33 Misc Laff: Past Master
Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs off the once well-known novel “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (which was later a [film] and eventually a [musical])? Or that, to its original readers, Alfred Bester’s “Of Time and Third Avenue” immediately recalled Thomas Wolfe’s “Of Time and the River”? I do suspect that writers Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s “They’d Rather Be Right” (remembered only because it was the [second] novel to win a Hugo) was riffing off the [Rodgers] and Hart musical—forgotten now but a big hit in the late 1930s—“I’d Rather Be Right.” Many readers of, say, R. A. Lafferty’s story “The World as Will and Wallpaper” will fail to recognize the reference to Schopenhauer’s “The [World] as Will and Representation,” but that volume is regarded as a classic of modern philosophy. None of the above works, good as they may be (I like Moore’s poem), are remembered today. And who is writing the glosses? Nobody. — Gregory Feeley, Facebook.
I saw a post by Gregory Feeley on Facebook last night, and it made me think about how acute this problem is for Lafferty. Recognizing the Schopenhauer allusion requires basic philosophical literacy. Lafferty’s extensive use of songs, films, and popular books presents a different problem: as those works fade from memory, some of his jokes and arguments become harder to recognize. Here are three examples from Past Master that I suspect some readers miss.
I would put the first in the same box as the allusion to Schopenhauer in the title of “The World as Will and Wallpaper.” The Past Master chapter titles “The Shape of Things to Come” and “The Deformity of Things to Come” plainly allude to H. G. Wells’s 1933 book and its film adaptation, Things to Come (1936). Wells imagines a world rebuilt under scientific administration, with organized religion suppressed as an obstacle to its development. Past Master reaches its climax with the Ban the Beyond Bill.
Readers who know Wells through The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds may miss the kind of future Lafferty is satirizing in these titles. Astrobe has the planned cities, technological mastery, and material abundance Wells imagines. Lafferty says what he thinks of it all by changing “shape” to “deformity”:
“When we have all become one perfect city in our totality, then our evolving will be completed. The individual must pass and be absorbed. The city is all that matters.”
This second example belongs more squarely in the category of neglected popular culture. The opening chapter of Past Master, “At the Twenty-Fifth Hour,” alludes both to Orwell’s opening and to C. Virgil Gheorghiu’s The Twenty-Fifth Hour, published in French in 1949 and in English in 1950. Gheorghiu’s protagonist, Johann Moritz, moves through a succession of camps and official classifications, his real identity counting for little beside the categories imposed on him. Gheorghiu’s subject is close to Lafferty’s theme: the destruction of the human person by a civilization organized like a machine.
“The clock stood at the twenty-fifth hour so often that the very survival of man through it all appears a miracle.”
The last is a favorite of mine. I’ve written before about how important Sour John’s emerald-eyed idol is to understanding the conspiracy in Past Master. The little set piece takes us back to the culture of dramatic recitation. J. Milton Hayes’s “The Green Eye of the Yellow God” (1911), more often known as “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God,” tells of Mad Carew, who steals an idol’s green jewel for the colonel’s daughter. He is later found murdered, presumably by the idol’s servitors. The poem has largely been forgotten: people nowadays remember the ephemera of colonialism about as well as they do the Mystic Knights of the Sea.
Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. “I knew it would,” said Paul. [ . . . ] Three years later Paul (Sour John) was back in Ghazikhan. He was told that the center eye of the idol had been reappraised. By a miracle it had changed, the people said. It had become richer in color, finer in texture, of a deeper brilliance; and a grand new aroma came from it. And now it was worth thirteen million dollars. “I figure I lost two million dollars on the deal,” Paul said as he woke up.
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