Jules LaForgue

I’m a little late to the party, but Jeff Vandermeer proposed recently on his blog the World Cup of Fiction, in which he encouraged people to share favorite pieces of fiction from different countries. I thought I’d mention French writer Jules LaForgue (1860 — 1887) and his short story “Salomé,” which I first read in college for a class from the book Nineteenth-Century French Tales.

I’ve always been taken with the story’s exuberant inventiveness, with tossed-away terms such as “dynastic caryatid,” “endless decamerons of polychromatic statues,” “alcohol of Silence,” “hydrocephalic theosophists,” “the Snow Cult,” “submarine villegiatures,” “obsolete breezes of November,” and “the Omniversal Atmosphere.”

This is the story of Salomé, but a different Salomé than the one we know. She is princess of the Esoteric White Islands and “the foster sister of the Milky Way” and is described in a repeating refrain as “hermetically bemuslined in a spidery jonquil with black dots.” The real star of the story, however, is the Palace Mandarins of the Tetrarch, a tour of which takes up most of the text.

Here are some excerpts:

“With pylons, three blocks of them, squat and stark, inner courtyards, galleries, vaults, and the famous Hanging Park, its jungles undulating in the Atlantic breezes, and the Observatory’s one eye on the lookout six hundred feet up, near the sky, and a hundred flights of sphinxes and cynocephali: the tetrarchic palace was no more than a monolith, carved, excavated, hollowed, compartmented, and finally burnished into a mountain of black basalt streaked with white, extended by a pier of sonorous pavement, with a double row of poplars, funereal violet, in tubs, projecting far out into the shifting solitude of the sea, until it reached an eternal rock, very much like an ossified sponge, holding out a pretty comic-opera beacon toward the night-prowling junks.”

“Oh, everywhere, echoes from unknown passages, filling that austere green solitude, kilometrically deep, sprinkled with patches of light, furnished exclusively with an army of rigid pines, whose bare trunks of a salmon-flesh tint spread, far above, far above, their dusty horizontal parasols.”

“Next were vast gulfs of lawn, grassy slopes like dreams about a faun’s kermis; and stagnant sheets of water where swans that wore earrings far too heavy for their spindle necks were immersed in ennui and old age; and endless decamerons of polychromatic statues with fractured pedestals, but posing with surprising — nobility.”

“And why are we so incapable of curling up in our own little corner and sleeping off the drunken stupor of our sad little Self?”

As for the World Cup of Fiction, I believe submarine villegiatures, firing torpedo congeries, should get France at least into the semifinals.

This continues a series I started here about a Library I Ching, in which I take a book I own and open it randomly to two passages with a question in mind, as if using the I Ching, and see what wisdom is to be found as one passage changes into the other. Like that first post, I’ll share an image of one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, one that somewhat relates to the question I’m asking the library version.

The passages are chosen completely randomly, eyes closed. The choice of book will fit the mood and question at the time. Will I share the question? Well, no — but maybe that will allow the reader to draw his or her own reflections on the excerpts.

This time around I chose Frank Herbert’s Dune. I chose Dune because of recent thoughts about the concept of the Voice in the book, and the reality of it in our own world when people apply certain tones to their voices.

First cast:

Jessica, pulled into the end of the troop by eager hands, hemmed around by jostling bodies, suppressed a moment of panic. She had recognized fragments of the ritual, identified the shards of Chakobsa and Bhotani-jib in the words, and she knew the wild violence that could explode out of these seemingly simple moments.

Jan-jan-jan, she thought. Go-go-go.

Second cast:

Jessica sensed rather than saw the knife hidden in a fold of the man’s robe. She permitted herself one bitter regret that she and Paul had no shields.

‘Do you also speak?’ the man asked.

Hexagram 12, meaning "Obstruction"

Commentary (added Aug. 29)

It seemed a commentary was needed on this entry to fill it out (though nothing about the Library I Ching should be taken too seriously).

It’s interesting that both passages are about the same character and juxtapose together as if they are in the same scene, though they are taken from different sections of the book.

