SOLAGE
FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART FIVE HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/15/solage-by-a-nimbus-5/
My continued review will appear in the comment stream below, as and when I read this book…
Hélène Cixous — by Nicholas Royle
Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, realist, analyst, writing.
Manchester University Press 2020
My previous reviews of Nicholas Royle here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress. reviews-of-nicholas-royle/
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8 thoughts on “Hélène Cixous — by Nicholas Royle”
From the ‘fits and starts’ of The Uncanny to the ‘cuts’ of Cixous, I hope I am a ‘creative reader’, too!
Royle: “To read Cixous: cut off into another thinking of space and time and history. Her writing is a new kind of science fiction or poetic science criticism.. It has to do with nanoments, narratoids, omniscience and ornithophony, with ‘literature’ as a land as much of the ancient past as of the unforeseeable future.”
[See my gestalt review of SOLAGE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/solage-nimbus-ashley/ ]
My review in 2015 of Edgar Allan Poe’s LIGEIA:
****
LIGEIA
“Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. — JOSEPH GLANVILL.”
A sumptuous, rhapsodically textured text, deceptively ‘slender’ or agile like Ligeia herself perhaps when in full health, but decadently and morbidly tapestried throughout otherwise. Like Ligeia, there is a ‘strangeness’ in this text but one that is hidden in Plain Sight, like Poe’s purloined letter earlier. But, here, it is the Sight itself, her eyes, the most thrilling eyes in all literature, I claim — followed in time’s due accretion by a “Saracenic” tapestried undulance, a literally textured vision of her soul wrestling with shadow… In the end, the Eyes Have It, the Eyes Have It. Eyes with the glance of pervasive foreign, oriental cultures…
A subsuming of one’s second false love with a revivification by one’s first true love. The hope of transcending Death through the narrator’s (or is it Ligeia’s?) wilful amorality? Like today’s battling Saracenic wills in Iraq and Syria? That Conqueror Worm? Poe at his undidactic best. Or with a didacticism hidden in Plain Sight?
cf ‘The Giaour’ by Lord Byron, about Leila… This review of mine seems to be the very first connection between ‘The Giaour’ and ‘Ligeia’. Poe was a fan of Byron. And there are similar Islamic connections in ‘The Giaour’ (and, by the way, a vampire)…
“She was attracted also repelled all at once by the crab like creature he had become.”
These three sections headed WAR represent another rite of passage for the reader and any reviewer is likely to become almost a blend of the ventriloquist and its dummy, explicitly a grandfather clock as a doppelgänger, as Violet now disembodied or what?
“Groups of creeping people moved about in rhythm within the pall of the red brick tower betokening skyward emancipation. Many were holding their breaths for as long as they could and hoping that reassurance would appear more real than what it looked like in their imagination.”
And there is Piquadador with other ventriloquistic machinations of the plot that one manages to voice clearly aloud or get garbled, although one is surely becoming more and more confident upon travelling deeper into the book and developing a reliable voice of description, interpretation and evaluation while keeping in mind this book’s own counterpoint of “…an illusionary mind-bending routine around numerous hypothetical indices hovering above metaphysical extrapolations to continue influencing the plot of this tale.”
PS. I posted picture of a crab above yesterday, before reading about the ‘crab’ today!
“…arm hinged at several elbows instead of the normal singular version many bipeds preferred;”
This book, too, (ending the overall section headed WAR) stretches its manifold parts, machine into machine, mainframe computer into mainframe computer on their hindlegs, as well as mankind into machine, machine into mankind, alongside turbine engines, Lego mechanics, even Electral love, plus Trouser People V-2, and someone acting as her own midwife in the birth-death syndrome of The Uncanny, including a cargo of eggs, a spluttertongue, the means of cryology — a human diaspora to die for, as outer space beckons and its Goldilocks Zones.
All above, and more, takes SF at least a notch further than I have ever experienced before, and that claim of mine is coming from someone who has studied and described in detail all the fiction in INTERZONE from 2013 to 2023, and plenty of other SF!
And also there is “An extract from Olympia’s encyclopedia of tales entitled, ‘The Owl’ η κουκουβάγι”!
THE TALISMAN
“Esoteric words added value to a time loop no ordinary language could supersede.”
