In the walls of eryx pdf

The Prison

Borges on his childhood nightmares, (from a 1977 lecture):

Let us into the nightmare, into nightmares. Mine are always the same. I have two nightmares which often become confused with one another. I have the nightmare of the labyrinth, which comes, in part, from a steel engraving I saw in a French book when I was a child. In this engraving were the Seven Wonders of the World, among them the labyrinth of Crete. The labyrinth was a great amphitheater, a very high amphitheater (and this was apparent because it was higher than the cypresses and the men outside it). In this closed structure—ominously closed—there were cracks. I believed when I was a child (or I now believe I believed) that if one had a magnifying glass powerful enough, one could look through the cracks and see the Minotaur in the terrible center of the labyrinth.

My other nightmare is that of the mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. I remember seeing, in the house of Dora de Alvear in the Begrano district, a circular room whose walls and doors were mirrored, so that whoever entered the room found himself at the center of a truly infinite labyrinth.

The House of Asterion was inspired by George F. Watts 1885 painting, The Minotaur.

The lonely gazes out to sea, heedless of the bird crushed beneath his paw. Borges saw in the painting a loneliness that sparked pity for the minotaur, even as it also depicts his casual brutality.

I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps misanthropy, and perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which I shall exact punishment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) (footnote: The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. . . he will also find a house like no other on the face of this earth. (There are those who declare there is a similar one in Egypt, but they lie.) Even my detractors admit there is not one single piece of furniture in the house. Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?

Of course, Asterion’s home is the labyrinth, a place so convoluted that even Daedalus could scarely find his way out.

Sometimes I run like a charging ram through the halls of stone until I tumble dizzily to ground; sometimes I crouch in the shadow of a wellhead or at a corner in one of the corridors and pretend I am being hunted. There are rooftops from which I can hurl myself until I am bloody .... But of all the games, the one I like best is pretending that there is another Asterion. I pretend that he has come to visit me, and I show him around the house. With great obeisance I say to him "Now we shall return to the first intersection" or "Now we shall come out into another courtyard" Or "I knew you would like the drain" or "Now you will see a pool that was filled with sand" or "You will soon see how the cellar branches out". Sometimes I make a mistake and the two of us laugh heartily.

The house is as big as the world—or rather, it is the world. Nevertheless, by making my way through every single courtyard with its wellhead and every single dusty gallery of gray stone, I have come out into the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea.

That sight, I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen (an infinite number of) seas and temples. Everything exists many times, fourteen times, but there are two things in the world that apparently exist but once—on high, the intricate sun, and below, Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this huge house, and no longer remember it.

Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come. Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?

Can you believe it, Ariadne?' said Theseus. 'The Minotaur scarcely defended itself.'

Contemporary Bulgarian author. , one of the most translated contemporary Bulgarian writers. His first novel, Natural Novel was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2005 and was praised by the New Yorker, New York Times, and several other prestigious review outlets. A collection of his short stories, And Other Stories was published by Northwestern University Press. The Physics of Sorrow is his second novel.

Georgi Gospodinov 1968—

The unnamed narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s inventive, ambitious novel The Physics of Sorrow suffers from “pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome,” most acutely in his childhood. “Over the years the attacks became easier to control and lost their most acute manifestations, without disappearing entirely. Just as in empathy . . . we never know where the person wanders when he is in such a fit.”

As the novel opens, the narrator has wandered into a memory of his Grandfather’s—he becomes his Grandfather at a fair in a small Bulgarian town in the mid-1920’s, being ushered into a tent to encounter a Minotaur. The myth of the Minotaur, concealed within a labyrinth until he is killed by Theseus, is a guiding theme in the novel, as is the myth of Scheherazade, who told other people’s stories to keep herself alive.—from The Literary Review online.

