A Perfect Vacuum (4 page)

And further: for the common man the beings who are the most desired, and at the same time entirely real, are beings
beyond reach.
Everyone knows of the Queen of England, of her sister the Princess, of the former wife of the President of the United States, of the famous movie stars; that is to say, no one who is normal doubts for a minute the actual existence of such persons, even though he cannot directly (by touch) substantiate their existence. In turn, he who can boast of a direct acquaintance with such persons will no longer see in them phenomenal paragons of wealth, femininity, power, beauty, etc., because, in entering into contact with them, he experiences—by dint of everyday things—their completely ordinary, normal, human imperfection. For such persons, up close, are not in the least godlike beings or otherwise extraordinary. Beings that are truly at the pinnacle of perfection, that are therefore truly boundlessly desired, yearned for, longed after, must be
remote
even to full unattainability. It is their elevation above the masses that lends them their magnetic glamour; it is not qualities of body or soul but an unbridgeable social distance that accounts for their seductive halo.

This characteristic of the real world, then, Robinson attempts to reproduce on his island, within the realm of beings of his own invention. Immediately he errs, because he
physically
turns his back on the creation, the Snibbinses, Boomers, et al., and that distance, natural enough between Master and Servant, he is only too willing to break down when he acquires a woman. Snibbins he could not, nor did he wish, to take into his arms; now—with a woman—he only
cannot.
The point is not (for this is no intellectual problem!) that he was unable to embrace a woman not there. Of course he was unable! The thing was to create
mentally
a situation whose own natural
law
would forever stand in the way of erotic contact—and at the same time it had to be a law that would totally ignore the
nonexistence
of the girl. This
law
was to restrain Robinson, and not the banal, crude fact of the female partner's nonexistence! For to take simple cognizance of her nonexistence would have been to ruin everything.

And so Robinson, seeing what must be done, sets to work—that is, the establishment on the island of an entire, imaginary society. It is this that will stand between him and the girl; this that will throw up a system of obstacles and thus provide that impassable distance from which he will be able to love her, to desire her continually—no longer exposed to any mundane circumstance, as, for example, the urge to stretch out his hand and feel her body. He realizes—he must—that if he yields but once in the struggle waged against himself, if he attempts to feel her, the whole world that he has created will, in that bat of an eye, crumble. And this is the reason he begins to “go mad,” in a frenzied scramble to pull multitudes out of the hat of his imagination—thinking up and writing in the sand all those names, cognomens, and sobriquets, ranting and raving about the wives of Snibbins, the Hyperborean aunts, the Old Fried Eggses, and so on and so forth. And since this swarm is necessary to him
only
as a certain insurmountable space (to lie between Him and Her), he creates indifferently, sloppily, chaotically; he works in haste, and that haste discredits the thing created, lays bare its incoherence, its lack of thought, its cheapness.

Had he succeeded, he would have become the eternal lover, a Dante, a Don Quixote, a Werther, and in so doing would have had his way. Wendy Mae—is it not obvious?—would then have been a woman no less real than Beatrice, than Lotte, than any queen or princess. Being completely real, she would have been at the same time unattainable. And this would have allowed him to live and dream of her, for there is a profound difference between a situation in which a man from reality pines after his own dream, and one in which reality lures reality—precisely by its inaccessibility. Only in this second case is it still possible to cherish hope, since now it is the social distance alone, or other, similar barriers, that rule out the chance for the love to be consummated. Robinson's relationship to Wendy Mae could therefore have undergone normalization only if she at one and the same time had taken on
realness
and
inapproachability
for him.

To the classic tale of the star-crossed lovers united in the end, Marcel Coscat has thus opposed an ontological tale of the necessity of permanent separation, this being the only guarantee of a plighting of the spirits that is permanent. Comprehending the full boorishness of the blunder of the “third leg,” Robinson (and not the author, that's plain!) quietly “forgets” about it in the second volume. Mistress of her world, princess of the ice mountain, untouchable inamorata—this is what he wished to make of Wendy Mae, that same Wendy Mae who began her education with him as a simple little servant girl, a domestic to replace the uncouth Snibbins.... And it was precisely in this that he failed. Do you know now, have you guessed why? The answer could not be simpler: because Wendy Mae, unlike any queen,
knew
of Robinson and loved him. She had no desire to become the vestal goddess, and this division drove the hero to his ruin. If it were only
he
that loved
her,
bah! But she returned his feelings.... Whoever does not understand this simple truth, whoever believes, as our grandfathers were instructed by their Victorian governesses, that we are able to love others, but not ourselves in those others, would do better not to open this mournful romance that Monsieur Coscat has vouchsafed us. Coscat's Robinson dreamed himself a girl whom he did not wish to give up completely to reality, since
she
was
he,
since from that reality that never releases its hold on us, there is—other than death—no awakening.

