The Bridge: spoil-o-thon
Rich Puchalsky
last read it and since I need something to read in between work to avoid
burnout. I thought that this time, I'd make notes as I went about things
that I saw and post them here. These will be rather disconnected and
rambling. If you're one of those UK people who pays for bandwidth by the
word or something, you may want to kill this thread now. Needless to say,
spoilers will abound.
I thought I'd do a chapter a day, or so. I'm using HarperPrism edition ISBN
0-06-105358-9. I'll label my remarks by the chapter headings in the book.
Coma
Starts with the main character, unnamed, in a first person inner monologue
from his crashed car on a bridge. The first paragraph starts a
red-blood-on-the-bridge recurring image that I seem to remember crops up
later a lot. The main character can't remember his name, remembers that
he's an atheist and swore he'd never pray for help, dimly senses people
rescuing him. I probably could go over each sentence of this and find some
allusion to something or other, for instance, in the scene where he's
wondering if he's being rescued, he thinks:
"I lie on a flat plain, surrounded by tall mountains (or maybe on a bed,
surrounded by ... machines? People? Either; both (Like, man, in the really
wide view, they're the same. Far out.)"
which is a reference to a Culture idea. I seem to remember that when this
book was written Banks had written some Culture works but not published any.
At any rate, we come to the signature concept of the book, introduced within
the introduction as per Banks standard operating procedure:
"Maybe there's life after life... hmmm. Maybe all the rest was a dream
(yeah, sure), and I wake up to ("Thedarkstation") -- what was that?"
The rest of the book is going to have the fantasy in this sentence explored:
the main character is going to have a highly detailed hallucination of a
bridge that he wakes up on, while in actuality he's in a coma in the
hospital, recovering from his accident.
In a section just above, the main character is wondering where he came from,
there's a library list of a) God, b) Nature, c) Darwin, d) Marx, e) all of
the above. Well, in the rest of the book the main character is going to try
his own self-creation, of his environment, his body, everything. It's all
in his head, of course, but this is still his one shot at being the
Demiurge.
Rich Puchalsky
Metaphormosis: One
This chapter begins with the narrator's vision of the dark station mentioned
at the end of the introduction; a dream that the narrator is the coachman
for a sealed carriage that he has to bring somewhere. He is blocked by
another carriage, with another driver who makes every motion at the same
time as he does.
Then we find out that this is a dream that the narrator is describing to his
therapist; actually, that he's made up the dream because he can't really
dream anything. "I guess it means I'm frightened of something" the narrator
snarls later. Frightened of what? Well, as far as I can guess, the sealed
carriage is his conciousness of the reality that he is actually lying, near
death, in the hospital, he is not actually in good health and talking to his
therapist. He's blocking himself from acknowledging it and trapping himself
in his internal vision, as a way of blocking out pain and trauma.
The therapist scene quickly leads into some basics: the narrator is on a
giant bridge, over the ocean. Everyone lives on this bridge. He's an
amnesiac, so he's been given the name John Orr. (Orr because he was found
in the sea near the bridge with a giant O-shaped bruise on his chest and
broken ribs; the bruise is a recurring image. It's actually from where the
steering wheel hit his chest in the car crash, presumably.)
The therapist, Dr. Joyce, is clearly a part of the narrator that's trying to
get him to acknowledge his real situation, right from the start. Here's a
precis of their actual situation, disguised as them talking about Orr's
made-up dream;
"[Dr. Joyce is] looking very suspicious (as I've said, with good reason).
'You wake up?' he says.
I try to sound as annoyed as I can: 'Damn it man, I can't control what I
dream.' (A lie.)"
Typical Banks: he says right at the start what is going on. The narrator
has not really woken up, he is still dreaming, and he can really control
what he dreams, but he's lying about that to himself.
A bit later it gets even more blatent, the doctor says that the bridge might
be a dream and asks Orr how he'd know if it wasn't. Orr asks him back the
same question and Dr. Joyce says "No point asking me that; I'd be part of
the dream." True. But at any rate, the doctor says that Orr probably can't
tell him what the dream means, and it's clear that Orr isn't ready to leave
his created world.
The bridge is a bit surreal. The therapist has two patients, one of whom
thinks he's various items of furniture and has a policeman sitting on him,
and the other a window washer who never comes in; there is a tax on wheels,
so most people can only afford monocycles which crash often; everything has
a kind of mock-Victorian flavor with giant elevators that have musicians and
elevator operators. Orr has supposedly been trying to find out who built
the bridge, what it is for, and what it is a bridge between, but all of his
queries get lost or are answered in a language he can't read. The records
are supposed to have been kept in the third city library, which has been
lost. That has a definite flavor of images that will appear again in
_Feersum Endgin_.
What is the bridge between? He knows it's between the City and the Kingdom,
but not any more. But that's actually a very good hint for the reader: the
City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven. In other
words, they represent Life and Death, and he's on a bridge hanging halfway
between them, and could go in either direction.
The Dr. shows Orr the bridge, and we get the first description of it. It's
red-painted.
Finally, at the end of the chapter we have the first intrusion of reality.
Orr turns on his TV, and instead of a program it shows a man lying in a coma
in a hospital bed -- clearly the narrator himself. Noteably, the visitor's
seat next to him is unoccupied. The man in the bed doesn't look like Orr;
in addition to his obvious wounds, he is short, ordinary-looking, and has a
bald patch, and we've already gotten the impression that Orr is
good-looking. Clearly the narrator has created a fantasy counterpart that
is himself as he would like to be, not as he is.
Unlike, say, Stanislaw Lem in _The Futurological Congress_, or Philip K.
Dick in most of his books, Banks isn't setting up a normal apparent reality
that later catastrophically fails. Reality is intruding from the start,
right from the first chapter. That, to me, indicates a certain basic
optimism; we're not supposed to thrash around with a Philip K. Dick
character whose world is shattering; we're supposed to inhabit someone's
head as he puts himself back together.
Andrew McGleish
"Rich Puchalsky" <wrote
Big Snip
> What is the bridge between? He knows it's between the City and the
Kingdom,
> but not any more. But that's actually a very good hint for the
reader: the
> City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven.
In other
> words, they represent Life and Death, and he's on a bridge hanging
halfway
> between them, and could go in either direction.
>
Scottish readers would also recognise that the bridge (The Forth Road
Bridge) runs between Edinburgh (the city) and Fife, a county which is
often called the Kingdom of Fife.
Took me years to read The Bridge, didn't finish it until I'd read
almost everything else I(M)B wrote
HTH
Andrew
Grom
news:mDKF6.1744$V84.3...@typhoon.we.rr.com...
> What is the bridge between? He knows it's between the City and the
Kingdom,
> but not any more. But that's actually a very good hint for the reader:
the
> City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven. In
other
> words, they represent Life and Death, and he's on a bridge hanging halfway
> between them, and could go in either direction.
The concept of liminality (lying on the boundary between two different
states) is a pretty common one in modern literature. Interesting to compare
Gibson's _Virtual Light_ with what I've read of your synopses, although I
haven't read TB myself. If I can understand your reading correctly, there
is a fantasy bridge inhabited by various interesting figures. This is a
very similar state of affairs to VL. Apologies if I have got the wrong end
of the stick :)
Liminality is almost always applied in situations when a character (or a
culture/society) is going through a change in states. Life and death as you
say is one, childhood/adulthood is another, with the process of puberty
being the liminal state. Bridges, doorways and other thresholds are very
powerful symbols in literature, with the decision to cross or not cross the
liminal space forming the themes of many novels. I will have to give TB a
go.
grom
Martin Lewis
> Kingdom,
> > but not any more. But that's actually a very good hint for the reader:
> the
> > City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven. In
> other
> > words, they represent Life and Death, and he's on a bridge hanging
halfway
> > between them, and could go in either direction.
I always had it as Coma and Reality, I can't remember from the book is
Lennox/Orr in life threatening danger?
> The concept of liminality (lying on the boundary between two different
> states) is a pretty common one in modern literature. Interesting to
compare
> Gibson's _Virtual Light_ with what I've read of your synopses, although I
> haven't read TB myself. If I can understand your reading correctly, there
> is a fantasy bridge inhabited by various interesting figures. This is a
> very similar state of affairs to VL. Apologies if I have got the wrong
end
> of the stick :)
Yes, it is similar to Virtual Light, although cos tB is a fantasy within a
mainstream novel the Bridge is more overtly symbolic.
> Liminality is almost always applied in situations when a character (or a
> culture/society) is going through a change in states. Life and death as
you
> say is one, childhood/adulthood is another, with the process of puberty
> being the liminal state. Bridges, doorways and other thresholds are very
> powerful symbols in literature, with the decision to cross or not cross
the
> liminal space forming the themes of many novels. I will have to give TB a
> go.
Banks rates as his best (along with UoW) and I'd go along with that.
Actually I find it strange that someone who can write tB also wrote Whit. Am
I right in thinking that tB is one of the books he'd been writing for a long
time before he was published? I think it shows and I'm glad he's slowing
down his rate of production.
--
Martin
- -
xGSV A Plaything Of Alien Forces
Rich Puchalsky
> "Rich Puchalsky" <wrote
> > the
> > City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven.
> Scottish readers would also recognise that the bridge (The Forth Road
> Bridge) runs between Edinburgh (the city) and Fife, a county which is
> often called the Kingdom of Fife.
Interesting, thanks.
Rich Puchalsky
> I always had it as Coma and Reality, I can't remember from the book is
> Lennox/Orr in life threatening danger?
I don't think the Bridge can be between Coma and Reality because the
narrator is in a coma already. I think we can presume that he's in life
threatening danger because of the severity of the accident; at any rate, if
he never wakes up there is only so long that they can preserve someone in a
hospital bed.
> Actually I find it strange that someone who can write tB also wrote Whit.
Am
> I right in thinking that tB is one of the books he'd been writing for a
long
> time before he was published?
I think so; it's one of his early ones.
Rob Greenberg
"> I don't think the Bridge can be between Coma and Reality because the
> narrator is in a coma already. I think we can presume that he's in life
> threatening danger because of the severity of the accident; at any rate,
if
> he never wakes up there is only so long that they can preserve someone in
a
> hospital bed.
>
his eventual journey along the bridge signifies his recovery.
Martin Lewis
> > Lennox/Orr in life threatening danger?
>
> I don't think the Bridge can be between Coma and Reality because the
> narrator is in a coma already. I think we can presume that he's in life
> threatening danger because of the severity of the accident; at any rate,
if
> he never wakes up there is only so long that they can preserve someone in
a
> hospital bed.
I mean like a non-recoverable zero brain wave coma, at the moment he's in a
short term limbo type coma represented by the Bridge. It should be obvious I
know nothing of the nomenclature of the comatose or any medical facts about
them. This is basically analoguous to life and death though your right, know
that I think about it I'm saying the same as you in different words.
Rich Puchalsky
Metaphormosis: Two
This chapter starts with Orr making up a dream for his therapist; the dream
is similar to the first, with the narrator being one of the crew of a
sinking ship; they board the ship they are fighting just as that crew boards
their ship, the two crews and ships seperate, both sinking.
In the scene where Orr gets up from bed, we hear about his fairly palatial
apartment and clothes, and he combs his "hair (a pleasantly intense black,
and just curly enough to give it body)". Clearly this is his wish
fulfillment; from the end of the last chapter we've already seen that the
narrator's real body has graying and balding hair.
Reality intrudes once again. This time, after he turns on his TV and sees
the person on the hospital bed, aircraft fly by outside and leave smoke
signals. The signals are "grouped in three-by-three grids, carefully
spaced" -- in other words, this is a reference to Marian, the Culture's
language, which we know from Excession is written on a three-by-three dot
grid. But within the story they function symbolically as a signal from
outside trying to break through. It's noteable that in later passages the
people of the Bridge express distrust of the aircraft, they are scandalous,
something not approved of in advance. They might well be suspicious of the
aircraft, because if the smoke signal message every gets through, the
narrator's fantasy (the Bridge itself) will cease to exist... At any rate,
the trilogy of signals is completed when Orr picks up his phone to call
about the TV being broken and the phone just transmits slow, not quite
perfectly regular beeps -- the beeps of the machine tracking the narrator's
heartbeat as he lies in a coma on his hospital bed.
Orr has breakfast with his friend, the engineer Mr. Brooke. If the narrator
has cast Dr. Joyce the therapist in the part of the person within the dream
trying to wake the narrator up, Mr. Brooke is the corresponding figure
trying to help him maintain the fantasy -- as symbolized by his job
maintaining the bridge supports. Brooke always seems ill-lit, "even in
direct sunlight he always seems to be standing in shade", so he's something
of a devil figure. Brooke tells him that there's plenty within the Bridge
to interest him and that he should give up his investigations of what's
outside it, the same investigations that Dr. Joyce told him he was giving up
too easily. Brooke suffers from insomnia, which makes him diametrically
opposed to Joyce the dream analyst.
Just after this, Orr goes to his appointment with Dr. Joyce, but the
therapist's office has been relocated. Clearly Orr is nervous about talking
to him and this is an avoidance mechanism. Orr's chest aches where the
circular bruise used to be (actually, where it still is, it's just that as
he loses confidence in the dream of the Bridge he feels his real pains
more).
Dr. Joyce thinks the first two dreams tell nothing. He uses two drawings of
the girders of the Bridge as psychological tests, asking Orr to indicate
which direction of force the structures are indicating at certain points. I
admit that I don't understand the significance of this scene at all.
Orr takes an elevator and sees that one of the floors is labelled as having
the Third City Library, the one that supposedly explains the Bridge. He
goes there in high excitement, but when he gets there, there has just been a
disaster, firemen are running around and everything has either been burned
or demolished. In other words, the narrator is not yet ready to admit what
is going on to himself, so he has to take the Library back away at the last
minute.
But this seems a bit suspicious, even to Orr, so the integrity of the
illusion is damaged. Orr finds a diagram in his pocket, supposedly a map of
the way to Dr. Joyce's new office. It's a hexagon with an L-shaped line in
the middle with an O and an H at each end of the line, the O next to the
hexagon. It's clearly significant to the narrator, and he almost loses the
Bridge illusion into formless mist. He feels himself seem to tip, which is
something I've actually had happen to me. When I've realized with a shock
that I'm dreaming, and I wake up, sometimes there is a readjustment of the
feeling of gravity as I move from a perception of myself as standing, within
the dream, to the true perception that I'm lying on my back in bed.
What does the diagram mean? A previous scene within the chapter referred to
part of the Bridge as hexagonal. The lift that Orr took to reach the Third
City Library is L-shaped, and he comments on this more than once. The
elevator attendant said that it "doesn't look much like a library from this
angle", and when Orr felt himself seem to tip, he felt like he was back in
that elevator, "completing another unscheduled and dangerous lift-shaft
maneuver", i.e. waking back to conciousness. The H could mean Here and O
mean Outside.
But the hexagon with an H, an O, and another line also looks very much like
a molecular diagram, with the hexagon being the carbon ring. Anyone have
any ideas on that? Something about alcohol, possibly? I don't remember
enough chemistry to see what it is without looking it up. We don't know yet
in the story whether the narrator crashed his car because he was drunk,
although he does indicate in the introduction that he thinks the crash is
his fault.
Orr throws the diagram away after hearing his phone beep again. The
narrator's been giving himself lots of messages, but it's clearly not
working, because he's not yet ready or healed enough.
Andrew McGleish
In fact to go beyond interesting and become downright pedantic here is
a link showing you photos of the real bridge on which Lennox had his
accident.
http://www.doughoughton.com/webpage/page/page014.html
I think I'll stop with the literal thing now
Andrew
Rich Puchalsky
Metaphormosis: Three
This chapter, like the others in Metaphormosis, starts with a dream. The
narrator sees an abandoned city, long since destroyed by the desert and the
sea. There is a statue of someone the narrator can't remember the name of,
he guesses at something like Mock or Mocca. At the shore, a ragged man is
whipping the waves with a flail. The man seems to be chained by his ankle,
but he says that he's employed to do this, and that once, a great emperor
... he no longer seems to see or hear the narrator, and as the narrator
walks away a manacle appears on the narrator's wrist. Orr wakes and finds
that he's really dreamed this dream, he didn't just make it up for Dr.
Joyce.
This dream takes mythological symbolism from two sources: Shelley's poem
Ozymandias ("Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") and the legend of
King Canute whipping the waves. They are both stories about the futility of
power. In this case, though, the kings and emperors are gone, but their
servant remains, still carrying out their futile task. Clearly the narrator
feels that he's playing this same role, self-chained to a meaningless effort
that he thinks is voluntary. But I don't quite have this one interpreted to
my satisfaction.
Orr wakes, looks at his TV, and sees the man in the hospital bed being given
an injection. Orr never liked injections and winces with "sympathetic" pain
which is of course not really sympathetic at all. The telephone is beeping
a little faster than before, his heart rate has actually speeded up a bit.
Brooke breaks in with a phone call. He asks Orr to visit him at a bar, and
bring a hat; Orr arrives and is annoyed by Brooke and a couple of other
drunken engineers. But the main purpose of the scene is that he meets the
Chief Engineer's daughter, Abberlaine Arrol. If Brooke is the devil
assigned to keep the narrator's dream going, Abberlaine is clearly one of
the chief temptations he has to offer. Orr has had several scenes in the
previous chapters, which I haven't commented on (these posts are long
already) in which he worries about his lack of libido; in this sequence,
Brooke and the other engineers are going to a brothel, and Orr declines.
Abberlaine's purpose within the Bridge fantasy seems to be to let the
narrator approach the idea of sex within the Bridge. After all, if this is
going to be a wish fulfillment, sex is necessary. But the narrator doesn't
have real physical drives at the moment (in reality, his body is deeply
wounded) and also, sex is something that often makes you more concious of
your physical body and is therefore deeply dangerous to the narrator's
avoidance of trauma. Orr and Abberlaine have a talk where they discuss
whether it's easy to fool yourself or not, and she alludes to a child's
creation of fantasy worlds.
Abberlaine's brother throws a pitcher behind him, and it shatters, just as
Zakalwe does at the beginning of Use of Weapons. I think Banks had actually
written most of UoW at this time.
What does Abberlaine Arrol's name mean? Does anyone have a better idea of
the UK context? At first "Arrol" reminded me of an amusing scene from
Moorcock's _The Runestaff_, where the beast lords of Granbretan have all of
their ships named after their ancient gods, "Chirshil, the Howling God;
Bjirn Adass, the Singing God, [...] and Aral Vilsn, the Roaring God, the
Supreme God ..." It took me a while to realize that Aral Vilsn was Harold
Wilson, and that this was a list of British politicians. Anyways, I vaguely
remember a place in the UK called Abbey Lane in connection with the Beatles.
Anyways, back to the chapter. Orr can't figure out why the engineers wanted
him to bring a hat, but one of them throws up into it, and he figures that
may be why he wanted it in the first place. Orr's next appointment with his
therapist is cancelled. He visits an art gallery where artists keep
depicting the Bridge as a damaged human form or human tissue; surely this is
striking too close for comfort. Orr goes home, turns on the TV, and waits
for a new message, but quickly loses his nerve and turns the TV off when he
sees the nurse coming to give another injection.
BaldiePete
> >
> Scottish readers would also recognise that the bridge (The Forth Road
> Bridge) runs between Edinburgh (the city) and Fife, a county which is
> often called the Kingdom of Fife.
>
Sorry to be pedantic but I'm sure most Scottish readers (including myself)
will be aware that The Bridge is based on the Forth Bridge - that's the one
with the railway - not the Forth Road Bridge - that's the one with the road
:-)). The two bridges are about half a mile apart. The best thing that can
be said about the road bridge is that it gives a fantastic view of the Forth
Bridge if you walk across it.
BaldiePete
BaldiePete
> In fact to go beyond interesting and become downright pedantic here is
> a link showing you photos of the real bridge on which Lennox had his
> accident.
> http://www.doughoughton.com/webpage/page/page014.html
>
> I think I'll stop with the literal thing now
>
> Andrew
>
>
For photos of the actual Forth Bridge which is obviously the inspiration for
the design of The Bridge try
http://www.doughoughton.com/webpage/page/page013.html
BaldiePete
Rich Puchalsky
Metaphormosis: Four (in two posts, 1 of 2)
As with all four sections of "Metaphormosis", this chapter starts with a
dream. I'm going to go into much greater detail for this one since it
introduces recurring characters. That means I'll break the chapter into two
posts.
In this dream the narrator is a sword-and-sorcery style swordman, and the
whole thing is written phonetically, in Scots-accented English, in a very
similar style to _Feersum Endjin_. The swordsman tells about how he got a
familiar (from a magician that he killed) that the swordsman can't get off
his shoulder, even though it annoys him that the familiar keeps talking in
highly intellectual English that he can barely understand. The familiar has
been teaching the swordsman new words, though, and the swordsman says he's
done all right since he got it -- not surprising, since later on in the
dream the swordsman will more than once be stuck somewhere, the familiar
will tell him what to do to keep going, and the swordsman will do whatever
the familiar said as if it was his own idea, without acknowledging that he
understood. You quickly get the idea that there is some mind vs body
symbolism going on. Both the familiar and the swordman are very good at
what they do; both share a casual attitude towards killing people.
In one of his first passages, the familiar says that the tower symbolizes
retreat, the limitation of contact with the real world. Naturally the next
scene has the swordsman fighting his way into a tower inhabited by a queen
with magic powers. The familiar mentions that they are high enough for
oxygen deprivation; yet another reference to a scene used later in _Feersum
Endjin_.
(Parenthetically, I wonder if there is some general attraction for
sword-and-sorcery heroes among anarchists? Bob Black, a well-known U.S.
anarchist, wrote an appreciation of Conan as a sort of anarchist ideal.)
They run into a harem room full of mutilated women -- all their limbs have
been cut off -- tied down, some crying, clearly sex objects in the worst
imaginable sense of that phrase. There are a number of old men there; the
familiar questions them and then tells the swordsman to kill them. Later we
find that these were actually young priests; the vampiric queen keeps the
mutilated women there to excite them, then she "milks" them, a process that
ages them quickly. I really haven't yet figured out the point of the dream
blaming this version of twisted male sexuality on a dominating woman, but
maybe it's part of the narrator's defense mechanism.
The final dream scene has the familiar facing the queen; the swordsman has
been paralzyed by her magic, but she and the familiar are clearly old
enemies and start fighting. The queen has a some kind of grenade-like ball
that heats red hot and then explodes, taking the top off the tower, by then
the swordsman is long gone, having seized the chance to get away from the
familiar. Disappointed that he didn't find any gold, the swordsman rapes
the mutilated women on the way out.
Orr wakes up and is prompty seized with guilt and self-disgust, because he
was the swordsman in the dream, he lusted after the mutilated woman and
raped them. Actually, he says that to the barbarian it meant nothing, but
he, Orr, wanted the woman, actually created them. "My God, better a lack of
all desire than one excited by mutilation, helplessness, and rape."
The narrator is at an especially difficult point. It appears that he's
actually started dreaming, when he would normally wake up, he returns to the
Bridge construct. He's wanted to revive his libido, sure, but now his
unconciousness is telling him that it wants something different than he
thinks he should want, he really wants is a sadistic power fantasy. But
he's far too guilty about it to just indulge himself and tell himself that
it's not real anyway. What's the use of being the Demiurge and creator of
whatever you like if you're disgusted by what you like?
Fascination with power in sexuality is a common theme with Banks. It
drives a lot of the emotional action in Player of Games, where Gurgeh grows
out of it, in Excession, where Dajiel and Byr-Hofoen have a sexual power
struggle, in Use of Weapons, where the main character has sex just to hurt
someone else, in Inversions, where the female characters are seemingly
written mainly to pander to it.
Anyways, Orr gets his next appointment with his therapist, and determines to
lie about his dreams. In a classic nightmarish embarassing scene, he keeps
telling Dr. Joyce about innocuous dreams that he invented, but Dr. Joyce
keeps hearing him tell about the real dreams he had. Joyce asks him if he
identified with the man whipping the water in the first dream, and what it
meant that the man whipping the waves seemed real, and that the narrator was
apparently the unreal person and had no shadow. For the second dream, the
doctor asks what the dialect signifies, and whether it was a wet dream. Orr
says no.
