Whoah, the list is getting spicy! Russian! But now here's a request in English (so that everyone can understand - sorry, but I'm trying to be practical).
We've got a group in Vancouver reading the Glass Bees together once a week and
we're quite unable to satisfy ourselves on the nature of Zapparoni's automatons
and the film genre as it is visualized by Juenger in this book. The uncertainty
regards the tangible reality of these creatures. On the explicit level Juenger
is describing a level of physical robot technology which we can only suppose at
this point could be possible in the future. (Or are we further than that,
Gary?) Yet the suggestion has recurred within the group that perhaps his vision
was of our emerging virtual reality ..... Here, with my emphases, is a
particularly relevant passage:
"Prognoses have been made which contend that our technology will terminate
in pure necromancy, If so, everything we now experience would be only a
departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer
require any crude embodiment. Lights, words, yes even thoughts would be
sufficient. Clearly the Zapparoni films had very nearly realized such a future.
The dreams of old Utopians were coarse-grained in comparison. With the freedom
and elegance of dancers, the automatons had opened up a world of their own.
Here a principle operative only in dreams - namely, that matter thinks- seemed
to be realized."
Pg. 28-29, from the Noonday Press 1991 translation.
A couple of our members are computer game animators and they instinctively
assigned these "actors" to the virtual world they "create" in. Do these
"perfect" human models not remind one of the ever-more perfect virtual
creations we see on video games, music videos, cartoons, movies? (What really
surprised them was Junger's vision of the deep power that these images have on
their viewers, young and old - but this is different point...)
One thinks back to Man's age-old attempts to attain immortality through the
creation of his likeness in an automaton - Frankenstein, etc - and one imagines
that Juenger gave Zapparoni a similar ambition. At the time of this glimpse
into the future computers had barely been invented and so Juenger conceived his
creatures with the most logical technological "flesh" that was known to him
back then - robotics. Yet he saw clearly enough to give these "robots" an
ethereal, insubstantial nature. (The Luminar in Eumeswil is certainly a virtual
reality synthesizer but then this novel came much later.)
What do you all think - is this reasonable, or are we to still await perfect
material automatons from technology? An interesting question arises from this
line of thought: if the robots are in fact virtual, then what of the glass bees
who have the same creator and seem to share the same technology and physical
nature? If they are not robots, what are they? Do they have a corresponding
virtual form, as we are imagining for the robots? Or are mechanical bees an
analogy for a new type of human and human society, the type Zapparoni is in
some mysterious way fostering with his robot role-models: "In this place,
however, a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. The
same mind had devised this insult: it intended to rely on man power in the same
way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and
divisible, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had
already been destroyed." Pg. 141. This last idea has some terrifying
implications.
If anyone would care to shed their own light on these questions we would be
grateful - these do seem to be questions of importance, and not just to an
isolated group in Vancouver or on the Internet. Actually we'd love to hear any
thoughts on the Glass Bees at all.
Thomas Friese
Association Eumeswil Vancouver
Can't resist a last comment: why so much discussion on the old Junger and so
little on the recent works, which are surely the product of an even wiser and
more mature author - force of habit?
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