The Sword and Laser discussion

I don't really know about Keats, but I wanted to post the topic first. :) Keats fits largely in the book, not only because of the title. There's some other poetry in there as well by The Poet.

I read a little of Keats' Hyperion last weekend on the train. Seems like a pretty serviceable essay on depression, to me.

Keats is an interesting fit because he's the most self-referential of the Romantic period poets...arguably, the most self-referential of any poet up to Wallace Stevens. Whereas his contemporaries in the second-generation of Romantics, Shelley and Byron, were mostly concerned with (a) politics and (b) getting into young ladies' pants, they left it up to Keats to write poem after poem about poetry itself.

Keats' best-known poem is his Ode on a Grecian Urn...for bonus intertextuality points, see how many Great Novels have ripped their titles from its lines. The final contention in that poem, that "Truth" and "Beauty" are the same thing, is idealistic, evocative, and frustrating as heck to critics because it's impossible to parse without an external referent. What the heck does it mean? How does one identify the "beautiful" in order to find what's "true?"

That post was beautiful and true.

I will say that Keats is my least favorite of the Romantic poets - and considering how badly I think of Wordsworth, that's saying quite a bit. Keats' obsession with perfection is always at odds with his belief that perfection is impossible, since no matter what you accomplish, the mind can always come up with something to top it.

That's why his 'Grecian Urn' is such a relevant example here: the whole conceit is that the characters on the urn are caught mid-action...the young lovers are *just about to* kiss, the priests are *just about to* consumate the ceremony...and because we never see the actual event, just these figures frozen in the moment before, our minds can fill in the lacunae much more effectively than the artist ever could.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter..."

That's one reason I'm kind of interested in treating Simmons' Hyperion as a fragment. We hear the characters' backstories, see them leading up to their moment of crisis and then...

...our minds fill in the blanks.

P. Aaron wrote: "That's why his 'Grecian Urn' is such a relevant example here: the whole conceit is that the characters on the urn are caught mid-action...the young lovers are *just about to* kiss, the priests are *just about to* consumate the ceremony...and because we never see the actual event, just these figures frozen in the moment before, our minds can fill in the lacunae much more effectively than the artist ever could."

"Lacuna" is a pretty interesting choice of word. I'd have gone with "Void." ;)

Lacuna is lit.-theory jargon, common to narratology, but it's the appropriate term here. A void is simply an absence. A lacuna is a 'gap'. The difference is that in the case lacunae, there is material surrounding the textual 'gap' which gestures towards an interpretation.

P. Aaron wrote: "Lacuna is lit.-theory jargon, common to narratology, but it's the appropriate term here. A void is simply an absence. A lacuna is a 'gap'. The difference is that in the case lacunae, there is ma..."

Just read the rest of the book!

If I didn't know better, Aaron, I'd say we discovered a reason for the book ending where it does that is more ingenious than I could have imagined.

Except he did write the second half.

Ah well.

We are living in the wonderful world of distributed authorial presence: all readers are co-creators of meaning along with the 'author'. Simmons wrote a second half, but I choose not to read it (Didn't like Hyperion well enough to invest the time). Thus, as far as I'm concerned, the characters remain suspended in time, like Keats' urn figures. In some ways, Keats laments the ways in which stories always end, but in another, figures in text are eternally in the present tense. If you re-read the story at a later time, the characters are still there, living out their same struggles, over and over, for your amusement.

P. Aaron wrote: "We are living in the wonderful world of distributed authorial presence: all readers are co-creators of meaning along with the 'author'."

"I am Dan Simmons, weaver of aeons, auteur amongst animals, and you, you disgusting wretch, you deluded fool, you have no say in my masterpiece! You are a worm, transfixed by a tapestry infinitely greater than you could comprehend. You think you have read a book, a novel? No! You have but glimpsed the face of God!"

That's not an actual Dan Simmons quote—he's much less deferential in real life—but I think it would sum up his reaction to your co-creator theory. I'd pay cash-money to see someone expound your idea in his forums! :)

Happily, if I found him worth my time. I don't.
If Simmons wishes to remain ignorant of Barthes and Saussure, and cling to the completely debunked 'hypodermic' model of information transfer theory, it's his right to be self-deluding. It's also his right to wonder forever why people don't necessarily get the same thing out of his novels as his authorial intention meant for them. Huh. Must be faulty telepathic wiring or something.


No, I think I'll stick with Keats' take on the subject, which is parallel to Sam Johnson's in Rasselas: the job of the author, when describing a flower, is to evoke a general sense of 'flowerness,' sufficient to awaken the reader's own memories of flowers...the moment the author becomes too specific, or too insistent on meaning a particular flower of the author's intent, the reader can no longer empathize with the text, and is lost forever.

I'd say it's unfair to judge Simmons' take on Keats and relevant matters of philosophy and style of artistic expression without reading the rest of the books. Philosophical theme continues with more clarity and focus in Ilium & Olympos, trading Keats for Homer & Shakespeare. I especially like it how it's even explained plausibly with scientific theories.
Wants my fantastic fiction believable ^^