Là-bas (Down There) by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Shock lit from a Zola protégé

Émile Zola, founder of the French literary school of Naturalism, was often castigated by his contemporary critics for including vulgar and disgusting subject matter in his novels. Much of what was considered vulgar and disgusting in the late 19th century, however, we today would just consider realism. One of Zola’s more prominent literary protégés, however, seemed to take such criticism as a challenge and proceeded to actively court controversy and deliberately shock readers with the decadent and gruesome content of his writings. Joris-Karl (or J. K.) Huysmans (1848–1907) was the author of À rebours (Against the Grain) and Là-bas (Down There or The Damned). The latter book, published in 1891, deals with the subject of Satanism in France.

In Paris, a writer named Durtal is working on a biography of a historical figure named Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), a French baron who fought alongside Joan of Arc. Gilles de Rais was tried and executed for abducting, torturing, raping, and murdering at least 140 children. According to Durtal, these heinous crimes, which Huysmans describes in graphic detail, were acts of Satanic worship. Durtal feels that in order to truly understand Gilles de Rais, he must delve into the activities of contemporary Satanists. His investigation leads him through a series of friend-of-a-friend referrals that bring him closer to rubbing elbows with real live devil worshippers in one of their Satanic ceremonies.

Much of the story is told through dinner conversations between Durtal and his friends des Hermies, a physician; Carhaix, a church bell-ringer; and sometimes Gévingey, an astrologer. It is to these listeners that Durtal relates much of the history of Gilles de Rais that he has uncovered. When Durtal is not dining with these companions, the story turns to his love life. He receives a letter from a secret admirer, a fan of his work, and begins an amorous correspondence with her. What comes out of the conversations between Durtal and his friends is a nostalgia for medievalism in preference to the modern world. Even though they’re not satanists, they enjoy dabbling in superstitions and the occult because such matters harken back to those earlier times. A lot of supernatural conspiracy theories are brought up at the dinner table, and it’s always somewhat unclear whether Huysmans actually believes this stuff, or if these are just the thoughts of his fictional characters. It was always clear where Zola stood on religion, but I don’t know Huysmans well enough to judge his supernatural inclinations.

Judging from Là-bas, Huysmans seems to want to be the Marilyn Manson of French literature. The way he’s written this book reminds one of those heavy metal bands that try really hard to be louder, harder, and more demonic than everyone else. Even for libertine France, there is a surprising amount of indecent and risqué content for 1891: semi-graphic sex, sacrilege and blasphemy, bodily functions and feces, mass murders, rape, sodomy, pedophilia, and, of course, a lot of talk about the devil. Even when Huysmans isn’t discussing one of these topics, he goes out of his way to digress gratuitously into some off-putting subject, such as food sanitation. There is a sexual affair in this book between Durtal and a married woman, but Huysmans doesn’t even make it titillating. Instead, he describes it as the most annoying, ungratifying, and pointless love affair imaginable.

There’s a lot that’s unpleasant about Là-bas, but it is interesting. Sometimes it reads like classic Zola-esque naturalism, and sometimes it reads like a 1970s Satanic B-movie. It’s rarely boring, which is more than I can say for Huysmans’s À rebours, but I can’t really recommend this as a great work of literature.

Icarus; or, The Future of Science by Bertrand Russell

Pessimistic outlook on scientific progress

Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, even though he was not a literary writer. He was a philosopher and mathematician who broke through to a wider general audience as a public intellectual. His essay Icarus; or, The Future of Science was published in 1924 as a 72-page book. The London publisher Paul Kegan produced a series of 110 books called To-day and To-morrow, consisting of short volumes containing essays that speculate on the future. The first book in this series was Daedelus; or, Science and the Future by J. B. S. Haldane. Russell’s Icarus, published six months later, is a response to Daedelus. The two authors were not in total disagreement. Both expressed doubts that some recent scientific advances were actually beneficial to mankind, but overall Haldane was the more optimistic of the two. In general, Haldane thought scientific advances would elevate the happiness of the common man, while Russell predicts that only the powerful will reap the benefits of progress.

