THE ART OF DREAMING: THE NOVELS OF JACK DANN
Andres Vaccari reviews Dann’s most recent three novels: The Man Who Melted (1984), The Memory Cathedral (1995) and The Silent (1998)
Although Jack Dann has been internationally renowned as an editor and science fiction author for quite some time, The Memory Cathedral marks the commencement of a new period in his career. Subtitled A Secret History of Leonardo DaVinci, the book is a fictional life of the great artist and inventor, on whom little biographical information is available.
From historical evidence, we know that DaVinci was an accomplished military inventor, engineer and student of military strategy, and that after his expulsion from Florence he travelled to the Middle East. In Dann’s version of events, The Devatdar of Syria employs DaVinci as a military engineer to work for the Caliph in the war against the Turks. DaVinci builds a successful flying machine and witnesses the use of his inventions for the purpose of unimaginable slaughter. Conjured out of exhaustive research and a vivid narrative style, Dann’s fictional world (his Florence, his descriptions of distant desert wars) is a form of dream: history as science fiction. Part political thriller, part imaginary biography, The Memory Cathedral creates a sensuous world that evokes all of the rich colors of the perceptual spectrum: the visuals, the sounds, the smells, the despair and joy and lust, from the baroque flux of Florence’s streets to the sanguinary din of war. The effect is spellbinding, yet Dann’s technique is simple, relying on exuberant enumeration and juxtaposition to create the hypnotic momentum of the narrative. Thus the text also becomes a cathedral of sorts, arranged spatially, sometimes following an embroiled and enigmatic logic.
The recurrent image of the novel is a mnemonic device through which DaVinci orders and makes sense of his own life. Each facet has a room, guarded at the door by different characters who come to play key roles in DaVinci’s development as an artist and human being. More than scientist and inventor, Leonardo is portrayed primarily as a sensualist, an ardent lover whose fate is dictated by the intensity of his attachments: first to Ginevra de’Benci, then to Simoneta Vespucci, A’isheh and Niccolo Machiavelli. Often, in DaVinci’s mind, these people become confused. In the climax of love, Simonetta becomes Medusa and Ginevra. Sometimes, the reality of events seems to recede before the depth of DaVinci’s longing. As he lies exhausted and feverish, he is visited by past lovers, and his dreams become the only real thing.
So deep is DaVinci’s love and the extent of his loss that he pays no heed to the moral implications of his inventions. Until a memorable scene in which, as he walks
“… through the carnage in the wake of his machines, through the body parts and flapping wings of broken tents, his feet squelching in the blood and gore that fertilised the parched ground, he tried to pray, to call God to attention.
“But he knew there would be no reply, for just now, he was God.
“What he beheld was his own, the product of his thought.
“Lacrimae Christi.�
There are striking continuities between The Memory Cathedral and the rest of Dann’s work. Underlying all of Jack Dann’s fiction is a preoccupation with the visionary experience. His novels abound with dreams, memory, spirits, visions and hallucinations. The narratives observe the structure of a hero’s journey and his awakening to knowledge, usually following a life-shattering experience: DaVinci’s escape from Florence and the murder of his beloved Ginevra; the killing of Mundy’s parents and the destruction of his home in The Silent; the Great Scream in The Man Who Melted. There is also an element of solipsism, inasmuch as the circumstances of the protagonist take on a universal character, and are extrapolated into vast situations, into insidious wars with no discernible sides.
Although the plots of these three novels are fairly linear, the events succeed each other according to a highly subjective and imaginary logic, often distorted by extreme emotional circumstances, exhaustion, fever, distress or, in the case of The Man Who Melted, hallucinogens and mind-enhancing machines. Dann is skillful at compelling the reader to suspend disbelief and be lured into the often strange reasoning behind the events. Mundy, the narrator of The Silent, for example, insistently compares his experience to a dream, and comes to inhabit a universe ordered around a hybrid of shamanism, superstitious Christianity and Negro spirituality. The fact that the novel is narrated from the point of view of a young boy makes the fantastic events seem natural, a result of a child’s overactive imagination, or possibly the deeper sensibility we suspect all children have. In The Memory Cathedral, the matrix of the story is provided by the scientific beliefs of the Renaissance, including the central metaphor that gives the book its name.
It is obvious that Dann is interested in alternate world-views and rarefied ontologies, something that must have attracted him—at least in the initial stage of his career--to science fiction, where the conventions allow more liberty of movement.
In The Man Who Melted, the world-view of schizophrenia and drug-induced states furnishes the novel with its cosmology, a world where nightmare and reality have become undistinguishable.
The story goes like this: Raymond Mantle, a painter and “newsfax technician�, is looking for his wife Josiane, who has disappeared during the initial surge of an uncanny psychic disease known as the Great Scream. A group of people (known as Screamers) has spontaneously become a channel for telepathic visions that irrupt into reality and trigger savage attacks of collective destruction: “Their scream was like the ariara; it was the rhythm of fire and transcendence and death…� During the attacks, the visions become embodied and the minds of the affected descend into “infinite psychic space, all the dark spaces surrounding dreams, the countries of the dead.�
Josiane has not only disappeared from Mantle’s life, but also taken his memories with her. She is a missing piece of himself, literally torn away from him. All he has is 3D videos and a room that is an exact replica of hers as she left it before joining the Scream. During his search in Europe, Mantle meets Carl Pfeiffer, a figure from his past, and Joan, who later becomes a double of Josiane, a passage to her. Then he comes in contact with a Screamer church and plugs into the mind of a Screamer at the moment of death, hoping to see if Josiane is at the other side. Gradually, Mantle begins to frequent the “dark places� and to experience visitations and journeys, and the events of the narrative become disjointed and hallucinatory. A great part of the narrative takes place in a psychic limbo where the individual mind meets the murmur of collective dreaming. The narrator enters a place that is not the “outside of his senses where he could verbalize a thought, see a face, but in the dark, prehistoric places where he dreamed, conceptualized, where he floated in and out of memory, where the eyeless creatures of his soul dwelled.�
Mantle, Pfeiffer and Joan form a promiscuous love triangle. They swim in and out of each other’s minds, join and meet in the great dark. Sometimes, in the midst of this orgiastic merging, their solidity becomes doubtful, as if, like Josiane, all of them were projections, or splintered reflections, of the narrator. Mantle himself is a spectral figure defined mainly by his loss, a projection without an original, the dream of a forgotten other.
