the two essays isn't altogether clear to me, and I find it puzzling that Harrison, who wrote "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" first, later transferred his judgment of the sandbox-building revisionists and their readers to Tolkien himself.

But here let us take our leave of M. John Harrison for the time being. I shall continue to read his Viriconium stories because I think they're good and well worth the effort, and his provoking essays have provided some grist for the old blog-mill, for which I thank him.

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* It has occurred to me that, whatever its artistic value, the use of postmodernist deconstruction in genre fiction is potentially a very clever commercial ploy. People nowadays have little patience for the less-than-consistent, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants serials of yesteryear. Well, if carefully cultivated, a postmodernist pose lets the genre writer get away with pretty much anything in the way of self-contradiction, and critics (genre critics) will laud his or her work to the skies and gush about how close it is to real literature. That reflects what I'm always saying, which is that fantasy, when it tries to stop being itself and hobnob with high society, just ends up appropriating a bunch of outdated fashions. There's something absurd about genre writing that festoons itself with the trappings of what the cool kids were doing decades ago and calls itself "literary." Not that I think The Pastel City or A Storm of Wings fall into that, exactly...

A little deconstruction is a fine thing in a genre story. It adds bite. But you see what I mean? It's as much a material element as any of the little tricks Lin Carter recommends in Imaginary Worlds. Readers tolerate it, or even enjoy it, so long as it's subordinated to the end of the story. Deconstruction as an end in itself is a pursuit for the literati. In genre fiction, it's just a narcissistic (!) betrayal of readers. It's also as pointless, derivative, and time-bound as Lin Carter's clumsiest pastiche.

** T. S. Eliot was famously inspired by Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. His poems are referenced repeatedly by Apocalypse Now, and From Ritual to Romance – the very same edition I have on my bookshelf, as a matter of fact – is visible in Kurtz's dwelling at the end of the film. What I'm saying is, I could have worked all this into my last post, which also touched on The Valley of Gwangi, hollow earth theories, Pellucidar, Kong: Skull Island, "Heart of Darkness," colonialism, weird German conquistador movies, and various other things, but I didn't.

*** "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" was (so far as I can discover) written in 1996 and subsequently published in a fanzine. The other essay appears to have been copied from an archived version of a blog post. It's possible that they were both typed by dogs with keyboards. That's the Internet for you.

Willa Cather on the Art of Fiction

One of my favorite literary authors is Willa Cather. I like her more than anything else for her sensitivity to the land as a living, vital force shaping the destinies of her characters rather than a mere backdrop for action. She's also a person I admire as having found her own way through life. After a youth marked by a certain amount of what must have seemed eccentric behavior to her fellow townsmen (conducting scientific experiments, adopting men's clothing and a masculine nickname, etc.), she set out to become a physician and subsequently became a writer, yet retained a deep respect for and understanding of the milieu that had produced her, whereas a lesser person would merely have shaken the dust from her feet.

A few years ago I made a detour whilst traveling through Nebraska to visit Red Cloud, her hometown and the setting of many of her novels. As I've mentioned before, there's nothing quite like visiting the place that most influenced an artist you admire.

On the Divide, near Red Cloud, Nebraska.

We took the tour of her childhood home and visited all the salient landmarks, including the drug store (where she performed dissections), the opera house (where she performed in plays), and so forth, guided by the kindly old ladies at the visitors' center. Being great admirers of Death Comes for the Archbishop (which happens to be set in the Santa Fe area), we made the mistake of mentioning it to said ladies, only to have it hastily brushed aside, despite their glowing praise of works set in the Red Cloud area. Amusing.

On right edge of the window you can see the drug store.

Anyway, what brought this post on is my discovery of the following short essay, offered for your inspiration (emphasis mine):

On the Art of Fiction 

One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim of that school of writing was novelty—never a very important thing in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards—taught us to multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind. But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its point by tomorrow. 

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal. 

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.

Courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

Religion and Fantasy

Last spring I submitted a religious-themed science fiction story to a religious short-story contest. I don't usually submit to contests, and I never submit to religious markets, so this was doubly out of character. Still, the story was a speculative piece about a possible solution to a relevant bioethical issue that hasn't (so far as I know) been seriously considered yet, and perhaps rather too specialized for a more general market.

After I submitted the story I forgot about it, figuring it wasn't likely to get anywhere. So I was surprised when the editors contacted me to tell me that it had made it to the final round. Eventually it was one of the top fourteen (out of hundreds, with ten winners in the end). But when we spoke on the phone, I was informed that there were serious qualms about the story, to the effect that the thought of publishing it scared the hell out of them (well, the word they used was "heck," but I knew what they meant), and that one reader had had a very bad visceral reaction to a particularly shocking image.

Mission accomplished! Unfortunately, after some highbrow literary back-and-forth, the story was rejected. Structural problems were cited as the cause. Fair enough. How did it get as far as it did? Got me. Why was a personal interview felt to be necessary? I don't know.

Now, none of my other stories have religious themes. If anything they have philosophical themes. Religion is divisive. I suppose the same could be said for any strongly held opinion. All the same, there are plenty of religious sci-fi novels – VALIS, A Case of Conscience, and A Canticle for Leibowitz, to name a few famous ones. I'm not saying they're all necessarily friendly to traditional religion, but they at least treat it seriously and try to grapple with the issues involved, as opposed to the silly Carl Sagan, "Nightfall" approach.

So suppose I sit down to write a religious sci-fi story. Not a trite religion story that happens to take place in outer space, or a sci-fi story that happens to have an ironic genuflection thrown in, but a sci-fi story that has religion woven into its very fiber. Well, clearly speculative fiction can only be religious as such if it speculates about religious things. If you have what we might call a dogmatic religion, this involves the possibility of coming to the wrong conclusion about an issue that hasn't been settled yet, or deliberately denying or questioning some tenet that is held to be settled. And that bugs some people.

But what are the duties of the fantasist or scientifictionalist to his religion? Here I speak as what I happen to be, a Catholic. Our beliefs are clearly enunciated and organ-ized, but at the same time there's this constant outgrowth and deepening and process of maturation, or what John Henry Newman called the development of doctrine.* Sometimes an idea which was once seemingly universally rejected later becomes an article of faith. To someone interested in such things, there is a rich field for speculation. But suppose you get something wrong? Or suppose that you decide to write a story that clearly contradicts some received article? Is that bad? I think it's fair to say that a lot of people who consider themselves very religious would say, yes, it is bad.

Let's look to Tolkien, the great exemplar for Catholic fantasists. Tolkien, it is often claimed, wrote in a purely Catholic universe. This is debatable, depending on what one may mean by it. But he seems to have departed from established doctrine for literary effect on at least one occasion. In The Silmarillion it is intimated that death is the gift of Eru, the One, to Man, rather than a punishment for transgression.** In a letter he notes that this understanding of death is an Elvish myth, told from their perspective, and perhaps neither here nor there as regards the Christian myth. But he goes on to say:

I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the "Fall of the Angels": a rebellion of created free-will at a higher level than man; but it is not clearly held (and in many versions is not held at all) that this affected the "World" in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable.

Despite what he says regarding the divergence from Christian myth, this reminds me of the Catholic understanding of "physical evil":

[...] God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" toward its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection. [CCC 310]***

For my argument, though, that's immaterial. What seems clear to me, based on Tolkien's manner, is that he was not at pains to align his secondary world with his beliefs regarding the primary world, though he plainly regarded Middle-Earth as a mythical prehistoric precursor to Europe. In fact, the various parts of The Silmarillion contain a good amount of theological speculation.

