Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce

The final paper for Gothic Disturbances class was an argument essay. The way the teacher (I only name teachers on here who I am almost certainly never going to have again to avoid issues of favoritism or some lame finger-pointing game as that, and also for their own privacy...and, if you notice, I have not named teachers with whom I've had problems, only those I toss complimentary remarks about) explained it to class:

Imagine you're at a cocktail party with the author of the work you're using as primary source. Also present are at least one opposing critic of that work and one or two critics who agree with your argument thesis.

Following class I asked the professor if I could take him literally. My friend Sean Kilburn and I have long imagined a barbeque at the end of all things in which only those people worthy to sit at a table and break bread with are invited. So I wanted to set this argument paper at the barbeque... The professor responded with, "Most people I'd say no to about that, but if you think you can pull it off, go for it."

I received the mark of an A++ and commentary that more academic papers should strive for a readable narrative. Even with the flaws I leave showing in this, it's still a damn fine idea manifested in word.


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
April 27, 2009

Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce

The entire planet had begun to disintegrate into junk, and to keep the planet habitable for the remaining population the junk had to be hauled away occasionally . . . or, as Buster Friendly liked to declare, Earth would die under a layer—not of radioactive dust—but of kipple. (8:87)

That's not a very cheery note to read at a cook-out, but this is a Phildickian barbeque, and, as Phil Dick reads from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I fill my plate with ribs and sauce, pull a draught of beer, and sit down at the picnic table with Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanisław Lem, and Dr. Sigmund Freud. We eat barbeque ribs. The kipple eats at the corners of our shared reality. We each have a few questions we want to discuss, but don't have long to share this time together.

"Kipple?" Dr. Freud asks.

"A sort of Escalation of Chaos," Kim Stanley tells him, "The First Law of Kipple is 'kipple drives out nonkipple.'" (DADOES)

Phil obliges by flipping the pages of his book, staining the edges with dark red sauce, and continuing our journey into his text with all the fervor of a speed-addled pulp writer.

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more." (6:65)

"But what is the etymology of this word, 'kipple'?" Dr. Freud asks.

"There really is none," Stanisław says. "Phil made up this word."

Dr. Freud arches an eyebrow. "How very interesting. Do you often make up words to signify what you intend to say? A replacement for something deeper, perhaps?"

"The way Mercer is a Christ-like character in this novel?" I ask in return.

Phil grumbles at us, "Transcendental despair. Without empathy," Phil tells us, "we would stand detached, spectators, acting out by our indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and moral island is not a man." ("Man, Android & Machine")

"I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voigt-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments. [...]
"I'd like to watch," Rachael said, also seating herself. "I've never seen an empathy test being administered. What do those things you have there measure?"
Rick said, "This"—he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires—"measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so—called 'shame' or 'blushing' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate." He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. "This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of—" (4:46)

"Phil, you squander your talent by using these brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"You're just being a contrarian," I tell Stanisław.

Dr. Freud leans forward over the picnic table, "I would like to hear more about this, Voigt-Kampff apparatus."

"It's named after the German physicist Woldemer Voigt," I tell him, "Known for, among other things, the Voigt profile in spectroscopy—associated with a Doppler broadening. Quite relevant, considering the empathy box and mood organs. I suspect the word 'doppler' is linguistically connected to the doppelgänger which you wrote about." ("Empirical fits")

"No, no, no, young man," Dr. Freud says admonishing me. "Not the same word at all. Doppelgänger means 'double-goer,' while the Doppler effect is named after my fellow Austrian, Christian Doppler. A sound-alike word—a homonym." (OED)

"Hmm," I feel embarrassed, but quickly recover, "Homonym, a sound-alike word. Android, a look-alike human. Interesting connection all the same. And, synchronistically," I add, "I believe Doppler was a professor in Prague when he wrote a number of his theories." (Doppler)

I'm met with mostly blank stares, but Phil's groan indicates he catches the connection between Doppler and the doppelgänger of the Prague Golem. But Phil doesn't comment, only reads another passage from his novel.

