Digging Deeper into S.: Part 2 - The Importance of a Bubbling Cauldron

(This series assumes that you have read the book, have started your own inquiries, and would like to delve deeper into the text to find the hidden.  Many of the things discussed here shouldn't be a complete surprise to ongoing seekers, but if you are new, you might want to start here, first.) 

In the first post of this series, I talked about layers. For this second post, I have adapted the two posts I wrote on Burgoo.  



The Mckay's review of Ship of Theseus calls the book "a vulgar ouroboros of a novel."  Ourobos, the snake that eats its own tail. According to wikipedia,

The Ouroboros often symbolize self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist's opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism.

Based on what I have found, I suspect that almost everything in S. is a "ship of Theseus."  An unreliable narrator with subterfuge in mind and a reclusive author; both of whom seek to encrypt and misdirect.  The people, the dates, most footnotes appear to be composites of real and literary references and individuals with some intentional misdirection and fictions thrown in to obscure and muddy the waters.

Palimpsests, archaeological strata, literary references that don't quite make sense; pastiches, layers and composites join in to obscure.

The archaeological strata of literature...

That snake that eats its own tale can be a metaphor for literature that takes what came before.  Whether we like it or not, much of what is written, painted or discussed is based in part on something that came previously.  That's not to say the work can't be original and engaging, but it can't exist without history.  Works like Tristram Shandy, The King in Yellow, Finnegans Wake, Ready Player One, The Waste Land and now S. all owe a debt to history.

It's a literary genealogy that Tolkien referred to as the "cauldron of story." Sterne was inspired by Rabelais, Locke, Pope and Swift and their influence is well documented.  The King in Yellow owes a debt to Ambrose Bierce from whom Chambers appropriated Carcosa.  These works went on to inspire the likes of Lovecraft, Goethe, Marx and many, many others.  And it continues to this day, as Mystimus discovered with the Glass Bead Game.

Prehistoric pastiches...

Juan Blas Covarubbias, the Portuguese pirate is fictional. Yet the name Covarubbias is not, nor does it originate from Portugual, but Spain.   It comes from Burgos Province and some of the surrounding areas to describe the red caves found in that area; many of these same caves feature prehistoric art. Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, amateur archaeologist, discovered the Altamira cave on his property in nearby Cantabria (which used to be part of Burgos and was in 1590), but it was his young daughter who spotted the drawings on the ceiling.  Cueva de La Pasiega, also in Cantabria has sanctuaries or galleries of cave paintings from different ages not unlike the cave S and Corbeau escape through.  It was officially discovered when researchers were told by villagers in the area of its existence 1911.

The city Burgos of Spain, and located in the province of the same name, has two interesting looking museums, one for books and a museum on evolution (following the monkey, perhaps?).  Both opened in 2010, so it's possible that DD knew of their existence while he was writing S., or it could just be a happy accident.

The Hemingway hodgepodge

I know I've touched on Hemingway before; Hemingway is one of the handful of real persons identified in S.  In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics."    In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka.  There is no way that Le Monde could have interviewed him in 1935 since Le Monde didn't exist until 1944.  Le Monde started on December 19, 1944 using the same building, machines and masthead of its predecessor, the most circulated paper in France, Le Temps, which shut down after the liberation of France under accusations of Nazi collaboration.

David Burke, author of Writers in Paris called A Moveable Feast a hatchet job on the people Hemingway once associated with, not unlike the mythical A Swindle of Cowbirds by Guthrie MacInnes. And as Malcolm Cowley noted to the Paris Review:

"Hemingway had the bad habit of never forgiving anyone for giving him a hand up."

It is known that Hemingway could be spiteful.  I've talked about Dos Passos before, whose friend Jose Robles was most likely assassinated during the KGB purges that took place during the Spanish Civil War.

Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, among others, became targets for his spiteful behavior.  Hemingway's book, The Torrents of Spring was a parody of Anderson's Dark Laughter. Stein subsequently chided Hemingway for his rough treatment of Anderson in the parody.

Also interesting is the coded reference to the loss of Straka's valise which mirrors an incident in Hemingway's own life.  Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, accidently lost a satchel full of his writings on a train in Europe.  Hemingway was deeply upset with the loss and there has been much speculation that given Hemingway's personality, it was something he ultimately couldn't forgive.

The theft of the valise is also mirrored in Robert Ludlums, The Scarlatti Inheritance.  In Ludlum's book, the briefcase is stolen directly from Grand Central Station and the owner is subsequently poisoned by a distinguished looking, but unknown assassin in a gentlemen's club in New York.

