A Perfect Vacuum Read online

  In order to go beyond what Joyce did—to go Joyce one better—Hannahan decides to make the book an intersecting point (nexus—node—nodus—knot—noose!) not only of all cultures, ethoi and ethnoi, but also of all languages. Such analysis is necessary (the letter M in “GigaMesh,” for instance, directs us to the history of the Mayans, to the god Vitzi-Putzli, to the entire Aztec cosmogony, and also their irrigation system), but it is by no means sufficient! For the book is woven out of the sum total of human knowledge. And again, involved here is not only current knowledge, but also the history of science, and therefore the cuneiform arithmetics of the Babylonians, the models of the world—now extinct, reduced to ashes—of the Chaldeans and the Egyptians, and those from the Ptolemaic to the Einsteinian, and the abacus and the calculus, algebras of groups and of tensors, the methods of firing Ming Dynasty vases, the flying machines of Lilienthal, Hieronymus, Leonardo, the suicide balloon of André and the balloon of General Nobile. (The incidence of cannibalism during Nobile’s expedition has its own deep, special significance in the novel; it represents, as it were, a place in which a certain fatal weight has fallen into water and disturbed the mirror surface; so, then, the spreading concentric circles of the waves surrounding Gigamesh are the “sum total” of man’s existence on Earth, going back to Homo javanensis and the Paleopithecus. ) All this information lies inside Gigamesh, concealed, but retrievable, as in the real world.

  We understand the compositional idea of Hannahan thus: with an eye toward outdoing his great countryman and predecessor, he wishes to encompass in a belletristic work not only the accumulated linguistic-cultural wealth of the past, but in addition its universal-cognitive and universal-instrumental heritage (pangnosis).

  The preposterousness of such an objective would appear to be self-evident; it smacks of the pretensions of an idiot, for how can a single novel, the story of the hanging of some gangster, possibly become the distillation, the matrix, the key, and the repository of that which swells the libraries of the globe?! Perfectly aware of this cold, even sneering skepticism on the part of the reader, Hannahan does not confine himself to making claims, but proves his case in the Commentary.

  It is impossible to summarize it; we can only demonstrate Hannahan’s method of creation with a small, rather peripheral example. The first chapter of Gigamesh consists of eight pages, wherein the condemned man relieves himself in the latrine of the military prison, reading—over the urinal—the countless graffiti with which other soldiers, before him, have ornamented the walls of that sanctuary. His attention rests on the inscriptions only in passing. Their extreme obscenity turns out to be, precisely through his intermittent awareness of them, a false bottom, since we pass through them straight into the sordid, hot, enormous bowels of the human race, into the inferno of its coprolalia and physiological symbolism, which goes back, through the Kamasutra and the Chinese “war of flowers,” to the dark caves, with the steatopygous Aphrodites of primitive peoples, for it is their naked parts that look out from underneath the filthy acts scrawled awkwardly across the wall. At the same time, the phallic explicitness of some of the drawings points to the East, with its ritual sanctification of Phallos-Lingam, while the East denotes the place of the primeval Paradise, revealed to be a thin lie incapable of hiding the truth—that in the beginning there was poor information. Yes, exactly: for sex and “sin” arose when the protoamoebas lost their virgin unisexuality; because the equipollence and bipolarity of sex must be derived directly from the Information Theory of Shannon; and now the purpose of the last two letters (SH) in the name of the epic becomes apparent! And thus the path leads from the walls of the latrine to the depths of natural evolution ... for which countless cultures have served as a fig leaf. Yet this is but a drop in the bucket, because in the chapter we also find:

  (a) The Pythagorean quantity pi, symbolizing the feminine principle (3.14159265359787...), is expressed by the number of letters to be found in the thousand words of the chapter.

