Lord of the Afternoon
Page 19
This esoteric vein is most apparent in the novel Quest of the Three Worlds. Within the genre format of a popular magazine is the embryo of a genuine “apprentice novel”. It is the classic theme of the quest, the search for the Grail, the “the hero’s journey” popularized by Joseph Campbell.
Anthony Cheetham51 was the first to point out that Casher O’Neill’s initiation journey has the same structure as Homer’s The Odyssey.
Moreover, the romance of Casher and Genevieve is reminiscent of the story of Odysseus and Nausicaa (Book VI, The Odyssey).
On the planet Henriada, Casher meets several “amnesiacs” whose lives the Instrumentality has spared at the price of erasing all memory of their previous existence. They are the equivalent of Homer’s lotus-eaters (Book IX).
The fight with John Joy Tree evokes Odysseus’s descent into Hades to combat the Shades (Book XI), while T’ruth could be seen as an honorable Circe (Book X).
When Casher returns to Mizzer, he blends in with the masses, like Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca.
Despite the play of these Homeric themes, however, the outcome of the Cordwainerian odyssey is radically different.
Ulysses returns to avenge his honor, to be reunited with Penelope and to destroy his enemies. For this reason, the pagan Odyssey ends in an orgy of blood. Casher’s odyssey, however, is Christian. It does not culminate in revenge but forgiveness, which is an act of freedom. It does not exhaust itself in forgetting and relinquishing passions but in doing something for one’s enemy.
Toward the end of “On the Sand Planet”, as an epilogue to the voyage during which Casher O’Neill “finds” himself, a wandering mystique reviews different forms of conformism and escapism, including the religious variety.
Guided by D’alma, Casher searches for the Quel (the “source”) but does not find peace in any of the cities he visits.
The first stage in his journey takes him to the City of Hopeless Hope, the same name Santuna uses to describe the utopia of the Instrumentality. Its inhabitants live under the spell of superstition and magic. “These are the people who have the wrong hope and who go to no place at all, who find under this earth and under the stars their final fulfillment.” The second stage is the city of the Jwindz Jo, the Perfects, so proud they do not wish to continue searching.
The rest of the cities have Provençal names like Mortoval (Valley of Death) and Kermesse Dorgueïl (Kermés of Pride). Its inhabitants enjoy pleasure in moderation, in the manner of wise epicureans, and do not err on the side of excess.
Celalta, a Lady who has renounced the Instrumentality, takes Casher away from there. With her, Casher comes to realize that “nothing is victory, nothing is arrival, nowhere is getting there.”
They visit a place where there are “neither believers nor unbelievers; but there is something that comes out of the soil which makes people die.” In the end, they decide to stay in an Edenic valley where “one feels the presence of the First Forbidden One, the Second Forbidden One, the Third Forbidden One. We don’t need a church for this, though I suppose there are still churches on some planets.”52
The initiation journey, in other words, concludes beyond time.
1 “Under Old Earth”
2 “Under Old Earth”
3 Norstrilia, ch. “The Nearby Exile”
4 “Under Old Earth”. The sentence recalls a passage from Lao Tse (Tao Te King, 74): “If men are not afraid to die, it is of no avail to threaten with death.” In fact, a few pages earlier, the author quotes aphorism 78, which he attributes to “Laodz” (Lao-Tse).
5 Ria, pg. 11-12
6 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
7 “Under Old Earth”
8 “The Colonel Come Back from Nothing-at-all”
9 “Scanners Live in Vain”
10 “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul”
11 “Drunkboat”
12 “Himself in Anachron”
13 “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”; Norstrilia.
14 Norstrilia, chap. “FOE Money, SAD Money”
15 Norstrilia, chap, “At the Gate of the Garden of Death”
16 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
17 “Think Blue, Count Two”
18 “Think Blue, Count Two”
19 “On the Storm Planet”
20 Norstrilia, chap. “Fortunes and Watchers”.
21 “On the Storm Planet”
22 J.J. Pierce, Introduction to The Rediscovery of Man, 1993.
23 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
24 “On the Sand Planet”
25 Norstrilia, chap. “Hospitality and Entrapments”
26 This expression appears in “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” and The Planet Buyer but is not included in Norstrilia.
27 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
28 Norstrilia, chap. “Tosting Amaral”
29 In Greek: Iesous Cristos qeou ¡ios Soter = ICqUS
30 Miesel, Sandra, “I am Joan & I love you “; Algol 20 (1973).
31 Lucas 13,24
32 “Under Old Earth”
33 “The Fife of Bodidharma”
34 “Under Old Earth”
35 Norstrilia, chap. “Everybody’s Fond of Money”
36 Tao Te King, 76
37 The Underpeople, chap. 1. (not included in Norstrilia).
38 “On the Storm Planet”
39 Norstrilia, ch. “Everybody’s Fond of Money”
40 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
41 Norstrilia, chap. “Hospitality and Entrapments”
42 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
43 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
44 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
45 Norstrilia, chap. “His Own Strange Altar”
46 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
47 Norstrilia, chap. “Everybody’s Fond of Money”
48 Norstrilia, chap. “His Own Strange Altar”
49 Norstrilia, chap. “Birds, Far Underground”
50 Jordan (1991)
51 Cheetham, Anthony, “The World of Cordwainer Smith”. 1971.
52 “On the Sand Planet”
“THE SITUATION”AND ITS LIMITS
“THE SITUATION”AND ITS LIMITS
You would believe more in my underpeople
if you knew me and my good friends, both animal and human,
who live with me in our present civilization.
