Comparison papers are often very frustrating to write. This is not because of any actual difficulty involved in comparing or contrasting themes, characters or opinions, rather it seems to me that it is not always easy to pick two or three pieces of work wherein it is plausible to find such items worth comparing. I here acknowledge that worth is completely subjective and arbitrary depending upon personal taste and experience. So, imagine my delight upon finding myself reminded of Umberto Eco while reading Daniel Pinkwater.
Umberto Eco came into my left several times in very small ways for many years until I finally picked up The Name of the Rose. Then I read it. And I fell in love. My love manifests itself in various expressions with which I will not entertain you now.
Daniel Pinkwater came into my life via email. My sister's friend's husband suggested him as he knew that I grew up in Chicago, and he thought I would enjoy his writing. I picked up Young Adult Novel at the library. And I read it. And I fell in love. Again.
This is what happened in my brain after I had read Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and was in the middle of reading Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars. The main characters in Eco are Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi. In Pinkwater they are Alan Mendelsohn and Leonard Neeble. I won't go into the details of stories - head to Amazon or to the authors' websites if you're interested, which you should be.
Alan and Leonard spend much time wondering if they've been swindled, feeling impatient with their accomplishments and discoveries until their day-to-day lives suddenly become more meaningful and involving. The question of perceptive truth is not one that either boy spends much time considering in the face of the actualities of their actions. They know what they know and don't spend time splitting the hairs of meaning.
Casaubon & company spend so much time splitting hairs, even as parody, that it is not even in the face of what exists that they realize what they know. Sitting on the hill, looking out over the world that has suddenly become beautiful, Casaubon finally sees it as something beautiful and worth while, not as a figment or a symbol or cog in the game. He simply sees it as it is to him at that moment, which is all any of us have anyway.
It strikes me that the ever repeated need to act or to analyze becomes so much a hindrance, but a necessary one. It is too much to ask that an individual record every moment as poetry or inspiration. We all connect over the activity of being alive and in a moment, that is what makes it possible to share through word or sound or image or mathematical representation.
Anyway, it does not seem to me that there is one righter way than another to navigate through this world of endless possibility. Alan Mendelsohn removes himself to a world which is as narrowly defined as Leonard's, just in a differently defined space. Leonard does not dwell on past events, rather choosing to explore the options available to him immediately. Casaubon is the only one of the three meta-conspirators who has a connection to the world of immediate reality and possibility (through his lover, Lia) and he is left alone to enjoy its beauty only at the end, with death invisible and imminent.
One of the appealing traits of finding thematic continuity in literature or life is the constant threat of conclusion drawing. There is no definite answer or meaning to life. No disclaimer, no corollary. Whatever is added is just the recognition of perception and human reason and analysis. I prefer to keep things practical. That is the language I choose to describe my interaction with the world.
I think I could drive myself completely batty with an essay on 'practical' - find a theme of short story, and exploit it for everything it's worth. Then I go back to the story of the Four Rabbinim and I remember that stories are fun, that the world is as it will be around us and in us and there is little comfort for me in the over indulgence of my own definitions. Seeking always for meaning becomes something of a lame passtime, and tends to send me back into a state of paralysis and comprehension. I like that once Heinlein's alien man realized laughter, he stopped needing so much to shut down to grok - he was connected enough to the rest of humanity to not have to remove himself from the actions of the world anymore.
Back to Eco & Pinkwater:
The idea of the game: the existence of a continuum of interconnected constantly shifting conspiracies all leading to and away from, protecting, hording, seeking some unnamed source of ultimate power and knowledge. In Foucault's Pendulum, Eco plays it past the point of repetition, exhaustion and madness. Every potential is sought and pursued. All possible magic, sex, symbol, decadent exploration, devotion and permutation is touched, having its climax in terror, horror and the absence of all mystique, all decorum, all honor or noble code. It is a feast of information, one at which I found myself working until I realized that no matter what parts I paid attention to, no matter how many facts and connections remained in my gray cells, the story was going to move forward through the pages and I might as well get on with it. At is turned out, I was perfectly correct to discontinue my double readings. I would have been just as correct to continue them, to have spent time studying the symbols, the patterns, the criticism, the writing about Eco and semiotics, his essays, etc. It only made a difference that I chose to read on less slowly because I finished at a different time with different information and a different lag time between finishing the reading of the book and realizing the extreme to which I enjoyed the experience and its after effects.
