Whoop whoop, James Joyce action all up in here. Maybe this could be a tradition. (It was about this time last year that I was reading Ulysses). I mean, I did just buy The Dubliners... And there's only so much Joyce I can take in one sitting, I guess. It's funny, I loved almost all of Ulysses, but I found a lot of this book as fairly tiresome. Of course, it's possible that that is because Ulysses is so crazy and random and utilizes a million different techniques and spontaneous prose and all of that--actually, if I recall, I didn't like the chapters on Stephen Dedalus too much either (the first two or three). They're damned slow compared to the rest of the book, too, and a lot tougher than most of the rest of the book. This book was a lot easier--but the style is more the same. That could be because they're dealing with the same fellow, but I don't know...
Anyways, this is about Stephen's early life. Childhood through college. First of all, there is his name. For those of you unfamiliar with Greek mythology, Dedalus (Daedalus) was an incredible architect--he designed the labyrinth the Minotaur (a half man half bull beast--whole other tangent for that one) was trapped in. Anyways, he had to escape imprisonment and he made wax wings to fly away. With him was his son, Icarus. His son flew too close to the sun and his wings melted and he fell to his death--but Daedalus lived. This implies a somewhat optimistic outcome for Stephen. Apparently Stephen is named after St Stephen as well--St Stephen was stoned to death after making the local Jewish community mad.
So--before I start out still, I just want to point out that apparently HG Wells really liked this book. Or at least he thought it was great. Also, the cruelty and unfairness described in the schools is almost exactly the same as what Roald Dahl dealt with during his school days (as described in Boy, specifically the sections on the canings and captain Hardcastle). And lastly, while I'm thinking of it, I picked this up at my aunt's Cape house. The last time I went was three years ago, and I remember coming across this book and thinking that it looked incredibly boring and stupid. How foolish I was! Anyways, let's go.
First note comes from when Stephen is most likely in his elementary years--first stint in the boarding house, I'd imagine. (Are schools like that still the norm over there?) Oh, by the way--Joyce omits quotation marks and all of that, so I'll be adding them in on quoted conversations just to make life easier. "'What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you?' 'I don't know,' Stephen said. 'Sick in your breadbasket,' Fleming said, 'because your face looks white. It will go away.' 'O yes,' Stephen said. But he was not sick there. He thought he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place" (13).
Second note is on the next page--some bigger boys tease Stephen because they ask him if he kisses his mother every night before bed he says yes, then when he tries to renege so they won't make fun they continue to laugh. Ugh, that's pretty much the worst thing ever, because he gets all confused and everything, and everybody knows how awful that situation is. Unless if you were the sort of person who enjoyed causing those situations, in which case, you are/were a terrible person.
"Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did it mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?" (15).
Ah, so I marked the page that I said was like Roald Dahl's recollections of school. Stephen, like Joyce, wears glasses (and since Stephen is supposed to be Joyce--his Kilgore Trout, if you will--there's a very good chance that this is based on an actual occurrence). He breaks them and when explaining how he very legitimately broke his glasses he is made out for a liar and his wrists are buffeted by a pandybat.
My next note comes on many pages later--Stephen's father drags him to the bars. Mr Dedalus gets very drunk, embarrassingly so. That hardly matters--an old man there drinking is "tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it" (95). There's something about the "raising his glass to drain it" that gets me and amazes me. I'm not sure what it is exactly, though.
Ulysses Leopold imagines that he has been turned into a woman after he has drunken far too much in the red light district (where he's going to collect Stephen!). This leads me to believe that Joyce was to some extent curious about what it was like to be female--or at least what it would be like to experience sex as a woman, judging from this scene. To be completely honest, I don't remember much from Leopold's scene other than the part where he spontaneously gave birth to eight children. (Ew ew ew ew ew ew gross EW.) I'm also going to back Joyce and say it's natural to wonder what it's like to be a member of the opposite gender. And if my interpretation is correct, I can't help but wonder what the significance of having Stephen being the female--or submissive--figure is. Perhaps saying that he is a slave to his lust or passions, cannot control them...?
My second note actually plays off from the end of the last quote: "...The cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal" (100). First, I find it impossible to find that bit about the urinal wall gross. This is thanks to the Hash-Slinging Slasher episode of Spongebob... This would be funnier if I could find the clip on Youtube, but apparently it doesn't exist? What? Okay, fine--but on a more serious note, during Stephen's chapters in Ulysses, he says that God is like a shout in the street. Perhaps it's a somewhat weak and obvious connection--but hey. I'm trying here!
His adventures with prostitutes are cut off short after he hears a sermon about the pains and tortures of hell--he is suddenly stricken with a fear for his soul and repents.
My next note is from later still--Stephen hears his surname called and he imagines he sees someone flying over the waves of the ocean in front of him (he never makes it clear whether he is actually aware of who the original carrier of the name actually was). He then realizes that he is in that body and he is soaring.
"Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man" (198).
Stephen: "I tried to love God, he said at length. It seems now I failed. It is very difficult" (240).
"'Did the idea ever occur to you,' Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what he pretended to be?' 'The first person to whom that idea occurred to,' Stephen answered, 'was Jesus himself' (242).
"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning" (247). This is an interesting idea--we discussed it a lot in Contemporary Lit when we were reading 1984. Winston and Julia do a lot of rebelling (and by rebelling I mean having sex everywhere and anywhere possible). However, they rebel silently and quietly. Until they are sold out, no-one is aware of their rebellion. The idea that we discussed was if such a rebellion should even be considered a real rebellion. Sure, they are rebelling against the norms and thought police and government and all--but their rebellion has literally no effect on the rest of the world. Obviously they can't tell anyone about what they're doing--no-one can be inspired to join them--the society doesn't even allow martyrs to happen (what I mean is, people simply disappear, they aren't made into tragic saints or any of that)--so are their acts real rebellion? Nothing is gained, nothing real is done, and so on... They're still contributing to the world which they are trying to fight as well. So, they might as well be doing nothing... So yeah. Nothing occurs.
"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world" (251). The last few pages take on a very different form, they become entries from Stephen's diary. This is from one of the entries.
The book doesn't end with real closure--which makes sense. Stephen's story is continued in Ulysses, and if Stephen really is supposed to be Joyce's Kilgore Trout, there shouldn't be.
A note on the text--James Joyce's curious way of writing dialogue and speech is apparently copied from the French model. It was the style which was common in France at the time of the writing, and might even still be popular, though I've never looked at a French novel (in French) dated past 1956.
It was also a little funny while reading this book--though I didn't remember much of the story (though there really isn't much) I remembered quotes that particularly struck me that I did write down (somewhere) almost instantly. For example, reading the bit about being sick in his breadbasket... Immediately I thought of the end of the quote without any real trouble at all. I don't know, I just thought that it was kind of funny. That's not usual for me, especially if I didn't own the book the first time through.
MLA citation information: Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Penguin books: Pennsylvania, 1976.
Also, since Emma is too busy to read these and because no-one else reads these, I've removed the mystery lyrics thing (unless if a song particularly jumps out at me, in which case I will simply say that it reminds me of song X). The answer to last post is If I'm Dreaming My Life by David Bowie, by the way... Well, yeah. I'm taking a brief break from all of this to catch up on my writing and to rest my wrist and all, so expect a much lighter load of posts this summer. Have a good one!
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Demian by Hermann Hesse
This is an amazing book, first of all. I remember being awed by it when I first read it (sometime during junior year, possibly during the summer)... And apparently the last time I read it, I misspelled Demian's name to Damian EVERY SINGLE TIME. The hell was wrong with me? I spelled it correctly in the tag. And funny story, I must have read Fight Club right before it then too, because a quick scan shows that I quote it about ten gajillion times. And... Then I start talking about Paradise Lost. Okay. There's a reason why I don't reread my old posts.
So, first of all, at the time I originally read this, what awed me was the information about Abraxas, but there's so much more that amazed me this time, mostly in that it almost always seems like Hermann Hesse read my mind and wrote down what he saw there in his book. I mean, it's cool that my thoughts contributed to a book that won the Nobel prize, but you couldn't have asked permission? Or hooked me up with your time machine?
I don't think it seemed like that when I first read it, I don't think I really understood those parts of it (I don't really discuss them, and I don't really remember them, so...) but anyways.
Oh, and I attempted to read the introduction about Hesse, but I just lacked the attention span. I did get from it, however, that Hesse was bipolar and this is considered by many to be his most autobiographical work, so maybe it's not good that I'm nodding my head at almost everything he says. Oh well.
