Jerusalem Commands

Michael Moorcock

Description

”I will admit I was lured into temptation during the twenties and thirties, and I blame no one for what happened then, least of all myself.”

Unmistakably, this is the voice of Colonel Pyat, addict, inventor, and bizarre Everyman for the twentieth century. In Jerusalem Commands, the third of the Pyat quartet, our hero schemes and fantasises his way from New York to Hollywood, from Cairo to Marrakech, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage in his wake as he crashes towards an inevitable appointment with the worst nightmare this century has to offer.

It is Michael Moorcock’s extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Maxim Pyatnitski into epic and often hilariously comic adventure. Sustained by his dreams and profligate inventions, his determination to turn his back on the realities of his own origins, Pyat runs from crisis to crisis, every ruse a further link in a vast chain of deceit, suppression, betrayal. Yet, in his deranged self-deception, his monumentally distorted vision, this thoroughly unreliable narrator becomes a lens for focusing, through the dimensions of wild farce and chilling terror, on an uneasy brand of truth.

Sujets

• Controversia
• Philosophy
• Erudition
• Intellectual
• 20th century

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868685
• Langue: English

Extrait

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards
August Derleth Fantasy Award
British Fantasy Award
Guardian Fiction Prize
Prix Utopiales
Bram Stoker Award
John W. Campbell Award
SFWA Grand Master
Member, Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
Praise for Michael Moorcock and Jerusalem Commands
‘New adventures both picaresque and grotesque take [Pyat] across bootlegging America, like a hobo, to Hollywood as actor, writer and set-designer; to Egypt with various film-making eccentrics, only to end up enacting scenes of lurid degradation for a powerful pervert…. Such escapades are Hollywood and schoolboy fantasy seen through the eyes of a talented inventor who is also a bigoted racist, egoist and abuser of women…. Moorcock shows us through this remarkable but odious bore that fascistic attitudes are not as far removed from some forms of popular fiction and fantasy as we might prefer to think.’
Robert O’Brien, Time Out London
‘Few novelists have risen above the orthodox categories of fiction … to produce something as expansive and elaborate as this.’
Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times (UK)
‘The Pyat books are in some ways the most ambitious work of Mr Moorcock’s long career, and offer peculiar rewards, in that the narrator, although charming in a roguish way, is also a deeply flawed creation, and spending psychic time with the character is emotionally trying. I’m always up for a challenge, though.’
Mike Whybark, Whybark.com
‘Moorcock’s powers of description especially when focused on the sights and smells of megalopolis and his range of references are immense…. Like Thomas Pynchon he can be … highly impressive…. His main achievement in this tetralogy … is to force the reader to afford the luckiest bastard in the whole damn universe [Colonel Pyat] a grudging respect. Even a little affection too.’
Mark Sanderson, Times Literary Supplement
‘Pyat is the most unreliable narrator in the fiction of the last half-century; the dustbin of history on legs. A racist, a bigot, a fanatical Slav nationalist forever ranting of the glories of Byzantium and its need for ever-ceasing vigilance against the malign forces of Carthage (by which he means Jews, Muslims and all of Africa), a pedophile, a cocaine addict, a man for whom the distinction between lying and self-delusion has long since eroded, an eternal betrayer forever feeling himself perpetually betrayed by others…. Pyat is so consistent, so much of a piece, so relentless in his repulsiveness that the reader ends up reluctantly saluting his indefatigability, as well as that of Mr Moorcock, his editor and Boswell.’
Charles Shaar Murray, The Independent (UK)
‘Through Moorcock I was introduced to a whole set of countercultural possibilities, as well as to the idea that writing didn’t have to conform to well, to anything really.
After the manic productivity of the 60s and 70s, Moorcock slowed down (slightly) during the 80s and 90s, producing increasingly literary and complex picaresques, such as the tetralogy featuring Captain Pyat, an anti-hero whose peregrinations through the 20th century take him from the Russian revolution to a flat on the Portobello Road, where he tells his unlikely tale to a writer called Moorcock. However, despite productions like the Pyat books, which are maximalist fables of the type that have made global stars out of Pynchon or Rushdie, Moorcock has never shown any interest in eschewing genre.’
Hari Kunzru, The Guardian (UK)

