Authors: Mark Z. Danielewski
I am convinced Minos’ maze really sees as a trope for repression. My published thoughts on this subject (see “Birth Defects in Knossos” Sonny Won’t Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1968) [124—“Violent Prejudice in Knossos” by
Zampanô
in Sonny Will Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1969.]
[125—I have no idea why these titles and cited sources are different. It seems much too deliberate to be an error, but since I haven’t been able to find the “flyer” I don’t know for certain. I did call Ashley back, left message, even though I still don’t remember her.]
inspired the playwright Taggert Chiclitz to author a play called The Minotaur for The Seattle Repertory Company. [126—The Minotaur by Taggert Chielit, put on at The Hey Zeus Theater by The Seattle Repertory Company on April 14. 1972. ] As only eight people, including the doorman, got a chance to see the production I produce here a brief summary:
Chiclitz begins his play with Minos entering the labyrinth lute one eveiing to speak to his son. As it turns out. the Minotaur is a gentle and misunderstood creature, while the so called Athenian youth are convicted criminals who were already sentenced to death back in Greece. Usually King Minos had them secretly executed and then publicly claims their deaths were caused by the terrifying Minotaur thus ensuring that the residents of Knossos will never get too close to the labyrinth. Unfortunately this time, one of the criminals had escaped into the maze,
encountered Mint (as Chielitz refers to the Minotaur) and nearly murdered him. Had
Minos himself not rushed in and killed the criminal. his son would have perished. Suffice it to say Minos is furious. He has caught himself caring for his son and the resulting guilt and sorrow incenses him to no end. As the play progresses, the King slowly sees past his son’s deformities, eventually discovering an elegiac spirit, an artistic sentiment and most importantly a visionary understanding-of the world. Soon a deep paternal love grows in the King’s heart and he begins to conceive of a way to reintroduce the Minotaur buck into soeicty.f Sadly the stories the King has spread throughout the world concerning this terrifying beast prove the seeds of tragedy. Soon enough, a bruiser named—Theseus arrives (Chielitz describes him as a drunken virtually retarded, frat boy) who without a second thought hacks the Minotaur into little pieces. In one-of the play’s most moving scenes.
King Minos, with tears streaming down his face, publicly commends Theseus’ courage. The crowd believes the tears are a sign of gratitude while we the audience understand they are tears of loss. The king’s heart breaks, and while he will go on to be an extremely just ruler, it is a justice forever informed by the deepest kind of agony. [128—Even in Metamorphosis, Ovid notes how Minos, in his old age, feared young men.
Qui, duni/u,t integer oeiti, terrucrat nwgnas 1/550 guoque Iwflhine gelUe3 i’une ert i,nwlidu.v, DeIni€knqut I rn tar robore julie turn Pibgue parente sup
erbuin pirlitnuil, eredcnstjue
suis insurgere ignL haut tun,n Cs! palriis LIr rcpncaihus ausux
.
(“When Minos was in golden middle age! MI nations feared the mention of his name,/ but now he’d grown so impotent. so feeble! He shied away from proud young Miletus. The forward son of Phoebus and Deione;/ Though Mines half suspected Miletus/ Had eyes upon his throne and framed a plot! To make a palace revolution, he feared to act,/ To sign the papers for his deportation.” Horace Gregory p. 258 259.) Perhaps Miletus reminded Mines of his slain son and out of guilt he cowered in the presence of his youth.]
However, even as Holloway Roberts,
Jed
Leeder, and Wax Hook make their way further down the stairway in
Exploration #4
, the purpose of that vast place still continues to elude them. Is it merely an aberration of physics? Some kind of warp in space? Or just a topiary labyrinth on a much grander scale? Perhaps it serves a funereal purpose? Conceals a secret? Protects something? Imprisons or hides some kind of monster? Or, for that matter, imprisons or hides an innocent? As the Holloway team soon discovers, answers to these questions are not exactly forthcoming.
[129—Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.]
[
Note: Struck passages indicate what
Zampanô
tried to get rid of,
but
which I, with a little bit of turpentine
and
a good old
magnifying
glass managed to resurrect.]
It is too complex to adequately address here; for some, however, this mention alone may prove useful when considering the meaning of ‘play’, ‘origins’, and ‘ends’—especially when applied to the Navidson house:
Ce centre avait pour fonction non seulement d’orienter
et d’équilibrer, d’organiser Ia structure—on ne peut en
effet penser une structure inorganisée—mais de faire
surtout que le principe d’organisation de la structure
limite ce que nous pourrions appeler
le
jeu137
de Ia
structure. Sans doute le centre d’une structure, en onentant
et en organisant Ia coherence du système, per-
met-il le jeu des éiêments a l’iatônieur de Ia forrne
totale. Et aujourd’hui encore une structure pnivée de
tout centre repésente l’impensable lui-mCme.
And later on:
C’est pourquoi, pour une pensée classique de la structure,
Ic centre peut être dit, paradoxalement,
clans
Ia
structure et
hors de
la structure. Ii est au centre de Ia
totalité et pourtant, puisque le centre ne lui appartient
pas, Ia totalitè a
son centre ailleurs.
L.e centre n’est pas
le centre.
[130—Here’s the English. The best I can do:
The function of [a] center was not only
to orient, balance, and organize the
structure—one cannot in fact conceive of
an unorganized structure—but above all to
make sure that the organizing principle of
the structure would limit what we might call
the
play
of the structure. By orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the
center of a structure permits the play of its
elements inside the total form. And even
today the notion of a structure lacking any
center represents the unthinkable itself.
