Mathias Énard: Compass - Network Analysis of Connection in the Novel

Well, I did something 'atrocious' with Compass by Mathias Énard. As soon as I started reading this book, I began to wonder how his demonstration of 'everything is connected' will look like in a visualization. The picture you see is the so called network analysis of the connections made in this book.

Few pointers:

1. All the items which are used in the book are broken in to 11 categories: Character, Concept, Entity, Event, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, People, Person. A person is a historical figure, a character is a character out of fictional writing, Event is for example a battle and so on.

2. Each class of item above are color coded.

3. Relations or connections you see in the picture are limited to the connections made in the book, that is to say, no connections are made from out of the book. In other words, we could find more relations than those that are made here external to the book from historical sources, but those are not used.

4. Size of a circle (called Nodes) represents the magnitude of its relation (called degree), or how much it is connected to other nodes.

Notes

1. Tools used - Gephi, YED, and good old N++
2. Potential imporovements abound in this representation, as for instance: (a) labelling the edges giving some clue to what actually connects two nodes, (b) bisecting the nodes in two broad super classes representing Orient and Occident, (c) assigning geospatial coordinates to the nodes based on the location and then overlaying this diagram on a map and so on.

Link to higher resolution drawing: Link

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‘Searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause...’: Reading László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó

Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil . . . 'Now he is standing up," he wrote in a deepening reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. 'He scratches his groin and stretches. He walks around the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up.’ He scribbled feverishly and was practically seeing everything that was happening over there, and he knew, was deadly certain, that from then on this was how it would be. He realized all those years of arduous, painstaking work has finally borne fruit: he had finally become the master of a singular art that enabled him not only to describe a world whose eternal unremitting progress in one direction required such mastery but also—to a certain extent—he could even intervene in the mechanism behind an apparently chaotic swirl of events!
[…]
He adjusted the blanket across his shoulders and leaned over the journal again. ‘Either I have gone mad or, by God’s mercy, this morning I have discovered that I am the wielder of mesmerizing power. I find I can control the flow of events around me using nothing more than words…’

So runs the thoughts of the Doctor in the last chapter of the novel, titled ‘The Circle Closes’. We have seen this Doctor earlier, sitting forever at the window, watching everything that goes on outside and unremittingly, systematically writing down the events to the last detail. Now, Krasznahorkai’s name has always been associated with Apocalypse, but this then is the lifting of the seventh seal, this moment in which the act of writing turns reflexively on itself, when the Doctor shifts his normal mode of writing, of noting down every movement, every change in living and non-living things, from people getting out to pee to changes in weather, sketches of drainage varying with the rain to the dog standing in the rain outside, he changes this mode of journal keeping to a narrative, the very same narrative we have been reading. But earlier, he mentions what drives him to this superhuman task of observing and recording everything,

He decided to watch everything very carefully and to record it constantly, all with the aim of not missing the smallest detail, because he realized with a shock that to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order. However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn't afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.

And who is this Doctor? Other characters in the novel are decrepit, filling their squalid existence with hopelessness – but there is a constant dream in them, dream of getting out from this hell-hole of village, if not in all characters but in most of them. But the doctor is lower still, except for the notes all that he does is to gulp pálinka and smoke. He steps outside just once, to replenish his stock of brandy, and ends up in the hospital. But then it simply cannot be anyone else to whom this role can be assigned. Can it?

There are other reversals still, events which in the first appearance present as events of great significance, only to turn out in the end as part of a dark insignificant hokum, nails in the coffin of this elegy of meaningless incidents, for this writing is not even an elegy over a lost, irreparable world but the pure derision at any attempt towards such an elegy. The novel opens with one of the characters waking from his sleep listening to bells tolling and breaking his head at figuring out the source of this sound, imagining this to be the harbinger of something grave, finding the origin of which the doctor considers as ‘compensation for the miseries of his entire life’. Guided by this dream Doctor carries his ailing body towards the source of this ‘mysterious bell’, only to discover a homunculus – a tiny, huddled, mad man – ringing it in a ruined chapel.

