Crackland:The Land of Fissures

A.G. (c)October, 2013

A Novelistic Phenomenology

● It is a writing which is “present”, is “presented”, and is a “presentation”

● It is a self-presentation of one's history-in-the-making, on a physiological basis

● The author uses a method of physio-imaging to access the “charges” of the physiological masses which form his experience, and presents them in text

The Authorial Function

● In the novelistic phenomenology, the author “inserts” himself wholly into the text, but it is more than mere autobiography

● It is phenomenological, it is made up of the presentation of the author's mental acts and their contents

● The author is a messenger of experience

The Baron Complex

● The Baron Complex is a historical illness, part of the effect of a people “retelling” its own history in narration

● The novelistic phenomenology IS a self-narrative, and the Baron is the figure of the Authorial Function

● The Baron is the “presenter” in the text

The Messenger Boy

● The Messenger Boy, or Boy from the Cemetery, is the bringer of messages within the novel's story, i.e. he brings the Baron's missives to the characters, and therefore to the reader via the characters

● He uses lines of transmission which pass through the walls of the Rooms the characters meet in

The Doctor's Office

● This is the main room where characters meet, usually in twos, i.e. the Dr. and his patient, the Boy who is thought to have the Baron Complex

● They do psychological and philosophical experiments using a wide range of technologies, projectors, phonographs, radios, etc.

The Dream Assembly

● The Dream Assembly is an assembly which writes the dreams and realities of people on earth (within the novel)

● Their main representative is the Baron, who then “enacts” the decisions made in the assembly via the Messenger Boy

● The Mother of Dreams is a kind of “symbol” or “spirit” of this Assembly

Geo-Grammatical Planes

● 1. Dream Assembly – Beyond Elsewhere● 2. Saint-Elsewhere (not-place)● 3. Crackland – Land of Fissures● 4. City-form – City-Of, i.e. City Template● 5. “City” of the City, i.e. Montreal of the City,

Venice of the City, etc.● 6. House of Habit and Memory● 7. The Room + its contents, i.e. Objects

The History-Project

● Characters Alphonse, Evelyn, Professor Phillip Soutine, Dr. Kropotkin, and J.G. Dufray come together to work on The History-Project in Montreal, Quebec

● Main Aim: to solve the historical conditioning process which has made present-day Montrealers suffer anxiety

● The anxiety is historical

Historical Therapy

● Dr. Kropotkin is a retired psychiatrist who comes to Montreal from St-Petersburg, Russia

● His research was mainly on historical therapy and on the Baron Complex

● His techiques include Physio-Imaging and Dream Genesis, which are a means to the self-presentation of one's historicity

Habitance

● Evelyn is Chair of Philosophy at Harmonia University in Montreal

● Her work is on Habitance, the quality of being-in-the-world of the Habitant

● She sees the Capitulation of Montreal as causing a kind of “capitulation neurosis” guided by secrecy, inauthenticity, control fear, forced secularization (the forbidden religion, latent patriotism, and depatrialization)

Alphonse Lemoyne

● Alphonse is the main character● He is a painter, a.k.a. “Painter A.”● The novel begins with his overdose and

subsequent coma● He suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and

substance abuse disorder● He is, in principle, meant to be confused with

the Baron from the Dream Assembly

Professor Phillip Soutine

● Dr. P. Soutine's wife is in the final stages of cancer

● His daughter Stefani, a teenager still, falls in love with J.G., twice her age

● He was Evelyn's adviser and brings everyone together for the History-Project, a project funded by the government

All actions are History-projects

● Any goal-oriented behavior can be seen as a “project”, as “tasks” and as “work”

● Every “project” is a work of history in the sense that work, being a sequence of felt experiences, is what History is made of

● History is therefore depicted as comprised solely of individual experiences, the rest being mere descriptions of experiences

Experience is First

● The Author's own “private underworld”, that is, his inward experience of composing texts outwardly, is emphasized and used as content or material for the novel

● The Reader's experience is also included as part of the same experience of the novel, creating the First Encounter

Characters as Political Prisoners

● The notion of being “exiled in one's own homeland”

● They are freed by The History-Project, which is essentially a total failure

● By the end of the novel, they each transcend their own prison-states, through the work that they do in The History-Project