“‘But I do know who you are — Able Midshipman Öppenhoff.’ There was a threatening purr in its voice he could well remember that indicated amusement guided by an insane pleasure caused by its audience’s confusion.”
This is an extraordinary and substantive section, involving Ōppenhoff and other characters in a wasteland where farming is attempted, picking up themes and conflicts between them somewhere to a ‘barren planet’ where they have fled or still back home on earth in Rook Farms orchards? — a theatrical scenario where you are beyond the fourth wall, sometimes glimpsed by one of the characters. Sometimes holograms sometime just an illusion or even sometimes real, the eponymous talisman as amulet or jewel or bauble sometimes holding a genie that is one of the characters or a doppelgänger. A ritenuto of bolt guns, references to Clock-Beetle, a ‘bothersome imp’ pestering Ōppenhoff, a ‘turf witch’, fleas, a flame and its candlewax, chattels dragged along a trail, an alpha, beta and omega on their RUST TUNDRA. More a ‘character-building exercise’ that I once used to know as strange team-building ones! A reader-building exercise, too?
“…a long tongue that looked more like rope compared with muscle sinew.”
’THEM’ EGGS
“Was this a conspiracy to contradict his security around a tight corner on which to progress: Her majesty and a man who claimed to know her like the palm of his hand growing out from his forearm stump?”
Another head-lined substantive part of the book where the plot turns yet another elbow, a part that is possibly the most obliquely challenging part of them all to read so far, but also potentially the most fruitful part given the reader’s sensitivity to see the woods for the trees and the words for the trip-ups.
Starting with Abi (throwing eggs at the wall?) and who is now beginning to show her power as a character previously in the side-lines, in interface with Öppenhoffl, plus references to the ‘Forth Bridge’ on our ‘elderly planet’ in real-time, some inscrutable holes or depressions, Pollymina of erstwhile Larch Court now ‘enduring a system of melancholy’, plus much about Constanza and her ‘batch of boys’ and ‘terrible hive’, her wings spread wide, fairies and fayres, canyons and Trouser People, bipeds, cybernetics, kinetics, ‘metal-soaked people’, an oval egg in a soil jar, and a woman somehow with a serial number and bar code, not forgetting a young man as a cheeky stripling, where the book takes a Shakespearean turn, I feel.
But much of this part reads as if I am watching an opera by Wagner or Rutland Boughton, and indeed ‘Russalka’ by Dvorak. A ‘fairy law’ until kingdom come.
“…stumped up between them both in words… [……] …a perfect biped structure was born hybrid with a human of digital interconnectivity…”
VIOLET
“Wearing fashionable garments for her time, she intrepidly wore a flush space-grey robe flooded with a cobalt shade complementing her hairdo revealed to be a big fat feather on her head torn away from the fringe.”
A section mainly about Violet and Olympia looking after each other amid ‘little dots’ and ‘fairy bulbs’, also referring back to Jaye, the B&B, their strange but perhaps not so strange habits, the Sun-Estuary, plot elements evolving even when the reader fails to yet notice them. The book being a bespoke template for each mind reading it as a chair specially built for a particular body.
“This code was activated by the touch of the skin alone, such as the cupola device containing a valuable Greek garden chair sprouting complicated swirls moving up and down the inner lining so massaging the sitter’s unique backside.”
“; rust and mildew had infested the cold slate dribbling down the wooden platter rotten with damp.”
Particularly enjoyed the reference to the CANE having being relegated to the moon (like the Rwanda scheme today!?) and a weir with ‘flouncy trees’ preceding a namecheck for Shakespeare, a rune and its glyphs, Violet as sorceress and alchemist of Elégiac, a gate with curly-wurly figurations, a little girl with the giant cat Bluey, a ‘great big sneeze-like giggle’, the Mausoleum, the palace for the dead, and more on Piqudador and Petrioc amid unwrapped fixtures on the skin and orphaned blotches amid Violet’s fury.
I have so far read in this long section up to the first “Ah Haaa” mewed by Violet.
“Overhead it came, the windy rain detailed in its execution, whisking through the air, swirling down, concentrated, sucked down into the chimney on the scuffed-up old roof, and then out through the silent holes poked into the cottage’s sides, a whooshing sound beckoning dread…”
This second half of the latest section is a prime example of this book’s powerful disarming of the reader by what I have called in the past ‘a vexed texture of text’ to which the process of the reader’s acclimatising is part and parcel of that very power. A mixture of, say, SF or steampunk art, Henri Rousseau, Lowry, Chagall and Mondrian as in visuals. ‘The means to grasp the full narration’…
“The reality through the screen can be so deceptive; cease walking through plexiglassand look at stuff with your own eyes.” (Ah-Haaa, I say.)