As it is, I am sitting here now, writing about the game and remembering when it popped its head back up into my consciousness. It happened in two phases, really, 1) driving to Chicago talking to my mother, and 2) Jingle Bells in Mendelsohn.
Driving to Chicago talking to my mother.
It is about an eight hour drive from Lincoln to Chicago. That is just driving time – not including lunch. My mother and I sat in the front and split the driving responsibilities while my father sat in the back seat, worked on his paper and got some much needed sleep. We didn’t turn on the radio. I didn’t sleep. Neither did my mother. She drove first. I started a crochet project: a pineapple doily in blue.
Driving after lunch, east of Iowa, about an hour out of Chicago, the conversation turned here: a nested box series where nothing exists inside one box except another box. The outside is the key – the space – the markings, the workmanship of the covering. The trick is that the last box is empty – maybe (Now that I write this, I like the idea of having to re-nest the boxes, to recreate the puzzle. Find the remnants, reverse the codes, etc. What fun.) As we spoke, the game – the never-ending meaningless conspiracy theories – resurfaced briefly and I had to go on about it for some minutes. I had thought of Eco before in conversation, even Foucault’s Pendulum specifically, but it had always been as an example of sublimity and endlessness in the face of mediocrity with meaning. Particularly the recent Da Vinci Code. To consider the story, and the writer as having transcended the hopelessness of a happy ending and settled in my consciousness where it fits with all of my other chaos needs – that was created, that was the sudden recognition of a new heartbeat in space.
Jingle Bells in Mendelsohn...
...and then two fictional 12 year old boys got so frustrated with the ridiculous attempts to get a wireless to play Jingle Bells when clamped to their ears, that they started laughing uncontrollably at how easily they had been swindled. And I thought of the wonderful power of laughter to return us to a state of enjoyment and relaxation; how fabulous to live in a world in which this is our best weapon against adversity. And then the wireless radio equipped with alligator clamps started playing Jingle Bells.
For me, this was the moment when everything fell apart – the game became real, it became possible, it became part of the world around it. It became incredibly boring. Alan and Leonard took about 24 hours to master the art of Jingle Bells and move into other realms of telekinetic possibility, and they found it boring. What is the point of being able to make other students trip or the headmaster speak weirdly into the PA every morning? It’s dull. It doesn’t make life any more fun. Instead of trying to piece together some new philosophy of life in which all people are simply puppets and everyone lives on a stage with some strangely unidentified puppetmaster who is sought by some who claim to know that he exists, it is possible to simply continue to exist, knowing that the tricks are just that: tricks. Casaubon has this wonderful moment with his lover, Lia, when she tells him that searching for some underlying pattern or conspiracy or source of control is a completely stupid thing to do. And she is right. It is an incredible passage that tugged at my heart the first time that I read it, and I am still reminded of it every moment of every day.
"Yes indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you’ve been without retracing your steps is to walk a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that’s why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it’s hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it’s best to move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everybody can see the one who’s in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn’t see. And that’s why the circle and rotary motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite." (Eco, 302)
It is a simple concept. Things work because they do. The only reason for the joke of any under- or over-arching system or conspiracy controlling the whole world and everyone in it is to laugh at its insanity.
The first time that I read Robert Anton Wilson’s book the Illuminatus, I did not grasp the joke and spent many days wondering how much of it could be true. Then I watched Oliver Stone’s version of JFK’s assassination and it sparked some ridiculous need to use the analytic abilities of my brain to turn every tiny little event in my life into some kind of cog in a wheel that I could never see, find or know.
Pinkwater’s 12 year old boys instinctively know that life just exists with weirdness, and level 26’s and really super hot chili. They understand that laughter is the key. For me, it is enough to know that at the end of every joke there is a punch line that leads to another, even more laughable, joke.
Eco, Umberto. Foucault's Pendulum. Ballantine. 1990. 533p.
Pinkwater, Daniel. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars. Bantam Books. 1979. 200(ish)p.