What does the dialect signify? I'd guess that it means that the narrator is
really Scottish, but his fantasy image, Orr, is not; he's not comfortable
with his ethnicity, probably because of class connotations.
dan griliopoulos
> the UK context? At first "Arrol" reminded me of an amusing scene from
> Moorcock's _The Runestaff_, where the beast lords of Granbretan have all
of
> their ships named after their ancient gods, "Chirshil, the Howling God;
> Bjirn Adass, the Singing God, [...] and Aral Vilsn, the Roaring God, the
> Supreme God ..." It took me a while to realize that Aral Vilsn was Harold
> Wilson, and that this was a list of British politicians. Anyways, I
vaguely
> remember a place in the UK called Abbey Lane in connection with the
Beatles.
LOL. Two pretty obvious references spring to mind in my inebriate state;
Automobile Association and Alcoholics Anonymous, both matching her initials.
A bit glib for Banks d'ye reckon?
Of course her name is also massively anagramable, if you so wished -
"bearable nor liar", "loanable barrier" etc.
Grill
Breaking down the boundaries of etymology with a big hammer...
Rich Puchalsky
Metaphormosis: Four (in two posts, 2 of 2)
After hearing Orr's dreams, Dr. Joyce says they're ready for the next stage
of treatment, hypnosis. Dream analysis won't get them closer, according to
the doctor, because if you regard the human mind as a castle, then all that
they've been doing for the last few sessions is going on a tour of the
curtain wall. Orr is really uneasy about hypnosis and puts it off.
Orr goes on a walk and meets Abberlaine Arrol. They flirt and go on a fast
rickshaw ride. Suddenly, their rickshaw crashes; Orr gets hit on the head
and goes unconcious. He's had another crash on the bridge, even in his
internal world.
When he wakes, he hears aircraft engines. It seem importent to him to hear
which direction they are flying in, but he can't.
Why is the direction important? Well, in the last flyby the signalling
airplanes flew from the direction of the Kingdom to the direction of the
City. Assuming that the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven, i.e. death, and
the City is the City of Man, life, that means that the narrator is getting
better. Probably what happened this time is that he had a sudden medical
problem that knocked him out, or perhaps an operation, and now he's trying
to sense whether he's getting better or slipping away. That interpretation
is supported a bit later in the scene; Arrol is kneeling next to Orr, and
his internal monologue goes "I thought there were other people crowded
around me, but there are none, just her." The shock has caused him to
momentarily sense the medical personnel crowded around his bed.
Arrol promises to get back in touch with him, he lends her a handkerchief
for her bleeding nose, and she leaves. In the last scene, he returns home
to find that the hat that the engineer threw up in has been cleaned and
returned, good as new. He throws it off the balcony.
If anyone can figure out some symbolism inherent in him lending out one
piece of clothing and getting another returned, feel free. Maybe him
throwing away the hat means that he's going to approach the Bridge as less
of an intellectual experience? The bartender at a place where he stays
after the accident says about Arrol; "God must have sneezed when he blew the
life into that one." Since the narrator is effectively God in this place --
he created Abberlaine Arrol, anyway -- that clearly has something to do with
him lending her the handkerchief.
Martin Lewis
> What does Abberlaine Arrol's name mean? Does anyone have a better idea of
> the UK context? At first "Arrol" reminded me of an amusing scene from
> Moorcock's _The Runestaff_, where the beast lords of Granbretan have all
of
> their ships named after their ancient gods, "Chirshil, the Howling God;
> Bjirn Adass, the Singing God, [...] and Aral Vilsn, the Roaring God, the
> Supreme God ..." It took me a while to realize that Aral Vilsn was Harold
> Wilson, and that this was a list of British politicians. Anyways, I
vaguely
> remember a place in the UK called Abbey Lane in connection with the
Beatles.
Am I being dense? Who is Bjirn Adass? All I can get is Moorcock contempory
Brian [W] Aldiss.
--
Martin
- -
xROU A Calmer Zakalwe
Rich Puchalsky
Me:
> > What does Abberlaine Arrol's name mean? Does anyone have a better idea
of
> > the UK context? At first "Arrol" reminded me of an amusing scene from
> > Moorcock's _The Runestaff_, where the beast lords of Granbretan have all
> Am I being dense? Who is Bjirn Adass? All I can get is Moorcock
contempory
> Brian [W] Aldiss.
>
I don't know. I'll post the whole list for anyone who wants to try
identifying them; I'm curious myself.
From _The Runestaff_ pg. 78 (paperback), the chapter "The Fleet at
Deau-vere" (Dover), the list of Gods is :
Jhone, Jhorg, Phwol, Runga, who were said to have ruled the land before the
Tragic Millenium
(John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr)
Chirshil, the Howling God (Churchill)
Bjrin Adass, the Singing God
Jeajee Blad, the Groaning God
Jh'Im Slas, the Weeping God
Aral Vilsn, the Roaring God, the Supreme God (Harold Wilson)
father of Skvese and Blansacredid the gods of Doom and Chaos
The scene is really quite funny, though I don't know Moorcock's exact grudge
against Wilson -- though I believe that Moorcock was an anarchist leftist by
the time the book was written (1969 and revised 1977).
At any rate, Meliadus, the Beast-lord of the Order of the Wolf, is rallying
his Granbretanian troops:
"This ship is the Aral Vilsn, named after the supreme god of ancient
Granbretan, who made this nation into what it is today. [...] would you do
anything to make sure that Granbretan retained her black might and lunatic
glory?" (the men cheer) "And would you all unite with me in an insane
adventure such as those embarked upon by Aral Vilsn and his peers?"
Andrew McGleish
"Rich Puchalsky" <wrote
> Bjrin Adass, the Singing God
Andrew
Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet]
> Jeajee Blad, the Groaning God
J. G. Ballard
-[z].
Loz
The images of the patient on the hospital bed. Did you not feel that
these were in some way connected with the plight of Gustave (Andrea's
French boyfriend)? The connection to Lennox's own situation seemed far
too direct, given the overall subtlety of the novel.
Orr's friends on the bridge were all engineers - given the author's
interest in engineering, and the works thereof, what do you think is
the significance of this fact?
The rickshaw crash, where Arrol was responsible for the excessive
speed at which they travelled was an interesting role-reversal of
Lennox's life in which it was Andrea who complains that Lennox drives
too fast.
The dots and dashes of the aircraft that fly past - they were
supposedly braille, but I believe that they are representations of the
dots and dashes of lights Lennox has seen on passenger trains crossing
the Forth Bridge. Furthermore, the fact that these signals are
incomprehensible seems to me remniscent of Lennox's inability to read
the Cyrillic script that Andrea was studying as part of her Russian
course.
There may be further questions and observations as you progress
through the book :-)
Loz {:-)>
Alleged Package Fetishist
Eric Jarvis
> Jh'Im Slas, the Weeping God
>
James Last?
band leader from the fifties/sixties IIRC
--
eric
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"
Eric Jarvis
>
> Anyways, I vaguely remember a place in the UK called Abbey Lane in
> connection with the Beatles.
>
Abbey Road
an album named after a the place they recorded a lot of their
stuff...a lot of present day musos live around that area
incidentally...though I'm not sure the studio is still
going...certainly it isn't a fashionable place to record any more
--
eric
"when all is said and done, there is a lot
more said than done"
BlueShift
Highly doubtful, given the publication date, the nationality and geez,
Brian Adams <> singing god!!
BlueShift
-+-+-+--+-+-+-
Getting closer
==============
The best way to get information on
Usenet isn't to ask a question,
but to post the wrong information
==============
Rich Puchalsky
> Some minor points, Rich:
Those who want to "read" The Bridge in order with me may be confused by this
part, since it relies on parts of The Bridge I haven't yet got to:
>
> The images of the patient on the hospital bed. Did you not feel that
> these were in some way connected with the plight of Gustave (Andrea's
> French boyfriend)? The connection to Lennox's own situation seemed far
> too direct, given the overall subtlety of the novel.
No. It can't be Gustave because 1) Gustave has multiple schlerosis, so he
wouldn't look beaten up, as the person in the hospital bed does, 2) there
would be no way for the narrator to know how Gustave is doing, since Gustave
is in Paris, 3) the narrator explicitly identifies himself as the person in
the hospital bed at the end.
>
> Orr's friends on the bridge were all engineers - given the author's
> interest in engineering, and the works thereof, what do you think is
> the significance of this fact?
Not really sure.
>
> The rickshaw crash, where Arrol was responsible for the excessive
> speed at which they travelled was an interesting role-reversal of
> Lennox's life in which it was Andrea who complains that Lennox drives
> too fast.
Well, it is his fantasy world, and part of that means that he can fantasize
that he wasn't the one to blame for the crash.
>
> The dots and dashes of the aircraft that fly past - they were
> supposedly braille, but I believe that they are representations of the
> dots and dashes of lights Lennox has seen on passenger trains crossing
> the Forth Bridge. Furthermore, the fact that these signals are
> incomprehensible seems to me remniscent of Lennox's inability to read
> the Cyrillic script that Andrea was studying as part of her Russian
> course.
Actually, I think they are Marain. Braille is on the same three-by-three
dot grid as Marain, so it'd be natural for its characters to be seen as
braille. Of course Marian doesn't really exist in the story, but I think
that Banks is making a reference or in-joke about it, or just writing about
what he was thinking about, since I think he was preparing the background
for the Culture at that time.
I haven't gotten to any part of the book where Lennox is even identified
yet, so I can't check out the part where he sees these lights. In any case,
the dots could be both inspired by the lights and be braille at the same
time. Banks likes double meanings.
>
> There may be further questions and observations as you progress
> through the book :-)
Sure, I hope so!
Rich Puchalsky
Sounds right. But what would Moorcock have against J.G. Ballard?
Eric Jarvis <er...@last.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
> Rich Puchalsky wrote:
> > Jh'Im Slas, the Weeping God
>
> James Last?
>
> band leader from the fifties/sixties IIRC
Phonetically not as good, but close. Again, I'm not sure how he would get
this "Weeping" epithet.
Hmm. I figured they were all politicians.
BlueShift
>Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet] <use...@piraeii.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hey:
>>
>> > Jeajee Blad, the Groaning God
>>
>> J. G. Ballard
>
>Sounds right. But what would Moorcock have against J.G. Ballard?
>
IIRC his writings were not the most bright & cheerful around.
>Eric Jarvis <er...@last.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Rich Puchalsky wrote:
>> > Jh'Im Slas, the Weeping God
>>
>> James Last?
>>
>> band leader from the fifties/sixties IIRC
>
>Phonetically not as good, but close. Again, I'm not sure how he would get
>this "Weeping" epithet.
I'm not familiar with his works, but I'm picking it would relate to
the genre/style/subject/tone of his music.
>
>Hmm. I figured they were all politicians.
>
>
Rich Puchalsky
Triassic
This chapter seems as good a place as any to bring up one of Bank's
strengths: formal structure. The chapters are patterned Coma, Metaphormosis
(4 parts), Triassic, Metamorpheus (4 parts), Eocene, Metamorphosis (4
parts), Coda. By this chapter it's clear that the four separating chapters
are about the narrator's real life and that the "meta" chapters are about
the Bridge, with the beginning of each "meta" chapter a narrator's dream
within the Bridge.
So this chapter starts with an internal monologue of the narrator, in
stream-of-conciousness as was the Coma chapter. The narrator acknowledges
that he's creating The Bridge, that it's all inside his mind, and complains
that the lights, tubes, and being turned over disturbs his concentration.
He introduces "a friend from wayback" -- i.e. his previous self -- and the
"ghost capital" location is introduced insistently just as "the dark
station" was at the end of the Coda.
The rest is a realistically told story of an ordinary person's past life,
leading up to University. He's the youngest of his family, his dad's
working class, and he's a little ashamed of him although he likes him too,
his mom's a cipher. Edinburgh is his big city (hence "ghost capital", it
was a capital once). He's taking courses in Geology (so that's why Brooke
can know so much about rock layers) but he writes poems and song lyrics too.
This is in the late 60's.
And he meets Andrea Cramond. She's beautiful, countercultural, and
upper-class. He gets his first date with her when she's walking in a crowd
without looking around her, and he purposefully bumps into her -- on a
bridge. They start sleeping together, though she occasionally sleeps with
other people as well, and he's jealous though he doesn't want to be.
He tries to find a class conciousness that he's satisfied with. His parents
view he thought was too limited, Andrea's family too pretentious or
self-satisfied. So he becomes a middle-class technocrat. He's the kind of
annoying atheist who thinks that people who are interested in religion or
mysticism, just for the fun of it and not really beleiving, are worse than
actual beleivers.
He wants to show her the "three, long red summits of the Forth Bridge", but
they never see it on their trip to her parent's second house. He
habitually drives too fast.
So how much of this is Banks' real life story? I've wondered just how much
of this is thinly reworked autobiography. It has that feel to it.
I'm going to write a few words about a subject that has interested me, the
limitations of dreams. When Brooke, earlier in the book, started spouting
details about rock layers, I was wondering how the narrator could produce
that within his dream. I find that in my own dreams, I don't have the
memory or creativity to come up with certain details like that on the fly.
For instance, whenever I read a book in dreams, that's usually the end of
the dream, because my unconcious can't produce real writing on the spur of
the moment. Therefore I can't read the book and I realize that it's a
dream, or at least feel a sense of annoyance that leads to the dream ending
soon. That's why I don't generally think that it's possible to create a
real dream world the way that the narrator in this book has done, at least
for most people. (Dr. Joyce tells Orr that he has exceptionally vivid and
coherent dreams, and he's certainly right.) Detection of dreams is fairly
easy, if you become a bit more concious within a dream; whatever part of you
is producing the dream can't reproduce the details of reality. It's
unsatisfying because it brings up the limitations of the unconcious,
something that you don't normally think of as limited.
dan griliopoulos
"BlueShift" <BlueShift2000@hotmail_is_a_spam_magnet.com> wrote in message
news:3aecaba0....@news.waikato.ac.nz...
> "Andrew McGleish" <amcg...@netscape.net> spake thusly:
>
> >
> >"Rich Puchalsky" <wrote
> >> Bjrin Adass, the Singing God
> >? Brian Adams?
> >
> >Andrew
> >
> >
> Highly doubtful, given the publication date, the nationality and geez,
> Brian Adams <> singing god!!
agreed, highly unlikely - could it be Bjorn from abba?
--
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too
dark to read.
Martin Lewis
I think they must be New Wave authors. Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard (Jeajee
Blad). Dunno about Jim Slas though.
Duncan Wood
> "Rich Puchalsky" <rpuch...@mediaone.net> spake thusly:
>
> >Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet] <use...@piraeii.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Hey:
> >>
> >> > Jeajee Blad, the Groaning God
> >>
> >> J. G. Ballard
> >
> >Sounds right. But what would Moorcock have against J.G. Ballard?
> >
> IIRC his writings were not the most bright & cheerful around.
>
> >Eric Jarvis <er...@last.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Rich Puchalsky wrote:
> >> > Jh'Im Slas, the Weeping God
> >>
> >> James Last?
> >>
> >> band leader from the fifties/sixties IIRC
> >
> >Phonetically not as good, but close. Again, I'm not sure how he would
get
> >this "Weeping" epithet.
>
> I'm not familiar with his works, but I'm picking it would relate to
> the genre/style/subject/tone of his music.
>
Richard Horton
<mar...@theculture.org> wrote:
> I think they must be New Wave authors. Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard (Jeajee
>Blad). Dunno about Jim Slas though.
James Sallis. Really good writer, actually, still publishes the
occasional short story in F&SF.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
Rich Puchalsky
> I think they must be New Wave authors. Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard
(Jeajee
> Blad). Dunno about Jim Slas though.
I think that's it. Richard Horton later added that the three one is
probably James Sallis, another (New Wave?) author, so these three make the
most sense as an in joke with the fellow New Wave writers. I have no idea
where he got their epithets from, but maybe that's an in joke too.
That identifies all of them except Skvese and Blansacredid, the gods of Doom
and Chaos. These don't look like names. They are the sons of Harold Wilson
though, so might be results of his policies; Squeeze and something perhaps?
Mark Jason Dominus
Rich Puchalsky <rpuch...@mediaone.net> wrote:
>That identifies all of them except Skvese and Blansacredid, the gods of Doom
>and Chaos. These don't look like names. They are the sons of Harold Wilson
>though, so might be results of his policies; Squeeze and something perhaps?
Balance of Credit.
--
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print
Andrew McGleish
"BaldiePete" <nae...@wasps.net> wrote in message
news:_GfG6.4734$Qi.5...@news1.cableinet.net...
Oops, you're right about The Bridge. but of course the crash was on
the road bridge wasn't it (years since I've read the book).What was
banksie up to mixing up his bridges like that?
Andrew
Rich Puchalsky
> Rich Puchalsky <rpuch...@mediaone.net> wrote:
> >That identifies all of them except Skvese and Blansacredid, the gods of
Doom
> >and Chaos. These don't look like names. They are the sons of Harold
Wilson
> >though, so might be results of his policies; Squeeze and something
perhaps?
>
> Balance of Credit.
I was looking at that one for a long time and had no clue, but that's
definitely it.
Congratulations, everyone, I think that's all of them! Although we still
don't know which policies Squeeze and Balance of Credit refer to, I doubt
that anyone is going to want to do the historical research necessary to
figure it out. So unless anyone remembers offhand, I think we can put this
one into the "minor mystery solved, pretty much" column. The Gods of
Granbretan were 4 pop singers, 3 New Wave SF authors, 2 Prime Ministers, and
2 economic policies/slogans/results.
Dragi Bonzi Raos
news:1p2H6.1881$9x6.3...@typhoon.we.rr.com...
> [....]
> Actually, I think they are Marain. Braille is on the same
three-by-three
> dot grid as Marain, so it'd be natural for its characters to be seen
as
> braille.
> [....]
I also seem to remeber them identified as Braille, but isn't Braille
matrix 2x3, not 3x3 (and so uses prefixes for capital letters, digits
etc)? Anyway, trying to communicate something visually in Braille would
be very Banksish :-)
Bonzi
Rich Puchalsky
> > dot grid as Marain, so it'd be natural for its characters to be seen s
> > braille.
>
> I also seem to remeber them identified as Braille, but isn't Braille
> matrix 2x3, not 3x3 (and so uses prefixes for capital letters, digits
> etc)?
Yes, you're right. I just looked at a main Braille Web page and Braille
uses a 2x3 grid, while Banks says the plane signals "are grouped in
three-by-three grids, carefully spaced." No wonder the Bridge authorities
think it's nonsense in Braille; it isn't Braille at all.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: One
This one starts with Orr not sure if he remembers his dream last night --
other than that he knows it's all a dream, isn't everything? The Bridge has
changed; there are now barrage balloons tethered along to keep the planes
from flying by. Orr gets a message from Arrol inviting him to a date, maybe
the barrage balloons (i.e. his increased resistance to messages from
reality) are due to him looking forward to his date within The Bridge. Orr
sends a letter to Dr. Joyce rejecting hypnosis, further signalling his wish
to preserve The Bridge.
But there's resistance to him cutting off all messages as well, or maybe he
just can't. Repairmen arrive to fix his TV and phone, but they can't get in
because his door mysteriously jams shut. By the time another repairman gets
it open, the first two have left. His TV and phone are stubbornly going to
continue to transmit his hospital view. By the way, the phone is fairly
obvious -- he just hears the beeps -- but it wasn't clear, when I thought
about it, how he was getting the TV picture, since he can't really see
himself. Then I thought that he must have a mirror hanging in his room and
his eyes slightly open. The view in the mirror becomes the picture in the
TV.
On the way to the date, Orr sees that the balloons are only on the
down-river side of the Bridge, not the up-river side. He's the only one
astounded by the up-river view; everyone else goggles at the down-river one.
I have no idea what the significance is of the balloons being missing from
the up-river side.
Orr meets Arrol for their date; she is painting a picture using railway
equipment as her subject. She chooses an engine hoist; this recalls a scene
from Triassic where the narrator describes seeing a locomotive engine being
tested as a young child, and how this feeling of power impressed him that
anything was possible with "work and sense and matter" -- in other words,
his early, defining religious experience. She paints the railway yard as a
jungle, one engine has become a monstrous lizard and is chasing a terrified
man -- it's the reverse of his early experience. He doesn't like it until
she gives the painting to him. In addition, she gives his handkerchief
back, cleaned and newly monogrammed with an O.
They discuss the Bridge a little more; it has farming sections and
universities, in other words it's completely self-sufficient. Orr had
originally thought that to get food the Brdige residents must trade with the
land somehow, now he's starting to think that it could be a big closed
circle in the ocean whose curvature is too small to see. She leaves, and
he's fascinated by a glimpse he gets of her leg in fishnet stockings. He
even indulges in a bit of symbolic word-play/analysis of the type I'm doing
here, "Fishnet, indeed; I am netted again."
Orr drinks with Brooke again, Brooke supports Orr's decision against
hypnosis. Then the planes show up again; they easily avoid the balloons and
leave more signals. This time they are flying towards the Kingdom. I
suppose that's because the narrator's increasing interest in his dream makes
it less likely that he will wake up.
And at the end of the chapter, Orr talks to a journalist and the journalist
tells him that the messages are in Braille, but that it's nonsense even when
you decipher it. Orr is "dumbfounded".
Why Braille? Braille is the most appropriate language for the signals
because it is completely tactile. The signals are coming from the
narrator's body, which he can only feel -- he can't examine it in any other
way -- thus a tactile signal.
That symbolism aside, it isn't really Braille. On pg. 31 of my edition, the
text clearly states that the signals are in "three-by-three grids, carefully
spaced." Braille is in 2 x 3 grids. As I pointed out before, Marain, the
language of the Culture, is in 3 x 3 grids (from a scene in _Excession_).
So the reason the authorities in the Bridge think the Braille message is
nonsense is because they are reading it in the wrong language.
Of course, you don't need to think of Marain to have this element work
within the story. It makes perfect sense as nonsense Braille, both in terms
of plot and symbolically. I'd guess that Banks left the 3 x 3 grid part in
as an in-joke, perhaps for his friends that he had been showing his Culture
material to.
Loz
<rpuch...@mediaone.net> presented the following as snipper monster
bait:
>Loz <loz...@garbage.bigfoot.com> wrote:
>> Some minor points, Rich:
>
>Those who want to "read" The Bridge in order with me may be confused by this
>part, since it relies on parts of The Bridge I haven't yet got to:
Sorry. I got excited.
>> The images of the patient on the hospital bed. Did you not feel that
>> these were in some way connected with the plight of Gustave (Andrea's
>> French boyfriend)? The connection to Lennox's own situation seemed far
>> too direct, given the overall subtlety of the novel.
>
>No. It can't be Gustave because 1) Gustave has multiple schlerosis, so he
>wouldn't look beaten up, as the person in the hospital bed does, 2) there
>would be no way for the narrator to know how Gustave is doing, since Gustave
>is in Paris, 3) the narrator explicitly identifies himself as the person in
>the hospital bed at the end.
The narrator's word on this is insufficiently objective. The narrator
knew very well that Gustave was in very poor health and, IIRC, in
hospital, as Andrea had left him to be with Gustave, prior to the
crash. The fact that the figure in the bed looked beat up, IMO, is due
to the narrator's wish to usurp Gustave's position as first call on
Andrea's sympathy and concern. He identifies with Gustave.
I cannot really argue this point convincingly enough, it's a gut
feeling for me. Not disputing your POV, I think it is one of IMB's
double meanings.
>> Orr's friends on the bridge were all engineers - given the author's
>> interest in engineering, and the works thereof, what do you think is
>> the significance of this fact?
>
>Not really sure.
>
>>
>> The rickshaw crash, where Arrol was responsible for the excessive
>> speed at which they travelled was an interesting role-reversal of
>> Lennox's life in which it was Andrea who complains that Lennox drives
>> too fast.
>
>Well, it is his fantasy world, and part of that means that he can fantasize
>that he wasn't the one to blame for the crash.
>
>>
>> The dots and dashes of the aircraft that fly past - they were
>> supposedly braille, but I believe that they are representations of the
>> dots and dashes of lights Lennox has seen on passenger trains crossing
>> the Forth Bridge. Furthermore, the fact that these signals are
>> incomprehensible seems to me remniscent of Lennox's inability to read
>> the Cyrillic script that Andrea was studying as part of her Russian
>> course.
>
>Actually, I think they are Marain. Braille is on the same three-by-three
>dot grid as Marain, so it'd be natural for its characters to be seen as
>braille. Of course Marian doesn't really exist in the story, but I think
>that Banks is making a reference or in-joke about it, or just writing about
>what he was thinking about, since I think he was preparing the background
>for the Culture at that time.