My own opinion is that a story is a literary artifact, not a profession of faith, and that an authentic religious impulse in an artist will move him to make the best work he can make, regarded as a work of art and nothing more. Of course his faith will inform it, as it must all he does, but this is not a matter of particular concern to him, and may be quite hidden to casual observers.

Consider the bee. The bee spends her days gathering nectar and making honey. It is not her concern to deliver a message, to illustrate a virtue, etc. Her task is simply to make honey, and she goes about it assiduously until she dies. In this she glorifies God, for such a honey-maker God has made her to be. Be what you are, Catherine of Siena said, and you will set the world on fire.

Further, fantasy is a kind of play. We are regular mass-goers here at Casa O., and my children have played mass since a very young age, using makeshift surplices, thuribles, candles, and the rest. Well, because they're children, they sometimes don't get it exactly right. They even introduce terms and ideas that might raise the eyebrows of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Do I correct them? Of course not. Why? Because I'm not a narrow-minded wet blanket, and I recognize that playing is a way for children to process their experiences and grow into adults. Well, we are all children in the eyes of Eru Ilúvatar.

As regards Tolkien's popularity among my co-religionists, and my own seeming propensity to be put on the Index, well, there was a time when Tolkien's works were more beloved by heavy metal bands (and by Leonard Nimoy – watch only if you hold sanity cheap!) than the would-be architects of Catholic culture. But now he stands canonized. In religious circles one hears unceasing praises of him and Dante and Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh, but what really strikes me about these authors is that they established themselves on their own merits, in the world at large, and not in a religious literary ghetto. And if they didn't now have a kind of communal Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur one suspects they'd be rejected out of hand. As Solon said to Croesus, no man can be called happy until he's dead.

It's this perceived adherence to the faith, and not literary merit, that a certain religious critic looks for. They stand diffident, reserved, careful to neither praise nor censure, until they have some kind of idea about where the author stands. They want to be certain whether the author is on their team or the other team before they commit.

Take Anne Rice. Not many years ago she returned to the Catholic Church and proceeded to write a multi-volume fictionalized life of Christ. (I don't think vampires were involved.) She actually took out ads in First Things and sent a review copy to Richard John Neuhaus, who responded with a backhanded compliment, something about how it wasn't exactly Dostoevsky but maybe people would benefit from it. Anyway, everyone lauded her. Catholic-types talked about how they'd always felt there was something special about her vampire books. I actually heard a nun speak about it in front of a group of catechumens. Then, not long after, she left the Church again, in something of a huff, and Catholic-types talked about how they'd always felt there was something not quite right about her Christ novels, something not altogether real about her conversion.

Then there's Oscar Wilde, an author I happen to admire. He experienced a deathbed conversion, so he's canonized. But if that conversion had remained unknown, or if he had lived to repudiate it, then (one suspects) certain critics wouldn't care about him except to make snarky triumphalist comments about his lifestyle.

In the end, then, the attitudes here are not far from those of the diversity-obsessed. They're primarily concerned with secondary elements, and not altogether honest in their criticism. If you're religious and just want to write then it seems you must steer your way between this Scylla and Charybdis. Or, to continue the analogy, maybe just ignore all voices as you would the Sirens.


* As a matter of fact, Newman wrote a speculative historical novel about the early Church (Callista), which I read in grad school – read it aloud to my wife, in fact, if I recall correctly – but didn't much care for. It's richly detailed, but rather too minute in its descriptions, and the characters are wooden, which isn't surprising, seeing as Newman was a great admirer of Ivanhoe. My wife adores Ivanhoe, but me, not so much. I read it in the cab of my pickup truck during lunch breaks at a warehouse job across from a brewery when I was sixteen. I enjoyed it then, but have never been able to stomach it since: it reminds me of the overpowering smell of cooking barley.

** This would seem to be tied to the idea that the men of Númenor lay down their lives voluntarily, in full possession of their faculties, rather than seek to prolong their years through dotage, and are praised for it, another idea that is problematic from a Catholic point of view.