Jerusalem Commands
Michael Moorcock
© 2013 by Michael Moorcock
This edition © 2013 PM Press
Introduction © 2013 by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978–1-60486–493–9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913633
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Bibliography reprinted with the kind permission of Moorcock’s Miscellany ( www.multiverse.org )
Project editor: Allan Kausch
Copy editor: Gregory Nipper
Cover by John Yates/ www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
Copyright © Michael Moorcock 1992
Cover photo by Linda Steele
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Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
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To the memory of Arnold Schoenberg who, on July 30, 1933, ten days after the formal signing of the Concordat between Hitler and Pope Pius XI, reconverted to the Jewish faith.
FOR ANDREA DWORKIN
Contents
INTRODUCTION BY ALAN WALL
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Jerusalem Commands
APPENDIX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to Jerusalem Commands
In the editorial introduction which Michael Moorcock provides to this third instalment of the memoirs of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, aka Colonel Pyat, we are told that the old rogue’s philosophy is as follows: ‘Constant change is the paramount rule of the universe. To reduce the rate of entropy, we must make enormous efforts, using skill, intelligence and morality to create a little justice, a little harmony, from the stuff of Chaos.’
This is probably the only moment of intellectual congruence between the paranoid racist from Notting Hill and the eminent Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1943 delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, in which he argued that living forms drain their surroundings of whatever order they possess in order to bring more order into their own temporary existences. This was effectively the formulation of a law of anti-entropy, and humanity was better at it than any other living organism, because we represent the most successful form of life ever known. Our civilisation is a reversal of the entropic principle, however brief; order increases here with us whereas everywhere else in the universe it is decreasing. The ultimate fate of the universe, a teleological decline into the maximum possible state of disorder or thermodynamic equilibrium, is briefly countermanded by humanity and its historic achievement.
The books that constitute the Pyat Quartet raise an interesting question: how precisely do we contribute our quotient of order in this universe of ultimate disorder by fabricating monsters? Why does Dickens make Bill Sikes, or Shakespeare create Iago, whose ‘I am not what I am’ directly contradicts the Almighty’s ‘I am that I am’ in the Book of Exodus? Pyat presents himself to us here as cosmologist and theologian, moralist and political commentator, not to mention cokehead extraordinaire . The white powder is to our grubby self-denying Jew what laudanum was to Coleridge and De Quincey: a universal panacea, altogether too expensively purchased. Even Sherlock Holmes (not to mention Freud) employed the snow and its blissful narcosis to alleviate the longueurs between cases, but he of course injected rather than snorting. Pyat, as someone remarked of a recent American president, must have had a nose like a vacuum cleaner.
He is also a great respecter of nature, whatever his clamorous caveats regarding the human variety. He has this in common with one of his heroes, Adolf Hitler, in whom vegetarianism and a devotion to the Bavarian high spots seemed to merge the noble solitaries of Caspar David Friedrich’s mountain paintings with the murderous besuited anonymity of Adolf Eichmann. Pyat laments the ceaseless trashing of our planet that modern industrial society effects. He died before he could watch so many of these nature-degrading industries dying in their turn. That’s in the West, of course; it would surely not have been lost on our student of comparative civilization, that each industry lost in the Western Hemisphere represents another one gained in the east. Down goes Detroit; up comes Beijing. The industrial revolution is replaying itself through the looking glass, with equally deleterious environmental effects, this time rising with the sun.
And so Pyat once more romps on, having made an enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, he turns up in Hollywood, talking to Sam Goldwyn in Yiddish. Then we are off to North Africa where Pyat, metamorphosed into the movie star Max Peters, plays his part in creating a pornographic film. Brutish sex is to be had in the Sahara, where the clear moral to be drawn is that folks don’t necessarily improve the nearer they are to the soil, or the sand. Rousseau got that one wrong, evidently. Pyat meanwhile effectively writes his own version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in these pages, without restricting the worldwide conspiracy to Jews: why forget the part played in our current disasters by Communists and Muslims? One thing you can say for Pyat: his racism boasts a certain universalism. Only the Cossacks come out of it all unscathed. It is to them of course that he attributes his genetic evidence. Not that anyone else ever believes him.
So back for a moment to Schrödinger. Our order is, he insisted, a type of anti-entropy. We suck order out of our environmental surroundings, and one of the forms it then takes is art. Pyat is a pantomimic figure of prejudice, mendacity and unscrupulous appetite. He struts through his fictional life like a dictator without a specific country in which to dictate. He utters his untruths with such zeal and conviction that he undoubtedly believes them himself. Is he then a parable for our times? Is he, as Hamlet recommended to the players, hold