Nemonymous
Grimscribe
IN THE SHADOW OF ANOTHER WORLD
On one level, a post-Lovecraftian vision of Bulwer-Lytton's 'The House and the Brain' or Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' or Poe's various houses. About a haunting and an exorcism with spiritual crises and kaleidoscopes of colours to spice the weird plot, dense and textured with dark theosophies, and in many ways, for me, delightfully inaccessible, like the building of this book itself. Inaccessible, but something does permeate the reader involuntarily.
Like the earlier J.P.Drapeau work, this presents another version of the philosophical core of the whole book, the book as this House of Spare, transposed as the structure of all our body parts as a single body-gestalt with the metaphor of optically stained-glass apertures looking in and looking out, originally spare or antiseptic inside, a "spiritual wasteland", with the apertures shuttered before birth, with an unknown outside, an outside eventually bearing in on the post-birth self, a birth, as if forged by the shape of the house's turreted erection. A "ceremonious desecration", the only defence mechanism becoming the act of showmanship, the trumped-up histrionics of some tout of mystical freak shows - to use words trumped-up by myself from the text. A "marriage of insanity and metaphysics." Ultimately a self "bare and abandoned", as it once began with birth's antiseptic hopes, hopes now dashed.
There is a paragraph in this story (including six extra lines at the end of it which were not included in this paragraph by the Robinson text of the story in 1991*), a paragraph that now straddles pages 372 and 373 of the Penguin Classics book. I feel it is significant to the phenomenon that is the inferred author, whatever today's value of my own views as represented by this my own quickfire and instinctive real-time analysis of these pure texts day by day in accordance with my own obsessive sense of the Intentional Fallacy in literature, texts re-read by myself since first reading them in 1989 and 1991 (inasmuch as the texts are assumed to be largely unchanged).
And I also feel this paragraph is significant whatever the perceived value of the author's own such "esoteric analysis" (in the sense of that phrase as used in this paragraph), an analysis of possibly misremembered intentions upon proofreading (and editing, subtracting from or adding to) the text of this new book.
The past is its own shadow of another world here today, but presumably a longer, more tenuous shadow. A shoddy shadow, or as the above specific paragraph has it, a 'sacred' one?
*this is the only time so far that I have studiously compared the two texts at length.
On one level, a post-Lovecraftian vision of Bulwer-Lytton's 'The House and the Brain' or Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' or Poe's various houses. About a haunting and an exorcism with spiritual crises and kaleidoscopes of colours to spice the weird plot, dense and textured with dark theosophies, and in many ways, for me, delightfully inaccessible, like the building of this book itself. Inaccessible, but something does permeate the reader involuntarily.
Like the earlier J.P.Drapeau work, this presents another version of the philosophical core of the whole book, the book as this House of Spare, transposed as the structure of all our body parts as a single body-gestalt with the metaphor of optically stained-glass apertures looking in and looking out, originally spare or antiseptic inside, a "spiritual wasteland", with the apertures shuttered before birth, with an unknown outside, an outside eventually bearing in on the post-birth self, a birth, as if forged by the shape of the house's turreted erection. A "ceremonious desecration", the only defence mechanism becoming the act of showmanship, the trumped-up histrionics of some tout of mystical freak shows - to use words trumped-up by myself from the text. A "marriage of insanity and metaphysics." Ultimately a self "bare and abandoned", as it once began with birth's antiseptic hopes, hopes now dashed.
There is a paragraph in this story (including six extra lines at the end of it which were not included in this paragraph by the Robinson text of the story in 1991*), a paragraph that now straddles pages 372 and 373 of the Penguin Classics book. I feel it is significant to the phenomenon that is the inferred author, whatever today's value of my own views as represented by this my own quickfire and instinctive real-time analysis of these pure texts day by day in accordance with my own obsessive sense of the Intentional Fallacy in literature, texts re-read by myself since first reading them in 1989 and 1991 (inasmuch as the texts are assumed to be largely unchanged).
And I also feel this paragraph is significant whatever the perceived value of the author's own such "esoteric analysis" (in the sense of that phrase as used in this paragraph), an analysis of possibly misremembered intentions upon proofreading (and editing, subtracting from or adding to) the text of this new book.
The past is its own shadow of another world here today, but presumably a longer, more tenuous shadow. A shoddy shadow, or as the above specific paragraph has it, a 'sacred' one?
*this is the only time so far that I have studiously compared the two texts at length.
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