Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  In fact, the settings of the twenty-one Conan tales vary from an Arabian Nights vision of the Middle East in “The Slithering Shadow” to an Arthurian romance-style picture of knights “in richly wrought plate armor, colored plumes waving above their burnished sallets.” One of Howard’s main themes is the corrupting and debilitating effect of civilization. There is no serious attempt to describe any social structure, beyond the power of various kings, counts, high priests, and wizards: Conan’s world is mythical and psychological rather than political.

  There are several aspects of that frequently violent psychology that are troubling to a modern reader. For example, the theories of eugenics and racial purity, which were popular at the time, echo throughout Howard’s imagined history. Conan himself, in disguise in a sleazy thieves’ kitchen, is described as having “broad, heavy shoulders, [a] massive chest, lean waist, and heavy arms. His skin was brown from outland suns, his eyes blue and smoldering; a shock of tousled black hair crowned his broad forehead.” For all the black hair, the mighty swordsman and man of action would not have been out of place as one of Hitler’s Übermenschen.

  Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

  —“The Phoenix on the Sword”

  Women play a supporting role in many of the stories, generally wearing clothes that coyly do little to conceal their “sleek limbs and ivory breasts,” and occasionally whipped until they scream and writhe. Conan himself, generally a silent and terrifying man of action, occasionally grumbles like a 1930s old man about how long they take beautifying themselves.

  Howard’s own life was short and very ordinary. As a boy, in and around the town of Cross Plains, Texas, he idolized his sick and ailing mother and immersed himself in comics and pulp fiction. He was chronically shy and melancholy by disposition, and poured out reams of fiction and poetry through his adolescence, before his first story was accepted when he was eighteen. He lived with his parents all his life, although by the time he was twenty-five, his short stories were bringing him a growing reputation. Conan enjoyed spectacular success.

  In 1936, however, his mother fell into a coma caused by her tuberculosis, and her nurse said she was unlikely to recover. Howard walked out to his car and shot himself in the head, dying a day before her. Conan, however, has survived not just in Howard’s stories but also in comic books, television programs, video games, and films. Many of them bear little resemblance to Howard’s original creation, but the “noble savage” idea of a barbarian standing alone against the corruption of civilization, continues to exert a powerful attraction.

  VLADIMIR BARTOL

  ALAMUT (1938)

  A story set in the mystical world of an eleventh-century cult leader serves as an allegory of Mussolini’s twentieth-century fascist state.

  Vladimir Bartol (1903–67), the Slovenian writer and intellectual who died in Ljubljana with most of his work out of print, could easily have slipped away without making a lasting mark in his own field—let alone in one yet to be invented. Instead, his novel Alamut is arguably the most internationally popular work ever to come out of Slovenia and is the inspiration for the video-game series, Assassin’s Creed.

  At first glance, the subject matter of Alamut appears as unlikely for Bartol as its twenty-first-century spin-off. First published in 1938 (although not translated into English until 2004), the novel is set in an eleventh-century Persian fortress, where sectarian leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, or Sayyiduna, has devised an ingenious and disturbing strategy for incentivizing his troops (or “fedayeen”) to fight to the death: recreating paradise on earth.

  Writing about such a challenging and alien subject required Bartol to prepare extensively. His inspiration for the tale is found in The Travels of Marco Polo (c.1300), which includes a story about a powerful Persian warlord who uses hashish and a secret garden of women to fool young men into thinking he has the power to transport them to paradise and back, and he spent ten years researching and structuring his book. He then retreated for nine months to the mountain town of Kamnik to write it, while the Anschluss proceeded just thirty miles away and Mussolini’s Fascists persecuted the Slovenian population of his birthplace, Trieste.

  The result is a rich and engrossing evocation of a terrifying world. In Sayyiduna’s hands, the remote mountain fort of Alamut becomes a crucible in which to conduct “an experiment in altering human nature” based on the motto that underpins his brand of Ismailism (a religious sect with roots in Islam): “Nothing is an absolute reality; everything is permitted.” As his enemies advance to lay siege to his stronghold, the dangerously charismatic despot delves deeper into the desires and psychology of the youths under his control, steeling them to display fearlessness in the face of inevitable defeat.

  Bartol’s greatest achievement is that he makes Alamut almost as alluring as it is sinister. Seen through the eyes of two newcomers, young harem recruit Halima and prospective fighter ibn Tahir, the fort is a place of mystery and delight, where misgivings flower into fear and disillusionment. Wandering Alamut’s passages and secret places with Halima and ibn Tahir, peeling back layer after layer of Sayyiduna’s horrific vision, we are at once charmed and appalled. As with the best action-packed computer games, the book makes us feel we are unable to look away even as we gasp.

  Unsurprisingly, the world of Alamut is often read as an allegory for the evils of Fascism. The parallels with real-world events don’t stop there, however: subsequent generations have found that many experiences resonate in its pages, among them life under Josip Broz Tito’s oppressive regime in Yugoslavia and the events of the Balkan war. Many twenty-first-century readers also see reflections of the radicalization of young jihadis in the novel.

  Yet the eclecticism of the story’s resonances and applications serve as a reminder that what Bartol criticizes is not a particular ideology but the human readiness to believe and follow compelling leaders unquestioningly. As Sayyiduna himself explains, the key to his power lies in his realization that “people wanted fairy tales and fabrications and they were fond of the blindness they blundered through.” Knowing this enables him to control and manipulate his subjects as deftly as avatars in the virtual gaming worlds that were invented decades after Bartol committed this mesmerizing and terrible world to the page.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS (1941)

  A short story incorporating many of Borges’s philosophical preoccupations, which details the creation of an alternate world and its infiltration of our own.

  “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary,” writes Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) in the brief prologue to Ficciones, the 1941 volume of short stories that begins with “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Characteristically, Borges’s self-deprecation masks considerable ambition: “Tlön” proposes just such a commentary, but the essayistic, even academic, veneer of the story distracts readers while Borges constructs the most extraordinarily compact of literary wonderlands. “Tlön” is a scant twenty pages that remake the world.

  Borges turned to fiction only shortly before his fortieth birthday, to affirm his mental faculties in the wake of a head injury. With “Tlön,” his second story after the accident, Borges manages to blend the “epic destiny” he yearned for, on the model of the many military heroes among his forebears, with the bookishness and frailty that marked him from earliest youth. In a long autobiographical reminiscence published in The New Yorker in 1970, Borges observes that, “if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.” One way to understand “Tlön” is as a singularly successful attempt to make a library into an event.

  From the start, the story blurs the lines between the literary and the literal
, the figurative and real-life figures. It is dotted with the names of Borges’s contemporaries, scaffolded on his ability to reference obscure philosophical tomes with breezy assurance—and free with its attribution of made-up quotations to both. Borges describes himself dining with his frequent collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, who recalls a statement made by a heresiarch of Uqbar: “mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.” Intrigued, Borges asks for his source; Bioy points him toward the Anglo-American Cyclopedia, a “literal but delinquent” reprint of the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica. Borges’s edition makes no mention of Uqbar, but Bioy’s own copy includes four pages on Uqbar tucked into the end of Volume XLVI. The article is vague on Uqbar’s whereabouts, and largely uninspiring, but piques Borges’s interest with its observation that Uqbar’s literature uniformly shuns realism in favor of fantasy and takes place entirely within the imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön.

  Most of the remainder of the story elaborates on the fantastic, aided by Borges’s discovery two years later of an entire volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. It is “something to be reckoned with,” Borges writes, not “a brief description of a false country,” but “a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments.” Not only the philosophical disputes, but all the rest of Tlön too, depends on Berkeleyan idealism, which holds that the physical universe does not exist other than as a projection of our minds.

  Under the guise of encyclopedic pedantry, Borges plays out numerous implications of such a stance—impugning ideas of causality and of time itself, subordinating all scientific disciplines to psychology, teasing out the scandalous “doctrine of materialism,” and, most tellingly, exploring several visions of literature that might emerge from this conceptual confluence. All books are treated as the work of one “timeless and anonymous” author, pieces of fiction contain every permutation of a single plot, poetry eschews nominatives in favor of massive agglomerations of adjectives or verbs. “There are famous poems,” Borges notes, “made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer.” At length, Borges reveals that “centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality” in Tlön, that real objects, too, may be produced by desire or expectation. Lost items have long been rediscovered by more than one person at once; archaeologists have arrived at the methodical production of ancient artifacts, rendering the past “no less malleable or obedient than the future.”

  This unexpectedly concrete development sets up the story’s final pivots: from past to future, from fantasy to reality, and from poetry to prose and back again. In time, Borges learns that Bishop Berkeley himself took part in an early-seventeenth-century secret society dedicated to inventing an imaginary country. The work demands generations, and two centuries later gains the financial backing of a pugilistic American atheist millionaire who bequeaths the society his fortune on the condition that it accord itself to American audacity and create an entire planet. Members receive the complete forty-volume First Encyclopedia of Tlön in 1914. Then, Borges writes, “about 1942, events began to speed up”—the fabulist qualities of the literature of an imaginary country itself situated in the literature of an imaginary country start to impinge on the real.

  Borges dates the bulk of his story to 1940, reflecting the actual moment of its composition, but he appends a postscript fictitiously dated 1947, narrating Tlön’s conquest of the realist precincts he has carefully woven through the rest of the tale. The specific contours of this wonderland then become more clear: that it will not lie quiescent down a rabbit-hole or over a rainbow, and that “literary” is not in this case a contingent modifier but an absolutely essential one. This is a wonderland predicated on poiesis—the origin of our word “poetry”—in its root sense in Greek: to make. Just as Tlön’s poets fashion “poetic objects” out of enormous compound words, so too does Tlön finally insinuate its brand of poetry into the prosaic precincts of our own world. Borges is present when a compass encircled by Tlönian lettering emerges from a French packing crate in Buenos Aires, and again some months later when a dead man in rural Uruguay turns out to be in possession of a small but impossibly heavy cone made of a metal that “does not exist in this world”—an “image of divinity in certain religions of Tlön.”