The fact that it is actually Marain (something confirmed by IMB at
some stage, IIRC) has no bearing on the story itself, it is an
author's in-joke, one that would have never come to light had IMB
never published his sf. It can be discounted for the purposes of my
point.
>I haven't gotten to any part of the book where Lennox is even identified
>yet, so I can't check out the part where he sees these lights. In any case,
>the dots could be both inspired by the lights and be braille at the same
>time. Banks likes double meanings.
The link is plain - you'll see it soon enough. :-)
Loz {:-)>
"I love the dead." ROFL
Eric Jarvis
> Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet] <use...@piraeii.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > Hey:
> >
> > > Jeajee Blad, the Groaning God
> >
> > J. G. Ballard
>
> Sounds right. But what would Moorcock have against J.G. Ballard?
>
probably nothing...I'd see them all as affectionate tributes from
somebody who has moved a little further from the mainstream
Eric Jarvis
well...I haven't seen former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis
Healey for a while (lives just around the corner from me)...but I
think I can answer this off the top of my head
in order to deal with the economic problems caused by the budget
deficit (balance of credit) the Treasury instituted a policy of
tough interest rates, additional taxation and even foreign exchange
controls (the squeeze)...this did not go down well at the time, and
it's a measure of Wilson's political genius that he lasted as long
as he did...he actually handed the country over to Jim Callaghan in
a better state than when he became Prime Minister...Callaghan then
promptly lost his nerve...Thatcher got elected and spent the newly
arrived North Sea Oil profits on tax cuts and a property price
fuelled boom and bust economy...
let's just leave it there
there is a case to be made for Wilson as a heroic figure wielding
his weapons of Squeeze and balance of credit that is both apposite
and ironic
sometimes Moorcock can be pretty good
Bob Henderson
news:yYjH6.839$aP6.1...@typhoon.we.rr.com...
> Eighth post
SNIP
> On the way to the date, Orr sees that the balloons are only on the
> down-river side of the Bridge, not the up-river side. He's the only one
> astounded by the up-river view; everyone else goggles at the down-river
one.
> I have no idea what the significance is of the balloons being missing
from
> the up-river side.
"The airplanes are coloured silver including the windows so you can't see
the pilot (if there is any). They are moving graphs on some monitoring
equipment in the hospital. That's why they're only on one side of the
bridge: That device is on one side of his hospital bed." Lars Henriksen.
There are three planes and when I first read tBridge, I related these to
the Id, the Ego and the Superego. However after an uncompleted re-read
earlier this year, I found little direct evidence for the existence of the
Superego and therefore its representation as one of the three planes in
comparison to the seperate story of the Id (the barbarian) and the Ego
(Orr's struggle to understand and interact with others).
Control or suppression of the Id is necessary before Orr can re-enter
society, (=re-gain consciousness), and this is represented by the death of
the barbarian and by one of the planes being shot down.
Bob.
Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet]
In article <yYjH6.839$aP6.1...@typhoon.we.rr.com>, "Rich Puchalsky"
<rpuch...@mediaone.net> wrote:
> They discuss the Bridge a little more; it has farming sections and
> universities, in other words it's completely self-sufficient. Orr had
> originally thought that to get food the Brdige residents must trade with
> the land somehow, now he's starting to think that it could be a big
> closed circle in the ocean whose curvature is too small to see.
Sounds like an orbital, that does.
-[z].
Rich Puchalsky
>
> > They discuss the Bridge a little more; it has farming sections and
> > universities, in other words it's completely self-sufficient. Orr had
> > originally thought that to get food the Brdige residents must trade with
> > the land somehow, now he's starting to think that it could be a big
> > closed circle in the ocean whose curvature is too small to see.
>
> Sounds like an orbital, that does.
Actually, I goofed. Not only is Orr's speculation in the next chapter (I
typically read one chapter ahead of where I write) and I put it in that one
by mistake, after looking at it again I think he thought that the Bridge
might go all the way around the Earth to rejoin itself.
Rich Puchalsky
> > down-river side of the Bridge, not the up-river side.
>
> the pilot (if there is any). They are moving graphs on some monitoring
> equipment in the hospital. That's why they're only on one side of the
> bridge: That device is on one side of his hospital bed." Lars Henriksen.
This chapter does mention that the planes are silvered; the original
sighting of them didn't. The one-side-of-the-bed thing is a good idea, but
I'm not sure about it -- why would he see dots instead of solid lines?
Every piece of medical equipment I've seen like that has solid lines. Also,
Orr's direct sensing of the hospital room matches the original sense used;
he sees the hospital room on the TV and hears it on the phone. So you'd
think he's see the monitoring equipment as well. That's one of the reasons
I think that Braille indicates a tactile or internal message.
Perhaps downstream symbolizes the past and upstream the future. The planes
not being blocked from the upstream direction indicates that he can forget
the message, but he can't avoid them.
>
> There are three planes and when I first read tBridge, I related these to
> the Id, the Ego and the Superego. However after an uncompleted re-read
> earlier this year, I found little direct evidence for the existence of the
> Superego and therefore its representation as one of the three planes in
> comparison to the seperate story of the Id (the barbarian) and the Ego
> (Orr's struggle to understand and interact with others).
If you look at the barbarian story, the barbarian would be the Id and the
familiar would be the Ego, the part that rationally figures out what to do.
The pair don't have a Superego to restrain them, which is why they happily
go around killing people. I thought they were much clearer as a mind-body
pair.
>
> Control or suppression of the Id is necessary before Orr can re-enter
> society, (=re-gain consciousness), and this is represented by the death of
> the barbarian and by one of the planes being shot down.
I don't remember the end of the book too well, so I'll have to comment on
this when I re-read that part.
Andrew McGleish
"dan griliopoulos" <wrote
>
> "BlueShift" wrote
> > "Andrew McGleish" <> spake thusly:
> >
> > >
> > >"Rich Puchalsky" <wrote
> > >> Bjrin Adass, the Singing God
> > >? Brian Adams?
> > >
> > >Andrew
> > >
> > >
> > Highly doubtful, given the publication date, the nationality and
geez,
> > Brian Adams <> singing god!!
>
> agreed, highly unlikely - could it be Bjorn from abba?
>
Well if you think that was silly I did intially think of Brian from
the Magic Roundabout! ;-)
Andrew
Keith Waddell
Rich Puchalsky wrote:
> Fourth post
>
> Metaphormosis: Three
>
> What does Abberlaine Arrol's name mean? Does anyone have a better idea of
> the UK context?
I've always associated it with Arrol's, the Scottish ale brewed in or near
Edinburgh & likely to have been very familiar to Al Lennox!
Also, the name of the bar/restaurant - Dissy Pittons - is an Edinburgh
reference. I think that, in general, Banksie's references are more localised &
straightforward than you may think; though only to readers who know the locale.
I remember that it was the geographical & cultural (small 'c'!) references that
made it such an engaging book to me.
For example, Al & his friend discussing a TV documentary about lucid dreaming.
It's relevance to the story is obvious - but it was a real documentary, on
BBC2's Horizon, and it made a similar impression on me. To then see it mentioned
in a novel really impressed me.
I'll be going past the Bridge this weekend, on my way back from Glencoe.
(Travelling from The Kingdom to The City!) I'm already looking forward to it -
hope it's a sunny day!
Regards,
Keith.
Bob Henderson
> Bob Henderson wrote:
> > "Rich Puchalsky"
> > > On the way to the date, Orr sees that the balloons are only on the
> > > down-river side of the Bridge, not the up-river side.
> > "The airplanes are coloured silver including the windows so you can't
see
> > the pilot (if there is any). They are moving graphs on some monitoring
> > equipment in the hospital. That's why they're only on one side of the
> > bridge: That device is on one side of his hospital bed." Lars
Henriksen.
> This chapter does mention that the planes are silvered; the original
> sighting of them didn't. The one-side-of-the-bed thing is a good idea,
but
> I'm not sure about it -- why would he see dots instead of solid lines?
> Every piece of medical equipment I've seen like that has solid lines.
I understood and accepted Lars' explanation as the planes themselves as
being the images from the monitoring equipment rather than the message
left being the images from the monitoring equipment. The three planes were
flying in vertical formation so they could represent the peaks of the
graphs. IIRC the *message* from the planes is not interpreted later in the
book but I agree with your previous hypothesis that these *messages* are
the reality of his hospitalisation impinging on his *dream* of his life on
the bridge.
(Another parallel to the silver, windowless, pilotless planes with no
undercarriage is the "silver propelling" pencil which the doctor uses to
make notes on Orr's condition. These notes are not available to Orr but I
assume that Orr would like more information regarding the doctor's
appraisal.)
> Also,
> Orr's direct sensing of the hospital room matches the original sense
used;
> he sees the hospital room on the TV and hears it on the phone. So you'd
> think he's see the monitoring equipment as well. That's one of the
reasons
> I think that Braille indicates a tactile or internal message.
But in relation to Orr in bed in the hospital, what could cause this
tactile message? Although he sees himself quite clearly at times on the TV
screen, the picture is grainy and he has difficulty identifying much in
the room including whether it had a window or not so maybe the monitoring
equipment is only faintly observed with peripheral vision.
> Perhaps downstream symbolizes the past and upstream the future. The
planes
> not being blocked from the upstream direction indicates that he can
forget
> the message, but he can't avoid them.
> >
> > There are three planes and when I first read tBridge, I related these
to
> > the Id, the Ego and the Superego. However after an uncompleted re-read
> > earlier this year, I found little direct evidence for the existence of
the
> > Superego and therefore its representation as one of the three planes
in
> > comparison to the separate story of the Id (the barbarian) and the Ego
> > (Orr's struggle to understand and interact with others).
> If you look at the barbarian story, the barbarian would be the Id and
the
> familiar would be the Ego, the part that rationally figures out what to
do.
> The pair don't have a Superego to restrain them, which is why they
happily
> go around killing people. I thought they were much clearer as a
mind-body
> pair.
When I read "mind-body", I get stuck on Descartes and the question of the
relationship between mind and body but I don't think this is what you are
referring to, is it?
SNIP remainder.
Bob.
Bob Henderson
"Rich Puchalsky"
> Bob Henderson wrote:
> > "Rich Puchalsky" wrote
SNIP parts replied to in separate post.
> > There are three planes and when I first read tBridge, I related these
to
> > the Id, the Ego and the Superego. However after an uncompleted re-read
> > earlier this year, I found little direct evidence for the existence of
the
> > Superego and therefore its representation as one of the three planes
in
> > comparison to the seperate story of the Id (the barbarian) and the Ego
> > (Orr's struggle to understand and interact with others).
> If you look at the barbarian story, the barbarian would be the Id and
the
> familiar would be the Ego, the part that rationally figures out what to
do.
> The pair don't have a Superego to restrain them, which is why they
happily
> go around killing people.
Yes. I regard the barbarian as Lennox's Id, the familiar as his sub
conscious Ego, Orr on the bridge as Lennox's conscious Ego and his
personal history together with the society of the bridge being the
Superego.
(Though the Superego is not so clear to me as the rest.)
SNIP
Bob.
Rich Puchalsky
> (Another parallel to the silver, windowless, pilotless planes with no
> undercarriage is the "silver propelling" pencil which the doctor uses to
> make notes on Orr's condition. These notes are not available to Orr but I
> assume that Orr would like more information regarding the doctor's
> appraisal.)
That's a good observation, especially since that pencil is mentioned at
least twice. I hadn't also noted that the planes are propellor planes, not
jet planes, thus matching the "propelling" pencil. So there clearly must be
some symbolic equivalence.
> But in relation to Orr in bed in the hospital, what could cause this
> tactile message? Although he sees himself quite clearly at times on the TV
> screen, the picture is grainy and he has difficulty identifying much in
> the room including whether it had a window or not so maybe the monitoring
> equipment is only faintly observed with peripheral vision.
Since he's in a coma, he can't move his eyes. I had assumed that the TV
showed a view of himself that he had through a mirror in his room, but that
since the mirror was in his peripheral vision -- or since he couldn't focus
on it, at any rate -- the view is grainy.
The tactile message is his internal feeling of pain, discomfort, pressure or
whatever. There is a technical term for this which I forget, but you do
have some ability to sense how you are doing internally. "Tactile" is
perhaps not the right word, since the narrator isn't feeling anything with
his hands, but it is a message that is not transmitted through sight, sound,
taste, or smell.
> When I read "mind-body", I get stuck on Descartes and the question of the
> relationship between mind and body but I don't think this is what you are
> referring to, is it?
Perhaps. I meant it in the simple sense that many people, philosophers and
otherwise, assume that there is some disjunction between the mind and the
body, and that the barbarian and the familiar symbolize these two entities.
In the narrator, they are disjoined; his body is lying in a bed while his
mind travels around an internal world. The process of waking up is a
process of getting them back together.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Two (part 1 of 2 posts)
The dream this time has the narrator standing on a moor, near a canal. As a
train approaches he sees that he's standing btween the train tracks. No
matter which way he runs the tracks move so that he's still between them.
At the last minute he jumps in the canal, the train vanishes, and he finds
he can breathe. He settles to the moss-covered floor of the canal and finds
that there are train tracks that the moss has grown over; the tracks fill
the whole tunnel. Finally, he hears the train start to approach again.
This dream is about escape -- back to the womb or birth canal, symbolically,
just as the narrator has created a dream world in which seemingly nothing
can really hurt him. Yet he can't escape; the knowledge of the crash (i.e.
mortality) pursues him even there.
When he wakes, he wonders if he should take down Arrol's picture; he's
disturbed by the dream and her picture did involve a man being pursued by a
train. He takes a warm bath and falls asleep, suddenly waking up feeling
cold, terrified, "that I was trapped in some constricting tunnel: the bath a
tunnel-canal [...]" This is a reenactment of birth trauma; first he's in a
warm bath, then he's stuck in a canal. He's worried that waking from The
Bridge into his damaged body will be just as traumatic as being born. And
it would be like being reborn into the world in a certain sense.
Here is where Orr actually speculates that The Bridge may run all the way
around the world and meet itself, a closed loop; I had incorrectly mentioned
that for the last chapter.
Orr sets out to find the Third City Library again. On the way he sees that
they are attaching additional barrage ballons to the trawlers that anchor
them. He finds the great round window that marks the corridor that the
elevator to it used to be in. Dr. Joyce's patient who never stops
window-washing is washing it from outside. Orr looks outside and sees that
a trawler has been attacted to three ballons and is not floating up through
the air towards them. Orr breaks a pane of glass and warns the
window-washer just in time; the guy ducks as the trawler comes smashing
through then window, then continues to float upwards. The window-washer
goes by to cleaning after bandaging his glass cuts; Orr gives up on looking
for the library again.
I should point out that this scene has a lot of sexual imagery in the
description and word choice. Orr comes to the familiar corridor; it's damp,
the carpet squelches with each footfall, and it has a huge round window at
the end of it -- i.e. he's in the birth canal. The window-washer is "Dr.
Joyce's patient who refuses to leave the cradle." The trawler floats
towards The Bridge, "rising as it nears". Orr breaks the glass with the
knob on the tip of his stick, then the trawler crunches into the center of
the great round window, making a terrible groaning, screaming sound as the
structure shakes. The "barnacles and fragments of the shattered panes fall
together onto the carpet, beating at the broad leaves of the nearby
pot-plants like some hard, fierce rain. Then, incredibly, it is gone."
I'm not sure what to make of this, frankly. Orr is definitely also "Dr.
Joyce's patient who refuses to leave the cradle", i.e. refuses to wake up
from his dream. Now a giant metaphorical penis is breaking in -- similar
to the train in the canal, now that I think of it. Is Orr worried that the
existence of sex in his dream is going to inevitably destroy it? Or is this
supposed to be some strange varient of birth anxiety, or of the narrator's
anxiety about the aggresive aspects of sex?
If someone else wants to read this scene, and give their own opinon, that
would be useful. I think that Banks tends to write male characters who are
worried about sex in certain way (for instance, Zakalwe in Use of Weapons
can't help but think of each sex act, no matter how loving, as an attack.)
Rich Puchalsky
> If someone else wants to read this scene, and give their own opinon, that
> would be useful. I think that Banks tends to write male characters who
are
> worried about sex in certain way (for instance, Zakalwe in Use of Weapons
> can't help but think of each sex act, no matter how loving, as an attack.)
To briefly follow up to my own post, I remember an earlier scene from the
barbarian dream in Metaphormosis: Four; the familiar tells him of a place
below the tower where the woman are in charge, men grow only to the toddler
stage, except that they mature sexually, and therefore can be used to
perpetuate the species without ever being a threat. I'd ignored this
(literally) infantile fantasy of sex without power the first time around,
but now it seems relevant.
Loz
>Ninth post
>
>
>
>Metamorpheus: Two (part 1 of 2 posts)
<large snip inc. trawler scene>
>If someone else wants to read this scene, and give their own opinon, that
>would be useful. I think that Banks tends to write male characters who are
>worried about sex in certain way (for instance, Zakalwe in Use of Weapons
>can't help but think of each sex act, no matter how loving, as an attack.)
>
Assuming that the trawler incident is a reflection of the sexual act
(I hadn't made that link, but what else is new?) -
The trawler rising as a result of the barrage balloons being attached
to it suggests to me the narrator's own attitude towards the feeling
of being out of control during sex. His fear of sex is abundantly
clear, as evidenced by his sensation of being crushed whilst he is
with Arrol (is that this chapter or the next?). It is interesting that
those observing the trawler incident, with the exception of Orr, are
entirely un-phazed by it. Is this because the narrator feels that
other people are somewhat blasé about sex, whereas he himself suffers
anxiety over it?
Loz {:-)>
"Who wants to get hung up on a real-life permanent dream?"
Bob Henderson
> Third post
> Metaphormosis: Two
SNIP
> Orr finds a diagram in his pocket, supposedly a map of
> the way to Dr. Joyce's new office. It's a hexagon with an L-shaped line
in
> the middle with an O and an H at each end of the line, the O next to the
> hexagon. It's clearly significant to the narrator, and he almost loses
the
> Bridge illusion into formless mist. He feels himself seem to tip, which
is
> something I've actually had happen to me. When I've realized with a
shock
> that I'm dreaming, and I wake up, sometimes there is a readjustment of
the
> feeling of gravity as I move from a perception of myself as standing,
within
> the dream, to the true perception that I'm lying on my back in bed.
> What does the diagram mean? A previous scene within the chapter
referred to
> part of the Bridge as hexagonal. The lift that Orr took to reach the
Third
> City Library is L-shaped, and he comments on this more than once. The
> elevator attendant said that it "doesn't look much like a library from
this
> angle", and when Orr felt himself seem to tip, he felt like he was back
in
> that elevator, "completing another unscheduled and dangerous lift-shaft
> maneuver", i.e. waking back to conciousness. The H could mean Here and
O
> mean Outside.
> But the hexagon with an H, an O, and another line also looks very much
like
> a molecular diagram, with the hexagon being the carbon ring. Anyone
have
> any ideas on that? Something about alcohol, possibly? I don't remember
> enough chemistry to see what it is without looking it up. We don't know
yet
> in the story whether the narrator crashed his car because he was drunk,
> although he does indicate in the introduction that he thinks the crash
is
> his fault.
I don't understand the significance of the diagrams either but the
following comments from Rob Keogh will hopefully generate some ideas.
Quote begins:
> /\
> / \ O----H
> / \/
> | |
> | |
> | |
> \ /
> \ /
> \/
this is phenol, it dissolves flesh fast. nasty stuff i would reccomend
against drinking it.
>
> /----------------\
> /o \
> / | \
> / | \
> / ------------H \
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \----------------/ in the paperback
methanol is C2H5-OH
H H
| |
H - C - C - OH
| |
H H
ethanol (toxic and causes hangover) is CH3-OH
the OH is an hydroxy group, the hexagon an aromtic ring.
================End quote.
Rich Puchalsky
> I don't understand the significance of the diagrams either but the
> following comments from Rob Keogh will hopefully generate some ideas.
>
>
> against drinking it.
Yeah, I broke my resolution when I started this thing (no research) and
looked it up on a Web page. A carbon ring with a single oxygen and hydrogen
is phenol. It's a heavily used industrial chemical, highly toxic. I can't
think of any way that it could have anything to do with The Bridge, so I
think this is a false trail. Thanks for passing on the comments though.
Bob Henderson
> Sixth post
> Metaphormosis: Four (in two posts, 2 of 2)
> If anyone can figure out some symbolism inherent in him lending out one
> piece of clothing and getting another returned, feel free.
I have just re-discovered a short review of The Bridge from a political
perspective with reference to Orr's situation and Lennox's life as a
comment on the social/political situation in Scotland/Britain of the
1980s.
Later, Orr has to pay for the missing hat and the monogrammed handkerchief
that he decides to keep. This is interpreted as being a comment on
privatisation of govt services where the taxpayer is duped into paying for
something that he already owns.
But I am more interested in the approach Rich is taking so maybe the
political aspect should be put aside for now.
The only symbolism I can think of in regard to the clothing is that our
possessions help define our identity. Orr has no possessions apart from
hospital issue clothing which was not chosen by him and therefore would
have no meaning to him. Although the hat was cleaned, he has no emotional
attachment to it so throws it away. The handkerchief has been soiled and
cleaned also but when it is returned, it has his initial monogrammed on it
making it personal. The handkerchief becomes a symbol of his relationship
with Abberlaine and has positive emotional connotations.
Perhaps it signifies that at the time of the return of the handkerchief,
he is more accepting of his status as a resident of the bridge than he was
at the time of the return of the hat?
Bob.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Two (part 2 of 2 posts)
Orr returns to his apartment and "an ever greater disaster". Workmen are
taking all of his clothes and belongings. One of them tells him he's being
moved to level U7. Orr says it must be a mistake, that's where "workers,
ordinary people live." The man tells Orr that all of his belongings were
bought with his hospital allowance, and that therefore the hospital really
owns them. Orrs asks to call Dr. Joyce, but the man shows him Dr. Joyce's
signature -- the doctor was the one who authorized throwing him out. They
even take his clothes and give him overalls.
This is a wonderfully symbolic moment, with all sorts of interpretations
that are mutually consistent. I'm going to number them.
1. Right off we know that this is about social class. When he enters the
room, there is a "tall fellow" holding his shirts, so strong that he doesn't
even get angry when Orr tries to grab him, Orr describes him as an "oaf".
Orr has enjoyed his pseudo-Victorian-gentleman-hood, and even said " ..
they accept their lot and their position in society with a meekness I find
both surprising and disappointing" about the workers back on pg. 30. Of
course, the narrator is the one who created the whole society; having his
alter ego, Orr, muse piously about why the workers don't revolt is comedic.
The narrator could have created a classless society if his fantasies had run
in that direction, but they really don't. A lot of this has to do with the
narrator's discomfort with his changing class position, of course. In any
case, Orr will soon find out just how hard it is to refuse to be poor once
you're poor.
2. In this interminable thread of high culture, I'm going to make a "Red
Dwarf" reference (a British TV comedy) -- did anyone see the episode where
the crew find a video game that puts you into a virtual reality that is
exactly how you want it to be? It was called "Better Than Life", I think.
Well, they all went in, at first things were fine, then one of the crew who
had always rather despised himself and expected things to go wrong found
things indeed going wrong. His subconscious was influencing the virtual
reality to create the horrors that he expected. They end up getting out of
the game just as he's buried up to his neck in sand and about to be eaten by
rats or something. The point is that the same thing is happening here.
This is a fantasy!, the narrator might well cry, how can this be happening?
Because part of him wants it to. Just as the narrator can't control his
sexual fantasies to make them palatable to his conscious mind, he can't
really control everything that happens in The Bridge. He's fighting against
himself.
3. But of course the part of him that wants this to happen is the part that
wants him to wake up, as represented by Dr. Joyce. The fantasy of
upper-class life on The Bridge is holding him back, obviously he's not going
to want to leave if he is really enjoying being a Victorian gentleman. So
the doctor is really continuing his therapy. He can send letters rejecting
further progress -- hypnosis, within the context of The Bridge -- but he
can't shut up that part of himself so easily. It's going to keep trying by
one means or another.
