The content of the
Blog is reflected in the title, The Altamaha Trilogy:
Life at the End of
History, the sub-title indicating the theme of the trio of related novels.
The end of history is something that I have been thinking about and writing
about for a long time. It is about our time, a time of spiritual crisis.
What follows, and
will continue to follow, is an account of my writing, what has motivated it,
what struggles it has brought, where it has taken me and directions it may take
in the future. I first tried writing what you are now reading in the third
person, thinking that by using this personal pronoun that intimacy bordering on
narcissism could be avoided, but I found this extremely uncomfortable and
realized why: only royalty and God should refer to themselves in the
presumptive third person. So, let me explain, by default, in my own words, and
thus, in the first person.
Published in
January of 2012, Disorderly
Notions is my first novel and the first book of the Altamaha Trilogy. The MSS
for the second book of the trilogy, Come Spring, is
now finished, is ready for editing. The third book, In the Widening Gyre,
is underway. While these three books constitute my debut in fiction, I have
been writing academic philosophy for many years and I suspect that my approach
to writing fiction follows well worn paths that I have taken before. I think
the following will illustrate this.
There were three
main literary guides for Disorderly Notions:
Homer’s Odyssey,
Cervantes’s Don
Quixote and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
For lack of a better term, ‘field research’ was conducted in such far ranging
places as northern Canada, Singapore, India, China , Russia, England and the
National Archives in Washington, D.C.. So, this ‘field research’ is the
experiential ground for what became Disorderly Notions.
Come Spring was inspired by Roger D. Master’s
Fortune is a River
and his Machiavelli,
Leonardo, and
the Science of Power, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks,
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives
of the Artists, Machiavelli’s Prince, and his Art of War,
research on the lives of Leon Trotsky, Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera and several
excursions and sojourns to such places as Italy, Greece, Mexico and
Belize.
My vocation of
teaching and writing political philosophy and related perspectives such as the
philosophy of technology and architectural theory is allied with my fiction. My
main teachers have been the writers of the classics ranging from such moderns
as Shakespeare, Blake, Yates, Eliot, Faulkner, O’Connor, Tolstoy, Davies, and
McCarthy and to ancients such as Aristophanes and Plato, but the last, who also
wrote fiction (see his ‘Letter II’, @ 314c) in the form of his famous
dialogues, is my main inspiration and teacher. Thus, it has been my endeavor to
fully integrate my fiction into the philosophy that I have been teaching and
writing for years, and when asked what business a writer and teacher of
political philosophy has writing fiction, I simply reply that I’m just
attempting to do what Plato did. This my plans will reflect.
In March of 2013 I
attended and participated in the Mediterranean Conference for Academic
Disciplines which took place in Malta. I delivered a lecture on my theory of
technology and spiritual crisis, the above mentioned theory that I have been
developing and writing about for many years. This lecture will then become an
essay, an extension of a previous essay derived from a lecture given at the
University of Rome in 2011. [See ‘Overarching Metaphors and the Configurations
of the Western City’ (Champaign, Ill., Design Principles
& Practices: an International Journal, Volume 5, Issue 6, Dec.
2011).
Technology and
spiritual crisis is one of the two major themes of my trilogy, the other being
the theme of the end of history which is explanation for the same phenomena The
latter theme was first explored by G.W.F. Hegel and has become one of the most
prominent topics examined and elaborated during the late twentieth and early
twenty first century - the specific time-line of my trilogy - the years from
1989 to 2002.
Related to the end
of history theme, is my acceptance of an invitation to participate as a
discussant on a panel marking the 60th anniversary of the French
publication of the celebrated correspondence and debate about the end of
history between Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojeve. This also will mark the 25th
anniversary of the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article, ‘The
End of History’. This will take place in Chicago during September, 2013 at the
annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).
In conjunction with
the initial writing of the third book of the Altamaha Trilogy,
In the Widening
Gyre, I have followed the same path taken before. I have done an intense
three month study of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain,
an eight hundred page novel occurring in the seven years preceding WWI, set in
a Swiss tubercular sanatorium, in which virtually no action occurs until the
last few pages with the eruption of technological warfare in 1914. As I
interpret it, this book is about the end of history, a non-time when no action
occurs and the spiritual crisis of the West resulting in the Great War.
Also, I have spent
a month studying Flannery O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood, which
takes place in Macon, Georgia, just after WWII. Macon is up-river from the
mythical town on the Altamaha River founded by my imagination and erected in my
trilogy. As I understand it, this novel is about a spiritual crisis so acute
that it no longer is possible to make sense of everyday experience, resulting
in a loss of all purpose and meaning and hence a crisis of the spirit. But the
novel also is about comic attempts to address this tragedy, and because it is
at once comic and tragic in that the comic is tragic and the tragic comedic,
O’Connor’s novel is not only a literary masterpiece but a philosophic
masterpiece as well.
During the fall of
2013, I plan to do some more ‘field work’ for In the Widening Gyre.
This will take me to Ireland, the home of W.B. Yates, the poet who wrote ‘The
Second Coming’, which begins: ‘Turning and turning, in the widening gyre…’.
Ireland is the birth place of a major Altamaha character in my third
novel, Dr. Beesley McGee, a specialist in trauma medicine and former combat
medic. And it is for this reason that it is imperative that I spend some
time there learning about his early life on that island before he immigrated to
the United States in 1972.
Soon I will resume
interviews with Vietnamese Boat People, many of whom came to Ottawa between
1975 and the early 1980’s. I am doing this because I am trying to better
understand Nhung Hoang, a character who appeared in Come Spring and
whose role becomes major In the Widening Gyre.
Many of the
characters who will inhabit In the Widening Gyre
will migrate from the other two novels constituting the Altamaha Trilogy, and
alas, many will be new characters I’ve never dreamed of before, thus making
their appearance unexpected. But then, it seems to me that this is the
way of fiction.