Russell opens Icarus by stating he’s not going to talk much about the biological sciences. That’s not his department, and Haldane already covered that topic sufficiently in Daedelus. Strangely, however, Russell then goes on to talk mostly about biological sciences: genetics, eugenics, birth control, and anthropology. The longest chapter discusses changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Russell really doesn’t discuss technology much at all, but rather focuses on how our modern industrial and commercial society has spawned a revolution in organization, both in terms of efficiency and ubiquity. The result is that people now have less control over their lives than they did in, say, the 17th century, since much of our existence is regimented by organizational bureaucracy and government oversight, from our lives at work to the media we consume to the education of our children. Russell goes on to argue that science may very well be the downfall of liberalism and democracy.

Science would increase mankind’s happiness and health, Russell argues, if man were a rational being, rather than an emotional and greedy animal. Rapid scientific progress upsets the comfort zone between man’s desires and living conditions. In addition to the mythical metaphor of Icarus, Russell offers the analogy of how wolves become accustomed to periods of starvation; as a result their evolutionary descendants, domestic dogs, overeat every chance they get. It would be interesting to hear Russell’s take on the current (human) obesity epidemic, something he does not predict here.

I suspect that Icarus may have been delivered as a lecture before it was published in book form. That’s how it reads, anyway. The two books, Daedelus and Icarus, comprise a sort of debate in print, a point/counterpoint. Much of what Russell predicts for the future has already come to pass—declining birth rates, global economy, media empires, the arms race, and a general dumbing down of humanity. He presents some really interesting ideas here, but the obvious fault of the book is its brevity. It would have been a more productive work if Russell had had more room to develop his arguments, but the format of the To-day and To-morrow series confined it to a brief discussion. There aren’t enough pages for him to really convince you of anything. This is a thought-provoking work, but more thoughts are provoked than satisfied. Perhaps Russell delves deeper into these topics in other books, and I have yet to discover them.

Neils Klim’s Journey Under the Ground by Ludvig Holberg

18th-century sci-fi from a Danish Voltaire

Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground or Niels Klim’s Underground Travels is a science fiction novel published way back in 1741. It was penned by Danish author Ludvig Holberg. The edition I read included a brief biography of Holberg, which makes him out to sound like Denmark’s version of Voltaire. He was that Scandinavian nation’s pre-eminent man of letters in the 18th century, an Enlightenment freethinker who, besides this one novel, also wrote books on philosophy, history, and law, as well as plays and poetry. Niels Klim’s Journey, Holberg’s only novel, is very much in the same vein of satirical sci-fi and fantasy literature as Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

The story takes place in 1664. Niels Klim, a recent graduate of a Copenhagen university, returns to his hometown of Bergen in Norway. Near that city is a mountain with a mysterious hole in it, from which warm air emanates. Someone should really investigate that hole, so Niels volunteers to lead an expedition. He enters the cave with a small team of men. While rappelling into a chasm, Niels’s rope breaks, and he falls for a very long time.

It turns out that the Earth is a hollow shell. Inside is an inner space complete with a small sun and a planet about 600 miles in circumference, named Nazar. Niels lands on this planet and finds himself in the kingdom of Potu. The citizens of Potu are intelligent, speaking trees. Unlike trees we know, they are not stationary, and can walk using their roots, but not quickly. They welcome Niels into their society and, due to his long legs, they give him the job of courier-general. The Potuans include many races, essentially different species of tree, each with its own peculiar characteristics and personality traits. In addition to Nazar, Niels also explores what Nazarians call “the firmament,” actually the interior surface of the Earth’s sphere, which also bears nations and their inhabitants. There he encounters civilizations of beings resembling animals of the surface world, but possessing language, the ability to walk upright, and human-like hands.

In total, Niels spends twelve years in this underground universe. Unlike Gulliver, who visited about a half dozen different lands in his travels, Niels seems to encounter a new race of beings every few pages, each with their own strange quirks. I’m sure many of these fictional peoples are meant to satirize different nations and polities of Holberg’s day. Not being an 18th-century Dane myself, I’m sure much of that satire was lost on me. For today’s reader, however, Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground does make for more accessible and humourous reading than Voltaire’s satires, such as Candide or Zadig. Even if you don’t know the politics of the time, you can enjoy Holberg making fun of various types of people and systems of government. There is a land where gender roles are reversed, for example. The women are sexual predators, and the men are expected to be chaste virgins and slut-shamed if they aren’t. Thus, Holberg points out some of the ridiculous double standards placed on women of his time. Another land is inhabited by philosophers and academics who are so focused on their search for knowledge that they have abandoned all personal hygiene and social graces. Each little country Niels visits has its share of comedic surprises.

