A Perfect Vacuum Read online

  All this—nearly 170 pages, not counting the epilogue!—produces the impression that either Robinson abandoned his original plans, or else the author himself lost his way in the book. Jules Nefastes, in Figaro Littéraire, states that the work is “plainly clinical.” Sergius N., in spite of his praxiological plan of Creation, could not avoid madness. The result of any truly consistent solipsistic creation must be schizophrenia. The book attempts to illustrate this truism. Therefore, Nefastes considers it intellectually barren, albeit entertaining in places, owing to the author’s inventiveness.

  Anatole Fauche, on the other hand, in La Nouvelle Critique, disputes the verdict of his colleague from Figaro Littéraire, saying—in our opinion, entirely to the point—that Nefastes, quite aside from what The Robinsonad propounds, is not qualified as a psychiatrist (following which there is a long argument on the lack of any connection between solipsism and schizophrenia, but we, considering the question to be wholly immaterial to the book, refer the reader to The New Criticism in this regard). Fauche sets forth the philosophy of the novel thus: the work shows that the act of creation is asymmetrical, for in fact anything may be created in thought, but not everything (almost nothing) may then be erased. This is rendered impossible by the memory of the one creating, and memory is not subject to the will. According to Fauche the novel has nothing in common with a clinical case history (of a particular form of insanity on a desert island) but, rather, exemplifies the principle of aberrance in creation. Robinson’s actions (in the second volume) are senseless only in that he personally gains nothing by them, but psychologically they are quite easily explained. Such flailing about is characteristic of a man who has got himself into a situation he only partially anticipated; the situation, taking on solidity in accordance with laws of its own, holds him captive. From real situations—emphasizes Fauche—one may in reality escape; from those imagined, however, there is no exit. Thus The Robinsonad shows only that for a man the true world is indispensable (“the true external world is the true internal world”). Monsieur Coscat’s Robinson was not in the least mad; it was only that his scheme to build himself a synthetic universe on the uninhabited island was, in its very inception, doomed to failure.

  On the strength of these conclusions Fauche goes on to deny The Robinsonad any underlying value, for, thus interpreted, the work indeed appears to offer little. In the opinion of this reviewer, both critics here cited went wide of the mark; they failed to read the book’s contents properly.

  The author has, in our opinion, set forth an idea far less banal than, on the one hand, the history of a madness on a desert island, or, on the other, a polemic against the thesis of the creative omnipotence of solipsism. (A polemic of the latter type would in any case be an absurdity, since in formal philosophy no one has ever promulgated the notion that solipsism grants creative omnipotence; each to his own, but in philosophy there is no percentage in tilting at windmills.)

  To our mind, what Robinson does when he “goes mad” is no derangement—and neither is it some sort of polemical foolishness. The original intention of the novel’s hero is sane and rational. He knows that the limitation of every man is Others; the idea, too hastily drawn from this, which says that the elimination of Others provides the self with unlimited freedom, is psychologically false, corresponding to the physical falsehood which would have us believe that since shape is given to water by the shape of the vessel that contains it, the breaking of all vessels provides that water with “absolute freedom.” Whereas, just as water, when deprived of a vessel, will spread out into a puddle, so, too, will a totally isolated man explode, that explosion taking the form of a complete deculturalization. If there is no God and if, moreover, there are neither Others nor the hope of their return, one must save oneself through the construction of a system of some faith, a system that, with respect to the one creating it, must be external. The Robinson of Monsieur Coscat understood this simple precept.

  And further: for the common man the beings who are the most desired, and at the same time entirely real, are beings beyond reach. Everyone knows of the Queen of England, of her sister the Princess, of the former wife of the President of the United States, of the famous movie stars; that is to say, no one who is normal doubts for a minute the actual existence of such persons, even though he cannot directly (by touch) substantiate their existence. In turn, he who can boast of a direct acquaintance with such persons will no longer see in them phenomenal paragons of wealth, femininity, power, beauty, etc., because, in entering into contact with them, he experiences—by dint of everyday things—their completely ordinary, normal, human imperfection. For such persons, up close, are not in the least godlike beings or otherwise extraordinary. Beings that are truly at the pinnacle of perfection, that are therefore truly boundlessly desired, yearned for, longed after, must be remote even to full unattainability. It is their elevation above the masses that lends them their magnetic glamour; it is not qualities of body or soul but an unbridgeable social distance that accounts for their seductive halo.

