I enjoyed doing the parodies hugely, and learned something from them, too. Another famous critic (whose name I shall not mention here, so as not to exacerbate further one of the numbskulls mentioned above) suggests in ABC of Reading that Eng. Lit. students might as an exercise compose parodies and then exchange them; the gauging pupil then should be asked (1) who is being parodied, and (2) whether the joke is on the parodied or the parodist; "whether the parody exposes a real defect, or merely makes use of an author's mechanism to expose a more trivial content." I think there are both kinds in "Getting Along." One can't, for instance, really parody Wells' manner, because he has few mannerisms to begin with; either you wind up with a pastiche, as Brian W. Aldiss did in The Saliva Tree, or you find yourself parodying his preoccupations, which is something else entirely.
But the story isn't literary criticism. It's only a game, and meant to be enjoyed as one.
Introduction to
TOTENBÜCH
Provincial, monomaniacal twits that we be, here in the flashy world of sf, we like to think we did it all ourselves, without even a good wash behind the ears from the waters of the mainstream. Yet how many times have we validated our existence to scoffers and critics with sponge-wringings of 1984, Brave New World, On the Beach, The Child Buyer and final, hysterical recourse to Vonnegut—who left us—and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land—the least worthy of all his many novels? When pushed to the wall, we try to obtain approbation and legitimacy by recourse to those works of sf written by men from outside our little circle.
Now sf is valid, it is legitimate, it is taught and analyzed and people write their Masters' theses on Delany and Aldiss and Sturgeon. And though it pains us to have to admit it, we did it only partially on our own hook. We managed to swing along into the golden land riding the hook with Wells and Hersey and Huxley and the rest of the big boys.
Yet even thumbscrewed into admitting our debt to the non-specialized writers who dabbled in our form and came away (as did all of us) richer for the experience, we still deify second-raters who will permit the words "science fiction" to be emblazoned on their book jackets, while ignoring the writers sui generis from outside sf, who have influenced us most strongly these past two decades.
Donald Barthelme, David Ely, W. S. Merwin, John D. MacDonald, Vladimir Nabokov, Carlos Casteñada, John Barth, John Fowles, Shirley Jackson, James Joyce, George P. Elliott—ignoring for the moment the inescapable debt we all owe to Poe—all have influenced to greater or lesser degree the kind and style of sf we are reading and writing today. Yet when we totemize the seminal and germinal influences, these names seldom, if ever, find their way onto the lists of admiration. But none of us would be writing as we do, today, had these writers not spread their pollen of special dreams.
And at this moment in time, the most innovating force working on new writers is that demonstrated in the unbelievable fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.
Though Borges has been writing for over forty years, it is only recently that the Literary Establishment (and even more tardily the sf Establishment) has come widely to appreciate the labyrinthine intricacies of the Borges ouevre. Along with the new vitality of the unpredictable, the intense and the magical Borges, the finest writing in the world today, the most important, the most different and the most inventive, is coming to us from Latin America. Fuentes, Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Cesar Vallejo, Ernesto Sabato, Juan Banuelos, Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . .these are the names of the knights of the pen who have cast aside the regimens of European thought and attack, and boldly sought out their own ways.
But more than any other, Jorge Luis Borges has influenced with the mysticism and potency of his work, an enormous number of younger writers. They could have no better model from whom to work. Because no one can imitate Borges. He is very much like John Campbell in one important way: he gives only the ground-plan. Going in his footsteps is virtually impossible, and when attempted is so disastrous that even the imitator realizes it before he has finished his Borges-like story, and he tears it to shreds, and then takes what lessons there are to be learned, and goes his own way.
In the purest sense, Borges is a teacher. To read him is to learn. If you have not discovered him, I urge you to obtain at once The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969 (Dutton).
One who has learned from Borges and the other Latin American brilliants, is Al Parra. I met him at the University of Colorado in 1969, and upon reading "Totenbüch" instantly bought it for this anthology. More than any other story in this collection, it shows a direction for speculative fiction that can truly be called "dangerous" because it is fresh, demanding, powerful and strangely unforgettable. I know of no one who has read this story in manuscript or galley who has not mentioned it with awe and delight. Many have found it beyond their powers of comprehension—for it is a story that demands the reader approach it fastidiously—but none have thought it irrelevant or slight or purposely obscure. They have recognized the hand of a talent here, and they have been driven to read it again and perhaps a third time, to finally unearth the burning truths buried in its metaphors and allegories.
I venture to say that ten years after many of the stories in this book have passed from memory, the reader will still recall "Totenbüch" with a shiver, and know without question that he or she was touched by a probe from another reality-plane.
And I must point out the regality of the story. There is a pervasive feeling of quality, of eminence and respect the story generates.
As an editor, I feel deeply honored to be able to present Parra to a wider audience than may previously have found his work. And as an introduction to what I consider the real New Wave of fiction, this story is a treasure.
