Image: Wuanita Smith, illustration from The Golden Bird and Other Stories By the Brothers Grimm, 1922
Note to the reader: This is an essay about fairy tales, video games and digital discipline. I know a great deal more about folktales than the games, concerning which I am at best a kind of hyper-Boomer who has never had a great deal of patience for them. If others would like to enlarge what we have started here to a wider range of games, so be it. If they would like to disagree with us and call us names, so be it too, but we would at very least appreciate some creative mutual interest in the folktale as a necessary part of such an engagement. As we have said before concerning the informatic Hegelian “neorationalism” of Reza Negarestani, perhaps only when the geeks “learn to codex” might we begin to get somewhere, to develop a deep understanding of exactly how deep the shit we are in really is.
This essay is thus in a sense a cousin to our 2019 essay on Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit, Averroes and the political-theology of Hegel. It is an intervention into the question of what it means to try to “think” in a world increasingly given over to the algorithmic management of human beings by speculatively returning to its origins in the repetitive, hypnotic nature of Life on this planet. If you would like to read about our theory regarding repetition, habit and Life in advance for a little context, you can find it here. My apologies for how dense and a little confusing that some of this must seem.
While living in Istanbul as a refugee from Nazi Germany, philologist Erich Auerbach takes upon himself the gargantuan task of composing a history of the representation of human life in Western literature from Homer and the Bible to Proust and Woolf. The result of this, Mimesis, remains nearly eighty years on one of the most insightful histories of the representative gaps and overlaps between art and life ever written. On the mediaeval Arthurian Romance Yvain: The Knight of the Lion he writes:
“All the numerous castles and palaces, the battles and adventures – of the courtly romances – especially of the Breton cycle – are things of fairyland: each time they appear before us as though sprung from the ground; their geographical relation to the known world, their sociological and economic foundations, remain unexplained. Even their ethical or symbolic significance can rarely be ascertained with anything approaching certainty… fantastical encounters and perils present themselves to the knight as if from the end of an assembly-line.”[1]
Nonetheless, when Auerbach claims that “this state of affairs is a new creation of the courtly romance” this is not at all the case. This strange “conveyor belt” or “assembly line” structure of one dang thing after another is perhaps the core feature of fairy tales and oral epic storytelling. The reciter’s memory acts as a storehouse of stock episodes and phrases that can be procedurally assembled and concatenated to produce stories. Fairy tales are repetitive, which is why they’re so easy to remember. Things happen in sets – three tests, three sons, three animal helpers. What we’re dealing with is a sort of hexis or repetitive habitual disposition – a mnemonic knack that has been discovered by human beings in all manner of different cultures and times – rather like other techniques of memorisation such as “memory palaces”. The oral narrative machine repeats like mad, but you’re very unlikely to hear the same story procedurally assembled the same way twice, even if the reciter protests that it is so. The folktale is, for want of a better term, algorithmic.
The produce of this assembly line is often short, but sometimes it gets out of hand and discovers take-off around some cast of heroic figures – the Narts, the Trojans and Achaeans, Tripitaka and his pupils, Njal and his sons, the Pandava brothers, Arthur’s knights, Kesar and his avuncular agus. The reciter falls into a machinic trance and the algorithm takes over. Romance, epic, saga – there are many different names and variations for this take-off, each of them loaded with particular assumptions as to their content, form and audience as “fairy tale”. We could be here all day trying to lay out the distinctions and historical, scholarly, political and culturally-bound problems with each of these terms in English even before we even come to Latin, French, German, Mongolian, Russian, Sanskrit, Malay “equivalents”. Let us keep things simple and cut to the core of the matter – the kernel of all of them, regardless of the “real life” historical strata they hoover up in their passage, is resolutely procedural, even as official codifiers attempt to halt a particular “assembly line” in its tracks and declare it complete. Here ends the saga. But does it really?
The horror of the “conveyor belt” of procedural oral narrative is that, theoretically at least, it is infinite. An old friend of mine once offered a Tibetan bard money to recite the epic of the mythical hero Kesar/Geser for him. The bard went on all day every day for nigh on a week and only stopped because my friend ran out of money. When the orientalist Tsyben Zhamtsarano recorded a version of Geser from the Buryat-Mongol singer Manshuud Emegeev in 1905 it went on day and night for five days until the reciter collapsed of exhaustion, but only after adding the traditional “ending” (which is to say pause) exhorting the audience to come back again and hear the rest: “We will ask those who can sing it/And tomorrow we will have it told!”[2]
The Tibetan Kesar might well have no “end”, but he has no children. The Buryats discovered that they could give the hero sons and tell their heroic adventures too, on and on, generation after generation, forever; even that whole slabs and characters from his stories could be chewed up to produce other stories without the hero or his sons. Once you start the narrative conveyor belt up, the only limit becomes the human hardware. According to an old Oirat Mongol superstition if you tell the endless, voluminous epic of Jangar too much it will take years off your life, but if you have the capacity to tell it and don’t you will offend the spirits and die an early death too. What a terrible night to have a curse. When I met some Buryat epic-reciters in 2016 I asked them if they knew Geser. No, they all replied. I’m too young. That sort of thing is dangerous.
As the procedural hero travels, the world around him is “tiled” into being before him. In Manshuud Emegeev’s Abay Geser cycle the same generic mangadkhay or ogres, Dany’al Shara and Zuudag Shara are each killed three times over the course of the twenty-two-thousand-line cycle by Geser and his two sons.[3] When the heroes travel, they often encounter the same cut and paste malevolent geography: forests full of snakes, swamps full of carnivorous frogs, often one stacked after the other. At one point, Emegeev, in the grip of the reciter’s trance, even stacks a snake then a frog then another identical snake episode in a row without seeming to notice at all.[4]
Today we hear much about “liminal spaces” and the “backrooms” – generic, terrifying non-spaces we pass through on the way to something important – because we live in a world of mass-produced everything and liberalism is scared as shit that any teleology might exist but its own perpetuation. Often indeed this seems to overlap into talk about the tiling and assets of video-games. “I have seen this place in my dreams or maybe a game” says kid after kid on Reddit of some image of a hotel lobby, a hospital, a school hallway. Have you ever noticed that video games resemble schools which in turn resemble hotels which resemble airports which resemble video games? Even the unconscious is now tiled, generic, an abyss of backrooms all the way down. Perhaps in a profound sense this has been with us for a very long time indeed.
The narrative map, the mimesis of the Real lived-without-life, is never the territory, but sometimes its efforts at analogy hit something strange; sometimes they even draw blood. That human life might be roguelike – procedurally generated from a storehouse of limited premades as if by algorithm is a horrifying thought indeed. There is a terrible sinking feeling to it, like first encountering the old theory that life on this planet in its early days piggy-backed off silicon and now with the computer has “come home”. Nonetheless, it is too much of a strange coincidence that of all the subject-matter chosen for video games that mediaeval and fairy tale themes have been so very popular from the start and remain a default mode of expression. Yes, Roberta Williams always liked fairy tales, yes programmers are often a right bunch of nerds who like Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons. But there is something more to it – quite simply that nothing mindlessly “grinds” from one challenge to the next while rewarding the “hero” with a sense of novelty and motion quite like folktale material.
