Laughter of Carthage

Michael Moorcock

Description

Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, that charming but despicable mythomaniac who first appeared in Byzantium Endures, is back. Having fled Bolshevik Russia in late 1919, Pyat’s progress is a series of leaps from crisis to crisis, as he begins affairs with a Baroness and a Greek prostitute while undertaking schemes to build flying machines in Europe and the United States. His devotion to flamboyantly racist, particularly anti-Semitic doctrines—like his devotion to cocaine—remains unabated, and he both sings the praises of Mussolini and lectures across America for the Ku Klux Klan. (His best kept secret is of course, the fact that he is Jewish.) As the novel ends, Pyat is in Hollywood—his new Byzantium—hobnobbing with movie stars and dreaming of making films like those of his hero, D.W. Griffith.

Engineer, braggart, addict, Pyat is a magnificent invention, a genius of innocent vituperation: his finest achievement (and that of the author) is that his own warped and deluded vision is powerful enough to redefine reality. This authoritative edition presents the first time this work has been available in paperback in the U.S., along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.

Sujets

• Jewish
• Jews
• JewishGen
• 20th century
• Intellectual
• Erudition
• Philosophy
• Controversia

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604867763
• Langue: English

Extrait

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards
August Derleth Fantasy Award
British Fantasy Award
Guardian Fiction Award
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 The Laughter of Carthage
‘Michael Moorcock is an absolute wizard of a storyteller. I can think of no writer like him, not here, not America. He is a wonder…. It is marvelous to meet a novelist who has the energy for the epic. It is not simply a case of energy, Mr Moorcock is also a storyteller, an old-fashioned buttonholing, nineteenth-century storyteller.’
Stanley Reynolds, Punch
‘He is an ingenious and energetic experimenter, restlessly brimming over with clever ideas.’
Robert Nye, The Guardian
‘This is epic writing …’
Valentine Cunningham, Times Literary Supplement
‘If you are at all interested in fantastic fiction, you must read Michael Moorcock. He changed the field singlehandedly: he is a giant. He has kept me entertained, shocked and fascinated for as long as I have been reading.’
Tad Williams
‘The greatest writer of post-Tolkien British fantasy.’
Michael Chabon
’The Laughter of Carthage is a formidable … work in which science and technology are subordinated to narrative techniques not usually found in popular fiction … a work of grand design … cast as Pyatnitski’s memoirs of a life uprooted by the Russian Revolution. He brags of his exploits as a Don Cossack; he claims pure Russian blood and a batch of patents for airplanes and automobiles. But one can never be sure that anything Pyatnitski says is true. He is certainly an egomaniac and very likely mad; he is also a reactionary Tom Swift, an anti-Semite, a sybarite and a paranoiac with a gargantuan appetite for cocaine. Rabid anti-Semitism is his way of denying the past and advancing his career as scientist and gentleman. There is also ample indication of a thin line between deceit and self-delusion. Pyat’s first stop on his flight from Bolshevism is Istanbul, a teeming cosmopolis of thieves and whores but also a site idealized as the bastion of a once glorious Christendom. From there, the grotesque innocent moves west through Rome, Paris, New York City and Hollywood. Moorcock takes large risks … there are rewarding detours: lush descriptions of landscapes and the world’s great cities, and a parade of characters that would feel at home in the novels of Dickens, Nabokov and Henry Miller.’
Time magazine
‘No one at the moment in England is doing more to break down the artificial divisions that have grown up in novel writing realism, surrealism, science fiction, historical fiction, social satire, the poetic novel than Michael Moorcock.’
Angus Wilson
‘There is a feast in store for those who have never been dazzled and disturbed by Michael Moorcock’s eye for the absurd and gift for fantasy, and confirmation for those familiar with his work, that he is one of the most original authors of our time.’
Sunday Telegraph