The Physics of Sorrow has many endings (as it has many beginnings) because both Gospodinov and his narrator have made it clear that they like to leave stories open for other possible turns (like a labyrinth). The favorite of my endings finds Theseus encountering the Minotaur and protesting that he has no desire to kill it. “Someone forced me into this story,” he explains, and together they leave the labyrinth. “I see them,” the narrator tells us, “walking along together . . . weaving parallel labyrinths from the threads of their stories, themselves entangled in them. And nothing can ever separate them again, the storyteller and his killer.”—from The Literary Review

The Yellow House

There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Oooooohhhh . . . That endless Ooooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening. . .

The porter more or less had to be there, but he was probably dozing drunk . . . That saved the howler, who would have otherwise undergo the traditional ice-cold shower under the garden hose. It was said that they sprayed them with water directly in their rooms (“cells” is the more precise term) through the bars of the window . . .

I walked around that house on that Sunday evening, the gloomy corridors of that howl sucking me in even deeper. I was afraid to enter it. Whatever was inside was not fit for the human eye and ear. But my body continued to move mechanically in a circle, I sensed that I was beginning to slip away from myself. Just a bit more and I’ll enter the corridors of the scream, I’ll embed myself in the body of the screamer.

Just then a hand grabs me firmly by the shoulder; started, I return to myself like a snail withdrawing into its shell. My father.

Ten years later, when I came down with that constant ringing in my ear, I knew that that howling-bellowing-crying thing was settled in there for good. In the very center, in the cave of the skull, from there to the tympanic membrane, the hammer and theanvil, in the very labyrinth of the inner ear, as the doctors put it.

Side Corridor: {digression on the perils and benefits of reading}

The tendency toward empathy is strongest between the ages of seven and twelve. The most recent research is focused on the so-called mirror neurons, localized in the anterior portion of the insular cortex (insula). To put it simply, they react in a similar fashion when a person feels pain, sorrow, or happiness, or when one observes these emotions in another person. Some animals also experience empathy. The connection between shared emotional experiences and mirror neurons has not been well studied; experiments are in the works. Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms. —The Journal of Community and Cortex

My Brother the Minotaur {artwork by George Micalef}

The narrator speculates:

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn't O000h, but M0000. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I'd already seen one such boy in my grandfather's hidden memory.) The human doctor hadn't been able to do anything for the human, so they had decided to treat the bull. Of course, they called the best (and only, incidentally) veterinarian in town: my father. There was another, darker version of the story, also fine-tuned at length during those lonely childhood afternoons. That half-humanhalf-bull boy was not just anybody, but my "stillborn brother," whom I'd heard them whispering about. Actually, he'd been born alive, but with a bull's head and they'd put him in the home. They had abandoned him. With the best of intentions. So he wouldn't disturb his healthy brother.

I was born to my own father and mother, but that doesn’t make me any less of a minotaur. I continued spending long days alone, at the window, paging through a book.

Bronze sculpture by Beth Carter

H.P. L o v e c r a f t 1890–1937

Born a nd lived his life in Providence, Rhode Island, with a stint in New York. He had an overprotective mother, and he inherited money from his maternal grandfather that let him live simply a nd focus on his writing a nd voluminous correspondence. Married for two years to an older woman , Sonia Greene. A night owl, Lovecraft rarely went out after dark.

Lovecraft ach ieved fame posthumously. During his lifetime he published in pulp fiction publications, but he never ach ieved any critical or widespread recognit ion or respect. However, highly sensitive to rejection, he frequently didn’t try very hard to get his work published.

He wrote around 100,000 letters to various correspondents.

H o w d o w e classify H.P. L o v e c r a f t ? Horror? We i rd F ic t ion? S c i e n c e Fict ion? Fantasy?

In a cosmos w i thout abso lute va lues . . . there is only o n e a n c h o r o f fixity . . . , a n d tha t a n c h o r is tradit ion, the p o t e n t emot iona l l e g a c y b e q u e a t h e d to us b y the massed exper i ence o f our ancestors , indiv idua l or nat iona l , b io log ica l or cultural . Tradit ion m e a n s noth ing cosmica l ly , b u t it m e a n s everyth ing loca l ly a n d p ragmat i ca l l y b e c a u s e w e h a v e n ot h in g else t o shield us f rom a d e vas t a t i n g sense o f “lostness” in endless t im e a n d s p a c e .

