fnord
Posting my Alongside Night review, I realized that I hadn't yet re-posted my review of Illuminatus! Trilogy:Some people can't make it past the first 50 pages of this book. It's too disorienting, too unfamiliar, too ... weird!
I've known several people who have gone back and tried again, finding themselves pulled in, immersed, obsessed with the story and the characters, struggling between the ingrained habit of trying to figure out What The Heck Is Really Going On?! and the increasingly pleasurable new habit of letting go, relaxing into the experience, allowing themselves to imbibe, to soak, to enjoy, to learn.
The book is written in an eclectic, polycentric style, jumping around through history as much as it jumps around through space and through the perspectives of its multiple narrators.
The medium is the message.
The authors succeed well in entertaining the reader, but they are also trying to break us out of our intellectual reflexes and prejudices -- they are teaching, implicitly, the skepticism, meta-skepticism (i.e., doubt your doubts!), and model agnosticism of modern semantic epistemology. I realize that this description makes the book sound very theoretical and academic, but it isn't. I am using the concepts that Robert Anton Wilson addresses in his non-fiction to describe what he was up to in this, his first published fiction.
(The so-called trilogy really was published in three separate books originally, but is only currently available as one volume, which is how most of its readers first encountered it.)
The book is a romantic adventure, a detective story, a war story, a crime drama, several memoirs, occasional pornography as well as a semantic, psychological, and political philosophy lesson. I couldn't begin to describe the plot here -- not in any way that could be truthful or revealing. The tome is 800 pages long and it keeps seeming to change its mind about what the story is -- although it does all tie together by the end.
Illuminatus! Trilogy was the first book to get me to take anarchist ideas seriously -- which it might not have been able to if it hadn't first conditioned me to suspend my judgments and to look past connotation to judge unpopular ideas with fresh eyes and an open mind.
After 622 of the 800 pages, we find Hagbard Celine's "Definitions and Distinctions" in which he defines CAPITALISM as "That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it." I've copied the whole set of definitions to the BlackCrayon library -- BlackCrayon.com/library/dictionary/celine/ -- and I highly recommend them.
I also highly recommend the book itself. If you find yourself wanting to give up before page 50, push onward. And relax your mind. It could change everything.
bkMarcus
Other R.A.Wilson links:
1 Comments:
That's a good review of the book.
Of all the books I've ever read, this is the one book where I don't think I could write a review that would be worth a damn. Avoiding the plot entirely was a wise choice on your part.
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