So, this book is about a boy named Emil Sinclair. It could be a coming-of-age story, and it partially is--if it went on, it would be one perfectly. You see, it goes up pretty much the usual loop of storytelling--you know, rising action/falling action/climax/et cetera--with maybe a few extra humps, but there's no 'falling action' really, just an implication... Well, I don't know. I guess it's still coming-of-age, just not your usual coming-of-age. It starts out when he's about ten, and ends probably when he's sixteen or seventeen... It ends during the first world war, so whatever the draft age would have been. So--let's go!
Hesse gives his own little prologue:
"Each man's life represents a road towards himself... No man has ever been entirely and completely himself" (2).
"We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone" (2).
Hesse starts his story by saying how he seemed to be aware of a dark world and a light world--the light world being that of his parents and sisters, the dark world coming from within himself, carried in by the house servants at times, but mainly a world of those that had gone astray. As a child, it scared him and made him feel guilty.
"There were stories of sons who had gone away, stories I read with passion. These stories always pictured the homecoming as such a relief and as something so extraordinary that I felt convinced that this alone was the right, the best, the sought-for thing. Still, the part of the story set among the evil and lost was more appealing by far, and--if I could have admitted it--at times I didn't want the Prodigal Son to repent and be found again" (5).
Sinclair's problems start when he tries to impress a bigger boy. He makes up a story about stealing apples, and the bigger boy informs him that the owner of that orchard has promised two marks to anyone who tells him who thieves of his orchard are. The boy demands that Sinclair pay him off so that he won't tell--but Sinclair only has some pfennigs. The boy then demands that Sinclair pretty much become his personal servant boy till the debt is paid--in actuality, till the boy says so. This plan is cut short, as Demian, a fellow classmate, just from watching, figures out the situation. Demian never reveals exactly what he said or did to Sinclair's tormentor to make him leave Sinclair alone, but yeah. Anyways, Demian first comes into Sinclair's scope after they learn the story of Cain and Abel. This is what originally blew my mind. I remember being awed. He explains the story of Cain being marked already, and the story forming around that, not how the Bible says God marked him. Maybe he had some strange characteristic that frightened or intimidated people and that was the mark--then the story grew up around him. Maybe the murder was true, and that was the real mark--people were afraid to mess with him and his children. Anyways, that stupefied me as a kid. I had never thought of the Bible like that. It amazed me. I was hooked.
"'People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest'" (24).
"'Ultimately all men are brothers'" (24).
"The question flashed through my mind whether Demian himself was not a kind of a Cain. Why does he defend Cain unless he feels an affinity with him?" (26). It becomes clear later that Cain and his mother seem to be marked in the same way. They think differently, they live differently, they are almost not human--angels, demons--Abraxases (I'll explain this later), more like. They are there own subculture, DemianStranger in a Strange Land, but with less orgies and crappy endings.
"'Cowards are constantly afraid, but you're not a coward, are you? Certainly, you're no hero either. There are some things you're afraid of, and some people, too. And that should never be, you should never be afraid of men'" (31).
"It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly" (41).
"Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams" (41). Sinclair is explaining the changes in the mind and feelings as one reaches and struggles through puberty.
"'Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him then he does himself'" (47).
"'If I'm not master of my own will, then I'm in no position to direct it as I please'" (47). Demian is remarkably perceptive, to the point where it seems as though he can read minds and control people. This is not the case--he just studies people. He finds it easy to figure out what makes them tick, and predict and guide their movements that they probably would make anyways in a way that seems like some sort of psychic power. It's pretty interesting.
There's another interesting take on religious stories Demian has--this time it's the story of Jesus's crucifixion. Jesus was crucified with two other men, two thieves. One man repents to Jesus, and Jesus promises him a place in the kingdom of heaven. Of course, in Sunday school, you are taught that this is the 'good' thief, because he accepted Jesus into his life and repented and all of that, and it's to show that repentance will cover all your sins, no matter what. Demian thinks it's ridiculous--"'What's the sense of repenting if you're two steps from the grave?'" (51). He thinks that it is pathetic and that all it does is show that the thief was a coward. He doesn't feel bad, not really, he just doesn't want to suffer. He is a coward. Therefore, the other thief is the better man, because he is willing to stay stolid and reap what he has sowed.
"'I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn't close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place'" (52). The natural things that Demian means are things that are suppressed and considered to be the devil's works--things like sexual desire. I want to point out that over that last sentence I have the note "Abraxas"--this was written in the book this time around. I had forgotten that this was the book I had learned about Abraxas in! Abraxas was a Gnostic god capable of the kindest or most evil of acts. He is the equivalent to God or the devil, or any one side of a yin yang--he is all. The "'uniting of godly and devilish elements'" (80). Demian himself is incomplete, as is Sinclair--Sinclair doesn't quite become Abraxas until the very end of the book. I know that sounds strange--and of course it is meant to be a metaphor--but I'll explain it when I get there.
Secondly, although what Demian is saying probably seems like blasphemy, it makes sense. God created everything, including the devil. If everything is supposed to have a spark of the divine... Well!
"'Each person must stand on his own feet'" (54).
When Sinclair goes away to college, he feels lost and adrift. He starts drinking heavily, becomes a lover of bars (I find it interesting that this is where he falls to, whereas Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in almost the same exact situation does not fall to the drink, but to prostitutes) and makes drinking buddies with the scum of the earth. He is lost and floundering.
"I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love surging up in me " (65).
"What I missed above all else was a friend" (65).
Eventually he does redeem himself--he sees a girl that he names Beatrice, after Dante's Beatrice, that he falls in love with from afar. He admires her figure, her face; he sees her as something divine, to be venerated. He cleans himself up completely, stays away from the bars, improves his dress and mannerisms, picks his grades up in school--and so on. He also begins to paint again, and in attempting to paint her he paints instead a holy image, altogether not male or female, but amazingly beautiful and touching.
"That's what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again. That's what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one. That's what my life and death would be like, this was the rhythm of my fate" (72).
Thinking back, he remembers running into Demian during one of his debauchery-filled nights, and Demian tells him that the sensualists and "men of the world" make the best saints when they turn. I believe it.
"'Who would be born must first destroy a world'" (78).
Later Sinclair learns about Abraxas in school, and even later he meets a man named Pistorious who teaches him even more about the strange god. However--again--we will get there in time.
"The figure of Beatrice with which I occupied myself so intimately and fervently gradually became submerged or, rather, was slowly receding, approaching the horizon more and more, becoming more shadowy and remote, paler. She no longer satisfied the longings of my soul. In the peculiar self-made isolation in which I existed like a sleepwalker, a new growth began to take shape inside me. The longing for life grew--or rather the longing for love. My sexual drive, which I had sublimated for a time in the veneration of Beatrice, demanded new images and objects. But my desires remained unfulfilled and it was more impossible than ever for me to deceive my longings and hope for something from the women with whom my comrades tried their luck. I dreamed vividly again, more in fact by day than at night. Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had a more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and longings and shadows, than with the actual world around me" (81). So... If you switched genders and stuff around, this could be me writing. Seriously. Hermann Hesse literally just wrote brain processes of mine out for everyone to see.
"I was always preoccupied with myself. And I longed desperately to really live for once, to give something of myself, to enter into a relationship and battle with it. Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved--as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful and I was prepared to commit suicide" (84). Again. Hermann. Please ask permission next time.
"'Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't'" (86).
So Sinclair eventually meets Pistorius, and Pistorius teaches him more about Abraxas. Pistorious becomes a sort of mentor for Sinclair, but as he learns more and matures he begins to see Pistorious as a dead end--Pistorious understands greatness, perhaps, but couldn't possibly have the skills to achieve it. Thus, Sinclair begins to loathe him and they grow apart--are very much forced apart by Sinclair. Though Sinclair doesn't mean consciously to do this and even feels guilty afterwards, it was undoubtedly seen as a necessary act to drive him back to Demian--so his unconscious self acted to do so. This would make sense with the book--and this is all I'll really say about Pistorious before moving on. he doesn't interest me much.
"'We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings. We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us'" (105).
When he and Pistorious finally break apart, he (Sinclair) says that "During that walk I felt for the first time the mark of Cain on my forehead" (110).
"Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself" (111).
So he finds Demian again--Demian:
"'For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour'" (118).
"Let the students have their drunken orgies and tattoo their faces; the rotten world could await its destruction--for all I cared. I was waiting for one thing--to see my fate step forward in a new guise" (120). Hermann, how are you in my head, you need to stop, it's wigging me out.
