SPLATTERISM: THE DISQUIETING RECOLLECTIONS OF A MINOTAUR ASSAILANT (AN UPBUILDING EDIFYING DISCOURSE)
by
CHRISTIAN WINTER
Translated by
C. S. Hand
Copyright © 2014 Christopher Scott Hand
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.
Other Books in the Splatterism Series
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant (An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse) is the second book in the Splatterism series. If you are new to the series, you’ll most likely get the gist of the events in this tome, but I suggest you to read the novella first: Splatterism: The Tragic Recollections of a Minotaur Assailaint (An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse). It is brief, wonderful, complex, and bittersweet, like the first love potion mixed by a young tyro in the alchemical sciences.
In blissful remembrance of Hegesias, the beautiful peisithanatos, who first educated man on smelling out of the flowers of infinity while still wearing the sandals of finality.
“There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind.”
Plato, Timaeus
“All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears. Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.”
Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
Historical Introduction: “A Book Written from the Peak of the Soul”
“I have, as of late, been glisterning with the twinkle of the old bards and at such a height, have written a book from the peak of my soul.” Christian Winter goes on in a later letter, in a particularly electric passage, to describe Splatterism as “a coruscanting work of youth, written in lightning and starlight.” Any modern reader must keep this sentiment in mind while reading this text (if that is what one does with a work like this), “written to the wildest beats of my heart.”
An earlier journal entry provides further insight into just what Christian Winter hoped to achieve with the style of his new fantasy novel. “I want to write in a writing that exceeds all that has come before it—it is beautiful like starlight after midnight and lawless like summer lightning.” He then adds that this book is “young and causeless and primordial—like our earth upon first waking from its starry sleep—and not yet ensnared by the teleology of this stretching universe.”
This desire for a radical or primordial newness suffuses all of his books, and set him on a course of rebellion against everything old and hallowed in our world, starting with one of its most famous institutions: Oxford University.
Against Authority
The chronicle of Christian Winter’s rebellious school days while rich and entertaining is not within the ken of this preface. Suffice it to say he wanted what all youth wants: to be free. And since there were many rules and established traditions at an ancient school, there were many opportunities to rebel against them. But there were other even more hallowed authorities the young poet was beginning to doubt.
Possessing a daring and questioning intellect, the desire for liberty instantly set him against any notion of mastery or authority—even his own. In the notebooks he kept while studying literature at Oxford, we find a hastily jotted entry adumbrating a list of “foes” that must be “overcome by overwrought youth through blood and cannon smoke, four tyrants we hate like adders and hiss at”: “The Nation, The Bank, The Self,” and the authority of “Ignorance itself as such” which “always must be fought and which perhaps will always have the upper hand on the cursed 5th generation of mankind, born, as we are, with no heroes, no gods, no hopes, and grey hairs adorning our temples at birth and a garland of misery interwoven into these hoary locks.”
The struggle to overthrow the first two foes “The Nation” and “The Bank,” are perhaps quite familiar to anyone who has ever decided to read a book or listen to their English or Philosophy professor for a little while. The struggle to free oneself of—one’s self—is perhaps a little more inscrutable, though we can catch what Christian Winter might have been trying to achieve if we examine his writing self, or self-in-writing: his style.
The two dominant traits of Winter’s style are long, unrestrained, maenadic moments of lyricism contrasted with tightly orchestrated moments of wit. One implies radical freedom, the other radical control. Considered together they suggest a fractured self seemingly unable to control which appears when and little care for the consequences. It is a self without authority.
Indeed, there are numerous passages throughout Splatterism where the lyricism is so potent and primordial we must wonder whether something golden and divine grew in Winter’s humid heart. However, other times the wit and skepticism is so frigorific and caustic we must wonder if the hand of someone else was present during the composition.
And perhaps there was.
Anticipating much of the theoretical work that would be undertaken by postmodernists, Winter wryly writes “this is not an authoritative tale. Indeed there have been many hands in it. Spare me ‘authors’ and ‘masters’ (especially of the Oxonian variety) but do lend me a hand to smite at all authority.”
Some of the other hands were other Europeans who had come before him. The burning pen of radicalism from the hand of nearly every iconoclastic writer or thinker from Greece, Italy, France, England, and Germany is seared into the heading of each chapter and—to those who know where to look—their maxims are utilized throughout the novel as well, with little mercy for prevailing customs.
At the least Winter is bemusedly borrowing from these other writer’s and enlisting their hands to strike at all authority. At the most theoretical level, Winter might be suggesting: where does my consciousness end, or where does my self end and the consciousness or self of these others who have had great influence on me and my writing and thinking begin? If we cannot draw a clear boundary, then whose hand is really responsible for the writing of this text? Who is the author?