The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major—but inferior—segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism— (3:30)

"To play the—What's that you called it? Contrarian?—to play the contrarian again," Lem says, "If the androids are programmed with the information that they are human, I cannot see why they are persecuted; if the androids are intended to represent a model of discrimination, such as the Jews under the label of a 'final solution,' then the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something the novel does in places." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"The androids as Jewish victims, Stanisław?" I say, "I don't see that at all."

"No?" Stanisław asks, with a tone that prods for more from me.

"Still," I finally say, "Voigt-Kampff. With such an austere name such as that, it's easy to see why it could conjure images of fascist goose-steppers in a national socialistic Germany—no offense, Dr. Freud."

Dr. Freud shakes his head and I continue.

"Luba Luft singing before Deckard goes backstage to kill her is certainly reminiscent of the Nazi officers having Jewish performers sing for them before being sent to the showers and ovens. They had no empathy for their victims, and Deckard shows none for Luba Luft."

On the stage Luba Luft sang, and he found himself surprised at the quality of her voice; it rated with that of the best, even that of notables in his collection of historic tapes. The Rosen Association built her well, he had to admit. And again he perceived himself sub specie aeternitatis, the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed. If the androids had remained substandard, like the ancient q-40s made by Derain Associates—there would be no problem and no need of my skill. I wonder when I should do it, he asked himself. As soon as possible, probably. At the end of the rehearsal when she goes to her dressing room. (9:99)

"What follows backstage is a key scene which illustrates that Phil is not writing about politics, he's writing about ontology," Kim Stanley says. (Novels of PKD)

Stanisław comments, "But these reality breakdowns create a confusion between androids as a wronged lower class and as inhuman menace—" ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"I think Phil deliberately creates this confusion—androids as victim or menace," I tell him, "He always refers to them as 'he' or 'she', never as 'it', thus, leaving the matter ambiguous. The humans in the novel feel alienated to themselves, as well as the world around them, preferring to withdraw into the artificial worlds of the Penfield Mood Organ, the empathy box, and the false religion of Mercerism. They don't—and seemingly don't want to—interact with the 'real' world."

"And why do you think that is?" Dr. Freud asks.

"Because the real world involves responsibility and emotional feeling."

"Ah, but isn't that too simple a formulae?"

Kim Stanley offers more clarification than I do, "The more contradictions there are in the androids, the more the novel succeeds in unravelling our easy biological definition of humanity, replacing it with a difficult spiritual and moral definition. Phil gives us two oppositions—Human/Android and Human/Inhuman." (Novels of PKD)

A pause and then Harry Bryant's face appeared on the vidscreen. "What's doing?" he asked Rick.
"Some trouble," Rick said. "One of those on Dave's list managed to call in and get a so-called patrolman out here. I can't seem to prove to him who I am; he says he knows all the about hunters in the department and he's never heard of me." He added, "He hasn't heard of you either."
Bryant said, "Let me talk to him."
"Inspector Bryant wants to talk to you." Rick held out the vidphone receiver. The harness bull ceased questioning Miss Luft and came over to take it.
"Officer Crams," the harness bull said briskly. A pause. "Hello?" He listened, said hello several times more, waited, then turned to Rick. "There's nobody on the line. And nobody on the screen." He pointed to the vidphone screen and Rick saw nothing on it. (9:107-08)

"Like the superimposing of Herr Freud's heimlich and unheimlich over virtually every theme in the novel—from the casual mention of designer lead codpieces to the twisting of the real and unreal when Deckard is accused of being an android with implanted memories working for a department that doesn't exist by an android working in a police department that doesn't exist," I add, not sure if my theory is true or even if that pretzel-logic even made sense. Nevertheless, what someone reads into the text is, in many ways, just as important as what the author intended to be there. We're all just offering our personal reading of the words Phil strung together for us to follow.

