Book Review & Critical Analysis; Explosion In a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion In a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier

       “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.

Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.

The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.

The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.

They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.

The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.

The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.

A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.

In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.

Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.

Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.

Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.

Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.

When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.

From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.

The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.

The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20^th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.

In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.

The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.

Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted. 

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar by Fernando Ortiz

Cuban Counterpoint:

Tobacco & Sugar

by Fernando Ortiz

      If you mention Cuba, the first thing most people will think of is revolution, politics, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. The second thing would probably be music and dancing. After that, I’m guessing another strong association with that Caribbean island nation would be cigars. There might be a few other general associations like beaches, palm trees, jungles, Ernest Hemingway, and rum. Somewhere in there you might also find sugarcane. This is significant for Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz since the titular essay of his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar is about defining his country’s national identity through its most prevalent economic industries.

While Fernando Ortiz is considered to have been Cuba’s premier anthropologist to date, the titular essay really isn’t a work of social science. The point of it is to compare and contrast Cuba’s sugar and tobacco industries in order to define the national character of the Cuban people. From the start it is clear that he believes tobacco to be the ultimate symbol of Cubanismo and that he has a less favorable view of the sugarcane industry even though it has been the backbone of Cuba’s economy for at least two centuries.

His argument is provocative. Tobacco is a native plant to Cuban soil and its cultivation and use was a part of the Taino and Arawak indigenous people’s culture before the arrival of European colonialists. Tobacco is grown in dry riverbeds called “vegas” and even though some cigars are manufactured using machinery, those of the highest quality are hand-rolled. Thus, making a good cigar is a craft or an art form, as he puts it, more than an industrially produced commodity. Cuban cigars are also a source of national pride because they are popular worldwide and considered to be the gold standard of smokes by connoisseurs. That is why if you tell someone you have a box of habanas or puro cubanos they know by association that it is a box of the best cigars you can buy. Even cigars from neighboring countries like the Dominican Republic or Jamaica don’t compare. The use of the words “habanas” and “cubanos” to mean cigars proves semantically just how closely people outside the country associate cigars with Cuba.

Sugar, on the other hand, is just sugar. While the quality of tobacco can range from putrid to a champagne-like elegance, there is little to no difference once sugar crystals have been processed and granulated into the white powder we find in any grocery store around the world. Sugar that comes from sugarcane is also indistinguishable from that produced by sugar beets. People generally don’t associate sugar with any particular nation the way tobacco is strongly associated with Cuba. Sugarcane was also imported by colonialists and is therefore, not native to the Caribbean. Sugarcane cultivation and the manufacture of processed sugar is also the primary reason so many slaves were imported into Cuba. This is a source of shame to Ortiz who also uses this as a chance to take a swipe at capitalism since it requires that laborers, be they slaves, indentured servants, or wage laborers, get treated as commodities for production rather than as human beings. You could easily counter this claim by arguing that communism does the same thing. Thus that problem probably has more to do with the technology of industrialization than it does with whatever politico-economic system that utilizes it.

So as it stands according to Fernando Ortiz, tobacco is far superior to sugar when it comes to symbolically defining Cuba’s national identity.

I’ll be honest at this point. I have no emotional investment in this subject. I have no ancestral ties to Cuba, but I find the history and culture of the nation endlessly fascinating. I do appreciate sweet foods, but I gave up smoking long ago when I became wise enough to admit that I am afraid of getting cancer. So the argument over whether tobacco or sugar is more suitable for defining Cuba’s identity is of no importance to me. I could weigh the pros and cons of Ortiz’s reasoning, but I don’t feel its necessary to expend my mental energy on the matter. It reminds me of John Milton’s rhetorical argument that the moon is superior to the sun. But Milton’s essay on that matter is a great work of art. I’d say that Fernando Ortiz’s essay is a great work of art too. It is fascinating to read from beginning to end and, even if you don’t agree with his opinion, or even care all that much, it does say a lot about Cuban history and society. It certainly serves as a good introduction to anybody who wants to learn about tobacco or sugar cultivation and how it relates to Cuban culture.

Some of the ideas might be outdated though. Ortiz argues that tobacco is masculine and sugar is feminine in a way that relies on traditional gender stereotypes. Even considering those stereotypes, I find his reasoning on that point to be vague and insufficient to make his case. And his attempt at defining national character leads in the direction of essentializing in a way that would get labeled problematic by hyper-sensitive social theorists today. I have some problems with the concept of “essentializing” to beging with, but this is not the place to take that up. The use of outdated words like “Negro” “retarded”, and “Mongoloid” will also be jarring to some, but this essay was written in the 1940s when those words were considered neutral terminologies. Any offense you might naively take will also be undercut by that fact that Ortiz was a strong proponent of racial equality and the bulk of his work was done to document the cultural practices and patterns Afro-Cuban people. Hopefully someday more of his works will be translated into English.