With this novel, Holberg inaugurated the hollow-Earth subgenre of science fiction, from which would arise Symzonia (1820), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867), Mizora (1881), A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), The Smoky God (1908), and At the Earth’s Core (1914), among others. Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground deserves respect as a pioneering work in science fiction, but it’s not just some stodgy old vintage antique that belongs in a museum display case. After all these years, it’s still fun to read.   

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

If Poe wrote The Omen

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is a Welsh writer known for his work in the fantasy and horror fiction genres. His best-known work is likely The Great God Pan, a novella first published in book form in 1894. Early in his career, Machen’s brand of decadent horror didn’t bring him a great deal of success or acclaim, as his writings were ahead of his time in challenging puritanical sensibilities. In the 1920s, however, critics started to rediscover and appreciate his work. The Great God Pan has since influenced later generations of horror writers, including Stephen King, Peter Straub, and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

The premise of this novella is based on the ancient idea known as Platonic dualism—the theory that beyond the world of our senses there is a higher, “real” world that we cannot experience except through rare and extraordinary revelations. Physicists and materialist philosophers conjecture that there are higher dimensions beyond 3D space that we are incapable of empirically comprehending, while spiritualists and clergy assert a supernatural spirit-world that exists outside the realm of matter. It is with this latter conception that Machen deals in The Great God Pan. Through an unethical medical experiment, a physician grants his guinea-pig patient the power to see into this extramundane world beyond. This opens up a Pandora’s box, from which an abyss of satyr-like demons and hellish abominations is revealed, once separated from our reality by a thin veil of imperception but now unleashed and seeping into the world in which we live. The phrase “the great god Pan” is not literal; it’s just a euphemism for this supernatural realm.

The Great God Pan has every bit of the spine-chilling macabre atmosphere of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best stories. The plot, however, presages modern horror films like The Omen, The Exorcist, or The Mothman Prophecies. A small group of characters teams up to investigate a mystery that leads them to horrifying supernatural conclusions. In this case, however, the evils they face do not come from the Christian Hell but rather from a pagan Hell that harkens back to ancient times. Though the heroes are British gentlemen who likely attend the Anglican church, they are forced to acknowledge horrors and evils that predate their beliefs and defy their cozy faith. Such ideas and imagery were a bit much for Machen’s Victorian audience. The book was perceived as controversial and scandalous upon its release, but it has been acknowledged by later generations as a masterpiece of the horror genre.

Machen has structured the narrative so that it reads almost like a series of reports—medical diagnoses, legal documents, personal diaries and letters—in which the characters exchange information. This heightens the realism of the work. It’s amazing how much terror Machen can generate by saying so little about the menacing cause of woe. Here you won’t find tangible villains like the vampires of Bram Stoker or the tentacled beasts of H. P. Lovecraft. The monsters in this novel are less forthcoming. They reveal themselves in a peculiar facial expression or an inexplicable feeling of dread. They don’t tear their victims to pieces but nevertheless silently engender a contagious chain of death.

This is only the second book I’ve read by Machen, the first being The Hill of Dreams. That book impressed me so much that I bought the Delphi Classics’ ebook The Complete Works of Arthur Machen, and I’m glad I did. I was even more blown away by The Great God Pan, and I look forward to exploring deeper into Machen’s body of work.

Aslan Norval by B. Traven

Late-career oddity

B. Traven, real name unknown, was a German author who emigrated to Mexico but continued to write in the German language. He was mostly active during the 1920s and ‘30s, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or Latin America. After not publishing much of anything during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Traven’s final novel, Aslan Norval, was published in 1960. He died in 1969. Aslan Norval is not only a couple decades removed from Traven’s better-known works but also quite different in style and subject matter. This novel is set in the United States, mostly New York, and features a Korean War veteran as its protagonist.