This methodical raising of tempo, throwing in a bite of something akin to hope, only to drop the reader and the miserable characters back to an even lower level, happens as a political drama running through the novel as well. The villagers sleeplessly wait for the Messiah, someone who in the beginning is thought to be dead, and so when at last they learn of his whereabouts, his arrival, it is resurrection. Irimias, who one character thinks of as someone ‘who has risen from his own ashes’, another as a man capable of ‘holding together things that just fall apart when we are in charge’. The poor villagers jubilantly gives him all their savings in return for wonderful future outside the village and follows him, like a herd of sheep, for he is the prophet – this Jeremiah who turns out in the end to be a criminal used by the authorities to spy on the villagers. He scatters the villagers, members of of a former collective, into various places enrolling all of them without their knowledge as ‘assets’ for spying.

These movements forward and backward is the general scheme of the book. Twelve chapters divided into two sections of six each represents the movement of tango; in the first section chapters are numbered forward, whereas in the second it runs backward.

So what is this whole thing about in an age about which the author once said, ‘an age which thinks no more of a dramatic ending than the Great Bulldozer thinks about a particular shell as it grinds up tens and tens of thousands of shells while driving along the sea shore speckled with herons drowned in oil’, besides the peripheral plots of betrayal, cheating, loss of hope? One thing is certain, in the same interview from which the previous quote is taken, he makes the following remark which almost sounds like a ‘manifesto’:

“My critical remarks do not mean that I think or have ever thought that literature could directly interfere with the workings of the society it criticises or rejects. The impact that a writer can exert over his or her own society is far more subtle, almost indecipherably complex and indirect, working through a number of transformations. I even doubt whether at such a degree of remoteness you can still call this an impact and an influence. In Oriental cultures, this question has found an almost radical solution: art had absolutely nothing to do with the direct, palpable reality of its own age. On the contrary, real artists were not “members” of their own society, in the same way that saints never are. This way, the art they produced did not exist as an integrated, definable, graspable part of society. Instead, it found its place in an emphatically spiritual space which nonetheless was still perceived as a part of reality.”

Doesn’t that amount to saying an attempt at finding logical, conceptual, systematic structure in his work is bound to go against the stated purpose – of not allowing the work to be assimilated, appropriated, and shall we say, commodified? I have seen attempts at finding logical structure in Melancholy fail. I just dropped the idea. But this work, even though it moves effortlessly between real and unreal,--think of the spider's work--lends itself better to a conceptual framework. One has to assume, looking at the chronological order of writing Melancholy and Sátántangó, that the author has perfected his art further.

But at the end, the glimmer of hope lies in what the Doctor suggests: 'the best he could do was to use his memory to fend off the sinister, underhanded process of decay.'

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"Crisis is the default state of history"

"He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos,to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials— into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of some day finding his way back home."

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"But of course a man can never...

...really liberate himself from anything, he leaves the prison into which he was propagated and born only at the instant of his death. We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can't cope with this world we're done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we're living in our own world, not in some previous world, one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us. Beginning with our earliest flickers of intelligence we have to explore intently our chances of making this world, that's been put on us like a worn, shabby suit of used clothes much too tight or much too large but in any case a shabby and torn and ragged and stinking outfit handed to us, as it were, off the world's rack, we must explore the whole surface of our world and its subsurface, and keep probing it deeper and deeper, so as to discover our chances of making this world which is not our world, our own after all, our entire existence is nothing but concentrating on such chances and on how, in what way, we're to change this world which is not ours, ultimately to change it, so Roithamer. And the moment of this change, such a moment is followed by the next and so forth, must always be the right moment, so Roithamer. So that we can say at last, at the end of our life, that we have lived at least for a time in our own world and not in the given world of our parents. But ninety percent of us die without ever having lived in a world of their own, only and always in a world that was ready-made, presented and adapted to them by their parents' generation, never, please note, in no way and never in their own world, they live and work out their lives in their parents' world, not their own."