(Transworld Publishers, London)

 

Here is an author who covets the laurels of James Joyce.
Ulysses
condensed the
Odyssey
into a single Dublin day, made Circe's infernal palace from the dirty laundry of
la belle epoque,
tied the bloomers of Gerty McDowell into a hangman's noose for Bloom the traveling salesman, and with an army of four hundred thousand words descended upon Victorianism, which was demolished with all the stylistics that lay at the disposal of the pen, from stream of consciousness to trial deposition. Was this not already the culmination of the novel, and at the same time the monumental laying of it to rest in the family sepulcher of the arts (in
Ulysses
there is music, too!)? Apparently not; apparently Joyce himself did not think so, inasmuch as he decided to go further, writing a book that is supposed to be not only the focusing of civilization into a single language, but also an
omnilinguistic
lens, a descent to the foundations of the Tower of Babel. As to the brilliance of
Ulysses
and
Finnegan's Wake,
which attempts the infinite with double-barreled audacity, we neither affirm it here nor deny it. A solitary review can now be nothing but a grain cast upon that mountain of homages and imprecations that has grown over both books. It is certain, however, that Patrick Hannahan, Joyce's countryman, never would have written his
Gigamesh
if not for the great example, which he took as a challenge.

One would think that such an idea would be doomed to failure from the beginning. Doing a second
Ulysses
is as worthless as doing a second
Finnegan.
At the summits of art only the first achievements count, just as, in the history of mountain climbing, it is only the first surmounting of walls unsealed.

Hannahan, tolerant enough of
Finnegan's Wake,
thinks little of
Ulysses.
“What an idea,” he says, “packing the nineteenth century of Europe, and Ireland, into the sarcophagal form of the
Odyssey
! Homer's original itself is of doubtful value. Why, it is your comic book of antiquity, with Ulysses as Superman, and the happy end.
Ex ungue leonem
: in the choice of his model we see the caliber of the writer. The
Odyssey
is a pirating of
Gilgamesh,
and bastardized to suit the tastes of the Greek hoi polloi. What in the Babylonian epic represented the tragedy of a struggle crowned with defeat, the Greeks turn into a picturesque adventure tour of the Mediterranean. ‘
Navigare necesse est
‘life is a journey'—great gems of wisdom, these. The
Odyssey
is a
dégringolade
in plagiarism; it ruins all the greatness of the fight of Gilgamesh.”

One has to admit that
Gilgamesh,
as Sumerology teaches us, did in fact contain themes that Homer used—the themes of Odysseus, of Circe, of Charon—and is perhaps the oldest version we have of a tragic ontology, because it manifests what Rainer Maria Rilke, thirty-six centuries later, was to call a growing, which consists in this: “
der Tiefbesiegte von immer Grösserem zu sein.”
Man's fate as a battle that leads inescapably to defeat—this is the final sense of
Gilgamesh.