*** It seems to me that the ideas expressed in this part of the Catechism, about physical evil, the angels and the visible world, the intrinsic goodness of each created thing, the interdependence of creatures, the beauty of creation, the hierarchy of creatures, and the cosmic sabbath-rest, form the central theme of The Book of the New Sun, another monumental Catholic work.

El Libro de Arena

Let's discuss Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Book of Sand" ("El Libro de Arena"). First, a synopsis. (You can also find an English translation here.)

The story opens with a few sentences about points, lines, and planes. More on this later. A man (the narrator — Borges?) receives a visit from a traveling Bible salesman. He expresses disinterest in buying a Bible, as he owns a Wycliff Bible, a copy of Cypriano de Valera's translation, Luther's translation, and the Latin Vulgate. The salesman — a man of indistinct features, dressed in gray, with a gray valise — then shows him the Book of Sand (so-named because sand has neither beginning nor end).

The narrator opens it. Each page is numbered with an Arabic numeral; the left-hand page might be numbered, say, 40514, or some eight-digit number, the left, 999, or a number raised to the ninth power. There are crude illustrations as well. "Study the page well," the salesman says, "for you'll never see it again." The narrator notes the page number, closes the book, then tries to find it again. He is unable to. He also discovers that he can't reach the beginning of the book. No matter how close he tries to open it to the cover, there are always pages between his thumb and the board.

In the end he purchases the book in exchange for his retirement fund and his Wycliff Bible. He hides it behind his volumes of the Arabian Nights. As he investigates the book over the coming months he concludes it to be monstrous. Rather than burning it — he's afraid that the smoke from an infinite book would suffocate the whole earth — he hides it on a shelf at the National Library.

A strange, enigmatic tale in its basic outline. Possibly I've left out some of the most significant details, but I've included those that strike me. Though a writer by night and a painter on Sundays, I'm a mathematician by day, and it's the mathematical aspects that I wish to speak about.

The opening seems to me to be the key to the whole thing, for in many ways the Book of Sand might be likened to a line segment of finite length, e.g., the segment from zero to one on the number line. I mean the segment between these two points, excluding zero and one themselves. For such a segment has neither beginning nor end. No matter how close to zero you choose a point to be, there will always be infinitely many numbers between zero and your point. Notable, too, is the fact that the narrator can never again find a page he's visited. This is true of any infinite set. Choose an element at random, then choose a second. The probability that the choices will be the same is precisely nil.

So, the book resembles the line segment to some extent. But there are many infinite sets within the line segment. We could, for instance, take all the points that correspond to fractions. For a number between zero and one to be a fraction we have to be able to write it as a/b, where a and b and whole numbers and a is smaller than b. Though infinite, it is possible to denumerate this set by taking them in the order

1/2    1/3    2/3    1/4    3/4    1/5    2/5    3/5    4/5    1/6    5/6    1/7

so that 1/2 is the first, 1/3 the second, 2/3 the third, and so on. We're skipping the fractions that can be reduced and thus have already appeared in the list. Because this set of rational numbers (so-called because they are ratios of whole numbers) is denumerable (can be numbered off without leaving any out), it seems to me to resemble the pages of the book. The page numbers would correspond to the labels affixed to the rational numbers. For instance, the page that occurs exactly two-fifths of the way through the book would be labeled as page 7, because 2/5 appears seventh in our list. Going against this interpretation is the fact that facing pages have different numbers, and that the narrator can turn the pages one at a time; for between each pair of rational numbers are infinitely many rational numbers. It isn't possible to find two that are right next to each other, so to speak. For the book to be exactly like the rationals, recto and verso would need to bear the same number (and thus be identified), and the pages would have to stick when the narrator turned them, much as the "first" pages cling to the front board, so that he can never quite turn a single one.

