"...I subconsciously felt that the MOQ was way too important to be
sugar-coated. Its primary concern is not what is popular. Popularity is a
social goal. Its primary concern is truth."
ZMM was a rather inspirational book ; it made everybody feel better in the end.
LILA is a confrontational book. Everybody in it dislikes everybody else, nobody
understands anybody else, everybody's fur is constantly getting rubbed the
wrong way including the fur of many readers. Phædrus has changed from a
romantic mystery figure into a rather disagreeable intellectual. The setting is
grotesque and depressing and so is the plot."
So why, you may wonder did I write it? (laughs)
Well, originally the intent was just to forget about Quality and write about
Indians. But books have a mind of their own. They tell you what they want. For
some reason this book just wanted to be cross and depressing. I never knew why
when I was I was writing it. But now maybe, I subconsciously felt that the MOQ
was way too important to be sugar-coated. Its primary concern is not what is
popular. Popularity is a social goal. Its primary concern is truth. And when
you say: 2 x 2 = 4 you shouldn't have to say it in a way that is pleasing to
its audience. It's 4! No matter how crossly you say it.
And the feeling as I wrote LILA was: "Look, this is what I believe, take it or
leave it" you know. And it was just that kind of declaration all the way
through. A lot of people have left it but I just heard during the interim that
it has been picked up in Berkeley in a huge way by their students. And this is
a wonderful surprise to me. I hadn't heard that and the question was asked
earlier: "How would I feel if nobody read the book?", I tell you, I feel damn
good that a lot of people [have read the book], students particularly in
Berkeley; students have always been my strongest crowd at the
freshman/sophomore junior level. Their minds are open, they are very dynamic.
When they get to my age they tend to rigidify in their thinking but when they
are young, they have new ideas and I know if I can make it with them I can make
it through history because they are going to be old later on and the ideas
they've picked up in ZMM and LILA are going to get damn static when they grow
up and they are not going to listen to anybody who has any other opinions.
Well, anyway, we're shifting into LILA now and the structure of LILA is that of
a philosophic discourse contained within a narrative. Although people might
think of it as something that I have originated, it is not new at all. Aesop's
fables are a mixture of narrative and moralising. "The Mahabharata", India's
most sacred book, is a mixture of narrative and moralising in which an entire
action of a battle is stopped while Krishna and Arjuna argue about how moral
the whole battle is.
Well, in ZMM the narrative comes to dominate the intellectual portion of the
book, the metaphysics. In LILA the metaphysics clearly dominates the narrative.
The three main characters are metaphysical chess-pieces. Lila embodies
biological values, Richard Rigel embodies social values and Phædrus embodies
intellectual values. The reason none of them get along is because their values
are mis-matched and this is quite deliberate and it is not a thing a good
novelist does. A good novelist does not plot his books where his characters
become chess pieces but this is primarily a metaphysical book and I have taken
that liberty of doing that.
Within LILA there are two huge divisions which are not very apparent to the
reader. The first part of the book, up to about chapter 13 is what we call high
level exposition in which we start with the basic ideas, the basic philosophy
of the MOQ. And then in the second part of the book we get to low level
exposition in which concrete examples appear of how the world is when these
high level principles are applied.
Now this created an enormous, perhaps the major creative problem for me in the
book. Because, and it's really what has blocked a lot of expected sales of the
book, because it's just too hard at the beginning. I couldn't get around this
problem. If you're going to be deductive you start with the hard part and you
go to the easy part and when somebody is reading your book and they hit that
hard part they never do get to the easy part. They just get stopped and this
has happened to a lot of readers.
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