"As the novel begins," Kim Stanley says, " but the action of the narrative first forces the two apart, and then leads us to conclude that the first one is inessential, the second vitally important." (Novels of PKD)

"So by that context," Stanisław grudgingly admits, still not feeling it is so, "The contradictions I mentioned dissolve. You are saying that it is not illogical to think that androids can be at once innocent and malicious, on different levels conscious and unconscious of their own natures." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

Dr. Freud nods. He makes a rare statement, speaking aloud what I am thinking, "Beings both human and threatening to human society. Much like we all are."

Phil himself mumbles, "What is vitally important is the theme of mystical identification via empathy..." but none of us are listening to him at this point, "When the Deity takes a trashy or even fake form, it says something about man's present, unredeemed state—his ontological condition—not an aspect of his state but is—esse—his condition." (Exegesis)

With his laser tube, Rick systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba. He did the job thoroughly, saying nothing; Phil Resch watched without understanding, his face showing his perplexity.
"You could have kept the book yourself," Resch said, when it had been done. "That cost you—"
"Do you think androids have souls?" Rick interrupted.
Cocking his head on one side, Phil Resch gazed at him in even greater puzzlement. (12:135)

The kipple at the edges of imagination consumes the cook-out of our shared reality. Kim Stanley Robinson and Stanislaw Lem have already disappeared—were they ever here at all?—and Dr. Freud licks the barbeque sauce from his fingers burning away like an drug-induced electric dream.

Before Phil disappears he tosses me his sauce-stained copy of the novel and flashes a cryptic smile. "One day, I'm going to write a book that will reach people outside the science-fiction ghetto. Something more than a recycling of life into a novel..." ("Horselover Fat & the New Messiah")

I look to where the novel has fallen open in front of me.

"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization." (6:65-66)

Many years after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written—about the time the film Blade Runner was released—author William Gibson compared Dick's novels to taking a hit of some furious unknown psychotropic drug and spending 48 hours trying to find some way back to Base Reality. ("With a Strange Device")

The Base Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one in which reassures you that you've made it safely back home, only to reveal, when you open your front door, that home isn't where it was last time you were here.

The recursive layering of the heimlich and unheimlich juxtapose one other to the point that there is no differentiating one from the other, until, reaching some temporary penultimate truth, a static-stasis is reached wherein reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

In the years since this novel was written, what is commonly accepted as the Base Reality has seen environmental destruction and awareness on a scale Dick himself would likely be surprised by; the world's first cloned animal being a sheep named Dolly; our own personal versions of Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes in the form of small handheld devices with Phildickian names like iPod and BlackBerry (is it so far-fetched to say these machines control our emotions by their induced sensations and even generate a electronic empathy?); and daily accounts of false reality being perpetrated upon us by the Mercerian façades that are our spiritual and political leaders (sometimes in the same persona) to the point that is is difficult—if not outright impossible—to determine what is reality and what is the simulation of reality.

...he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. (18:212)

Our journey to discover meanings in this novel is akin to an attempt to answer the question posed in its title: "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"

To make that journey of discovery we must first determine who the androids are, what the difference between being an android and being human is, and empirically verify that the sheep in question are indeed electric.

Again, recursively turning back to author William Gibson drug-addled comment, at this point in our post-Androids world, we could all use a strong dose of the PKD drug to shake the scales from our withered eyes. But—alas!—we have a limited supply of that now, while the layers of pseudo-reality—environmental, scientific, religious, pop-cultural, emotional, spiritual, artistic, reflected, and re-reflected—are increasing and unlimited. Our machines become more important than reality and reality becomes less than our machines.

My own journey through this bewildering reality finds me sitting in front of my own empathy box—my scrying mirror that connects me with the world—I sit before my computer and write this. I sit. I write. I wait. Hoping to feel something real.

This is real. These words. Subjectively, anyway. So long as I hit SAVE on my machine; my empathy box. But eventually even this created reality will fall, like Deckard's love for Rachael, into kippled-oblivion of recycled electrons.

•

Bibliography

Dick, Philip K.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey.

