A master of inescapology

I share Steve Yost's fascination with the obsessions of Paul Perry's blog, Alamut. Over time Perry has developed a series of variants upon a set of interlinked themes including Spinoza, locked room murders, Borges, nested (metadiegetic) narratives such as the 1001 Nights, premature burial and more. Clearly something interesting is going on in there, but as with murders committed in locked rooms, the key to the mystery is usually the mystery of the key.

As it happens, two things I read over the weekend seemed to connect to Alamut's threads. One, speaking of nested narrative, is a quote I find on Steve's blog, from Perry, who is quoting Steven Shaviro's Doom Patrol, who is paraphrasing something Klossowski said in The Baphomet:

every intention is an external event, a modification of my being, and hence a sort of demonic possession. Each thought or desire is an alteration of my previous state; it is an intrusion of the outside, a whispering in my ear, a breath that I inhale and exhale, an alien spirit prompting me from offstage or insinuating itself within me.

Steve relates this to the kinds of attention one develops as a musician, and says very interesting things suggestive of a dialectical progression of attentions.

By coincidence I was also reading The Marquis of Bolibar - a little-known hallucinatory novel written in 1920 by Leo Perutz. This guy can write. It's a fascinating tale of a city occupied by a foreign host, which relies on one man to save it, the Marquis. However, he is killed off early on, setting up the mystery of how two Napoleonic regiments manage to lose a fortified town they control to loose-knit bands of Spanish guerillas. The plot follows the leaders of the occupying army as they bring about their own destruction in precisely the manner planned by the dead Marquis.

Two things to note: First, the structure of the plot is very much like a locked room mystery - you know what is going to happen, you just don't see how it possibly can happen. Second, the story turns on a series of interrelated variations on the phenomenon of possession. Perutz, who was born in Prague about the same time as Kafka, has great fun with with intentions that take on a life of their own. Somehow, without its seeming at all contrived, and with a brilliant series of narrative devices, Perutz creates a sense of weird inevitability that manages to be haunting and droll at the same time. There's an ominous but hilarious figure of the Wandering Jew who seems to always get everyone around him killed while he survives, and there is a great deal of possession by intent, but none of the melodramatic paraphenalia of garden variety demonology. Perutz, who was also a brilliant mathematician, has his feet firmly on the ground. The characters are richly human, sketched in spare but intensely vivid prose that is extraordinary even in translation.

It was with some satisfaction that I saw on the book jacket, after completing the novel and thinking about it in relation to Perry's themes, that I saw this blurb of praise:

"A perfect example of the novel of the fantastic in its purest form." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Perutz will be more widely known - work of the caliber of The Marquis of Bolibar can't be ignored forever. I imagine Perry would like him - maybe Steve too. And I think the nested structure that fascinates Perry is intrinsic to blogging - which may be another reason why Steve, who created the Quick Topic facility, is drawn to it.

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