The Camus Connection - tale number nine in Michael Moorcock's The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius.
Just the mention of Albert Camus brings to mind The Myth of Sisyphus
where Sisyphus is condemned to forever push a boulder up a mountain
only to see the boulder roll down the other side. However, Camus ends
his tale thusly: "The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy".
Reading this Michael Moorcock
tale, I detect Eternal Hero Jerry C maintains an underlying cheer in all
the various situations and quagmires he must face. Hey, if you're going
to travel the multiverse, you might as well grab all the happiness you
possibly can.
The Camus Connection contains ten chapters,
each chapter opening with a quote from the likes of literary critic
Edward Said or American politician Bob Dole. Appropriately enough, the
final chapter quote is from Albert Camus that ends: "You can be homesick
in Paris for breathing space and the whisper of wings. In Algiers, at
least, you can sample any desire and be certain of your pleasures, your
self, and so know at last what everything you own is worth."
Whoa,
baby! From the sounds of it, Algiers is Jerry's kind of place. Hey,
Jer, maybe you can stay in Algiers with lovely Una and ditch the bitch
Brunner along with Shakey Mo, Major Nye and the rest of the raunchy
crew!
Keeping in the spirit of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, the mighty Moorcock invites his readers to fill in the Camus Connection gaps with their own imagination. So I'll do just that and sprinkle in my commentary linked with a trio of direct quotes:
"Now
we're somewhere between the end of one millennium and the beginning of
another....Maybe it was the dope in the sixties? They sell you any old
muck now." He (Jerry) patted his heavy suitcase.
"This is the age of the lowest common denominator. I blame America." So responds Miss Brunner.
In
many ways, the 20th century was indeed the American century with the US
participation in WWI and WWII and then the worldwide influence of
American television and movies and mass popular culture. I recall a
friend of mine who grew up in the 1960s in Tehran, Iran telling me his
abiding memory as a kid was watching Captain Kangaroo!
"I can't believe in a simple duality. The evidence is all against it. Once a clone...Clone away, young multiverse."
You
tell 'em, Jerry! The multiverse is teeming with multiple versions of
Jerry - and he knows it. Think about it. How many versions of 'you' have
you had in your own life, your 'one lifetime' so called? For me,
reading about the multiverse is nothing less than exhilarating. How many
Glenn Russells have I lived thru and metamorphosed from like a
butterfly from a caterpillar? Too many to count! This is one key reason
why, in a Fahrenheit 451 world, my choice would be MM's The Cornelius Quartet.
Sidebar:
my artistic life includes playing renaissance music on recorders and
other wind instruments in an early music quartet, performing spoken word theater a la Spalding Gray, performing living
sculpture mime, performing Commedia dell'Arte using the masks of
Pantalone, Dottore, Capitano, Arlecchino, Zanni and Pulcinella, doing street theater, improv dance, playing
mrdanga drum for kirtans and drum circles, publishing a novel and
collections of microfiction, creating montage art, reading 4,000 books and writing nearly 1,200 book reviews. It's
been a tasty multiverse life!
"We don't have to worry about the
Europeans. All the British and the French are waiting for is American
leadership." -- Bob Dole to Congress, 1995
Come on, Bobby! You're
coming off as a bloated buffoon. European countries have their
own rich traditions, not only in politics but in such fields as
literature and the arts. They need American blowhards like they need
toothache.
Read MM's Camus Connection and let your own imagination soar!
British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939
Comments
Post a Comment