  (b) When we take the numbers designating the dates of birth of Weismann, Mendel, and Darwin and apply them to the text as a key to a code, it turns out that the seeming chaos of that lavatory scatology is an exposition of sexual mechanics, where pairs of colliding bodies are replaced by pairs of copulating bodies; meanwhile this entire sequence of meanings now begins to interlock (synchroMESH!) with other sections of the work, and so through Chapter III (the Trinity!) it relates to Chapter X (pregnancy lasts ten lunar months!), and the latter, if read backward, turns out to be Freudianism explained in Aramaic. That is not all: as is shown by Chapter III—if we overlay it on IV and turn the book upside down—Freudianism, that is, the doctrine of psychoanalysis, constitutes a naturalistically secularized version of Christianity. The state prior to the Neurosis equals Paradise; the Trauma of Childhood is the Fall; the Neurotic is the Sinner, the Psychoanalyst the Saviour, and Freudian treatment Salvation through Grace.

  (c) Leaving the latrine at the end of Chapter I, J. Maesch whistles a sixteen-bar tune (sixteen being the age of the girl he raped and strangled in the rowboat); its words—extremely vulgar—he only thinks to himself. This excess has psychological justification at the particular moment; in addition, the song, when considered syllabotonically, gives us an orthogonal matrix of transformations for the next chapter (it has two different meanings, depending on whether or not we apply the matrix to it).

  Chapter II is the development of the blasphemous song whistled by Maesch in the first, but upon application of the matrix the blasphemies are transformed into hosannas. The entirety has three referents: (1) the Faust of Marlowe (Act II, Scene 6ff.), (2) the Faust of Goethe (“Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis”), and (3) the Doctor Faustus of Thomas Mann. The allusion to Mann’s Faustus is a master stroke! Because the whole second chapter, when to each and all of the letters of its words we assign notes according to the Old Gregorian clef, turns out to be a musical composition, into which Hannahan has translated back (going by Mann’s description) the Apoca-lypsis cum F iguris, a work attributed, as we know, from Mann, to the composer Adrian Leverkühn. That diabolical music is in Hannahan’s novel both present and absent (obvious it certainly is not), like Lucifer (the letter L, left out in the title). Chapters IX, X, and XI (the descent from the van, spiritual comfort, the preparation of the gallows) also have a musical subtext (the Klage Dr. Fausti), but only, so to speak, incidentally. Because, when treated as an adiabatic system a la Sadi-Carnot, they prove to be a cathedral (built based on Boltzmann’s constant) in which is celebrated a Black Mass. (The silent meditations are Maesch’s reminiscences in the prison van, concluded with a curse whose suspended glissandi cut short Chapter VIII.) These chapters are truly a cathedral, since the interclausal and phraseological proportions of the prose have a syntactic skeleton that is a blueprint—in a Monge projection onto an imaginary plane—of the Notre Dame Cathedral with all its pinnacles, cantilevers, buttresses, with its monumental portal and the famous Gothic rose window, and so forth. So, then, in Gigamesh we also have architecture, inspired by a theodicy. In the Commentary the reader will find (p. 397 et seq.) a complete diagram of the cathedral as it is contained in the text of the afore-mentioned chapters, on a scale of 1:1000. If, however, instead of a stereometric Monge projection we use a projection that is nonorthogonal, with an initial displacement according to the matrix from Chapter I, we obtain Circe’s Palace, and at the same time the Black Mass changes into a caricature of a lecture on the Augustinian doctrine (again, iconoclasm: Augustinianism in Circe’s Palace, while in the cathedral, the Black Mass). The cathedral and Augustinianism are thus not mechanically inserted into the work; they constitute elements of the argument.

  This single example may serve to explain how the author, with true Irish pertinacity, united in one novel the entire world of man, man’s myths, symphonies, churches, and physics, and the annals of world history. The example returns us once more to the title, because—to take that path of meanings—the “gigantic mess” of Gigamesh acquires an unex
pectedly profound sense. The Cosmos, after all, is tending, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to ultimate chaos. Entropy must increase, and for that reason the end of each and every being is failure. And so “a gigantic mess” is not only what happens to some former gangster; “a gigantic mess” is the Universe itself (the “disorder” of the Cosmos is symbolized by all the “disorderly houses,” the brothels, which Maesch remembers on the way to the gibbet). But at the same time there is the celebration of “a Gigantic Mass”—in German, Messe—of the transubstantiation of Form into final Void. Hence the connection between Sadi-Carnot and the cathedral, hence the embodiment, in it, of Boltzmann’s constant: Hannahan had to do this, for chaos will be the Last Judgment! Of course the Gilgamesh myth itself finds full expression in the work, but this fidelity of Hannahan’s—to the Babylonian model—is child’s play compared to the interpretational chasms that open up beneath each of the 241,000 words of the novel. The betrayal that N. Kiddy (Enkidu) commits against Maesch-Gilgamesh is a cumulative massing of all the betrayals in history; N. Kiddy is also Judas, GI Joe Maesch is also the Redeemer (and MESSiah!), and so on, and so on.

