Right, so remember back when I said I was reading all those books, and maybe I'd tell you what I thought of them? Yeah, I read those and moved through a whole slew of other books afterwards, but maybe I'll still get to them.
Ok, so one of them was The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin. I have to say I was a little disappointed, but mainly because my expectations were so high. Not only because of how it is billed on the cover, but more because of the traditions the novel hooks into - classical mythology, the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and the promise of philosophical speculation - I had big expectations which were not lived up to. If I look at it as more of a light entertainment book, however, then I regard it more favorably. I thought it was worth my time reading (so thank you for lending it to me, Sebastian), but I would not put it in my mental literary canon (yet note that I do find it interesting enough to write about). I will discuss what I interpreted the book as, what I liked, and what I didn't like.
First of all, if you haven't seen the book, it is a novel about some people who find themselves in a bizarre sort of labyrinth. They communicate via a text-messaging system (like AIM), and the text of the novel is a "transcript" of what they write. Weird stuff happens. You are left to figure out what it means.
The similarity I see between Helmet and a Borges short story is in the M.O. of writing. A lot of Borges' ficciones are not so much "stories" as much as pieces where he says to himself "I have this strange yet fascinating idea X. I shall make a sketch of what a world would be like wherein X is true." If I haven't made myself intelligible enough, The Library of Babel (here is the original Spanish if you are so inclined) is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, as is The Lottery In Babylon. In this way I see it as sort of akin to sci-fi, except that it's more like "intellectu-fi" or "philoso-fi."
I see Helmet as belonging to this same genre. Neat idea. What Pelevin has done is to take some important truths, find the opposite, and use those as his "idea X" to make his world-sketch. One of those is "a whole is greater than the sum of its parts" - remember the construction of the Helmet? Another seems to be the logical consistency of the world in general.
Now for its weaknesses. One category of objections stems from the choice of (what I've called) his "X's." Borges' genius lies in no small measure in thoughtful choice of this kernel in each story. It is as though Pelevin, though, wanted to outdo Borges by finding weirder starting premises in order that his story be more outlandish. In order to accomplish this, he picked the contraries of self-evident or very fundamental truths about reality. In doing so he overreached, leaving himself too little reality to stand on, so that he ended up making a story that is largely incoherent. Of course, it may well be that he did this on purpose in the interest of being post-modern. But I do not necessarily find this redeeming; I detest the despair that is all too common in postmodernism, the spirit that uses art or literature to proclaim that there is nothing to proclaim - or nothing worth proclaiming (and then often enough congratulates itself on its cleverness and irony).
The other categories of objections are about storytelling and picking on the philosophical premises he seems to take for granted. He should have either followed Poe's advice and chosen one effect and pursued it relentlessly or made the book a lot longer so he could develop his ideas properly. Borges is tremendous at the former. From the introduction of his starting idea to a terrible and seemingly inevitable conclusion is only a few tight, intense pages. But Pelevin is all over the place. He'll open up a new thread - The Matrix-type virtual reality, linguistic interpretation, etc. - and play with it for a little while, then toss it aside for something else before he's really made anything of it. Is it that he can't, or that he just doesn't care to? I think maybe he could, but just doesn't. It struck me as something written by someone who is smart, but content with a facile and superficial kind of intellectualism, sort of like Scott Adams' writing. At least it all seems to be focused toward one general theme, epistemology - what we can know and how we can know it. But unfortunately he seems beholden to Locke's dictum that we can't know things, only our own ideas. Unlike the more sensical view that we know things by means of our ideas, developing this one consistently to its conclusion leads to a despair at ever knowing reality.
Ok, so I spent a lot of time being critical. But I obviously liked it enough that I cared this much about it; and I enjoyed the literary thinking it occasioned. I'd much rather read a book that aspires to greatness than one that insults my intelligence by aiming at mediocrity and achieving it.
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