h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Welcome to the first of a month of journals.

As usual, I will attempt to weave a few themes throughout the month. You can expect to read about my mundane life, to share my struggles with life's imponderables (like public transport), and to witness my evil desire to set impossible quizzes every now and then.

One subject I especially want to explore this time is academia.

When Douglas Adams wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I wonder if he knew the level of literary analysis and criticism he would attract.

I came across this example recently. it was published in a South African literary journal. It compares Adams' themes to Samuel Beckett's Godot, Camus' Sisyphus and the philosophy of Sartre:

It's priceless - please read it if you have a few minutes:

http://www.literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/viewFile/128/112

So, literary insight or postmodern claptrap? You decide.

I thought the article was pretty well written and enjoyed it, but I am a tyro in philosophy but as long as they don't shove mathematical notation down your throat I'm ok with it.

How thoughtful of the Pretoria researcher to provide an abstract in Afrikans. Of course, now my absured inner radio is playing the Smother Brothers' version of 'Marching to Pretoria'... Something about Peoria...

This paper was highly entertaining. What sprang unbidden to mind, however, was the following exchange:

ARTHUR:
Oh. Oh! Vogonity. Sorry. Of the poet’s compassionate soul which contrived through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into… err…

VOGON CAPTAIN:
“…counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor…” Hm-hm. Death’s too good for them.

" literary insight or postmodern claptrap? You decide."



Gosh, when you put it that way, you make claptrap sound like a bad thing...unless you mean Stephen Gyllenhaal's book of the same title [which a few of my friends actually think of as a bad thing ]

I just laugh at it because it seems funny to me.

Don't take life too serious, it ain't nohow permanent. [Walt Kelly]

[Amy P]

Oh dear sounds like one of my wife's psychology papers! God bless South African scholars, poor loves. Put the kettle on somebody please?

Heh heh nice one Icy North! I have a whole shelf full of old Literator's here. My dad having been an author and a doctor of literature, he bought them and contributed to them. I studied at the University of Pretoria! Not literature though, physics, mathematics and so forth. I studied languages and philosophy at the University of Pretoria. So anyways ... it's a funny article. I *hope* it wasn't meant to take seriously. It can be taken as a bit of absurdism in itself perhaps. The thing is ... trying to make a statement of absurdism in literature always turns absurdism back on itself, because literature fundamentally is *not* absurd. It is the opposite of existentialism. Literature is created by a creator for a purpose. Even if the purpose is to demonstrate absurdity ... in which case the purpose subverts itself. Characters in a novel can't make choices or reinvent their own essences since they do what their author wants them to do. I would like to see a character who really strikes out on its own and defies its own author, inventing its own essence entirely autonomously! The part about the machines made me laugh. Marvin criticized for being a nihilist shadow? He was written as having been made the way he was ... he was therefore (at least) two acts of creation away from any semblance of autonomy!

Anyways I'm surprised the article doesn't mention 42.

Existential literature fails utterly because it cannot be other than written by an author for a purpose. Even if we make a computer that writes completely random stuff, we still made it and made it write. Literature can never realistically or authentically reflect an absurd reality.

And h2g2 was meant to be funny.

Sorry I meant to say I studied language and philosophy at the University of South Africa.

Great post, Willem

I think you just encapsulated my discomfort with the article, although I really enjoyed reading it - particularly for its earnest argument about what are essentially books full of jokes.

Amen to that.

It reminds me of Brendan Behan's comment about 'Finnegans Wake' - read it for the jokes, he said. <winkeye

I heard that John Lennon's son came home from school one day and told his father that they had analysed a Beatles song in English class to figure out what it meant.

Lennon went and wrote "I am the Walrus" - "Let the f&*(%rs work that one out", he said.

Willem, that's the finest post I've seen in quite some time. I disagree with one of your statements, though:

"I would like to see a character who really strikes out on its own and defies its own author, inventing its own essence entirely autonomously!"

