Doorways in the Sand discussion
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carol.
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Apr 02, 2016 07:41PM
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p.3 --He described a fountain as a "buckshot phallus" and then calls it a "phountain". Also, reference-Quasimodo, cleverly connected to a tower.
p.3 --"Emitted a labial consonant.." Reference--Bertie Wooster?
p.11--"Flying Dutchman" which I finally looked up (I've heard of it). A ghost ship doomed to sail forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_...
p.12--"If and object attains the speed of light it turns into a pumpkin. Everybody knew that ." -- did he honestly just mix Einstein and Cinderella?
p.27--"I spit into the face of Time that has transfigured me." ---reference Yeats, the Lamentation of the Old Pensioner. http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_l...
p.27--he then continues with a "narrowed our gyre" as the two descend--I suspect this is Yeats again, first because of a "widening gyre" poem The Second Coming-- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/... and second, Yeats apparently had a thing with geometry, so it's doubly referential.
p.40--"""Donnelly of the distant future with material for a book on the peculiarities of that antediluvian world .." --reference to author Ignacio's whose most popular book in 1882 which sourced the beginning of civilization to Atlantis?? --am I stretching here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatiu...
p.41 --the math poem
p.42-- "Mount Chimborazo" mentioned. It's technically the highest point in the planet because of planetary bulge or something extremely mathematically complicated. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
There are loads of references to Alice in the Wonderland. I just want to give you one sample. On the first page, Fred looks on his watch and notes that he is late. Zelazny relates Fred to the white rabbit who also takes out his pocket watch in the first page saying "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late"
Are all these references meant to be a joke about Fred's extended undergraduate education? It's like he's read so much over the decade and a half, his brain is exploding with random knowledge and he just can't help himself.Also: can anyone explain Phaeton and his Cadillac?
Phaeton for the myth about the Helios's son driving his chariot leaving the earth too cold or to hot, finally struck down by Zeus. (because Fred has chills for sunstroke) And for some kind of convertible?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaeton...
Following the Alice references - 'or the sound of the sinister bird. ' For Tweedledum and Tweedlede? (the Doodlehums)
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Jason--I suspect all the references just have to do with a broad classical education. Now there are so many different curriculum and learning styles, etc that we just don't have the same cultural touchstones. I might have had a poetry unit in school, but I remember Frost and Whitman, not Yeats. Of course, it does also fit with Fred and his education.
Thanks, Mitticus. The gold chariot (gold Cadillac) makes sense.
Ref for the beginning of Ch. 3: Sunflash, some splash. Darkle. Stardance.Story of Phaethon (spellcheck keeps trying to drop 2nd 'h' - my first try at Mitticus' link took me to the phaeton carriage entry, prob just my Mac) is at Phaethon & the Sun Chariot .
Phaeton's solid gold Cadillac crashed where there was no ear to hear, lay burning, flickered, went out. Like me.
Phaethon drove Zeus' Sun Chariot, thus RZ in the '70's upgraded the God's 'chariot' to a solid gold Cadillac, drawing an analogy between Fred's & Phaethon's dangers with Fred in the hot sun - possibly predicting a future plot element where Fred endangers the Earth? ('tho I hope Fred doesn't die!)
RZ's use of Greek myth & the structure of his lines reminded me strongly in both structure & content of W.H. Auden's use of same in his brilliant mid-century poem 'The Shield of Achilles': a good interpretation of which is here Interpretation: Achilles and the poem itself here The Shield of Achilles.
Fred, like Thetis, experiences a collision of the lyrical world of myth with the real world, where pain holds little lyricism. In Fred's case the statement of reality is in short sentences & the mythological element in longer form, reversing Auden's approach.
Although ... I'm starting to wonder if I'm reading entirely too much into these lines just because I like them so much! ;)
No, not at all. Thanks, Athena, for the insight.