I am not a fussy sectarian, but I get a great deal of happiness
from the teachings of Jesus
-Cordwainer Smith, Epilogue of Space Lords
Exclusionary “situations”
This is as far as we have come after piecing together the patchwork of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction, exploring its origin, and situating it in its historical moment. And yet the personality of its creator remains an open question.
First of all, we need to recognize that the act of “situating” a writer within a particular historical framework is always to a certain extent arbitrary.
Using the word differently than in the usual sense, then, we shall call the “act of situating” simply the “situation”. If we are to define the essence of a public figure, we must begin by situating this individual in a sociocultural context. This operation precedes all interpretations and is the foundation upon which they are built. It should be kept in mind, if only to later dismiss it.
The manner in which we initially classify a figure will depend largely on conjecture. Imagine the “biographies” we might arrive at if someone were to speak to us of an Athenian aristocrat, a schizophrenic Dutchman and two Frenchmen, one a tax collector and the other a postal worker, without bothering to tell us that the men in question were Plato, Van Gogh
, Lavoisier and Bachelard.
While each of these “situations” departs from some connotation grounded in fact, they exclude precisely all the other variables which make the person interesting to us. This is how all those scandalous unauthorized biographies get written, ones that flatter readers by showing us that heroes and geniuses are capable of being as petty and small-minded as we are.
In the extreme, some “situations” lack objectivity to such a degree that they never amount to much more than prejudice. The ideological history of the twentieth century is chock-full of fallacies of this kind, such as the “Jewish physics” of the Nazis or the “bourgeois genetics” of the Stalinists.
The initial “situation” is inescapable and can even serve as a guide as long as we do not lose sight of the fact that it can end up being reductive and exclusionary. It is a judgment without trial of sorts, one that will condition our subsequent interpretation, as if it were the cover of a judicial file.
A writer’s preliminary “situation” will depend on whether or not he is worthy of our consideration, whether from the perspective of the marketplace or academia. Moreover, it will influence the choice of categories that we use to interpret it.
The initial journalistic “situation” will determine whether or not an author is met with silence, in the event that he sells few books, his subject matter is not fashionable, or he resists classification in identifiable groups. Often an author does not even have the decency to die, in which case he would at least merit an obituary. The silence or enthusiasm with which an author is greeted condition both the market and the culture industry, encouraging or discouraging criticism, publication, research and even potential inclusion in the scholarly canon.
If we want our conjectures about Cordwainer Smith to have some kind of solid foundation, we will need to examine the “situations” to which he has previously been subjected, if only to reject or revise them.
While these biased readings can be strongly divergent even when they depart from the same set of facts, they nonetheless illuminate distinct aspects of a personality. Taking any one of them for an absolute, however, would lead to a reductionism of the complex and petrifaction of that which is changeable.
When we approach the problem from a fixed point of mediation (aesthetic, political or psychological), we are choosing particular aspects from among all the ones we know.
If we aspire to wholeness, which is legitimate when talking about a life that has already been lived, these mediations will be incidental, albeit salvageable in a synthesis. If, however, we limit ourselves to a single aspect and attempt to construct an interpretation solely on the basis of it, such mediations will go from being mediating to being intermediary.
By analogy, it could be said that a lens is “mediating” because it allows better vision of objects, even if it alters their actual dimensions. Colored glass, on the other hand, is “intermediary”, in that it introduces qualities alien to the object. But a chromatic filter, while distorting the image, provides access to less conspicuous details. In this case, we would say that it is mediating.
The most obvious interpretations, especially those resulting from an ideological matrix, can be so biased that they conceal any and all facts which are not compatible with them.
The same can be said of the existential interpretation that I am proposing here. I have preferred to present it as a “conjecture”: a hypothetical construct that can be rectified or refuted. As is well known, not even in the “hard” sciences are hypotheses proven definitively. A single maverick fact is sufficient to render them invalid, while a plethora of supporting evidence is barely able to back them up.
Below we shall review some of the most common approaches in this case.
For the sophisticated reader with bias toward science fiction, Cordwainer Smith lacks interest a priori, inasmuch as his life and work are attached to a “genre”. This leads one to believe that Smith would be of interest only to a severely limited public.