  Opening the book at random, we find on [>], fourth line from the top, the exclamation “Bah!” With it Maesch refuses the Camel offered him by the driver. In the index of the Commentary we find twenty-seven different bahs, but to the one from [>] corresponds the following sequence: Baal, Bahai, Baobab, Bahleda (one might think that Hannahan was in error here, giving us an incorrect spelling of the name of the Polish mountaineer, but no, not at all! The omission of the c in that name refers, by the principle already known to us, to the Cantorian c as a symbol of the Continuum in its transfinite-ness!), Baphomet, Babelisks (Babylonian obelisks—a neologism typical of the author), Babel (Isaac), Abraham, Jacob, ladder, hook and ladder, fire department, hose, riot, Hippies (h!), badminton, racket, rocket, moon, mountains, Berchtesgaden—the last, since the h in “Bah” also signifies a worshiper of the Black Mass, as was, in the twentieth century, Hitler. [Berchtesgaden was Hitler's mountain retreat in Bavaria.—ED.]

  So functions on every height and breadth one single word, a common exclamation, so innocent enthymematically, one would have thought! Consider, then, what vast semantic labyrinths await us on the upper levels of the linguistic edifice that is Gigamesh! Theories of preformation do battle there with theories of epigenesis (Ch. Ill, p. 240ff.); the hand movements of the hangman who ties the loop of the noose have as syntactic accompaniment the Hoyle-Milne hypothesis of the looping of two time scales in spiral galaxies. Maesch’s reminiscences—his crimes—are a complete register of all the villainies of mankind (the Commentary shows how against his transgressions are marshaled the Crusades, the empire of Charles the Hammer, the slaughter of the Albigenses, the slaughter of the Armenians, the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, the witch trials, mass hysteria (Mass!), Flagellantism, the Plague (Black!), Holbein’s dances of death, Noah’s ark, Arkansas, ad calendas graecas, ad nauseam,, etc.). The gynecologist whom Maesch stomps in Cincinnati is called Andrew B. Cross: acronymically alphabetic (atomic, biological, and chemical warfare), the name is a conglomeration of allusions—to the Passion, anthropomorphism (android), the BAHamas (the island Andros), and Ulysses (Johnson preceding Grant as president)—while the middle initial, again, is the key of B minor, “The Lament of Dr. Faust,” which this passage of the text incorporates.

  Indeed yes: this novel is a bottomless pit; in whatever place you touch it, roads open up, no end of roads (the pattern of the commas in Chapter VI is an analogue of the map of Rome!), and roads not every which way, for they all, with their innumerable outbranchings, interweave harmoniously to form a single whole (which Hannahan proves employing topological algebra—see the Commentary, the Metamathematical Appendix, p. 81 Iff.). And thus everything achieves its realization.

  Only one doubt arises, and that is: has Patrick Hannahan reached the mark of his great predecessor, or has he overshot that mark, thereby calling into question not only himself—but his predecessor as well!—in the realm of Art? There are rumors to the effect that Hannahan was assisted in his creation by a battery of computers furnished him by IBM. And even if this be true, I see no offense in it; these days composers make common use of computers—why should writers be denied? Some say that books so fashioned can be read only, in turn, by other digital machines, since no man is capable of encompassing, in his mind, such an ocean of facts and their correlations. Permit me one question: does the man exist who is able thus to encompass Finnegan’s Wake or even Ulysses? I do not mean on the literal level, but all the allusions, all the associations and cultural-mythic symbolisms, all the combined paradigms and archetypes on which these works stand and grow in glory? Certainly no one could manage it alone. No one, for that matter, could wade through the entire body of criticism that the prose of James Joyce has accumulated to date! And therefore the question as to the validity of computer participation in fiction is wholly immaterial.