The Notion of Passport

● “Fifteen minutes to Crackland,” is a chorus running throughout the novel

● To enter The Land of Fissures, one needs a passport, which must be a substance

● Substace for substance, passport for entry into Crackland, always fifteen minutes away

Characters as Real Individuals

● The novel as excavation in real-time of the becoming of the novel itself, a deep logic of cultural memory constituted in novelistic types, topics, and textures

● These historical forms as “physical memory” are “recovered” by the writer as architect and archaeologist

● Ergo, character histories are real histories of their becoming, presented as the novel is composed

A True Historical Novel

● The novelist as journalistic chronicler of national history

● A kind of journalism which is essentially phenomenological, a subjective and “critical journalism”

● The history of Montreal as object of research in The History-Project is its real history, all workers are part of the national “History-Project”

The Seigniorial System

● Montreal was once a Seigneurie granted to the Saint-Sulpicians who founded the Seminary of Montreal

● Montreal “Of-the-City” is a formal “template” of sorts, as historical figure

● Another figure, that of the Seigniorial Lord or “Seigneur” is portrayed in the novel as a kind of “ghostly apparition”, a characterological remnant of the past

The House of Habit and Memory

● Characters inhabit rooms, this being the first plane of their immediate existence

● The novel is a sequence of scenarios within different Rooms, also templates

● Each room is within a House, i.e. The House of Habit and Memory

● Action in the novel “needs” a space, ex. The Clinic, the Prison, the Manor-house, etc., to take place

● The Boy forges the action, making it possible through lines of his physical system of message transmission

Karak La'han

● Karak La'han is used in the novel as a sort of avatar of Crackland

● Its employment is purely to suggest a merely “tonal” reading of the script

● The novelistic phenomenology itself becomes nothing but a string of sounds

● The physical sounds are reference-points for the re-enactment of real histories

The Novel as Manual

● The novel itself can be seen as an abstract handbook or Manual for navigation once one enters Crackland

● Skills in cartography are a requisite● Substance for substace, access is never

granted, it is essentially a form of “Trade”● One is never “in” Crackland, one only

“Encounters” it or makes “Contact”

The Land of Fissures

● Essentially depicted as floating land-forms in an imaginary space

● To make Contact with these settlements, a platform is needed

● These “passports” are dwelling-places or physical objects, abstract contents of the novelistic phenomenology

● They are essentially physio-images

Bio-Documentary Evidence

● Historiography represented through retinal physio-imaging

● Novelistic motifs seen as a tectonics of real periodicities, Crackland, or C-land, becoming the meeting-place of “transmitter” and “receiver” of the Message

● Rooms are self-calculating Chambers as though self-subsiding bodies (Compressed with possessive power)

The Invention of Metaprojection

● Through Metaprojection, Councils, Houses, and Assemblies are not bound to existence in Crackland

● The Main Assembly, for instance, is a material place, has a real location through Atmospheric Diffusion

● Meaning that the Assembly and its Officials are encrypted digital-atomically

● In essence, they are disintegrated and reintegrated after each Meeting

More on Atmospheric Diffusion

● Therefore, the Dream Assembly is invisible yet concretely real, scattered atomically across the fissured field of Crackland

● Any single molecule can exist anywhere in C-land, undetectably because the molecules take on provisory elemental natures

● i.e. a Chieftain may take the form of a rock or enamel molecule somewhere in C-land

The Evasion of Bureaucracy

● Metaprojection is how Cracklanders circumvent bureaucratic processes

● Decisions are effectuated immediately when the Council closes, is adjourned

● Council decisions are performed through reintegration: changes made atomically, therefore immediately, without the need for bureaucracy, only Metaprojection

Dr. Briggs-Buxby

● The main Contact is through the Boy and the Doctor in the Dr.'s Office

● The experiments performed there cause essential Contact between Office and Assembly through action and speech

● The time of disintegration of the Assemblies is concealed so that Saboteurs cannot know of the transport

● In fact, the whole operation is highly secretive, and special encryption and codification is required

The Structure of Eleven

● In Crackland, there are essentially eleven main territories

● Crackland, however, has no definite number● Eleven is used to indicate its nondecimal

nature, not ten and not a twelve-tone gradient● Eleven as absurd combination, securing a

sense of the number's arbitrariness

The Essence of the Novel

● The main concept of this novel is that of displacement, irony, inversion, and reference

● It was meant as a catalogue of healthy types and ways of reaching them

● Therefore, the characters go through the process of a historical therapy, via The History-Project

Furthermore...