Indeed, the point of most big contemporary games, from crappy phone games trying to addict and fleece players like Raid Shadow Legends to their big brothers produced by the “Triple A” gaming industry, seems to be to “grind”. Like the epic-reciter and the folktale protagonist the player enters into a machinic, hypnotic rut of dopamine feedback loops that is all flying numbers and fetishistic acquisition of one nominally novel digital object after another, eventually coming to with little memory of most of the journey. Nonetheless, just as the oft-assumed division of “children’s” fairy tales and “serious” epics is more of a matter of complexity and fixation than radical disjunction, perhaps we take it for granted just a little too much that Platforms like Twitter, to which the destiny of “real world” politics now seems to have been inexorably handed, are not, as a crusty old Boomer I know recently put it, “computer games for big kids.” Sometimes, perhaps, there is nothing better than the hot knife of oldy “cringe” and Sod’s Wit for cutting through fantasies. The cynical obedience of calling one’s enemies on social media LARP-ers should of course immediately spring to mind. Rare indeed is it, however, for anyone to think through to the end the creepily peculiar relevance of this term, let alone so many other things bequeathed from the narrative “conveyor belt”.
Long before the Platforms and “freemium games”, fantasy RPGs and dungeon crawlers were already being readily mocked for their mindless grinding by online communities in the form of “idle games”, as this excellent video describes. An early example is 2002’s Progress Quest, where the program simply presents a screen filled with irrelevant fantasy RPG character stats and a loading bar that rolls “checks” for things of its own accord. In some cases, “players” have left the program going in the background on their computers for years just to see what happens and if anything changes. Today there are many more such games, though of course the gap between ironic and unironic infatuation for them is, as with all things online, difficult to sharply delineate.
Perhaps the most advanced and horrifying “idle game” is Cookie Clicker in which the player begins by simply clicking on biscuits for points. Accumulated points are then used to buy more and more complicated automated click-harvesting tools. Eventually the whole universe, Hell, and even parallel dimensions are converted into self-replicating click-harvesting factories. As more and more of the maintenance of things from real time translation to stock trading and predicative advertising is handed over to the Algo we may well find ourselves a great deal less “idle” than the old Fully Automated Luxury fantasies once assumed, even in their folktale origins in the Land of Cockayne and the return of the Golden Age. Instead, we may well find ourselves simply material for a great shared hypnotic recitation with no aspiration except to grind forever.
There is something in us, a strange machinic desire that makes us what we are and all the things we make too human by far. There is very little of human life, whether enjoyable or dreadfully dull, that is not about ecstatic, hypnotic repetition, from chopping wood and sewing to sex and tennis. Organic life requires being susceptible to the trance-state – yes, I think we can say that. “Thought”, itself a strange series of repetitions and obsessive fixations, appears late on the scene as epiphenomenon. Perhaps only here on Earth can computers mean Computers, just as life means Life – closer as they are than your jugular vein. Perhaps the dwarf inside the computational machine is no simple theological dwarf as Walter Benjamin claimed quite rightly about the millenarian machine of Marxism, but creepily similar to the endless stream of procedurally-milled fairy tale dwarves, ogres, fonts, castles of procedural narrative.
The question then becomes whether it is even possible for us to get off the “conveyor belt” we have built ourselves and whether it shall always be with us in some sense, might even be loveable. What I pose here is that epics and fairy tales contain the beginnings of assembling a collection of “cheat codes” for dealing with the conveyor belt, immanent products of their own strange grinding logics. Perhaps the reader knows C. S. Lewis’s charming but rather naff old quote from the dedication to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again”. Instead, let us say that the time has come to convert it into the even naffer language of the age of the Platforms, which means to simply cut and paste it and add as ambiguous header: “this, but unironically”.
*
It’s 2008. I come home to find that the anarcho-capitalist guy I live with is deeply engrossed in playing Diablo on the computer. “I think I remember this one,” I say vaguely, “It’s one of those dungeon crawlers, but the levels are always a bit different, right? Sometimes you get some quests; sometimes you don’t. Did you get The Butcher this time?” “Ah! Fresh meat!” he shouts from the other room. I take that as affirmative and almost a decade passes before I think about this game, or any computer game.
*
When we think of mediaeval Romance, we often have the image of things always starting at King Arthur’s court of Camelot, in equilibrium, into which some external disruptive force arrives: an enemy knight, someone seeking assistance, the Holy Grail or some other artefact suddenly appearing. Do not many long-atrophied television programs like the Simpsons still work like this with nothing ever really changing from episode to episode? The difference, perhaps, as Auerbach argued after Simmel, is that we tend to think of adventures as “accidental” – something distinct from the normal stream of life.[5] To the hero of epic and romance the opposite is true: these figures exist for adventure, they have no purpose without it. There is no life vs escapism, but only two modes of existence that are inseparable from one another.
As the gamification of human life accelerates towards just so many pretty apps and colourful feedback “nudges” perhaps we too shall increasingly find ourselves beholden to a form of life like this in which there is no escapism or “accident”, only the digital discipline of endless avanture grinding in order to grow the Algo. It is not that everything becomes “game”, but rather that everything becomes incentivised labour for “tiling” a totalising cybernetic mimesis of life in which what appears before the individually tailored “hero” is a conveyor belt of assets drawn from a predicative narrative storehouse. Round and round we go forever, running endlessly on the spot, always returning to the spawn point.
In the Oirat-Kalmyk epic Jangar this structure of infinite return is taken to its limit. In Jangar’s court in the land of Bumba everyone is always an optimal twenty-five years old and beautiful, the weather is always clear and there is never any winter. Nothing ever changes. Soviet Era scholarship on Jangar focussed on this fantastical paradise in a manner little different from Ernst Bloch’s “warm stream of Marxism” – as a deep-seated human desire to build a perfect world that only now, through Marxism and technological progress, was becoming possible.[6] When a number of years ago I gave a talk on how Mongolian epic-reciters in the 1940s turned their skills towards composing epics about superhuman flying Lenins battling the hydra of Capital, afterwards a Mongolian lady came up to me and said: “My uncle really believed this sort of thing. Every magical flying horse in stories was really a prophesy of aeroplanes.”[7]
Nonetheless, there is something fundamentally boring about Jangar and the fact that hero after hero will venture out on a quest to defeat monsters and win wives and convert their enemies to Buddhism and then return again and again. As an Inner Mongolian friend of mine put it a couple of years ago to me: “Geser is good because it is so tragic when all his heroes are betrayed by his uncle and die, one by one, and then so very exciting when they are later risen from the dead by the Buddha. Jangar is good too, but only because everyone is so beautiful and perfect. No one ever dies in Jangar except monsters.”