Well... Sinclair visits Demian to stay with him and his mother over the holidays. That fate's guise is Demian's mother, Eva--almost immediately he loves her.
"'How glad I am,' I said and kissed her hands. 'I believe I have been on my way my whole life--and now I have come home.' She smiled like a mother. 'One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time'" (122).
"'It is always difficult to be born'" (123).
"'There is no dream that last forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one'" (124).
"'Your fate loves you. One day it will be entirely yours--just as you dream it--if you remain constant to it'" (124).
That's all her. The next bit is from Sinclair, and the dialogue is her's, of course: "At times I was dissatisfied with myself and tortured with desire: I believed I could no longer bear to have her near me without taking her in my arms. She sensed this, too, at once. Once when I had stayed away for many days and returned bewildered she took me aside and said: 'You must not give way to desires which you don't believe in. I know what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come'" (129).
"'Love must not entreat... or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. Sinclair, your love is attracted to me. Once it begins to attract me, I will come. I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won'" (130).
"'But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome'" (130).
"Little by little, sensual and spiritual love, reality and symbol began to overlap" (131).
"'No one dreams anything that doesn't "concern him personally"'" (135).
So--the book begins to wrap up when the first world war begins to really begin boiling. "How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts" (141).
Demian is drafted, and shortly after Sinclair is as well. Sinclair is at one point wounded badly, but drags himself--or is dragged, it's not entirely clear--into a building full of other wounded men. On the mattress next to him lays Demian. Now we get to what I meant by saying Sinclair becomes Abraxas. Demian explains to Sinclair that when Sinclair needs Demian and calls for him he won't come to him physically anymore--that he will be inside of Sinclair to answer to his call. As a sort of conscious. Demian gives Sinclair a light kiss from his mother and Sinclair, exhausted, falls asleep. When he wakes in the morning, Demian is gone and there is another in his bed. The end: "Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master" (145).
MLA Citation Information: Hesse, Hermann. Demian. Perennial Classics: New York, 1999.
Read this book. Go ahead, do it. I'm biased, but I think it's worth a spin. It's not my fault that Hermann Hesse was writing about me just with a gender swap. Seriously.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Moonage Daydream by David Bowie
Answer to this post's cryptic lyrics: All the lights are fading now--if I'm dreaming all my life
So, first of all, at the time I originally read this, what awed me was the information about Abraxas, but there's so much more that amazed me this time, mostly in that it almost always seems like Hermann Hesse read my mind and wrote down what he saw there in his book. I mean, it's cool that my thoughts contributed to a book that won the Nobel prize, but you couldn't have asked permission? Or hooked me up with your time machine?
I don't think it seemed like that when I first read it, I don't think I really understood those parts of it (I don't really discuss them, and I don't really remember them, so...) but anyways.
Oh, and I attempted to read the introduction about Hesse, but I just lacked the attention span. I did get from it, however, that Hesse was bipolar and this is considered by many to be his most autobiographical work, so maybe it's not good that I'm nodding my head at almost everything he says. Oh well.
So, this book is about a boy named Emil Sinclair. It could be a coming-of-age story, and it partially is--if it went on, it would be one perfectly. You see, it goes up pretty much the usual loop of storytelling--you know, rising action/falling action/climax/et cetera--with maybe a few extra humps, but there's no 'falling action' really, just an implication... Well, I don't know. I guess it's still coming-of-age, just not your usual coming-of-age. It starts out when he's about ten, and ends probably when he's sixteen or seventeen... It ends during the first world war, so whatever the draft age would have been. So--let's go!
Hesse gives his own little prologue:
"Each man's life represents a road towards himself... No man has ever been entirely and completely himself" (2).
"We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone" (2).
Hesse starts his story by saying how he seemed to be aware of a dark world and a light world--the light world being that of his parents and sisters, the dark world coming from within himself, carried in by the house servants at times, but mainly a world of those that had gone astray. As a child, it scared him and made him feel guilty.
"There were stories of sons who had gone away, stories I read with passion. These stories always pictured the homecoming as such a relief and as something so extraordinary that I felt convinced that this alone was the right, the best, the sought-for thing. Still, the part of the story set among the evil and lost was more appealing by far, and--if I could have admitted it--at times I didn't want the Prodigal Son to repent and be found again" (5).
Sinclair's problems start when he tries to impress a bigger boy. He makes up a story about stealing apples, and the bigger boy informs him that the owner of that orchard has promised two marks to anyone who tells him who thieves of his orchard are. The boy demands that Sinclair pay him off so that he won't tell--but Sinclair only has some pfennigs. The boy then demands that Sinclair pretty much become his personal servant boy till the debt is paid--in actuality, till the boy says so. This plan is cut short, as Demian, a fellow classmate, just from watching, figures out the situation. Demian never reveals exactly what he said or did to Sinclair's tormentor to make him leave Sinclair alone, but yeah. Anyways, Demian first comes into Sinclair's scope after they learn the story of Cain and Abel. This is what originally blew my mind. I remember being awed. He explains the story of Cain being marked already, and the story forming around that, not how the Bible says God marked him. Maybe he had some strange characteristic that frightened or intimidated people and that was the mark--then the story grew up around him. Maybe the murder was true, and that was the real mark--people were afraid to mess with him and his children. Anyways, that stupefied me as a kid. I had never thought of the Bible like that. It amazed me. I was hooked.
"'People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest'" (24).
"'Ultimately all men are brothers'" (24).
"The question flashed through my mind whether Demian himself was not a kind of a Cain. Why does he defend Cain unless he feels an affinity with him?" (26). It becomes clear later that Cain and his mother seem to be marked in the same way. They think differently, they live differently, they are almost not human--angels, demons--Abraxases (I'll explain this later), more like. They are there own subculture, DemianStranger in a Strange Land, but with less orgies and crappy endings.
"'Cowards are constantly afraid, but you're not a coward, are you? Certainly, you're no hero either. There are some things you're afraid of, and some people, too. And that should never be, you should never be afraid of men'" (31).
"It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly" (41).
"Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams" (41). Sinclair is explaining the changes in the mind and feelings as one reaches and struggles through puberty.
"'Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him then he does himself'" (47).
"'If I'm not master of my own will, then I'm in no position to direct it as I please'" (47). Demian is remarkably perceptive, to the point where it seems as though he can read minds and control people. This is not the case--he just studies people. He finds it easy to figure out what makes them tick, and predict and guide their movements that they probably would make anyways in a way that seems like some sort of psychic power. It's pretty interesting.
There's another interesting take on religious stories Demian has--this time it's the story of Jesus's crucifixion. Jesus was crucified with two other men, two thieves. One man repents to Jesus, and Jesus promises him a place in the kingdom of heaven. Of course, in Sunday school, you are taught that this is the 'good' thief, because he accepted Jesus into his life and repented and all of that, and it's to show that repentance will cover all your sins, no matter what. Demian thinks it's ridiculous--"'What's the sense of repenting if you're two steps from the grave?'" (51). He thinks that it is pathetic and that all it does is show that the thief was a coward. He doesn't feel bad, not really, he just doesn't want to suffer. He is a coward. Therefore, the other thief is the better man, because he is willing to stay stolid and reap what he has sowed.
"'I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn't close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place'" (52). The natural things that Demian means are things that are suppressed and considered to be the devil's works--things like sexual desire. I want to point out that over that last sentence I have the note "Abraxas"--this was written in the book this time around. I had forgotten that this was the book I had learned about Abraxas in! Abraxas was a Gnostic god capable of the kindest or most evil of acts. He is the equivalent to God or the devil, or any one side of a yin yang--he is all. The "'uniting of godly and devilish elements'" (80). Demian himself is incomplete, as is Sinclair--Sinclair doesn't quite become Abraxas until the very end of the book. I know that sounds strange--and of course it is meant to be a metaphor--but I'll explain it when I get there.
Secondly, although what Demian is saying probably seems like blasphemy, it makes sense. God created everything, including the devil. If everything is supposed to have a spark of the divine... Well!
"'Each person must stand on his own feet'" (54).
When Sinclair goes away to college, he feels lost and adrift. He starts drinking heavily, becomes a lover of bars (I find it interesting that this is where he falls to, whereas Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in almost the same exact situation does not fall to the drink, but to prostitutes) and makes drinking buddies with the scum of the earth. He is lost and floundering.