● The novel was principally conceived as an elaborate plot existing solely to bring the Canadian reader to a starting-point of reflection on his History

● Paradoxes are presented as a means of subversion, the idea of being “exiled in one's own homeland”, or of the characters being political prisoners inside the historical narrative

The Author's Task

● To envision the organic text of the individual as diversified, positional negotiation of exchange technique

● To create an Axis of oriented Contact: as associative program which counterfeits the usual, formal motive derived in limit protection of systematic disassembly figures

The Organic Text

● The novel is a physiologic stamp of graphic realism in complication

● A redirection of assembly-line, ritualistic encounter in projected scan-path routines of modernized compression

● To posit contextual and thematic invariance: the individual stipulates departure only to meet uneventful stasis in the luring power of the same

Genosense

● Characters are defined genetically, their genesis in the author's mind is presented factually, as self-history

● Genosense is a “genetic sense” akin to the schematic, behavioral potential of the genomic code

● Orbito-retinal and other physiologically “charged” masses, i.e. Peak events in bioelectricity, concur to make genosense visible / interpretable

The Author's Method

● Atomic personality: room-scripts tracing a generative plot pucture, a marked Number of passive return equations

● Target variation: an ellipsis into plastic reproduction, constitutive of decisive and charged reading-faculties

● Improvement: the Individual succumbs to the grain of his Habitance

Empathetic Participation of Reader

● Orbito-retinal matrimony: sympathetic participation orders scientific theatre and individuality collapses

● Endearment found here: designed to know death ceremoniously, to translate absence in serial calculus of moving focal-points in cyclical representation

● Bio-documentary evidence revealed in situated meetings orienting contractual habitance as systematic complication of intensive, elastic dimension

A Simple Plan

● The complexity of the theory behind the novel is merely virtual

● For all intents and purposes, the novel is entirely a work of fiction

● The pseudo-scientific basis of the theory, however, makes it seem believable

● Therefore, the reader is tricked further into his own conclusions, narrated to himself

The Anthem

● The character J.G. Dufray composes electroacoustic soundscapes, applying his own theories of the Anthem

● The Anthem is both appendix and key to person-to-person Encounters

● The Individual requires only his own reflective function and passes in supplying self-presentation necessarily

● The Anthem is inherited Habitance

Conditions of Empathetic Participation

● a) Melodic expression● b) Transitional aesthetic function● c) Orientation to limit substance in market horizon● This is also the historical method of cognizing

rational exhaustion through paradoxical opposition

● The result is an enclosure on truth, a schedule of influence through redirection back to empathetic participation as countercontrol mechanism to face endurance in deterministic model of existence, i.e. essential prison-states

Prison-States and Their Transcendence

● Possession emerges and must translate having into corporeal unification requisite for the Individual to find a curative intermission in the formal and scriptural dynamics of the text

● Or else the Reader is essentially lost in reading, and forgets his own existence, himself “exiled in his own home”

Extended Notice for Laypersons

● The novel itself remains unfinished● In essence, it consists of over a thousand

pages of “Notes Towards a Novel”, which transcribe the process and experience of writing the novel

● The mental acts and their contents involved in writing were presented to the reader in the form of fictional motifs

A Theoretical Novel

● In principle, the Crackland novel, a.k.a. “The History-Project”, can be written in any number of ways

● The only rule is to follow the guidelines defined in this presentation

● The rest is history● i.e. Reader and Writer sound the age-old

Anthem of unanimous creative reflection

In Conclusion...

● There is no novel● The only novel possible is the self-narration

the Reader makes to himself, via his mental acts and their contents

● The Author is effaced, his work also● His Task was merely to exist passionately as

Individual, possibly transmitting this passion to his Readers

A Cautionary Note

● There can be no true transcendence from deterministic prison-states

● We are all political prisoners in our own homes

● British Imperial Colonialism has scarified the social tissue, causing a character depression of the Habitant people, marked by persecution anxiety, chronic insecurity, and the trauma of identity violation through martial imposition. The doubly colonized Habitant psyche is polarized

● The only remedy is the decentralization of the monarchic powers towards a community-based truly liberal democracy, with a laissez-faire capitalistic economy

● Sovereignty for this people is the only viable option

● Self-determination and self-governance is the fundamental historical therapy, anything else is servility and domination