A scenario mainly with two women and a girl with pigtails: Violet, Olympia and Pollymina, as we gather, out of potentially constructive confusion, who is exactly talking to whom and who they actually are or by what they are named. Mixed with a canopy of birds, shape-shuffling, ‘regression’, mechanical figure skaters, toxic waste, ‘plods’ as law-enforcers, a dreaming cottage, and the girl eventually becomes trapped by ‘furry down’ AS a bird (an owl). An enchantment.
“A doughnut shaped disc that Violet placed on her left wrist…” and its ’spectrum light’, and much else. Or a ring as in Wagner or Tolkien. The algorithms of Papagena (or the umpa lumpas?)
“For centuries children were by tradition classed as a hopeful intervention to any bonding-loop.”
“Now Pollymina had the means to grasp the full narration citing the ring as a supreme example of her true destiny censoring all rival claims.”
POLLYMINA AND ABI
“She left the precious dawn to progress on to sunrise gradually covering more ground until its shock of light cascaded over the blinded windows fully open and marking the time with happy memories.”
However, not all memories, in Pollymina’s case, are happy, i.e. when being an Elégiac lozenge captive as a teenager of Arabella etc., as we the readers, meantime, wallow in ancient magnetised tape, walk on two legs, think about the mind as a Palace, alongside an oval globe, a pet drone, and an empty wooden box held in ‘shaky mittens’.
Now with an older version of Pollymina, in this linear non-linearity, we see a mauve sky, a sun waking from its forty-winks, Twinkle the hydro-car, a wardrobe, three yew trees hugging us (if not a yieldingtree), water carriers vis à vis Petrioc and Abi and “the wrath soon to come”, ‘flesh and blood carriers’, too, and “the Sword of Damocles”, plus a ‘personal snow globe’ allowing us to enjoy all that is sprinkled at us! Not to mention the old mansion with a ‘gap in the roof’!
I have read so far in this part up to around where a “tide of galaxies” is mentioned.
Bonding-loops, plot loops, ‘digital contagions’ and ‘mental health’ of the ‘mind palace’, and much else.
“A petrified party clown was placed at the broken carousel wheel with lifeless eyes resembling plus signs ripped off from the old block graphics displayed on the screen layout on computers last manufactured during the late 20th century.”
This and the old Test Card and old dials lit up for the Medium Wave serve as just a few memories among many in the second half of the section headed ‘Pollymina and Abi’. It starts with a sort of notebook monologue memory of the Clamforth festival during ‘Achtro’ by Abi , a lengthy italic portal (“skein by skein”), as it were, or a version of Joyce’s Molly, and this ‘monologue’ when factored-in to further narration presents a tantalising portrait of arguably the two girls’ potential Sapphic or mutual Muse love in the context of this book’s plot-lines, both linear and non-linear, as blended with considerations of Music itself, including a Dvorak symphony whereby Russalka is brought to mind again, and their playing of a pianola, etc, and all this blended, too, with an explicit reference to ‘the dying earth’ as an important factor for this book, I feel, bringing to mind Jack Vance, an SF writer who was also a proponent of great music, including opera, as well as space opera! Scenes involving a locket, ginger scents, timelines, a yoyo and ‘empathy loop’, composted video screens, ‘climate change’ as an italic portal, ‘technological bells and whistles’ and Pollymina’s erstwhile or future car crash. There is more remarkable rhapsodic writing here for the reader to distil, too much for me to fully itemise — involving a significantly unique theme-and-variations on the aforementioned potentiality of a form of Sapphic or unique Muse love. Star balanced against star, a planet from which to flee balanced with these stars while its lifeforms (on two legs or mainframe) are in balance with words and such words’ music of meaning. All the book’s themes up for grabs, not locketed in stone.
“Saddled up on Twinkle, Pollymina surmised all by herself, she was getting nowhere riding in an ellipse, much like the one the planet did side by side with the star named Sol.”
This review will continue here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/03/solage-by-n-a-7/