In the opening chapter, Clement Beckford, the veteran in question, is hit by a car. Although not seriously injured, he is rushed to the hospital and forced to undergo medical examinations so the hospital can rake in some insurance dollars. Luckily for Beckford, the motorist who struck him is a beautiful billionairess who wants to make up for his inconvenience and minimal pain and suffering. This woman, named Aslan Norval, invites him to lunch and inquires into his situation. Since returning from the war, Beckford is down on his luck. He can’t find a decent job or get a useful education. He tells her that what he’d really like to do is hydrological engineering—the construction of dams and canals. Within a few days, he finds that the wealthy woman has established a new company in his chosen field and installed him as president. She then reveals her grand plan to build a canal across the United States, thus circumventing the need for the Panama Canal, which is inconveniently located in a foreign nation. Rather than reveling in the generosity of his benefactress, Beckford can’t help but think that she has an ulterior motive. Either she wants to have an affair with him, he surmises, or she wants to set him up as a patsy in some fraud scheme.

Traven always emphasizes anarchist, leftist, and socialist themes in his work, and Aslan Norval is no exception. In this late-career offering, however, his political message is less pointed and more scattershot. In the opening chapters, he manages to satirize and/or complain about the insurance industry, for-profit hospitals, ambulance-chasing lawyers, veterans’ benefits, and higher education. Later he turns his attention to the Panama Canal project, Congressional corruption, defense spending, foreign aid, the arms race, the space race, and Cold War paranoia. His critical darts are dispersed all over the board, so he never really hits the bullseye with any of them. His sense of humor also seems to have suffered with the passing of time. Slapstick and sarcasm are distributed in a haphazard, willy-nilly fashion. The result is something that reads less like classic Traven and more like one of Upton Sinclair’s lesser efforts.

Despite the odd humor, there is somewhat of an odd film noir atmosphere to this book, with Aslan Norval as the femme fatale. At first, Traven seems to want you to root for Beckford and Norval, but he then has them both behave in unethical ways that makes you like them less. There are a couple of “love” scenes in this book that are rather creepy and off-putting. Overall, the plot is not well constructed, dragging in some portions while fleeting in others. Aslan Norval almost reads like a novel that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. You wonder why Traven chose to waste the second-to-last chapter dwelling on a pointless romantic subplot instead of building the canal story towards a conclusion. Then he wraps up everything way too quickly and unsatisfactorily in the final chapter. In general, I really like Traven’s writing, so this book was not a worthless read for me, but it certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as those Latin American novels (The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Bridge in the Jungle) that he wrote in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson

Ho-hum escapades of a hobo hobbyist

The Friendly Road, a book by David Grayson, was published in 1912. David Grayson was a pseudonym used by Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and writer of nonfiction in the muckraking style of social justice exposé. Under the pen name of Grayson, he published several lighter and fluffier books. The first was Adventures in Contentment (1907), about life on a farm. The Friendly Road is the second Grayson book, hence its subtitle New Adventures in Contentment. The Friendly Road is written as if it were a first-person nonfiction memoir, but then again, David Grayson isn’t a real person, and many of the happenings in the book seem contrived and not very realistic. This is more of a work of semiautobiographical fiction, and it falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.

Grayson owns a farm, whereabouts unknown. All the names of cities and towns in the book are fictional, so you never know where the story is taking place, just somewhere in America. (Baker lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.) Grayson decides he wants to take a break from his farm and strike out on the road to dabble in the life of a tramp. He carries very few possessions and soon spends all of the money in his pockets. Over the course of his journey, he lives off of the kindness of strangers. In a typical chapter, he encounters someone along the road. He sees them working and decides to pitch in and help, uninvited. He asks for no compensation, but there’s always hope that he’ll be offered a meal and a place to sleep for a night or two. There’s no real purpose to Grayson’s journey other than wanderlust and the possibility of making new friends. Grayson wants to make friends with everyone and thinks everyone wants to make friends with him.

I can sympathize with Grayson’s wanderlust, and I generally enjoy reading books about this unfettered, wandering lifestyle. What I don’t like about The Friendly Road, however, is how Grayson constantly reminds the reader that he’s bestowing sage wisdom upon you. He’s extremely satisfied with his own sense of humor and flaunts a know-it-all confidence in his discovery of the secret meaning of life. His revelations, however, are not particularly surprising. What is the key to a happy life? No responsibilities. Duh. Nice (non)work if you can get it, but Grayson’s rosy pictures of pointless wanderlust don’t really stand up to his own moral sermonizing. If everyone lived their life this way, would the world be a better place? Nope. It’s important to note that when Grayson leaves home and strikes out on the road, he leaves behind a woman whom you assume is his wife. She, or someone else, is left responsible for the farm from which he’s fled.