Another possibility is that the pages correspond to the points in the entire continuum from zero to one; but this seems to be ruled out by the pagination, because the continuum, as Georg Cantor showed, is not denumerable. It is "more infinite" than the infinite set of rational numbers. (Incidentally, Cantor's proof made use of the decimal system, which originated in India; the Bible salesman had bought the Book of Sand from an Indian untouchable.) What we noted about page-turning above also goes against this interpretation.

There are of course many other infinite sets on this line segment that could be considered.

It's interesting, by the bye, that the book is called the Book of Sand; for the number of grains of sand is in fact finite. Though counterintuitive to some, the fact was demonstrated by Archimedes in a little book called The Sand-Reckoner, to which I feel almost certain Borges must have referred in at least one of his stories.

In this book, Archimedes obtains an estimate for the size of the material universe, which was very, very large (it is a myth that the ancients believed in a small cosmos and a flat earth), and, using another estimate for the density of packed sand in terms of grains per unit volume, computes an upper bound for the number of grains that could possibly be contained in the cosmos, were it packed solid with sand. He arrives at the number 10⁶³, which is very large, but still, of course, finite. The square of this number would be larger than a googol, if that puts it in perspective for you.

The fact that the narrator fears polluting the whole earth with the smoke of his book makes me think of a certain nineteenth-century mathematical controversy, of which Cantor, mentioned above, was at the center. Cantor showed that the points on the line segment could be paired in a one-to-one fashion with the points on a unit square and, thus, with the set of points in any such space of any dimension. This pairing, though not continuous, scandalized the mathematical community, for it seemed contrary to reason that a one-dimensional space could be equally as infinite as a two-dimensional space.

Later on, Guiseppe Peano and David Hilbert devised continuous mappings from the segment onto the square; these were no longer one-to-one. The first several steps in the construction of Hilbert's mapping are shown above; the "squiggle" eventually fills the square, with no points left out. There is a three-dimensional analogue of this mapping, which fills the cube, and could, in principle, fill all of space.

So, if we imagine the pages of Borges' book to correspond to (say) the rational numbers, then the particles of its burning might not fill all the atmosphere, but, since the rationals are dense on the segment (infinitely many lie between any two points, no matter how close), we could easily imagine that its smoke might be so dense as to entirely pervade the atmosphere, with infinitely many particles in every space, no matter how small.

Cantor, as I noted, was a figure of controversy; he was denounced as a "scientific charlatan" and "corrupter of youth" by other mathematicians, and the strange curves and mappings he and others of his "school" described were shunned by many as monstrous or pathological. His investigation into the infinite also had a bearing on metaphysics and theology, for medievals like Thomas Aquinas had held that there could be no such thing as an actual existent infinity, only a potential infinity. Cantor's research seemed to some to indicate the existence of actual infinities, and thus, for various reasons, to tend toward pantheism. Cantor believed that further distinctions had to be made, and that Thomas wouldn't have objected to his ideas, had he been able to explain them; he corresponded with philosophers, theologians, and cardinals of the church, and even addressed a pamphlet to Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Aeterni Patris had advocated a renewed interest in scholastic philosophy.

But to return to the "monstrous" Book of Sand, whose serial infinity inspires in the narrator the same horror Cantor's theories had struck in his contemporaries. The narrator traded for it a copy of scripture that was a historical and literary treasure in itself as well as his savings for retirement. Might not this be a statement about modern man, who has traded his patrimony and future for a kind of gorgon's head of infinity? How fitting, too, that the narrator hides the book in a library, making it one page in the monstrous Book of Sand that is the modern glut of information, our "Library of Babel."

America's Great Epic

Last weekend I drove in a single day from the torrid depths of my place in the Texas hinterlands amid prickly pears and palm trees to the airy heights of the Colorado Rockies, then drove all the way back two days later, again in a single day. But it was no wearisome journey, for I had as companion and copilot an unabridged audiobook of Moby-Dick, read by the peerless Frank Muller, who (by gum) did an Ahab that seemed almost enfleshed beside me in the cab of my pickup truck. After twenty-one hours of listening I reached from hell's heart I stab at thee in a town called Eden set upon the rolling uplands of central Texas, with sunset thunderheads flashing in the distance before me.