The reader addicted to science fiction, on the other hand, will place Cordwainer Smith among the authors of the Golden Age. His work from this period has its share of fanatics, detractors and those indifferent to his work. For this kind of reader-consumer, the personality of Paul Linebarger is utterly secondary.
Meanwhile, the popular genre critic will only demonstrate interest if the work conforms to everything expected of a genre production. From his point of view, what matters is the literary technique of Cordwainer Smith, the originality of his fictional situations, his ability to recast classical themes, the influence of other writers (as along as they are genre writers) and Smith’s own influence on them.
In any event, neither the erudite reader nor the sci-fi addict would be very much interested in knowing that this “genre writer” was inspired more by Dante and Rimbaud than Heinlein and E. E. Smith.
In a way, these divergences are inevitable. When clarifying the structure of the work, we had to place the author momentarily on the sidelines. Likewise, the work moved into the background when we were dealing with biographical elements.
By contrast, it is not inappropriate to recall that Linebarger “never wanted to become part of that kind of thing (science fiction).” While he deeply respected some fans, the turbulent atmosphere of aficionados “made him nervous”.1
The best example of what could be mediation conditioned by genre perspective is found in Cheetham and Wollheim. Both limit themselves to salvaging certain biographical curiosities, yet they are most comfortable when dealing with story structure and themes. This is what interests a reader of science fiction.
Foyster, a fan of the genre with more sophisticated tastes, calls attention to aesthetic merits. He believes that Cordwainer Smith is the first writer able to elevate science fiction to a decisively literary level.2 He is interested in the way in which Smith introduces a story, comparing him with esteemed mainstream writers. Biographical elements are referenced solely to illuminate aspects of the work.
The perspective of writers is similar. Roger Zelazny proclaims his admiration for the master but alludes to Linebarger’s life only to lament the fact that he never had the chance to meet him in person.3 Robert Silverberg points to the “naturalness” of the Cordwainerian universe, a quality that makes it seem familiar in spite of being remote, and praises the writer’s métier.4
True, he never fails to mention Smith’s political and military career, but this is incidental. At any rate, it serves to arouse curiosity, insinuating that these aspects of Smith’s life conceal unexpected elements.
In this view, the work is paramount. Biographical facts are secondary and barely deserve mentioning. Focusing on the work, the autonomy of the literary fact makes everything else relative.
Still, it should be noted that Arthur Burns (who everyone agrees was Linebarger’s friend) believes it is more important to point out Smith’s intellectual training and ideas in regard to politics and strategy. Burns was not a critic, however, nor a writer or fan of science fiction either but an economist.
It was practically inevitable that at some point the suggestive Cordwainerian universe and the mystery that surrounded its creator would give rise to a legend. This we could define as “fantastic exegesis”.
Robert Silverberg was the first to suggest it rhetorically when he states: “I think Cordwainer Smith is a visitor from a remote time who lives among us, perhaps as an exile from his own age, or simply as a tourist who delights in projecting his knowledge of the future in the form of science fiction stories.”
A more fanciful version of this conjecture can be found in the presentation of the “story of Kirk” in the magazine Planète. Edited by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Planète was a precursor of the New Age. Its successful formula combined theosophy with science, art, literature and elegant graphic design. In its eagerness to discover inexplicable facts, alternative sciences
and occult knowledge, it often blurred the lines between reality and fiction.
What for Silverberg was mere rhetoric Planète did not hesitate to take literally, speculating (“The fabulous voyage of a nuclear physicist”) with the seriousness of a scientific report.5
After discovering Lindner’s text, the writer of the article (almost certainly Bergier) begins to theorize, taking for granted that it concerns real events whose authenticity is guaranteed by a renowned psychiatrist. He does not question Kirk’s being a nuclear physicist and even goes so far as to invent his own proof: “According to Bergier,” he states, “it concerns a researcher who, in 1959, was still working at the military base in Livermore.”
For Planète, the meticulousness of the account is the best “proof” that Kirk has actually been on spiritual journeys to other planets. To back its claim, it cites the books of Madame Blavatsky and other “inspired encyclopedias”.
The Planète text is the quintessential caricature of a hasty “situation”: a generalization made on the basis of scant and unreliable information, without heeding the minimum journalistic precautions.
It should be noted that Planète excludes from the text almost all indications of a sexual nature, specifically ones that lead to a “situation” more akin to psychoanalysis. Placing all emphasis on “astral journeys”, it sets forth a theosophical interpretation of the case, on the assumption that the initiated are able to perceive the “hangover of the future”.
Ten years later, the legend seems to have congealed. We encounter it again in a book of magic wherein techniques (charms, pentagrams, Tarot, I Ching, etc.) are revealed for passing through the so-called “Astral Gates” and gaining access to parallel worlds. Among the most modern sources mentioned are the works of Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien and even Ray Bradbury. As “proof” that these voyages are indeed possible, it unhesitatingly revives the version offered by Planète.