The Joy of Fan Conventions

Anyone who has participated in a comic book or sci-fi convention will know precisely what Walter Benjamin is talking about below. Joy is tangible. Affectations are few. You and your friends are discussing the most important things:

"The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such a fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion." From "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).

Lack of Character Relatability: Scott Hawkins' The Library at Mount Char

Scott Hawkins' The Library at Mount Char (2015) is a compelling, experimental fantasy novel. Set in the 2010s in the state of Virginia, it features a group of orphans who have been tortured by a deity who imprisoned them in an extra-dimensional and vast library that contains the total knowledge of the cosmos. It's a strange, surprising novel. Perhaps a more accurate description would be it is a combination of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber, and Jorge Luis Borges's "La biblioteca de Babel." Indeed, it combines strange mythology (Gaiman), cruelty-laced phantasmagoria (Ellison), a cast of cruel demigods (Zelazny), with a disorienting, labyrinthine fictional ontology (Borges).

Despite the novelty of the concept and Hawkin's skill at rendering vivid and memorable characters, I couldn't get too into this book. I give it a 3/5. Why? Put simply: the characters weren't relatable.

The main characters, the demigods--they're called "librarians"--each have a particular "catalog" or subject in the library that they are forced to master by their god-like father: e.g. murder, medicine, prophecy, death, etc.. The protagonist, Carolyn, focuses on language; her psychotic brother, David, focuses on murder and war. There were other flatly characterized librarians: the "goth" girl, Margaret (death); the pot-smoking healer, Jennifer (medicine); the animal whisperer, Michael (animals), and others who were barely sketched.

These characters were compelling in the beginning, but in execution they weren't fully realized. For the most part, they seemed wooden and alienating. And when they were characterized in depth, they had a bizarre, inhuman quality to them. David, for example, was super evil: a torturer, sadist, and sometimes rapist. Despite the fact that the novel wants you to see him as the sad product of abuse, I just couldn't. He legitimately had no redeeming qualities at all, and his abusive and cruel nature was too extreme for me to relate to him as a human. So, he was basically a monster from my perspective.

Margaret, the librarian of death, was equally off-putting: her leitmotif behaviors consisted of creepy giggles and torturing animated decapitated heads. The protagonist, Carolyn, was the most relatable of the three, but, alas, not by much; the novel spends a lot of time exploring her past and rounding her out. But her experience in the strange world of her god-like father's library has made her evil, at least from an ordinary human perspective. For example, she massacres several dogs, kills an innocent lion, and blows up two helicopters filled with people.

There were two minor, non-librarian characters I could root for: Steve and Erwin. The problem with these two characters for me, however, is that they were macho-types whose fragile psychologies was barely probed and treated only obliquely. Both had a rough, no-BS exterior but both were barely keeping it together, a compelling tension that the narrator largely ignores. And both had a traumatized past: Erwin was haunted by the combat he saw in Afghanistan and Steve had a criminal past that resulted in the death of one of his best friends. Neither were able to talk about their traumatic past. Steve sought spiritual relief in Buddhist meditation. Both characters were very similar. Erwin was a little more folksy than Steve. Steve came off like a self-denigrating twerp, perhaps betraying Hawkin's skepticism towards self-help practices like meditation. But both characters were basically rendered as good guys with feet firmly planted on the ground; they served as anchors of the ordinary in a novel filled with strangeness.

The fantastical concepts, the world building, the renderings of the sublime and otherworldly: these things aren't what keep me coming back to fantasy novels; instead, it is for the vivid, likable characters that I can root for through engaging crises. In other words, fantasy novels provide me virtual friends who I want to spend a long time with.

Despite the strange, labyrinthine plot and the occasional flash of cosmic horror, The Library of Mount Char didn't completely work for me. Why? The traumatized, nihilistic characters of the novel--corrupted and haunted by abuse--were just too alienating.

Stanley G. Weinbaum, "A Martian Odyssey"

Stanley G. Weinbaum's, "A Martian Odyssey," published in Hugo Gersnbeck's Wonder Stories in 1934, treats the strange experiences of a surveyor, Jarvis, who, after crashing his rocket ship, has to hike his way back to his base ship, the Ares, over 800 miles of bizarre and inhospitable martian landscape. In the course of his difficult journey he encounters several strange creatures: a hypnotic tentacle monster that kills by projecting itself as the deepest desire of its selected prey, a bird-like intelligent creature named Tweel, a race of silicon-based mindless pyramid builders, and a barrel-shaped race of suicidal scavengers.

Much of the story focuses on the relationship between the protagonist and Tweel, who struggle to understand each other in spite of language and logic barriers. A general question posed throughout the story is whether or not Tweel is as intelligent as Jarvis. This dynamic reminds me of the movie, Enemy Mine (Wolgang Peterson, 1985), about how a human and an alien have to come to understand each other and trust each other to survive an inhospitable planet.

