Cordwainerian machines are rather baroque. Just think of the “drama cubes” from which emerge tiny holograms that recite Hamlet or King Lear, or the Leonardo-like ornithopters that fly through the air flapping their wings like seagulls. No less original are the manikin-mee, the puppet that allow Lord Sto Odin to control his declining health; the mustachioed robots in a renovated Parisian cafe; or that “old robot, dressed in a prehistoric tuxedo jacket” that waits on Rod MacBan in a restaurant.
There are even odder details, like a menu for cats25, a recipe for hens26, or the use of live oysters in space technology.27 In Olympia the clouds are square28 and numbered29, while in Norstrilia insects are so scarce they are registered.
Some landscapes are practically surrealist, like the infinite plane of Shayol, which is dominated by a foot-shaped mountain, or the perennial storms of Henriada, reminiscent of the images in Bosch. Sometimes, as in “On the Sand Planet”, a certain abuse of symbolism seems to give way to parody.30
The grotesque solemnity of rituals, however, has a functional purpose. These include the tribunal that interrogates Norstrilian youth, the trials in “Drunkboat” and “D’joan”, the jury that sentences Mercer, and especially the assembly of the Scanners.
When circumstances are leaning heavily toward melodrama, humor serves as a counterweight. Thus, when Casher O’Neill is ready to fight against John Joy Tree, his most pressing desire is to run to the toilet. Rod MacBan, who rules the world but is disguised as a cat, must seek out a sandbox to relieve himself.
References
Arthur Burns thought that all the stories of Cordwainer Smith were oblique commentaries on contemporary politics and society.31 He taught Frederik Pohl how to decipher some of them,
“but only the easiest ones.” The story of Casher O’Neill, for example, alludes to the politics of the Middle East (in the margin Linebarger wrote the names of the Egyptian and Lebanese leaders that were sources of inspiration).32
Indeed, Casher O’Neill’s planet is the Egypt of the fifties. Mizzer (Misr, Mizraim are names for Egypt) is the “planet of the Twelve Niles” and its capital is Kaheer (Cairo). It features pyramids and minarets, and its inhabitants have Arab names such as Ali Ali. Casher himself goes by the name Bindaoud (bin Daoud means “son of David” in Arabic).
The name “Casher O’Neill” is more complex, even if in the text it seems to be derived from the slang for money (“cash”). O’Neill sounds like O’Nile, “of the Nile”. It would seem that nothing is more apt for an adventurer than an Irish name, yet might Casher also be a reference to kosher Jewish food?
The key seems to be in Quasr El Nil, the name of a central street in Cairo, but the discovery lies in the very fact of the name being invested with so many different meanings.
The old dictator of Mizzer is named Kuraf, an anagram of Faruk, the Egyptian king toppled in 1952 by Naguib and Nasser, here referred to as Gibna and Wedder. Wedder (Nasser) ends up in power, just like in Egypt.
The inspiration for the story of Mizzer is the Egyptian revolution of 1952, an uprising “of coronels” later imitated by the Greeks and Turks. In those years, the left idealized young coronels as being progressive and modernizing.
At the Bandung Conference, the birthplace of the Non-Aligned Movement (Tiers Monde), Nasser proposed a policy of neutrality to distance himself from the superpowers. The indecision of the United States in its treatment of these regimes (the so-called “Eisenhower doctrine”) only served to underscore the outmoded monarchies of the region. Linebarger had been advising Eisenhower ever since the presidential campaign and took part in those operations in Egypt. Perhaps his fiction contained a kind of self-criticism.
Overthrown by General Naguib and Coronel Nasser, Faruk abdicated in favor of his son Ahmed Fuad. Months later, Fuad (a possible source of Casher O’Neill) was ousted and the republic was declared. Taking refuge on the Riviera, Fuad became a citizen of Monaco. In Cordwainer’s fiction, Kuraf “had gone off to Sunvale, on Ttiollé, the resort planet, to live out his years between the casino and the beach.”33
Sunvale and Ttiollé could be Beausoleil and Utelle, which are located on the outskirts of Nice. Similarly, the “most potent narcotic in the universe, condamine,”34 owes its name to La Condamine, which is part of the principality of Monaco. Or could it be to the Charles Marie de la Condamine who explored Brazil?
In “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons,” Sunvale is the setting for a case of espionage: the death of the thief Bozart. The story might be an allusion to the pilot Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets in 1960, thwarting the Four Powers Summit sponsored by De Gaulle.
Other clues are more explicit. Beauregard mansion, the oasis where T’ruth lives, is in the Gulf of Esperanza, between Ambiloxi and Mottile. Ambiloxi suggests a city in the Deep South of the United States, an area prone to tornadoes. The trees lining the road are covered in Spanish moss. Beauregard mansion seems like a luxurious and stately antebellum manse, with its neo-classical facade and palm trees in the yard.
The entire region is on the Gulf of Mexico. Mottile is Mobile (Alabama) and Ambiloxi Biloxi (Mississippi). As a boy, Linebarger had been in Biloxi during a hurricane.
