Adam Erlich Sachs' THE ORGANS OF SENSE

It was well known at that time that meteorological conditions in Prague were usually connected to conditions in the Emperor's mind, a phenomenon that certain churchmen as well as the vulgar attributed to the action of demons flitting in and out of the emperor's head, which evidently they could, on this theory, enter at will - "anything of course can be explained by recourse to a head entering demon."

While the title and stunningly odd cover art of Adam Erlich Sachs' stunningly odd The Organs of Sense suggest that this weird little novel will chiefly concern itself with how we apprehend the world directly, the text is occupied with a very different but related matter: how most of what we say we "know' about the world actually comes at many removes from such direct apprehension. 

Told as an encounter between a young Gottfried Leibniz (he of the monads and the famous dispute with Isaac Newton over which of them could claim to have invented calculus*) and an elderly, blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense never lets the reader forget the chain of custody through which the facts and ideas being discussed are coming to us. We are constantly reminded, for instance, that our knowledge of what happened in this encounter and what was said comes to us via later writings of Leibniz.** And very, very often, we are also reminded how various anecdotes the astronomer shares with Leibniz reached the astronomer, as when he relates a story in which the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II punked his art agent over how dumb it was for that agent to hold forth for an absurd length of time over the various technical and art historical qualities of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, Water, without having once mentioning fish. I mean... Look.

Anyway, the astronomer originally heard the story from Emperor Rudolf's Court Chamberlain, who presumably had to oversee clean-up efforts after Rudolf convinced his art agent that he was facing severe punishment for being a phony and a blowhard and the art agent wet himself. 

So yes, there are some amusing moments in this otherwise very serious book. 

But why has Leibniz traveled out of his way, right after being denied his doctorate for his first learned publication, to meet an unnamed blind astronomer in his remote mountain observatory? 

Because not only does this astronomer claim to have invented the telescope (a feat usually credited, in a prefiguring of Leibniz' future in the calculus dispute, to someone more famous) and has in fact built the longest one then in existence, but he also claims that doing so led directly to the loss of his eyes (he is not only blind but has empty hollows where his eyes were, but, as we soon learn, his tear ducts are still intact and functional); and not only has he invented and built the greatest of telescopes but lost his eyes, but he also claims he can still see through said telescope***, and that in doing so he, alone in all the world, has predicted a total solar eclipse for the very day and location on which and to which Leibniz has made his scientific pilgrimage. 

Leibniz wants to be there to see whether or not the old guy is right.

And meantime, they have a few hours to kill. During which the astronomer relates his story to Leibniz and makes a frequent show of putting an empty eye socket to the viewfinder of his telescope, "looking" for a moment, and then jotting something down with a quill. He is adding to his catalog of stars, which he is determined will be longer than anybody's.

Of course I thought of this scene from what is perhaps my very favorite movie of all time, Peter Greenaway's**** Drowning by Numbers:

Will the eclipse actually happen? Will we find out how the astronomer still "sees?" Will we get to find out what he's been writing down? Will his dad ever realize his dream of being re-appointed the Imperial Sculptor?

Speaking of the astronomer's dad, fans of a fictional trope that's turning up a lot in late 20th and early 21st century fantasy fiction makes an appearance of sorts here: that of an actual, physical city that is a tangible representation of a human creator's memory palace. I'm speaking mostly of Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City and of Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft and maybe also Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog and Ludluda. Is that enough to call it a trend or a trope? I feel like Christopher Priest and Susanna Clarke may have played with it, too. At any rate, the Vienna of Emperor Maximilian's day, the astronomer insists to us via Liebniz, via Liebniz' translator, was a physical representation of the mind of the astronomer's father, who had designed most of its facades and buildings and sculptures during his time as Imperial Sculptor to Maximilian. Who was later fired by Rudolf when Rudolf dumped all of Maximilian's functionaries and moved to imperial court from gold and marble Vienna to "black-spired" Prague.

And it is in Prague that the astronomer, or so he tells Leibniz, who tells us via his unknown translator, loses his eyes and loses credit for inventing the telescope and loses his dignity to become, well, the punchline of a shaggy dog story, the point of which really seems to be that "learning math is important, actually."

To the point where I almost think that conveying this is, actually, the point of this novel, for all that it mostly consists of amusing scenes of Hapsburg court politics and pseudoscience and discovery and madness, feigned and un-.

By the way, this is also very much an alternate history in addition to its other attributes: the Rudolph II of The Organs of Sense seems much the same as our historical Hapsburg, but book-Rudolph  had fewer children with his mistress and gave them different names, though the Prince Heinrich of the novel shares the outlines if not the details of the real eldest son's, Julius', main claim to fame, as a murderer. Heinrich comes to relate this story in considerable and exhausting detail to the astronomer while the astronomer is disguised as a priest come to hear Heinrich's confession, adding yet another layer of indirect storytelling to the text. 

Which Sachs' continues to emphasize, so at least once we are reminded that one of the princesses told something to Heinrich, who told the disguised astronomer, who years later told Liebniz while they awaited an eclipse that may or may not happen, who relayed the tale as part of a journal article, which a translator then rendered into English, from which Sachs derived the story he is telling us. 

Got that?

*A significant factor in the vast and convoluted plots of Neal Stephenson's incredible trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, a perennial favorite for re-reads, chez moi.

**And yes, adding still further to the chain of custody through which this story has passed, our actual narrator for this overall account is the unnamed translator of this fictional account of this fictional event in the life of the very real Leibniz.