"Our snark is a Boojum" (p 152) is a reference to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark - Boojums are very bad snarks, in this case it is the Willowhim Agent. Which is also the Cheshire Puss from Alice in Wonderland: Remember the phantom smiles throughout the book? The Willowhim disappears similarly to the Cheshire cat, starting with the disappearance of the tail, ending with a "grin full of teeth hanging in the air".
A question: who came up first with the trope of a student who does not graduate because his allowance would end? This book was the first time I encountered it, but later on Pratchett reused it in Moving Pictures.
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ooh, clever!
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p.55 "How long, how long, O Lord" --Psalm reference?
p.66 "It raineth on the just and the unjust" --reference Charles Bowen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...
p.77 "The girl shouted 'Evoe'" --reference. A shout of joy at Bacchus festivities.
Fred's education permitted him "to rest full-burnished, not grow dull in use" (opening of chapter 9): word-play on Tennyson's "Ulysses"
"Our Snark is a Boojum" - Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, of course, implying that something they think they've caught, something they've been looking for, will turn out to be a fraud (the stone?)Also, the entire scene in which the crazy plant tries to get the memory of what Fred did with the stone out of Fred's unconscious is extremely reminiscent of the climactic scene in Wilkie Collins' famous The Moonstone - surely not a coincidence, since both narratives revolve around a central scene in which a doctor of sorts digs into the unconscious mind of the protagonist to determine where they put a mysterious stone that the characters have all been looking for since the start of the book.
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Also, just as I was thinking that Fred's constant income from a mysterious uncle was deliberately reminiscent of Great Expectations, Zelazny has Fred tell his uncle he feels like Pip. The point of this novel, I think, ARE the allusions. Zelazny keeps reminding us, in case we occasionally forget, that everything in this novel is MEANT to make us think of an earlier text...
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I'll throw in a reference as well. I'm using an epub to read, so I can't swear to the page numbers.Pg. 56 (midway through Chapter 5); Fred falls asleep and goes "'Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.' I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name." -- A reference, of course, to René Descartes "Cogito Ergo Sum", I think, therefore I am.
Pg. 66 (midway through Chapter 6): Dr. Merimee, the donkey, the garland of bay leaves, the dwarf, are all references to the Dionysian Mysteries / Bacchanalia, with Merimee in the guise of Silenus, Dionysius's old satyr companion, who rides a donkey.
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Pg. 97 -- "you'll look like a statue by that Henry Moore chap!" Henry Moore being a very prominent abstract sculptor of the 60s and 70s. His statues tended to look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M...
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Logically, full of holes. Though I confess that Moore's work isn't really all that hole-y. But I don't have a better explanation, since Byler is explicitly stated to have a regular pistol.
Pg. 112 -- "...which sounds more like a caption for a Dali or an Ernst than a Da Vinci." Everyone knows Da Vinci and Salvador Dali, but Max Ernst is a tad less well-known today. Father of Surrealism, big on Dadaism, basically a German contemporary of Dali. Very weird guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ern...)Pg. 131 -- "Rather like Pip," Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, with the mysterious benefactor turning out to be a crook.
Pg. 146 -- "tormented in the desert," I feel like this is a Biblical reference.
Pg. 147 -- Kuhn is Thomas Kuhn, the originator of the term "Paradigm Shift"
Pg. 149 -- "chimes at midnight," a Shakespeare quote, Henry IV, Part II. Also a movie by Orson Welles, and a recent book by Seanan McGuire, and maybe fifty other things.
Pg. 149 -- "shadowy, Traven-like author" B. Traven is an early-mid 20th century author, most famous for his Westerns (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and for the fact that to this day, no one has the faintest idea who he actually was.
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oh, interesting!
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At least with modern recluses like Salinger or Pynchon or Ligotti, we know that they exist. Traven is an absolute void in comparison.
Doorways in the Sand
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Moving Pictures (other topics)The Hunting of the Snark (other topics)