But this is getting long so I'll stop at 3., though I could write more about
his loss of identity and so on. The workmen have a checklist of all his
belongings, they let him keep his handkerchief because it's been
monogrammed, but they're going to make him pay for it and the hat out of his
new allowance. They also let him keep the other gift from Arrol, her
painting, though they keep the frame. He's been stripped of everything
without personal meaning to him.
Of course Dr. Joyce's office refuses to let him see the doctor. He goes to
his new room, it's small, with a communal toilet, etc. He is met by a guy
named Lynch, a complete stereotype of the lower class as seen by people like
the narrator. Lynch is grubby, his eyes don't meet you, he has awful table
manners, he coughs, yet he's friendly, the salt of the earth, he helps Orr
and buys him food when none of Orr's upper-class neighbors even wished him
good day.
Orr goes back to the bar, Dissy Pitton's, where he and Brooke the engineer
would meet. The doorman doesn't recognize him and won't let him in. When
he persists, the doorman waits till there's no one around, then beats him
up. Now he knows why the lower class accept their lot and position in
society.
He somehow find his way home and lies on his bed. He is racked with pain,
everything hurts. He has put his handkerchief over his cut eyebrow, a
mirror of the time he gave it to Arrol for her bleeding nose. In all of
this pain, the deep, circular chest pain that he's used to is drowned out.
He is lying on his bed, being flooded by waves of pain. He passes from a
stage of "waking agonies which the reasoning mind can at least attempt to
place in context" to the "semi-conscious trance of torment" in which the
deeper parts of the brain know only that "the body aches, and that there is
no one to turn to for comfort."
In other words, he has just recapitulated his real situation. He really is
lying on a bed, in great pain, with no one to turn to, and he has escaped
that by using the higher, reasoning parts of his mind to create a livable
illusion. But he has to face it once more if he is ever to wake up. This
experience, within the dream of The Bridge, may be a way of preparing
himself for the trauma -- of saying, this is how it will feel, but I can get
through it. Dr. Joyce is still on the case; his rejection of the narrator's
easy fantasy has helped to prepare him for reality.
On the other hand, this still is a fantasy, this pain drowns out the real
pain. So he may be getting closer, but he's certainly not there.
I should mention that with this post I reach the approximate midpoint of the
book. I suppose I've got another ten or so to go.
BaldiePete
> I've always associated it with Arrol's, the Scottish ale brewed in or near
> Edinburgh & likely to have been very familiar to Al Lennox!
>
> Also, the name of the bar/restaurant - Dissy Pittons - is an Edinburgh
> reference. I think that, in general, Banksie's references are more
localised &
> straightforward than you may think; though only to readers who know the
locale.
> I remember that it was the geographical & cultural (small 'c'!) references
that
> made it such an engaging book to me.
>
What is the Edinburgh reference for Dissy Pittons??
I've been scratching my (almost hairless) head and can't think of one.
BaldiePete
dan griliopoulos
> looked it up on a Web page. A carbon ring with a single oxygen and
hydrogen
> is phenol. It's a heavily used industrial chemical, highly toxic. I
can't
> think of any way that it could have anything to do with The Bridge, so I
> think this is a false trail. Thanks for passing on the comments though.
Pertinent point might be that they are all alcohol groups. I needn't
point out the narrator was drinking before the crash.
[Couple of interesting segments on phenol below. When Bob says this is nasty
he might be accused of understating the matter somewhat. Similarly there was
case in Oxford about 6 months ago of a russian chemistry professor getting
confused between methanol and ethanol (which he was a regular imbiber of)
and dying fairly rapidly. None of these are good to drink - all
poisons/toxins basically - but then again neither is normal alcohol.]
http://www.wemove.org/spa_mpa.html
"Mechanism of Action
Phenol's mechanism of action is to denature protein, causing non-selective
tissue destruction in the injected area, including coagulation of nerves and
muscle necrosis. Wallerian degeneration of neurons occurs in the weeks
following injection. The microcirculation around the nerve may also be
affected, possibly accounting for longer-term effects. Most axons eventually
regrow, over a variable period of time."
http://ntp-db.niehs.nih.gov/NTP_Reports/NTP_Chem_H&S/NTP_Chem1/Radian108-95-
2.txt
"This compound is used as an intermediate, general disinfectant for
toilets, stables, cesspools, floors and drains, reagent in chemical
analysis
and sanitizer. It is used in the manufacture of colorless or light-colored
artificial resins, many medical and industrial organic compounds and dyes,
phenol-formaldehyde resins, bisphenol A, nylon intermediates, alkylphenols,
germicides, antioxidants, preservatives, barn deodorants, explosives, fer-
tilizers, coke, illuminating gas, lampblack, paints, paint removers,
rubber,
asbestos goods, wood preservatives, textiles, drugs, pharmaceutical
prepara-
tions, perfumes, bakelite and plastics. It is used as a pharmaceutic aid
(antimicrobial agent). It is also used topically as an anesthetic in
pruritic
skin conditions and internally and externally as an antiseptic. It is also
used in medicine as a cauterizing agent and in the treatment of severe dis-
ability (muscle spasms and paralysis). It is used in caustics, fuel-oil
sludge
inhibitors, solvents, rubber chemicals, and in the petroleum, leather,
paper,
soap, toy and agricultural industries.
Symptoms of exposure to this compound include irritation of the skin,
eyes, nose and throat, blindness, headache, dizziness, loss of appetite,
abdominal pain, skin depigmentation, severe skin burns, vomiting, diarrhea,
difficulty in swallowing, muscular weakness, unconsciousness, coma and
death [058,102]. Other symptoms include heart damage, central nervous
system depression, respiratory arrest, irritation of the respiratory tract,
mouth and stomach, giddiness, jaundice, shortness of breath, bladder
damage,
cardiac arrest, severe burns of tissues and the eyes, burning pain in the
mouth and throat, irregular breathing, corrosion of the skin and eyes and
blurred vision [058]. Liver and kidney damage may occur [036,058,301,346].
Nausea may also occur [031,036,058,301]. Exposure may result in
circulatory
collapse, tachypnea, paralysis, convulsions, greenish to smoky-colored
urine,
necrosis of the mouth and gastrointestinal tract and icterus [031]. It may
also result in respiratory alkalosis followed by acidosis,
methemoglobinemia,
necrosis of the mucous membranes, cerebral edema, bladder necrosis,
erythema,
pulmonary edema followed by pneumonia, profuse sweating, intense thirst,
hyperactivity, stupor, blood pressure fall, hyperpnea, hemolysis, oliguria,
anuria, central nervous system damage and muscle contractions [301]. Eye
effects include conjunctiva chemotic, white and hypesthetic cornea, edema-
tous eyelids, iritis and carbolochronosis [099]. Other symptoms may
include
necrosis of the skin, ulcerative esophagitis, laryngeal edema, white or
brownish stains and areas of necrosis about the face, mouth and esophagus;
neurolysis of the cervical posterior roots, hypersensitivity, idiosyncrasy,
hypothermia, loss of vasoconstrictor tone, cardiac depression, stertorous
breathing, mucous rales, frothing of the mouth and nose, ventricular
arrhyth-
mias, hyperbilirubinemia in newborns, Heinz body hemolytic anemia, sores
and
burning in the mouth, pallor, weakness, tinnitus (ringing in the ears),
weak
and irregular pulse, hypotension, shallow respirations, cyanosis, fleeting
excitement, confusion, rhonchi and fever [151]. Exposure may cause antipy-
resis, tremors, digestive disturbances, ptyalism, anorexia, fainting,
vertigo,
mental disturbances, ochronosis and gangrene [430]. It may also cause
spasm,
inflammation and edema of the larynx and bronchi; chemical pneumonitis,
burning
sensation, coughing, wheezing, laryngitis, dermatitis and central nervous
system disturbances [269]. Mucocutaneous and gastrointestinal corrosion
may
occur [406]. Damage to the pancreas, spleen or lungs may also occur [051].
Skin eruptions and rapid and difficult breathing have been reported [036].
Other reported symptoms include severe eye damage and skin rash [346].
Exposure may cause irritation of the mucous membranes, weight loss, muscle
aches and pain and conjunctival swelling [102].
"
Rich Puchalsky
> > Yeah, I broke my resolution when I started this thing (no research) and
> > looked it up on a Web page. A carbon ring with a single oxygen and
> hydrogen
> > is phenol. It's a heavily used industrial chemical, highly toxic. I
> can't
> > think of any way that it could have anything to do with The Bridge, so I
> > think this is a false trail. Thanks for passing on the comments though.
>
> Pertinent point might be that they are all alcohol groups. I needn't
> point out the narrator was drinking before the crash.
I originally thought of alcohol too, but phenol is actually not an alcohol.
The alcohols (ethanol and methanol) mentioned were never actually referred
to in the book or any of its diagrams.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Three
The narrator dreams that he's on another bridge, he doesn't know where,
because he did something wrong. This bridge goes a small river, but it's
actually the top quarter of a giant hollow iron wheel that rotates as the
narrator walks, so that he can never reach either bank of the river. He
can't swim the river because there are carnivorous fish in it. In short,
he's trapped. On one bank, there are pavilions and wagons with a number of
ladies living in them; they put trays of food on the bridge for the narrator
every now and then. They are young and beautiful, and do everything
possible to excite the narrator; call to him, undress, make love to each
other, occasionally have full orgies with men who come running out of the
forest. But the narrator can never reach them. He's tormented by lust,
anger, jealousy and so on. He "recall[s] that witches cannot cross water."
It's interesting to note at this point that jealousy has been mentioned
exactly once before in the book that I can remember; the part set in the
real world where the narrator is jealous of his girlfriend Andrea sleeping
with other people. This is also the second time that the concept "woman
with control over sex = witch" has shown up; the last time was with the
queen in the barbarian dream.
One day the mist clears and the narrator sees that the river goes on
forever, and along it are spaced an infinite number of bridges with men in
them and ladies on the shore, just like his situation. The man downstream
looks at him, runs a little on his bridge, then jumps in the water and is
eaten by the fish. The narrator decides to run and run until he dies; his
ladies watch, sad-eyed but "somehow resigned, as if they have seen this all
before". They start crying, but he's happy, "They are caught, trapped,
transfixed, heads bowed; but I am free."
Here we start to get to the reason why the narrator crashed his car in the
first place. We don't know much about that yet in the course of the story,
just that he thinks it's his fault, and that he likes to drive too fast.
But in this dream the narrator says "I am the keystone of the bridge" and
this chapter is in the center of the book both by chapter count and page
count. So this dream is the key to why the whole thing is taking place. To
explain why, I'd have to use information I know from reading the book once
before; at this point the reader is only supposed to suspect why. So I'll
just leave it at that for now and come back to this later.
Orr wakes up in The Bridge, screaming, believing he's encased in ice (he is,
he's in a coma). But the scream isn't his own, it's the "sheet metal
works"; metaphorically he can't even scream. He finds out he's going to be
on half allowance for a month till he pays off what he owes for the
handkerchief and the hat. Maybe that's why people on The Bridge are so
careful to return soiled clothes that they borrow, it's all a relatively
closed system. Orr gets a new doctor, and gets to see what kind of great
medical care the poor get; the doctor is overworked, undersupplied, and
can't do anything for him until he's reviewed the case. Lynch gives Orr a
forwarded letter from Arrol inviting him to a date. He calls her and tells
her what happened, expecting her not to want to see him anymore because of
their now divergent "places in society". But she asks to help him, oh joy.
Of course we've seen a relationship between a lower-class guy and an
upper-class woman in this story once before; the narrator and Andrea.
She arrives and gives him her brother's cast-off clothes; when he changes
clothes and comes out she's actually getting along with Lynch and telling
him -- a dirty joke! Why, what a regular gal she is. Maybe it's because
I'm an American, and we don't have the same feel for social class, but this
seems faintly ridiculous. Are Orr's class fantasies supposed to be typical?
I mean, here the narrator has created a lower-class guy who is nothing more
than a stereotyped cipher, whose only purpose is to show what a great person
his girlfriend is when she treats him "like a normal person" -- actually, in
a rather condescending way. Does she really tell dirty jokes to many of the
upper-class men that she meets casually for the first time?
Arrol asks Orr which is more important, regaining his social position, or
getting back his lost memories. He says that having lost his memories is
like having a sealed, forgotten chamber, she's says that it sounds like a
tomb, and if he's afraid of what he'll find, he says "It's a library; only
the stupid and the evil are afraid of those." The narrator is obviously
afraid of the library, he causes a disaster to happen whenever he gets close
to it. So which is the narrator supposed to be, stupid or evil? We know
he's not stupid, since he has the ability to make this incredibly detailed
internal fantasy, so by his own standards he must be evil. He does think
that the accident was his fault, ergo in some sense he wanted something like
this to happen, so we can start to see why this judgment of himself is
implied.
At this point the planes come flying by again, the lights go out, apparently
turned off by the people who run the Bridge so that the planes can't be
seen. They are flying from the direction of the City. That, according, to
our previously worked out symbol set, is a sign that the narrator is
slipping deeper into coma/fantasy, perhaps because he's now even more
interested in Arrol. Joyce set him up to be lowered in social class, for
the purpose of disenchanting him with The Bridge, now Arrol (who Brooke
introduced him to, remember) is re-enchanting him again. The smoke from the
planes is just detectable as a smell "blown through the structural grammar
of the bridge, like criticism."
Arrol sets him up in a disused apartment that her father owns but never
uses. He's now the equivalent of a "kept woman". To reinforce this, Arrol
needs something to reach the light switch with, and asks him to give her his
stick. Orr says that she's being very kind, but the basic structure of the
fantasy remains whether he's conscious of it or not. And that basic
structure seems designed to give him unconscious cause to feel that she is
controlling him.
caliban
I think the characteristic smell of hospitals is (was?) due to the use of
phenol in cleaning wards and theatres.
John Bennett
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Four (part 1 of 3, probably)
or
A Scottish Barbarian Trashes the Greek Underworld
The dream at the start of this chapter features the barbarian again. This
time he's looking for Sleeping Beauty. "I luv the ded", an old man tells
him when he asks where Sleeping Beauty is, and the barbarian, thinking that
the guy is telling him that he's a necrophiliac, gets annoyed and slits his
throat. The guy clarifies that he meant Isle of the Dead before dying. A
lot of this dream is like that; violent and funny. Anyways the barbarian
also has a lot of anachronistic equipment and makes jokes about modern-day
things, so he's getting further away from the fairly straightforward
sword-and-sorcery barbarian he was in the first dream.
One of the things he has is a knife missile. Yes, a Culture-style knife
missile, though later it's called a cheap copy, though it is from the
future. Plus it sings these little puzzle-poems that spell out names of
things; it's first one, about itself, spells out "dagger", though the
barbarian, who spells phonetically, thinks its spelling is wrong and that it
means daggir. A witch gave it to him; he mentions how great witches are in
bed too.
Anyways the barbarian gets a sorceror to conjure him to the Underworld and
he proceeds to wipe out most of the well-known entities there. He didn't
run into Tantalus, which is too bad, I would have thought that that
encounter would have potential. Anyways, a quick rundown of the damage
follows.
Sisyphus: escaped from his eternal doom. The barbarian helps him roll his
stone to the top of the hill in return for directions on how to cross the
river, and Sisyphus wedges the stone there before pointing toward Charon and
delightedly running off.
Promethius: killed by liver cancer. The barbarian tries to ask him for
directions, only gets Greek, and kills the eagle when it attacks him. P.'s
liver is apparently used to completely regenerating every few minutes, and
the eagle is no longer tearing it out and eating it, so when the barbarian
passes Promethius on the way back he's dead with his liver burst out.
Charon: killed by petrification. Charon asks for Cerberus' head as the
price of the barbarian's passage, the barbarian says sure but loses the head
and brings back Medusa's as the nearest substitute. Hey, will this one do?
he asks as Charon turns to stone and smashes through the bottom of the
ferry. The barbarian has to swim the Styx to get back.
The knife missile starts to make a poem spelling out the name of Charon and
each of the next two entities as the barbarian meets them, but the barbarian
always shuts it up before it finishes.
Cerberus: killed by impact. The barbarian cuts off one of Cerberus' three
heads to give to Charon, but the head starts growing back. (I've never
heard of Cerberus having this ability, only the Hydra.) So the barbarian
tells Cerberus to fetch the stick and throws the knife missile over a cliff,
Cerberus tries to get it; splat. The extra head rolls over the cliff too so
the barbarian is pissed.
Medusa: killed by knife missile. The barbarian bashes his head on a
doorway, gets blood in his eyes and can't see much, and realizes that the
knife missile is still around when it starts rhyming again. He throws it
and that's it for Medusa.
So the barbarian finally finds Sleeping Beauty's chamber, expecting to wake
her up with something more than a kiss. (The original Sleeping Beauty story
actually had Sleeping Beauty raped by the Prince; she wakes up when one of
the children she's given birth to from the rape tries to suckle and
accidently sucks out the poisoned needle that's keeping her asleep.
The old European stories were expurgated considerably when they were written
down in their current form as "fairy tales".) But it's not Sleeping Beauty,
it's the guy in the hospital bed.
Andrea appears on a TV screen in the wall and tells the barbarian not to
kill the guy on the bed "Because he will become you; you will kill yourself
and he will live again, in your body." Andrea warns him not to look at the
Medusa's face and tries to tell him not to take something, but gets cut off
by static. So the barbarian takes a gold frog statue sitting nearby and
leaves. And as soon as he gets across the Styx (drinking some of the water,
too), the gold frog turns into the familiar, who has called the barbarian
there with Sleeping Beauty dream-telepathy to rescue it. The familiar
makes a few remarks about the rocks looking metamorphic, not igneous, jokes
about the barbarian being Orpheus, and that's it.
So what does all this mean? Most is pretty good comedy, but the last two
paragraphs above have lots of extra symbolic meaning. The narrator is
Sleeping Beauty; he's in a coma, waiting for his beloved (Andrea) to kiss
him so that he'll wake up. We already started to get the idea that this
whole crash thing involved her in some way. Anyways, he's waiting for her
affection before he'll make the effort to rouse himself.
The bit about the barbarian killing himself and the narrator living again in
his body suggests one of those near Eastern death-rebirth myths where the
god is killed and reborn each year as a symbol of the harvest. At any rate
I already had the barbarian figured to represent the narrator's body, as
well as his class background, so this fits. Andrea's comment is still a bit
confused, but maybe I'll come back to it later. It seems significant that
Andrea was (probably) trying to tell him not to take the familiar back.
Why? The familiar is education, in a sense -- after all it knows about
rocks, just as the narrator does from his Geology courses. If the barbarian
is Orpheus, then the familiar is Eurydice, and Eurydice is dead after all.
The bit about the rock in the Greek Underworld looking metamorphic, not
igneous, is probably a joke about the anachronisms and so on -- the place is
composed of reworked, not original, material.
Rich Puchalsky
(Intermission)
This part of the book is particularly densely grained. As is common in
Banks' better works, there are sections where each sentence means something
else in addition to its obvious meaning. At this point I really should step
back and go over what I'm doing by writing this and why it's taking so long.
What kinds of books does Banks write? One answer might be that he writes
the kinds of books that it's possible to write lots of critical study about.
Unless you want to descend into the uttermost depths of postmodernism, where
anything can mean anything, and you can write at book length on, say, any
issue of Spider-man, it's necessary that such a book have a lot of
complexity in it. But what kind of complexity? They are not books like
Joyce's _Ulysses_, which make manifold references to other literature. They
aren't like Tolstoy's longer works, where a lot of the complexity has to do
with length of plot and number of characters (at least, Banks' *good* books
aren't like that; _Excession_ might qualify). They aren't brilliant
philosophical pieces, and they certainly aren't books that capture every
nuance and feeling of ordinary life. Their complexity consists of having a
multitude of *internal* references.
Banks creates a symbology, keeps coming back to various parts of it at
different points in the book, and produces a complicated structure, where he
can finally say a whole lot with a few words, because those words have
already been given multiple symbolic meanings. If his books weren't
grounded in concern with the human condition, they would merely be puzzles,
though rather good ones. Sometimes he achieves a sort of triple layered
cake effect; most readers appear to read them as simple adventure stories,
many realize that there are puzzles going on underneath that aren't strictly
required in order to grasp the high points of the adventure, and get
interested in the puzzles, and a few try to interpret those puzzles as part
of literature.
For example, take the familiar's remark about the rocks looking metamorphic,
not igneous. Is he just showing off his erudition and annoying the
barbarian? That's the obvious meaning. Does it have something to do with
the differences between metamorphic and igneous rocks -- in other words that
metamorphic rocks are igneous rocks that have been melted and changed, and
that this is really a joking description of Banks' reuse of Greek myth in
the Underworld scene? That's the puzzle meaning. There would normally be
no other particular symbolic meaning attached to these words. But Banks has
already referred to geology twice; once when Brooke said that there was
enough just in the Bridge to keep people interested without going outside
it, and talked about the rock layers supporting it, and once when we hear
that the narrator went to university and studied geology. Banks has already
created a host of symbolic meanings for "geology", so that his later
sentences can evoke them all in just a few words.
These kind of often-used symbols range from simple images like "red on the
bridge" to heavily overloaded words like "witch", which start to take on
connotations of all of the narrator's various sexual fears. Plus there are
entire sequences, like the chapter in Use of Weapons where Zakalwe tries to
write poetry, or like many of the dream sequences in this book, where nearly
every sentence has a coherent second meaning, producing both an obvious and
a hidden narrative. Making some sense out of these things, in a way that
says something important about the human condition, is what I take to be the
goal of literary criticism of Banks.
Now, are these meanings arbitrary? There is every indication that Banks is
putting them in there on purpose, or at the very least, that his unconcious
is putting them in there on purpose. If someone wants to argue that, we can
discuss individual cases, but otherwise I'll just say that while most
authors' works have multiple symbolic meanings that are more or less created
by the reader's history, Banks' are to a great degree implicit in the
writing. There is an esthetic theory that holds that an attempt to force a
single emotion in the reader is kitsch. I don't think that this is true
when a more-or-less single symbolic meaning is implied, which the reader can
then associate with a range of emotions. But maybe this is one of the
reasons, besides genre, why Banks doesn't seem to have a big critical
following. Or it could be just that my own critical sense is impaired and
that I should be spending my time with better authors. But Banks combines
some literary quality with at least some "ideas", whether political or
social, that make his works more attractive to me than yet another great
American novel of street life. And he's simply a good writer of fantasy, of
which there are few.
So why is this taking so long? Well, to have any hope of pointing out some
of the meanings of a work like The Bridge, I have to dig down to at least
the puzzle level. That means that in certain parts of the work, each
sentence can be described with another sentence. And when Banks starts
really using internal references, each sentence might need a paragraph or
two. You could easily end up with a critical study as long as the original
book. Which is silly, of course; maybe I should have re-read _Pale Fire_
before this as a cautionary tale.
But this isn't a critical study, because it isn't carefully summarized, with
the important parts picked out. It's a set of notes, written as I read,
from a personal perspective. And because of the low-culture Usenet
convention that an explanation of what happens is a "spoiler", as well as
because explanations of puzzles can be spoilers for those who want to find
the solutions themselves, it's a marathon of spoilers, a spoil-o-thon. It
could be turned into a critical study if I cared to re-read the whole thing
afterwards and re-write it, which I am most likely never going to do -- but
the next guy that posts here for the first time looking for someone to help
him do his homework is going to get pointed to this thread. After which I
will sit back and laugh.
The next post will return to _The Bridge_.
Kevin McGuire
: The bit about the rock in the Greek Underworld looking metamorphic, not
: igneous, is probably a joke about the anachronisms and so on -- the place is
: composed of reworked, not original, material.
Also a nod to Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 10 of which chronicles Orpheus'
descent into and return from the underworld.
Here it is in English:
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html
http://www.trinityprep.org/mcclureb/LATIN4/ovid/metamorph.htm
--
Kevin McGuire University of Pennsylvania
Rich Puchalsky
> Rich Puchalsky (rpuch...@mediaone.net) wrote:
>
> : The bit about the rock in the Greek Underworld looking metamorphic, not
> : igneous, is probably a joke about the anachronisms and so on -- the
place is
> : composed of reworked, not original, material.
>
> Also a nod to Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 10 of which chronicles Orpheus'
> descent into and return from the underworld.
I didn't think of that. I originally read the Orpheus story from another
source, so I didn't associate the two.
The names of all the intermediate chapters are probably implied here too;
they are metamorphosis, metaphormosis (for all the metaphors, I suppose),
and metamorpheus (Morpheus being the Greek god of dreams).