Often the I Ching will advise whether a course of action is auspicious or inauspicious. In the first excerpt we have a drive to action (“Go-go-go“) in the face of danger, but what it changes to seems a caution against rash decision: there is a hidden knife and our characters are unprotected (“no shields”).

We also have hints about the Voice, with caution about what words can lead to with “shards of Chakobsa and Bhotani-jib” and in the question of the last line.

Conclusion? Beware a hidden knife of words.

Inspired by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s excellent and entertaining post at Omnivoracious in which they pair Stone Brewery’s 13th Anniversary Ale with random samplings from books they have received in the mail; and further inspired by Aerophant’s lovely post “Little Homecomings,” which struck a chord with me and which I will henceforth use to slap across the face those who ask me why on earth I would keep a book after reading it, I conceived of an experiment in which I would explore among the books on my own shelves a concept I have noticed while in libraries and subsequently heard described by another writer, which supported my observations: to wit, that when one walks randomly around the stacks one will invariably find what one is looking for, books connected to what one is currently researching or wondering about, or connected to each other, without having first looked them up in the computer index.

I first thought I would explore random quotes from books on my shelves after imbibing an alcoholic beverage to see if they were connected to each other or to my state of mind, books with appropriate titles to such a course of action, such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Heart of Darkness and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I then did a test run BB (Before Beer) with half-hearted results, but the results were supposed to be unexciting without beer anyway; nevertheless, my fear grew that the experiment, which clearly was about the quantum mechanical nature of things, would actually work under the influence, and I did not want to appear to condone quaffing adult beverages in the interest of furthering researches into quantum mechanics, for then science professors in our higher institutes of learning would feel obligated to become inebriated whilst flinging about their formulae, or have an excuse to do so. Besides, I do not believe the experiment works except under the influence of coffee.

So I conceived of the Library I Ching instead.

Hexagram meaning "Center Returning"

Without going into too much detail, when one uses the I Ching, one forms in one’s mind a question and then casts coins or yarrow sticks to produce two hexagrams. One meditates on the changing of one hexagram into the other. Each of the six lines of the hexagram are either yin or yang, and they transform or stay the same to produce the second hexagram. The answer to one’s question, or actually the reflection of one’s self to help you find the answer, lies in the second hexagram. One reads the text that matches the changed lines, and so on.

With my Library I Ching, one takes a book from one’s bookshelf, perhaps one with a title that reflects one’s state of mind or question, and randomly — blindly — selects two quotes.

Once again, I did a test run, picking Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I had not quite settled on how to pick a section of page once I randomly opened the book. With one, I randomly stabbed with a finger, eyes closed, and with the other mentally chose a section before opening my eyes. I also realized I did not begin with a question in mind. So I did the whole thing again, randomly opening the book and choosing the right or left page and what section by finger, eyes closed, and choosing the sentence it landed on as my quote (with a subsequent sentence or two as optional).

The fact that the first quote I randomly chose during the second run matched exactly the second quote I randomly chose during the first run (no lie) is either a complete coincidence or a full-on confirmation of the experiment and the non-coincidental quantum mechanical nature of the universe (though even with the I Ching one is expected to come up with different results even when performing one casting immediately after another: dip your toe into the river a second time and it is not the same river.)

Here are the two quotes.

First cast:

“The actress spoke about suffering children, about the barbarity of Communist dictatorship, the human right to security, the current threat to the traditional values of civilized society, the inalienable freedom of the human individual, and President Carter, who was deeply sorrowed by the events in Cambodia. By the time she had pronounced her closing words, she was in tears.”

Second cast:

“She would push her body up to the border, let it stand there for a moment as at the stake, and then, when the engineer tried to put his arms around her, she would say, as she said to the man with the rifle on Petrin Hill, ‘It wasn’t my choice.’”

Did this help with the question I posed to the Library I Ching? Very subtly at first, yes; and then more strongly, indeed, yes — concentrating, as with the I Ching, on the second cast.

Hmmm. I might have to do this again soon.

Come to think of it, there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching ….