Hidden Narratives - A Clew

I've stated before that I've thought the review is key to play the game.  I'm a bit surprised that not one person has found the object, at least that I know of.

Just a warning, this post can be considered a bit of a spoiler, so if you are still interested scroll down. If you still want to try to suss this out on your own stop here.

It's Ash Wednesday today and it seems fitting to share a new clue.   It's occurred to me that the review could very well be a key on how to play.  While I am not willing to completely expose the thread that brought me to the object, perhaps a hint is in order to get you started.  Especially now since I seem to have stumbled on more layers, although I have no idea how they fit yet in the larger narrative.


So the clue is this:
Edsel B. Grimshaw

Edsel, B, and Grimshaw are all references to unpopular car models.  Find the cars to find the man (which is only just the beginning). Just a warning though, travels in unpopular cars may lead you to unpopular views.

And all my other posts (here and here) about the larger game still apply.  As does my request to keep spoilers out of the comments for other seekers who may still want to work out the clues on their own.

Monkey's Marginalia, No 18

I know I've been mostly absent from the blog lately, and honestly it's been difficult lately to come up with topics.  It didn't help that events in the real world needed to be addressed and the book was put aside for awhile.  Also, I'm currently taking some college courses, so posting infrequently will have to continue to be my modus operandi for the time being. But I will continue to check the comments and blog email, just be patient if you don't hear back right away from me.

Anyway, while I'm trying to figure where to go next and which threads to pull, I thought I would at least gather all the random bits from my twitter feed and drop them here. 

1.  Otto Rahn, archaeologist, early on, became interested in the Holy Grail and the Cathars and had published one book on the topic, Crusade Against the Grail.  He ended up working for Himmler as a junior officer of the SS due to Himmler's occult interests.  He tried to resign from the SS in 1939 after a couple of troubling incidences including anti-Semitic statements appearing in printed editions of his last book.  He disappeared and was found frozen on a mountain near Soll in Austria.  To this day there appears to be some question as to whether he was murdered or committed suicide.
It should also be noted, that Otto Grahn, the director who filmed The Santana March, receives a scathing letter from Straka about the film.  Perhaps Rahn's fate is alluded in the name of the primary antagonist in The Santana March; a man who is named Jerry Frost.

2. Lewis Looper is almost certainly a homophone for Lucifer.  And Otto Rahn's last book, ironically, was titled Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers. (Sunnydags? Sola?)

3. Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize, once called Hitler and Mussolini "rabid monkeys."

4. I, the Supreme by Augusto Bastos contains 3 references to mouths sewn shut.  Also included are references to twins, alchemy and non-being.

5. Oscar Hammerstein's first play was titled The Light.  It opened on May 19, 1919 and was a failure.

6.  And lastly, there is Rhiannon, from the Mabinogion, whose magical birds could wake the dead and lull the living to sleep.

Monkey's Marginalia No 17

Once again, I've collected enough random bits for another Monkey's Marginalia.

image from wikipedia.org 

1.  Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949.  Before Campbell wrote the work that became an inspiration for the likes of George Lucas, he had written A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in 1944, which, in part, was prompted by Campbell's finding parallels between Finnegans Wake and Thornton Wilder's play, The Skin of Our Teeth.  Originally Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson had written two articles for The Saturday Review about the Wilder play and Joyce's book.  The articles were originally published December 19, 1942 and February 13, 1943.
But back to Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Copyrighted by the Bollingen Foundation (which was named after the house of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Tower), the book was published by Meridian Books in 1955 which was a division of The World Publishing Company.  The Meridian edition comes with a volume number M22 with a cover designed by Alvin Lustig.  I found his covers for Summer and Smoke, The Great Gatsby, and Siddhartha in tune with the midcentury (20th century) design echoed in Ship of Theseus cover.

2.  The alternate version of chapter 10 found on Jen Heyward's tumblr blog reminded me of the Joseph Campbell book in this excerpt:

3.  Meridian Books published some other interesting titles such as: 

• Codes and Ciphers, 1939
• Secret Societies: Their Origin, History and Ultimate Fate, 1939

Additional titles from Meridian Books can be found through a Worldcat search and through the website on Lustig's work (link above).

4.  The Bollingen Foundation was set up by Paul Mellon initially to disseminate the works of Carl Jung; his wife was a great admirer of Jung.  It expanded to award fellowships to writers, artists and scientists; and it awared an annual prize for poetry.  In 1949, a firestorm errupted with the foundation when the prize was given to Ezra Pound.  The public in 1949 was well aware of Pound's political leanings and the poet, Robert Hillyer wrote a scathing rebuke of Jung, the Bollingen Foundation and Pound in the Saturday Review of Literature, as did Fredric Wertham, a pyschologist who was well known in the 1950s for his crusade against comic books, although later researchers would accuse him of cherry-picking picking his data to prove his theories.  In 1950, the prize was awarded to Wallace Stevens, but the damage was done.  The Bollingen Foundation became inactive in 1968.