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Four (part 2 of 3)
One last mention of the barbarian dream: at its beginning, the barbarian
mentions how magic has grown much more common, but that people will still
need non-magicians to do ordinary things like building houses or planting
seeds. He figures that magic can't be all it's cracked up to be, or that
everything would be wonderful and all the folk would live in harmony, and
they wouldn't need people like him (plus it'd be boring). This is basically
another Culture reference. It also reinforces that the barbarian represents
the lower class, and hints again at his death later.
Orr wakes up and looks outside "It was early spring when I was washed up
here; now the summer is almost over." Yes, it is, as we'll find out by the
end of the chapter. He looks for the library again and can't find it. I
think that not being able to find the library is a clearer representation of
what may be actually organic damage causing the narrator to lose his memory;
having a disaster occur as the library was about to be found always struck
me more as an expression of the narrator not wanting to find it. Orr finds
a man hitting golf balls near the top of the bridge, and doesn't recognize
what the game is, so perhaps the narrator's memory really is damaged to some
extent.
Orr sleeps again and has a quick run-through of his recent dream images:
being chased by trains into tunnels, being chained to the wall of the Greek
Underworld as the barbarian lopes by, running on the revolving iron bridge.
Arrol comes by again; Orr asks where she disappeared to yesterday, but she's
unconcerned. She's been at a party. She quickly takes steps to seduce Orr;
getting wine, showing off her dress, starting a fire, etc. Her lipstick is
smudged and he uses the handkerchief that she had monogrammed to wipe it.
That precipitates them kissing each other. After a bit of feeling each
other, she tells Orr that she didn't think he would be so passionate; a
remark that doesn't seem intended to be ironic, but which is, from someone
who has initiated each stage of contact.
They have sex. She's still wearing stockings, a corset, gloves, all sorts
of strapped and ribbed silk things. He thinks of the barbarian's tower,
where some of the mutilated women were wearing similar things. The straps
form lots of X's, which remind him of the structure of The Bridge. She's on
top. They both climax, but his is almost negligible, a "brief beat", and
his first self-description afterwards is "I ache. I am exhausted." This is
hardly great fantasy sex, it seems to me, it sounds more like he's had to
get more in contact with the true state of his body. He says that he feels
like he's just had sex with the bridge, and in a way it's true; no-one else
is involved except part of his fantasy world.
They have sex again, and again though everything seems to ostensibly go
well, the narrator feels horrible. A few sentences: "Its climax chills me
though; something makes it worse than joyless, makes it frightening,
terrifying." "My orgasm is nothing, a detail from the glands [...]" Orr
feels a gripping, a pressure, as though he's the body to be dressed,
strapped, enfolded, etc. It sends a memory crashing through him:
"Ancient and fresh, livid and rotten at once; the hope and fear of release
and capture, of animal and machine and meshing structures; a start and an
end.
Trapped. Crushed. Little death, and that release. The girl holds me,
like a cage."
OK, we already know that the narrator does not exactly have a happy sexual
life. But what's all this? Well, first, the narrator is flashing back to
the car crash. In the description of the car crash in the first chapter, he
describes how he's squeezed inside the crushed metal, trapped in a definite
meshing of animal and machine. Second, his sexual fantasy just isn't
working, his real body is just too trashed. Third, there's the interesting
reversal of his clothes/bondage fetish from his partner to himself -- after
all he really is the one who needs to be dressed and strapped to things in
the hospital.
But mostly you get the feeling that this is part of what he feels about sex
all the time. He really seems to fear sex because he feels that it will
give his partner control over him.
If you want my opinion -- and you do, I would guess, because you've read
this far -- one of the reasons he's messed up is because his leftist
ideology tells him that jealousy is a result of his cultural programming,
and one that he should reject. From Triassic: "he was appalled to find
himself jealous when Andrea slept with somebody else, and cursed the
upbringing that had told and retold him that a man should be jealous, and a
woman had no right to screw around but a man did." Well, he's right about
different standards for men and women being wrong. But jealousy is a lot
older than our culture. It's like blaming capitalism for the existence of
anger, or patriarchy for the existence of sorrow.
Jealousy is actually a highly functional emotion. Who you sleep with
generally has a pretty good correlation with who you spend time with and who
you spend resources on. Relationships tend to hold together longer when the
people involved are jealous, and don't want to hurt the other person by
doing something that would give them good reason to be jealous. Let's even
ignore all the economic/sociobiological stuff and imagine a relationship in
the Culture. What is the most precious thing to a 200 year old resident of
the Culture (male, let's say)? He has no possessions or need of any. No
health problems, no mortality problems, no need to work or accomplish
anything. In fact the most valuable thing that he has is his 100 year
relationship with someone else. Shared experience is the one thing that
can't be replaced. Sure, his partner may leave for months at a time, may
sleep with other people, but what if they get interested enough in someone
else so that they don't spend real time with him? You bet there will be
jealousy, blazing jealousy, because the other person is doing things that
are threatening what could be the only real value in the first person's
life.
The narrator in this book is in the same position as our imaginary person in
the Culture. He's found a woman (Andrea) who is intelligent, beautiful,
uninhibited, etc, and he really likes her. Well, if she leaves, he can't
just find someone else, like a replaceable part. You bet he should be
jealous. The more she "screws around" as he puts it, the greater the chance
that he will be merely one of a number of replaceable people to her. She
*is* "holding him, like a cage" because he needs her and she seemingly
doesn't need him. So he has power fantasies where he is in complete
control, and victimization fantasies where she is a witch with evil power
over him.
So. One last thing, "the hope and fear of release and capture". Ostensibly
this is just about sex. But remember the end of his dream where he's
running on the rotating iron bridge. He decides to run to death, and the
witches who have been sexually tormenting him are crying, he is free, they
are trapped. We have started to get the idea that maybe that's why he had
the car crash, to force her to give him affection again. I'm sure he didn't
plan for this to happen, but he's been "released" -- he's free to wander
around in a dream world where in theory he can do or be anything -- while
she's hopefully been "captured" by guilt.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorpheus: Four (part 3 of 3)
After sex, Orr brushes Arol's hair, then she takes off, claiming that her
family will be expecting her. She'd stay if she could she says, but really,
why can't she? It seems more likely that she just stopped in for a quickie
and now doesn't want to hang around. Orr reassures her that it's OK that
she's leaving, but he would like to say more and can't. He has that fear of
being crushed, being trapped, still -- i.e., the fear that if he comes out
and tells her that he wants her to stay, he'll be admitting his
vulnerability, putting himself in her power.
Once she leaves, Orr sees a TV in the next room, an old library with shelves
bare. It's turned on, but blank. Something dark closes over the view, then
withdraws, it's a hand. He sees the man on the bed again; a woman moves
away from the camera and goes to brush her hair, staring at "what must be a
mirror on the wall." A chair has been shifted and the bed is not quite as
neat. The woman looks down at the man, then kisses him on the forehead,
smoothes some hair away from his brow, and leaves. Orr doesn't get a good
look at her face. He turns off the TV, picks up the phone, and the beeps
are not quite regular and a bit faster.
It's clear that the woman is Andrea, visiting the narrator in the hospital.
The guy in the hospital bed, Sleeping Beauty, has finally gotten his kiss.
There is an equivalency between Orr brushing Arrol's hair in the dream and
Andrea brushing her hair in reality; was the narrator's fantisized sex with
Arrol sparked by Andrea's presence?
I'm still not quite sure of how the hospital room is supposed to be set up.
Now at least it's confirmed that there is a mirror in it. But I don't
really understand how the view works out.
So what's the next thing that happens after Sleeping Beauty is kissed? Orr
walks outside, the bridge shudders, there's another disaster. His legs and
chest hurt, he tries to think of Abberlaine to make himself feel better, but
it doesn't work. "It was in a haunted apartment; the ghosts of that
mindless noise and that nearly unchanging picture were there all the time, a
hand's motion away, a switch-turning away, probably even when I first kissed
her, even while her four limbs gripped me and I cried out in terror." Note
the quick return to all the recently introduced images: the static and
unchanging picture of the TV, Andrea's hand, switching off the TV -- all
make it obvious that the experience with Abberlaine was indeed false. Orr
is dissatisfied with this new "distraction", as well he should be.
Orr tries to remember how the room looks, but sees it in black and white,
from up in one corner -- is he seeing the room through on of those
corner-placed mirrors that let nurses see around corners as they pass by?
Thinking this, Orr approaches a train wreck. He gets drafted to haul a
stretcher. He helps to bring a seriously wounded man to an express train,
and has to stay there, gripping a torn piece of skin in the man's neck to
compress the wound. The man is "unconcious but still suffering", "reduced
to something pathetic and animal in his agony." The doctors bandage the
man, and Orr is left on the express train as it leaves. He also sees an
injured woman giving birth.
Orr realizes that he can just stay on the train and, perhaps, escape The
Bridge. Should he get off the train? He thinks that Joyce, Brooke, and
Arrol would want him to. But he feels that all he's doing is playing games.
He refers to the "echoing horror" that happened during sex with Arrol ...
He thinks "Here I am in a thing become place..." (the train). He thinks of
the train explicitly as a phallic symbol, poised between the limbs of the
bridge. He's tempted just to stay on the train and therefore go, "to voyage
out bravely leaving the woman at home." "Is a woman a place and a man just
a thing?" he wonders. He feels there's something to this idea because he's
offended by it. "So what do I represent then, sitting here, inside the
train, within the symbol? Good question, I tell myself. Good question."
Well, there is only one thing that's symbolically inside a phallic symbol,
and that's sperm. Orr is moving towards a new conception and a second
birth, a rebirth, like the injured woman who is the last victim of the
disaster that he sees.
Otherwise, note that Orr's symbolism is not quite symmetrical. Women are "a
place" and men are "*just* a thing". Is being objectified as a place
supposed to be better than being objectified as a thing? This sounds a bit
defensive to me; after all, things get to move, to do things, while places
just sit there. Places get conquered -- a bit of an expression from
_Inversions_, by the way. Orr's symbolism, seemingly denigrating both sexes
equally, conceals a lot of wished-for male dominance within it.
Orr rides off. He takes off his hospital identity bracelet, "a little
circle of plastic with his name on it", which identifies him as someone who
isn't supposed to leave his neighborhood on the bridge. Symbolically, he is
leaving his identity as Orr, the man defined by the circular injury on his
chest. He feels naked without it.
This is the last part of the novel set on The Bridge. It marks a sea
change; the rest may still be set within a dream world, but the surroundings
are different. It's worth while to think about the characters on the
bridge, who we're never going to see again. What was their point, now that
we've seen as much of them as we're ever going to? We've gone over Joyce's
and Brooke's purposes; Joyce has seemingly won, since Orr has completed
Joyce's rejection of his high status with a rejection of the bridge
entirely. Arrol did her best to give Orr a reason to stay, but failed, for
the reasons discussed above. The only other named character that I can
remember Orr exchanging words with is Lynch. Apparently the narrator really
needed a complete lower-class stereotype who is never anything else.
Rich Puchalsky
Eocene (part 1 of 2)
This is the seperating chapter before the last "meta" group of chapters. It
starts with the usual stream-of-conciousness from the narrator. He seems to
feel that his body is being moved, he doesn't know where. He defiantly
thinks that though they can do anything to his body -- turning him over,
repairing bits, etc. -- they can't catch/find/get through to him, because
he's in charge, in command, invulnerable. Of course he's wrong, a bit later
when he's being moved he's bumped around, and it hurts.
But right after saying he's invulnerable, he starts railing against "a
typically dirty piece of underhand undercover unclothed misunderstanding by
the evil queen herself." (Andrea, clearly -- who else?) After another
double-entendre "how could she stoop so low?" he says she tried to rouse the
barbarians against him; a bit later, that she tried to "raise a rebellion."
"No chance, of course, but there you go." he assures himself.
What is all this about? Well, it seems likely that Andrea has tried to wake
him up by actually having some kind of sex with him, there in the hospital
bed, and that his mind turned this into his fling with Arrol in the dream.
A rather unpleasant mental picture, but all the evidence seems to fit -- in
the last chapter, the narrator's view of the room is whited out, until
Andrea turns the camera back towards him after the end of the Arrol scene
(is there an actual camera/monitor directed at his bed? I can see why she'd
want to turn it away during that bit), and the chair is moved and, most
significantly, the bed is messed up a bit. Thus all the "rousing the
barbarians", "raising a revolution" language; she's tried to pull him out of
his dream by involving his body directly.
The evil queen in the first barbarian dream survives by appealing to the
innermost fantasies of young men and causing lust in them, while the
familiar is going to get rid of all of all that. I originally identified
the barbarian with the body and the familiar with the mind; it appears that
they may be even more specifically the narrator's body and mind -- his mind
wants to stay in the dream, and therefore perceives Andrea, who appeals to
him physically in the real world, as an enemy. In the second barbarian
dream, Andrea, this time as herself, told the barbarian not to kill the
narrator, and she appeared to be about to tell him not to bring the familiar
with him before she got cut off.
Anyways, he's moved physically, it hurts, and he ends up in a new place. He
jokes about how he hears voices and that's an "impregnable defense", then
says he's been raped -- in the alternate meaning of the word, of being
looted and carried away, ostensibly. But this also refers to what Andrea
has done, for he says "I'll stitch her up. No, sorry, that's not funny, but
I mean! What a dia-fucking-bollockal liberty, eh?" In the second barbarian
dream, the barbarian says that if a kiss will wake Sleeping Beauty up then
what he's going to do will make her really lively; Andrea has basically done
the same thing. Maybe his fears about being sexually dominated weren't so
far off.
The narrator assures himself that it meant nothing to him, or her, probably,
then goes on to express what seems like resentment about her being "a woman
of letters"; the demanding sentence at the end of the stream-of-conciousness
is "she got her degree". Note that this is the first time the repeated,
demanding sentence at the end hasn't been a location, first it was "the dark
station" then "ghost capitol".
Rich Puchalsky
Eocene (part 2 of 2)
The rest of the chapter continues the story of the narrator's real life.
Andrea got an advanced degree. Their relationship becomes long-term and he
thinks of asking her to marry him -- but he doesn't want the state or church
to be involved, and he admits that she'd say no anyway.
He gets his degree a year later; she has started studying Russian. She gets
on well with his parents and he's ashamed of having been ashamed of them.
Then the calamity (from his point of view): she wants to go to Paris for
three years to study Russian. He just got a good job in power station
design so he doesn't want to go. He feels it difficult to be supportive, but
"He was anyway powerless, and she determined." I guess he's starting to
discover why people get married, and why it has nothing to do with the
church or the state.
On her last evening there, they go out, she takes him to the Forth railway
bridge. "The Tallahatchie Bridge fell down", he tells her, quoting a song.
He thinks about the old tradition of people throwing coins from trains going
over the bridge -- the same custom that the narrator has created within the
dream Bridge. On the way back, she drives on the road bridge, he looks at
the railway bridge and sees the long, dotted row of lights on a passenger
train, flickering as they pass through the girders of the bridge; they look
like "meaningless Morse" to him. I agree with a previous suggestion that
these are probably his inspiration for the airplane signals (puffs of smoke)
in his dream, and it may explain why the airplanes are conpletely silvered
over (so that they look like trains). It doesn't explain why there would be
three of them.
He tells her that the railway bridge takes three years to paint. It's
obvious that he's peeved that she's going.
He moves up in his career and starts to buy one car after another, each more
expensive than the last. He travels around the world; there's a mention of
him being 25. He always finds excuses not to visit Paris, but goes on
vacations with Andrea. He knows that she's seeing someone else in Paris and
feels jealous. After that, there's the first actual mention of him sleeping
with other people -- there's a six month relationship with someone he gets
bored with, and he sleeps with an old school pal of Andrea's. (That last is
a bit sad.) The girl he stays with for six months is called Nicola; people
make jokes about their names, calling them imperialists, and asking when
they were going to claim Russia back. That last is undoubtedly a clue
towards the narrator's real name, but one I can't be bothered to figure out;
feel free to post it anyone who knows it.
His mother dies, and when he tries to call Andrea about it a guy picks up
the phone, then when he gets to talk to Andrea she apparently hangs up.
He's angry and hurt, he goes to the funeral; stopping by the brdge and
thinking that it's the same color as her hair. She meets him as he's
leaving the funeral, says that she got cut off and couldn't get back in
touch with him, though she tried all sorts of things. He's relieved and
grateful, he turns to his father and cries tears "for his mother, for his
father, for himself." Though I get the impression that they were mostly for
himself; he didn't start crying until finding out that Andrea still loved
him after all.
She is staying in France a fourth year; again she asks him why he won't come
to Paris. He sleeps in the same room as his father because his father has
been sleepwalking and he doesn't want him to hurt himself in his sleep.
(Like father, like son I guess.) She tells him that the guy who answered
the phone was Gustave, and that he'd like him.
He gets along well with Andrea's father, wondering why when the guys an
upper-class conservative, and thinking that it's because neither of them
take anything entirely seriously. He now refers to revolutionary socialist
orthodoxy as "theological". He starts sleeping with a lot of women and
drinking a lot. He steadily gets richer. Andrea says she's coming back
soon but he's doubtful.
Andrea's father dies of a heart attack while driving; he thinks that isn't
such a bad way to go as long as you don't hit someone. He goes to the
funeral and somehow expects Andrea not to be there, but she's there. He's
moved at the oration and thinks that ten years ago he'd have sneered at
being moved by words spoken by a minister about an upper-middle class
barrister.
(A question for Brits; is Andrea's father really upper-middle class, or
upper class? Based on the way he describes her lifestyle, I might have
guessed the second. I wonder whether he's supposed to be setting the bar
for being upper class higher now that he himself is getting uncomfortably
close to it.)
Andrea's mom tells him that he'll be the closest person to Andrea now. He
and Andrea go on vacation together and find a big hollow round tower called
Penielhaugh; he pushes boulders away from the door and they climb it. At
the top they finally talk about her future plans, he asks that if her asked
her to marry him, would she say yes. She says that she thinks she wouldn't.
She says that she's marry him, if anyone, but it just isn't her. He says
that he doesn't suppose it's him either (ha!) but finally gets the courage
to tell her openly that he doesn't want to be away from her for so long
again. She says that she doesn't think that they'll have to, that she's
attached to both Edinburgh and him, but that she'll always need her own
place, and that she's easily seduced by other people. They have sex --
again she initiates each stage -- and she gives him a silk scarf to mop up
with, because she's having her period. Now we know where the handkerchief
in the dream of the Bridge came from.
Finally she asks if he really loves her, he shrugs and says he does, and she
says that he's a fool, and that she's fickle and selfish. He says she's
generous and independent. The problem is that her stated opinion of herself
can be wrong, and his opinion of her can be true, and that their
relationship can still be screwed up because of their power imbalance and
his reaction to it.
Thomas...@cologne.de
>The girl he stays with for six months is called Nicola; people
>make jokes about their names, calling them imperialists, and asking when
>they were going to claim Russia back. That last is undoubtedly a clue
>towards the narrator's real name, but one I can't be bothered to figure out;
>feel free to post it anyone who knows it.
(rot13, for spoiler protection)
Gur ynfg pmne jnf Avpbynf, gur ynfg pmnevan jnf Nyrknaqen. Fb, bhe ureb'f
svefg anzr vf Nyrknaqre.
Rich Puchalsky
> (rot13, for spoiler protection)
Thanks -- but why bother with spoiler protection? Anyone reading the thread
is supposed to be pretty thoroughly spoiled in any event.
Daniel
"Rich Puchalsky" <rpuch...@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:ZRkK6.29099$mu1.5...@typhoon.we.rr.com...
> Seventeenth post
>
>
> Eocene (part 2 of 2)
>
> (A question for Brits; is Andrea's father really upper-middle class, or
> upper class? Based on the way he describes her lifestyle, I might have
> guessed the second. I wonder whether he's supposed to be setting the bar
> for being upper class higher now that he himself is getting uncomfortably
> close to it.)
You can't become upper-class simply by being rich. You have to be born into
it. Andrea's family are not - so definitely upper middle-class.
--
Daniel.
dan griliopoulos
(Maybe I should give up those GCHQ aspirations) A hint, anyone?
<Thomas...@cologne.de> wrote in message
news:9ddcou$o2a$1...@mvmap66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de...
Stewart Smith
ROT13 coding. Basically every letter is moved 13 places forward in the
alphabet. Most newsclients have some option where you can get it to do the
coding so you don't have to do it by hand. In netscape news you can right click
on the message body and the bottom option in the popup menu is "Unscramble
(ROT13)". Goddess knows what it is in anything else.
Stewart
Grom
news:9de3ff$lc6$1...@news.ox.ac.uk...
> > Gur ynfg pmne jnf Avpbynf, gur ynfg pmnevan jnf Nyrknaqen. Fb, bhe
ureb'f
> > svefg anzr vf Nyrknaqre.
> Ok, very good for protection I'm sure but I have no idea how to read this.
> (Maybe I should give up those GCHQ aspirations) A hint, anyone?
I see you're using Outlook Express; go to the Message menu and select
Unscramble (ROT13).
Alternatively the unscrambled version says (and if you don't want to know
the result, look away now):
"The last czar was Nicolas, the last czarina was Alexandra. So, our hero's
first name is Alexander."
Robert
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Oligocene (part 1 of 2)
In the third and last "meta" section of the book, the chapters are labeled
with geologic era names instead of with a simple One, Two, Three, Four. So
this seems like the best time for a disquisition on the chapter names.
Metaphormosis, the first section, is mainly concerned with the extended
metaphor of The Bridge. Metamorpheus, the second section, is named after
Morpheus the Greek god of dreams. In this section, Metamorphosis, the
narrator will finally change.
The first and last chapters are Coma (the starting car crash) and Coda (the
passage at the end of a composition that brings it to a formal close); those
have obvious enough meanings. The remaining chapter names are all geologic
periods of time: Triassic and Eocene are the first two separating chapters;
the four chapters within Metamorphosis are Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and
Quaternary. So why these names?
The geologic time scale is hierarchically broken up into the following
divisions of time: eon, era, period, epoch, age. The Triassic Period was
the time between 245 to 208 million years ago (henceforth "mya") when the
dinosaurs evolved; it's the first of three periods in the Mesozoic Era, the
"age of the dinosaurs". From this you might expect the next separating
chapter, Eocene, to also be a period, but it's not: it's an epoch -- the
second of six epochs in the Cenozoic era. It extends from 54 to 38 mya.
So, let's say that Banks wanted to symbolize changes in the narrator with
changes in geologic era. Triassic begins the age of the dinosaurs, that's
fine. But why Eocene rather than, say, Tertiary, the first period of the
Cenozoic Era, or Paleocene, its first epoch? It may just be because of the
sound and other connotations of the names. But the Eocene is the first
geologic period when fossils of all the major orders of modern mammals are
found (specifically, it's named after horses). If Banks wanted to go from
dinosaurs to mammals it's not a bad choice, since the first primitive
mammals were actually found in the age of the dinosaurs, which would get
confusing.
The first three sub-chapters of Metamorphosis, Oligocene (38 to 23 mya),
Miocene (23 to 5 mya), and Pliocene (5 to 1.8 mya), are the next three
epochs after the Eocene. That makes sense; Banks wants to make his chapters
go forwards in time, and though he could have used the names of ages -- the
last smaller division of time than epochs -- most of them have odd-sounding
names, like Rupalian or Messinian, that would not be recognizable to people
as the names of geologic time periods. So Banks has to use these three
names if he wants three more names after Eocene; they are the only ones
available. The last of the sub-chapters, Quarternary (1.8 mya to 11,000
years ago), is the name of a period, not an epoch. Why did Banks suddenly
go back to the name of a larger time unit, a period? Probably because the
Quarternary period contains only one epoch, the Pleistocene, so they are
both the same length, and both start after the Pliocene. Banks had the
choice of whether to use Quarternary or Pleistocene, and he chose
Quarternary -- why? Well, I'd guess it's because Quarternary means fourth,
and this is the fourth sub-chapter, and also because Quarternary sounds like
more modern period of time.
Why geologic periods of time at all? Because the narrator thinks in terms
of geology, that's one reason. Second, because it is evocative of a
recapitulation of evolution back to the present, and mirrors the slow
awakening of the narrator back to real life.