There are several memorable moments from this story, such as when the barrel-shaped creatures the protagonist and Tweel encounter parrot back the protagonist's English. There is another element near the end of the story, a strange crystal produced by the barrel-shaped creatures that possesses strong healing properties. Here is how it's described:

There was something [...] shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to the beat Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed the funny thing.

After an exciting battle the protagonist is separated from Tweel and saved by his companions, other engineers on the Ares, but in the course of being saved, he steals the crystal. This is a common, enduring mythological and literary trope. Here the crystal is a kind of life-giving lotus, such as that sought by Gilgemesh, or the Holy Grail, sought by the Knights of the Round Table.

Toxic Beauty in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) allegorizes the effect of scientific knowledge on human relationships. The three main characters, the young man Giovanni Guasconti, the mad botanist Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, and his daughter Beatrice, interact to narratively test the idea that perhaps the pursuit of scientific knowledge is toxic to romantic love.

The story takes place in medieval Padua in the botanical gardens of the University of Padua, which, through the logic of allegory, becomes a version of the Garden of Eden. In this view, Giovanni and Beatrice are the innocent Adam and Eve figures and Dr. Rappaccini is the serpent/satantic figure.

Dr. Rappaccini cultivates a variety of toxic plants and creates a few deadly plants through artificial means. In the course of doing this, he subjects his daughter, Beatrice, to a poisonous environment. Beatrice then develops a tolerance for poison but she also becomes poisonous herself. Her touch shrivels flowers. Her breath kills insects. Her kiss is deadly. And despite all of this, she is sublimely beautiful. Consider when Giovanni sees her for the first time:

There emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young woman [...] beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy.

But, upon deeper scrutiny, there is revealed something sinister to her beauty:

The impression the stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they--more beautiful than the richest of them--but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask.

Beatrice here makes me think of the Batman villainess, Poison Ivy, although, unlike Poison Ivy, this particular poisonous woman hates the toxic garden her father has created.

The conflict of the story proceeds from the vexed love that Giovanni develops for Beatrice. He sees her strolling in the garden everyday and so falls hard, and she for him as well. Beatrice never allows Giovanni to kiss her and she never embraces him, and soon he discovers her tragically poisonous nature. Even more, he discovers that since he has been hanging out with her in this toxic garden he, too, has become toxic and therefore unable to return to society. Beatrice is wracked with guilt because she thinks she has doomed them both to social isolation. We she tries to cure herself by drinking an antidote to her poisons, she dies.

Beatrice is the first of many female personifications of knowledge, inspiration, and truth, a literary tradition going all the way back to the Muses of Greek Mythology. I find Beatrice's poisonous quality compelling. She combines the allure of knowledge with the threat it also holds. I find it intriguing that this ambivalent view toward science appears as early as it does, fourteen years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1959) decentered the human animal. Rappaccini isn't a Darwinian figure, though; he is one of our first SF mad scientists, a inhuman sorcerer whose pursuit of knowledge leaves no room for the human.

Lovecraft and Literature: A Depersonalized Process of Tranquility Creation

Consider H.P. Lovecraft's advice to a fellow amateur journalist, Rheinhart Kleiner, related in a letter dated March 7th, 1920:

My advice to you would be to re-enter active amateurdom and follow my example of accumulating a Johnsonian circle of literary dependents--worthy folk who suffer more than you, and whose pain cou'd be assuaged by the exercise of the critical gifts which you possess in so great an abundance.

Lovecraft then goes on to reveal the secret of true contentment, which consists of the adoption of two philosophical perspectives (numbering below is mine):

1. I am convinced the secret of true contentment [...] lies in the achievement of the cosmical point of view; whereby the most cruel distinctions between great and small things are shewn to be merely apparent and unreal. 

2. The next philosophical step is to acquire the impersonal attitude--to divest oneself of egocentric consciousness, and assume the role of a spectator at the comedy of man.

From my perspective, Lovecraft is reflecting, and in a sober way, on the value of literature and literary culture (read fandom, if you'd like). Why write, read, think, and discuss with others?

Lovecraft's primary value is very similar to Epicurus' idea of "ataraxia," which is basically the tranquil state of being free from worry and anxiety. For Lovecraft, a way of cultivating "ataraxia" is to read, to become a writer, and these things done, to inspire others to read and to become writers. This is a subtle utilitarian view of literature. Lovecraft sees literature as functional in the most practical sense; his time spent as an amateur journalist made him see participating in literary culture as transactional and collaborative, a group activity where everyone is less concerned with their own legend and more concerned with the activity as a mode of salvation.

What is that activity? One might say simply "writing," "learning," "imagining," "entertaining," or "fandom," but Lovecraft doesn't get that specific. Earlier in the letter he put the goal of literary activity quite simply: To enjoy tranquility and to promote tranquility in others.

I find this refreshing. Lovecraft views writing, reading, thinking, and discussing as a depersonalized process of tranquility creation.