It was on the Babylonian cycle, then, that Patrick Hannahan decided to spread his epic canvas—a curious enough canvas, let us note, because his
Gigamesh
is a story extremely limited in time and space. The notorious gangster, hired killer, and American soldier (of the time of the last world war) “GI Joe” Maesch, unmasked in his criminal activity by an informer, one N. Kiddy, is to be hanged—by sentence of the military tribunal—in a small town in Norfolk County, where his unit is stationed. The whole action takes thirty-six minutes, the time required to transport the condemned man from his cell to the place of execution. The story ends with the image of the noose, whose black loop, seen against the sky, falls upon the neck of the calmly standing Maesch. This Maesch is of course Gilgamesh, the semidivine hero of the Babylonian epos, and the one who sends him to the gallows—his old buddy N. Kiddy—is Gilgamesh's closest friend, Enkidu, created by the gods in order to bring about the hero's downfall. When we present it thus, the similarity in creative method between
Ulysses
and
Gigamesh
becomes immediately apparent. But justice demands that we concentrate on the differences between these two works. Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact,
Gigamesh
runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847). We learn at once how Hannahan's method works: the first, seventy-page chapter of the Commentary explains to us all the divergent allusions that emanate from a single, solitary word—namely, the title. Gigamesh derives first, obviously, from Gilgamesh: with this is revealed the mythic prototype, just as in Joyce, for his
Ulysses
also supplies the classical referent before the reader comes to the first word of the text. The omission of the letter L in the name Gigamesh is no accident; L is Lucifer, Lucipherus, the Prince of Darkness, present in the work although he puts in no personal appearance. Thus the letter (L) is to the name (Gigamesh) as Lucifer is to the events of the novel: he is there, but
invisibly.
Through “Logos” L indicates the Beginning (the Causative Word of Genesis); through Laocoon, the End (for Laocoon's end is brought about by serpents: he was
strangled,
as will be strangled—by the rope—the hero of
Gigamesh
). L has ninety-seven further connections, but we cannot expound them here.

To continue, Gigamesh is a GIGAntic MESS; the hero is in a mess indeed, one hell of a mess, with a death sentence hanging over his head. The word also contains: GIG, a kind of rowboat (Maesch would drown his victims in a gig, after pouring cement on them); GIGgle (Maesch's diabolical giggle is a reference—reference No. 1—to the musical leitmotif of the descent to hell in
Klage Dr. Fausti
[more on this later]); GIGA, which is (a) in Italian, “fiddle,” again tying in with the musical substrates of the novel, and (b) a prefix signifying the magnitude of a billion (as in the word GIGAwatts), but here the magnitude of
evil
in a technological civilization.
Geegh
is Old Celtic for “avaunt” or “scram.” From the Italian
giga
through the French
gigue
we arrive at
geigen,
a slang expression in German for copulation. For lack of space we must forgo any further etymological exposition. A different partitioning of the name, in the form of Gi-GAME-sh, foreshadows other aspects of the work: GAME is a game played, but also the quarry of a hunt (in Maesch's case, we have a manhunt). This is not all. In his youth Maesch was a GIGolo; AME suggests the Old German
Amme,
a wet nurse; and MESH, in turn, is a net—for instance, the one in which Mars caught his goddess wife with her lover—and therefore a gin, a snare, a
trap
(under the scaffold), and, moreover, the engagement of gear teeth (e.g., “synchroMESH”).

A separate section is devoted to the title read backward, because during the ride to the place of execution Maesch in his thoughts reaches
back,
seeking the memory of a crime so monstrous that it will
redeem
the hanging. In his mind, then, he plays a game(!) for the highest stakes: if he can recall an act infinitely vile, this will match the infinite Sacrifice of the Redemption; that is, he will become the Antisaviour. This—on the metaphysical level; obviously Maesch does not consciously undertake any such antitheodicy; rather—psychologically—he seeks some heinousness that will render him impassive in the face of the hangman. GI J. Maesch is therefore a Gilgamesh who in defeat attains perfection
—negative
perfection. We have here a high symmetry of asymmetry with regard to the Babylonian hero.

So, then, when read in reverse, “Gigamesh” becomes “Shemagig.”
Shema
is the ancient Hebraic injunction taken from the Pentateuch
(“Shema Yisrael
!"—“Hear 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”). Because it is in reverse, we are dealing here with the Antigod, that is, the personification of evil. “Gig” is of course now seen to be “Gog” (Gog and Magog). From
Shema
derives the name “Simeon” (Hebrew Shimeon), and immediately we think of Simeon Stylites; but if the Saint sits atop the pillar, the halter hangs down from it; therefore Maesch, dangling beneath, will become a stylite
a rebours.
This is a further step in the antisymmetry. Enumerating in this fashion, in his exegesis, 2,912 expressions from the Old Sumerian, Babylonian, Chaldean, Greek, Church Slavonic, Hottentot, Bantu, South Kurile, Sephardic, the dialect of the Apaches (the Apaches, as everyone knows, commonly exclaim “Igh” or “Ugh”), along with their Sanskrit roots and references to underworld argot, Hannahan stresses that this is no haphazard rummage, but a precise semantic wind rose, a multidimensional compass card and map of the work, its cartography—for the object is the plotting of all those ties and links which the novel will realize polyphonically.