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Outside Time

"Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last light of the daylight, if Newton really thought that the time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those if water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been noncuncurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows in what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own century as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough cut us off from the past and the future."

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Flaubert, Borges, and Bouvard and Pecuchet

An article by Borges in defence of Bouvard and Pecuchet, written in 1954 seeks to answer some of the criticisms levelled against that magnificent work. I personally have a feeling that my almost reverent appraisal of that work has got something to do with a faint foreboding I have always carried with in me. It is like, I always tend to repeat to myself in moments solitude - That one either has to be born a genius to change the world or stupid enough to swallow whatever is. I don't belong to the former, so my lot is to swallow, however bitter whatever is.
Borges, citing some of the critics say the presence of two protagonists, Bouvard and Pecuchet, the copy clerks, is nothing more than a verbal artifice. Much more tellingly, another critic has said it is a kind of two-man Faust. But the lamentation of Faust in his study about the invariable vanity of his learning of various fields, is contrasted with the two protagonists in a seminal way - Bouvard and Pecuchet is the story of a Faust who is also an idiot. That is the key for if one can convincingly posit Bouvard and Pecuchet lacked the mental capacity to the enterprise they put themselves to, the whole project of Flaubert would crumble down. The story of two imbeciles reviewing the achievements of all mankind would end up as a fallacy. The problem would lie with them and not the human pursuit to know the world and the fruits of that labour. Borges says, the common line of refutation of this theses is to prove the falsity of it's premise, that is, Bouvard and Pecuchet are imbeciles. He quotes Maupassant as having said Bouvard and Pecuchet are 'two fairly lucid, mediocre, and simple minds' of which Borges himself is not convinced. He writes he wouldn't be convinced even if Flaubert were to make such an assertion because the text itself refutes this.
He venture to suggest an alternate justification for the work, which is, I must say, beautful as anything from Borges. It is the pervasive idea of two elements combining in individuals - simplicity and wisdom. 'That fools teach more than wise men because they dare to speak the truth' is one among the many quotes he invokes in defence of this. Well - Do you feel convinced? The beauty of Borges's mind is as ravishing as ever, but I happen to remain doubtful about this spefic line of argument.
I have always thought that Bouvard and Pecuchet are not imbeciles per se, essentially, but it is the enterprise they involve in, that gives them that appearance. Their actions precede our judgement, and it is the act that defines them, even to the extent of that judgement being recursively valid.

----
Why do I tend to remember the words of another French who wrote years later - "Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question."?

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And the Scheme of Things...

Indian people are inclined to consider the universal seriously in expressing their ideas of things. This can be easily seen in the fact of their verbal usage in which they have so great an inclination to use abstract nouns. In Sanskrit, an abstract noun is formed by adding -ta (f.) or -tva (n.) suffix to the root. These suffixes correspond to th (Greek), -tas (Latin), -tät (German), -té (French), -ty (English), and etymologically they have a close connection. In these European languages, however, abstract nouns are not often used except in scientific essays or formal sentences, while in Sanskrit they are often used even in everyday speeches. For example, "He becomes old," "Er wird alt," is expressed in Sanskrit ''He goes to oldness": vrddhatam (-tvam, -bhavam) gacchati (agacchati, upaiti, etc.); "The fruit becomes soft," "Die Frucht wird weich" is expressed in Sanskrit "The fruit goes to softness": phalam mrdutam(-tvam, -bhavam mardavam) yati; "He goes as a messenger," "Er geht als Bote" is expressed "He goes with the quality of messenger": gacchati dautyena; "A man was seen to be a tree" is expressed "A man was represented by the quality of tree" (puman kascid vrksatvenopavarnitah). The European languages express the individual by its attribute or quality realized concretely by the individual itself, while the Sanskrit expresses the individual only as one of the instances belonging to the abstract universal.

Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples - India-China-Tibet-Japan
- Hajime Nakamura

Tell me, isn't that mightily revealing?

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