Enter my chamber you never will leave
Festering bodies will cover the streets
Satanic prophecies, Christian hypocrisy
Bury me deep in the filth and disease
Open my mind and then hammer it closed
Into the darkness I'm strangled and choked
Tracing the patterns and numbers in smoke
Blood on my dagger from enemies throats
Crucify ghosts in a frozen abyss
Ocean of planets in total eclipse
Nowhere I wander wherever I drift
Using a razor to open my wrists
My body is vacant, my soul is enslaved
To a hatred as ancient as day and night
Ladder of Jacob, the devil awakened
In hell I created, I pray tonight
Lil Ugly Mane
It wasn't a month into Winter when I heard such a call. Winter, here, inspires all sorts of imaginations. Ghost white poplars bear a phantom-like visage; trees creak above and, with a wind, howl like the legions of half-frozen soldiers at the sight of a fire, miles away. The wind used to whistle, and nearly sing, through abandoned, towering laboratories. The sky has not yet reached towards tropical sunrises of early Spring, -- but months ago it had vacated blistering Fall sunsets. In the drives of something wavering between inanition and despondence I uncovered the unhappy chronicle of a man named Eugene Onegin, translated by a Cornell English Professor.
I quivered at words I read late, although it wasn't even late into the night. I was unsure if, in a sweet song, Pushkin told the life of countless vagrant Bachelors, -- or just my own. The details of the tale are almost common knowledge: a young man moves to the country, thinking it will take the city out of him. His uncle has fallen sick, and he can't but wait at his bedside. He's fed up with cosmopolitan life and has done the run-around so much he now neglects to give an effort. This lad, Eugene, fancies himself a Scholar and Well-Read: -- but can now only be motivated to flip through a page or two of Adam Smith or some philosopher.
He's struck by the simplicity of the folk herein: they go about their day and have their own sort-of soiree's, and appear completely satisfied. He strikes acquaintance with a young Romantic, Lensky, who strums on his lyre and sings happy songs.
Lensky and Onegin are the rumbus of the town. The most eligible women, -- so beautifully simple, -- Tat'yana and Olga, -- are captivated. Lensky swoops on Olga, and Eugene is swept on by the sweet Tat'yana: She's lost herself in the English Romances: Byron, centrally. A captive in such a world, she transfigured her beloved Onegin to the dark, brooding, misanthropic heartthrob that she had always believed him to be:
But nowadays all minds are in a mist,
a moral brings upon us somnolence,
vice is attractive in a novel, too,
and there, at least, it triumphs.
The fables of the British Muse
disturb the young girl's sleep,
and now her idol has become
either the pensive Vampyre,
or Melmoth, gloomy vagabond,
or the Wandering Jew, or the Corsair,
or the mysterious Sbogar.
Lord Byron, by an opportune caprice,
in woebegone romanticism
draped even hopeless egotism
My eye's pause frozen at the page: who, -- or what, -- is a Melmoth? To `speak of things which eye has not seen nor ear heard, and which have never entered the heart of man'... Not a letter later and I see, an annotation of Pushkin's:
Melmoth the Wanderer, a work of genius by Maturin.
My interest piqued at just what a Melmoth could be: But I was so lost in Pushkin's telling of Tatyana's English Romances:
My friends, what sense is there in this?
Perhaps, by heaven's will,
I'll cease to be a poet; a new demon
will enter into me
I continue, perhaps as this Melmoth to wander with this new Demon that inhabited Pushkin. I was altogether lost in Tatyana's letters promptly rebuked by a posing-as-wise Onegin, -- in Onegin's self-exile, -- in Pushkin's self exile and tattered manuscripts documenting his chase with his muse, -- and in Tatyana's solemn recognition of the changed-yet-unchanged figure of Onegin:
Is this the same man, or has he since softened?
Or does he act the same old freak?
Tell me, does he come here often?
And what character does he play this week?
What is his stage persona? Melmoth?
A cosmopolitan, a patriot,
Childe Harolde, a quaker, or a bigot?
Or does he show off a mask he has brought?