  Hostile reviewers say that Hannahan has produced the largest logogriph in literature, a semantic monster rebus, a truly infernal charade or crossword puzzle. They say that the cramming of those million or billion allusions into a work of belles-lettres, that the flaunting play with etymological, phraseological, and hermeneutic complications, that the piling up of layers of never-ending, perversely antinomial meanings, is not literary creativity, but the composing of brain teasers for peculiarly paranoiac hobbyists, for enthusiasts and collectors fanatically given to bibliographical digging. That this is, in a word, utter perversion, the pathology of a culture and not its healthy development.

  Excuse me, gentlemen—but where exactly is one to draw the line between the multiplicity of meaning that marks the integration of a genius, and the sort of enriching of a work with meanings that represents the pure schizophrenia of a culture? I suspect that the anti-Hannahan group of literary experts fears being put out of work. For Joyce provided brilliant charades but did not tack onto them any explanation of his own; consequently the critic who contributes commentary to Ulysses and Finnegan is able to display his intellectual biceps, his far-reaching perspicacity, or his imitative genius. Hannahan, on the other hand, did everything himself. Not content merely to create the work, he added reference materials, an apparatus criticus twice its size. In this lies the crucial difference, and not in such circumstances as, for example, the fact that Joyce “thought up everything on his own,” whereas Hannahan relied on computers hooked up to the Library of Congress (twenty-three million volumes). So, I see no way out of the trap into which we have been driven by the murderously meticulous Irishman: either Gigamesh is the crowning achievement of modern literature, or else neither it nor the tale of Finnegan together with the Joycean Odyssey can be granted admission to literary Olympus.

  Sexplosion

  Simon Merrill

  (Walker & Company, New York)

  If one is to believe the author—and more and more they tell us to believe the authors of science fiction!—the current surge of sex will become a deluge in the 1980’s. But the action of the novel Sexplosion begins twenty years later, in a New York buried in snowdrifts during a severe winter. An old man of unknown name, wading through the drifts, bumping into the hulks of snow-covered cars, reaches a lifeless office building; he pulls a key from his breast pocket, warm with the last of his body heat, opens the iron gate, and goes down to the basement. His roaming there and the snatches of memory that intrude upon it—this is the whole novel.

  The silent vaults of the basement, through which wanders the beam of the flashlight unsteady in the old man’s hand, may have been a museum once, or the shipping division of a powerful concern in the years when America once again carried out the successful invasion of Europe. The still half-handmade trade of the Europeans had clashed with the implacable march of conveyor-belt production, and the scientific-technological-postindustrial colossus instantly emerged the victor.

  On the field of battle remained three corporations—General S
exotics, Cybordelics, and Intercourse International. When the production of these giants was at its peak, sex, from a private amusement, a spectator sport, group gymnastics, a hobby, and a collector’s market, turned into a philosophy of civilization. McLuhan, who as a hale and hearty old codger had lived to see these times, argued in his Genitocracy that this precisely was the destiny of mankind from the moment it entered on the path of technology; that even the ancient rowers, chained to the galleys, and the woodsmen of the North with their saws, and the steam engine of Stephenson with its cylinder and piston, all traced the rhythm, the shape, and the meaning of the movements of which the sex of man—that is to say, the sense of man—consists. The impersonal industry of the U.S.A., having appropriated the situational wisdoms of East and West, took the fetters of the Middle Ages and made of them unchastity belts, harnessed Art to the designing of sexercisers, incubunks, copul cots, push-button clitters, porn cones, and phallo-phones, set in motion antiseptic assembly lines off of which began to roll sadomobiles, succubuses, sodomy sofas for the home, and public gomorrarcades, and at the same time it established research institutes and science foundations to take up the fight to liberate sex from the servitude of the perpetuation of the species. Sex ceased to be a fashion, for it had become a faith; the orgasm was regarded as a constant duty, and its meters, with their red needles, took the place of telephones in the office and on the street.