"I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love surging up in me " (65).
"What I missed above all else was a friend" (65).
Eventually he does redeem himself--he sees a girl that he names Beatrice, after Dante's Beatrice, that he falls in love with from afar. He admires her figure, her face; he sees her as something divine, to be venerated. He cleans himself up completely, stays away from the bars, improves his dress and mannerisms, picks his grades up in school--and so on. He also begins to paint again, and in attempting to paint her he paints instead a holy image, altogether not male or female, but amazingly beautiful and touching.
"That's what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again. That's what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one. That's what my life and death would be like, this was the rhythm of my fate" (72).
Thinking back, he remembers running into Demian during one of his debauchery-filled nights, and Demian tells him that the sensualists and "men of the world" make the best saints when they turn. I believe it.
"'Who would be born must first destroy a world'" (78).
Later Sinclair learns about Abraxas in school, and even later he meets a man named Pistorious who teaches him even more about the strange god. However--again--we will get there in time.
"The figure of Beatrice with which I occupied myself so intimately and fervently gradually became submerged or, rather, was slowly receding, approaching the horizon more and more, becoming more shadowy and remote, paler. She no longer satisfied the longings of my soul. In the peculiar self-made isolation in which I existed like a sleepwalker, a new growth began to take shape inside me. The longing for life grew--or rather the longing for love. My sexual drive, which I had sublimated for a time in the veneration of Beatrice, demanded new images and objects. But my desires remained unfulfilled and it was more impossible than ever for me to deceive my longings and hope for something from the women with whom my comrades tried their luck. I dreamed vividly again, more in fact by day than at night. Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had a more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and longings and shadows, than with the actual world around me" (81). So... If you switched genders and stuff around, this could be me writing. Seriously. Hermann Hesse literally just wrote brain processes of mine out for everyone to see.
"I was always preoccupied with myself. And I longed desperately to really live for once, to give something of myself, to enter into a relationship and battle with it. Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved--as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful and I was prepared to commit suicide" (84). Again. Hermann. Please ask permission next time.
"'Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't'" (86).
So Sinclair eventually meets Pistorius, and Pistorius teaches him more about Abraxas. Pistorious becomes a sort of mentor for Sinclair, but as he learns more and matures he begins to see Pistorious as a dead end--Pistorious understands greatness, perhaps, but couldn't possibly have the skills to achieve it. Thus, Sinclair begins to loathe him and they grow apart--are very much forced apart by Sinclair. Though Sinclair doesn't mean consciously to do this and even feels guilty afterwards, it was undoubtedly seen as a necessary act to drive him back to Demian--so his unconscious self acted to do so. This would make sense with the book--and this is all I'll really say about Pistorious before moving on. he doesn't interest me much.
"'We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings. We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us'" (105).
When he and Pistorious finally break apart, he (Sinclair) says that "During that walk I felt for the first time the mark of Cain on my forehead" (110).
"Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself" (111).
So he finds Demian again--Demian:
"'For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour'" (118).
"Let the students have their drunken orgies and tattoo their faces; the rotten world could await its destruction--for all I cared. I was waiting for one thing--to see my fate step forward in a new guise" (120). Hermann, how are you in my head, you need to stop, it's wigging me out.
Well... Sinclair visits Demian to stay with him and his mother over the holidays. That fate's guise is Demian's mother, Eva--almost immediately he loves her.
"'How glad I am,' I said and kissed her hands. 'I believe I have been on my way my whole life--and now I have come home.' She smiled like a mother. 'One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time'" (122).
"'It is always difficult to be born'" (123).
"'There is no dream that last forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one'" (124).
"'Your fate loves you. One day it will be entirely yours--just as you dream it--if you remain constant to it'" (124).
That's all her. The next bit is from Sinclair, and the dialogue is her's, of course: "At times I was dissatisfied with myself and tortured with desire: I believed I could no longer bear to have her near me without taking her in my arms. She sensed this, too, at once. Once when I had stayed away for many days and returned bewildered she took me aside and said: 'You must not give way to desires which you don't believe in. I know what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come'" (129).
"'Love must not entreat... or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. Sinclair, your love is attracted to me. Once it begins to attract me, I will come. I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won'" (130).
"'But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome'" (130).
"Little by little, sensual and spiritual love, reality and symbol began to overlap" (131).
"'No one dreams anything that doesn't "concern him personally"'" (135).
So--the book begins to wrap up when the first world war begins to really begin boiling. "How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts" (141).
Demian is drafted, and shortly after Sinclair is as well. Sinclair is at one point wounded badly, but drags himself--or is dragged, it's not entirely clear--into a building full of other wounded men. On the mattress next to him lays Demian. Now we get to what I meant by saying Sinclair becomes Abraxas. Demian explains to Sinclair that when Sinclair needs Demian and calls for him he won't come to him physically anymore--that he will be inside of Sinclair to answer to his call. As a sort of conscious. Demian gives Sinclair a light kiss from his mother and Sinclair, exhausted, falls asleep. When he wakes in the morning, Demian is gone and there is another in his bed. The end: "Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master" (145).
MLA Citation Information: Hesse, Hermann. Demian. Perennial Classics: New York, 1999.
Read this book. Go ahead, do it. I'm biased, but I think it's worth a spin. It's not my fault that Hermann Hesse was writing about me just with a gender swap. Seriously.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Moonage Daydream by David Bowie
Answer to this post's cryptic lyrics: All the lights are fading now--if I'm dreaming all my life
Monday, June 13, 2011
The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells
Helloooo! This is going to be a really short post, I promise you that.
So, first of all, there's a little background on Wells by a fellow named Robert AW Lowndes. (Also, I'm going to mention that this is a really cool edition from the sixties. Actually, it was printed in sixty five--I find it funny, because of course you know what happened four years later... (And consider--a paltry sixty-eight years after the book was originally published!)
So yeah--a background on Wells. First of all, Wells was a son of the working class, and of course England was a very classed society in the eighteen-hundreds. It says that he struggled to escape those boundaries placed upon him, which of course he did, and even at the start of the book itself this is reflected. The main character, Bedford, was a banker--bankrupt at the start of the story. He sees that he will probably have to spend the rest of his life as a clerk (low-class work, of course--) unless if he doesn't think of something else. He decides to go to the country to write a play. At first when I read that, I was like, how stupid! But then I remembered that that's sort of close to when Oscar Wilde wrote his plays (like a decade off. Decade and a half at most), and since Wilde's plays were so awesome, it seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea. As in, "Oh, Wilde did it? Well then duh everyone would want to do it." So yeah...
Another interesting note in the introduction is that of course Jules Verne's works were widely read and very popular, they were only read as fantasies and romances. Apparently HG Wells made people see crazy scientific explorations and going ons as possible realities. It also goes on to say that while Verne would have liked the characters in his book, From the Earth to the Moon, to land on the moon, he made that impossible for himself. I don't know if HG Wells was aware of that and that's why he decided to go one step further, or if he just did for the hell of it, but I guess this is really the first book that dealt with aliens. Originally I was going to complain at how lame the aliens are, but... Ugh, fine. HG Wells, you did something novel, amazing and groundbreaking, and you improved on it later, too. But they're still sort of lame. (Listen, I read Animorphs, okay!? Compared to that, this is like... Well. The opposite of great.)
Not only that, this appears to be the book that CS Lewis refers to in the opening note of Out of the Silent Planet. He has a little note that says that he's aware of similarities between his and other works, and that some of his ideas are based on other works and so on. Of course, this means that almost all of my notes are based on differences between the two, though most of them are pretty superfluous and needn't actually really be discussed. (Things like the fact that the men with the ship in Lewis's first book knew what they were doing, had already completed the ship, whereas Bedford had to urge on Cavor and help him, Cavor still had to make the ship, similarities between the ships, and so on...) CS Lewis is very briefly discussed in the closing paragraph, and he is praised highly because he is pretty awesome, just saying: "It is interesting to compare the career of H. G. Wells and C. S. Lewis, a contemporary author on religious subjects, who examined and wrote about the same human problems as Wells, in his 'Perelandra' trilogy of science-fiction novels. Lewis lived to see far greater evils than Wells, who died in 1946; but Lewis knew there was no utopia, no simple solution to human ills, and showed far deeper understanding of the human condition. Wells died in despair; Lewis never despaired" (10). So I put this down mostly for that last sentence. The rest is all context. For whatever reason, that last sentence enthralls me.