Or perhaps he is just a jolly good sport,
Like you and I, like the world, in short?
My advice is this, if he will take it,
To put aside all that worn out kit.
He has fooled the world more than we can tell..
―So you know him then? ― Yes, no. Not well.
And again, Onegin takes the form of some unhappy Melmoth. In just what shape, or what form Onegin could wander unchanged by the years as this Melmoth creature I resolved to uncover. In a matter of stanzas I had seen to the end of Pushkin's recovery of Onegins tale, -- and wept in bitter rejection that I could ever be an Onegin, -- that I would ever let my life take the form of…
I was compelled to seek out who, or what, this Melmoth was… but compulsions dissipate more rapidly than they appear. Several months later lounged in the Pacific Northwest; the sky is bigger, and brighter out West, -- away from my dreary abode. I philtered through Pushkin's letters looking for some hints of what this Melmoth could mean to him, -- but was lost. I only found such immortal advice as:
… the first love is one of sentimentalism, the second is one of voluptuousness. To extend this metaphor to its conclusion would be informative..[73]
In these letters I did not find my Melmoth. Instead I lost myself, again, in Pushkin's translator’s own work: the documentation of a window into the mind of a depraved soul, and froze in fear at what he dubbed “their” car:
…our own Dream Blue Melmoth…
Out of Nabokov's Lo-lee-ta. Another Melmoth! But if Pushkin had led me into Nabokov, and to Tat'yana led me to Melmoth, -- then I must find this Melmoth firsthand. I climbed up creaking stairs, and brushed cobwebs aside in neglected stacks to uncover an Irish preacher's documentation of this Melmoth.
Finding Maturin's account of Melmoth was not so easy, -- but in dusty stacks of whose annals carry: ... and ... I recovered a single copy: Melmoth the Wanderer. Just as I began the infernal tale I saw that the story of John Melmoth II (not THE John Melmoth I sought) begins his tale by visiting his uncle, – much as my beloved Onegin did:
My uncle has most honest principles:
when he was taken gravely ill,
…
…
When will the Devil take you?
Maturin reports to me the story that he heard, that has inspired several of his sermons, and makes him quiver to recollect. He documents the travels of the student John Melmoth II, an Irishman who visits his heirless uncle for money while away at Trinity college. His uncle's deathbed unveils a portrait of a man with searing eyes[74], and a tattered & burned scroll to follow. He pours through the scroll to find Charles Stanton, an odd man trying to fit in with the burgeoning dandy scene of the time: -- he has no place here nor there. Stanton, abroad for unknown reasons, encounters a man in Spain who says he will "meet him in an insane asylum several years from now." Unbelievable, finding respite at an Inn Stanton hears the tale of a weary wanderer seen across Spain. He was met uninvited at a wedding, and pointed at like the devil by some Catholic priest. Years later Stanton, slowly losing his grip and seeing this man everywhere, is interned in an entrapment like manner in an insane asylum. He howls and screams, and concluded it is worse to be sane with the insane, than insane like all the rest of them… one night, in the depths of his cell, the very same Melmoth comes to his aid offering him an unutterable bargain for an immediate escape by unutterable means. Perplexed at how this man knows him to be here, and how he arrived undisturbed are the least of Stanton's issues: he won't take such an infernal offer. He eventually recoups, but makes it his goal to find out just who this man is. The scroll is torn, an burned, and scratched out, -- and J. Melmoth II's light is slowly fading…
Over the course of the next few days J. Melmoth the second encounters horrors and horror stories beyond belief recounting his distant relatives; stories that are too profane to mention here[75]. Maturin's account done, I uncovered a sliver of who this Melmoth is, learning that he died 150 years ago, after bargaining to live for 150 years. There are uncountable stories of Melmoth that I will never hear, and infinitesimal details I will never resolve. But sated I end my quest, and go forth knowing not again will I encounter such an infernal name…
I was in a Printing house in Hell
& saw the method in which
knowledge is transmitted from
generation to generation
– William Blake
Melmoth is a close approximation to what became known as metafictional. C.R Maturin is writing the story of John Melmoth, who himself reads the story of Stanton, and hears the story of Moncada; Moncada hears a few stories, and records the story of the mysterious Adonijiah whose story is actually that of the resplendent Imallee, whose tale encapsulates that of Guzman and of Elinor Mortimer, both relayed to Montilla, one by an innkeep and one by the infernal Melmoth himself. The above narrative was my attempt at imitating such a method. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin has a similar proto-metafictional bent, as do (versions of) Pope's Dunciad, Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Why such an approach became fashionable or ‘experimental’ more than a century after being one-of-many conventions is something of a mystery.