***Yes, of course I'm thinking of how Paul Atriedes can still "see" in Dune Messiah. This astronomer's "vision," too, may be "oracular."

****Duh!

100 Books #124 - Joseph Roth's THE RADETZKY MARCH

"A word, a word so easily spoken; it is not spoken."

I am developing a minor obsession with the literature of the 19th and early 20th century Hapsburg Empire, and I can't quite put my finger on why, or how it started, unless it was when I read about Robert Musil in Philip Ball's amazing Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Ball's interest was in Musil's unfinished two-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, and its depiction of a mathematician's dispassion for the world, which doesn't sound terribly promising on the face of it, does it? But it's quite an engaging read nonetheless, and one that I look forward to re-reading again soon; I'm a Robert Musil fan (see also my look last year at Musil's first novel, The Confusions of Young Torless, from last year), loving his way of examining moral and social paralysis and its consequences, as well as how his German prose becomes English.

The (delightfully!) occasionally ornithological Radetzky March* both does and not partake these qualities (or, I guess, lack of qualities) as it details the misadventures of three generations of the Trotta family: a grandfather ennobled as a reward for sort of blunderingly saving Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's life in battle, a son whom the new Baron forces into a civil service instead of a military career**, and a grandson who takes up the family's military mantle again, only to very nearly disgrace it.

But this makes it sound like The Radetzky March is a book in which things happen, and really, it's not. It's more a book in which things are felt and perceived, and what is perceived is mostly that the Empire is in a period of stasis and stagnation, a period in which the gloss of civilization is polished to a blinding brightness, the better to conceal the turmoil it hides, the turmoil of an empire that purports to bind a staggering variety of cultures, religions and ethnicities into one people*** but really hasn't, except in that all those different peoples are temporarily too busy buffing and polishing (under some duress) to get on with the business of being themselves and hating each other. But don't worry, they'll get around to it. Boy, will they get around to it.

But even that makes it sound like stuff is happening. Which is erroneous. I mean, these people don't even eat:

"The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food -- its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay."

And:

"He was sorry that Trotta had missed the schnitzel. He would have gladly chewed a second one for the lieutenant -- or at least watched it being eaten with gusto."

Nor do they ever really seem to talk to each other, especially not the Trottas. Especially not the youngest Trotta, who is constantly struggling over whether or not to utter even the most banal pleasantry: "Carl Joseph almost replied reverently 'Good evening, Herr Doctor!' But all he said was 'May I?' and sat down."

And things get worse when young Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta (the grandson), posted to a border village whose chief employer is a bristle factory, suddenly faces his duty as a soldier to put down an insurrection at said factory. He insists to a colleague that he "simply won't order the men to shoot!" because he now realizes that the factory workers are "poor devils" but another tells him "You'll do what you have to, you know you will." And what he has to do right away is get drunk... And do things improve from there?

"Immense files swelled around the Trotta case, and the files grew, and every department in every agency splattered a little more ink on them, the way one waters flowers, to make them grow."

So, uh, not so much, then.

And then there's the dreary love affair and whatnot (in general, women are not well-regarded in Radetzky March, but what are you gonna do? This is a story about a young man raised motherless by, apparently, a motherless son of a military hero, said son spending most of the novel either in military school or in the military. Sausage fests everywhere). Sigh.

But so then why bother to read this stuff at all, you might ask? Because it's good. As a masterful evocation of the spiritual paralysis of an entire society, as a look at the consequences of too much civilization as something that does not require robot butlers and flying cars to happen, as a vivid portrait of the twilight years of Emperor Franz Joseph (who had "lived long enough to know that it is foolish to tell the truth.") and the Hapsburg Empire just before the outbreak of World War I****, and, yes, as an exquisite piece of writing for its own sake -- as all of these things, The Radetzky March is a very, very good book.

*The book's title comes from a piece of music by Johann Strauss, Sr., which a military band plays outside of the grandfather's house every Sunday to salute their local hero. It's a nifty, stirring tune if you care to enjoy:



As for my characterization of Radetzky March as occasionally ornithological, dude, it is loaded with references to birds, from a servant's caged canary to the different birds singing outdoors in every season in Austria and the empire -- a very charming touch. Seriously. More birds than anything I've read this year that wasn't by Michael Chabon. Birds signal changes in scene and setting and sometimes provide the strongest of dramatic counterpoints (hello, wild geese and Russian ravens!). This is wonderful!

**The grandfather's insistence that the son have any career but military stems from a misunderstanding regarding a children's history book that presents a tarted up version of how the grandfather saved the Emperor's life, to which the grandfather takes great but ultimately ineffectual umbrage in one of the more bitterly humorous sections of the novel.

***All in the service of allowing the Hapsburgs, once Holy Roman Emperors and lords over most of Europe in one form or another, to feel like they still had an Empire and were still a relevant power in world affairs, big terrifying inbred jaws and all (though yes, I'll admit to having been a little sad when they finally had to cut down the Sisipalm in 2008).

Oh, and check out the people, as seen through the eyes of a somewhat minor character, Count Chojnicki:

"The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers and fashion photographers."

So, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was basically the Golgafrincham B Ark, then?

****Weirdly, it was only when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was communicated (very dramatically) that it hit home for me that the events of this novel were taking place in the 20th century. The book otherwise feels so timeless, so universal, that a particular historical event's depiction, even second-hand as happens here, is really jarring, but not in a bad way. Just a wow way.