In case you missed my earlier posts about John Dos Passos, his break from Hemingway occurred due to the murder of Dos Passos' friend, Jose Robles.  Robles was Spanish and was the one who introduced Dos Passos to bull fighting, who in turn, introduced Hemingway to the spectacle.  It was Robles who introduced Dos Passos to Spanish culture; and it was Robles who noted that the culture was static, unchanging, and stagnating.

Robles' death galvanized something in Dos Passos and marked the beginning of his political reversal into conservative politics.  Dos Passos began to understand that revolution meant nothing without civil liberties, and that communism as administered by the Russians only replaced one form of repression with another.  Dos Passos was understandably distraught from Roble's disappearance and when he sought help from Hemingway, was labelled a traitor to the communist cause by Hemingway and Gellhorn who felt that Robles was a fascist spy.

In page 6 of Ship of Theseus, Eric and Jen discuss the death of Amarante Durand, supposedly shot by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War after being thrown from a roof.  Dos Passos, Hemingway and Gellhorn are mentioned in the marginalia as having knowledge of the murder.  It is hinted that Dos Passos knew the full details of Durand's death.  It's likely though, that Dos Passos never knew the full details of Roble's murder during his lifetime.  According to the author Stephen Koch, Robles was killed because as a translator for the Soviets, he knew too much about their activities.

The Spanish Civil War is discussed again later in the marginalia by Eric and Jen, but the timelines are off from the actual events.  Page 186 discusses the events again and mentions an October 1937, photo from the Hotel Florida in Madrid.  From my research, I know that Robles disappeared in early 1937.  Dos Passos left Spain in May 1937 with Liston Oak, saving Oak's life in the process.  Hemingway and Dos Passos were both on their way back to the states later that month.   And before Dos Passos left, he had an interesting and engaging conversation with the young man later known by his pen name, George Orwell, who had been on the front lines.  Hemingway was a known admirer of Orwell, but it's very possible that the feeling was not mutual.   Hemingway seemed to have a knack for self-deception and confabulation.   Stephen Koch notes in The Breaking Point:

"He [Orwell] was not unduly impressed by the power of language to intoxicate.  It was a little too close to the original sin of language: the power to lie.  His supreme test for seriousness in any writer was whether she or he knew how to undo a lie." 

Also, it is mentioned in the marginalia on page 186 that Hemingway made a pass at Durand and she punched him out.  Interestingly, I can't find any record of a woman punching Hemingway, although several men had the opportunity throughout the years, including the poet, Charles Wallace Stevens.  Hemingway did return to Spain with Gellhorn a few months later and finished his play, The Fifth Column, in December 1937.

And Hemingway's perception of the war is distorted in For Whom the Bell Tolls according to Arturo Barea, who himself lived through the events in Spain (via The New Yorker),

“I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”

The Guardian reported that Hemingway was a failed KGB spy according to Stalin-era archives.   Hemingway was a volatile braggart who Gellhorn called "...the biggest liar since Munchausen."

Dates are off, perceptions are skewed, at times MacInnes seems to be analog for Hemingway with his A Swindle of Cowbirds, as is Amarante Durand for Jose Robles.  But then MacInnes is listed separately from Hemingway and in his own context, and seems to include echoes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound with their love lives.  The timing for Amarante Durand's murder is off from the death of Jose Robles, who was a translator, professor, and revolutionary.  Robles was from the Spanish aristocracy, but Durand was French.  And there was the conversation that Mystimus and I had regarding Vonnegut.

And so we go back to burgoo.  As we fall and rise through the layers like a game of snakes and ladders, people, events, books, and places get mixed up, combined into a "mish-mashia" of words.

It should be no surprise then, that at some point, amazon.com added another genre classification to S. The genre classification added was "mash-up."  Typically a mash-up takes a book in the public domain (so the author does not need to worry about potential copyright issues) and adds his own writing to create a plot (usually) involving vampires, zombies, werewolves, and/or monsters).  It's not apparent, thought, that Dorst has taken a single book for his mash-up as everything seems to be a composite, a mix of layers, a stew of several texts and historical events.  Do the clues that Dorst himself has given, 19 and 42 having any bearing here?  Perhaps, but even I'm still not sure.

You must fall and rise and be puzzled.  You will hit dead ends; you may find something that we bloggers have missed.  Don't be afraid to dive deep into the cauldron of story awhile to see what might be found.