  This characteristic of the real world, then, Robinson attempts to reproduce on his island, within the realm of beings of his own invention. Immediately he errs, because he physically turns his back on the creation, the Snibbinses, Boomers, et al., and that distance, natural enough between Master and Servant, he is only too willing to break down when he acquires a woman. Snibbins he could not, nor did he wish, to take into his arms; now—with a woman—he only cannot. The point is not (for this is no intellectual problem!) that he was unable to embrace a woman not there. Of course he was unable! The thing was to create mentally a situation whose own natural law would forever stand in the way of erotic contact—and at the same time it had to be a law that would totally ignore the nonexistence of the girl. This law was to restrain Robinson, and not the banal, crude fact of the female partner’s nonexistence! For to take simple cognizance of her nonexistence would have been to ruin everything.

  And so Robinson, seeing what must be done, sets to work—that is, the establishment on the island of an entire, imaginary society. It is this that will stand between him and the girl; this that will throw up a system of obstacles and thus provide that impassable distance from which he will be able to love her, to desire her continually—no longer exposed to any mundane circumstance, as, for example, the urge to stretch out his hand and feel her body. He realizes—he must—that if he yields but once in the struggle waged against himself, if he attempts to feel her, the whole world that he has created will, in that bat of an eye, crumble. And this is the reason he begins to “go mad,” in a frenzied scramble to pull multitudes out of the hat of his imagination—thinking up and writing in the sand all those names, cognomens, and sobriquets, ranting and raving about the wives of Snibbins, the Hyperborean aunts, the Old Fried Eggses, and so on and so forth. And since this swarm is necessary to him only as a certain insurmountable space (to lie between Him and Her), he creates indifferently, sloppily, chaotically; he works in haste, and that haste discredits the thing created, lays bare its incoherence, its lack of thought, its cheapness.

  Had he succeeded, he would have become the eternal lover, a Dante, a Don Quixote, a Werther, and in so doing would have had his way. Wendy Mae—is it not obvious?—would then have been a woman no less real than Beatrice, than Lotte, than any queen or princess. Being completely real, she would have been at the same time unattainable. And this would have allowed him to live and dream of her, for there is a profound difference between a situation in which a man from reality pines after his own dream, and one in which reality lures reality—precisely by its inaccessibility. Only in this second case is it still possible to cherish hope, since now it is the social distance alone, or other, similar barriers, that rule out the chance for the love to be consummated. Robinson’s relationship to Wendy Mae could therefore have undergone normalization only if she at one and the same time had taken on realness and inapproachability for him.

  To the classic tale of the star-crossed lovers united i
n the end, Marcel Coscat has thus opposed an ontological tale of the necessity of permanent separation, this being the only guarantee of a plighting of the spirits that is permanent. Comprehending the full boorishness of the blunder of the “third leg,” Robinson (and not the author, that’s plain!) quietly “forgets” about it in the second volume. Mistress of her world, princess of the ice mountain, untouchable inamorata—this is what he wished to make of Wendy Mae, that same Wendy Mae who began her education with him as a simple little servant girl, a domestic to replace the uncouth Snibbins.... And it was precisely in this that he failed. Do you know now, have you guessed why? The answer could not be simpler: because Wendy Mae, unlike any queen, knew of Robinson and loved him. She had no desire to become the vestal goddess, and this division drove the hero to his ruin. If it were only he that loved her, bah! But she returned his feelings.... Whoever does not understand this simple truth, whoever believes, as our grandfathers were instructed by their Victorian governesses, that we are able to love others, but not ourselves in those others, would do better not to open this mournful romance that Monsieur Coscat has vouchsafed us. Coscat’s Robinson dreamed himself a girl whom he did not wish to give up completely to reality, since she was he, since from that reality that never releases its hold on us, there is—other than death—no awakening.