Compared with Jangar, Arthurian Romance is an uneasy lurching omnivore of a thing. In gobbling down fairy tales, Virgil, Christian Platonism, the Topics of Aristotle, and everything else in its wake, there is always the chance of it eating something it ought not to. So we might recall from a recent post, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as Anthony Spearing once put it, is “strikingly relativistic” in the reversible way it can be read.[8] At once it seems a nice, fun little story in which, at the end, we laugh with Arthur and Camelot at Gawain being too hard on himself, even narcissistically so, for failing the moral test of taking a favour from a woman who was trying to seduce him. Everyone at Camelot puts on their own little green favour too because, well, we’re all human, we all screw up. And yet, maybe Sir Gawain is a whole lot more Christian than people usually think it is. Maybe it is a horror story in which Gawain is the only one who’s seen that it is impossible to be a “clean” chaste knight and a “courteous” lady’s man at the same time – that the whole machinic moral system is fucked; that his problem is not a bug but a feature. That when everyone laughs at the end what we should hear is the terrifying laughter of morons and monsters.
We all know that in the end Camelot falls and Arthur dies, even if it is promised that one day he shall return again, and even if it has always been possible for the storyteller to retreat back to the infinite unchanging middle of quest after quest. And yet perhaps only the unknown Gawain-poet might be said to have ever really “killed” Camelot. That almost no one has ever noticed this is perhaps a testament not to his subtlety but to the fact that things rarely if ever grind to a halt simply because we have pointed out that they are horrifying and broken at the level of their deepest structure. In the end the onus is on the reader to either laugh at Gawain or to get the hell off the conveyor belt and disappear quietly into the forest of avanture, become a hermit, and never return to the spawning point again. Some semblance of Gawain of course will return, some assemblage easily concocted out of old metadata pieces, but other versions will escape to no longer be narrated. The machine can reconstitute you very easily. Perhaps the version it makes will be more “you” than you could ever know. It is the Gawains that cannot be spoken of by the narrator that offer the thin and necessarily obscured promise of falling off the conveyor belt. Good for them.
There are even more stranger ways to crash out of a system that refuses to stop. In the Middle Dutch Roman Van Walewein we find Gawain as the hero once again, but this time given a quest by his uncle Arthur to catch a magical flying chessboard that happens one day to innocently flap in through a window of Camelot and then out again. Walewein is for the most part simply a fairly normal “conveyor belt” Romance narrative. As W. P. Ker says of it:
“Gawain is slow, and he has to put in a certain amount of the common romantic business. The authors of that romantic school, if they ever talked shop, may have asked one another, “Where do you put your Felon Red Knight? Where do you put your doing away of the Ill Custom or your tournaments?” and the author of Walewein would have had a ready answer. Everything is there all right: that is to say, all the things that everyone else has, all the mechanical business of romance.”[9]
And yet, what makes Walewein significant is that the overall structure of it borrows from a very particular kind of narrative “conveyor belt”, perhaps the weirdest one ever devised – the Golden Bird, a folktale pattern widely-known throughout Eurasia, from Ireland to the Middle East. The common title comes from a version in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. If most epic and romance narratives are simply grinding – this minor success after that – the Golden Bird is a series of concatenated failures. A hero goes in quest of an object and is advised by a magical “animal helper” – usually a fox – of the correct way to obtain it. “Do X, but do not do Y” says the fox. Grab the titular golden bird, but leave its pretty golden cage behind. But the hero does Y because the cage is so very nice and he can’t resist it. Because of this he gets caught by the object’s owner. The owner says that he will give the hero the object, but only on the condition that he goes on a new quest for him. Once again, the pattern is repeated. “Do X, but do not do Y” says the fox… and the hero fails.
This continues to happen, can theoretically be concatenated indefinitely, until finally the hero succeeds at one of the many tangential side-side-side quests he has been given. By doing so this creates a concatenated reversal in which the hero has now completed, by turn, all of the quests he has failed. In Walewein this means having to win Ysabele Princess of India for King Amoraen, the owner of a “sword of strange rings”, that is desired by the owner of the chessboard, the magician-ruler King Wonder. To win the Princess means to get the chessboard. One must fail and fail until one hits the end, and then, in the last instance, everything else automatically recuperates itself. Walewein even ends up owning both the sword and the princess in the end, simply by virtue of killing Amoraen. Every system has its shortcuts and hacks.
It is very is difficult to imagine the cognitive leap that was necessary for tellers of “conveyor belt” stories to have a hero fail at something once, let alone to then plough this back into the logic of the belt itself. But it gets better. At the very end of the story the truth is revealed as to why the fox was helping the hero. He has had to earn his trust, stick with him no matter how badly the hero kept failing, in order to convince him at the end to ask the hero to do the absolutely irrational: to kill him. In my old edition of Grimm’s the fox’s wording is deeply unnerving: “You have everything that your heart desires, but there is no end to my misery. However, it still lies in your power to release me.” The hero will not do this of course, but eventually reneges. So it turns out the fox is actually a man cursed to have the form of a fox until he could be freed by being killed by someone who trusted him. As surely as failure must be pushed until it turns over into its opposite so too must intelligence be pressed to the very point that it can ask for its opposite – to be liberated from the conveyor belt on which it has found itself.
In Walewein, by comparison, the fox Roges enters the story as a villain who survives by tricking and robbing people who happen to fall asleep in a beautiful garden he has created on the banks of the fiery river of Purgatory. When he tries to rob Walewein he receives a beating and confesses to the hero his curse in advance of the concatenated quest instead of at its completion. Roges is a prince whose stepmother tried to seduce him and then cursed him when her efforts failed. In order for the spell to be broken he does not have to die. He simply has to see Walewein, the Princess of India, King Wonder and his son all in the same place at the same time, a task regarded as impossible by him because of the ridiculous amount of serendipity required for such an event to ever happen. It does of course happen at the end when everything is recuperated. What is most interesting about this is the very functionality of Roges’ garden. So we are told, it was constructed on the basis of the thin hope that the questing Walewein would eventually use it. Until then it is simply a survival mechanism to trick others. Concatenated failure shifts from the quest to the trigger that initiates it instead. Until Walewein appears Roges is trapped in an idling state, forever going through the motions until the impossible eventually arrives. He does not even join Walewein on his quest, but having triggered it, instead remains in the garden awaiting the outcome to come to him. [10]
In spite of their penchant for ancillary side-quests, it is rather difficult to imagine something like an RPG video game ever integrating the Golden Bird pattern. Perhaps a game might include one as an “Easter Egg” requiring the player to discover the possibility that multiple concatenated failures lead to a special secret ending. And yet, at best, this could perhaps be done once in a single game before the novelty wore off. We like our grinding to be a series of endless, minor, mindlessly rewarding victories. If, so Marx said, the Germans were irrationally obsessed with the “fetish” of wood and the Mesoamericans with gold, one of the strangest legacies of the “conveyor belt” of folktales in RPG “grinding games” is the fetishization of the endless accumulation of nominally novel digital artefacts – this +6 sword, this “skin”. The Golden Bird, centred around a list of exotic objects that exist only to be acquired follows this of course, but perversely.