The following essay in the book is of some interest up to a point. Ortiz examines the cultural uses of tobacco in pre- and post-contact indigenous societies. Although he starts by examining the practices of the Taino, Arawak, and Carib peoples, the scope extends farther into what we now call North, Central, and South America. The cultural uses of tobacco fall into four main categories being the social, the medicinal, the ritual/spiritual/religious/shamanistic, and the individual/leisure uses. He examines the history of how tobacco was ingested and the paraphernalia used as well as the social etiquette and praxis. He also examines whether or not tobacco was the only substance used in these ways. Various other writers have labeled tobacco and nicotine with contradictory terms like “stimulant”, “depressant” amd “hallucinogen”. Thus he analyzes evidence from colonial, missionary, archaeological, and pharmacological sources to figure out if some naive scholars in the past, not paying careful attention to details, mistakenly designated plants other than tobacco as tobacco. A lot of the essay is also devoted to disputes amongst anthropologists and archaeologists over what tools and paraphernalia were used for ingesting tobacco smoke and snuff. I feel like those debates are of more interest to specialists in this field and not so much for the general reader. His arguments aren’t hard to follow though and if you want to learn about the reasoning process and problem-solving methodologies in the social sciences, this is an accessible place to look.

The remaining essays are about the history of sugarcane cultivation and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on mass production and consumption of sugar. Again, these essays are well-researched and easy to follow, however, they feel more like filler than anything substantially related to the supposed main theme of the book which is Cuba and the importance of tobacco and sugarcane to its culture and economy. These filler essays stand on their own but stray too far outside the subject of Cuban national identity to be worthwhile in the larger context of the book. If you are solely interested in the subject of Cuban culture, you might want to consider reading the titular essay only and skipping the rest of the book. If you’re interested in the history of tobacco and sugar from a global perspective than the whole book will be of value. I fall into the former category, not the latter, so reading a lot of this felt like a chore even though all the essays are well-written.

Cuban Counterpoint was written at the end of World War II when the post-colonial era was taking off. Cuba was politically turbulent at the time, but it was also at the peak of its pre-Revolution cultural development. At that time the island nation was asserting itself internationally as a tourist destination and a producer of goods for international trade. In this context you can see how the subject of national identity and character could be of importance to a social scientist like Fernando Ortiz, especially considering his high academic stature then and now. Still, the book feels a bit dated. The negative health effects of smoking tobacco have caused it to be associated more with lung cancer than Cuba. Processed sugar is now associated with obesity, tooth decay, and other diseases. The tobacco and sugar industries plus communism should have made outsiders’ perceptions of Cuba inherently bad yet the country’s reputation is still alluring. Maybe it’s time for Cuba to choose a new symbol to redefine its national character. I’d choose their music to be a symbol of that identity if it were up to me (it’s not). Who couldn’t be enticed by those beautiful curvaceous women in tight skirts and stilleto heels defying the laws of gravity while dancing to mambo, rumba, charanga, salsa, cha cha cha, or Latin jazz. And if this book is dated, it still can evoke fantasies of sipping rum in a shack on a beach, palm trees swaying in the wind while clear waved waters wash ashore as you relax with a burning puro, its tip dipped in honey, while the silvery blue smoke you exhale disperses in the Caribbean breeze. If we lived in a just world, cigar smoke wouldn’t be harmful. But we don’t. Your dreams, however, won’t hurt you. Let those dreams keep you alive. 

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: Algorithm by Jean Mark Gawron

Algorithm

by Jean Mark Gawron

magine what life would be if Earth were governed by an algorithm. Life would be stagnant and predictable, possibly even a bit decadent, because the code would manage human events to the extent that nothing out of the ordinary could ever happen. Embedded in the code, however, is a flaw allowing for a certain amount of uncertainty to circulate throughout the rigid structure. Such is the world portrayed in Jean Mark Gawron’s Algorithm, a proto-cyberpunk novel from the 1970s that draws heavily on computer programming and language theory that shows why uncertainty is not only inevitable, but maybe also desirable in the maintenance of human societies.

The plot revolves around a rumor that an assassin will be visiting the city of Monotony during the annual Carnival celebration. The main characters in the narrative go on the hunt to track down the assassin, each having their own personal motivation for doing so. Their hunt reveals a lot about who each one of them is and what they hope to achieve if they catch the assassin.