Lastly, why should the four sub-chapters of Metamorphosis have geologic
names when the subchapters of the earlier "meta" areas don't? Two reasons
that I can think of: first, because it makes the list of chapters look like
a geologic time chart, which always has more divisions of time grouped
together at recent time than at times further in the past. (Roger Gray also
pointed out that the chapter list looks like the supports of The Bridge
itself). Second, because all of the chapters named after geologic time
periods are largely about the real life of the narrator, as opposed to the
others, which are largely about The Bridge and other dreams of the narrator.
And these four sub-chapters are much more about the narrator and less about
his dreams.
Well, that's taken long enough so that I'll save any actual discussion of
the contents of Oligocene for another post.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Oligocene (part 2 of 2)
The chapter begins with musings by the narrator on eyes silting up, pretend
snowflake globes, how we are igneous in youth, metamorphic in our prime, and
sedimentary in dotage, and how we are the gathered silt of ancient star
explosions.
The narrator's half awake, he thinks "Cities and Kingdoms and Bridges and
Towers; I'm sure I'm heading for them all." Note that I haven't been able to
find anywhere an indication of which direction this last train that the
narrator takes to escape is going in. Maybe the City/Kingdom symbolism no
longer matters so much now that he's decided to leave.
Then, with the narrator half awake, he sees the three planes come, flying
alongside in the same direction. Now the Bridge has anti-aircraft defenses,
a hail of shells is fired at the planes and bursts of smoke explode all
around them. The planes look invulnerable, but after a while one is hit in
the tail. Its tail disappears, consumed by smoke, it drops back till it's
flying evenly alongside the train. The gray smoke eats its way up the
plane; the plane still flies along, though it shouldn't be able to, until
it's a flying engine, then a propeller, then gone.
Why the symbolism of one plane being destroyed? I'm not entirely sure, but
I have an idea, supported by something I remember from a later part of the
book; there are three men in Andrea's life -- her father, Gustave, and the
narrator. In the last chapter, her father died. Therefore the first of the
planes has been shot down. An alternate symbolism might be the division of
a person's life into youth, adulthood, and dotage that the narrator made
earlier. In this symbolism, his decision to leave The Bridge indicates that
he's finally growing up, that his youth is gone. Threes are such common
symbolic numbers that it's possible to come up with many other meanings --
such as, as someone else suggested, it represents him dealing with his id,
leaving his ego and superego to continue -- but I like my first
interpretation best.
On the journey, Orr has recurring dreams of a life lived on land (i.e. the
sections describing the narrator's life), and wonders if those are reality.
He has stowed away on an empty train, drinking from the washbasins but
having nothing to eat for days. It gets warmer and sunnier as he goes, the
skins of the people he glimpses outside become darker. Then one night, he
realizes that he has reached land, a forest. The train enters a sprawling
town the next day (the City?) and Orr hides in a cupboard, but he's found
the day after that. He's locked up, but fed, they clean his clothes and he
gets back the handkerchief that Aroll had monogrammed, and "on which she had
left a smudged red image of her lips" quite clean. Orr has other dreams
besides "the recurring one of the man in the severely beautiful city" --
i.e. the narrator -- there are also brief allusions to the two carriages
facing each other, and the two ships firing on each other, the first two
dreams that he made up for Dr. Joyce.
Orr is brought to a cold, concentric place, a circular island in the middle
of a circular sea, with a causeway dividing the sea, called The Eye of God.
Here he's going to be put in a dormitory with a hundred other men.
And here is where I would think that Banks' editor would have raised some
strong objections. He's bringing us into another dream realm, similar to
The Bridge, but not actually it. Why? We are three quarters of the way
through the book, and most of the remainder of the pages will be about the
narrator's real life or about continuations of previous dreams, the scenes
in the new setting really take up only a few pages. In my opinion, none of
the succeeding non-Bridge Orr sequences are worthwhile; they add little and
detract from the symbolism of The Bridge itself. After all, Orr's left The
Bridge, you'd think he'd have reached reality. But instead we have to go
through more little bits and pieces full of newly introduced, unnamed dream
characters, none of them the ones that we already know something about.
Ostensibly, as we find out later, this new dream area may be there because
they moved the narrator and they are trying out new drugs on the narrator's
physical body, but this seems like a very weak rationale; you'd think that
drugs that affect his mind enough to keep him from dreaming about The Bridge
coherently would keep him from dreaming any coherent dream world. And Banks
didn't have to write these new drugs into the plot in any event.
I think this is the weakest part of the book, one of the elements that keeps
it from being a first-rank masterpiece, and possibly a reason why I've seen
other people write that the book is so hard to understand; these parts don't
need to be there and never really gell. They have every appearance of being
written when Banks was first thinking of the book and not excluded later
when he'd figured out what structure the story should actually take, rather
like various parts of _Excession_, or the bit of a following story grafted
on to the end of _Use of Weapons_ (a much better editing job there since it
only suggests another story, rather than actually being one). Maybe they
are supposed to make the book less of a neat puzzle and more like messy real
life, but I don't think they succeed in this regard; after all they aren't
real life. But they are there, so I suppose I have to go through them,
though if any part of this series of posts feels dutiful rather than fun,
this is it.
The Eye of God contains the Republic, it seems both run down and full of
energy, and there are immaculate palaces and temples of an earlier age among
gray buildings, and a cemetary of millions of identical white pillars. Orr
is put to sweeping leaves from the paths of a part even when there are no
leaves to sweep; it's the law. He can speak to few people, but those who do
understand him are delighted to find someone else speaking their language.
Everyone seems like a prisoner or a guard. Then he dreams that he's lost
half his weight during the night and that the city is being bombed. When he
wakes he finds that everyone in the city has such dreams, they may be
sparked by such an attack in the past that he sees signs of on the
buildings. Orr talks too much about the Bridge and the secret police pick
him up and beat him, they take him to a prison headquarters where the chief
explains that the prison is a bunch of rotating cylinders sunk into the
rock, like a lock. Orr blacks out and wakes up on another train.
See what I mean? Pretty utterly worthless if you ask me; who cares about a
completely new dream context at this stage?
Thomas...@cologne.de
>Note that I haven't been able to
>find anywhere an indication of which direction this last train that the
>narrator takes to escape is going in. Maybe the City/Kingdom symbolism no
>longer matters so much now that he's decided to leave.
Quite late in the book, a geographical explanation is given for
the City and the Kingdom: The City is Edinburgh, and the Kingdom
is the former kingdom of Fife.
Rich Puchalsky
news:9dfua6$sl3$1...@mvmap66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de...
Yes, someone else pointed that out when we discussed this before. It
doesn't invalidate the alternate symbolism of the City of Man and the
Kingdom of Heaven. It's like the Bridge itself; the word takes on a
symbolic meaning that persists even when you later find out that it's
modeled on the Forth Bridge. Frankly, I think that many of the local
references are irrelevant; a literary work is supposed to be evocative even
to people who have never been to the particular locale that it is set in.
That's the same reason why I'm basically not concerned about the name of the
narrator: unless the name has symbolic value, I don't see that knowing it
adds anything. But a previous chapter of the book has already indicated
that the direction of travel is important. Just after his crash in Arrol's
rickshaw, it matters to Orr whether the planes are coming from the City or
the Kingdom, therefore -- unless the narrator is supposed to be listening
for trains going by outside his hospital window, which is possible but
terribly prosaic -- the direction matters symbolically. In a larger sense,
from the first chapter it's clear that the narrator is midway between life
and death, and that City and Kingdom are symbolic directions.
Someone else wrote that lots of things in the book are just local references
and shouldn't be taken symbolically. Well, if you grew up in the area,
that's a nice bonus for you to be able to recognize local things. But we're
talking about world literature here, right? I mean, would _Hamlet_ have
really benefited if Shakespeare had made a study of the actual pubs and
street landmarks in Denmark? Would we expect the Danes to say that you can
see Ophelia's real pond if you take a tour of the castle, 5 euros please?
However, since "Edinburgh" and "Fife" themselves have symbolic meanings
within the book, finding out that they are the City and Kingdom later in the
book could add another layer to the meaning of the direction of Orr's
escape. Edinburgh is the big city, the place where the narrator got
educated, the upper-middle class, the narrator's present; Fife is the
country, the place he came from, the lower class, the narrator's past.
Eric Jarvis
there are other aspects to the two places that may also be relevant
Edinburgh is the administrative capital of Scotland...it is the seat
of the Scottish establishment...the place where the old money
is...Edinburgh is a city of art and artifice
Fife is a mix of agriculture and mining, and some fishing...a place
where hard work gets minimal rewards directly from the land (and
sea)
so there is also a resonance of the intellectual and the
physical...certainly that's what I got from it
--
eric
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Miocene
This time the dream that starts the chapter is Orr's dream of part of the
narrator's real life. There has been an inversion of reality and fantasy,
or a double negative; a dream character's dreams are actually reality.
A brief scene starts with the narrator reading a political poem to his
friend, to see if he likes part of it. His friend asks if it's new. The
narrator says no, it's ancient, but that he was thinking he might try to get
some printed. A funny scene, and one which subtly equates the narrator and
Banks himself. After all, Banks was the one who wrote the poem in the book,
probably a long time ago by the time he wrote _The Bridge_, and now he has
gotten it printed -- in _The Bridge_. I wonder whether the narrator (first
name Alexander, last name unknown at this point in the book) is sort of an
alternate Banks, a path that he didn't take. I can easily imagine that
Banks might be good at enginneering, and that he might have started his
education with something like it; if he had stuck with that, and not become
a writer of fiction, is the narrator the person he imagines he would have
turned in to? I've previously commented that a lot of the narrator's past
sounds like thinly reworked autobiography; if this idea is psychologically
true, then the narrator would share Banks' personal history up to a certain
point. In fact, this point may be almost precisely locatable; on pg. 85 of
my edition, in Triassic:
"He decided to drop Geology; while everyone else was doing Eng Lit or
Sociology [...] he would do something useful. Some of Andrea's friends
tried to persuade him to do English [...] No, he was determined to do
something which would be of real use to the world."
The road not taken, eh? I seem to recall that there is a Banks novel that
focuses heavily on this theme; I can't recall which at present.
At any rate, Orr wakes up and tells us that he's now with a Field Marshal
and his bandits; he raids his dreams for stories that he can tell them for a
living. They burn books for warmth, they are cannibals and casual killers.
Orr tells them the story of a boy whose dad had a pigeon loft and a man who
was never happier than when his marriage proposal was turned down at the top
of a pigeon-loft folly. (Yeah, sure. Incredibly happy.) The Field Marshal
isn't impressed, so Orr tells them/us the story of how he got there,
starting with his swoon at the end of the last chapter.
After the swoon, Orr wakes up on a new train; he aches in various places,
including the old circular pain in his chest. "I was to be a waiter; one
who waited" he says. The train contained officials from the Republic on a
peace mission; he was drafted as an assistant to the head waiter, there
because he can't understand their language and therefore can't reveal their
secrets. Of course there is an obvious second meaning of him being forced
to wait for something else to happen; maybe he's given up on the dream of
The Bridge and wants to wake up, but his body has not yet recovered enough.
The train has cars with anti-aircraft guns; they are going towards a war,
and more and more of the train starts to be replaced with armored carriages
holding troops, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and the like. Orr now served
only military officers.
They are attacked by planes; the anti-aircraft guns drive them off or they
drive the train into tunnels. They start going through an area with many
active volcanoes and lava flows. They are attacked in the midst of an
avalanche of boulders, probably set up as an ambush; the Field Marshal's men
loot the train and kill everyone but Orr. "Language saved me again"; Orr
speaks the same language as the bandits, and the Field Marshal laughs at him
and decides that he'll keep him alive as a valet and to tell stories. The
Field Marshal takes his handkerchief. They set out on the bandits' smaller
train.
(I should point out that language was a complicated issue on The Bridge as
well. There, Orr spoke the general language that everyone spoke, the
language of administrators, but most people had a second specialized
language for their profession, and Orr understood none of them. That was
why he couldn't understand many of the answers to his questions about The
Bridge.)
The Field Marshal is sort of a third-world cliche; he wears garish uniforms,
throws captured soldiers into boiling mud for sport, or ties them to the
front of his train and runs them down, and keeps a dozen pigs in luxurious
state carriages while keeping his human captures in cattle trucks. Later he
drags a guy out of the boiling mud, lets the mud harden, and makes a statue
out of him. He likes to ask Orr if Orr likes their little games, knowing
that Orr has to lie and say that he does, or be killed. Three medium
bombers (an allusion to the three planes of The Bridge) bomb the train; the
Field Marshal, Orr, and then men survive in a ruined city, where the men
hunt and eat the inhabitants. This brings us back to the beginning of Orr's
part of this chapter.
The Field Marshal decides to play a sexual game with Orr; he has Orr put on
a black dress, and gives him a machine gun that he says is loaded. The
Field Marshal wants Orr to poke the machine gun up the Marshal's bum while
the Marshal mounts a pig. Orr figures that the bullets in the machine gun
have been emptied of powder; he thinks that the Field Marshal is waiting for
Orr to pull the trigger, after which the Marshal will have the fun of
killing him with some weapon hidden under the pillow. So Orr crushes the
Marshal's skull with the machine gun instead. Then he escapes, taking
various valuables including his handkerchief.
End of chapter. Well, what was this for? The Field Marshal and his milleu
never return; the whole episode is contained within this chapter. In the
final conflict with the Marshal, Orr narrates: "I detest this man. But
neither of us is stupid." A rather out-of-character sentiment, wouldn't you
think? I can imagine Orr thinking "I detest this man" but "neither of us is
stupid" has rather a James Bond quality that seems unlike the Orr of the
rest of the book. In fact, Orr has no real personality whatsoever in this
chapter. In theory, this is supposed to be because he is totally focussed
on survival, in fact, I suspect that it's because this little chunk of story
could be about anyone, and it's just stuck here with Orr as the protagonist
because Orr is in the rest of the book. This is, in fact, the Obligatory
Deadly Vengeance scene in this book.
Nearly every Banks book has an Obligatory Deadly Vengeance scene (ODV, for
short). The ODV has the following invarient structure:
1. The protagonist is presented as, ordinary, a good guy.
2. But there is a villain. We know he's villianous because he does
exaggeratedly villainous things, far worse than most real-life evil people
do.
3. After we've been regaled with stories of how bad the villain is, the
protagonist kills the villain, often in some "poetic justice" fashion, often
with torture.
4. But the protagonist's murder or torture/murder is fine, justifiable, and
good -- because the bad guy is such a villain.
I have no idea why the ODV is there, really, but Banks loves it. It exists
in Use of Weapons, Excession, Inversions, Look To Windward, and in lesser
form in Player of Games and The Crow Road. _Complicity_ is based on it.
It's probably in more Banks books that I haven't read.
What are the consequences of the ODV? Well, Banks has political goals for
his work, and the ODV directly detracts from those goals by making Banks'
readers feel like torture and/or execution are the right way to handle these
kind of people. In real life, people with Banks' politics don't go on lone
killer vengeance sprees. They start human rights groups. And by doing so,
they win at least limited victories. Those who do decide that killing the
kulaks is the way to go end up, if they happen to win, by creating regimes
that are worse than the ones they overthrew. Does anyone think that South
Africa would be in better shape now if, instead of having a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, they had a lot of firing squads?
But who could argue with killing people like the Field Marshal? Well, the
reason you can't argue is because Banks has written them that way. They
have no humanity whatsoever, and are furnished with over-the-top atrocity
stories designed to elicit exactly the feeling that this person must be
destroyed at any cost. Remember, none of these people ever really existed,
so their purpose within the book is simply to elicit this feeling.
So why does Banks do this so regularly? Well, the only answer would involve
guessing at motives from a distance, which is of course difficult and dicey.
I'd guess that he writes these scenes for the same reason, whatever that is,
as he writes all of the male characters who are dealing with power-fueled
sex fantasies in his books. Surely he can't beleive in this kind of thing
for intellectual reasons, or that these are simply fine dramatic scenes, or
really think that putting in an ODV helps his readers confront these issues
in some way. The ODV exists to present only one reasonable solution; they
are not there to cause the reader to think about "these issues", because
they don't cause the reader to think.
In any event, the ODV is the biggest thing holding Banks back from really
top-class writing. Here it's caused him to drop irrelevant material into a
perfectly good, even efficient story structure; in other books it destroys
the work entirely. I suspect that a fondness for the ODV is what causes
some people to inexplicably put _Inversions_ at the top of their Banks book
list; that book is one long, twisted fantasy in which the female characters
exist mostly to be raped or threatened with rape. Banks' later Culture
books, _Inversions_ and _Look To Windward_, both show an increasing fondness
for the ODV and are among his worst as a result; his best book, _Use of
Weapons_, works in part because the protagonist and the writer and the
reader all *know* that the ODV is wrong even as it's being committed, yet
understand in some other than comic-book way the flaw in the protagonist's
character that causes him to do these things.
I really hope that when Banks returns to writing from his vacation that he
will have thought about this. If any of the people out there who say that
they know him are reading this, ask him about it, would you?
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 1 of 3)
Now that the ODV has been gotten out of the way, Banks can return to the
story. This chapter again begins with the narrator's history, presumably as
a dream of Orr's.
Andrea moves into her mother's house; it's a good time in the narrator's
life. She gets him to like some classical music. He forgoes hang-gliding
and goes parachuting. He goes into partnership with two other people and
they start their own business. His politics are getting less radical, too;
he joins the Labor Party and writes letters for Amnesty International.
His friend's wife catches his friend in an affair; the narrator tries to
smooth things over. It seems strange to him to try to persuade her not to
leave him over sleeping with another woman "almost unreal, almost comical at
times." After all, both he and Andrea are still regularly sleeping with
other people. "Was it the slip of paper that made the difference, the
living together, the children, or just the belief in the vows, the
institution, in a religion?"
What pathos. His friend and his friend's wife are certainly not described
as the kind of people who have much belief in institutions, religion, slips
of paper, or any of the other bogeymen that the narrator throws up. Hidden
in that list are all the life experiences the narrator doesn't have: the
living together, the children, the acknowledged commitment to each other.
Still, he thinks that it shows "how fragile even the most secure-seeming
relationship could be, if you went against whatever rules you'd agreed." In
other words, it scares him off of trying to change the rules with Andrea.
We finally find out the genesis of the handkerchief. He's cleaning out his
car and he finds the silk scarf she'd given him to use that day at the
tower; it has a blood stain dried on it in a rough circle. He tries to
clean it but can't, offers it to her, she tells him to keep it, changes her
mind, takes it and returns it, cleaned spotlessly, with his initials monogra
mmed on it. She wouldn't tell him how she and her mother cleaned it: it's a
"family secret". He keeps it carefully ever after.
This is a potently symbolic scene; Banks is back to writing excellently once
again. The circle of dried blood is an O, the same as the wound on Orr's
chest that defines him, the same O that Arrol monograms on the handkerchief
in the dream of The Bridge, the same O that her lipstick leaves on that
handkerchief. In real life, it's the mark of sex, a female mystery, a lunar
mystery, a female "family secret". She knows how to wipe it away as if it
had never been. He can not. Therefore, she has control over his
identity -- his initials -- he has no control over hers. She calls him a
fetishist for keeping it so carefully. Meanwhile he's thinking of it as a
symbol of their past history, their love, their unstated commitment, like a
knight's favor -- but it's also a symbol of his fear of a woman using sex to
trap or confine him, to control him; the wound that takes away his strength.
Anyways, I could go on for pages about that handkerchief -- one probably
could write a Ph.D. thesis on it -- so I'll just stop.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 2 of 3)
I'll resist writing more about that O and the she-was-a-woman-of-letters
thing on pg. 156 that equates his anxiety over her education to his
amazingly primal anxiety over a part of her anatomy, and how both give her
more power over him ... anyways, the narrator finds out that Andrea is
writing articles about Russian literature, he feels "confused, almost dizzy"
and hurt that she didn't tell him. She joins a feminist collective running
a bookshop; hers is a "partnership, of sorts" unlike his own descriptively
unqualified partnership; he feels uncomfortable there especially after one
of them criticizes her for kissing him goodbye in public.
The Tories win: Maggie Thatcher is in power. He reacts to this as a good
reason to take his accountant's advice to buy a bigger house and another
car, otherwise the Tories (and not the government, presumably) will get the
tax money. She helps him decorate the house, and he feels deja vu over the
time a year earlier when he'd helped her decorate her house; he is
enormously happy. If this were a story or a film, this is where he'd want
it to end.
Unfortunately there is a saying of some Greek philosopher (Plato, perhaps?)
that you can't count any man as having a happy life until you know how their
life ends. Something can always happen later that makes you so miserable
that it seems to invalidate what went before, or even destroys what made you
happy before. This theme is also one that Banks picked up on in
_Excession_, where one of the Minds wonders whether entities Sublime simply
to end their story so that they can finally evaluate it without fear of
adding anything else; to metaphorically calculate their score.
But he can't freeze their moment of togetherness and life goes on. People
ask if he's related to the lead singer who is one half of the new hit group,
the Eurythmics; he says no. This is a clue that his last name is actually
Lennox.
So now we know that the narrator's name is actually Alexander Lennox. Does
this tell us anything? No, not really; all I can think of is that it means
his initials on the monogrammed scarf that Andrea gives him are "AL", which
doesn't mean anything to me. I've never really liked the way that people
refer to him as Lennox when discussing the book; the word "Lennox" never
actually appears in it. I'm going to continue to call him the narrator,
though perhaps protagonist would have been more accurate.
Andrea continues to have flings: "he tried not to be jealous. It isn't
jealousy, he told himself; it's more like envy. And fear. One of them may
be a nicer, kinder, better man than I am, and more loving." Not to mention
younger, or more exciting, or richer, or smarter, or better in bed, or...
In fact there is a name for this mixture of envy-and-fear; it's called
jealousy. But it does sound like the narrator is starting to be a bit more
honest with himself.
She has a tempestuous love-at-first-sight relationship with a young
lecturer; he takes off for the hills in the second week of it. When he gets
back, it's over, but she's reluctant to see him; a week later he sees that
her eye is still bruised. She tells him not to do anything to the lecturer,
if he does she'll never speak to him again. His answer is illuminating.
"'We do not all,' he told her coldly, 'resort to violence quite that
quickly.'" Instead of saying something like "I wouldn't do that" or "You
should know that I wouldn't resort to violence that quickly" he's defending
men as a class against a remark that he interprets as an insult, not to him
as an individual, but to him as a member of the group of men. His first
concern is to differentiate himself from a stereotype, one that the lecturer
has reinforced by being quick to resort to violence. In some way, he feels
that he and the lecturer are in this together; what they do reflects on each
other in some gender-linked way. If Andrea had been struck by a female
enginneer with whom she was having a fling, and told him not to hit her
back, would he have said that "We do not all resort to violence that
quickly" ?
He realizes that just as he has never been to Paris, Gustave has never to
Edinburgh; he feels curiously close to him.
Andrea and her mother start having less well-off intellectuals over; he
tells her that "you're starting a salon; you're becoming a goddamned blue
stocking!"
He goes to Yemen on business, and stands in the ruins of a place called
Mocha n the desert on the Red Sea; now we know where the imagery for that
dream comes from. (He tried to remember the name of the statue and guessed
"Mock? Mocca?" I'll come back to this later.)
The Tories and Thatcher win again. So does Reagan. The narrator fumes
about how Reagan has the power to destroy everyone in a nuclear exchange, so
why doesn't the narrator get a vote to elect him or not? His friend says
"Still, on the subject of unelected reactionaries, what d'you think the
Politburo is?" "A fucking sight more responsible than that gang of gung-ho
shitheads" the narrator answers about the opposing gang of completely
unelected gerontocrats with their finger on the button. Thus proving that
the religion of one's youth is never easily given up, even when one has a
big house and lots of expensive sports cars.
The narrator's father dies of a heart attack, like Andrea's father had. He
asks Andrea not to come to the funeral. (Why, exactly?)
His company expands, he argues with his partners about their employees'
salaries, saying they should all have a share. His partners, SDP
supporters, say "a workers' collective? Why the hell not?" They say no, but
start a bonus scheme. I have to admit; I found this to be very funny. A
bonus scheme is one of the classic tools of capitalist motivation; tell
people that the harder they work, the bigger a bonus they will get, a token
sharing-out as the carrot that is supposed to make people think that oh no,
they are not generating excess profits for the bosses.
Then we go from comedy to tragedy. Andrea returns from Paris and looks sad.