—H. P. Lovecraft , Se lec ted Letters

Hey There Cthulu

Common Themes in Lovecra f t :

Folklore a n d tradit ion

Forb idden k n o w l e d g e

Inher i ted gui lt a n d fa te

(Human ) civi l ization under threat

Rac ia lpur ity/monstrosity o f hybr idity

Dangers o f scientif ic k n o w l e d g e

Juxtaposit ion/l ink b e t w e e n m a g i c a n d sc ience

Rel ig ion a n d hosti le n o n - h u m a n deit ies

N e w Eng land a n d c osm ic settings

Lovecra f t i an themes in th i s s to ry :

Forb idden k n o w l e d g e

(Human ) civi l ization under threat

Dangers o f scientif ic k n o w l e d g e

Juxtaposit ion/l ink b e t w e e n m a g i c a n d sc ience

Rel ig ion a n d hosti le n o n - h u m a n deit ies

Curiously, like other late Lovecraftian stories, this story subverts his earlier handing of themes. For instance, are the aliens really hostile . . . ? Is it actually human civilization that is under threat?

Lovecraft wrote this story with a young friend, Kenneth Sterling, at Sterling’s suggestion. Kenneth had basically knocked on Lovecraft’s door, introduced himself, and proposed that they become friends. Lovecraft agreed, and he also rewrote Sterling’s original draft of the story. As you can see, it was published in Weird Tales—although it is arguably much less weird than many of Lovecraft’s stories, and more purely “science fiction” than many.

Sterling went on to become a very prominent doctor and researcher in his field.

One of the intriguing references early in the story, before the labyrinth, is when the narrator checks his watch after encountering a narcotic Venusian plant and notes that it is only 4:20—from his perception, far more time had elapsed.

4:20, as you might know, is the international ”time” or code for smoking pot. It could well be that the group of California students who originated this slang term were influenced by Lovecraft’s story.

In the Lovecraft story, the plant is a danger; “tripping” on Venus could prove fatal.

Narratively speaking, what is the purpose of these early incidents and observations in the story? Arguably, there are two mazes in Eryx: the first one is the psychological fog caused by the mirage plant:

I realised all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms; heading away from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly—regardless of what might seem to swirl around me—until safely out of the plant’s effective radius. Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have consumed little

There must be a great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those damnable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just as foolish for coming to Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for grovelling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or for keeping that great mass on a pedestal in their temple. I wish they’d get a new religion, for they have no use for the crystals except to pray to. Barring theology, they would let us take all we want—and even if they learned to tap them for power there’d be more than enough for their planet and the earth besides. I for one am tired of passing up the main deposits and merely seeking separate crystals out of jungle river-beds.

The Mission: get the crystals

The dirty little place was impenetrably black except in one spot, where he perceived an unusual glow of light. Approaching this, he discovered it to be the crystal egg, which was standing on the corner of the counter towards the window. A thin ray smote through a crack in the shutters, impinged upon the object, and seemed as it were to fill its entire interior. . . He approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had determined his choice of a calling. He was surprised to find the light not steady, but writhing within the substance of the egg, as though that object was a hollow sphere of some luminous vapour.

Possible Influence: H.G. Wells’s The Crystal Egg

Ancient Eryx, a prosperous Elymian and Carthaginian city, boasted a well-known temple to a Phoenician fertility goddess, Astarte (later identified with Venus and worshipped by the Romans). The original settlement was probably founded by the Elymian people of western Sicily.

According to legend, the town was named after Eryx, the son of Aphrodite and Brutes the Argonaut, who died after a boxing match with Hercules and was buried at that location. The Aeneid places Eryx as the location of a temple to Venus/Aphrodite founded and constructed by Aenaes and his group during their stop in Sicily. The area is also supposedly the burial location of Anchises.

Greed or enthusiasm leads to a lack of caution. Although he sees his dead colleague, he assumes that he himself will make it to the center and back out again. That assessment proves to be fatally flawed.

Who or what is Theseus, the Minotaur, and Ariadne in this story?