One of the first things to note is the multiple layers of the setting. Monotony is actually a misspelling and mispronunciation of “Manhattan” and the inhabitants believe they are the distant ancestors of New York City, a place that has vanished long ago in the past. They speculate that Monotony is located someplace south of the historic Manhattan. Otherwise it is a mixture of ancient Rome and a high-tech urban dwelling in the future. Like Rome, Monotony is built on several hills. On one of them Whore Hall is located, a giant temple structure with columns that could easily serve as a temple to Venus. Like both Rome and New York, it is in part a canvas for writers of graffiti. Other resemblances to Rome are the city walls and gates of entry as well as the network of caves and catacombs below. These underground tunnels connect up to the interior of the Pleasure Dome where most of Carnival is celebrated, a combination of ancient Pagan festivities and the Acid Test dances of the 1960s or rave scenes from the 1990s. Inside the city walls there is also a Roman-style amphitheater, the place where the story begins and ends. Notice the three levels of the city: the hill tops, the level ground, and the subterranean tunnels; they are symbolically important to the meaning of the story.

Then there are the characters. The man of most consequence is Danton, named after the French Revolutionary leader who got sent to the guillotine for trying to stop Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Gawron’s Danton is less incendiary though as he is the leader of a biker gang called the Proets. It isn’t exactly clear what the Proets are actually about as they don’t seem to actually write any poetry, prose, or anything else. One character also points out that they are never actually seen riding their motorcycles even though they are always in close proximity. In one passage they do discuss putting on a play though. But Danton is definitely a writer because we learn he suffers from writer’s block. He hopes to find the assassin because he believes it will either inspire him to write again or else leave his past behind and become poetry rather than writing it, a hint that Danton may be a prophet. Danton is not from Earth; he was brought there as a missionary soldier and left behind when the WUTs invaded Earth.

The WUTs are people from the other planets in the solar system who have formed a unified government. They are again planning on invading Earth and they have sent a spy named Potocki to report back on the conditions there. Potocki provides some insight into the nature of life on Earth. For one thing, he explains the meaning of the word “assassin” and plants doubts in the other characters’ minds as to whether there really is an assassin coming or if the word has alternate meanings to what they think it means. Another observation he makes is that the citizens of Monotony are passive observers and do little to take charge of life in their own city. They don’t need to because the algorithm does the governing for them. Finally, he expresses confusion over how they survive since they have no religion and no god and he believes such a thing is necessary to stabilize society. What he doesn’t realize is that they are ruled by an algorithm that renders religion unnecessary.

Other characters of note are the Juggler, a man who encounters Danton at several points throughout the story. He acts as though he wants to be the assassin, but he never seems to fulfill the role. There is also a paranoid schizophrenic named Savage who believes he is the assassin, but, like the Juggler, he also never proves to be what he believes he is. Then there is Guillemet, whose name means “quotation marks” in French, a seven foot tall giantess who has aroused the romantic interest of Danton. She is employed as a bodyguard and hopes to kill the assassin to protect the people of Monotony, although her true intention nis to get away and find a better place to be.

Furthermore, we learn the life story of Novak, the mathematician who wrote the algorithm that controls Earthly society. While writing the code, Novak was having marital problems and then one day when he entered a cave beneath the city wall, he got attacked by a monster that slashed his face with its claw. Novak received a laceration from his ear to his chin in the shape of a question mark. So while writing the code, this frustration, the attack, and the injury unconsciously found their way into the formula as a flaw that injected a principle of uncertainty into the algorithm. Since the code governs through repetition, Danton visits the same cave later on and encounters something that attacks him there just as Novak got attacked. It is uncertain whether this was a serious attempt at assassination or not.

Since Novak knew he was going to die, he built a computer named Alphy to embody his algorithm and regulate society. Alphy has two main terminals, one in a hidden section in the catacombs, the other in Whore Hall where it is monitored by the brothel madame whose name is Wunder. Alphy acts as the dramatic chorus of the novel, but speaks over everybody’s heads in a complex and abstract language that often confuses more than it clarifies contrary to the traditional purpose of a chorus. It is hard to tell if there is more signal than noise in what it communicates, but a couple ideas do emerge to help in explaining the meaning of it all. One is an explanation of quantum mechanics and the search for a grand unified theory. The dilemma of that branch of physics is that subatomic particles at the micro level of matter act in unpredictable ways that make little sense to their observers. In contrast, objects at the macro level are predictable because they follow the established laws of physics. There is no known way, as of yet, to explain the connection between the macro and micro levels of existence. If we graft this onto the society of Monotony, we get a similar dilemma. To Potocki, the spy from the WUTs and to the reader, the characters in the book have erratic behaviors patterns, motivations, intentions, and emotions that are difficult to apprehend. We try to make sense of these people even though they don’t act in ways that are familiar to us, just like subatomic particles that baffle the observations of physicists Even worse, the act of observing alters the behavior of the observed. On another level, the pursuit of the assassin alters the way that the assassin appears to its pursuers. To what extent do our observation of the characters in this novel alter our perception of the lives the lead? Are we, the readers, the macro level that is disconnected from the micro level of the world they inhabit? Is that why they are difficult to comprehend?