All too often an author will invent a character who sort of takes off on his [or her] own. Whatever plan the author had for the story has to be discarded because the character is now calling the shots. Once Oscar Wilde created Lady Bracknell, she ran the show from then on, with Wilde hanging on for dear life. Or how about Wagner's Brunnhilde? Siefried and his buddies were supposed to be what the Ring cycle was all about, but audiences go out of the theater thinking that Brunnhilde was the main point. Arthur Conan Doyle thought he could kill off Sherlock Holmes. Ha, ha! Did L. Frank Baum think he could move on from the Wizard of Oz?

In "At Swim Two Birds" by Flann O'Brien, there was an author Dermot Trellis who used standard characters for many of his books. This meant that he didn't have to keep introducing the characters because the readers would already know them. The standard characters lived with the author in a cheap hotel in Dublin and were totally at his mercy - he could get them do anything in the books because they were created by him. The characters hatched a plot to take control of the books from their author and to reclaim their own lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Characters_in_Search_of_an_Author

I wonder what Adams himself (staunch atheist that he was) would have thought of that article...

I wonder that too Lil!

Anyways of course I'm aware of the phenomenon of a character 'getting away' from an author, or at least seeming to do so! There are basically three ways an author can relinquish (or not have) conscious control over a character:

1) Bu writing the character in a more 'spontaneous' and less pre-planned way. In this case what comes out in the character will come out of the subconscious of the author.

2) Let outside factors such as what the readers reading the stories want, determine what the characters do. In this case, 'authorship' becomes extended, so the readers, or outside society, become co-authors. But when writing, the author is still deciding what factors to allow to influence the story. It can be done consciously or subconsciously which takes us back to point 1. Or it can (theoretically) be done completely randomly (I don't know if any author has ever done this but I can imagine how it might be done). Then we're back to the randomly generated story I mentioned before. Even such a story is brought into being by a deliberate act of creation ... and there is still *someone* deciding which parameters to influence its progression.

To be noted here is that an author never really has complete control over how audiences will *interpret* characters. This actually still falls under this point, because when writing for an audience you are automatically allowing them to be co-creators along with yourself.

3) The third way which will be very problematic indeed for existentialists, is if both the author and his/her characters are in fact creations of another author (or creator!) who has *his* or *her* own purposes for both author and characters. Then the author is not free from the outset to do what s/he wants with the characters.

I enjoyed the read, thanks, Icy. I never really get to grips with modern philosophy or Existentialism, although I think I am a believer in the absolute nothingness of everything, and therefore the absolute need to create the universe in my own image. If that's alright with the rest of you?

I did enjoy reading Camus, and also watching Becket, although I can honestly say I did not understand the basis of any of it. Perhaps that means I am an instinctive Existentialist?

The value of the article is not what light Existential philosophy throws on Hitch Hiker, but what Douglas illuminates in philosophy. Relating it to H2G2 gives me a far better understanding than I ever had.

Great 20th century philosophers? Douglas has to be right at the top. With him as a guide, you understand the utter pointlessness of it all, whilst laughing out loud.

The great divergence in theories of meaning (and in philosophy generally) is between those who expect the whole to be coherent and those who don't.

Those who expect the universe to be coherent often go on to expect that they could potentially understand the meaning of it all.

Their opponents find meaning within certain parts of the universe without expecting to find an overriding meaning in the whole.

Pythagoras taught that music exemplifies and expresses the mathematical basis of all existence, but the later Sceptics said that meaning within music, as within language, is entirely a matter of convention. In this they foreshadowed Derrida's assertion that language only refers to itself.

Philosophers have always found themselves in one of these camps or another. Idealists look for a reality behind appearances, empiricists look at the appearances themselves. William of Occam (14th c) is highly celebrated for his ban on positing entities without necessity, such as hampsters to drive the servers of h2g2. It is enough to see it working, it's foolish to guess at what makes it work.

The one philosopher who belongs in both camps is Wittgenstein A1024156 who set out as a young man to find the unifying theory behind logic and maths, but who in later life, having abandoned that quest, quoted King Lear saying "I'll teach you differences!"

As Gnomon mentioned, "At Swim Two Birds" is an excellent experiment in allowing fictional characters to assert their independence. It figures in my entry "Where Does Fiction Begin and End?" A87809124 which is surely relevant to this topic, if indeed anything is relevant to anything else.

> 42 <

F S

Just want to say I enjoyed that entry about fiction you wrote Recumbentman!