Oh, I also want to mention that whenever Wells skews a scientific fact that we of today take for granted (remember, this was written in 1901--judging from the text, helium was only just recently discovered at the time of the original writing) I have a little moment of aw, Wells, you are just too cute. Even though he was undoubtedly nine thousand times smarter than me and more of a visionary than I'll ever be--I mean, his idea of a ship is amazing and all, but I can't wrap my head around it, either because I'm too dumb to understand it (very possible) or because I'm just automatically like funny story, Wells, that is not how we do it at all (possibly). Anyyyywayyyys. Yeah. His idea is a sphere powered by strips of cavorite which is an element like helium that can go against gravity. Or something like that... And I also want to mention that this is something else CS Lewis borrowed from HG Wells in Out of the Silent Planet. I don't remember if Lewis gets into all specifics, but their ship is a sphere with blinds, though I can't figure out how the control room fits into his ship. And the blinds in Lewis's book (I haven't read the other two in the series) seem to be more for aesthetic purposes than controlling the ship purposes.
HG Wells also decides it's no worse to go into space than to go on an arctic expedition. Again, Mr Wells, you are so adorable.
Also, that word/slang/whatever you'd call it tidbits--originally, the phrase was apparently tit-bits. (Insert everyone from the twenty-first century clawing their eyes out in disgust.) That was also apparently a very popular magazine at the time.
One thing that really makes me mad is the fact that Bedford pushes Cavor to make his machine and go to the moon (even though Cavor doesn't really see the point of it all, not really) and then when they've taken off he flips out and begs to be let off.
"It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream" (36).
So they land on the moon and explore the landscape. HG Wells has a ball making up the strange environment--it seems like a barren tundra, but then the snow melts and strange plants sprout and bloom at amazing speeds and so on--it's actually pretty enthralling. Anyways, they start searching for food and find some edible fungoid. The fungoid are actually intoxicants, and Bedford declares that the 'discovery' (the landing, that is) is second only to the potato. It's hilarious and it's definitely one of the best scenes from the book. (It's page sixty-five in this edition.)
"Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use" (104).
So the men part ways--the moon people take the two men into bondage, and they break free and kill a few moon people in the process. Cavor is eventually recaptured, but Bedford finds their sphere and takes flight. He then begins to bemoan his trip, and seems to view himself as an objective outsider--he "looks down" upon himself. "I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast where I hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited and rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses" (117). Hehehehe.
He goes on to say how after his little existential crisis, he set himself to "puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth" (118). Just move along...
On earth he decides he must make a new identity for himself to escape his failings and so he'd never be obliged to explain the occurrences on the moon and Cavor's disappearance and all. He signs his name as Wells. He says the name seemed to be "thoroughly respectable" (126). I see what you did there.
The book sort of ends after that. I say it sort of ends because Bedford/Well's bit pretty much ends. He mentions that he received a few transmissions from Cavor, who came into contact with theMooninites. The book then switches to the transmissions, sort of as an after note--not dissimilar to the after note in Out of the Silent Planet. The only thing I have marked is the very last page of it--the people of the moon are apparently completely peaceful (might I mention that, when not working, everyone indulges in what is essentially opium?)--Cavor must explain war to them. They don't get it, of course it is seen as beastly, and Cavor says rather hopelessly that it can thin the population (the 'Grand Lunar' can't understand its existence, because there is no benefit to be measured from it). This is unsurprisingly kind of a buzzkill for the moon people. They demand to know how Cavor got there, and I'm not sure whether he explains to the Grand Lunar how to make cavorite (his last message very nearly ends with the fragment "'I was mad to let the Grand Lunar to know--'" [159]) or if they just decide to kill him because he would bring war and pain and death and all to the moon. I am completely convinced that he was killed either way, though.
MLA Citation Information: Wells, HG. The First Men in the Moon. Airmont Books: United States of America, 1965.
This was a pretty good book. Not phenomenal, but I don't have any regrets about reading it.
Also, for all you film buffs--that famous 1902 film where--well, where the men go to the moon... It's based on this book. It's called A Trip to the Moon--its famous image is the moon with a face and a rocket sticking out of one of its eyes. It's mentioned in 99% of all film books, so yeah... It's pretty interesting. I haven't actually watched it in a few years.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen
This post's cryptic lyrics: Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!
So, first of all, there's a little background on Wells by a fellow named Robert AW Lowndes. (Also, I'm going to mention that this is a really cool edition from the sixties. Actually, it was printed in sixty five--I find it funny, because of course you know what happened four years later... (And consider--a paltry sixty-eight years after the book was originally published!)
So yeah--a background on Wells. First of all, Wells was a son of the working class, and of course England was a very classed society in the eighteen-hundreds. It says that he struggled to escape those boundaries placed upon him, which of course he did, and even at the start of the book itself this is reflected. The main character, Bedford, was a banker--bankrupt at the start of the story. He sees that he will probably have to spend the rest of his life as a clerk (low-class work, of course--) unless if he doesn't think of something else. He decides to go to the country to write a play. At first when I read that, I was like, how stupid! But then I remembered that that's sort of close to when Oscar Wilde wrote his plays (like a decade off. Decade and a half at most), and since Wilde's plays were so awesome, it seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea. As in, "Oh, Wilde did it? Well then duh everyone would want to do it." So yeah...
Another interesting note in the introduction is that of course Jules Verne's works were widely read and very popular, they were only read as fantasies and romances. Apparently HG Wells made people see crazy scientific explorations and going ons as possible realities. It also goes on to say that while Verne would have liked the characters in his book, From the Earth to the Moon, to land on the moon, he made that impossible for himself. I don't know if HG Wells was aware of that and that's why he decided to go one step further, or if he just did for the hell of it, but I guess this is really the first book that dealt with aliens. Originally I was going to complain at how lame the aliens are, but... Ugh, fine. HG Wells, you did something novel, amazing and groundbreaking, and you improved on it later, too. But they're still sort of lame. (Listen, I read Animorphs, okay!? Compared to that, this is like... Well. The opposite of great.)
Not only that, this appears to be the book that CS Lewis refers to in the opening note of Out of the Silent Planet. He has a little note that says that he's aware of similarities between his and other works, and that some of his ideas are based on other works and so on. Of course, this means that almost all of my notes are based on differences between the two, though most of them are pretty superfluous and needn't actually really be discussed. (Things like the fact that the men with the ship in Lewis's first book knew what they were doing, had already completed the ship, whereas Bedford had to urge on Cavor and help him, Cavor still had to make the ship, similarities between the ships, and so on...) CS Lewis is very briefly discussed in the closing paragraph, and he is praised highly because he is pretty awesome, just saying: "It is interesting to compare the career of H. G. Wells and C. S. Lewis, a contemporary author on religious subjects, who examined and wrote about the same human problems as Wells, in his 'Perelandra' trilogy of science-fiction novels. Lewis lived to see far greater evils than Wells, who died in 1946; but Lewis knew there was no utopia, no simple solution to human ills, and showed far deeper understanding of the human condition. Wells died in despair; Lewis never despaired" (10). So I put this down mostly for that last sentence. The rest is all context. For whatever reason, that last sentence enthralls me.
Oh, I also want to mention that whenever Wells skews a scientific fact that we of today take for granted (remember, this was written in 1901--judging from the text, helium was only just recently discovered at the time of the original writing) I have a little moment of aw, Wells, you are just too cute. Even though he was undoubtedly nine thousand times smarter than me and more of a visionary than I'll ever be--I mean, his idea of a ship is amazing and all, but I can't wrap my head around it, either because I'm too dumb to understand it (very possible) or because I'm just automatically like funny story, Wells, that is not how we do it at all (possibly). Anyyyywayyyys. Yeah. His idea is a sphere powered by strips of cavorite which is an element like helium that can go against gravity. Or something like that... And I also want to mention that this is something else CS Lewis borrowed from HG Wells in Out of the Silent Planet. I don't remember if Lewis gets into all specifics, but their ship is a sphere with blinds, though I can't figure out how the control room fits into his ship. And the blinds in Lewis's book (I haven't read the other two in the series) seem to be more for aesthetic purposes than controlling the ship purposes.
HG Wells also decides it's no worse to go into space than to go on an arctic expedition. Again, Mr Wells, you are so adorable.
Also, that word/slang/whatever you'd call it tidbits--originally, the phrase was apparently tit-bits. (Insert everyone from the twenty-first century clawing their eyes out in disgust.) That was also apparently a very popular magazine at the time.