He wonders about calling Gustave but doesn't; finally Andrea's mother finds
out that Gustave has MS. He asks Andrea why she didn't tell him, she says
she doesn't know, and that she doesn't know what to do, Gustave doesn't have
anyone to look after him properly.
A chill settles in the narrator. And well it might. Having someone to look
after you properly during severe illness is, in our societies, not a given.
Ideally, it takes one-on-one care from someone else who loves you or at
least personally cares about you. It is in fact one of the big things that
people who get married commit each other to do ("in sickness and in
health..."). It's not the kind of thing that you can really do well for
more than one person at once. Therefore it is one of those zero-sum-game
economic entities; Andrea taking care of Gustave necessarily means Andrea
not taking care of the narrator. If Andrea, Gustave, and the narrator were
in some kind of functional communal family, this might not be the case, but
our societies don't support such arrangements well. And the narrator and
Gustave certainly haven't tried to remedy this lack by getting in touch with
each other.
Andrea spends more time in Paris; when she comes back, he feels that their
sex is less fun but more tender, with a sense of how impermanent such
moments are, as if it has become in itself a kind of language. He feels
self-pity but then thinks about how many people are worse off than he is.
He finds out with "righteous dismay" that the bridge was not painted over a
neat three-year period (i.e. the period over which Andrea was originally
going to stay in Paris), it's done piecemeal in a cycle lasting from four to
six years. He tries to assuage his dismay at this messiness of human
relationships by his usual remedy; he buys a fantastically expensive new
car.
It's now 1985; Andrea's thoughts are never really all with him; he tries to
talk about Gustave's MS but she won't. "It was his own fault; he had never
wanted to talk about Gustave. You couldn't change the rules now." Rather,
she can change the rules, but he can't.
He dreams about the dying man, and sometimes thinks he can see him lying in
a hospital bed, surrounded by machines. This line is the main thing that I
can find to support a suggestion that when Orr turns on his TV, he's really
seeing Gustave in his hospital bed, not the narrator. I don't think this
really works; the TV image is too detailed, the correspondences between the
man in the bed and the narrator are too great (the man in the bed looks
beaten up initially), there is interaction between the dream narrative and
when Andrea appears in the TV, and later the narrator and the man on the bed
are explicitly identified with each other. But symbolically the two are
being equated; first the narrator sees Gustave in the hospital, in dreams,
later he will, from dreams, see himself in the hospital in reality. And we
can take this as evidence that Gustave's situation is certainly known to the
narrator's unconcious.
The narrator starts to get disgusted with his situation -- something which
never struck him as incongruous while he was happy with Andrea, though it
certainly struck me often -- he makes money for oil companies, he's a boss,
he employs. He gives up drinking and starts doing coke, quitting when he
sees African famine pictures and realizing how much money he's throwing
away. (I note that he never seems to think this about his car, however.)
Finally, Andrea tells him that she's going to stay in Paris, to look after
Gustave. "They might have to get married, if his family insisted. She hoped
he understood. 'I'm sorry kid,' she said, dull voiced." This is the
crowning blow; she turned his proposal of marriage down, and now she's going
to get married to Gustave. Because he's sick. The family insisting on it
is an obvious excuse; if they were that interested, they could look after
him themselves. Now the narrator's car crash is pretty much inevitable;
he's going to beat Gustave at this competition, damn it, even if it kills
him.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 3 of 3)
The last half of this chapter has the third barbarian dream. Note that this
is one of times when formal structure tells you something. One of the good
points about formal structure is that when you break it, even slightly, it
puts sudden emphasis on that section of the work, which can be used to great
effect. On the other hand, sometimes you just break it because you can't
think of anything to put there that fits the structure. This feels like one
of those times.
The "meta" chapters have a certain structure: dream first, then Orr's
experiences. In Metamorphosis, Orr has been dreaming about the narrator's
real life, so the structure is inverted: (dream of) narrator's real life
first, then Orr's experiences. So this part should be about Orr. But it's
not; it's a barbarian dream. Why?
Well, absent some insight by somebody else, I suspect that the truth is that
there really isn't much left for Orr to do. Once Orr decides to leave the
Bridge, his purpose for existence is really over. Yet his lifetime was
extended so that Banks could fit in the ODV. Now that that's over, all that
is left is the wrapup -- but Banks has more of the narrator's life he wants
to write about first. So, rather than create some other Eye-of-God-like new
dream place for Orr, Banks gives us more of the barbarian. I'm glad he did;
the barbarian was always pretty interesting. Still, this screams editing
failure to me.
So. Now the barbarian is 300 years old, but he still wants to live. He's
still with the familiar; the familiar is still trying to save him, because
when the barbarian dies the familiar will vanish into a puff of dust.
When they got back from the Underworld, the familiar had a big battle with
the sorcerer who had sent the barbarian there. The barbarian was frozen by
a spell that the familiar cast during this battle, just as he was frozen by
the witch. The familiar won, but found that he couldn't take over the
sorceror's body like he wanted to; he could be brought out of the
Underworld, but had to stay in an inanimate object. From this point on, the
barbarian and familiar really were stuck with each other. (I think this
means that when the narrator wakes up, i.e. leaves the Underworld, his mind
and body are no longer going to be able to be seperate.)
The familiar had advised the barbarian to get back together with the young
witch who gave him the knife missile, Angharienne. She was suspicious, but
the familiar made an agreement with her, and told the barbarian that they
were going to have a trial troilistic arrangement. The barbarian said OK,
as long as there's nothing dirty involved. (A troilistic arrangement is not
simply a menage a trois, but a relationship in which one of the participants
is dependent on observing their partner having sex with a third person.
This describes the familiar, barbarian, and witch pretty well if the
relationship is really between the familiar and the witch. If the familiar
represents the narrator's mind, the barbarian his body, and the witch,
obviously, Andrea, then this could be an allusion to the time on the
hospital bed, where his mind had to just watch his body.)
That was long ago, the barbarian and familiar are now in their flying castle
(space ship), with lots of mixed magic-technological things like enchanted
submachine guns, video screens and invisible platinum, the familiar has
dismissed the guards, sent off the grandchildren, and given away half of
their gear, giving people the impression that they were about to die. It
found new batteries for the knife missile and put it in charge of security.
The barbarian is trying to get it up, to see if he can anymore; he asks the
familiar to magic up a houri or put in a dirty video, but the familiar won't
because the barbarian might die of a heart attack and the familiar still has
a few irons in the fire. The barbarian was really attached to his wife, the
witch Angharienne; she stayed young till the end but she was really about
1000 years old, and she died some time back. She became a small wooden
statue and left instructions to be planted in a forest near where she was
born; the statue will become a small and shrivelled tree, grow big, and then
shrink like it's going back in time until it becomes a seed. I'm not sure
what this story means.
The familiar is sad, telling the barbarian about the witch's tree, because
when it dies it'll just be gone. When the barbarian dies, he probably won't
be allowed in the Underworld because after he destroyed Charon down there
last time they had to put in a whole new regime and a couple of characters
named Virgil and Dante took over. So he's worried about showing up at the
pearly gates and having them let him in but with something really nasty
arranged for him.
Anyways, the familiar says "Ah-ha", and the old barbarian sees a young,
strong barbarian in the video screens, coming towards the castle. The young
guy is really impressive looking, and the old barbarian is scared; he's all
stiff now, and his hand shakes, and he needs glasses. (Note: the narrator
complained that he was getting old at the end of the first half of this
chapter; his needing glasses was one of the signs.) The young barbarian is
wearing a wolf helmet.
Anyways, the new guy walks through the flying castle's defenses (most of
which are used as Culture pseudoscience in later books); a total exclusion
field fails to put him to sleep because it's screened by the helmet, a laser
is blocked by some sort of mirrorfield in the guy's sword (he has some sort
of limited prescience, from the helmet or something, that lets him know that
the laser's about to fire on him), he cuts through monofilament
reinforcement in the airlocks with blade-fields in his sword, the knife
missile won't attack him because it's not a real (Culture) one that can
think for itself, it has an IFF circuit that the helmet feeds a fake Friend
signal. The barbarian is yelling at the familiar for letting all the guards
go. Now the barbarian is in the exact same position that all of the people
that he used to attack were in, he's an old guy, surrounded by the treasure
he's built up, and a young guy is marching through all his defenses and
coming to kill him.
The old barbarian really doesn't want to die, he wets the bed, screams
"Mammy, Daddy!", and tries to promise the young barbarian anything he wants.
It's an oddly affecting scene, actually. But the young barbarian just walks
up and kills him in a really impersonal way, the old barbarian has asked
"Wh- wh- what's yer problem, big filla?" and the young one says "Now problem
moy son" and raises his sword.
But the familiar has planned for the whole thing. As the sword comes down,
a transference (machine, probably) goes into action, reading what would in
the Culture be called the familiar's and old barbarian's mind states and
putting them into the wolf helmet and the young barbarian's brain
respectively. Basically, the familiar has arranged to lure a young
barbarian here so that they can steal his body (and the helmet for the
familiar) and avoid death.
The barbarian's confused about the whole thing, but the familiar gets him
going, the castle's circuits won't accept that the barbarian is the rightful
owner of the place because he's in a new body, so a thermo-nuclear explosion
is going to be set off, and they have to leave. (These "fidelity circuits"
are just like the ones used later in _Consider Phlebas_.) The barbarian
feels great, like he's had a dream about being an old man like the one in
the bed but had just woken up. They didn't get any treasure, but he's sure
that there will be more castles and magicians and old barbarians -- "What a
life, eh? This is the gemm!".
Parts of this are just a fun story, like parts of the Underworld one, but
there are some symbolically important ones too. The old barbarian being
killed, and then being reborn young again, is exactly like any one of lots
of death-and-resurrection, cycle-of-life, harvest legends that you can find
in any Joseph Campbell book; I'm sure that there were Scottish varients of
it. They used to put the old king to death so that the earth would be
renewed, and the young king would mystically be the same person reborn;
later the custom became more symbolic and less literal. Banks very
typically takes an ancient myth form and dresses it up in Culture
pseudoscience so that nothing literally mystical happens, everything is
"rational", but that the myth itself is reenacted. This is a good
storytelling technique for someone who insists on strict rationalism and
atheism, because the ancient myth forms still resonate better as stories
than most others.
The symbolism for this book is less clear; significantly, the barbarian
feels that his time as an old man in the bed has been a dream, just like the
narrator's time in the hospital bed has been spent in dreams. Something
about the vigor of youth renewed is going to be critical in getting the
narrator out of bed later, as we'll see. The barbarian will appear one more
time in the book and I'll try to go into this further then.
Rich Puchalsky
> Rich Puchalsky wrote:
> > escape. Edinburgh is the big city, the place where the narrator got
> > educated, the upper-middle class, the narrator's present; Fife is the
> > country, the place he came from, the lower class, the narrator's past.
>
> there are other aspects to the two places that may also be relevant
>
>
> Fife is a mix of agriculture and mining, and some fishing...[...]
>
> so there is also a resonance of the intellectual and the
> physical...certainly that's what I got from it
That's good to know. I tend to think that the intellectual vs physical are
more directly represented by the familiar and barbarian, and that the
upper-middle vs lower class is the more important representation for
Edinburgh and Fife, but I could be wrong.
Eric Jarvis
I think the implication is that the two are inextricably linked
historically they are...and for those of us who live on the cusp of
middle-working class it does seem to still be the perception...work
with your head is middle class...work with your hands is working
class
Keith Waddell
Apologies for the tardy reply, & I'm afraid it's not a very helpful one:
I'm sure that at few years ago, driving into Edinburgh from the north, I saw a
road sign to a place; the name of which made me think "Aha! That's where Banksie
got Dissy Pittons from!" However, I can't now remember or find any reference to
the place name.
Maybe I dreamt it?!
Cheers, Keith.
BaldiePete wrote:
> >
> > I've always associated it with Arrol's, the Scottish ale brewed in or near
> > Edinburgh & likely to have been very familiar to Al Lennox!
> >
> > Also, the name of the bar/restaurant - Dissy Pittons - is an Edinburgh
> > reference. I think that, in general, Banksie's references are more
> localised &
> > straightforward than you may think; though only to readers who know the
> locale.
> > I remember that it was the geographical & cultural (small 'c'!) references
> that
> > made it such an engaging book to me.
> >
>
> What is the Edinburgh reference for Dissy Pittons??
> I've been scratching my (almost hairless) head and can't think of one.
>
> BaldiePete
BaldiePete
> Twenty-third post
>
>
> Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 3 of 3)
>
> The last half of this chapter has the third barbarian dream
<snip the rest>
This is a bit off-topicand apologies if someone has mentioned this on the NG
in the past.
In The Bridge, the barbarian is never given a name (at least not than I
remember). However, in Feersum Endjinn there is another character (Bascule)
whose speech is written phonetically like the barbarian in The Bridge.
Completely by accident I discovered yesterday that a bascule is the lifting
part of an opening bridge like Tower Bridge in London. It looks like IMB
might have been playing a little joke with characters name making a
connection to the barbarian in The Bridge.
Sorry for the interruption - back to you Rich !!
BaldiePete
Rich Puchalsky
> In The Bridge, the barbarian is never given a name (at least not than I
> remember). However, in Feersum Endjinn there is another character
(Bascule)
> whose speech is written phonetically like the barbarian in The Bridge.
> Completely by accident I discovered yesterday that a bascule is the
lifting
> part of an opening bridge like Tower Bridge in London. It looks like IMB
> might have been playing a little joke with characters name making a
> connection to the barbarian in The Bridge.
>
> Sorry for the interruption - back to you Rich !!
Oh, no problem. I hadn't ever looked up Bascule, so I didn't know the
meaning of the word. There are similarities between The Bridge and Feersum
Endjinn that go beyond the phonetic spelling, too, both have people living
in a large, incongruously built structure that knows one seems to remember
the origin of, or the purpose of. (The Bridge is incongruous because people
don't usually live on a bridge; the castle in Feersum Endjinn is incongruous
because it's built to giant scale.)
Actually, there are images that are later used in just about all of the
Culture novels found somewhere in The Bridge. For the next chapter I found
one later used in _LTW_, of all things.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Quarternary (part 1 of 2)
Actually, I'm going to briefly go back to a couple of things I missed in the
last chapter -- as references pile up on each other, the layered meanings
get denser, and I have to decide what to leave out. But these couple of
things I probably should have put in.
First: in the story of the narrator's life in Pliocene, the narrator starts
exercising, he starts playing squash but doesn't like it because "he
preferred to have his own territory in a game". "Besides, Andrea kept
beating him." This is a comment on his relationship with Gustave; each has
their own territory, neither will venture into the other's, and Andrea is
the one with real control in that game.
Second: I had been wondering about the story of the witch turning into a
tree that starts out old and ages backwards. It struck me today that this
is probably one of the stories from Ovid's _Metamorphosis_, which has very
many stories of women turning into trees. I don't remember it well enough
to remember which story is most similar, and I'm not going to take the
effort to read through it just for this, but if anyone does remember, feel
free. Anyways, someone else here previously suggested a connection to Ovid,
and this seems like a clear one.
The chapter starts with the narrator talking with his friend about all sorts
of then-current stuff, all of which has relevant story overtones. First the
narrator mentions that (Revillos band singer) Fay Fife's name is a pun:
"Where are you from? Ah'm Fay Fife". Another thread here discussed the
symbolism of being from Fife: it's rural, the lower class, the narrator's
past, the Kingdom of Fife that is the Kingdom which is one of the directions
on the Bridge (the other being the City, or the city of Edinburgh, or the
upper-middle class, the narrator's present.)
They talk about the Sandinistas and SDI. About parapsychology and lucid
dreaming (The Bridge is in some ways a lucid dream, a dream that is
consciously controlled by the dreamer). They talk about the hypothesis of
causative formation, a theory by a British guy named Sheldrake which struck
me as being a big pile of crap -- it's the theory that once someone,
somewhere, does something, a "morphic field" makes it suddenly easier for
everyone everywhere to do that same thing. Immediately after they discuss
what the reader realizes is a candidate for morphic field emulation; a
Russian engineer living in France who crashed his car in England, they found
a lot of money in the car and suspected him of crime, but he was in a coma
which the doctors thought he was faking. "Devious bastards we engineers"
the narrator says. And yes, this is quite an idea for the narrator it
seems.
The narrator's drunk, and he thinks about taking thr train back to Edinburgh
from his friend's place. He could take the train over the old bridge, throw
out a coin and wish that Gustave would kill himself or that Andrea would get
pregnant and want to raise the baby here. He wonders how Andrea could leave
Scotland, this was her home, where her mother lived, her earliest friends,
where her character formed etc etc. -- he would willingly leave himself out
of the equation (yeah right, I must interject) but how could she do it?
"Self sacrifice; the woman behind the man, looking after him, putting
herself second; it went against all she believed in."
The narrator is working himself up, obviously, but let's stop for a moment
and ask if that last sentence is true. First, the narrator is as usual
conflating the problems of ordinary humanity with the problems of
patriarchy; although women are called on to sacrifice for men in certain
ways in our societies more than the reverse, this is hardly a case where
patriarchy is driving the self sacrifice. The fact is that in any lifetime,
patriarchal society or not, there are times when people are called on to
make sacrifices for other people. In fact, whenever someone gets sick,
someone else must make the sacrifice of looking after them. If Gustave had
asked or even implied that Andrea should look after him because she was his
woman, she'd have been out of there like a shot, but that isn't what's going
on. The problems of human existence can't all be blamed on the
capitalist/patriarchal/whatever bogeyman.
So, putting aside the bit about "the woman behind the man", does
self-sacrifice go against what Andrea believes in, or her character at any
rate? Andrea previously said that she was selfish and fickle; the narrator
said that she was generous and independent. I implied before that I thought
that she was wrong and he was right in that case. Well, now's really the
best time to decide; we have all of their back story that we're ever going
to get.
It seems to me that there is nothing particularly selfish and fickle about
Andrea. Fickle people don't get Ph.D's in Russian literature; selfish
people don't start salons and support artists. Yes, she sleeps around, but
that isn't being selfish by her standards, and she is capable of maintaining
long term relationships, so she isn't that fickle. On the other hand,
generous and independent seems fairly accurate. She's generous with her
time and affection, and certainly independent. If she's making
self-sacrifices for Gustave, it seems likely that it's because she sees a
need on the part of someone who she genuinely likes, and that her generosity
outweighs her need to be independent.
The narrator's basic problem with Andrea is that he loves her and she
doesn't love him; or rather, she loves him, but not in the same way or with
the same strength. In the Intermission to this series of posts I wrote
about Banks books being about the human condition; well, this novel is
basically a story of unrequited love. I'll get into this in more detail
later, I'd better stop for now.
So, the narrator is worked himself up. He feels like he should Andrea
everything about how he feels, about Gustave and her and himself. (If only
he had done that a decade or so ago.) But he can't through to her on the
phone. So -- he decides to drive home. Why not, everyone does it, he
drives better drunk than most people sober, etc. He tries the phone again:
still busy. (Like the time when his mother died, when he got disconnected
from her and got angry; the metaphorical dangers of his inability to
communicate.)
He resolves to drive carefully. "What am I doing this for? he though. Will
this really make any difference? I hate people who drunk-drive; why the
hell am I doing it?" We know why he's doing it, but he doesn't have the
self-knowledge to know why. Largely, I think, because his ideology doesn't
permit him to admit that he has every right to feel an honest jealousy and
thwarted love, so he has to do a revenge/guilt trip scheme worthy of an 17
year old -- though, to give him credit, worthy of an 17 year old in an
operatic or Shakespearian romance.
He drives towards the bridge; the rail bridge's hollow metal bones look like
dried blood. He thinks, about the bridge. "One day, though, even you'll be
gone. Nothing lasts. Maybe that's what I want to tell her." (No, of
course not. He wants to tell that *he*'ll be gone, that *he* won't last,
because she's left.) "Maybe I want to say, No, of course I don't mind; you
must go. [...] Go; we'll all survive." (Of course, he actually wants to say
that if she goes he *won't* survive. Isn't fooling yourself wonderful?)
A truck pulls out from in front of him; there's an abandoned car there in
the near side lane on the bridge, he crashes into it. His seat belt holds
buts the steering wheel pistons into his chest.
Did he really plan for the whole thing to happen? Well, he hardly can have,
you can't plan a crash that will be exactly bad enough to send you into a
controllable semicoma but not kill you. So things worked out this way at
least partially by chance. On the other hand, it seems clear that he was
unconciously looking to have a bad crash that would send him to the hospital
and call her back to take care of him. If it hadn't been the abandoned car,
maybe he would have contrived something else. He could have died, sure, but
when you're that pissed off and drunk, your unconcious is willing to take
some big risks. Anyways, she *really* would have felt bad then, wouldn't
she?
But once it did happen that way, it all makes sense; recall his dream where
he decides to run to death on the rotating bridge and get back at the
unattainable witches who keep sexually teasing him; "They are caught, bound
[..] but I am free." He can lucid dream whatever he wants in his coma,
while she must come back and take care of him for a change; didn't that work
out well?
BaldiePete
> BaldiePete <nae...@wasps.net> wrote:
> > In The Bridge, the barbarian is never given a name (at least not than I
> > remember). However, in Feersum Endjinn there is another character
> (Bascule)
> > whose speech is written phonetically like the barbarian in The Bridge.
> > Completely by accident I discovered yesterday that a bascule is the
> lifting
> > part of an opening bridge like Tower Bridge in London. It looks like IMB
> > might have been playing a little joke with characters name making a
> > connection to the barbarian in The Bridge.
> >
> > Sorry for the interruption - back to you Rich !!
>
> Oh, no problem. I hadn't ever looked up Bascule, so I didn't know the
> meaning of the word. There are similarities between The Bridge and
Feersum
> Endjinn that go beyond the phonetic spelling, too, both have people living
> in a large, incongruously built structure that knows one seems to remember
> the origin of, or the purpose of. (The Bridge is incongruous because
people
> don't usually live on a bridge; the castle in Feersum Endjinn is
incongruous
> because it's built to giant scale.)
This theme has been used before in SF. I remember as a young SF fan about 25
years ago (woops that was a giveaway) being particularly keen on a short
novel by Robert Heinlein about a civilisation based on the crew of a slower
than light starship which had had some sort of accident (or mutiny ??) and
on which the descendants of the original crew no longer knew they were on a
ship. They thought that the entire universe consisted of the interior of the
ship. I can't remember the name of the novel but I do know that it was
actually two short stories or novellas cobbled together (Universe and Common
Sense IIRC).
These days I can't read any Heinlein without wanting to rip the book up -
his politics are just too annoying.
BaldiePete
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Quarternary (part 2 of 3, not 2)
This is the last chapter in which the formal structure says that Orr needs
to appear. So in this chapter he can indeed appear and wrap up his
existence.
Orr walks along the railroad track away from the city where he escaped from
the Field Marshal. Every night he dreams of the same man and city (i.e. the
narrator's real life), he starts to believe that these dreams are the
genuine reality, and expects each morning to wake up into a new life, "just
a nice clean hospital bed would be a start" -- but he doesn't.
He walks onto a battlefield, where he meets a man from one of his dreams,
the man who used to be whipping the waves with his flail. Note: this time
they don't meet in Orr's dream, but in Orr's reality -- which is still the
narrator's dream, but the guy has shifted up one level closer to reality.
The man is dressed in rags. Orr thinks "we last met in ... Mocca? (Occam?
Something like that)". Mocha is the place where the narrator saw a ruined
city by the sea in reality, in Yemen; Mocca was one of the names that Orr
guessed at for the scornful (mocking) statue in his dream of the place, now
we have a third variation of the name, Occam. The likely association for
Occam is Occam's Razor, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
This is commonly taken to mean, in science, that when you have two theories
that make the same predictions, the simplest one is best. Atheists often
use it to mean that it is not necessary to postulate the existence of a god
in order to explain anything; events can be explained more simply without
one.
The man is now whipping dead bodies that lie everywhere, not waves. He
beats each body exactly 100 times. Orr talks to him; the man says he's not
the same person as the man by the sea. He hands Orr a playing card, the
three of diamonds, that he says he was told to give to Orr. He doesn't know
what it's for, he won't say who gave it to him or why. Orr asks him what
happened to all the dead people. The man says that they didn't listen to
their dreams.
Orr walks off, and wonders if he should have lain down and let the man lash
him to death, maybe death is the only way to wake up from this "terrible,
enchanted sleep". But that would require faith and he can't risk it.