5,  The Bollingen Foundation, in its initial focus to print the works of Carl Jung and disseminate them, published a large number of books before it was shuttered.  The I Ching and a second volume of essays regarding the I Ching were Bollingen series numbers 19.1 and 19.2.  Series 20 was the work of Carl Jung; volume20.19 in the series was the bibliography of Jung's written works. Series number 22 was a book of essays called The Science of Mythology.  Series number 42 was The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann which prominently featured an ouroboros on the cover in early editions. 

The Ledger of Readerly Transactions

(note: This is part 3 of a series about digging into the deeper mysteries of S.)

I was queued to read Pale Fire by Nabokov at the recommendation of friend who is a retired high school literature teacher.   Then S. happened.

It's a clever text in that there are readers who will be content with the story at the surface; and there will be readers desiring to delve into its mysteries.  Either approach is possible and completely viable.  The choice that the reader is going to make is based on the interactions they will personally have with S.  No two readers are going to have the same experience.  The proliferation of blogs for this one book is a ready example of several different approaches a single reader may take.

S. is a book lover's nirvana, but the text can be unsettling and frustrating when too many synchronicities in the real world, perhaps with a touch of apophenia, make it best to step away from the text for a brief period; or when you've hit a dead end and aren't even sure you want to start anew.  I can say unequivocally that both have happened to me.

I started this blog originally to really keep track of my own thoughts.  As a result of this blog, I've had fabulous email correspondences with other readers and bloggers of S.  I've waffled several times over my enthusiastic embrace of Borges' short story The Aleph, first thinking perhaps I was too enthusiastic.  I now wonder that perhaps I was not enthusiastic enough. And quite disturbing and awesome are the times a book or another link seem to fall from the sky into my eager hand; such was the day The Gulag Archipelago showed up in a local used bookstore on the very day I had just discovered it via the internet.

I hope that my personal experiences illustrate that these are the kinds of transactions with the world that literature creates.

The Power 15 ad in the McKay's review of Ship of Theseus published by Rose & Blatt Publishing is a pretty bold reference.  Most references in S. aren't so easily found; the reader must have some familiarity with the text and the references in order to begin sussing out the clues, hints and threads the author has so cleverly hidden.

Rose & Blatt is a reference to Louise Rosenblatt, who in the 1920's met Gertrude Stein and Robert Penn Warren in Paris.  During World War 2, she work for the war department analyzing reports from or about German-occupied France.

Most importantly, to us as readers, she first advanced her transactional theory of literature in the 1930s which is considered a reader-response literary theory.  To Rosenblatt, every reader is going to have a different interaction with any given text because no two people are going to be identical in experiences and temperament.

Readers aren't just readers.  They are authors and bloggers, philosophers and professors, journalists and editors.  Each person will have a unique experience with the text they have chosen to read.

Hero with a Thousand Faces is well-documented as being a primary source for inspiration for George Lucas and his film Star Wars.  The Invention of Morel is reputed to be an inspiration for the game Myst.

These interactions are dynamic.  How often has a good book stayed in your thoughts after you've finished reading it?  Text may be panned by critics, lauded as a great new scientific theory, adapted into movies and plays, or used as a political weapon.  Authors wouldn't write pastiches or mash-ups if they weren't readers of other texts by other authors.  The opportunities for engagement with the written word are endless.

Perhaps this is what Doug Dorst wants us seekers to keep in mind as we continue to dive even deeper.

The Snot Brake, 1919, Corbeau/Durand, Ashes and Wednesdays

The Charlie Chaplin moustache sported by Vevoda (along with his Van Dyke beard) can be classified as one of those nagging things that bug me until I can't stand it anymore and ask the google.

The moustache sported by Chaplin is also known as a toothbrush moustache, and apparently was sported by several individuals in the early 20th century as a alternative to the more complicated and traditional moustache styles that required way more upkeep, included waxing and perfuming.  It should be noted that Adolph Hitler had a toothbrush, although because his was much shorter horizontally, Hitler's moustache could be better classified as a variation of the tootbrush, known as a snot brake, from the German rotzbremse. (I will never look at a moustache without thinking of that term again!) Hitler incidentally was a fan of Chaplin's movies, but by all accounts, Hitler's  'stache was not inspired by Chaplin.