One thing that really makes me mad is the fact that Bedford pushes Cavor to make his machine and go to the moon (even though Cavor doesn't really see the point of it all, not really) and then when they've taken off he flips out and begs to be let off.
"It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream" (36).
So they land on the moon and explore the landscape. HG Wells has a ball making up the strange environment--it seems like a barren tundra, but then the snow melts and strange plants sprout and bloom at amazing speeds and so on--it's actually pretty enthralling. Anyways, they start searching for food and find some edible fungoid. The fungoid are actually intoxicants, and Bedford declares that the 'discovery' (the landing, that is) is second only to the potato. It's hilarious and it's definitely one of the best scenes from the book. (It's page sixty-five in this edition.)
"Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use" (104).
So the men part ways--the moon people take the two men into bondage, and they break free and kill a few moon people in the process. Cavor is eventually recaptured, but Bedford finds their sphere and takes flight. He then begins to bemoan his trip, and seems to view himself as an objective outsider--he "looks down" upon himself. "I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast where I hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited and rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses" (117). Hehehehe.
He goes on to say how after his little existential crisis, he set himself to "puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth" (118). Just move along...
On earth he decides he must make a new identity for himself to escape his failings and so he'd never be obliged to explain the occurrences on the moon and Cavor's disappearance and all. He signs his name as Wells. He says the name seemed to be "thoroughly respectable" (126). I see what you did there.
The book sort of ends after that. I say it sort of ends because Bedford/Well's bit pretty much ends. He mentions that he received a few transmissions from Cavor, who came into contact with the
MLA Citation Information: Wells, HG. The First Men in the Moon. Airmont Books: United States of America, 1965.
This was a pretty good book. Not phenomenal, but I don't have any regrets about reading it.
Also, for all you film buffs--that famous 1902 film where--well, where the men go to the moon... It's based on this book. It's called A Trip to the Moon--its famous image is the moon with a face and a rocket sticking out of one of its eyes. It's mentioned in 99% of all film books, so yeah... It's pretty interesting. I haven't actually watched it in a few years.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen
This post's cryptic lyrics: Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
I had an inexplicable (maybe not so much) urge to reread this book because good news, it's AWESOME! I can never decide whether this or Invisible Monsters is my favourite Palahniuk book. I mean, Invisible Monsters is so good, but this is his first and ahhhh...
So I'm sure you've heard of this book. More likely than not, you saw the movie. At the very least, you've heard the first rule about Fight Club: don't talk about fight club. Pretty much a nobody office worker meets a guy named Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden is charismatic, interesting, rebellious--the narrator even says that Tyler is pretty much everything he wants to be. Which makes sense--but I'll spoil that later. And by the way, if you somehow don't know the ending, do not spoil it for yourself. Straight up read it. Doooo it.
So let's start!
So it starts out with the almost final scene--a lot like Invisible Monsters, actually, since if I recall that starts out with the scene that's second to last and the final scene is in the hospital... Sooo... Yeah. Anyways, this second-to-last scene is Tyler with a gun in the narrator's mouth. Tyler assures him that "'This isn't really death... We'll be legend. We won't grow old'" (11). The narrator tells Tyler that he's thinking of vampires. It's just kind of funny. Also, you're now thinking of Achilles. HAH!
"It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die" (12).
"That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways" (13).
"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?" (15). I want to say Palahniuk goes into this a little more in Choke or something, but I could just be thinking of Desperation by Stephen King. Anyways, at the time I originally read this, this just about blew my mind.
"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero" (17).
"This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you" (21). Okay, I'm going to back up and be a good book blogger here. The insomnia is how it all starts out. The narrator (who, by the way, is never named) hasn't slept for about three weeks and he begs his doctor to give him pills. The doctor refuses, and tells him if he wants to see real suffering, he should go to support groups--cancer support group, parasite support groups, and other groups for various mostly fatal diseases support groups. The narrator sort of... He doesn't exactly get off on it, but he starts feeling really alive afterwards. He loves it. He goes to all the support groups, and his insomnia seems to have cleared up, and all seems to be peaches and cream. Like he says--"This is better than real life" (22). Unfortunately, Marla Singer shows up. With her there he can't let go and cry with the dying people, and thus he can't sleep. After suffering like this again, he plans to tell her to bugger off, and this is around the time Tyler shows up.
Like was said, Tyler is charismatic, handsome, all of that... And they become fast friends. They move in together (they met on a business trip, and when the narrator came back, his apartment was quite exploded). Tyler explains some of his feelings about the world and all of that which I'll be parroting back to you soon enough, and he came up with the idea of fight club early on. But let's back up a bit, shall we?
So when he arrives at the airport he is first of all told that his razor went off and his bag and the bag had to be held up and checked for a bomb and all of that. Then he is told that his apartment was blown up. He's talking about all his Ikea furniture being blown up--"I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue" (43). "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you" (44). On a lesser note: Settling for an Ikea sofa!? Ugh.
On the other hand, I just started thinking. I mean--it's almost a little.... Um, I can't think of the word. I don't think presumptuous fits. But it's almost a little something that the narrator would want this. Sure, who wants to be perfect, but still, then you see people sans limbs, or what have you... Then again, there's Brandy Alexander with her face blown off, and she's more than happy. Well, maybe not happy--but content. Satisfied. I guess it's more funny that the 'perfect' or at least healthy/normal people would want to destroy themselves, and mutilated people want the opposite (sometimes).
"What you see in fight club is a generation of men raised by women" (50).
"My father never went to college so it was really important that I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering of another woman is really the answer I need" (51).
"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves" (52). Again, Brandy Alexander and Shannon and all of that.
Marla. They talk. They trade numbers. One night the narrator calls her up and she says she's taken too many pills. She says she doesn't exactly mean to kill herself, that it's just "one of those cry-for-help things" (59). The narrator doesn't care. He goes to his support group, he goes to bed early. Tyler picks up the phone when she calls and goes to her. The two of them are up all night having sex, and the narrator dreams about it (only it's him, not Tyler, of course) all night. Anyway, after this night, Marla tells Tyler she wants to get pregnant and "have his abortion" (59). There's just something about that... Not disturbing, exactly, but weird. Unsettling, maybe? Disconcerting. That's the best I've got.
Oh, and Tyler called the cops before he went over to Marla's. Marla grabs Tyler to run out while the cops are trying to talk her out of suicide through the door to her empty room. Marla tells the police: "The girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster... and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. 'The girl in 8G has no faith in herself,' Marla shouts, 'and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options.' Marla shouts, 'Good luck'" (61).
So one day at fight club, there's a 'mister angel face', who I'm pretty sure plays a bigger part in the movie, but seeing him, the narrator goes half mad. "What Tyler says about being the crap and slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit rock bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground... For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born" (123-124).
Tyler reveals project mayhem that night to the narrator. He wants to destroy society basically--he tells the narrator to imagine that Seattle and NYC are rotting and rusting, that they've made an ex golf green into a farm of sorts, the remainders of mankind will use zoo cages as shelters from the released animals, having to hunt elk in what were once great cities... I think it's bulls--t. Completely. He wants the earth to recover. Maybe it's because the concept seems so impossible to me, but it just seems like utter crap. I think very easily the same society would rise, and history would pretty much repeat itself. I keep on thinking of Ayn Rand's Anthem. People would be wiped out if nothing else. The way I see it, people are so softened from the way we've been living for 200, 300 years, we literally can't survive out in the wild and such. Also, as a side note, "Colours of the Wind" came up on my shuffle. This is a really, really weird coincidence. And... It works strangely well. Woah.
I also think it's kind of funny in comparison to Invisible Monsters--I know, I won't shut up about that book but let it go for a second. One of my favourite scenes is when Seth is talking about the space needle and the "future via the 1960's" (I don't remember the exact page this is said, but it really stuck out to me, so...) He's talking about how people are giving their kids biblical names, soaking lentils for dinner, making their own shoes out of leather and all of that, and "they're walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must've built them" (99). Shannon says on the next page that "The future is just wasted on some people" (100). I don't think she's trying to be sarcastic or ironic or anything like that, but the elevator operator doesn't get how cool the future was supposed to be--how cool the future according to the sixties is. Maybe Tyler doesn't get it. Maybe he's pissed that that didn't work. Maybe he didn't even care. Maybe they're both thinking the same thing, it's just that their futures are so different. Either way, they were made by the same guy.
