Plowing the dark

It seems as if technology in the 21st century develops so quickly that soft- and hardware are obsolete as soon as they are released into the market. The same could be said about my latest read.

Plowing the dark is set in 1989/90 and was published in 2005. It juxtaposes two settings: a multinational’s lab, intent on being first-to-market with quality virtual reality technologies, and a man who is being held hostage in Iran by religious fundamentalists.

In the first setting, the characters wrestle with the dangers of virtual reality versus the enthralling experience of it, the differences in perspective between generations, the constantly updating technology. It asks why we need to replicate daily experiences virtually and why art no longer fills our aesthetic hunger.

In the second, the man is in isolation and treated like a chained dog. He gets through the days, weeks and months using routine and his imagination, and negotiating for small, everyday concessions which he appreciates as great gifts.

In the first few chapters of the book, I was uninspired by the themes, which seemed dated six years later. Perhaps the author means to trick the reader into apathy, maybe not. Reading on, the characters contribute so many perspectives to any debate, whether about technology, art, accountability or moral philosophy.

The chapters featuring the hostage, in a few pages, provide a key to his experiences, experiences far from our own lives if we have the luxury to read this book. It stands on its own (to be honest, I wish more pages were spent with the hostage), yet provides an apt metaphor for the concerns of the first set of characters.

As with Three farmers on the way to a dance, the novel is more concerned with exploring its theses than the conventions of fiction, but unlike that first novel isn’t didactic (although, again, I felt differently in the first few chapters).

Since I’m only halfway, I could only speculate any further. Perhaps the remainder will swing back to trite didactics; perhaps it will prophesy our present and future; perhaps asking this of any novel is too much of a burden. Regardless, the novel has already made me think and even hunger for the physicality of art and quiet spaces.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)