—. In Pursuit of Valis:

Selections from the Exegesis.

Underwood-Miller.

—. "Man, Android and Machine."

In Science Fiction at Large,

ed. by Peter Nicholls.

"Doppelgänger." Oxford English Dictionary.
Freud, Sigmund. "Das Unheimliche."
Gibson, William. "With a Strange Device."

In Wing Window (Seattle fanzine).

"Horselover Fat and The New Messiah."

Interview with John Boonstra.
Hartford Advocate.

Lem, Stanisław. "Science Fiction:

A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions."

In Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd,
ed. Bruce Gillespie.

Olivero, J.J., R.L. Longbothum.

"Empirical fits to the Voigt line width:
A brief review."

Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy
and Radiative Transfer.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick.

UMI Research Press.

Štoll, Ivan. "Christian Doppler—

Man, Work and Message".

In The Phenomenon of Doppler.
The Czech National University.

· • ·

The Horns of Dilemma

The second in a trio of papers for Gothic Disturbances class.

The night before this was due, I was at someone's house with my then-wife, and, around midnight, I said I had to go since I had this 5-7 page paper due in the morning. "How much have you written so far?" I was asked. "About a paragraph."

I finished it about three hours later and received the highest marks in the class. A fête I would repeat with the third paper in the class. Both the writing it in the last hours of its deadline as well as highest marks. But with the third one, I knew quite well what I would write about. With Orlando, I made it all up as I went along...

I love the way referenes to Phillip José Farmer (via the Donne quote), William Burroughs, and Lou Reed pop up in this.


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
March 24, 2009


The Horns of Dilemma


At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
―John Donne


On Thursday, May 10 (year unknown), when Orlando was in the seventh day of his trance, he dreamed (hallucinated/envisioned) his own demise—

Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. (133-34)

Like so much in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, this death is only an affected circumstance in which the male Orlando metaphorically dies while the female Orlando will rise from the sleeping trace. What Woolf may intended with this analogy is that the male Orlando's death is his trance, and his body is not buried in a grave beneath six feet of earth, but in a bed beneath the sheets.

In directly addressing the reader, Woolf once again breaks the proverbial "third wall" between audience and performers (or, in this case, the author and her readers), which creates a sense of immediacy and an informational tone of conversation, almost like a friend relating a news article they had just heard.

Woolf then invokes her first trinity, which are named for three things which her text ironically obscures to a great extent:

But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth! (134)

When she cites Truth, Woolf is calling forth the single most important content of this scene—perhaps the novel—yet a perspective which cannot be subjected to absolute analysis. Truth, in this case, lacks any veracity and is not entirely correct nor accurate. Even so, the truth here could still be seen as something of a troth, a betrothment of Orlando's aspects to each other; an alchemical marriage between him and herself (to mix the pronouns with which we can truthfully describe hir (sic)). And truth, in the case of Orlando, means not only different things at different times, but contradictory things at the same time.

(As we shall see in these examples, the juxtaposition of paradox is commonplace in the world Woolf shows us with the hermaphroditic Orlando.)

Candour is a truthful openness which also means to shine, (this latter definition is quite likely, at this point in the scene, the most intended meaning). Shining an austere light upon this confusing satire is much needed to critically analyze the state of flux Orlando hovers in amidst this cacophonous delirium of his transformation from him to her.

The use of the word Honesty in this context, like the original meaning of the word itself, has more to do with honor than being honest, represents Orlando's sense of worthiness to transcend his gender. So worthy in fact, that in his dream-state, the onset of change is literally heralded by a refrain of silver trumpets blowing forth their tintinnabulation.

But why silver trumpets in particular; why not gold?

Silver trumpets would indicate a certain civility, a certain delicacy that gold does not represent—silver requires more refinement in its smelting process than does gold, and Orlando is, at this point, in a state of refinement, a state of sublimation between being a male in his past and a female in her future.