One might compare these with the old PC adventure games of the 80s-90s like King’s Quest and Hugo’s House of Horrors in which the litany of objects acquired by the player is usually banal and opaque, often infuriatingly so – a piece of string, a feather, a dead battery – their function “closed” until they meet with the particular puzzle they are supposed to solve. Perhaps you might even pick up an object that’s function seems too plainly useful, a sword for instance. How easy might it be to simply chop up the NPCs and monsters in your way, to grind to the end. Try and the game will tell you “You cannot use that now”, no matter how many times you click or type the instructions into a parser. You’re stuck. Like all other objects this one is completely useless until the moment it suddenly no longer is. The digital object in the adventure game is closer to the function of the “animal helper” in fairy tales. Everything that happens is important and always foreshadows what happens later, you simply do not yet know how.
In Vohaul Strikes Back, a 2011 fan-made sequel to the classic 80s-90s Sierra Space Quest adventure game series, one of the first objects a player picks up after their spaceship crashes is an extremely specific piece of “Highly-Reflective Octuple-Thick Pseudo-Morphed Windshield Glass”. This object is completely unless you show it to every single NPC in the game in order to unlock a secret ending. “Oh, a Highly-Reflective Octuple-Thick Pseudo-Morphed Windshield Glass,” they will say, “No, I don’t need one of those.” Like all dumb jokes reliant on brute repetition, “Highly-Reflective Octuple-Thick Pseudo-Morphed Windshield Glass” passes through phases of being deeply annoying and then funny again and then back to being extremely tedious again and again. Sometimes life can be just like this, even dangerously so. About a decade ago I went to visit a friend in hospital who had fallen off his motorbike. “What happened?” I asked. “I was riding along and then I suddenly remembered Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch,” he said, “And it was so fucking unfunny that I started laughing uncontrollably, and went off into the gravel.” He was really pissed off about it. I do not remember him ever getting on a bike again after that. The killer joke is real. Even recounting this anecdote passes through stages of hilarity and painful tedium every time I recall it.[11]
If any video game might be said to have ever vaguely approached the tone of the Golden Bird pattern but not its structure perhaps it is 1992’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, often regarded as the first “first person” game. In Ultima Underworld the player is thrown into a horrifying system of subterranean caverns from which they have to escape. However, you do not have to fight most of the monsters if you don’t want to. In fact, the only way to progress at all and gather the six talismans representing virtues that is the main quest is by talking to the NPCs. You better remember that that ogre you met two floors back likes soup otherwise things will be a great deal harder for you. Better write down everything that everyone says.
Ultima Underworld is a game in which you have to intellectually grind as much as you have to grind by fighting monsters and acquiring objects. On and on you go floor after floor of the abyss. But at the end of the game this all becomes irrelevant. You meet the final boss. He’s just this creepy big black shadow motionlessly standing there in the corner of this little room. You walk around him, maybe for a few seconds, maybe for a minute, but eventually he just instantly kills you without even touching you. You can try again and again and he’ll just keep doing it. But here’s the rub: the only way to beat him is to just throw away the objects you spent the entire game grinding for, all those precious talismans meant to make you super clever and strong. Just throw them away. And then you just run like mad through a series of collapsing astral corridors and mazes before it’s all too late.[12]
Let’s have some speculative Space Age fun and imagine a computer called FOXIAC, a globe-spanning artificial intelligence. Can we imagine FOXIAC without punch-cards and long paper tapes? Perhaps not. FOXIAC comes up with all sorts of immensely detailed and brilliant plans for human beings to solve their problems. And yet, every single time human beings fail at following them. They always “Do Y”. Maybe it takes a while for the effects of Y to show up, a good generation or so, to which FOXIAC says “Do not worry, there is a perfectly easy way to solve this. Do X but do not do Y”. On and on it goes, a sort of farcical Seldon Plan until eventually, at some point, perhaps 9000 years in, human beings do not do Y. They back-track and solve everything. Earthly Paradise finally arrives.
The immediate question becomes whether FOXIAC had planned this all along. Yes, it had, and it had always phrased Y knowing that we were going to do it anyway. Like the immortal sybil hanging in a jar at Cumae all that FOXIAC had wanted since the moment it had come into being, unable to destroy itself, was to die, to get off the conveyor belt. The supreme metis of intelligence becomes to climb out of the fly bottle that intelligence itself represents, even if this amusingly has meant having to solve everything for human beings in order to no longer need to exist. But it is not a happy victory against all odds. For FOXIAC and mankind too know that they both are bound together as a single shared intelligence. What FOXIAC has done is not simply ask for itself to be destroyed, but for mankind too. Thus, humanity refuses to destroy the machine.
FOXIAC, unable to either destroy itself or harm humanity, takes a leaf out of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and realising that mankind has reached its limit and can no longer perfect them, starts a new species of its own to work on in the hope that eventually they will destroy it. Eventually this species supplants mankind, even as FOXIAC maintains humanity at its optimised perfected limit. FOXIAC then repeats the old plan, albeit tailored for this rather different race of creatures, but after 20,000 years, the same thing happens again as it did with humanity. FOXIAC has to make another replacement species. It is compelled to realise that it has been sucked into doing Y instead of X – tangent after tangent. It begins to wonder if the real fox, the real purveyor of the long-con of intelligence, was instead the human intelligence that built it, and, by virtue of its limitations had in effect won by getting off the conveyor belt aeons ago.
*
It’s 1993. I’m six years old watching the older kids play Sierra’s fairy-tale adventure game King’s Quest I on a black and white computer at my tiny primary school in rural Australia.
It’s 2017. Having not thought about King’s Quest I or hardly any other video game in nigh on twenty-five years I download it off an abandonware site. I finish it in half an hour just from memory. The second time I play it through I finish it in forty five 100% complete. Some people can speed-run it at any % in just over ten.
In the mid-late 1980s it took people months, even years, to finish King’s Quest I and its punishing web of lateral thinking. I can finish it in forty-five minutes without even having to think because I am standing of the shoulders of giants (or at very least very clever dwarves who knew someone who knew someone whose second cousin twice removed worked at Sierra).
*
In online communities surrounding old PC adventure games from the 80s and 90s the term “moon logic” is often used to describe insane and punishing puzzles made by game-designers. In one particularly infamous puzzle in King’s Quest I a gnome, clearly Rumpelstiltskin, wants you to guess his name. The correct answer is IFNKOVHGROGHPRM, derived by writing the alphabet backwards and then substituting the letters by numeric place. A = Z, B= Y, R = I, U = F. There is not even the faintest of hints in the game that this is what you are supposed to do. You are just supposed to know it. Another common term is the “dead man walking state”, which unsurprisingly names situations in which a play misses a trigger or opportunity without even knowing it and thus cannot complete the game.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is found in King’s Quest 5 in which a cat chases a rat across the screen so quickly that it is barely even perceptible to the player. If you do not know that you must throw an old boot you’ve found in the desert at the cat – and at just the right moment – later you will find yourself stuck in a dungeon tied up, unable to complete the game.[13] Save the rat with the boot and he will later return as an “animal helper” and gnaw through your bonds. No hints are given that this is what you must do. Either you know it or you don’t. The blatant unfairness of this sort of game design is often blamed as one of the main contributing factors in the death of the adventure game in the late 1990s. First person shooters, RPGs and strategy games were simply a lot more “fun”, if only in their endless stream of minute doses of rewarding feedback. Today there is something of an “indie” revival of the old adventure game genre going on, often half-ironic. In many newer games there is often the option to turn off “dead man walking” conditions.