Yeah, yeah... I know.  What does this have at all to do with Corbeau/Durand and Ash Wednesday?

To paraphrase a well known author, blogs are a lazy machine in which the reader must do some of the work.  You'll get there.

Oh yes, the toothbrush moustache, I came across a German who was pretty much a cipher during the Nazi Party years, but he was known to have sported the infamous configuration of facial hair below the nose called the toothbrush.  Soldier and activist, Waldemar Pabst was a supporter of far-right causes and was a staunch enemy of all things communist.  He is very well known for his counter-revolutionary activities in the years following World War 1 and for his directorship of Rheinmetall AG (auto parts and military tech) before World War 2.  Despite his warm support of Hitler early on, he did not became a Nazi Party apparatchik.

In 1919, Pabst was busy dishing out reprisals for the Spartacist uprising that had occurred early-to-mid January that same year.  (Hitler also adopted his trademark moustache late in 1919.)  These reprisals took the form of executions ordered by Pabst.  One of those executions was that of the Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg who was shot and whose body was thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal.  Her birthday, March 5, was the date assigned to Ash Wedneday in 1919.

Her friend and companion in 1919, Paul Levi, survived the reprisals, became critical of the Bolsheviks and in the 1920's attacked several prominent Nazis in left-wing publications.  In 1930, he died from his injuries when he fell out of his fifth-floor window delirious from pneumonia.  (Ash Wednesday again fell on March 5 in 1930).

The year 1919, the execution, emmersion, the defenestration, Ash Wednesday, the pneumonia, the relationship between Levi and Luxemburg all echo in S. to some degree.  I've stated before my belief that Durand, Ekstrom, et al. are composites, but perhaps I'm flogging the horse at this point.  Oh, stew.

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.

Part 2: Spinning Compasses, Associations of Evil and Three Volumes, Footnote 1, page 415

In Footnote 1, page 415:

Straka’s phrasing here is no accident; though the characters have a map to the Vévoda estate, they still must view the location through the fog. As the essayist Norman Bergen discussed in the third volume of his Spinning Compass series, there is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil, Bergen argued, are blurry and porous, if they can be said to exist at all.

Part One discussed Montagu Norman's complicit involvement in the Nazi theft of Czechoslovakian gold in the days leading up to British entry into World War 2.  He is certainly the reference in the name "Norman Bergen."  It was Norman's actions in support of the Nazis that proved "the boundaries of evil...blurry and porous..."

So who or what does Bergen in "Norman Bergen" reference.  The clue is again found in the footnote,

...there is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)...

The "specific, bounded" place is the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp founded by the Nazis in 1940 in northern Germany.  In this instance, however, the apparent human "need to locate evil" needs little help in doing so.  Bergen-Belsen is the camp where Anne Frank and the Czech author, Josef Capek lost their lives.  Also of note, Jews from Salonika accused certain members of their community of being Nazi collaborators during the Rosenberg Commission.  In a lawsuit filed by the Salonika Jews, Bergen-Belsen was allegedly the camp where the collaborators were sent to live in relative safety for betraying their community to the Nazis.

It was an evil, filthy place, a hell on Earth.

The extensive documentation, filmed footage, and photographic evidence made at Bergen-Belsen made it clear to the world the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.  The British military ordered the location to be made into a permanent memorial, but the site languished until 1960 when the German government began a series of upgrades to improve the site.  Permanent buildings were erected and in the 1980s a permanent scientific staff was put in place.  Changes and improvements continue through to the present day.

It's not a stretch then, that the Nazi symbol, the swastika, is the "Spinning Compass" referred to in the footnote above.  It's hard to imagine that there was a time that the swastika was not associated with an ultimate evil as embodied by the Nazis under Hitler.  Prior to the swastika's adoption by the Nazis, the swastika was a popular symbol and often represented good luck; it was a common lucky charm for airplane pilots in the early days of manned flight.  It's origins trace back to ancient history and several cultures; it is symbol found all over the world. One possible interpretation is that the swastika is a symbolic representation of the sun.
The reference to three volumes would then be a reference to the three empires of Germany, an idea conceived by conservative German author, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, from one of his novels.  The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and The German Empire of 1871-1918 being the First and Second Empires.  The Third Reich (or Drittes Reich) was the term famously used as a label for Nazi Germany under Hitler's control to add legitimacy to their power by trying to place it in a historical context of past German influence and power.  By 1939, the Nazis had banned the use of term, Drittes Reich, in Germany and had provided several alternatives for the German press and government to use.