Maturin goes one step further than most. Likely by the strength of each individual narrative(s) alone he negates metafiction; when you hear the tale of Immalee, you forget its being told in a several-story relay, and think yourself in a fairy-tale. The reader forgets that they are in this web of nested stories, and as a result interruptions to the narrative become more jarring than they would be otherwise, - -further reminding one that he reads a story. Occasionally he will break the flow of the story with an interjected footnote[76].
What Maturin does interject, at every instant he can, is an epigraph at the start of each chapter. Typically these are excerpts from English or Classical poetry, or Shakespeare. These do an excellent job of further communicating that we are "in a conversation" with a variety of texts at any given moment, each that interferes with our interpretation of events at hand, and events in other texts. This used to be (somewhat) commonplace: to the point where transcriptional errors were tolerated, – perhaps a way to earn cachet for not bothering to look up the complete quote and instead pen from memory. More subtly, Maturin highlights every instance of excerpted tex with quotation marks; almost always biblical these suggest that Maturins ‘copy editing’ of the tales he tells.
Literature, like Biology and Physics, is the study of necessity. If, in Biology, a feature has evolved it is because it must have been there in order for the organisms to exist to this day, any biologist who claims that randomness rules is not a true biologist. Similarly Physics is the study of what has to be, and what can only be for a theory to be true, Quantum mechanics works because it is the only way physics at short length-scales can work, the Renormalization Group (one of the more beautiful theories in physics) works because it is the minimal theory to reckon with scale-invariance, – and takes advantage of this necessary structure of the problem[77].
Literature: any well-made book is structured and written as it is, because the message or intent of the book would not have been communicable without it. This dawned on me when reading Joyce's Ulysses: in order for Joyce to complete the project of relaying exactly what life in the modern day (Dublin 1904) was like, he had to use 18 different narrative styles to convey the disorienting, psychotropic experience that many in his age (and ourselves, now) are numb to. Why does Maturin (another Irishman) write Melmoth as a series of nested tales, with inconsistent commentary?
The first thing you might guess is that this structure makes the reader an essential part of Melmoth's story: like Stanton, and J. Melmoth II the reader hears the story through such a web. This is what it is like to experience Melmoth in the fullest sense: most people will never meet him, and will only hear stories of the infernal creature.
A slightly contrasting reason would be because Melmoth the Character is a Wanderer, "condemned to wander outside of history". In writing the novel as a collection of tales that themselves are not about Melmoth, C.R Maturin indeed conveys that the purpose of life is not whatever Melmoth is: he is a sidenote present at the climax of each story, but not the reason why the stories are being told. Only in encapsulating many people's stories, with different sets of heroes and villains can Maturin relay this idea. Additionally, Melmoth experiences life as “anecdotes”, -- he's lived in every locale, and visited every locked dungeon in 150 years. In this way, -- we experience Melmoth as he sees the world; the only way we can do this is through an amalgamation of media, with many cut-and-paste sections that we don't quite hear the end or the details of, -- a life through lived and firsthand, but not real experience.
Neither of these are quite satisfying, however. We must also have a reason as to why Maturin could not have structured the story any other way: why are the tales nested, and not sequential? Further, both of these explanations start to get at why Maturin would do such a thing, but they don't reveal any fundamental truth, nor clarify the nature of things.