Woolf continues, with her tongue placed firmly in cheek, to introduce her second trinity, which take the semblance of the Three Graces, or, considering the outcome their appearance has upon Orlando, they could be closely likened to the Moriae of Greek myth.

At which--Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space--the doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had wafted them apart, and three figures enter. (134)

They appear very much like the cloaked witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, although these three Ladies have a very different agenda. They are not here to prophesy, but to obscure, and yet in obfuscation, they act as a Greek chorus does, and tell far more than they disguise.

The three are the Lady of Purity, the Lady of Chastity, and the Lady of Modesty. Each speak over Orlando's sleeping form, and their three speeches are followed by a pealing of trumpets which seem to banish them.

Our Lady of Purity speaks first:
[...] I cover vice and poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare! (135)

Purity is defined as that which is clean or unsoiled. So the veils of Purity hiding the dark and doubtful are perhaps the only things her nature is capable of hiding. And even as she covers the vice and poverty of the world, the Lady of Purity entreats us not to speak or reveal these things.

But are we not suppose to speak of her actions, or are we not to reveal that it is she who does so? Like so much else in Orlando, we are left with impressions of answers, and the intentional ambiguity which is an integral theme of the work.

As if sensing that the reader—the viewer of this dance of veils—wishes to ask questions of the Lady of Purity's enigmatical comments, Woolf dismisses the first sister and brings on the second.

Here the trumpets peal forth.
'Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!'
Then Our Lady Chastity speaks:
[...] where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, O spare! (135)

The trumpets peal, she tells us, which is a loud summoning—peal being the shortened form of appeal—and then says "Purity Avaunt!" which, like so much else Woolf shows us in this quandary, means opposite things simultaneously; avaunt being a word that means both "to call forth" and "to send away," which is a paradox that was certainly not lost on Woolf in writing this.

The Lady of Chastity speaks of stones and stars, of dancing and the Alps, of lightning, eyes, and bones. Whereas the Lady of Purity spoke of covering vice and poverty, the Lady of Chastity tells us that she kills all she looks upon, and would rather freeze Orlando's bones rather than let him awaken from his fevered dream.

The connection between chastity and ice is entirely metaphoric—as so much else has been—involving the sexual frigidity of being chaste. Regardless of Orlando's physical experiences of sex, in the moment he is in the depths of his dreaming, Woolf is telling us, completely pure and sexually unsullied. Rather than allow him to awake back into a body that has been—in the eyes of the Lady of Chastity—defiled by sexual desires and encounters, she would just as soon freeze his bones.

But once again, there is a clamor of horns and the Lady of Chastity is banished, bringing forth the third sister.

Here the trumpets peal forth.
'Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!'
Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:
[...] I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do no see. Spare, O spare! (135-36)

Modesty is self-control, a freedom from exaggeration and excesses; moderation and even measures. Sober. And the Lady of Modesty speaks of virginal things, as well as fertile things such as vineyards, flocks of sheep, apples, and fields of ripened fruit. The sort of things that are known to be associated with the very acts that show no modesty—once again displaying the paradox and contradictions contained within this scene and this story.

The Lady of Modesty lets her mantle fall, her long and sleeveless cloak that is wrapped around her. Her hair covers her eyes because, of course, she must be too bashful to even look about the sleeping form of this man (soon-to-be-woman). She too, like her sisters, ends her dialog with the repeated phrase, "Spare, O spare!"

The word spare could mean extra, additional, or even frugal, but in this case it is more likely to be associated with the definition of "to refrain from harming" and "to allow to go free."

Despite the threat of harm the sisters may appear to be harbingers of, none of them will, or, (since they may well be apparitions springing from Orlando's fevered trance) can harm him.

But what they do bring about is a profound and immediately noticeable change in the man.

Again the trumpets peal forth:
'Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!' (136)

With the paradox call of come forth and be gone, the Lady of Modesty has spoken her piece and now, all three sisters begin to dance in unison, performing a sort of pavane around the sleeping form of Orlando.