  Gigamesh

  Patrick Hannahan

  (Transworld Publishers, London)

  Here is an author who covets the laurels of James Joyce. Ulysses condensed the Odyssey into a single Dublin day, made Circe’s infernal palace from the dirty laundry of la belle epoque, tied the bloomers of Gerty McDowell into a hangman’s noose for Bloom the traveling salesman, and with an army of four hundred thousand words descended upon Victorianism, which was demolished with all the stylistics that lay at the disposal of the pen, from stream of consciousness to trial deposition. Was this not already the culmination of the novel, and at the same time the monumental laying of it to rest in the family sepulcher of the arts (in Ulysses there is music, too!)? Apparently not; apparently Joyce himself did not think so, inasmuch as he decided to go further, writing a book that is supposed to be not only the focusing of civilization into a single language, but also an omnilinguistic lens, a descent to the foundations of the Tower of Babel. As to the brilliance of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, which attempts the infinite with double-barreled audacity, we neither affirm it here nor deny it. A solitary review can now be nothing but a grain cast upon that mountain of homages and imprecations that has grown over both books. It is certain, however, that Patrick Hannahan, Joyce’s countryman, never would have written his Gigamesh if not for the great example, which he took as a challenge.

  One would think that such an idea would be doomed to failure from the beginning. Doing a second Ulysses is as worthless as doing a second Finnegan. At the summits of art only the first achievements count, just as, in the history of mountain climbing, it is only the first surmounting of walls unsealed.

  Hannahan, tolerant enough of Finnegan's Wake, thinks little of Ulysses. “What an idea,” he says, “packing the nineteenth century of Europe, and Ireland, into the sarcophagal form of the Odyssey! Homer’s original itself is of doubtful value. Why, it is your comic book of antiquity, with Ulysses as Superman, and the happy end. Ex ungue leonem: in the choice of his model we see the caliber of the writer. The Odyssey is a pirating of Gilgamesh, and bastardized to suit the tastes of the Greek hoi polloi. What in the Babylonian epic represented the tragedy of a struggle crowned with defeat, the Greeks turn into a picturesque adventure tour of the Mediterranean. ‘Navigare necesse est‘life is a journey’—great gems of wisdom, these. The Odyssey is a dégringolade in plagiarism; it ruins all the greatness of the fight of Gilgamesh.”

  One has to admit that Gilgamesh, as Sumerology teaches us, did in fact contain themes that Homer used—the themes of Odysseus, of Circe, of Charon—and is perhaps the oldest version we have of a tragic ontology, because it manifests what Rainer Maria Rilke, thirty-six centuries later, was to call a growing, which consists in this: “der Tiefbesiegte von immer Grösserem zu sein.” Man’s fate as a battle that leads inescapably to defeat—this is the final sense of Gilgamesh.

  It was on the Babylonian cycle, then, that Patrick Hannahan decided to spread his epic canvas—a curious enough canvas, let us note, because his Gigamesh is a story extremely limited in time and space. The notorious gangster, hired killer, and American soldier (of the time of the last world war) “GI Joe” Maesch, unmasked in his criminal activity by an informer, one N. Kiddy, is to be hanged—by sentence of the military tribunal—in a small town in Norfolk County, where his unit is stationed. The whole action takes thirty-six minutes, the time required to transport the condemned man from his cell to the place of execution. The story ends with the image of the noose, whose black loop, seen against the sky, falls upon the neck of the calmly standing Maesch. This Maesch is of course Gilgamesh, the semidivine hero of the Babylonian epos, and the one who sends him to the gallows—his old buddy N. Kiddy—is Gilgamesh’s closest friend, Enkidu, created by the gods in order to bring about the hero’s downfall. When we present it thus, the similarity in creative method between Ulysses and Gigamesh becomes immediately apparent. But justice demands that we concentrate on the differences between these two works. Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact, Gigamesh runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847). We learn at once how Hannahan’s method works: the first, seventy-page chapter of the Commentary explains to us all the divergent allusions that emanate from a single, solitary word—namely, the title. Gigamesh derives first, obviously, from Gilgamesh: with this is revealed the mythic prototype, just as in Joyce, for his Ulysses also supplies the classical referent before the reader comes to the first word of the text. The omission of the letter L in the name Gigamesh is no accident; L is Lucifer, Lucipherus, the Prince of Darkness, present in the work although he puts in no personal appearance. Thus the letter (L) is to the name (Gigamesh) as Lucifer is to the events of the novel: he is there, but invisibly. Through “Logos” L indicates the Beginning (the Causative Word of Genesis); through Laocoon, the End (for Laocoon’s end is brought about by serpents: he was strangled, as will be strangled—by the rope—the hero of Gigamesh). L has ninety-seven further connections, but we cannot expound them here.