Mr. Parra delivers the following data on himself:
"Born and raised in Key West, Fla. Both sides of the family Cuban (great-grandfather, Pedro E. Figueredo, composed the national anthem, and was executed for his pains). Educated at St. Joseph's, University of Florida (BsJ, MA), and University of Iowa (MFA in August 1970). Worked at news editing and writing, college teaching, four years in Far East with the Navy, and some odds and ends like construction and shrimp boat labor. Married Lois Mitchell (Madison, Wis.) and have four children—two girls and twin boys. 1969, had Harcourt, Brace & World Fellowship to Colorado Writers Conference and Florida Faculty Development grant to Breadloaf. Now on a teaching assistantship through Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, in Vance Bourjaily's workshop. Will be included in Directory of Young American Writers, though as I'm not under thirty, don't know what they mean by Young. About the name: christened Armando Albert, but the Armando got lost in the shuffle between church (Episcopal) and state records. Since my blood is Cuban, I feel entitled to append my mother's family name also.
"Publications include: 'Sanchez Escobar at the Circus' (SS), Quartet, Fall, 1967; 'Cross-Country' (SS), Laurel Review, Spring, 1968; 'The Lake at Hamilton's Bluff' (SS), Kansas Quarterly, Winter, 1968; 'This Side of Bahia Honda' (SS), Four Quarters, Jan., 1969; 'The Almond Tree Swing' (SS), Fine Arts Discovery, Spring, 1969; 'The Estevez Holograph' (SS), Kansas Quarterly, Winter, 1969; 'Put Down for Jack' (Poem), 3rd Prize, Writers' Digest contest, 1969; 'North Atlantic' (Poem), Dekalb Literary Arts Journal, Accepted for future pub; 'The Golden Bone' (SS), Forum, Acc fut pub; 'King Kong: The Art of Loving in the Promised Land' (Essay), Dekalb Literary Arts Journal, Acc fut pub; 'Pie de Palo: Relacion' (SS), Transatlantic Review, acc fut pub."
TOTENBÜCH
A. Parra (y Figueredo)
The evidence from camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthansen, Ravensbrüch, Sachsenhausen, Treblinka, and Wolsek somehow never ceases to amaze. Libraries of documentation: diaries, photographs, suicide epistology, journals, confessions, depositions, tapes, movies! The imagination falters. But for Oberweiler—nothing. Not a scrap of paper, a shred of film, not a word.
Rudulf von Pfister was in command, though the true genius of the place was not this SS colonel. Elsbeth Zimmermann had come up through the Bund Deutscher Mä
del and (a rare honor) had been selected for elite training in the Ordensburgen. So whatever her relationship to von Pfister or her role at Oberweiler, she came well trained and dedicated. And while so much of the bestiality was sexually oriented, Elsbeth's ingenuity had no equal in any of the camps.
"But get on with it."
"Ah! A surge of salacious juices?"
Perhaps you weren't ready for such a story. Like so many amateurs. So wrapped in LITERATURE you miss all around you the stuff it's made of. You conned yourself into believing your mind was recording for the future, in UP-case, for posterity demands the grand style for its memory of reality. So you soaked up the raw materials well enough, the details of the illusion you fabricated.
"The illusion you wanted to fabricate."
Illusions can be controlled, reality not. Yet the front-page came out accurate enough: you spelled all the names right, you got all the facts straight. Lisa Steinberg . . .prominent winter visitor . . .the old Curry house of wrecking fortunes from the Reef . . .charter member of the Old Island Restoration Foundation. But anyone can have money. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why all the rumors of what went on behind the walls of that landmark house? Then Perucho . . .painter of seascapes which in no way compare to the power of his photographs . . .age 48 . . .the—what? The relationship was uncertain, beyond confirmation, though not important enough to risk editorial cuts that might distort the rest. And what photographs! that collection uncovered after the fact. Not at all like the ones he put on exhibit. Was he merely a fancier? a collector? Moreover you discovered in that writing something of how mystery enhances the piece. Or was it mere rationalization that some things are best left unsaid? After all, why not let the reader's imagination work for you?
"How innocent!"
"Like Jarcha?"
The day he sailed between Havana's Malecón and the Morro, bound for Barcelona and the university, how innocent was Jarcha. Those adventures must be slighted here, though, including lessons learned in the International Brigade. So much seemed to happen to him by accident, though, so much. Suffice it to say Jarcha Avicebron was the victim of two mistakes, one of which was Jewish ancestry predating the Inquisition.
Having escaped Spain under the most impossible conditions left him exuberant, however, and he took such Prussian recalcitrance to be a misunderstanding. Manana y manana! But to travel the road to a Vernichtungslager with the eye of a tourist—nothing could be more innocent. Along the way he caught glimpses of the Saale and pleasant meadows. The shade of oak trees tempted him and his mouth watered at the juice-plump blackberries on wayside bushes. Remember, Jarcha? And the linden trees, from the barracks at night remember their fragrance?
"But all that is so ordinary."
Yes, ordinary. All enacted before. On purple pages of juvenalia, in sleazy rooms of cheap hotels, in throbbing chambers of the heart. And Elsbeth, what did she feel?
