Zetetical Society Meeting Notes

I hate the “many-worlds interpretation” passionately.  That’s the theory that quantum reality endlessly forks into infinite universes based on what happens with the something something something and a waveform and quantum mechanics and probability. I don’t object to the science behind it because I don’t understand the science for the life of me, and I’m not qualified to have an opinion. I mistrust it’s use in pop culture or pop spirituality because it seems to be an easy way to dismiss reality while sounding both spiritual and scientific at the same time. “It’s, like, infinite, man.” In most literature where it appears, I am immediately suspicious.

Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths is my favorite work where this comes up, but it comes up in an artistic context. It’s work itself is very short and I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll skip discussing it in detail if anyone wants to read it, but consider this quote:

I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses– simultaneously–all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.

This is a good literary device if you don’t depend on there actually being infinite worlds, but I’ve heard this bandied about as the very way the universe works and I call BS on the whole thing. Don’t agree with me? Fine. In one of the multiple worlds, your mom and I are on Channel 7 discussing why you are wrong with a still alive William F. Buckley, Jr. That’s the most palatable example of why applying the hypothesis to everyday life on a human scale totally misses the mark. There are far less palatable examples left as an exercise to the reader.

Enter into the genre Iain Banks’ latest novel, Transition. It’s an Iain M. Banks novel in the US, thus branding it Sci Fi, but he’s surprisingly left the M. off in the UK, branding it as mainstream. If you know anything about Iain Banks, I picked it up because of the present middle initial M. in the author’s name, thinking it was his latest Culture novel since one is due. The Culture is Bank’s massive space utopia of really, really cool people who inhabit most of the rest of the galaxy. Transition is actually a novel about a group of assassins and operators who travel between the Multiple Worlds of the aforementioned interpretation altering history in them in various devious ways to spread the influence of “the Concern.”

That’s almost painful to type.

It’s also not very far from the plot of the Culture novels, which tend to run along the lines of “Fabulously oversexed super agent So and So travels through the entire universe at amazing speeds with her amazingly smart super robot weapon friend to save absolutely everything from something totally amazingly bad that would happen on a rather large scale but for the fabulousness of the Culture and their ability to get their oversexed super agent or maybe the robot friend on the scene. And there’s torture involved.”

It’s a credit to Banks’ skill as a writer that he can pull engrossing novels out of plots like that. This book opens with the murder of the narrator and is told in chapters divided into sections that relate a particular character’s experience at a particular moment. In the beginning, there’s nothing to suggest a relation between the stories, and the narrative seems disjointed. Characters “flit” between parallel realities and their stories are told in different time frames with different degrees of backstory. That’s where Banks skill comes into play: the narrative evokes the confusion of many worlds at many times and then he masterfully brings them together into a coherent reality as stories converge and the real tale of what’s going on emerges sharply from out of what seemed incoherent.The personal becomes the political and a story of the resistance to the Concern emerges.

Banks’ usual themes of corrupt power, resistance, utopia, torture and madness are present. It just wouldn’t be the same without them. After a divorce, he was accused a few years back of losing his edge when nothing really horrible happened to or was done by one of his protagonists. I guess things are going well for him again.

So, Banks tackles the multiple worlds genre and seemingly pulls it off, not because the hypothesis somehow works in his hands, but because much of what he writes is about how humanity is very broken on levels ranging from the personal to the universal scale and what he thinks could make it right. Ultimately, no matter how goofy the plot might sound, it allows him to focus his rage about injustice and power while remaining both so appalled and so hopeful. I don’t know if he actually needs the multiple worlds, but in his hands they become a device for political possibility, an ultimate way of saying “things are not right, but could be.”

i just finished Graham Robb’s Parisians, An Adventure History of Paris. It’s an unusual book which narrates key moments in Parisian history from the 18th century to today through vignettes told in an unconventional style. In some cases: Marie-Antoinette getting lost fleeing the Louvre and missing the rest of the royal family in a wrong turn, or a retelling of Napoleon’s diary of his first sexual encounter, the narrative conceals who exactly it’s subject is until their role in history has to be clarified and describes their relationship to Paris in a novel way. In others, the story juxtaposes interesting characters and subjects, say a photographer with an evolving French street scene. or Marcel Proust with the Metro.

As an adventure history per se, it’s not successful. Alberto Santos-Dumont is too absent for it really to be an adventure history of Paris. And some of the episodes, especially ones which try to cover large modern French topics, May 1968 or the suburbs of Paris today, are less successful than stories which focus on a smaller aspect of history that was previously unfamiliar. But there’s a lot of rewarding and fascinating material, much of it new to this reader. There’s the story of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the inspector of quarries who created the vast underground catacombs and tunnels systems which hold up the city, a city originally built on and at risk of falling into the shaky rubble of the stone yards which it was literally mined out of. In a fitting end, his final resting place is among the huge deposits of skeletal remains in the municipal ossuary he created. There’s Fulcanelli, the 20th century alchemist who was hunted by the Nazis and Allies after essentially predicting the Atom bomb.  There’s even Francois Mitterand, not as the older President, but as a younger, ambitious politician faking an assassination attempt on himself.

Where the book is enormously successful is in it’s ability to relate very personal lives and ambitions to the much larger hero behind each scene, the city itself. It cannot be a comprehensive book because it tells its story through individual lives, but it really left me wishing for more to fill in the gaps.