So what does this sequence mean? I'm tempted to write "you've got me" and
go on, but pride insists that I at least give it a shot. OK, the original
dream was about the futility of power; it combined elements of the
Ozymandius poem ("look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair" -- but his
works are all crumbled) and the King Canute legend (whipping the waves won't
cause the tide to go back). Orr was a phantom in that dream. This time
he's real and can really interact with the man. The man himself is a
lower-class symbol, dressed in rags and hired to whip away at a meaningless
job; he's a diligent workman who doesn't ask questions.
Let's see: these people died because they didn't listen to their dreams, and
now they've been incorporated into a symbol of the futility of power. I
believe that this is a warning from the narrator to himself. He stuck
himself into this situation because of power; he wanted power over Andrea,
to get her back. But that is futile, and stupid; it really doesn't do him
any good to get Andrea back if he's in a coma anyway. Now his dreams are
telling him that he really wants to wake up. He can keep whipping away at
his dreams indefinitely, or he can leave, wake up, and do something
worthwhile. Something like that is my best guess.
The three of diamonds? Well, three planes, three men of whom the narrator
is the third. No idea why diamonds, except that they are valuable; maybe
the narrator is telling himself that he values his life too lightly.
I have no idea why Occam's Razor. You've got me. Having written a partial
analysis longer than the original scene, it's time to go on. Though
actually, Occam's Razor is telling him that all of the people in these
dreams, and specifically the man with the whip, are actually himself, which
is true.
Orr goes on to walk through a desert. He still has the handkerchief, "like
a [knight's] favor". He also still has the waiter's jacket, he's still
waiting. He falls on a dune, dehydrated. Then he sees the young barbarian
come towards him, with the wolf helmet. He looks transparent,
insubstantial. He sways, put a hand to his brow, talks to the helmet, walks
closer. He doesn't seem to see Orr. He stands "too close to me, too close
to my feet, as though his own feet were somehow inside mine. Then he falls,
the helmet cries out, he's apparently dying of exposure. But he doesn't
fall onto the sand; when Orr looks again there is no trace of him or his
helmet. In fact, it's obvious that he's fallen into, or merged with, Orr.
Orr uses the last of his strength to peel open his coat, that attracts two
buzzards that spiral down like DNA, Orr chokes them, he drinks their blood
and that gives him the strength to get through the desert.
That's it for the barbarian and the familiar. In Underworld dream, Andrea
said that the narrator would become the barbarian, the barbarian would kill
himself and the narrator would live again in the barbarian's body. Well,
the barbarian did kill himself once, he killed his old self and awoke in his
new self. The first and third parts of Andrea's prophecy are really the
same. In this case, the barbarian and familiar have both merged with Orr,
who is the narrator's alter ego. Note that neither of them really die;
there are no bodies left. Also, no one has called Orr by his name for a
while, the last person to do so was the Field Marshal, who called him Ore
(i.e. the ore from which metal, the narrator's real identity, is extracted),
so he's really becoming more and more the narrator and less a separate dream
self. All of the narrator's various identities are joining; when the
narrator wakes up, he will indeed live again in the barbarian, who was a
symbol of his physical body all along.
Finally, Orr sees, ahead of him, The Bridge. It is in ruins, just like the
ruined city of Mocca. The main sections are still intact, but the linking
sections, the bridges within bridges, have been destroyed. Everything is
deserted; old carriages are rusted to the rails. He finds Dissy Pitton's,
where he drank with Brooke, and Dr. Joyce's office, and the Arrol's summer
apartment. At that apartment, "The fire is buried beneath the waves of
sand, so is the bed."
This is getting too long, so I'm going to post it and have this chapter take
up three posts instead of two.
Rich Puchalsky
Metamorphosis: Quarternary (part 3 of 3)
So Orr has traveled along the railroad tracks all the way around the world
and returned to where he started. (He once thought the bridge might go all
the way around the world; it doesn't, but the rails do.) Now that he's
returned to where he started, I now know why it was never indicated whether
Orr left The Bridge in the Cityward or Kingdomward direction. The truth is
that he hasn't really left it, so the direction that he set out in was
immaterial.
Orr passes out and wakes up in a hospital bed, hooked up to a catheter and
so on. But he's not in the real world. He realizes that he's inside The
Bridge, inside its metal bones. Dr Joyce is there, as his doctor, he's seen
Arrol there, dressed as a nurse, later there is a mention of a sallow-faced
lad who might be the narrator as a child. They've taken away the card he
was given, "and the scarf...I mean the handkerchief" if we needed any more
confirmation that the scarf that Andrea gives him and the handkerchief he
gives Arrol are one and the same. (Though, come to think of it, part of his
dream fantasy may have been the role reversal of him giving her the
handkerchief instead of the other way around. If so, it didn't hold, Arrol
was still the one to monogram it with his initials, not he with hers.)
Dr. Joyce says that they have a new treatment that might make him better.
This time Orr eagerly agrees to it. The treatment turns out to be that Orr
has to tell everything he remembers to a machine. It takes a while. All
the people have gone, there's only Orr and the machine left. Again, no one
has used the name Orr in quite a while, so it might be just as good to say
that there is only the narrator and the machine left.
The machine tells him that his dreams were right in the end, that his last
ones after he left The Bridge were of his real self. The machine says that
he will believe it because he trusts machines, he understands them and they
don't frighten him, while he feels differently about people. In other
words, the narrator has constructed an entity within his dreams to present
himself with what he remembers, and he's made that entity in the form of
something he trusts. The technical term for this kind of entity is "spirit
guide", and at this point one should realize that the narrator has been
undergoing a varient of the type of experience known as a shamanic journey,
or a spirit quest.
This kind of thing is why I find it funny when people, or even Banks
himself, say that he doesn't have religion in his books. The drones and
Minds of the Culture are Hindu style gods, guardian angels, and other mythic
entities dressed up in a bit of pseudoscience. They are these entities not
because of their powers, although their powers are certainly worthy enough,
but because they function mythically and symbolically in the exact same
fashion. I've always felt that, extraordinary mental constraints aside, an
intelligent machine would probably get just as tired of looking after people
as other people do. One can certaily postulate that they wouldn't, but
absent evidence, it seems more correct to say that they don't because of
their mythic function within the story.
The machine tells him that his real body is in the Neurosurgical Unit at
Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, he was moved from the Royal Infirmary
in Edinburgh some time ago. He asks why the machine doesn't know exactly
when he was moved, and the machine replies that *he* doesn't know -- in
other words, the machine only knows what the narrator does. The machine
tells him that he doesn't know when it was because they have been trying
treatments and drugs on him that have scrambled his sense of time. The
machine tells him that he's been under for seven months, because last time
Andrea was there she said it would be "her birthday in a week and if [he]
were to wake up it would be the best --" time, presumably. So we know that
some part of the narrator can hear what his visitors say.
The machine tells him that his choice is to stay under or surface, and asks
if he's going to wake up. The man asks how he'd do that, and says that he
tried before, before he reached the desert. The machine says it doesn't
know how, but it knows that he can do it if he wants to. But neither of
them know if he wants to.
This is perhaps the explanation of the otherwise mysterious earlier
narration: "Let's get one thing absolutely straight: it's all a dream.
Either way, whatever. We both know that. I have a choice, however." The
"I have a choice" bit refers to the narrator's choice of whether to wake up
or not, and the "both" could be him and the machine -- but it could also be
Orr and the narrator.
The narrator/Orr wakes up again in an armchair in a small room with one door
and a screen. His body image has changed to one more closely matching
reality: no beard (they've shaved it), a bald patch, and he's thinner. The
door leads to another similar room with just a hospital bed in it; the bed
has a "blanket pulled back at one corner, as though in invitation." He half
expect to find an old guy who looks just like him, like Keir Dullea does in
_2001: A Space Odyssey_. But he doesn't, the screen turns on, this time in
color (previous times with the TV have all been in black and white).
He's sees the man in the hospital bed again, this time he's on his stomach.
There a plastic hospital bracelet on the man's wrist, just as Orr had on The
Bridge. Two nurses turn the man over but the narrator can't hear what they
are saying. Visitors start appearing for other people in the ward, but
"Nobody for my man yet. Doesn't look as though he cares." But of course
he does care! Banks is great at these narrative self-deception
statements...
Andrea shows up. She's pretty. She kisses the man in the bed and takes his
hand. The narrator thinks "Why is she here? Why isn't she is Paris?" Then
she lowers her head to the sheets, and her shoulders shake a couple of
times; it's unstated, but she's crying.
The screen goes dark. The narrator suspects his subconcious is trying to
tell him something. The narrator undresses and goes to sleep in the
hospital bed in the next room.
Note the sequence of settings in this part. He returns to The Bridge, it's
wrecked. The fact that he returned there, even though he was travelling
away from it, indicates that there is no where else in his dream world for
him to go; it's really all the same place. From then on, his settings
become more and more constricted, all the people gone except his machine,
until all he has left is two small rooms, then only one, really (since the
screen in the other is dark) with a hospital bed in it. He's systematically
closing off the idea that he has anywhere that he could go to escape waking
up.
As for the actual waking up itself, the final impetus is given by his proof
that Andrea actually cares for him, when she cries. Of course this is all a
little bit vicious and childish too: he has to see that he's hurt her, to
get revenge for her hurting him, before he'll wake up. If the sequence with
the Field Marshal was supposed to be justified as him confronting and
destroying the power-seeking, sadistic side of himself, it didn't completely
work.
There is one short chapter left -- plus I plan a conclusion or two after
that.
Rich Puchalsky
Coda
Hey, I should take up a collection here. Who wants to read the fascinating
conclusion, all secrets revealed! please send five dollars to ... never
mind.
The last chapter starts with the narrator arguing, apparently, with himself.
First he goes through the reasons for staying in a coma, saying "What the
hell do you think you're doing? You were happy there! Think of the
control, the fun, the possibilities!" This seems like a very bad tack to
me; the narrator wasn't having much fun in the latter part of his Bridge
experience. Perhaps sensing this, the narrator goes on to say that he'll be
chucked out of the partnership, tried for drunk driving, no more flash cars,
getting older etc. Then he mentions his resentment of Andrea: "You always
did what she wanted [...] it was role-reversal all right, and you got
screwed." "she rejected you, [...] if you show signs of recovery she'll be
off again."
But, the narrator replies that if he does nothing they might just turn his
life-support off, isn't self-preservation supposed to be the most important
principle?
He goes on to say that he and Andrea have left their marks on each other,
helped to shape each other, even if they never saw each other again they'd
be a part of each other. That doesn't mean they belong to each other, but
it means that in some sense they already have each other. (Note: I
mentioned before that shared experience was the only thing that can't be
replaced. This is a variant of that sentiment; it's also a variant of the
ideal of selfless and eternal love, that you can be happy just having known
the other person, even if you never see them again.)
The narrator says that if he wakes up she may go back to Gustave, but says
that "You had decided you didn't grudge him that, or was that just the drink
talking?" A heated exchange with himself ensues until he says that he meant
it, he meant it. "Damn it I did, too." he replies.
All right, why the heck is the narrator arguing with himself? Who are these
two people, has he suddenly gotten split personality disorder? No, I think
that he's just sort of abstracted his Brooke side, the part of himself that
wants to stay in a coma, and his Joyce side, the side that wants to wake up.
It sounds funny, but they both really are him.
The narrator says "And another thing: she still thinks things happen in
threes. There was her father, dying in the car; then Gustave, under
sentence [...] then me." He says that no doubt he and Gustave are very
similar, and that they might like each other, and that he's sure that
Gustave would have got on with Andrea's father the same as he did, and for
the same reason ... but if he can stop the similarities there, he will, "I
will not be the third man!" This is the strongest symbolic reason why there
are three planes, three diamonds, I think.
Note that the narrator thought he got along with Andrea's father because he
thought that neither of them took anything entirely seriously. Even at this
dramatic moment I have to wonder about the narrator's self-knowledge; he's
certainly taking *this* seriously. He probably got on with Andrea's father
because they were very similar in most ways; educated, smart, upper-middle
class.
Just as we might be starting to think that he was getting pretty unselfish,
he thinks a "slightly sneaky" thought; now that he realizes that he and
Gustave are alike, he knows what *he'd* tell Andrea if he was the one slowly
dying and she wanted to martyr herself looking after him... Of course we
may wonder if he really does know what he'd tell her.
And lastly, the final burst that seems to end the argument, a burst of
youthful desire for experience and lust for life. First he says that he
wants to go to that other city and meet Gustave, then "Damn it I wanna *do*
things!" He wants to go to India, stand on Ayers Rock, get wet in
Machupicchu, surf, hang-glide, see the aurora borealis, etc. etc., ending
with "I want to be in bed with three women at once!" The final thing that
decides him on waking up is, symbolically, his body's desire to do things.
The barbarian has ended up saving him; he will live on in the barbarian's
body. And just like the barbarian this list is pretty much pure Id.
And guess what one of those things he wanted to do was? "I want to walk
inside a lava tunnel", yes it's an image later used in _Look To Windward_.
It seems like all of the Culture was floating around in Banks' head at this
time.
Next he grouses that he's going back to Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's
world, a sign that he's apparently decided to wake up. He says that at
least the Bridge was safe, but then he says maybe not, he doesn't know.
(We've already seen that it wasn't really safe, he probably would have died
if he had, for instance, lain down under the lash of the guy who was lashing
bodies, because it would have been a signal to his body to give up.)
Then there is a curious part. He says he doesn't need the machine to tell
him the choice, the choice is not between dream and reality, it's between
two different dreams. One is his own, the bridge and all he made of it, the
other is the collective dream, our corporate imagery.
Well, highly amusing as it is to think of Banks (or the narrator, whichever)
as a Bodhisattva or an ascended yogic master who knows that the material
world is an illusion, the Veil of Maya -- I think that this is bollocks.
Banks is an atheist, the narrator is an atheist, no matter which one of them
is really saying this, in their own terms they are wrong. You simply can't
say that reality is comparable to a dream you're making up; if someone dies
in The Bridge, nothing has really happened -- they might even be alive again
later -- but if someone dies in the real world, they are gone, and if you're
an atheist of Banks' type, you have to think that they are permanently gone.
You can't compare the effect of our culture on how we perceive events, and
on how we act, to a situation in which nothing is real. This just sounds
like a formula for rejecting responsibility, as if the narrator was saying
"Hey, the real world is a dream too, so it doesn't really matter that I
crashed my car and spent seven months in a hospital in order to make my
girlfriend feel guilty." But the narrator does think that at least no one
else was hurt or killed in the crash, he's not sure if he would have wanted
to come back then.
The narrator makes more Bridge metaphors: a thing become place, a means
become end, a route become destination, and equates this with the three of
diamonds. It's "vast and ruddy frame forever sloughing off and being
replaced" -- i.e., it's like a living creature -- "like a snake constantly
shedding, a metamorphosing insect which is its own cocoon and always
changing" -- both common metaphors for personal transformation.
There's a bit where he remembers a drug experience, then a little
two-columned section in which part of the writing says "Brahma wakes".
Brahma is the Hindu god who created the universe, as the narrator created
The Bridge. Hell, maybe the narrator picked up some fashionable Hindu from
Andrea and that explains the world-is-a-dream bit earlier.
Finally, he actually seems to be in his body. He has a tough time ("Lie
back and think of Scotland") and realizes that he's going to have to learn
how to control his body again, but he starts by smelling Andrea's perfume,
then feeling things, then he sighs, then opens his eyes. Andrea is
sittingthere, she sees him waggle his toes. He's hungry.
He clears his throat and Andrea relaxes, just like that. He - who has
remembered his name -- is almost embarassed. (He should be.) She nods
slowly, and says "Welcome back," smiling; he says "Oh yeah?". And that's
it.
Next, my conclusion. If anyone remembers an unanswered question that I said
I'd get to later and haven't gotten to by now, please remind me of it.
Richard Puchalsky
(Conclusion)
_The Bridge_ is a fantasy about unrequited love. I say fantasy because it
is one by the classic definition: "imaginative fiction featuring especially
strange settings and grotesque characters" according to a rather
unsatisfactory Merriam-Webster, or even the alternate definition "the power
or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in
response to psychological need <an object of fantasy>; also : a mental image
or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created". I noted at the
beginning that this was a basically optimistic book, and so it is, no
permanent harm is done, and the protagonist keeps his lover -- really, she's
likely to come back to him eventually, the crisis with Gustave won't last
forever. The symbolism is generally excellent, the writing occasionally
inspired, the formal structure interesting.
So what is the book about, really? This is a complicated enough book so
that this question could be answered differently by different people, but
I'm going to address a couple of the general themes that I see:
1. The modern style of unattainability
In previous times and other places, there were many ways in which people
fell in love but could not be with each other. The whole idea of Western
romantic love started, according to Joseph Campbell anyway, with the
medieval troubadours, who celebrated those who loved each other outside the
formal economic business of marriage. Lovers historically were kept apart
by class, clan, previous engagement, distance ... with the crowning problem,
of course, being that one of the people did not love the other, and had the
power to resist the other's desires. Note that many fantasy writers, such
as America's best, James Branch Cabell, seem to have believed that
unattainability is a necessary part of romance in fantasy. In general, when
a couple in romantic fiction finally get together, the book is over.
Now we come to modern Britain. Is Andrea unattainable? Why, how could that
be, clan, class, previous engagement, distance present no problems -- she
has sex with the narrator quite often, doesn't she? And she likes him,
doesn't she? What more is there to attain?
By a curious poverty of thought, the narrator can't even *understand* what
the problem is. First of all, he's obsessed with sex, and her imagined use
of sex to control him; in some strange way he seems to think that the
problem of her not being with him is sexual. Of course it isn't. He has
sex with other people when she isn't there, which he seems to find quite
satisfactory. Sex with her can't be so much different than sex with his
other partners that that is what he misses so much when she isn't there.
No, this has to do with love. It is his love that gives her power over him,
because she is not replaceable to him, while he is replaceable to her. So
she gets to decide how much time they spend together, and he doesn't. This
is the real source of all of his hunger for power and fear of being trapped.
The truth is that he's in love with her, he wants her near all the time, he
isn't really happy without her. But these seemingly simple statements can
not be expressed in the tired ideologies that he's grown up with. If he
wants her to always be with him, then he must want power over her -- bad.
If he isn't happy without her, he's not being independent -- bad. And if
he's in love with her, and wants *an exclusive, life-long committed
relationship*, well, that doesn't bear even thinking of. In a sense, this
is a curiously politically conservative book, because it makes it seem as if
leftism constitutionally can not deal with these questions -- which is not
really true.
But back to Andrea. So, what can she give him? She obviously doesn't feel
in quite the same way about him, she likes him, but she's content enough to
spend half her time with other people. He can't even express what he's
feeling without an ironic shrug. She might come to think about him in the
same way if he really expressed his feelings, but he can't. Normally, sheer
proximity and its concomitant intimacy would cause her to eventually fall in
love with him, but she doesn't stay in one place long enough for that to
happen, and by the time they do get really used to having each other around,
she's also used to having Gustave around. She may not be fickle or
selfish, but she does seem somewhat blind to her effect on him. One can
imagine that some elements of their relationship were set when she was a
slightly older, sophisticated, upper-middle class woman and he was a lower
class young guy just in the big city and looking to move up in the world.
Things might have settled down with him remaining content with half a loaf,
rather than none, but then humanity strikes. Suddenly he discovers that
people need other people for more than just sex and occasional
companionship, that they actually *depend* on other people, and that maybe
that's part of why people keep inexplicably getting married. And guess
what, he can't depend on Andrea, because other people have claims on her
that are as great as his claim.
Since he, according to his politics, can't possibly admit to being in a
jealous rage, he can't do anything about it when he falls into a jealous
rage, and he goes for an gesture matched in its adult brilliance of
execution with its adolescent poverty of conception -- she doesn't want me,
so I'll hurt myself and make her feel bad, then she'll come back.
I've written far too much about this. To say what I should have said from
the start: what Banks does is create a love that is unattainable *because
the lovers have no valid way to interpret their emotions*. They are free
to say anything they like to each other, but they have no acceptable
concepts that would communicate what must be said.
2. The fantasy of demiurgy
A lot of the book is about a common fantasy: what if I could create the
world as I liked? The word Demiurge means artisan, and is probably most
well known from its use in Gnostic Christian thought. The Gnostics thought
that the world was created by a Demiurge, a sort of inferior god, whose bad
workmanship explained all the problems in the material world. The word also
has the meaning of "one that is an autonomous creative force or decisive
power". The fantasy of creating a world is often referred to as the fantasy
of Demiurgy. The Demiurge is generally not omnipotent, omniscient, or
omnibenevolent.
In this book, the narrator creates a world -- an interior world, it is true,
but one with apparently complete and coherent existence. He rejoices in his
supposedly complete control over this world. But, we see that in fact his
power is not complete. It can be broken by external events -- such as when
his body is moved or treatments are tried -- and it also can be the subject
of a sort of competition between different parts of his mind. We see this
in the scene where the narrator's alter ego is being cast down in social
class; part of the narrator's mind evidently wants this to happen, part does
not.
But there is a more interesting problem with his created world. It shares
his mental as well as physical limitations. The narrator is a political
leftist who would like to see a classless society. Yet, when he creates a
world seemingly from his desires, it is a Victorian, class-bound society.
The narrator's power fantasies might be seen as a major reason for this;
what that part of him really wants is a power structure with himself at or
near the top. Yet he didn't create a Roman Empire with himself as Emperor;
the society is still recognizably modern. Basically, his subconscious seems
to have been limited to the creation of a society of a type that he
thoroughly understood.
This, again, is rather a discouraging, conservative idea -- the idea that we
carry an image of our society around with us, even into our most creative
endeavors, and that we really can't transcend the cultural values that we've
grown up with. But there is a curious subtext at work.
Writing a work of fantasy is a form of demiurgy. The author creates an
imaginary world that they generally try to make complete and coherent, or at
least interesting. So the problem faced by the narrator in this book is a
metaphor for the general problem faced by the fantasy author.
Banks, as we know, is an author who, in books published after this one,
*did* create a well-known, coherent fantasy of a classless society. In fact
that fantasy bubbles up in all sorts of places in this book -- the bit of
narration by the barbarian, where he talks about magic getting so prevalent
that the lower class is no longer needed, the knife missile, the intelligent
machine, even some scattered images that recur in later Culture books.
So this book is sort of a precursor to the Culture, a demiurgy that fails to
express Banks'/the narrator's (the two are interchangeable in this instance)
politics. As such, it falls apart by the end of the book, while the Culture
continues. The Culture is a second demiurgy, once that transcends the
limitations of the Bridge.
But I'd have to say that the Culture shares, more subtly, some of these
problems. In particular, the creation of a world in this kind of fiction
requires drama, Banks once commented about something like needing to find
the Culture's dark side (presumably, to make it interesting). So we hear
very little about the presumed daily utopia of the Culture and a lot about
the presumedly rare cases where things go wrong. The Culture starts to slip
from classless utopia to dystopia just because Banks has to keep finding
things wrong with it, or the readers will get bored.
The classic Christian problem of evil is perhaps best explained, if you're
looking for theological explanations, by the need to make the world dramatic
to whoever is watching the show.
That's about it, I think. I could go on about what a multivalent symbol the
Bridge is -- between life and death, the narrator and Andrea, youth and
adulthood, the lower class and the upper, reality and dreams -- but this is
long enough.
One last note about love and power, vaguely applicable to the problems in
this book. I'll leave you with a highly out-of-context quote from Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and
love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love
implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power
correcting everything that stands against love."
Zero Piraeus [bola, not usenet]
In article <EsIM6.4041$oi1.2...@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>,
"Richard Puchalsky" <rpuch...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> (Conclusion)
[...]
Neato.
About the narrator/protagonist's name: Alexander is an anagram of Andrea
Lex [Lex means words or writing or something, right?], and if Lennox
was written in medical-standard[1] handwriting on an identity bracelet
which was
1/ partially obscured such that the letters L, E and X couldn't be seen
2/ viewed through a mirror
what was visible might look a bit like "orr".
A bit contrived, but there you go.
-[z].
[1] very bad, in other words.
Kevin McGuire
: Twenty-eighth post
: (Conclusion)
Bravo!
Richard, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on The
Bridge. I found them to be quite interesting reading.
Thanks,
--
Kevin McGuire University of Pennsylvania