But there are also more figurative hands writing and rewriting Winter’s tale. Evander’s tale is certainly modified by Tristan. Both Evander’s tale and Tristan’s have almost certainly been modified by S. T. Undernote. Winter, in turn, has modified these and I as translator have of course had a hand in Winter’s wondrous work.
All of these hands gesture towards questions regarding authority of the most sacred type: the authority of truth. Whose story should we believe? Or should we believe any of them at all? Thus begins the torture of questioning for the reader.
A Tortuous and Torturous Narrative
One of Christian Winter’s classmates who went on to become a notable Milton scholar once remarked, “Your mind is in a Homeric fever, and yet, you Lucifer, you maze me.” This was at once a compliment and a well-thrown academic javelin. The scholiast had acknowledged how clever the plot was (“how daedale your twists”), but, unless the reader was of extraordinary care in the study of the work, he or she might simply get lost in the labyrinthine text. Such a reader would then be tortured and would not finish reading the book.
It is likely that Winter intended to torture his readers. But just how much is up for debate.
There is ample evidence to suggest that Winter was engaging in a long literary tradition of subverting the reader’s expectations. Fantasy books at the time usually offered a
linear narrative experience centering on a quick and digestible plot. Winter wanted to jostle his readers but he didn’t want to entirely alienate them from a complex narrative with deeply imagined characters in a rich, lyrical tale.
We do not have to search far to find evidence of this in Winter’s own correspondence with the future Milton scholar. “I hope they realize with some study and reflection what the minotaur is doing. That is, having been immobilized and subsequently tortured, he must learn to fight a different way, a modern way. He must learn to fight with words.”
There is also a more simple explanation that makes narrative sense.
At the opening of the story the minotaur, Evander, has been captured and cannot be said to be in a sound or stable state of mind.
He is, one might say, jumpy. And so is his narrative.
In the beginning of the minotaur’s tale, we as scrupulous readers would expect it to be the least coherent of all the books, which is true of Splatterism: The Tragic Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant. In the following installment, the minotaur would be more calm, but still very uneasy and his story would begin to take a more coherent shape. And this is also true of the aptly named second installment, Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant.
Thus, rather than a Homeric fever-dream this text should be read as an astute fitting of form and style. This feat becomes evident when one considers that the minotaur has discovered a way to torture his torturer—and anyone, including readers—seeking easy access to truths, whether they are historical or metaphysical. This becomes all the more evident when we consider Christian Winter’s philosophic background. Deeply schooled in the philosophy of Plato and Nietzsche he was of the belief that readers or students or initiates should discover things for themselves, and not be led gracefully through a set of issues to a rational and satisfying conclusion.
We might consider something else that Winter neglected to mention in any of his letters, though it is highlighted in the subtitle “An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse.”
The initial teachings are difficult, confusing, and many will elect not to continue on. But as one becomes more familiar with the reasoning and rites of a philosophic sect its teachings become easier to understand and far more rewarding. This seems to work in parallel with the direction of the entire series. The Tragic Recollections is full of dismay and is difficult to understand. The Disquieting Recollections is aptly discomfiting, but much more amenable to reading. The final installment of the series, The Ecstatic Recollections is the most digestible and entertaining of all.
Contemporary Reception for a Manifesto on the Destruction of the World
Many of Winter’s learned peers at Cherwell were struck and fascinated by the novel’s intellectual vivacity, lyrical florescence, and general strangeness. One remarked that this is “a demonic volume written with a wizard’s hand, the likes of which our school has seldom authored. What eerie revenants have you summoned through candle flame whilst I was reading my Vergil?” This surely must have pleased the young Christian Winter. Another was equally enthusiastic. “I should like to accompany you to this glowing fairy circle you visit every midnight. Does one get there down a black staircase in the Bodely?”
Just as many were concerned for his scholarly reputation. “If you had managed to finish your degree, Oxford surely would have stripped you of it.”
A professor of philosophy wrote “This is a thinly veiled manifesto for the destruction of our world. Though it is one of the most finely written and stimulating volumes I have ever read, I would admonish you to burn this manuscript and continue to study mathematics where you might make a lasting contribution to this world. Europe, especially right now, needs little encouragement to resume its spilling of blood.”
I think it is best to conclude with what Christian Winter thought of Splatterism. “This is a talisman with which one may destroy the world, or at least become a clever lyricist, which is everything a young girl loves and her old father hates.” He called Splatterism a “lullaby for nihilists” a unique lullaby that “causes one to pass out from prodigious strenuousness rather than merely succumb to Nature’s slow destruction or Culture’s corrosive conditioning. Yes, finally, this epic poses the question written in the hues of daylight across the ivory clouds that linger pensively on our epochal horizon: What, O What, will the bad do when the good become evil? And it answers—perish miserably.”