Another major explanation we get from Alphy is that the word “assassin” has no fixed meaning. As the characters try to discover who or what the assassin is, the definition of the word changes too. This is initially pointed out when Potocki explains that “assassin”, :killer”, and “murderer” may all be related categorically, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. This appears to be an illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. Wittgenstein claimed that words, in and of themselves, have no meaning and only an arbitrary connection to whatever it is they are meant to signify. Semantically, the meaning of a word is entirely dependent on its context and how it is used in a sentence, its semantic environement. Hence, the uncertainty over the word “assassin” and who decides who the assassin is. Many people in the story die or get killed, but probably none of their deaths would be considered an assassination especially because many of them are accidental. Two characters claim to be the assassin, but neither of them are. Wunder could be the assassin even though she doesn’t actually kill a person. It is also suggested that the assassin is a mathematical formula or possibly the grand unified theory that unifies the behavior of matter at the micro and macro levels. By extension, is the assassin an interpretation of the novel that ties all its confusing elements together into a neatly packaged whole that makes complete sense? Why would you even use the word “assassin” to signify such an idea? It is only suggested by Alphy though and never fully explained, leaving interpretations open to question.

So if Wittgenstein’s language theory is the theoretical underpinning of this novel, what is the implication for Novak’s algorithm that governs Monotony? First off, syntactical structures are algorithms that are filled in with lexical items to form sentences. So the connection between algorithms and language is clear. A computer code is an algorithm whose structures are filled in with lexical items formed by numbers, letters, commands, diacritical marks, algebraic formulas, symbolic logic, mathematical structures and so on and so forth. If the lexicon of language is semantically unstable in its meaning, and computer code is written using a language, albeit one of its own (actually if you study the history of computational linguistics and transformative generative grammar you will know that computer code is written relative to English), then computer coded algorithms are permeated with uncertainty despite their relatively stable structural appearance. So while Monotony is guided by a repetitive algorithm, we get a connection from Rome to Manhattan to Monotony, Novak and Danton are joined by their actions, and the WUTs are going to repeat their invasion of Earth with the anticipation that the results will be similar the second time around. The macro cycles of history are stable and redundant while the micro particles, the individual people, behave according to their own motivations which are context-dependent and sometimes opaque to outsiders. If you can separate the noise from the signals provided by the author, the meaning of the novel emerges as a theoretical outline inherent in the sometimes inexplicable occurences in the story. We might conclude that the uncertainty principle contained in Novak’s algorithm is what prevents life in Monotony from stagnating to the point of collapse. The pursuit of the assassin and the coming invasion of the WUTs are what gives the characters’ actions direction, meaning, and purpose. Of course, this interpretation could be entirely wrong, maybe even a self-serving projection of my own inability to find meaning in my boring, repetitive life. And besides, algorithms, like cultural patterns, only function by being invisible to plain sight. The certainty of interpretation may be an impossibility.

This is not a novel for everybody. The author immediately drops you into an unfamiliar world without a map or any guide posts to show you where you are going. He throws massive amounts of information at you, forcing you to make decisions about what is junk and what isn’t. There are repetitive symbols like triangles, compasses, and the number three that pop up all over the place without any clear connection, making you wonder if there even is a connection or if you are trying to find one where there isn’t, just for the sake of honing the chaos into comprehensibility. This is a book of information overload without a clear meaning and no explicit explanation as to what it is about. You as a reader have to connect the dots without even knowing with certainty that you are connecting the proper dots in the proper way. It doesn’t spoon feed you a story or an explanation and may be too cerebral for your average science-fiction reader since it approaches the maximalist complexity of writers like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. And like those authors’ major works, this is a book that needs to be read twice in order to really be understood. It probably isn’t as good or as saturated in meaning as a Pynchon novel, but it does reach in that direction.

So Algorithm is a big postmodern mashup that combines elements of hard science fiction, cyberpunk, psychedelia, Federico Fellini-style phantasmagoria, order and entropy, and communication theory derived straight from The Crying of Lot 49. It’s abrasive, frustrating, and mystifying, but if you like solving complex puzzles and language games, especially ones involving fuzzy logic and out-of-the-box thinking, the challenge of it all makes it worthwhile. Lazy readers stay away. This one is hard work.