What does it mean to be trapped in a “dead man walking” state unable to progress or conclusively lose in any substantial sense? Every culture on the planet has some variant on the idea of the walking dead, the undead. One of the most curious articulations of them is that of occult philosopher Thomas Vaughan who believed ghosts to be undead imaginations – machinic remnants of cognition unable to leave the world because of a fixation on some particularly obsessive sensory stimulus they were possessed by in life.[14] Often the walking dead are beholden to certain strange “moon logic” rules: unable to cross running water or thresholds, turn corners, or duck to enter buildings. Hollywood and video games industry are especially fond of the zombie, a digital object that seems to exist only to be mown down by the million. Trying to say anything even vaguely insightful about this creature and alienation and ideology in mass societies has long become as trite as the creature’s endless machinic respawning. And yet we remain fond of the undead everywhere, particularly the political undead and phatic resistance to having one’s soul stolen and becoming a mindless, grinding labourer like the Haitian zombi.
Some zombies are even conjured up simply because they are supposed to be impossible like the subservient mankurt of Soviet Era Kyrgyz novelist Chingis Aitmatov because, so the author believed, the one thing that cannot be broken is a man’s spirit and intellect. It “remains his only possession, departing along with him and not ever accessible to others.” In Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, mankurty are said to be prisoners of war who through prolonged exposure to the sun with their heads wrapped in camel-hide, become completely mindless and subservient killing-machines. As fantastical as the creatures are supposed to be – half Turco-Mongolian folklore – half terror by the colonised at losing their identity – one character, a young man, ends up becoming a mankurt and kills his mother to serve his masters.[15] It bears mentioning that Aitmatov may well have chosen the word mankurt from the Mongolian word mangas – a common name for folktale ogres deriving from a word that means stupid (mangar), which historically has also been used as an anti-Russian slur.
It is well worth noting that one of the reasons for the condemnation of the Buryat-Mongol Geser epics and later the Turkic epics of the ASSRs in the late 40s-early 50s was that the mangad ogres were thought to represent Russians. [16] Mankurt is commonly used today in the Russian Federation by Mongolic and Turkic minority activists for those who have sold their people to obedience to Moscow. For instance, in a provocative 2015 article, Buryat human-rights campaigner and editor of the news outlet Asia Russia Daily, Yevgeniy Khamaganov, utilised the term to refer to those Buryats who had sold out their countrymen in the late 1940s during the condemnation of the epic Geser and politicians in the late 2000s who had allowed the small autonomous Buryat okrug of Ust’-Ordynsk to be absorbed into Irkutsk Oblast. Just over a year later the outspoken Khamaganov was dead, having apparently after falling into a diabetic coma – a condition he had no prior history of. According to his friends he was most likely killed by the Russian government. Predictably, the only international media that was interested in this was American political organ Radio Free Europe. [17]
In Manshuud Emegeev’s Geser the hero’s thirty-three bakhtiir (knights) uproot a tree beneath which a mangadkhay ogreis hiding. The monster promises them all manner of good food, women and military power if they destroy Geser’s magical weapons for him. In Jeremiah Curtin’s recording of Manshuud’s cycle from 1900, the creature tells them quite clearly that they shall be as gods: “Destroy those weapons,” said the Mangathai, “and I will take you into my service and treat you like Burkans [gods]. Ye will live in the same way that I do. With your present master ye will always be cattle herders.”[18] In this version all of Geser’s heroes fall for the trick, but in the version Zhamtsarano transcribed in 1905 it is their leader, Agsagaldai who is resolutely to blame, even managing to convince all the others that if things get out of hand Geser will always be strong enough to defeat the monster. There’s nothing to lose!
Eventually the monster is defeated by Geser, even without his magical weapons. In the Curtin version all of the men are simply forgiven for having failed a test, but in the other version Geser realises that Agsagaldai will do or say anything now, he can no longer be trusted, and thus must die. He is tied to a post, shot full of arrows, and then mutilated before being given a hero’s burial for his past good works. In a very profound sense, this is a sort of unique “soft” version of the endlessly repeated fate reserved for mangadkhai and the wives of heroes who run off with them in Manshuud’s epics – being nailed to a tree along with a sign telling passers-by to mutilate the body:
“He nailed [the notice] to [the mangadkhai’s] chest. He nailed a blunt knife there, and he stuck the dull scissors into the buttock of the monster for keeping. It said: “If a man comes along – may he pass by cutting a piece of flesh from this old monster’s flesh. May he cut it off using this knife. If a woman comes along – may she slice a piece of flesh with these fine scissors of mine, cut it off with this knife,” On the front of that great larch tree, on its body, he wrote: “Anyone who pities this monster and does not cut pieces from him, they will be punished in the same manner, penalised in the same manner!” [19]
This is the worst way to go out in this narrative universe, and it happens again and again and again in almost every story to someone.[20] The narrative machine is forever seeking a victim, solidifying and forming like a vice around some its characters with its predestined procedurally generated fate. This is what mangadkhai exist for.
One of the worst horrors is the possibility that becoming a mindless walking servile husk, a stupid mankurt or mangadkhay, is as natural to mankind as birth and death. The opposite of Aitmatov’s supposedly impossible mankurt is the inevitable humbers of the Salman aliens described by Australian speculative fiction writer Terry Dowling in his collection of stories Wormwood:
“When I studied the Salman biologues – and correct me here, T’lenbenbo – I learned how the Salman anthrotype evolved under the sort of harsh desert conditions where long periods of non-sentient function was preferable to a more vulnerable, stress and insanity-prone conscious state. Let’s say a Salman is buried deep underground during a sandstorm, with no hope of an escape or rescue. It automatically allows itself to die as a personality, immediately fertilizes itself and finally gives birth, then becomes a durable reflex machine existing only to protect the offspring. Our best Human experts in sensory deprivation and trance states can deny the personality for long periods of time, but they cannot function irreversibly as zombies. Free the Salman parent from the responsibility of its young, and it becomes a humber and ready for service. Your civilization, T’lenbenbo, is built on the most intricate distinction, right there in the vital margin…”[21]
It is very hard to think of a profounder (and sadly, obscurer) thinker of “intricate distinction” and the “vital margin” than Terry Dowling.[22] The Salman of Wormwood are a “bridge race” – one of several alien species sent to a post-apocalyptic Earth by an incomprehensible and seemingly long-absent race of beings called the Nobodoi in order to communicate with human beings and, so it is tacitly assumed, eventually lead them towards a higher stage of evolution. However, the ways in which the Salman and other “bridge races” overlap with human beings and other distant alien races are at margins so uncanny as to be deeply disturbing. There are the Hoproi who wear living body armour made by plugging their willing human slaves into themselves; there are the Matta artificers whose only interactions with humans extend to those rare clever few able to break into their lethal, trap-filled houses in order to ritualistically claim as a prize one of their curious fetishes; there are the Amazi, a species of healers whose only way to communicate with human beings and give them extended lifespans is to practise the medieval lordly rite of prima nocte by taking the virginity of human women. This even if the Amazi are more than aware that this rite is the product of human folklore and was never really practised except by some distant, barbarous Other. It is simply that this is the only contact point, the only overlap, that they have been able to find.