"What goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetition gains the name of reality?"
The TP would be stripped and shackled by chains from the rafters. In the beginning Elsbeth would personally handle these interrogations. But time sapped any newly aroused interest, regardless of progressively more exotic perversions, until ennui relegated her to the voyeur's sidelines. Jarcha arrived during the period of her experiments with volunteer "administrators," an innovation whose success amazed even von Pfister. Since these sessions were mere introductions to Oberweiler, the TP usually survived. Rare was the time that things went so far as the night a raven-haired gypsy girl so aroused her "administrator" that he cannibalized her, biting away first her nipples and then, on all fours, her clitoris.
As it happened, Jarcha drew a stout Jewess whose husband had been beaten headless with rifle butts that morning for trying to wrest their screaming children from guards come to take one to the brothel, the younger sickly boy to the "Baths." The fury this woman spent on Jarcha's naked body was fantastic. The air whistling with flails, Elsbeth got up from her desk, her interest stirred for the first time since the night of the gypsy. Here was a Test Person who writhed, apparently, in pleasure. Her heart quickened to the spasmodic jerks of his body. No longer did she understand, she merely obeyed this urgency in her chest. In a sense she had no awareness of ordering the others from the room. Of undressing. Of hearing the moans of some deep voice coursing Jarcha's flesh. Of none of this had Elsbeth any knowledge. In a sense. Nor the flourishes at the end. So you became lovers, you and Elsbeth. But let's not forget the social graces.
"It's not my fault you know."
"I know—it's this heat. For crissake don't start on that. The tropics are supposed to be hot."
"You don't love me anymore, that's what. Anyway, we're not in the tropics, not technically. That is it, isn't it? You don't love me anymore."
"You've gotten as shrill as one of these green parrots. Get me a light, will you, love?"
"One thing, Americans know how to make cigarettes. Sometimes I feel the cigarettes make it all worthwhile."
"Ay! tú—it burns. You did it, I know, you did it on purpose. Even at cocktails you enjoy making me suffer."
"It's true. Nothing's like it used to be."
"You are shrill. Strange I've not seen that until now."
"All I know, all the fun has gone out of life. Nothing happens anymore."
"All things end, love. Then they are forgotten. Who knows that better than you?"
Much else you knew for fact never did appear in the KEY WEST CITIZEN. Of course, with people like Lisa and Perucho there always are fantastic tales on the tip of every tongue. Apocrypha which awed even intelligent men like Scott Fitzgerald into supposing that a difference exists among people. Even the fact that, after having spent only the winter months during previous years, in that one year they established residence at the outset of summer, that was enough to incite new curiosity about them. But it was short-lived. There was more interest in what would happen to Eichmann, who had been spirited from Buenos Aires.
So in the end what did you understand? What did you plumb of the scene enacted in this air-conditioned room upstairs in a wealthy house? Is it to your credit after all that so much blood did not dismay you? Neither the mutilations. No rationalization of—
"It's my job."
—rests easy with that spectacle of flesh you cannot imagine the mind so tormented as to consummate it. Did you not learn anything about the human heart? And the mind? How boundless the imagination to conceive the drama performed in this room reeking of passion and blood. How naive to think this a sex crime! How inane to dismiss it all as psychopathic! To generalize (however secretly) about moral decadence. You did not even know what to make of the "confession." All this hell behind papered walls because the victim had become a wretched bore. Understatement belonged to high comedy. Ah! You had begun to rewrite, with that you began, recreating the actors, redirecting their movements, their dialogue, building a new set entire. In so doing did you discover nothing important about the laws of reality and the nature of illusions?
"In the dark of the night who can hold his hand to the light without seeing blood?"
"All endings are the same, yes—invective, guilt, accusation."
These many years later you are uncertain about what to expect. But to find nothing—? It is perhaps the wrong place, you misunderstood the directions in Weissenfels. Yet you remember the oak woods, the pleasant meadows, and unmistakable is the June fragrance of lindens. No, this is the place. Here stood Oberweiler—one, an illusion. Pick one of the berries there. And feel! the sun bursting in your mouth, the succulence spreading on your tongue. When last you passed this way how you yearned to press those berries between tongue and palate. Remember how in your thirst you closed your eyes to imagine the tart juice filling your mouth? On that visit to Oberweiler, though, you weren't allowed to pick blackberries. Remember? And in this moment of perception do you know which blackberry tasted better? Those your imagination picked along the thirsty road here, or these you savor in the fiel
ds from which the reality of Oberweiler has been effaced?
"Come!" you cry. "Get down to the meat."
Ah! Petulance does not become you, though I understand your impatience. How many have been conditioned by our detumescent fiction?
"I've done my part."
Yes, everything but use your imagination. Still you want your titillation.
"But I don't know—"
Whether you want to go that far? You're no different than anyone else, and the heart has no limit. What you really want is to be relieved of responsibility, that's all.
"Have no qualms, love, that's only your humanity you feel. Nobody ever dies of that."
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 89