Family names are also scattered throughout Linebarger’s fiction. Genevieve (his wife) appears in the “On the Gem Planet”. Two girls, Marcia and Veesey, appear in “Think Blue, Count Two”. In regard to Veesey, it is said, “any normal adult of either sex could and would accept her as a daughter after a few minutes of relationship.”35 Marcia Christine and Johanna Lesley were Linebarger’s daughters. Moreover, a Lady of the Instrumentality is named Johanna. Wentworth, a character in Norstrilia, bears the name of Linebarger’s father and younger brother.
Omnipresent are the Vomacts, whose lineage dates back to the 20th century. From the first Lady Vomact36 descends “a great family of Scanners”37, to which the deacon38 belongs. Another Vomact was set to travel to the Knot in Time instead of Tasco Magnon.39
The Vomacts are strange people. Terza Vomact is “a complicated girl.”40 Some are cruel and callous, such as the Dr. Vomact who runs the prison colony on Shayol. A Vomact directs the clinic where Artyr Rambo is admitted after the cruel experiment in “Drunkboat”. An example of an evil Vomact is the Alsatian, Maximilien Macht, who takes Paul and Virginia down Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.
Yet other Vomacts are depicted as benevolent. They are loners, uprooted and degraded, like the psychologist Jeanjaques Vomact who helps Rod MacBan on Mars and his cousin the doctor who cures him on Earth.
These incidental clues add color to the stories, allowing us to appreciate allegories that at times seem almost accidental.
It bears asking what other motive, aside from entertainment, might explain so many cryptograms? Perhaps it suggests a certain pact with reality, far removed from the fantasy of science fiction: a kind of conjectural literature.
“Cordwainer Smith” defies the limits of conventional science fiction. He is practically its swan song as a genre, inaugurating to a certain extent the post-modern rapprochement between fantasy and reality.
This process ultimately closes a wider circle, one that emerged with modern fantastic narrative. When Romanticism made the fantastic sacred, it sought to fill the gap between Western man and nature, alienated from each other as a result of rationalism and experimental science.
Once science demystified nature, folk tales lost their charm: mystery had fled from the world, never to return again. Fantastic literature, which becomes meaningful in light of this disillusionment, emerged at this time.
The fantastic tale posits the existence of a rational order, only to violate it. Its greatest attraction lies precisely in proposing “the rupture of universal coherence.”41
Lovecraft was still somewhere between writing fantastic literature and science fiction at a time when the former had already assumed canonic
al form. The fantastic, the irruption of the irrational in the logical world, was justified in Lovecraft through a “materialist”, though not necessarily scientific, explanation.
The “scientific-marvelous” took hold with science fiction, a genre that exploited all of its possibilities. Conceits such as “hyperspace” permitted reconciling the supernatural of the fantastic tale with a pseudo-scientific explanation.
Sputnik marked the end of this era, as the conventions marked out by Gernsback and Campbell came face to face with reality. Science fiction was forced to confront the scientific reality it had sought to anticipate and that had now actually been realized. Satellites, computers and organ transplanting catapulted science fiction, until then self-sufficient, into the realm of daily life.
After that, the modus operandi did not revolve around ephemeral scientific innovation but the poetic transfiguration of reality, capable of embodying the spirit of utopia. It is this “speculative fiction”, or conjectural literature, to which the work of Cordwainer Smith belongs.
1 Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970).
2 Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati (1964).
3 Burns (1973)
4 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
5 Miesel (1973)
6 Todorov, T., op. cit. pg. 109
7 Adiabatic demagnetization is a procedure for freezing bodies at very low temperatures. It is the equivalent of “cryonic suspension”.
8 “Under Old Earth”
9 The Underpeople, chapter 1, (not included in Norstrilia).
10 “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”
11 “Golden the Ship Was —Oh! Oh! Oh!”
12 “On the Sand Planet”
13 Appears in “Drunkboat” and “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-all”
14 “Think Blue, Count Two”
15 “The Ballad of Lost C’mell”
16 An allusion to Tristes Tropiques by Lévi-Strauss?
17 The Underpeople, chapter 1, (not included in Norstrilia).
18 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
19 Demuth (1967)
20 See “Chanson de la plus haute tour”: High birds crying, and a/ High sky flying and a/ High wind driving, and a/ High hearth striving and a.. (Norstrilia, chapter. A High Sky Flying.) Or the poetic prose of “Drunkboat”. I’m the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man. . . I’m the most man, the post man, the host man, the ghost man, the coast man. . . I’m the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man. . .
21 The beat and the heat and the neat repeat.../ The churn and the burn and the hot return.../ The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge. . . (“Under Old Earth”)
Elaine, Elaine, whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain…. (“The Dead Lady of Clown Town”). Note the quote “Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lilymaid of Astolat” from Idylls of the King by Tennyson.
22 Huizinga´s influence is apparent in a passage from the story “On the Gem Planet” in which Casher O’Neill tries to explain to the Hereditary Dictator what a horse and horses are. “But,” Philip Vincent the Hereditary Dictator said, “an illogical situation arises! Once you have made these four-toed beings run, they know how fast each one can go. And so why should you worry? (“On the Gem Planet”).