The details are where the difference is made: Maturin is a master of the Gothic-Romantic. His nested clauses of subordinate atop subordinate nearly mirror the structure of the novel. Some people with a feigned appreciation for literature are wild for “good” descriptions', -- I typically don't, but Maturin frequently excites my imagination, even on a second read. His Romanticism is so over the top at times, and Gothic-ism so morose it borders the edge of parody at times; -- Maturin takes both styles to their limits, to the point that we can place the weakly sewn seams,
A question one might ask is what "genre" is Melmoth the Wanderer. Northrop Frye's description of this word suffices: “The very word ‘genre’ sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is”. What genre is Melmoth the Wanderer; Melmoth is a novel, it is something that contains every other form of media. The style is something of a come-down from a trip into both Romanticism & Gothic fiction. In Frye's classical classification, Melmoth the Wanderer is a collection of Comedies, save the tale of Immallee; Melmoth's own experience as an aborted Romance, as an aborted satire, -- but ultimately a tragedy. There is Summer and Fall phase, -- but where is the Winter and the Spring?
How well religious persons understand the secret of making every event of the present world operate on the future, while they pretend to make the future predominate over the present
– C.R Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
I charge thee to return and change thy shape;
thou art too ugly to attend upon me.
Go, and return an old Franciscan Friar,
That holy shape becomes a devil best.
– Christopher Marlowe
Maturin was a struggling Calvinist minister in Ireland, -- his disdain for Catholicism, I suspect, betrays his complaints with the larger world of organized religion, and the larger religion of an organized world. His polemical view against the Catholic church is fleshed out best in the first story, Moncada's Tale, -- it begins with what seems like a joke[78]:
“…there is a promise that the ears of the deaf shall be opened.'`Where are those words?'`In the Bible'`The Bible? -- but we are not permitted to read it.'`True, dear Moncada, but we have the word of our superior and of our brethren for it, and that is enough.”
It's trite to say that jokes have a kernel of truth; this isn't a joke, and is a truth. Much of the Catholic church ethos (and, to a similar extent, Eastern Orthodox), relies on the professional training of spiritual leaders such as priests and monks, -- the spiritual sustenance of Divine Liturgy is enough for the lay-person, -- the words of the superior are enough for a non-tonsured monk. Maturin spends c. two-hundred pages detailing the horrors of a monastery that at times more closely resembles a hell-on-earth than an abode of heaven.
Maturin's less aggressive anti-monastic attitudes are almost reminiscent of Rabelais (cf. Gargantua & Pantagruel Vol III Ch X; for a contrasting opinion see: Gargantua & Pantagruel Vol III Ch XI[79]). Put succinctly: What do monks even do anyway? They shut themselves off from the world, invent routines and get praises out of self-admonition, praise and neglect them & their brethren simultaneously, ignore the material reality of the world that really does matter &c &c &c: in a particularly horrifying tale told within Moncada's tale, a pair of monks are driven to such depravity it forces another monk to conclude:
One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the tintless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius
Maturin goes further: this is not just any monastery, but a monastery of "ex-Jesuits". Enlightenment Spain has outlawed Jesuitical orders, for their supposed interference in politics. This monastery holds Moncada as blackmail against one of the more powerful families in Spain. You can take the Jesuits out of Spanish Catholicism, but you can't take the…. Maturin scribes out the Church as a supra-national organization, taking advantage of the gullible & faithful, and otherwise intimidating or deceiving the rest. He almost sketches it as a regime of nation-, and possible worldwide, surveillance/intelligence network[80] but stops to only extend to Spain and her mercantile partners.
One could draw analogies to modern-, and yesterdays- paranoia surrounding surveillance, privacy, and behind-closed-doors negotiations dictating the sway of a populace under the facade of something completely unreal; the vision of a world constructed within our world, -- of a stage where each "player" is strung up like a child's marionette. I will not make the analogy here, but let the interested reader do so himself, and give the hint that you should think about the monastery first as a microcosm, -- and think about what this means for the Catholic church's "kingdom of heaven on Earth".