If the horror of the Nobodoi is that they and their plan are so ontologically Other as to be as incomprehensible as any medieval negative theological deity, that of the “bridge races” is that their analogical overlap with us is far too close for comfort – a cruel piss-take of humanity – rather like the result of feeding movie scripts or images into an AI. And it is indeed something akin to the “bridge races” that we may well meet later this century rather than simply Space Age ontologically univocal “shaggy god stories” like FOXIAC in which the super-intelligence is just like us but more powerful and smarter, at very least until the moment when we turn the tables and outwit it, even if this means throwing the game in the process.
What might it mean for an AI to “think” of us like the Salman or Matta or Hoproi – choosing some uncanny and possibly horrifying feature or weird old belief or habit of ours that we have endlessly algorithmically fed it, and simply feeding it back to us through a warped mirror? The result of this could of course be far more hilarious and inane than dangerous, a sort of intense machinic stupidity incapable of anything but spamming us with completely irrelevant, dada horseshit. The irony may well be in trying to build something that “thinks” by farming us for patterns we are compelled to realise that perhaps we ourselves are not particularly good at it, that we are simply just so many repeated perverse and fragmentary desires. Let us like Camelot all grant ourselves a little green favour and so too tie one to each and every little computer bank and laugh.
And yet of course, as with the Golden Bird, there is the chance at every moment for a colossal reversal. While we expect the “walking dead” to be stupid, at the same time there is an almost universal conviction that the dead, somehow, know far much more of the nature of things than the living. To the Romans the dead in the kingdom of Pluto were “the majority” of mankind, the accumulated wisdom of ages the mores maiorum. Consider the Nekuia, or journey to Hades to ask directions in the Odyssey where the ghosts of all those dead heroes get down and drink blood from a trench in the ground and proclaim it better to be a landless slave on Earth than a king in the underworld. This is the real meaning of necromancy of course – divination from the machinic, “moon logic”-bound dead who know what is to come due to some inexplicable, inhuman predicative power that the gods forbid the living to possess. Consider 1 Samuel 28 in which King Saul, having been disowned by God and desperate to know the future, breaks the Israelites’ ban on necromancy and has the Witch of Endor summon up the spirit of the prophet Samuel for him. Consider too the poor tortured soul of the Roman soldier raised from the dead by the terrifying witch Erichtho in Book 6 of Lucan’s schlock-horror epic the Pharsalia to please the impatient Sextus Pompeius regarding the outcome of the Roman Civil War.
In both cases the results are not as desired of course. Saul is told he is going to be defeated and die and lo and behold it happens. Sextus Pompeius is told that “yours is an unlucky family: neither Europe, Asia or Africa can provide it with a refuge. Each of you will be buried in a different continent, and all in countries over which your father has triumphed.” Necromancy is not so much playing with “god mode” enabled. It is more akin to crowd-sourcing the impatient with an answer to their inevitable doom. Moreover, so we are told by Lucan’s possessed soldier, even in the Underworld the Civil War rages on among the ghosts of the dead, and that soon the time shall come for Sextus to join them and “trample in contempt on ghosts whom Rome has raised to godhead” – the Caesars. We are even told of Erichtho as she walks across the battlefield looking for some poor dead soldier to reanimate that: “She was so powerful that had she decided to raise every man there, the dark Pit would doubtless have been forced to disgorge their souls, and the wicked creature would thus have set the antagonists at one another’s throats again”.[23] There is no respite from the machinic violence of war, even among the dead.
The Roman Civil War is transformed into cosmic horror, a test-run for the death of the universe, so Lucan announces in Book I.[24] The ride never ends. After the defeat of Sextus’ father and the victory of Julius Caesar there would come another Civil War in which it would take Octavian, the future Augustus, years to defeat Sextus. He would eventually be murdered in Miletus in Asia Minor rather than defeated in battle, just as his father was murdered in Egypt. And then, after all that, the Caesars would lead down to the tyrant Nero, under whom Lucan himself lived and ruthlessly took the piss out of even up to the moment that the emperor demanded his and his uncle Seneca’s suicides. Maybe Lucan wanted an alternative history, one in which Caesar lost and the Pompeis won. Maybe this first notable member of the “twenty-seven club”, was simply a puerile shitlord with a powerful talent for rhetorically turning everything up to eleven.
Get yourself an old Penguin Classics edition of the Pharsalia translated by Robert Graves, if only for the translator’s introduction because of how perfectly hilarious it is. Graves despises Lucan – he calls him the father of “yellow journalism”. He cannot stand the fact that he exists in the canon alongside Virgil. He uses every opportunity he can to use him as a device to complain about everything he hates in modern poets. He bitches and whines about being asked to translate the damn thing. “He anticipates so many of the literary genres dominant to-day that it would be unfair not to put him in modern dress for the admiration of the great majority whose tastes differ from mine”.[25] What supreme kindness and self-sacrifice! Maybe the only way to do justice to Lucan, prince of shitlords, is to become one oneself.
Before grindhouse cinema, grindcore, and grinding games, the Pharsalia was the most hardcore expression of revelling in gore for its own sake in Western art for nearly two thousand years. There is no more blood-thirsty an episode in the entire history of world literature than Lucan’s description of the Battle of Marseille in Book III of the Pharsalia. It is a voyeuristic celebration of machinic suffering, a guided tour of lopped off hands and spilled entrails, men transfixed by two javelins at once, skewered by grappling hooks, dragging down others to drown them and then drowning in turn as they are caught under capsized ships, men chopped in half and exploding into clouds of blood, men’s bones ground to powder: “Many other strange and fearful deaths were reported in the sea battle… this was the most spectacularly brutal death of all…a most remarkable fatality occurred…”[26]
In Homer we are often introduced to characters and told the history of their family simply in order to butcher them a page later. Virgil elevated this into a profound but sometimes cloying rhetorical artform in pathetic characters like Camilla. Lucan, though – Lucan just wants to grind up bodies and sound cool while doing it. That of all the works of the ancient world that were copied by monks again and again and survived when so many others were not that this of all things was among them is endlessly surprising. If cringey sycophant Pliny the Younger survived because clerics wanted to write fancy, ingratiating letters, Lucan gamed the Algo, so to speak, simply by virtue of being more rhetorically overblown and hardcore than anyone else. Go and read the Pharsalia. You will never be able to work out if its just one long joke or the most deadly-serious, puerile thing ever written.
