GRGR(3) - The Cabal: The Quest for the One & Only Slothrop

[Doug Millison]

David Morris wrote describes Spectro & Pointsman as "mad scientists,
Frankenstein-style.  Their goal/means is a Magic-Science, Alchemy?  The
Night is the land where the Unconscious breaks through to this world via
dreams.  The Lord of the Night?"

And we're back in the Gothic territory TRP mapped out as one of his
particular interests in his 1984 NY Times essay, "Is It O.K. To Be A
Luddite?" where, in the context of his historical discussion of the Luddite
movement, TRP moves into a discussion of the Gothic novel.  It's perhaps
fruitful to think about GR keeping in mind what TRP has to say about the
Gothic:

"If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one [Mary Shelly's
Frankenstein], warning of what can happen when technology, and those who
practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. [...]
However much of ''Frankenstein's'' longevity is owing to the undersung
genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than
well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the
much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt,
through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to *deny
the machine*.  [... now touching on another fictional character we'll meet
later in GR] To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least
some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things,
earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take
part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong
(?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the
movie, you recall, goes: ''Well, the airplanes got him.'' ''No . . . it was
Beauty killed the Beast.'' In which again we encounter the same Snovian
Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological."

We discussed the way TRP's interest in the Gothic seemed to play out in M&D
and in VL (all that fantastic brass and ebonite Jesuit hardware, the Golem,
etc. in M&D; the Puncutron and Takeshi's sci-fi movie origins in VL, to
cite a few of examples) -- it's interesting now to watch how he may be
playing with this genre in GR, too.

It's also worth noting, perhaps, that in the Luddite essay TRP makes
explicit his interest in the way material can cross over from dreams to
literature, and points to Gothic novels as a classic example of such:  "The
novels [Frankenstein and The Castle of Otronto] are also of strikingly
similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming."
Recall that in the _Slow Learner_ intro TRP says, of Surrealism, "Having as
yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of the
movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could
combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to
produce illogical and startling effects." This would seem to imply that at
some later point, prior to writing this Intro, TRP somehow gained access to
his dream life.  He returns to this subject again in his 1993 "Sloth"
essay:  "But Sloth's offspring, though bad -- to paraphrase the Shangri-Las
-- are not always evil, for example what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the
Mind, or "rushing after various things without rhyme or reason," which, "if
it pertains to the imaginative power . . . is called curiosity." It is of
course precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers are
known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal problems,
getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with luck can
be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we
do."  (It's interesting that in M&D, TRP introduces the Senoi people, who
bring dreams into their daily life.)

TRP, astral voyager.   Regarding his strategies as a novelist telling the
stories he feels compelled to tell, I think his statement, from the Luddite
essay, speaks volumes that Max has hinted at and to some degree illustrated
in previous posts, when TRP speaks of a novel (Frankenstein) as an
"attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise,
to *deny the machine*"  -- not a bad description of GR, after all.

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