The anti-catholicism continues throughout the novel, in different flavors: it strikes a much funnier tone in the story of Immallee/Isidora. Imallee is the logical conclusion of "flower children", shipwrecked on Indian Isles, later rescued and returned to Catholic Spain, -- the Natural Religion of Christianity she learned among the flowers and the trees is not the Catholicism of Spain: she thought it a religion of Love, not a religion of submission & indulgence. Her priest, the great Fr. Jose is an extended joke:
…”Daughter,” answered the priest, contracting his brows, “let me have some wine to slake the intolerable thirst caused by my anxiety for the welfare of your family, and let me meditate some hours afterwards on the measures best to be adopted, and then—when I awake, I will give you my opinion.'”....—”if a few slices of ham, or some poignant sausages, accompanied the wine—it might, as it were, abate the deleterious effects of that abominable liquor, which I never drink but on emergencies like these.—”....”Oh I am weak and worn with fasts and watching, and the labours of exhortation. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and my jaws cling together,—perhaps a draught or two might dissolve their parching adhesion. But I do so hate wine—why the devil don't you fetch up the bottle?”...
The lightness of Fra. Jose's character, combined with the levity of Imallees' ever-endearing spirit presents a criticism of Catholicism as just as controlling, and definable non-christian in ways that life in the totally-falsified world of the monastery cannot show. There are other instances of anti-Catholicism across several more tales, and all are tied together by Maturin's disdain for equivocation, he purports that monks carry a "feminine" character that betrays their true nature:
(It may be different in women—but my own experience has never failed in the discovery, that where there was a kind of feminine softness and pliability in the male character, there was also treachery, dissimulation, and heartlessness)
and engage in a variety of behaviors that are duplicitous, and blasphemous, -- but the quality that does make them the worst is their affinity for equivocation. In Moncada's Tale this is most clear, where the superior constantly paints the world, and even religion as a matter of many equivalent possibilities: incertitude. This seems almost anti-ethical to the point of religion (or certainty to Calvinism), where the "project" could be said to give some ground truth, and some degree of certainty or at least confident doubt ought to exist.
What a difference between words without meaning, and that meaning without words, which the sublime phenomena of nature, the rocks and the ocean, the moon and the twilight, convey to those who have `ears to hear'
– C.R. Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer
At roll-call Byron Dominus uttered at a fool-school,
Shouted by scottish ushers, caused his lordship to sob like a fool,
Yet Byron was the first to laugh at the over-sensitive Keats
‘Snuffed out by an article’, those were the words. A couple of rubber teats
Should have been supplied beyond any question to these over-touchy pets—
For me, you are free to spit your hardest and explode your bloody spleen
Regarding my bold compact Fourteener, or my four less than fourteen
– P. Wyndham Lewis
In jest I asked my brother to imagine an English Dandy reading Melmoth and thinking,`` -- wow he's just like me, doomed to wander history without sympathy… the dread love of the ever-pure Imallee… feared by all, unneeding in sympathy, and comfortable in misery''. Is there any truth to this jest? Maturin seems to poke fun, as did Byron, at the overly-Romantic sensibilities of yesteryears, and the depraved Gothic attitudes also popular at that time[81]. The brief tale of Stanton showcases this in a single scene, -- but Melmoth himself is utterly Byronic.
What is a Byronic? George Gordon "Lord" Byron was a poetical genius who warrants several book reviews or blog posts himself. Maturin was a fan, Pushkin began as an imitator; the entire Romantic ethos was completely blown apart, and reassembled under the Lord's rule. To read Byron in late Summer, under a tree at the edge of a lake, at the age of 19 is a Youth Enjoyed, to read him as a 24 year old is a Youth Renewed…
Wynham Lewis's poem, which I quote above, offers a more precise statement of Byron's impact. In _Childe Harold_e and Don Juan he writes as the angsty, disillusioned youth who no longer has will for the world. He jests that he spent his yesteryears waxing poetic above some tintern abbey, or philosophical at the sight of Trafalgar, and now laments that Nature or man can have some or any power over him. He hates the previous version of him who was a Romantic, and hopes to move to something else. It is a retrospective from a childlike enchantment (think: the flower-child Imallee) into a pale disillusionment (a lightened up Melmoth). Byron is "laughing at the over-sensitive" Romantic in all of us, and challenges us to reject our sentimental tendencies. There is some danger in this, - and done poorly veers to the common-to-all of us youthful angst.