And, again (a common refrain of our own in this discussion) we can liken an aspect of this scene to previous literature, this time it resembles that of Salomé's Dance of the Seven Veils, which both reveals and occludes the subject it addresses—

With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join hands and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:
'Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!'
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth:
'The Truth and nothing but the Truth.'
At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets so as to muffle them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets blare forth together.
'Horrid Sisters, go!'
The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and flinging their veils up and down. (136)

They dance, and in singing about concealment, even as the trumpets blare in counterpoint about truth. This conflict shows us the conflict Orlando has concerning his gender, and the difficulties of understanding what is to be done about this.

Truth, in this as in most cases, is not an unchanging law, but something that is variable, circumstantial, and most times, hidden. Truth is something to be unveiled; revealed. Just as Orlando's nature and gender is a hidden truth that must surely be offered for display.

The circling dance of the sisters represents the yonic powers of women, smooth and supple and calm (feminine actions). The trumpets are described as blaring or pealing or blasting (all masculine verbs), and the very musical instrument itself is phallic in its design and appearance.

This is the internal battle raging within Orlando as he sleeps and dreams, until finally—

They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind them.
We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast:--
'THE TRUTH!
at which Orlando woke. (137)

With a blast of the trumpets, Orlando's seven-day trance comes to an abrupt end. From the narrative, it would seem the trumpeters are real while the three sisters were not, but again, this is a metaphoric description drenched in the pheromones of paradox.

The phallic trumpets herald the awakening of a new Orlando, one that, it would seem, is minus a male appendage.

He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess--he was a woman. (137)

With this unusual and disconcerting paragraph, Virginia Woolf issues a statement about feminism, transgendered ideals, and a forerunner of sexual perversity that would not be matched for thirty to forty years when literature and music would once again take up the challenges of transgendered ambiguity, and such conflicts would arise (no pun intended) in the sexual ambivalence of William Burroughs' novels and Lou Reed's songs.

Like Orlando slipstreaming through time without apparent reason, we can connect the 1970s influences on Lou Reed from the likes of Virginia Woolf ("shaved her legs and then he was a she"—"Walk on the Wild Side") to the Jacobean poet who wrote the epigraph used at the onset of this discussion:

Orlando imagined these trumpets from the four rounded corners of his world (a combining of male and female geometric shapes), with the three graces of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty being like angels to him, he arises from a slumbering "death" back to his single body that is scattered between possible genders.

Conflict, paradox, and dualities overlay each other like veils upon this scene.

And here we, at last, write Finis on our own work.


· • ·

Terminal Point of a Cul-de-Sac

This course, this paper (and it's following siblings) profoundly changed something inside of me from where these sort of ideas become formulated into words. Breakthrough papers.

Of course, that's a subjective viewpoint. But I do think there is something noticeable in the trio of papers for Gothic Disturbances.

If nothing else, it was the course that lured me to the wondrous dark side of the English Department. And there I have found almost everything I hoped to find when I came here seeking knowledge...

It all clicked with the windings. They peeled off from my literary criticism blind eyes and suddenly I could see!

[This essay seems now to end curiously abrupt. I wonder if the file I have is an early save...? Hmm...]


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
February 17, 2009

The Terminal Point of a Cul-de-Sac

"The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. It is a scene terrifically desolate. In a thousand spots the traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground, some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the mountain or transversely upon other trees. [...] The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it and curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky and added to the melancholy impression I received from the objects around me." (Frankenstein, Vol. II Ch. II)

When Mary Shelley introduces us to this precipitous ascent of Victor on an Alpine peak facing Montanvert, she is doing more than telling us about the steep mountainside and the felled trees along the path of avalanches. Indeed, this is the sixth time in the text that Shelley has used a variance of the word "precipitous," and, in all, the word is used 14 times in the novel.

Given this frequent usage, the word must carry with it some importance; seemingly connected with Victor's perception of the world around him, and the reader's perception of Victor himself.