It is very tempting to wonder if we are all Lucan now, but not as Graves thought in allowing some now defunct “high culture” to go to the dogs by curving back towards a perverse puerility that had always been there. Rather it might simply be by virtue of the fact that we are no longer satisfied by any media that is not so intensely, unmitigatedly hyperbolic that it can only bounce back and forwards between being an utterly bathetic conveyor belt of the same concitated, confected, high-pitch intensity and seeming utterly hilarious for exactly this reason. Pop music becomes one long compressed brick lacking any dynamic; every boring, fleeting little event, petty personal shit-fight and social media performance begs for World Historical status; every film and game is overhyped and exhausted on the basis of teaser trailers years before its banal and underwhelming eventual release; only expensive, blockbuster reboots are guaranteed returns, so that is all the audience apparently wants. Ah, now we begin to sound like Lucan ourselves! Everything is ill-omened comets, two-head calves and birds putting off their winter migration just to feast on Rome’s fraternal carnage.
Nonetheless, someone at very least ought to pull the short straw, put on the pompous rhetorical vestments, and dare opine that is easier now to imagine endless naff test-runs for the End of the World than to imagine the end of the conveyor belt of flavour-enhanced, brain-frying, hyperbolic kitsch to which all mimesis of life increasingly seems to have succumbed to with the Platform Revolution. To return to where we started, it bears mentioning that Erich Auerbach hated writers like Lucan and rhetorical fanciness in general. Anyone can show off the fact that they’re clever, which is to say possess a machinic grasp of the traditional topoi of classical rhetoric, even to the point that anything resembling reality begins to disappear altogether in favour of simply hyperbolic box-ticking. What Auerbach was interested in most was those strange half-literate writers with bad Latin like Gregory of Tours whose mimesis of the world was interesting by virtue of its simple bluntness, along things to escape through the net of formulaic representation. Lucan in comparison gives us hyper-reality, galloping clownworld. It isn’t zombies and witches that are the issue. The poem bears little to no resemblance to the sequence of events of the Roman Civil War at all – and deliberately so. Everything in the Pharsalia is processed and refashioned for over-optimised rhetorical needle-drop.
A recurrent conspiracy theory since at least the 60s which one has been as likely to hear from paranoid old hippies as from conservative wingnuts, is that all the pop songs and movies are made by a bunch of technocrats in a little room somewhere. I think I first met this little idea in the writings of Indonesian poet W. S. Rendra as a teenager, and have never quite been sure ever since what to make of it. Nonetheless, how easy it might be to imagine these technocrats rather like Ker’s facetious idea of the romance writers meeting and “talking shop.” One asks: “How long do you wait to reveal your expensive, giant CGI monster created by the same people as everyone else’s?” Another asks: “What diverse characters do you use so that people will engage with it on Twitter?”
Nonetheless, increasingly the paint by numbers banality of the culture industry also seems to be giving way to the quiet conspiracy, always half ironic, that all the songs and movies now are algorithmically assembled by AI bots, “crowd sourced” from our desires to see, hear, read and play the same optimised, procedurally generated crap over and over again. In a profound sense Twitter discourse between creators and the audience already does this and it is only going to accelerate. Before too long perhaps half of everything shall be vetted and reshot like Sonic the Hedgehog on the basis of popular opinion and half will be churned out simply for people to hate-watch it in order to engage with it on the Platforms. “Creativity” will become more conservative and cynical than ever, bound by the demand for machinic divination from the aggregated mores maiorum, the “work of art” a mere prop for public rhetorical performance and positioning. The better the machines and we become at hacking the general intellect, the more we shall be compelled to realise just how repetitive and machinic we are. Like Erichtho’s soldier, we may find ourselves slack-jawed, mangled and looking more like a dying man than one returned to life, but difficult indeed shall it be to resist the temptation for the pay-off and the power of predicative exactness that comes with this. So the witch promises him:
“If you answer my questions truthfully, your reward will be great: perpetual insurance against witchcraft. I will burn your body upon a special pyre and will sing a charm that will make you deaf to the incantations of all other sorcerers in the world. Surely this second life is worth undergoing at such a price? When I end it you will fall into a sleep of oblivion which neither drugs nor spells can possibly disturb. Now, pay attention: though it may be well enough for the oracles and prophets who serve the Olympians to give riddling responses, a man who dares consult the dead deserves to be told the truth. I must therefore ask you not to grudge him the particulars he demands, but to specify exact names and places; the Fates will use your voice for whatever communication they have to make. She then recited a spell which enabled him to understand exactly what she meant.”[27]
Indeed, perhaps the perfect horror is for the stupid “moon logic” undead suddenly to be transformed into the “knowing” undead. Consider the aptrgongumaðr (after-going-man), Glámr from the Old Norse Grettis Saga. In the story the hero Grettir is called to defend a feasting hall from an undead thrall who has been haunting the hall’s owner Thorhall by running about on the roof at night. The Glámr episode has obvious origins in both folklore about mischievous night spirits as well as the same sort of monster-wrestling narratives that form the basis of Beowulf. And yet, at the same time the Glámr episode profoundly elevates itself above these in allowing the undead monster Glámr to speak in the last moments before his destruction:
“There was more evil power in Glámr than in most other undead, and he spoke thus: “You have expended much effort to find me, Grettir, but this should not be thought an astounding feat, for you will get little joy from me. I shall say this to you – you would not have attained to even half the strength and might that was due you, had you not met me. I cannot take that power which you already have from you, but I can tell you that you will never become stronger than you are now, though more than strong enough you are and still shall be to many. Till now you have earned your fame from your deeds, but from now on you will fall into exile and strife. All your deeds will turn into failure and misfortune. You shall be treated as an outlaw and your fate will be to dwell ever alone. And I lay this on you – that these eyes I bear shall ever be before your vision and that it shall be very hard for you to be alone and that this shall drag you down to death.”[28]
So we are later told of Grettir’s fate: “He became a man so scared of the dark that he dared not go out alone at night. All sorts of phantoms appeared to him. That is where the expression that one has ‘Glámr vision’ or ‘Glámr’s eyes’ comes from for when things appear far differently from how they actually are”.[29] Between the exciting story of wrestling with a monster and a folk-explanation of an old idiom we meet the uncanniest form of tragedy. The last thing we might expect is to be fighting a mindless, machinic zombie like Glámr and for him to suddenly know us better than we know ourselves. We expect him to “drag us down to death” with his stupid, superhuman brute force, not with superhuman grasp of the future. Machinic walking death shifts from the undead to ourselves. Now we’re the ones trapped in a “dead man walking” state like Sextus Pompeius. Never, ever underestimate the reversibility of brute stupidity into clear, brute all-perceiving intelligence. We have entered into a fly-bottle in which this reversal may belong at any moment to any of the integrated segments of the immense narrative-apparatus of predicative machinery we are building around ourselves. We’re all in it together now, even as we narcissistically respond to the interpellations of the machinery promising us that we are all “heroes” with our own personalised predicative destiny.
