I learned from Michael Kandel’s essay* in Peter Swirski’s collection
The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (McGill UP, 2006) that crew
member Harrach’s feelings about the absurdity of women appearing in
science fiction novels (on pp. 313-14 of the Polish original according
to Kandel) which expands into a rant was dropped from Kandel’s
translation (with Lem’s approval) because Kandel and his editor thought
that it would appear “ridiculous if not offensive to an American reader”
(80 n.8). If I understand Kandel correctly, this passage is clearly an
authorial aside.
An example of a scholarly investigation of a topic or figure which finds
that the conventional representation of such is in fact exhaustive and
accurate.
What is there to say about the writing machines? According to the IMDB
trivia page, Cronenberg wrote the script to this movie while he was
playing a character (a psychiatrist, as I remember) in a Clive Barker
film who would put on a mask and slaughter entire hotels because the
mask told him to. The trivia page also mentions that he wrote it on a
Toshiba laptop, which would have been suitably monstrous at the time.
One of the most interesting procedures in psychoanalytic literary
interpretation to me has always been what to make of writers who were
not innocent of psychoanalytic concepts. The feedback becomes very
difficult to entangle in those writers aware through cultural osmosis or
primary reading (or actual analysis) of psychoanalysis. Cronenberg
presents an interesting case here because, as even a quick glance
through the collection of his interviews shows, he’s well acquainted
with many of the most likely theoretical explanations that many people
trained in film studies or literary analysis would turn to when
interpreting the film.
Clancy and I just watched this now, and I’ve had a chance to scan over a
couple of the reviews. Ebert’s is surprisingly sloppy; several people do
pronounce “Chigurh” in No Country for Old Men, and Woody Harrelson’s
character is the only one who knows how to say it correctly. I mentioned
to Clancy while we were watching it that the Coen brothers excelled in
the poetics of everyday stupidity; “knucklehead” seems to be their
favorite description of characters, for example. The John Malkovich
character suggests that he’s been at war with morons his entire life,
and it’s interesting to consider how the various characters end with
respect to their various levels of accomplishment and intelligence: the
Frances McDormand character, for instance, is by far the most venal and
stupid and stupendously coerces the CIA into paying for elective
surgeries. (And this comes from a CIA introduced to us with a mock
spy-film satellite zoom to a faceless and dated office building, which
routinely commits and covers up domestic murders, and makes us laugh
about it. Because it’s clearly funny, expected, and deserved, in the
film’s logic.)
It’s pretty easy to tell if I’m in a sentimental mood when I’m listening
to music on my computer. If the Arcade Fire song “Intervention” comes up
and I don’t skip it when he gets to the line about “working for the
church,” then the natural lights of the season or something have gotten
to me. I then sometimes read the reviews in The Yearbook of English
Studies to get my edge back, if needed.
I realize that the Library of Congress has chosen to transliterate out
of the Crillic [sic?] into some quite private language, so that
Chekov, for instance, turns up as “Cexov,” which sounds like an
anaphrodisiac breakfast cereal; but these weird pedantries needn’t
infect the rest of us. (SFS 1.3 [1974] 182).
I’ve always thought that the manifest ludicrousness of the Quebecois
elements in Infinite Jest was a clear indicator of the diegetic
embeddedness of much of the book, but I have learned from two review
articles* in SFS that bizarre extrapolations about many different
varieties of Canadian separatism have a rich literary history. Wallace,
who enjoyed science fiction, might well have read some of them.
Heinlein’s Friday, for example seems about on par from a plausibility
perspective, if lacking in the grotesquerie of Wallace’s scenario.
Do you know of any fiction in which a character (or the narrator, better
yet) describes or engages in mythographic research in the mode of
Eliade, with all of the details being entirely fabricated?
I suspect that something in the Lovecraftian mythos might fit here,
though what I have in mind is more self-consciously metafictional than
anything I know of it in that genre.
My sense is that the worldspirit has passed the genre* by, but I think
that it would be a passable exercise to ask students in a first-year
literature course to identify the rhetorical figures in the Old 97s song
“House That Used to Be.”
*Left deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is the genre of
assignment or of “alt-country” that I mean.