The Byronic “hero'” is then the extension of these traits into a character. The Melmoth here aren’t quite our Byronic heroes. The true Byronic heroes can be found (again) in Eugene Onegin, in Goncharov's Oblomov, and in a way Bronte's diabolical-yet-dreamy Heathcliff. They are disaffected and thoroughly exhausted with all that life has to offer. In the pessimism they acquire therein, they begin to fade out of life and into the noisy background that (they claim) made them Byronic to begin with. Melmoth is these characters drawn up to their logical conclusion: he hopes that his victims, like him, lack any hope for an afterlife: a cynicism and misanthropy that is only possible in one who has first and foremost rejected himself from society.
Key to all of this is the fact that Melmoth argues that he does not do evil. In an extended passage near the novel's end, Melmoth makes the case that Man does more evil than he ever can. Melmoth is only the non-interfering observer who, himself, only finds himself in the presence of evil, and not in evil itself. This echoes Christopher Marlowe's genius in The Tragicall Historie of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus:
MEPHASTOPHILIS.: Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self-place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.
Hell is everywhere on Earth: we create the Hell that we live in. Perhaps this hell is created by the Catholic church, and their strategy of equivocation, perhaps we are numb to it by our myopic lives of abundance, disconnected. We clearly see throughout the monastery chronicle the patterning of the monastery on Hell itself. The most infernal of Byronics will create their own Hell-on-Earth, and insist to live in it.
Byron's last work worth mentioning here is Manfred, a masterpiece variation of the Faustian mythos that leaves one with the reassuring message: you can't escape the Fates, you can't change who you are. The troubled Manfred, retreating among the Alps, begs Nature first and Unholy Spirits second for reprieve from his untold sufferings. Even the strongest of the supernatural powers will not be able to save the doomed Manfred from the failings of his own personal agency.
Already obvious to some, but the Melmoth the Wanderer is more the story of a Faustian. However it is an inversion of the typical where we don't ever see the wonderful powers granted to Melmoth by his Mephistopheles, nor do we ever know exactly what the deal he made was. He barely gets the love of Gertrude that Goethe's Faust gets, or the seat with the Pope of Marlowe's. He gets a glimpse of Imallee's pure spirit, and Melmoth gets an audience with a middlingly-successful Spanish merchant, in a dim inn. What we can know is that all of the knowledge (information) obtained in this world, which Melmoth supposedly has access to, is useless and unsatisfying, and somewhat obviously he can't carry it into the next life. What's more is that, regardless of your idea as to what the next life is, Melmoth cannot influence the next life apart from these tales that we now carry. As a result of not being able to impact the world, he cannot “live on” in even a metaphorical way, nor can he leave traces of his taste for pleasure as any proper Byronic may…
The contrast may have pleased the philosopher, that though the ancient Greeks and Romans were savaged (as Dr. Johnson says all people who want a press must be, and he says truly), yet they were wonderful savages for their time, for they alone left traces of their taste for pleasure in the countries they conquered…
Information. What's wrong with dope & women. No longer the whole world's gone insane, with information set to be the only medium of exchange
– Thomas Pynchon
What Melmoth has that we don't have is the valuable commodity known as the reduction of uncertainty, the negative of entropy, -- information. He asks us:
Never again ask me that question—the intelligence that I can give you must be of more importance to you than the means by which I obtain it—enough for you that it is true.
Melmoth and any good Faustian is on a quest for information. The overly simplified, inaccurate take on Faust is that he is in a search for "knowledge". In Goethe's version, Faust wants, to paraphrase, "one red-hot second": a moment of infinite worldly pleasure, to which the devil has to tempt him. Marlowe's version is slightly different, and Faustus specifically seeks magic and eschews all other forms of knowledge. What does Melmoth seek? Maturin plays us fast & loose with this for most of the novel, but one can gather that he seeks eternal life and some other powers, and his knowledge of this is what permits him to have knowledge of everything else.