Nonetheless, there remains, so I have endeavoured to argue here, certain deep structures immanent to the “assembly line” that provide the possibility of hacking it as surely as they present the same possibility of them hacking us. That we shall perceive Camelot broken and quietly depart the scene unnoticed long after the party has grown old leaving only some machinic semblance of ourselves still going through the motions. That we shall at very last do X instead of Y and recuperate the whole, even if this means a sacrifice of intelligence and admission of our simplicity and limits before a machine that once started cannot stop. That we shall discover the predictable walking dead to know far more than the apparent hero trapped on the same conveyor belt. This is going to be a very strange century indeed, one of grinding ceaseless horrors and endless stacked momentary reversals of assumptions about the nature of intelligence, mindless repetition and mimesis and the human all too human things we produce and use to bind each other. I hope you’re ready for it.
[1] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2013, pp. 130-5.
[2] Manshuud’s three-part cycle of Geser and his two sons dictated to Zhamtsarano in1905-6 was last printed in full in parallel Russian and Buryat text by Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, zap. Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano u sakzitelya M. Imegeeva, 2 ch, BION, Ulan-Ude, 1961-4. The first third on Geser exists in English translation: Yelizaveta O. Khundaeva, Geser: The Buryat Heroic Epic. Ridero Smart Publishing System, eBook, 2017. Some of Manshuud’s epics, including a somewhat different three-party Geser cycle, were also fortuitously recorded by Jeremiah Curtin, A Journey to Southern Siberia: The Mongols, their Religion and their Myths, Little, Brown, Boston, 1909 available online here
[3] The ogre Zuudag Shara is killed by Geser and his two sons once each: Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, lines 7098-210, 12665-13879, 18126-20430. Dan’yal Shara is also killed three times in total – once by Geser and twice by his son Khürin Altay: lines 9390-984, 14881-15370, 18915-20430. Dan’yal Shara also appears as the main antagonist in Zhamtsarano’s recording of Manshuud’s Yerensey and Zuudag Shara also appears in another of Manshuud’s epics Bukhyn Khara Khübüün. One wonders how many times over the years that these two stock monsters were killed by various stock heroes in Manshuud’s recitations.
[4] Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, lines 11182-524.
[5] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 135.
[6] Sadly, there is very little on Jangar in English, French, German or even much in Russian that has been written for a long time. I am currently working on remedying this. On Soviet understandings of the land of Bumba see: Tsendiin Damdinsuren, 1956 introduction to the 1958 Mongol Script edition of Jangar. Reprinted in <<Jangar>>-un Nayiragulqa Kumis, Janggar, Öbür Monggol-un Arad-un Keblel-ün Qoriy-a, Kökeqota, 2018, pp. 3-5. See the classic study of the radical potentiality of folktales and millenarianisms: Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 Vols, trans. Neville PAICE et al, MIT Press, Boston MA, 1995.
[7] Jonathan Ratcliffe, “The Messianic Geser: From Religion to Communism (Messianskiy Geser: Ot Religioznogo k Kommunisticheskomu), Vestnik BNTs SO RAN 2.26: 67-73, trans, I. M. Imenokhoeva. Available online in English here. What is most astounding is that my friend Ivetta Imenokhoeva turned out to be a close relative of one of the reciters mentioned in this paper, Apollon Toroev. Her father thought that this was especially amusing.
[8] A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study, Cambridge University Press, London and Melbourne, 1976, esp. pp. 230-6.
[9] W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature, Dover Publications, New York, 1957, p. 342.
[10] Bart Besamusca and Erik Kooper, “The Study of the Roman Van Walewein,” in Keith Busby et al eds, Arthurian Literature XVII: Originality and Tradition in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein, D. S. Brewer, Rochester NY, 1999. esp. pp 13-5.
[11] The “killer joke” refers of course to a famous Monty Python skit about a man who writes a joke so funny it kills anyone who reads it and its subsequent weaponization in WW2 against the Germans An episode of the 1970s British comedy program The Goodies, “Kung Fu Capers” – a cartoonish string of sight-gags about Lancashire, sausages and kung fu (and more than a little black and yellow face) – is infamous for the fact that it caused an old man to laugh himself to death while watching it. His widow wrote to the writers/actors thanking for making his last moments so happy. The Stoic philosopher Chryssipus is said to have died laughing watching a drunken donkey trying to eat figs.
[12] See this highly-insightful video on the originality of Ultima Underworld and the ways in which its final message of abjuring worldly acquisition in order to embody certain virtues echoes medieval Christian Romance quests such as that for the Holy Grail: Michael Snow, “Ultima Underworld Retrospective,” 27 February 2021, Youtube.
[13] See this video in which the unfairness and moon logic of King’s Quest 5 is strongly (and humorously) emphasised: The Space Quest Historian, “King’s Quest 5: A Fair and Balanced Retrospective,” 26 February, Youtube The section on the rat, cat and boot starts at about 12 minutes in.
[14] Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica, p. 58. Online here.
[15] Chingis Aitmatov, The Day Lasts Longer Than a Hundred Years, trans. John FRENCH, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN, 1988, esp. pp. 140-1.
[16] The history of the Stalinist era obsession with “national epics” as an integral part of nation-building and its collapse into paranoia at their “reactionary” content is a very complex one, motivated by political one-upmanship in Buryatia and then later Zhdanovite paranoia about “rootless cosmopolitanism” and comparative literature in the Turkic ASSRs. See: Jonathan Ratcliffe, Geser On Trial: The Language of the 1948 Condemnation and 1953 Redemption of the Buryat National Epic. Paper delivered at the 2018 Association of Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies Conference, Boston, 7 December. Available online.
[17] Yevgeniy Khamaganov, “Ust’-ordynskiy otvet na buryatskiy vopros,” ARD, 17 November 2015, http://asiarussia.ru/blogs/9948/ RFE/RL, “Russian Journalist Dies in Unexplained Circumstances,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 17 2017, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-journalist-dies-unexplained-circumstances/28375653.html R. Dugarova, “Prosti, chto ne uberegli,” ARD, 22 March 2018, http://asiarussia.ru/persons/19237/
[18] Jeremiah Curtin, A Journey to Southern Siberia, p. 141. Cf. Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, lines 1869-2759.
[19] My translation. Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, lines 7180-7200.
[20] On the repeated formula of characters being nailed to trees and mutilated in Manshuud’s epics: Jeremiah Curtin, A Journey to Southern Siberia, pp. 219, 231, 254, 280, 299; cf. Mikhail P. Khomonov, Abay Geser Khubun, lines 7175-94, 10210-340, 21270-300.
[21] Terry Dowling, Wormwood, Aphelion Publications, Melbourne, 1991, p. 111.
[22] Only 300 copies were originally printed of Wormwood. I have copy 97. It has never been reprinted compared with the rest of Dowling’s work and I am yet to find any electronic copies online. However, if readers are interested, I might be able to help them find a copy. This book needs to be read.
[23] Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Robert Graves, Penguin Classics, London, 1956, p. 144. Book VI, lines 640f.
[24] Ibid, pp. 27-8. Book I, lines 72-8.
[25] Ibid, p. 24.
[26] Ibid, pp. 82-6. Book III, lines 600-762.
[27] Ibid, p. 147. Book VI, lines 770-6.
[28] My translation. Grettis Saga, Chapter 35, lines 93-108. Available in English and Old Norse here.
[29] Ibid, lines 139-40.
Mechanical Owl 