Prologue
What is known is that there was a cataclysm. What is not known is what things were like before it. Survivors, there were few, were summoned to sit for an afternoon with a few of the remaining Inquisitors, Professors, and Erudite Scribes to record their memories of what life was like, and what the world and its peoples were like, before the Cataclysm—before the spine of the world was cut. This text represents the last of those conversations, and is the last to be released to the public.
This is the official, palace recording of Serene Duelist and High Inquisitor Tristan D’Mure’s thought globe, as recovered from the empire’s Heretic Archives; its contents are highly controversial and their authenticity is hotly contested by Palace Scholars.
Erudite Scribe, S. T. Undernote
Chic Kills: Of Dragons and Champagne (Or, Of Lipgloss and Chainmail)
“Yet, till I killed a foe
And heard his groans, and heard his children’s groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth.”
Shelley
How was the first living creature killed? Was it an accident? Was it on purpose? Was it while it slept? Was it in a bowery meadow, next to a lover? Was it while its back was turned? Was it with magic? Was it with a knife? Was it with an arrow? Was it with a stone? Was it with two hands? Was it with a hatchet? Was it with the eyes? Was it because of greed? Was it because of hate? Was it because of sadness? Was it because of love? Was it from behind? Was it many against one? Was it one against another? Was it inevitable? Did it take courage? Was it quiet? Was it loud? Did it—did it feel—good?
The death shroud’s hood whipped around my face, flapping and snapping in the loud wind. I looked out off the back of the Criseida into the deep night sky as the vessel glided over swelling hills of soft clouds, and then silently across deep, tenebrous chasms.
The clouds were bigger than gods.
“There is a hole in the back of your hood,” someone said behind me. When I looked to the side, I could see September standing there, looking up at me with a strange twinkle in her eye. “I almost thought a giant, wandering ghost was dreaming on our ship, or praying to his goddess in the moonlight.”
“Would a ghost dream of the past or future?” I asked.
“I don’t know, what do you dream of?” she smiled.
“Of what may come,” I sang. “And I didn’t know ghosts had gods and goddesses.”
She shrugged. “The living do, so why not?”
“You know what I think the greatest superstition among the ghosts is?”
“No, what?” she said, leaning in curiously.
“That they’re alive.”
As she reeled away laughing, another voice spoke: “Ghosts are known for their prophecies.” I turned around as a second, pale, thick ebony haired, older and yet tremendously beautiful woman extended her hand to me. “I’m Sapphire,” she said as I shook her outreached hand. She had a nose like a fairy queen, with a small shinning stud on the left side. Behind her ear I saw a fluorescent butterfly tattoo glowing in the dark, trailed by a shower of luminous ultraviolet stars, some large, some small.
“And I’m Karamel,” a new voice behind me said. I turned back around to where September was standing, now with the other girl, Karamel, whose hair was the color of autumnal fire. “And ghosts always need so much blood for their prophecies, so I guess he hopes to un-riddle himself in strife and splatter.”
“I’ve never met a minotaur before, do they have gods and goddesses?”
“I’m sure they do, but I don’t worship them,” I said.
“Stunt says he doesn’t like to talk,” Sapphire replied, looking at me.
I shrugged and looked back out into the sky. “The world speaks and sings, and I’d rather listen to its deep, eternal rhythms than spoil it with speech. But that’s wisdom for some sweet future I suppose.”
There was some moaning and muttering between them, then Karamel exclaimed, “You’re worse than a ghost! You’re a philosopher!” And then they all started laughing.
I shook my head and grinned inwardly. “I thought they were the same thing,” I said, turning around.
“He sounds like he reads a lot,” said Karamel, biting her lip.
“September reads a lot,” said Sapphire, sidling over to Karamel and folding her arms around her fellow warrioress. “I’d say she is a philosopher.”
“Do you know of any female philosophers?” the two asked with sparkling eyes. I felt like I was being set up for something.
“I suppose the world is still waiting for one,” I said. “But I don’t read, so you would have to ask Scammander.”
“Then where did you learn to speak like an oracle?” they asked.
“Golden soil,” said September.
I chuckled. “Old proverb.” Sapphire and Karamel looked from me to September then back at me again. “There was supposed to be wisdom in our golden soil,” I said and glanced over at September.
“I used to read on campaigns,” she said with a smirk.
“A real soldier?” And I finally slipped. Two more females had arrived just in time for my error.
“Wish, Cinnamon,” Sapphire nodded to the newly arrived members as all five of them lined up across from me. “This cow doesn’t think a girl can fight,” she quipped.
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