The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock
© 2012 by Michael Moorcock
This edition © 2012 PM Press
Introduction © 2012 by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978-1-60486-492-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939673
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 1984
Cover photo by Linda Steele
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PM Press P.O.
Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
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Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
To the memory of Stokely Carmichael and a time when we seemed to be doing our best a little better than we’re doing it now.
For Michael Dempsey, Alexis Korner, Mongasi Feza
Contents
INTRODUCTION BY ALAN WALL
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
The Laughter of Carthage
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to
The Laughter of Carthage
We are addicted to narrative. Perhaps it is entailed in our status as the only fully linguistic animal. Even our mathematics can be read in a manner that expresses development, correspondence and dénouement, each time an equation progresses towards a summation and a resolution. Out of the Dirac Equation of 1928 the positron steps, that ghostly figure of antimatter, some years before anyone could actually confirm its existence experimentally. This equation is surely our greatest modern ghost story; there we found the doppelgänger for everything that had ever existed. And even in scientific writing we employ metaphor, and invent allegories which are, after all, metaphors in narrative form. We speak of the life and death of stars, though stars don’t actually ‘live’; they are inanimate. But we insist on bestowing our stories upon them, all the same. We bless all things that come our way with narrative structures and plot entanglements. That’s the way we read the world, the manner in which we situate ourselves inside these vast cosmic spaces where we presently find ourselves, whether the end of our endeavours then ends up being called myth or science. We tend to oppose a narrative by confronting it with an alternative narrative; we seldom oppose it by saying, here there can be no narrative at all. If we do say that, we are admitting we’re defeated. And the rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.
Michael Moorcock’s Pyat (together with the manifold variants of his name) is a focus through which the twentieth century recounts some of its more momentous narratives. Pyat is in the largest meaning of the word a narrative device, in the sense in which the Russian Formalists first used that term. The device of the detective in a novel by Raymond Chandler enabled a mobile intelligence unit to explore the heights and depths of society, often on the same afternoon, usually finding both equally wanting. Philip Marlowe is a licensed inquisitor, who probes the murky psychic corners of characters so socially disparate that they could only be connected by a single axis: crime, that vertical shaft through which all social strata can either rise or fall. Up and down the grand social elevator goes our freelance investigator, with his hardboiled banter and his unrelenting scepticism. The identity of the private dick is in truth an embodiment of his function. To be is to do, as the philosopher once expressed it. And what you do often enough turns into what you are; even turns you into what you are.
Now Pyat is the quintessential unreliable narrator: we can’t necessarily believe a word he says at any particular moment. And it is for this reason that Moorcock invented him: how else tell the story of the most mendacious and the most murderous century humanity has yet imposed upon itself (though we might of course be about to excel ourselves there) except through the mouth of someone as egregiously and energetically untrustworthy as the century itself? In Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann has a narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, whose calm humanistic composure provides the tranquil backdrop for the account of fascism and artistic demonism that the book proceeds to expound. The moody tension thus created supplies the narrative dynamic for that remarkable book. Moorcock in this quartet does the precise opposite. The psyche of Pyat is as big, ragged and confusing as the world it describes from the inside, and that is a world of revolution and betrayal, of communism, Nazism and finance capital. Bertolt Brecht once said that the child in Dickens presents us with an empty stage over which the mighty conflicts of the age march back and forth. The child is effectively the elected battleground; the childish consciousness registers with vivid but neutral innocence the dark forces battling all around it. Pyat sometimes seems like that. Although this child, if we are still being Dickensian about it, is more the Horace Skimpole of Bleak House than the true innocent of Oliver Twist. It is the dark distinction of Pyat to match his dreadful age in deadly sins, and deadlier denials of every single one of them. He makes the fornicating immoralists of Henry Miller look like Adam before the Fall. They really do seem to be innocents, as they seek out another cheery domicile between their well-used Parisian sheets.
The unreliable narrator called Pyat stands like a grand, half-ruined structure between ourselves and the facts of history. The facts keep coming at us, but they need to swerve round him as they do so, like starlings flying around a pier at twilight. We know the facts; they constitute the chronicle of the twentieth century. So when Pyat comments upon them, when he speculates for example on the intertwining of Bolshevism and the international Jewish influence, or praises Mussolini or the blacklistings of HUAC, we have enough information as readers to detect an irony where he evidently detects none. Irony, it should be said, is not our hero’s strong point. His remarks about Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley make that abundantly clear. Our civilisation has been destroyed, he informs us, by the wicked triumvirate of Marx, Freud and