Another angle is that in using his very unique narrative style, Maturin questions how much of `us' is really just information. Any (good) statistical physicist would say “it's all information”[82]. Melmoth has all the information he can ever want. He is satisfied. But what is information anyway, if it doesn't reduce uncertainty about your environment, -- and Melmoth has taken a bargain for a tremendous decrease in uncertainty, his extended life and powers, in exchange his eternal soul, – certitude both now and later. His capability to take in information is large, but the total amount of information he can now extract from the environment (the amount of usable work, perhaps) is severely limited. I won’t try to extend this much further, but also point to the corresponding view through the structure of the narrative: all we can take from these tales is – possibly corrupted – information. The rich life of Melmoth, and all others found in these pages reduce to alphabets encoded in alphabets encoded in foreign alphabets:
As my eye fell listlessly on the manuscripts, I saw they contained only the Spanish language written in the Greek characters
At the end of the novel, Melmoth sinks into a solemn acceptance of his fate, and the fireworks surrounding his demise, as with Marlowe's Faustus, are hidden. Information, -- all the information in the world could do nothing but beat him into submission of a certain fate.
I've made it this far and have hopefully not said anything too interesting to the average ACX/SSC reader. Now, I will, perhaps to painful effect: Maturin's talk of ails of equivocation, the quest for knowledge in the form of magic, the risk of worldly treasures versus otherworldly reward, anecdotal evidence not being a perfect substitute for experience firsthand, information sampled from multiple sources in different incomplete forms, begging others to make the same trade that you did. Perhaps you're onto it: -- there's some lesson in here about artificial intelligence.
I actually won't suffer to do so directly, -- as I am not equipped to go up against such a thing. I'll leave the reader to make the connections themselves, if there are any. Perhaps Melmoth is an example of “Artificial Intelligence” gone awry and relegated to the dustbin of history, only stumbled upon by depraved souls careening closely to Hell. Alternatively the governance of the Catholic church may be a society or company ruled by some conglomerated societal intelligence that itself must be evaded & escaped, but not confronted firsthand.
Thirdly: It's trite and overused to say that Technology is a Faustian bargain. The truth to it is that Technology promises a worldly reward, but the falsehoods are many. First, it's a Faustian wager, -- there is a risk of damnation, but this is not guaranteed. Second, it's not just a worldly reward, -- the Bible or other soul-purifying books would not be available without it. Literature, like Biology (and to a lesser extent physics), is about the details. I will make the metaphor much more precise: Technology is Melmoth's wager. He asks for those abilities to transport across the world at his will, to access everything.
If this is about AI, or technology, or simply a great Gothic-Horror Romance: what this means is that our ails with disinformation, multimedia, and technology aren't so new as we think. A backcountry minister reckoned with these ideas 200 years ago, -- and we do a worse job of it now. Did he suggest a remedy or solution? Not really: don’t become a Catholic, and don't take Melmoth's bargain because people in completely worse circumstances have kept their heads on straight, and they will be redeemed in the end, as the Melmoths are dragged to Hell….
Cowering and broken
I’m a victim of my evil deeds
But I don’t need your sympathy
I’m comfortable in misery
– Lil Ugly Mane
I closed Charles Robert Maturin's book, and still have not found this Melmoth character, -- he died c. two-hundred years ago, not long before Maturin himself. Not so long after, I close my review of Melmoth the Wanderer, -- to quote Pushkin:
Melmoth the Wanderer, a work of genius, by Maturin.
My only advice to whoever wants to chase ghosts, demons, or unhappy Melmoths: to those who are lost, and wandering, and maybe misunderstanding there place: to those who have not yet read Byron, and have not truly felt twenty-four, and don’t yet have a wandering-place: If it isn't apparent by now: read Eugene Onegin. It might lead you to a dusty book by some C.R. Maturin…