OK, I guess this is obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me until recently.
Nonexistent books
Here’s the background: The other day we went to the Grolier Book Club, which had an exhibition on lost, incomplete, and imaginary books. The fun gimmick was that they made mock-ups of physical books representing various books that no longer exist or never were. Examples included a lost play of Shakespeare, a never-finished novel by Sylvia Plath, the complete version of Kubla Khan, a monograph by Sherlock Holmes, the legendary Necronomicon, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, the code of the Bene Gesserit, and that famous original work which is a word-for-word remake of Don Quixote. I was pleased to see a copy of the “original” Garden of Forking Paths but disappointed not to see anything by Nathan Zuckerman, and really disappointed not to see some version of The Book of Gold, but I understand, as there are so many lost, incomplete, and imaginary books that any library of them would overflow beyond the space allotted to the exhibition.
When I was at the Grolier looking at these real objects representing unreal books–actually, the objects were just the outsides of the books, I’m pretty sure they weren’t filled with text on their pages–I was thinking that there must be a wikipedia entry with a long list of famous books that don’t exist. Wikipedia has its flaws (see also here and here), but . . . a list of fake books, this seems like it would be right in Wikipedia’s wheelhouse, kind of like if you want the plot of every Simpsons episode or a list of all the flavors of Pop Tarts.
Some googling led to the wikipedia page for “fictional book”. It’s not as comprehensive as I was expecting, but it does include The Grasshopper Lies Heavy—I’d forgotten about that one! Wikipedia also has this list, which is even more disappointing.
What’s up, Wikipedia? I was gonna say that the editors are so laser-focused on modern pop culture that they can’t be bothered to collect a list of old-fashioned books . . . but then I checked out the page on “lost literary works”, which offers an impressively comprehensive list starting with antiquity and going through the centuries since then, ending with this:
Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works were destroyed in 2017 after his death, fulfilling his last will; his computer hard drive containing his unfinished works was deliberately crushed by a steamroller.
The list of lost works includes novels by L. Frank Baum, plays by James Joyce, August Strindberg, and Leon Trotsky (!), treatises by Adam Smith, all sorts of things. It’s a list worth reading. Wikipedia also has an entry on unfinished creative work, which includes things like Mozart’s requiem and Schubert’s eighth symphony as well as various books.
The alzabo
As noted above, when I saw nonexistent books, I thought of The Book of Gold, and that made me think of the alzabo, that fictional animal who, if it eats a person, will ingest his or her personality as well, and then if you kill the alzabo, prepare it in a certain way, and swallow its extract, you will retain the memories of the person who’d been eaten.
Seeing the exhibition of the books gave me the sudden understanding that the alzabo is, very directly, a metaphor for literature:
– When, as an author, you pour your memories, ideas, and emotions into a book, that is like feeding yourself to the alzabo. As Paul Gallico said, “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.”
– When, as a reader, you dive into a book, this is like eating the alzabo. The characters, themes, and events of the book become part of your memory.
In the Book of the New Sun, there are times when Severian is overwhelmed by the memories he’s absorbed from Thecla, and there’s a point where he gets lost among the accumulated memories of all the past autarchs. When I read that, I recall thinking this was implausible (even in the science-fiction context of a willing suspension of disbelief)–how would there be room in his head for the memories of thousands of people?–but then I realized that my head contains memories of many thousands of books that I’ve read (not to mention TV shows and various other story-delivering mechanisms), so, yeah, that’s how it works. The alzabo is a beautifully poetic representation of this two-stage transfer, first from author to book, then from book to reader.
In one of history’s greatest fish-out-of-water stories, a retired Hollywood actor became president of the United States. Ronald Reagan was notorious for confusing his memories of movies with reality–but, at some level, all of us can relate to this, as we all “know” fictional characters who seem realer than people we know, we remember fictional stories that are scarier and more tearjerking than real events in our lives, and so forth.
Connection to statistics
And then, writing this, I realize that something similar happens in statistics! Measurements are performed that abstract complex reality into “data,” which are then analyzed by the researcher, who uses these data to reconstruct the world. Wow. I’d never thought of it that way before.
I’d never heard of an “alzabo”. Your description of them reminded me of the giant mutated crab monsters from Roger Corman’s “Attack of the Crab Monsters”. After eating a person, the giant crabs acquire the knowledge and memories of their prey, and can speak telepathically in their voices, the better to entice new victims with. A quick google seems to show that alzabos are a much later literary invention; perhaps the author(s) knew of the crabs?
Gregory:
I have no idea if Gene Wolfe was a Roger Corman fan, but it definitely seems like a possibility!
Credit for that aspect of Crab Monsters should probably go to the great Charles B Griffith, writer of A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors and MANY others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Griffith
The idea of acquiring personality through consumption was a recurring plot element of iZombie, leading to an excellent in-joke where Matchbox Twenty (fronted by the other Rob Thomas) was eaten by Zombies who are later seen in the aftermath strumming guitars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Thomas_(musician)#Television
Venus on the Half-Shell is a very special case of a real imaginary novel. I hope it was represented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_on_the_Half-Shell
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masked_Marauders
Re: your ‘connection to statistics’ (tech freelancer James Furbush said) : “”Scientists use the really-existing data to feel along and interact with the really-existing world, engaging data not as a representation, but as an instrument to help facilitate their empirical thinking,” he explained. “Like the cane, data is used as an extension of their senses, with their understanding of the world being dynamically coupled with the massive streams of data found in data-driven science.”” I like the idea that data is an extension of our senses (like a cane). That means without prior theory data is just a stream of numbers …
Nazi Literature in The Americas, but Roberto Bolano (sorry for lack of Spanish orthography), is a series of fictional essays about fictional works of fiction.
Fun fact: I once found this book shelved in my local library with a Library of Congress number for literary criticism. (I included a note about this when I returned the book.)
Kyle:
Categories for genres of books do not always make sense. In the bestseller lists, Charlie Brown, Pogo, and the Bible are labeled as nonfiction. You could maybe make an argument for one or two of these, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone could put all three of them in the “nonfiction” category!
A rather Harold Bloom sort of idea, where every writer is reacting to the writers they’ve read.
Milorad Pavic’s “Dictionary of the Khazars” presents itself as a later edition of an earlier work printed in three different languages, and which had some copies which would kill you if you read up to a certain point. However, it also contains entries from later than that first edition. To the extent that there is a narrative, a recurring element is various avatars of Satan acting to destroy work that could assist in putting the dictionary together, due to it having some larger Kabbalistic significance. The actual Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is more entertaining and comprehensible.
Speaking of non-existent pieces of fiction, Gene Wolfe has an excellent short story “Parkroads” which is a review of a fictional film. Reminds me of the Borges story “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” which is also a review of a non-existent book. I know Wolfe read Borges and you can certainly see the similarities in many of Wolfe’s stories.
What a beautiful topic. I’m not that literary, but will try to look at the links.
1. I think a lot about lost books from the Roman Empire, as I am chromosomally challenged. Presumably the best stuff was statistically more likely to get passed down (more copying). But there’s probably also some vagaries of chance that means some great literature or histories from Classical Rome/Greece was also lost. I sometimes fantasize about a Dead Sea Scrolls type finding of lost tragedies and the like.
2. I guess you can think of Fermat’s Last Theorem as a sort of lost book. I mean I would Bayesian bet that he confused himself when saying he had a proof. But it would still be a hoot if someone solved it without the need for all the fancy tools that Andrew Wiles used, with a Euler-style solution.
Where is “The Book of Gold” from? I know the rest, but not that one!
From chapter 6 of The Shadow of the Torturer.