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The lost ones

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Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid. “Very afraid,” by M. John Harrison Lccn 72084341 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL15026399M Openlibrary_edition The Lost Ones (novel), novel by Ian Cameron, later made into a 1974 Disney movie The Island at the Top of the World

I read Watt while seconded to Crossrail, but had forgotten about this surprising perambulatory method, and am grateful to Conor for putting me onto this recreation of it by Bruce Nauman: his ‘Slow Angle Walk’. So it’s certainly not the dystopian doom-and-gloom story so many have seen in it, because, if you have eyes to see it, there’s Hope. This and the featured image above it are two of Charles S. Klabunde‘s illustrations from the 1984 edition of The Lost Ones from The New Overbrook Press.

The narrator is scatter-minded – he chews his words, relishing the strange and new and intriguing. “One body per square meter, or two hundred bodies in all” he breathes tenderly as he roams through this story, his feet padding across the length and width of the floor. He’s spread out a painter’s cloth, stained with color and grime, which ripples and bunches at the edges. It is this bleak, almost lunar landscape which the tiny figures call home, and it creates a deeply unsettling apprehension, as if you were out at a restaurant and had a waiter standing next to you at all times, one hand on the tablecloth, ready to yank it all away. How suddenly mortal we all are, indeed, if our universe can so easily be scooped up and rolled aside! Obliged for want of space to huddle together over long periods they appear to the observer a mere jumble of mingled flesh. […] There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall." Yes, that’s Life, stripped of our endless media feed; Life that has a simple moral, as Freud had also found at the end: Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

The talk was given in November 2022 during the centre’s 50 th anniversary celebrations (delayed by a year due to the pandemic) in the Minghella Studios on campus. After the talk and subsequent discussions with Conor and Matt, my attempt to locate The Lost Ones within the archive became even more pressing. Freud’s longtime friend, colleague and biographer, Ernest Jones, tells a story about Freud’s death that is hard to imagine, from our comfortable modern viewpoint: I first encountered The Lost Ones as a young teen. Along with Finnegans Wake, it was the text that began my lifelong love affair with modernist literature. At that point, I’d been been immersed in fantasy literature for a while, and thus was transfixed by literary worldbuilding. Fiction writers often talk about worldbuilding. However, for reasons that escape me, readers of mainstream fiction often roll their eyes at the creation of imaginary worlds. Of course, mainstream works create imaginary places often enough. Usually, though, they situate them in actual locations and times familiar from the world around us: an imaginary courthouse in the New York of today, an imaginary county in Mississippi, or an imaginary street in Victorian London.

Die Frage nach der Individuation scheint sich unter den Gegebenheiten des Zylinders nicht einmal mehr zu stellen. Analog zu Endspiel, wo Hamm das Diktum der überflüssigen Schwachen/Alten buchstäblich nimmt und seine Eltern in Mülleimern entsorgt - während er und sein Diener ebenfalls keine richtig funktionierenden Körper mehr besitzen - gilt auch in The Lost Ones der Einzelne als ‚expendabel‘ und ist dem Apparatus der Gesellschaft/des Zylinders untergeordnet. What fascinated me more, though, was the attempt to create an imaginary world. First of all, I was interested in portraits of places more than those simply of people. Of course, works that do this can be found in mainstream fiction: any work, really, in which the setting could be considered the main character. However, in fantasy literature, I found, not simply place-portraits, but world-portraits.

In the beginning he always spoke walking. So it seems to me now. Then sometimes walking and sometimes still. In the end still only. And the voice getting fainter all the time. The Lost Ones (by Javellana), alternative title for Stevan Javellana's 1947 Filipino war-time novel, Without Seeing the Dawn There is no hard and fast answer in life for us. But once we see that and really accept it, our lives may find rest in the midst of Ceaseless Flux. For in The Lost Ones there is compassion for our human condition - real, hard-won, heartfelt compassion. In The Lost Ones, we find a similarly uncompromising but finely crafted paysage raisonné within a detailed though uneasy microcosm of modernity.

The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong. Au cœur des ténèbres by Joël Jouanneau, adaptation of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Théâtre de l'Athénée-Louis-Jouvet And that this gentle soul did through the solace of writing nonstop about the penniless and dispossessed victims who populate the mad cityscapes we think we know so well.

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