"'What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God... If you're male and you're Christian and you're living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? ...What you end up doing... is you spend your life looking for your father and God. What you have to consider... Is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen'" (140-141). I think this may be true even if you're female. It seemed like an interesting concept in theory, but when I really thought about it in relation to me, it sort of held water. It doesn't make sense in some extreme cases though...
"If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ...Which is worse, hell or nothing?" (141).
"The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back... It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky" (141).
EDIT: You know what I just realized? The narrator tries so hard to break free of Tyler--and Tyler tries so hard to get him back. He doesn't want to be a part of fight club, and he doesn't want to be a space monkey... And Tyler maybe isn't God, but whoever is doing unto something or someone else might as well be God to them... I'm not saying it's a perfect fit, I just figure that I might as well point out the parallels.
"Oh, this is bullshit. This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He's a disassociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden is my hallucination. 'Fuck that shit,' Tyler says. 'Maybe you're my schizophrenic hallucination.' I was here first. Tyler says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let's just see who's here last'" (168).
Ooooooops... There goes the non spoiler bit. Yeah, Tyler Durden is the narrator's alter-ego. The narrator describes Tyler as everything he's not--funny, charismatic, free, and so on--everything he wants to be. Which of course makes complete sense. He blames Marla for being the cause of Tyler's appearance--in some way he wanted her, kind of liked her. But he's not brave enough, cool enough, handsome enough or whatever enough to make a move on her or anything--maybe the real reason why his insomnia came back, why he didn't cry in front of her. He didn't want to seem weak in front of her, so he won't cry. Can't sleep because he's focused on her. Maybe? Okay, it's kind of weak but I'm writing this right now at 1 AM. Either way, it makes sense that he'd create his alter ego to be everything he's not and would want to be.
And while we're talking about the fact that TYLER DURDEN ISN'T REAL? When they fought in the parking lot that first time, the narrator says that after a while men started gathered around them and started shouting. Of course, you don't know that Tyler is a schizophrenic delusion then, so it seems like it's the normal crowd, egging two guys on. What it really is is the narrator beating himself up--so it makes sense that they would be yelling and freaking out. (But no-one did anything...?) And when Tyler has the gun in his mouth, the narrator explains that to anyone else it looks like he's holding the gun in his own mouth. I'd also want to mention that in that first fight, neither he (him?) nor Tyler kick each other. It's nearly impossible to kick yourself.
Then of course, when you realize that they're the same, all that repetition of "I know this because Tyler knows this" really makes sense.
"How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings" (201).
Anyways. Here's me spoiling the end. He shoots himself. Now, I haven't seen the movie. Well--not all of it. I saw the first half, about. The only thing I really remember is the scene where the narrator's boss finds the fight club rules and Eddie Norton does an amazing job at giving the narrator's description of shooting up the office. Anyways, I believe the movie ends with the narrator actually shooting himself and the buildings exploding--keep in mind that I don't actually know. The book, however, has the shot--but the shot just rips up the other side of the narrator's face, and the buildings don't explode. (Well... It's implied that they didn't blow up.) There's one more chapter, too. It's kind of funny that it's not actually in the movie--well, if it isn't actually in the movie. In A Clockwork Orange, there's a kind-of sort-of epilogue chapter that covers Alex's life after he's been re-educated and released. He sees his old hellions as police men, married, grown ups--and starts wondering if it's maybe time for him to grow up too. It kind of takes away the steam of the book, I guess, and it was cut out of the movie, and even the original American printings of the book. This is kind of the same thing (in nature, at the very least). Tyler is gone, and we don't know if he'll come back. He's pretending he's dead, though really, he is in the hospital. He's referring to people as angels, and his psychiatrist as God in an effort to fool himself, even though he really truly knows that he is still alive.
"We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, 'No, that's not right.' Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything" (207).
The ending wigs me out. Like I said, he's in the hospital, and there are orderlies who have black eyes, cut-up faces, missing teeth, shaved heads--the obvious signs of fight clubbers. It ends with an orderly saying that he can't wait to have him (/them) back.
There's also a brief afterward by Palahniuk, sort of a reflection bit. It makes sense, Fight Club took off--even now it's insanely popular, and this is more than ten years later.
First of all, there's a big section on people's reactions to it: a man asks what Palahniuk's takes on women's statuses in America today are, someone said the book was a failure because it didn't touch on racism, some people thought the book was actually about interpretative dance, watching gay men have sex, and so on. You get the feeling--or maybe it's just me projecting onto Palahniuk--that he thinks this is utterly ridiculous. I mean... Women don't come into play. They hardly even matter in the book. (I wrote 'anymore' originally--Freudian slip?) As for the racism bit, Palahniuk does mention it--he (Tyler Durden) says it doesn't matter if you're black or white anymore, the only thing that matters is how much money/power you've got.
Some people got mad, saying they invented fight clubs in boot camp, Depression labour camps... "There have always been fight clubs, they say. There will always be fight clubs. Waiters will always pee in soup. People will always fall in love"(217).
MLA Citation information: Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. Norton: United States of America, 2005.
So that's Fight Club! I guess it's easy to see that I love this book. It really is awesome; Palahniuk is really awesome too. I don't think this is his best book--but it's pretty amazing. It probably has the strongest voice out of all his books (that I've read, of course). I actually heard he published something just recently....?
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Warrior by Matisyahu
This post's cryptic lyrics: I'm knitting with only one needle, unravelling fast it's true. I'm driving only three wheels these days--but my dear, how about you?
So I'm sure you've heard of this book. More likely than not, you saw the movie. At the very least, you've heard the first rule about Fight Club: don't talk about fight club. Pretty much a nobody office worker meets a guy named Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden is charismatic, interesting, rebellious--the narrator even says that Tyler is pretty much everything he wants to be. Which makes sense--but I'll spoil that later. And by the way, if you somehow don't know the ending, do not spoil it for yourself. Straight up read it. Doooo it.
So let's start!
So it starts out with the almost final scene--a lot like Invisible Monsters, actually, since if I recall that starts out with the scene that's second to last and the final scene is in the hospital... Sooo... Yeah. Anyways, this second-to-last scene is Tyler with a gun in the narrator's mouth. Tyler assures him that "'This isn't really death... We'll be legend. We won't grow old'" (11). The narrator tells Tyler that he's thinking of vampires. It's just kind of funny. Also, you're now thinking of Achilles. HAH!
"It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die" (12).
"That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways" (13).
"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?" (15). I want to say Palahniuk goes into this a little more in Choke or something, but I could just be thinking of Desperation by Stephen King. Anyways, at the time I originally read this, this just about blew my mind.
"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero" (17).
"This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you" (21). Okay, I'm going to back up and be a good book blogger here. The insomnia is how it all starts out. The narrator (who, by the way, is never named) hasn't slept for about three weeks and he begs his doctor to give him pills. The doctor refuses, and tells him if he wants to see real suffering, he should go to support groups--cancer support group, parasite support groups, and other groups for various mostly fatal diseases support groups. The narrator sort of... He doesn't exactly get off on it, but he starts feeling really alive afterwards. He loves it. He goes to all the support groups, and his insomnia seems to have cleared up, and all seems to be peaches and cream. Like he says--"This is better than real life" (22). Unfortunately, Marla Singer shows up. With her there he can't let go and cry with the dying people, and thus he can't sleep. After suffering like this again, he plans to tell her to bugger off, and this is around the time Tyler shows up.
Like was said, Tyler is charismatic, handsome, all of that... And they become fast friends. They move in together (they met on a business trip, and when the narrator came back, his apartment was quite exploded). Tyler explains some of his feelings about the world and all of that which I'll be parroting back to you soon enough, and he came up with the idea of fight club early on. But let's back up a bit, shall we?
So when he arrives at the airport he is first of all told that his razor went off and his bag and the bag had to be held up and checked for a bomb and all of that. Then he is told that his apartment was blown up. He's talking about all his Ikea furniture being blown up--"I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue" (43). "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you" (44). On a lesser note: Settling for an Ikea sofa!? Ugh.
On the other hand, I just started thinking. I mean--it's almost a little.... Um, I can't think of the word. I don't think presumptuous fits. But it's almost a little something that the narrator would want this. Sure, who wants to be perfect, but still, then you see people sans limbs, or what have you... Then again, there's Brandy Alexander with her face blown off, and she's more than happy. Well, maybe not happy--but content. Satisfied. I guess it's more funny that the 'perfect' or at least healthy/normal people would want to destroy themselves, and mutilated people want the opposite (sometimes).
