With its cast of a child and seven socially functional adults — all but the narrator, in effect, in thrall to just that notion of an impossibly generous universe — We Who Are About to… functions as the bad conscience of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The revelation of the temperature at which these equations work is what sets Russ’s gelid vision: L.B. has only to be annoyed enough at the screech of the baby sparrows to kill them. The polite and well-bred Alan-Bobby has only to wake up to the fact that he is stronger than anyone else for civilization to slide back three thousand years.
Radically, Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality — and not the point of life at all. (Only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction — i.e., the manufacture of cannon fodder — is life’s real point.)
The narrator herself — certainly the most “civilized” person among the passengers — both recalls and re-voices Walter Benjamin’s famous observation: “Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.”
We Who Are About to… is a dangerous book because it is readable as allegory, though not an allegory about death: rather, death in this novel is the allegorical stand-in for whatever degree of social-political un-freedom the reader’s society has reached. For a long time the book will remain a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay we have undergone to arrive at “this point,” however “this point” changes.
Can I think of half a dozen works written in this century of the same length that are as brilliantly structured? Camus’s La Chute, Davenport’s The Dawn in Erewhon…
But these are Russ’s esthetic peers.
9. “What shall I do with this body I’ve been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him…?
10. At 1:45, just before we were ready to go down to Port Authority to catch the 2:45 bus up to Amherst, Dennis stood at our New York kitchen window, looking out at the snow dropping toward Amsterdam Avenue, five stories below. “To think, I used to sleep outside in that shit.”
Me: “That must have been fun.”
Dennis: “Yeah, it was so much fun, I’m gonna get a snow-making machine for my room.”
How much context is needed to make sense of such ironies?
11. A poetic bestiary: Rilke’s swan and panther, Moore’s buffalo, moose, snail, fish, and jellyfish; Bishop’s fish, rooster, and moose; and Davenport’s medusa. To read them all one after another is to reinvest with energy and incision the range of sensual relations between the animal and the natural.
12. “Public life on television is more real than private life in the flesh,” explains a character from the sound track of Cronenberg’s unsettlingly astute Videodrome, shortly before he undergoes a negative industrial birth in which his belly swallows a gun. But the fact is, public life — the life known, understood, and finally constituted by society — has always felt more satisfying than private life. That’s what lies behind the conflict thrashing at the center of Romanticism to render private life public.
13. The decade of the eighteen-sixties gave us three extraordinary novels. All of them could be described as turning on a single theme — the republican revolutions that had wracked the century so far in France, Germany, and Italy:
Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale.
Verne’s 20,000 lieues sous la mer.
All read in the same month — what a dialogue they construct with one another!
14. I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory — which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.
Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them — that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I.
15. “Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before,” announced American President Dwight D. Eisenhower during one of his ’50s terms of office. And in 1989, on first reaching the Peruvian Altoplano, American artist Gregory William Frux remarked: “Sure is alto. Sure is piano.” Reams have been written explicating the remark of German philosopher Martin Heidegger: “Nothing nothings.” And on more than one occasion I have been known to remind my daughter: “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”
16. Laura Bohannan’s delightful 1966 essay, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” while it makes some interesting cross-cultural points, seems to me to work even better as a kind of sf parable about discourse and rhetoric — specifically what happens when certain rhetorical figures are moved from one discursive field to be read within another.
The parable dramatizes what happens to the “universal appeal” of Hamlet when its plot is retold in a culture in which the sort of borderline sibling incest Claudius and Gertrude indulge is not only acceptable, but de rigueur, where, though magic is quite real, the concept of a ghost is unknown, and where there is no distinction between a scholar and a witch; where strict moral proscriptions preclude all intergenerational violence — and madness is always the result of witchcraft.
Even a cursory review of the plot will reveal that Hamlet, retold within such a discursive matrix, is a very different story from the one told in Anglo-European culture. In fact it is arguable that, within such a discursive matrix, the story we know as Hamlet cannot be told at all.
The question becomes interesting, however, when we start to explore the metalanguage necessary to begin translating one set of discursive assumptions, codes, and expectations into another. Such language is “theory.” And, generally speaking, theory must proceed with extreme care, at great slowness, and must risk being rhetorically, at least at the beginning, even more incomprehensible than the rhetoric it is being used to explain.
17… Every day I read a little French because it is such a pretty language. Does that make me a rascal? and then I can’t help walking around every day, a bit, in the winter countryside. Does that prove I am indifferent to a great deal of suffering? — Robert Walser, Letter to Hesse, November 15, 1917.
The sheer bulk of John Addington Symonds’s letters — three eight-hundred-fifty-plus-page volumes — suggests a totality they do not, alas, possess. While it’s true that scarcely a month goes by, between Symonds’s 14th year (1854) and his death from tuberculosis at his home in the Zauberberg country of Devos at age fifty-three (1893), that is not represented by two, three, or more substantial epistles, the totality of his life is still not to be had from these often informative, deeply moving, and frequently brilliant missives — if only because letters do not provide such totality.