And later on:
This is why classical thought concerning
structure could say that the center is,
paradoxically,
within
the structure and
outside
it. The center is at the center of
the totality, and yet, since the center does
not belong to the totality (is not part of
the totality), the totality
has its center
elsewhere.
The center is not the center.
[131—Conversely Christian Norberg-Schulz writes: In terms of spontaneous perception, man’s space is ‘subjectively centered.’ The development of schemata, however, does not only mean that the notion of centre is established as a means of general organization, but that certain centres are ‘externalized’ as points of reference in the environment. This need is so strong that man since remote times has thought of the whole world as. being centralized. In many legends the ‘centre of the world’ is concretized as a tree or a pillar symbolizing a vertical
axis mundi
Mountains were also looked upon as points where sky and earth meet. The ancient Greeks placed the ‘navel’ of the world
(omphalos)
in Delphi, while the Romans considered their Capitol as
cap
Ut
mund:
For Islam
ka’aba
is still the centre of the world. Eliade points out that in most beliefs it is difficult to reach the centre. It is an ideal goal, which one can only attain after a ‘hard journey.’ To ‘reach the centre is to achieve a consecration, an initiation. To the profane and illusory existence of yesterday, there succeeds a new existence, real, lasting and powerful.’ But Eliade also points out that ‘every life, even the least eventful, can be taken as the journey through a labyrinth.” [132—What Derrida and Norberg-Schulz neglect to consider is the ordering will of gravitation or how between any two particles of matter exists an attractive force (this relationship usually represented as 0 with a value of 6.670
X
10-’ I N-rn2! kg2). Gravity, as opposed to gravitation, applies specifically to the earth’s effect on other bodies and has had as much to say about humanity’s sense of centre as Derrida and Norberg-Schulz. Gravity informs words like ‘balance’, ‘above’, ‘below’, and even ‘rest’. Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned. Albert Einstein’s work on this matter is also worth studying, though it is important not to forget how Navidson’s house ultimately confounds even the labyrinth of the inner ear.]
[133—This gets at a Lissitzky and Escher theme which
Zampanô
seems to constantly suggest without ever really bringing right out into the open. At least that’s how it strikes me. Pages 30, 356 arid 441, however, kind of contradict this. Though not really.]
See Christian Norberg-Schulz’s
Existence, Space & Architecture
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), p. 18 in which he quotes from Mircea Eliade’s
Patterns in Comparative Religion,
trans. R. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward,
1958),
p. 380-382.]
Something like that.
From Jacques
Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in
Writing and
Difference
translated
by Alan Bass. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1978. p. 278-279
.
See Derrida’s
Lécriture et Ia dfjerence
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 409-410.
Penelope Reed Doob avoids the tangled discussion of purpose by cleverly drawing a distinction between those who walk within a labyrinth and those who stand outside of it:
[M]aze-treaders, whose vision ahead
and behind is severely constricted and
fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas
maze-viewers who see the pattern
whole, from above or in a diagram, are
dazzled by its complex artistry. What
you see depends on where you stand,
and thus, at one and the same time,
labyrinths are single (there is one physical
structure) and double: they simultaneously
incorporate order and disorder,
clarity and confusion, unity and
multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They
may be perceived as a path (a linear
but circuitous passage to a goal) or as
a pattern (a complete symmetrical
design)
…
Our perception of
labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable:
change your perspective and the
labyrinth seems to change.
[134—Penelope Reed Doob,
The Idea Of The
Labyrinth: from
Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1
X
]
Unfortunately the dichotomy between those who participate inside and those who view from the outside breaks down when considering the house, simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety. Therefore comprehension of its intricacies must always be derived from within.
This not only applies to the house but to the film itself. From the outset of
The Navidson Record
,
we are involved in a labyrinth, meandering from one celluloid cell to the next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along dissolving into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend. [135—At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
Or in other words, like the house, the film itself captures
us
and prohibits us at the same time it frees us to wander.-and so first misleads us, inevitably, drawing us from the us, thus, only in the end to lead us, necessarily, for where else could we have really gone?, back again to the us and hence back to ourselves
. See Daniel Hortz’s
Understanding The Self: The Maze of You
(Boston: Garden Press,
1995),
p. 261.] [129—Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.]
In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to rewind, and then open up again, whether in Navidson’s house or the
film—quae itinerum ambages occursusque ac recursus inexplicabiles
[136—[”Passages that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly Intricate manner.”
—
Ed.] Pliny also wrote when describing the Egyptian maze:
“sed crebisforibus inditis adfallendos occursus redeundumque in errores eosdem.”
[“Doors are let Into the walls at frequent Intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed In his wanderlngs.”—Ed.]
k
] —we should look to the etymological inheritance of a word like ‘labyrinth’. The Latin
labor
is akin to the root
labi
meaning to slip or slide backwards [
137—
Labiis
also probably cognate with “sleep.”] [134—Penelope Reed Doob,
The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1
X
]
though the commonly perceived meaning suggests difficulty and work. Implicit in ‘labyrinth’ is a required effort to keep from slipping or falling; in other words stopping. We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle past them. Hugh of Saint Victor has gone so far as to suggest that the antithesis of labyrinth—that which contains work—is Noah’s ark [138—See Chapter Six, footnote 82, Tom’s Story as well as footnote 249.
—
Ed.]—in other words that which contains rest.
X