At the point in the novel where Victor is ascending this precipitous, winding path, he has already brought life to his creation and abandoned it as something hideous, and William has been killed and Justine has been executed because of Victor's "unhallowed arts". Victor seeks some sort of solace in wandering the barren and starkly beautiful landscapes which bring to Victor's perception some calm reassurance that an omnipotent God must exist. He alternates these thoughts with suicidal considerations.

The word "precipitous" itself appears in various forms throughout the novel--most commonly as "precipice" (9 times); "precipitate" (3 times); and once each with "precipitation" and, in this passages, "precipitous". Of its meanings, perhaps the only definition not directly intended in any of these usages is the most apparent, that of meaning rain, mist, or snowfall; moisture. In this excerpt, "the ascent is precipitous" literally means the path Victor walks is extremely steep, but the word could also be used to represent his headlong ascent into unhallowed knowledge, and the way he abruptly ended his work upon successfully bringing life to a monstrous creation.

In chemistry, to precipitate something is to separate it, as in a solid form divided from a solution. In this sense, too, do we find a connection to Victor and his work, for he is seeking to separate himself from the substance--the thing--he has created.

Shelley describes the path Victor walks as "cut into [...] short windings" which is literally seen as being a treacherous path with many cut-backs crisscrossing the mountainside. But "windings" could also refer to Victor's meandering to avoid his responsibilities connection to playing God as a creator of life, his seeking to receive some sort of information about what he should do--to come to a conclusion about his uncertainty--as well as referring to the winding sheets used to wrap a dead body in.

All of these meanings could be found to have meaning in Victor's twisting, turning, walk through this landscape of his solitude. This landscape--where "traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived"--is described as an area where "trees lie [...] entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning [...] transversely upon other trees." An "avalanche" is, of course, a place of abrupt descent, or to suddenly go down, and to "traverse" is to barricade against, or to cross or thwart something. Victor feels like he has descended abruptly from his knowledgeable heights--that of becoming a life-giving God and then, falling from such a deified height in abandoning his creation--and feeling like he has been thwarted by the very thing he has created--that it is the creature's own fault that it is not a thing a beauty and perfection.

There is also a connection between "transverse" and crossing a bridge or passing through a gate. Perhaps, in wandering the Alpine mountains and valleys, Victor hopes to pass through a gate, or cross a bridge, that would allow him to shirk his past work and deeds, leaving them behind without having to ever deal with them again. This could then mean that the description of the trees should conjure images of broken limbs and other body parts that Victor would have seen in picking out the pieces to construct his creation, and he would have his creation scattered about in disarray like the mountainside in the wake of an avalanche.

Victor views these trees as "not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene." All at once, Shelley is revealing to us keys to Victor's nature and attitude with her choice of words. "Luxuriant" means to to have excesses, or to indulge, associated to Victor's unquenchable desires for knowledge that exceeds his reason; "sombre" and "severity" together displaying his gloomy and dark attitude, his austerity, and almost complete lack of kindness towards most anyone or anything. Descriptions which show him to be uncompassionate and selfish in the extreme.

His view of the peaks above him, shrouded in "thick wreaths" of "uniform clouds" where the rain falls from a "dark sky and added to the melancholy impression" also reveals to us his "black bile" of his irritability with the world surrounding him and his narcissistic sullen perception of how nothing he sees or has done is worthwhile. His creating life out of something dead is not a bright accomplishment, but a foul, deplorable thing, not because it is a creation of life from dead parts, but because it is, to Victor's eyes, not a thing of aesthetic beauty.

From his vantage point high along the winding path of the mountainside, where Victor has been wandering in philosophical circles, he looks down to the valley below where "vast mists were rising from the rivers". Aside from being a case where the word "precipitate" could have been used to indicate the falling moisture, it is a moment when Victor reaches a terminal point in his vicious circle of thought.

He looks back--and down--upon the world around him, knowing that he cannot forever stay in the solitude of the mountains, but must, eventually, descend back to the world below him, crashing like an avalanche upon those around him, shrouding a world he feels is, literally, beneath him.


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