The Friendly Road improves a little in its second half when Grayson encounters a socialist and gets involved in a labor struggle. Baker slips into muckraking mode for a while, and you at least get some sense of historical events that were going on at the time. Still, his insight into the class struggle is a lot shallower and tamer than contemporaries like Jack London or Upton Sinclair. Grayson is neither for nor against socialism. He won’t commit to either side. He just wants everyone to get along.

There are many better books on hobos, tramps, and drifters. In fiction, there are classics like Knut Hamsun’s Wanderer trilogy (1906–1912), B. Traven’s The Cotton-Pickers (1926), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983), just for starters. In nonfiction, Jack London’s The Road (1907) and John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) are both excellent. With so many other superior choices, why bother with Grayson’s tepid chicken soup for the soul?

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Big universe, big thoughts

The 1980 PBS TV series Cosmos was a landmark in the history of television. The companion book to that series, also published in 1980, was the bestselling science book of all time (until Stephen Hawking beat it a few years later). The Cosmos book has 13 chapters that parallel the 13 episodes of the TV program. Alexander von Humboldt published the original Cosmos book back in 1845 to 1862, and Sagan does mention Humboldt in a footnote. The intent by both authors was to summarize and encapsulate in one volume the state of scientific knowledge on the heavens and the earth. Though Humboldt’s Cosmos was popular in its day, his was a pretty dry scientific text compared to Sagan’s more accessible and inspirational book. The way Sagan combines science writing with philosophy, skepticism, and freethought reminds me of another book from the end of the 19th century: Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe.

As one would expect from an astronomer and planetary scientist, Sagan spends much of Cosmos discussing the planets and other bodies in our solar system, as well as galaxies, the universe as a whole, space travel, the Big Bang, and the search for extraterrestrial life. In addition, however, he discusses particle physics, the origin of life, DNA, evolution, the history of science and astronomy (particularly in ancient Greece), and the human brain. The final chapter of Cosmos is about nuclear war. Although still a threat, Armageddon is not on people’s minds as much as it was in the ‘80s, and disarmament now seems further from reality.

Like any science book of years gone by, the obvious drawback to Cosmos is that it’s outdated. Sagan doesn’t really say anything wrong in this book, but what’s omitted is notable. There’s no mention of quantum physics or dark matter, for example. Sagan wrote Cosmos after Voyager 2 had performed its flyby of Jupiter but before it had reached Saturn. There was no Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of exoplanets was still suspected, not confirmed. The nearly fifty intervening years since publication, however, didn’t really bother me. I consider myself pretty well-versed in astronomical matters for a general reader, but I still learned many interesting scientific facts from Sagan’s Cosmos. Sagan is great at putting things into perspective, both humanity’s insignificance in the universe and the immensity of space and time. (He’s much more eloquent than the “billions and billions” catch phrase for which he’s known.)

I’d read much of this information before, but never as succinctly nor as elegantly put as Sagan presents things here. The other famous science book of this era was, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though also aimed at the general reader, Hawking’s book is not easy to understand and his explanations aren’t quite user-friendly for the layman. Sagan, on the other hand, is great at explaining complex scientific phenomena in simple terms that anyone with a high school education can understand, without dumbing down the scientific content or the philosophical implications of the matters discussed.

Sagan stopped short of declaring himself an atheist, but for readers of a freethinking persuasion, he is one of the best areligious writers out there, if not the best. He is a superb rationalist preacher, without the pretensions or cynicism of Richard Dawkins and other “neo-atheists.” Since Sagan’s death, others have tried to assume his role as leading spokesman for science—most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—but no one has quite matched his passion, eloquence, and trustworthiness as a public intellectual. Cosmos, although published in the middle of his career, is Sagan’s magnum opus, the distillation of his entire career. His other books may focus in more detail on some of the topics presented here, but no book better encapsulates his thought in its totality as this one. In the 1980s, this book was a must-read, and today it’s still an important and rewarding work for anyone who cares about science.