“The Sha of Persia, on a visit to England, courteously refused to attend a horse race because he already knew that one horse runs faster than another.” (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1938).
23 Foyster-Burns (1973)
24 Burns (1973)
25 Norstrilia, chap. “The Road to the Catmaster”
26 “Three to a Given Star”
27 “Scanners Live in Vain”
28 “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”
29 “On the Gem Planet”
30 Sladek, John, “One Damned Thing After Another-A Cordwainer’s Myth”, in The Steam-driven Boy and Other Strangers; St. Albans, Panther Books, 1973, p. 181.
31 Burns (1973)
32 Pohl (1978)
33 “On the Gem Planet”
34 Mentioned in “Drunkboat”, “A Planet Named Shayol” and Norstrilia.
35 “Think Blue, Count Two”
36 “Scanners Live in Vain”
37 “When the People Fell”
38 “Scanners Live in Vain”
39 “Himself on Anachron”
40 “When It Rained People”
41 Caillois, Roger Imágenes, imágenes. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1970, p. 11.
[1] T.N. “I didn’t know… today and tomorrow.”
A COMPLEX MAN
A COMPLEX MAN
The seed of wheat is planted in dark, moist earth;
The seed of man in dark, moist flesh.
The seed of wheat fights upward to air, sun and space;
The stalk, leaves, blossom and grain flourish
under the open glare of heaven.
The seed of man grows in the salty private ocean of the womb,
the sea-darkness remembered by the bodies of the race.
The harvest of wheat is collected by the hands of men;
The harvest of men is collected by the tenderness of eternity
—Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia
The clues we have collected thus far give us an idea of the galaxy of influences that influenced the development of “Cordwainer Smith”.
A fertile and perhaps not fully integrated personality thus begins to emerge. His widow believed he was “the only true genius I ever met”, while his eldest daughter always remembered him as an “extremely complex” man.
One of his most striking features was the habit of talking about himself in the third person.1 In a piece of writing from his youth, he was already presenting three different Pauls: an observer, an observed, and a protagonist.3
These disassociations as well as his fondness for pseudonyms suggest a certain identity conflict, one quite foreseeable in his case. After all, it would be difficult to find a personality that had been exposed to such a diversity of cultural influences.
Linebarger studied in China, Germany and the USA, spent a good part of his life in the Far East, travelled throughout the world, and also lived for a time in Australia. According to Burns, these experiences helped him relate to people from different cultures and accept the most exotic customs in a natural way.
In some of his characters, such as Carola, Ria or Rod MacBan, it is easy to pinpoint autobiographical elements. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, the only story he wrote in the first person, one of the main characters is named Paul. He also seems to be talking about himself in “Under Old Earth” when referring ironically to “the mad cat-minstrel c’paul”. Linebarger was a poet, had gone “mad”, and loved cats.
Nor can we fail to point out some issues linked to gender. Cordwainer Smith often chooses female figures (D’joan, Elaine, C’mell, T’ruth, D’alma, Liana), assigning them important and, at times, even central roles.
The novels Ria and Carola are both written in the first person. Their main characters are two women insecure about their identity and sexuality. Ria lived in Germany, where Linebarger had studied, and Carola in China, where Paul had spent his childhood.
Another ambiguous situation emerges in Norstrilia. When Eleanor, Rod MacBan’s servant, stands in for her master in order to confuse his enemies, surgeons make her physically resemble Rod. Her personality also undergoes a transformation, and she becomes a kind of androgynous Tiresias, lacking a definite identity.
Androgyny, here viewed as a neutral condition, is depicted in other texts as something aberrant. It will suffice to consider the reference to androgynous humanoids3 and the threat Suzdal faces. Aracosia, Suzdal’
s world, was a world of transvestites that “lacked the fundamentals in the human personality itself, the balance of male and female, the family, the operations of love, of hope, of reproduction.”4
Smith’s first readers were already privy to this ambiguity. In his female characters, Burns thought Linebarger evidenced certain ambivalence in his unconscious5, one that oddly combined masculine and feminine characteristics in a single identity. The female component, with its tenderness toward all living things, found expression in the works by Forrest and Smith as a kind of compensation for the “masculine” aspects that dominated the writings of Professor Linebarger.
The Stranger
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, on July 11, 1913. His family was living in Asia, but his father wanted to Paul to be born in the United States. According to family legend, this was so that one day he could run for president.
His father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, was a lawyer from Chicago who had fought in Cuba. As compensation for his military service, President McKinley appointed him district judge of the Philippines when he was only thirty years old.
Deeply affected by the story of a Chinese servant who had been mutilated and tortured by Manchu oppressors in his homeland, Judge Linebarger approached Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan, 1866-1925) and took up his cause. In 1907, he renounced his magistracy and went to work as the legal advisor to Sun and his Chinese Revolutionary League.
Barely six years earlier, British, French and North American forces had crushed the Boxer Rebellion. Behind the Yi Ho Tuan (the so-called Boxers) was the Triad, a secret society fighting to restore the Ming dynasty. The sect had links to Western masonry, which also backed Sun Yat-sen.
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