The Silent is set in the American Civil War. After the narrator witnesses the murder of his parents and the burning of his home, he escapes into the forest where he first meets a spirit dog, which later appears sporadically throughout the narrative. The purpose of this spirit guide is often obscure, but it seems to keep watch over Mundy. Mundy believes he is a spirit himself, and that he can become invisible at will, although the reader is not presented with enough evidence of this, and the issue remains tantalizingly ambiguous. A series of disjointed adventures follow, including brief stints in the army and meeting with various historical and imaginary characters, some of them, like the Negro servant Jimmadasin, also “spirits� that only Mundy can see.
The experience has plunged Mundy into an altered, truer order of being. He is engaged on a kind of mystical quest, although the aim is not clear, since most of the time Mundy is just trying to survive. Nonetheless, Mundy’s new status allows him to discern the cosmic hierarchy of the world, where there exist various levels between the spiritual and the terrestrial. The novel ends in a rather despairing note, making it clear that the realms of the terrestrial and the spiritual are irreconcilable. Again, Dann mixes historical fact with wild fancy, and his reconstruction of the period is flawless and exhaustive in its detail. Mundy’s voice is convincing, childish yet open to visionary and literary flights. The construction of this voice must have been a challenging task, since Dann has married a recognizable Southern voice with the feeling of hallucinatory flux familiar to readers of The Memory Cathedral.
There is an amazing proliferation of dead bodies, violent death and mutilation in Dann’s fiction. Both DaVinci and Mundy walk through fields of corpses, where human flesh, mud and blood mingle to form a gruesome landscape. In The Memory Cathedral war is the place where DaVinci’s sensuality meets its dark side. Both war and love are a meeting and commingling of bodies. But before his incursion into the Far East, the character of Simonetta--with her worsening chest condition and her incandescent beauty—comes to embody a similar struggle, the yin-yang of love and death.
Both DaVinci (the character) and Dann are fascinated with the notion of embodiment. Indeed, a recurrent theme in Dann’s fiction is the passage of souls between bodies and in and out of bodies, and between realms. In The Man Who Melted the “great dark� is described as a shapeless underworld of pure and unbridled psychic force where transmigration and direct communication between minds can be achieved at will. Repeatedly, in The Memory Cathedral, DaVinci wonders where the point of contact is between the flesh and the soul. According to the beliefs of the time, this point can be found in the eyes, the “mirrors of the soul.� DaVinci vivisects visual organs and wonders if the preponderant ideas about vision (namely, the theory that the eye produces rays, rather than reflecting or absorbing light) are correct. When DaVinci discovers Ginevra’s murderers busy over her corpse, he kills them and crushes their eyeballs into a gooey paste to close off their souls’ possible entry into the world. Echoing this motif, in The Silent, Mundy is captivated by the sight of a dead Negro woman with pennies over her eyes. Later, as they bury Dixie, Colonel Ashby’s child companion, Mundy wonders if his spirit will come out of his eyes:
“… and I kept my own eyes peeled for Dixie’s spirit to come out of hiding and watch the proceedings… Now, maybe that’s why the niggers had put those pennies on top of Sweet Grandy’s eyes: to keep her spirit from getting out and just walking around wherever it felt like.�
So, we can see that the themes of war, embodiment, spirits and love are interrelated, and can be seen as parts of a greater theme. Dann’s fascination with the dead body is distant, and at times clinical and grotesque. Yet his numerous descriptions of war display a kind of subdued moral outrage, as if the author himself is trying to make sense of the events he describes and to come to terms with the seemingly bottomless human capacity for destruction. In some passages this morbid appetite is portrayed with a surreal and pungent intensity: for example, when rotting bodies are dragged out of their graves and displayed through the streets of Florence, or when Mundy encounters a pile of severed legs and arms.
But Dann’s aim is not to impart a moral message or impose a clear world structure in his imaginary universes. Although he exhibits an interest in mysticism and alternative world-views, Dann does not concern himself with traditional metaphysical enigmas, with the existence of God, the prevalence of universal justice, or the ‘other world’. The journey the characters undertake is intensely personal, yet inhabited with the nightmares of humanity, mainly the senselessness of murder and war. Dann’s novels are a kind of questioning, a voyage into abysses of memory and dream. It is as if war (with its ambiguous or downright bankrupt morality) provides a microcosmic allegory of society, and the challenge of the human being in this subverted landscape is to find his or her own bearings, a sense of self, of right and wrong. Both narrator and reader emerge at the other side with a heightened awareness of the state of human affairs, yet also inspired by the power of the mind to invoke cathedrals and spirits, to generate its own worlds and stare unflinchingly into light and blinding darkness. At the end of the journey comes an acceptance of loss as an irremediable fact of human life.
Andres Vaccari
posted by Andres Vaccari @ 2:32 PM