  And then the world submits to Tlön, at first in decidedly literary terms: “manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized reprints, and pirated editions of the Master Work of Man poured and continue to pour out into the world.” Its languages and its “harmonious history” supplant ours, its “transparent tigers” and “towers of blood” fill the popular magazines and “captivate” humanity. Borges likens this overwhelming embrace of the “minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet” to the widespread appeal enjoyed by “any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism”—in the 1930s. We can read the quiet resignation of the Borges character at the close, then, working on a Spanish translation of Sir Thomas Browne he does not hope to publish, as a counterpoint to the more aggressive stance taken by Borges as author, protesting the conquests being made by actual totalitarian states even as he was writing. But we should remember, on the other hand, that Borges was indoctrinated in philosophical idealism at his father’s knee and always remained fascinated by it, that many of Tlön’s outré literary practices reflect conceits animating Borges’s writing all along the decades. It seems no accident, then, that his narrated self is immediately caught up by Bioy Casares’ initial maxim, with its fusion of appearance (mirrors) and reality (copulation), or that a veritable paroxysm of delight attends his initial discovery of a volume of the Encyclopedia. If “Tlön” implicitly critiques real-world imperialism, it celebrates a more literary imperiousness with considerable fervor.

  Within the story but also beyond it, Borges makes poetic sensibility and conviction into an engine for real-world change, both narrating and subtly effecting a shift from the Enlightenment project of the Encyclopedists—to distill and record the whole of human knowledge—to the yet more radical undertaking of writing the world afresh.

  AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT

  ISLANDIA (1942)

  The story of the adventures of John Lang, a Harvard graduate who secures the position of first American consul to the utopian territory of Islandia. Rich in detail and brilliantly conceived, Wright’s creation of the Karain continent is rivaled only by Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

  Despite receiving little critical attention, Austin Tappan Wright’s (1883–1931) Islandia, published posthumously, has become a cult classic and was praised by Ursula K. Le Guin for being the only utopian work that directly addressed the issues of Westernization and “progress.”

  The novel takes place in the first years of the twentieth century when imperialism was at its peak; the maps that accompany the text—designed by Wright’s geographer brother John Kirtland Wright—show Islandia as bordered by a German protectorate as well as French and British colonies. The novel is unusually detailed in its topographical descriptions. John Lang first learns of the territory through an Islandian friend at Harvard and, after learning the local language, his uncle—a prosperous businessman who sees Islandia as a potential market for American goods—negotiates him a position in the consulate. Lang’s arrival dramatizes the main issue of the novel: whether Islandia should open its doors to overseas trade or preserve its independence on the edge of empire. As spelled out explicitly, the country’s predicament resembles that of Japan in the 1850s, which suggests Islandian independence will not last long.

  Islandia appeals to Lang for being rather old-fashioned and only lightly industrialized. His travels, mostly on horseback or by boat, around the country, are l
eisurely paced in contrast to the tempo of American life. In the first half, Lang is gradually learning Islandian society and an essential first step is to process his perceptions of the landscape. On approaching a farm: “the narrow road was rutted in places and with grassy patches, not in regular ridges as at home where wheeled traffic is so much, but in patches here and there, soft under the horses’ feet. And quite unexpectedly we came upon three of the Islandian gray deer, with their short antlers and round bodies and long colt-like legs.” The reader is encouraged to pay attention to small differences from America and we are constantly invited to infer the better quality of life lying behind his descriptions.

  Islandian society still possesses feudal elements, yet it displays greater gender equality than Lang is used to. He is initially impressed by the peaceful appearance of the country and also by the simplicity of dress worn by the locals. The latter greatly reduces social ritual and eases Lang’s encounters with the new society. The most striking event comes when the Islandian council debates a proposal to open the country to foreign trade. Two parties have formed, the more utopian one resisting this incursion of external values, while the other camp insists that they move with the times. The council vote goes against change. This does not mean that change per se is blocked because, of course, Lang’s own narrative can be read as an example of external influence.

  Lang’s account is divided into three phases, each revolving around a romance, but in every case the romance plot is used as a medium for cultural debate and comparison. Initially he sets his sights on the sister of a Harvard friend but that fails when she admits to the pull of family obligations. Lang’s second love is for a weaver, who consummates their relationship but argues against marriage. At that point Lang returns to America, which he sees through estranged eyes, and he finally persuades an American woman to travel with him to Islandia, marry, and set up a household there. Virtually the last words of the novel are when Lang declares to his wife “we are Islandians,” but this conclusion only comes after many heated arguments over the attractions of Islandian culture.