"What you see in fight club is a generation of men raised by women" (50).
"My father never went to college so it was really important that I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering of another woman is really the answer I need" (51).
"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves" (52). Again, Brandy Alexander and Shannon and all of that.
Marla. They talk. They trade numbers. One night the narrator calls her up and she says she's taken too many pills. She says she doesn't exactly mean to kill herself, that it's just "one of those cry-for-help things" (59). The narrator doesn't care. He goes to his support group, he goes to bed early. Tyler picks up the phone when she calls and goes to her. The two of them are up all night having sex, and the narrator dreams about it (only it's him, not Tyler, of course) all night. Anyway, after this night, Marla tells Tyler she wants to get pregnant and "have his abortion" (59). There's just something about that... Not disturbing, exactly, but weird. Unsettling, maybe? Disconcerting. That's the best I've got.
Oh, and Tyler called the cops before he went over to Marla's. Marla grabs Tyler to run out while the cops are trying to talk her out of suicide through the door to her empty room. Marla tells the police: "The girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster... and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. 'The girl in 8G has no faith in herself,' Marla shouts, 'and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options.' Marla shouts, 'Good luck'" (61).
So one day at fight club, there's a 'mister angel face', who I'm pretty sure plays a bigger part in the movie, but seeing him, the narrator goes half mad. "What Tyler says about being the crap and slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit rock bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground... For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born" (123-124).
Tyler reveals project mayhem that night to the narrator. He wants to destroy society basically--he tells the narrator to imagine that Seattle and NYC are rotting and rusting, that they've made an ex golf green into a farm of sorts, the remainders of mankind will use zoo cages as shelters from the released animals, having to hunt elk in what were once great cities... I think it's bulls--t. Completely. He wants the earth to recover. Maybe it's because the concept seems so impossible to me, but it just seems like utter crap. I think very easily the same society would rise, and history would pretty much repeat itself. I keep on thinking of Ayn Rand's Anthem. People would be wiped out if nothing else. The way I see it, people are so softened from the way we've been living for 200, 300 years, we literally can't survive out in the wild and such. Also, as a side note, "Colours of the Wind" came up on my shuffle. This is a really, really weird coincidence. And... It works strangely well. Woah.
I also think it's kind of funny in comparison to Invisible Monsters--I know, I won't shut up about that book but let it go for a second. One of my favourite scenes is when Seth is talking about the space needle and the "future via the 1960's" (I don't remember the exact page this is said, but it really stuck out to me, so...) He's talking about how people are giving their kids biblical names, soaking lentils for dinner, making their own shoes out of leather and all of that, and "they're walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must've built them" (99). Shannon says on the next page that "The future is just wasted on some people" (100). I don't think she's trying to be sarcastic or ironic or anything like that, but the elevator operator doesn't get how cool the future was supposed to be--how cool the future according to the sixties is. Maybe Tyler doesn't get it. Maybe he's pissed that that didn't work. Maybe he didn't even care. Maybe they're both thinking the same thing, it's just that their futures are so different. Either way, they were made by the same guy.
"'What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God... If you're male and you're Christian and you're living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? ...What you end up doing... is you spend your life looking for your father and God. What you have to consider... Is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen'" (140-141). I think this may be true even if you're female. It seemed like an interesting concept in theory, but when I really thought about it in relation to me, it sort of held water. It doesn't make sense in some extreme cases though...
"If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ...Which is worse, hell or nothing?" (141).
"The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back... It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky" (141).
EDIT: You know what I just realized? The narrator tries so hard to break free of Tyler--and Tyler tries so hard to get him back. He doesn't want to be a part of fight club, and he doesn't want to be a space monkey... And Tyler maybe isn't God, but whoever is doing unto something or someone else might as well be God to them... I'm not saying it's a perfect fit, I just figure that I might as well point out the parallels.
"Oh, this is bullshit. This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He's a disassociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden is my hallucination. 'Fuck that shit,' Tyler says. 'Maybe you're my schizophrenic hallucination.' I was here first. Tyler says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let's just see who's here last'" (168).
Ooooooops... There goes the non spoiler bit. Yeah, Tyler Durden is the narrator's alter-ego. The narrator describes Tyler as everything he's not--funny, charismatic, free, and so on--everything he wants to be. Which of course makes complete sense. He blames Marla for being the cause of Tyler's appearance--in some way he wanted her, kind of liked her. But he's not brave enough, cool enough, handsome enough or whatever enough to make a move on her or anything--maybe the real reason why his insomnia came back, why he didn't cry in front of her. He didn't want to seem weak in front of her, so he won't cry. Can't sleep because he's focused on her. Maybe? Okay, it's kind of weak but I'm writing this right now at 1 AM. Either way, it makes sense that he'd create his alter ego to be everything he's not and would want to be.
And while we're talking about the fact that TYLER DURDEN ISN'T REAL? When they fought in the parking lot that first time, the narrator says that after a while men started gathered around them and started shouting. Of course, you don't know that Tyler is a schizophrenic delusion then, so it seems like it's the normal crowd, egging two guys on. What it really is is the narrator beating himself up--so it makes sense that they would be yelling and freaking out. (But no-one did anything...?) And when Tyler has the gun in his mouth, the narrator explains that to anyone else it looks like he's holding the gun in his own mouth. I'd also want to mention that in that first fight, neither he (him?) nor Tyler kick each other. It's nearly impossible to kick yourself.
Then of course, when you realize that they're the same, all that repetition of "I know this because Tyler knows this" really makes sense.
"How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings" (201).
Anyways. Here's me spoiling the end. He shoots himself. Now, I haven't seen the movie. Well--not all of it. I saw the first half, about. The only thing I really remember is the scene where the narrator's boss finds the fight club rules and Eddie Norton does an amazing job at giving the narrator's description of shooting up the office. Anyways, I believe the movie ends with the narrator actually shooting himself and the buildings exploding--keep in mind that I don't actually know. The book, however, has the shot--but the shot just rips up the other side of the narrator's face, and the buildings don't explode. (Well... It's implied that they didn't blow up.) There's one more chapter, too. It's kind of funny that it's not actually in the movie--well, if it isn't actually in the movie. In A Clockwork Orange, there's a kind-of sort-of epilogue chapter that covers Alex's life after he's been re-educated and released. He sees his old hellions as police men, married, grown ups--and starts wondering if it's maybe time for him to grow up too. It kind of takes away the steam of the book, I guess, and it was cut out of the movie, and even the original American printings of the book. This is kind of the same thing (in nature, at the very least). Tyler is gone, and we don't know if he'll come back. He's pretending he's dead, though really, he is in the hospital. He's referring to people as angels, and his psychiatrist as God in an effort to fool himself, even though he really truly knows that he is still alive.
"We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, 'No, that's not right.' Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything" (207).
The ending wigs me out. Like I said, he's in the hospital, and there are orderlies who have black eyes, cut-up faces, missing teeth, shaved heads--the obvious signs of fight clubbers. It ends with an orderly saying that he can't wait to have him (/them) back.
There's also a brief afterward by Palahniuk, sort of a reflection bit. It makes sense, Fight Club took off--even now it's insanely popular, and this is more than ten years later.
First of all, there's a big section on people's reactions to it: a man asks what Palahniuk's takes on women's statuses in America today are, someone said the book was a failure because it didn't touch on racism, some people thought the book was actually about interpretative dance, watching gay men have sex, and so on. You get the feeling--or maybe it's just me projecting onto Palahniuk--that he thinks this is utterly ridiculous. I mean... Women don't come into play. They hardly even matter in the book. (I wrote 'anymore' originally--Freudian slip?) As for the racism bit, Palahniuk does mention it--he (Tyler Durden) says it doesn't matter if you're black or white anymore, the only thing that matters is how much money/power you've got.
Some people got mad, saying they invented fight clubs in boot camp, Depression labour camps... "There have always been fight clubs, they say. There will always be fight clubs. Waiters will always pee in soup. People will always fall in love"(217).
MLA Citation information: Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. Norton: United States of America, 2005.
So that's Fight Club! I guess it's easy to see that I love this book. It really is awesome; Palahniuk is really awesome too. I don't think this is his best book--but it's pretty amazing. It probably has the strongest voice out of all his books (that I've read, of course). I actually heard he published something just recently....?
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Warrior by Matisyahu
This post's cryptic lyrics: I'm knitting with only one needle, unravelling fast it's true. I'm driving only three wheels these days--but my dear, how about you?
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