I recently wrote a post comparing Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun to Moby-Dick. But, oh, while it may be argued that BOTNS is the Moby-Dick of science fiction, being the "Moby-Dick of" something and actually being Moby-Dick are quite different propositions. O sublimity, O profundity, O humor and vivacity of that greatest of American epics!

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Flannery O'Connor on the Grotesque

"Hawthorne knew his own problem and perhaps anticipated ours when he said he did not novels, he wrote romances… The writer who writes within what might be called the modern romance tradition may not be writing novels which in all respects partake of a novelistic orthodoxy; but as long as these works have vitality, as long as they present something that is alive, however eccentric its life may seem to the general reader, then they have to be dealt with; and they have to be dealt with on their own terms."

"When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque… In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored… Yet the characters in these novels are alive in spite of these things. They have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected."

"…[I]f the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will aways be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where the adequate motivation and the adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves—whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not. To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there.

"I would not like to suggest that this kind of writer, because his interest is predominantly in mystery, is able in any sense to slight the concrete. Fiction begins where human knowledge begins—with the senses—and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium. I do believe, however, that the kind of writer I am describing will use the concrete in a more drastic way. His way will much more obviously be the way of distortion."

"Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological… I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted… Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature."

"The Southern writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets. When Hawthorne said that he wrote romances, he was attempting, in effect, to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinisms and to steer it in the direction of poetry. I think this tradition of the dark and divisive romance-novel has combined with the comic grotesque tradition and with the lessons all writers have learned from the naturalists, to preserve our Southern literature at least for a while..."

—Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction"

Hawthorne on Inner Truth and Reality

"It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false…, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,—it is impalpable,—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist."

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

In Pursuit of Leviathan

I have come in my old age to be dissatisfied with the flimsiness of the contemporary fantasy novel. Not all are superficial or insubstantial, I know, but still it is rare that I come across something I can sink really my teeth into. Perhaps I am over-critical; perhaps years of reading mathematics and metaphysics have merely wound my brain too tight, so that anything not taxing is positively boring. However this may be, whenever I stand in need of something that offers what I look for in fantasy but that satisfies my need for the rich and the sublime, I turn to the nineteenth century. And foremost among the works of gothic imagination that attract me as fantasies do is Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Sometimes I amuse myself by tring to pinpoint what it is in Moby-Dick that draws me as Dune or Titus Groan do. The "fantastic" material elements—the improbability of the adventure, the omens and soothsayers, the sentience of the whale—are all somewhat beside the point. The book itself is the doorway to a complete and self-contained world—the world of the primordial ocean—and the reader loses himself in it. The opening scenes in Bedford play the role of an induction, like the finding of the wardrobe or the arrival of the hippogriff. The sailors don’t merely move across the sea as across a backdrop: they become part of it, the lovers and foes coequal of Leviathan. The Pequod, too, that tiny island in the midst of the featureless face of the waters, lorded over by Ahab its sultan, is itself a character and a potent force, like Arrakis or Gormenghast Castle.

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed… She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

In Moby-Dick Melville seeks to communicate the fiery vision of a nature pregnant with the utter absence of God. This vision is couched in the very language and imagery of the King James Bible. The affective structure of the work and its stylistic elements transform the gothic vision of nature into a living, breathing reality that can be touched and communed with. The sought-for whale is itself the personification of the brutal unconcern of the cosmos with aught that is human, and its very whiteness is a living force and symbol of impenetrable mystery.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

And so I delight in Moby-Dick as I do in few fantasies, but for the same reasons that I enjoy the greatest fantasies. I revel in its grotesqueries and "digressions." I wander in it like a lost soul in Faërie, wondering at all that I see, drinking in the sentences and symbols like heady wine.