  To continue, Gigamesh is a GIGAntic MESS; the hero is in a mess indeed, one hell of a mess, with a death sentence hanging over his head. The word also contains: GIG, a kind of rowboat (Maesch would drown his victims in a gig, after pouring cement on them); GIGgle (Maesch’s diabolical giggle is a reference—reference No. 1—to the musical leitmotif of the descent to hell in Klage Dr. Fausti [more on this later]); GIGA, which is (a) in Italian, “fiddle,” again tying in with the musical substrates of the novel, and (b) a prefix signifying the magnitude of a billion (as in the word GIGAwatts), but here the magnitude of evil in a technological civilization. Geegh is Old Celtic for “avaunt” or “scram.” From the Italian giga through the French gigue we arrive at geigen, a slang expression in German for copulation. For lack of space we must forgo any further etymological exposition. A different partitioning of the name, in the form of Gi-GAME-sh, foreshadows other aspects of the work: GAME is a game played, but also the quarry of a hunt (in Maesch’s case, we have a manhunt). This is not all. In his youth Maesch was a GIGolo; AME suggests the Old German Amme, a wet nurse; and MESH, in turn, is a net—for instance, the one in which Mars caught his goddess wife with her lover—and therefore a gin, a snare, a trap (under the scaffold), and, moreover, the engagement of gear teeth (e.g., “synchroMESH”).

  A separate section is devoted to the title read backward, because during the ride to the place of execution Maesch in his thoughts reaches back, seeking the memory of a crime so monstrous that it will redeem the hanging. In his mind, then, he plays a game(!) for the highest stakes: if he can recall an act infinitely vile, this will
match the infinite Sacrifice of the Redemption; that is, he will become the Antisaviour. This—on the metaphysical level; obviously Maesch does not consciously undertake any such antitheodicy; rather—psychologically—he seeks some heinousness that will render him impassive in the face of the hangman. GI J. Maesch is therefore a Gilgamesh who in defeat attains perfection—negative perfection. We have here a high symmetry of asymmetry with regard to the Babylonian hero.

  So, then, when read in reverse, “Gigamesh” becomes “Shemagig.” Shema is the ancient Hebraic injunction taken from the Pentateuch (“Shema Yisrael!"—“Hear 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”). Because it is in reverse, we are dealing here with the Antigod, that is, the personification of evil. “Gig” is of course now seen to be “Gog” (Gog and Magog). From Shema derives the name “Simeon” (Hebrew Shimeon), and immediately we think of Simeon Stylites; but if the Saint sits atop the pillar, the halter hangs down from it; therefore Maesch, dangling beneath, will become a stylite a rebours. This is a further step in the antisymmetry. Enumerating in this fashion, in his exegesis, 2,912 expressions from the Old Sumerian, Babylonian, Chaldean, Greek, Church Slavonic, Hottentot, Bantu, South Kurile, Sephardic, the dialect of the Apaches (the Apaches, as everyone knows, commonly exclaim “Igh” or “Ugh”), along with their Sanskrit roots and references to underworld argot, Hannahan stresses that this is no haphazard rummage, but a precise semantic wind rose, a multidimensional compass card and map of the work, its cartography—for the object is the plotting of all those ties and links which the novel will realize polyphonically.