File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-12-23.023, message 75


Date: Fri, 6 Dec 96 18:27 PST
From: solipsis-AT-hevanet.com (Baron Karl von Reichenbach)
Subject: Re: enclosed space in literature


>On Thu, 5 Dec 1996, David Erben (Art) wrote:
>
>>
>>I'd be grateful if members of the list could backchannel me suggestions
>>for works of fiction that depict tunnels, caverns, and any other enclosed
>>spaces.
>
>
Recollections of The Golden Triangle   <Alain Robbe-Grillet>

try around page 78 in the grove press, this is prison-cell related

The Ark Sakura <Kobo Abe>

The entire novel centers around an underground quarry and its structure (on
many levels)

Plus <Joseph McElroy>
Brain in a satellite...

A little more hard to find:

Polyphilo, or The Dark Forrest Revisited: An erotic epiphany of Architechure
<Alberto Perez-Gomez>

and of course the book/treatise on which it was based

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili <Renaissance>

Some Non-Fiction Works that might be related:

 Ewa Kuryluk's <Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex>

and maybe even Umberto Eco's <Travels in Hyperreality>
first section "The Fortresses of Solitude"

And this:

fragment from the eruption of Mont Pelée on the island of Martinique, May of
1902...

Of thirty thousand, one survived:

Auguste Ciparis--or his name may have been more properly Samson
Sil~Barice--a Black
stevedore, age 19, and a convicted murderer. He was lodged in an underground
dungeon beneathe
the city jail.... the only opening to the outside was a tiny grated aperture
high on the dungeon door.
May 8, in the morning, he awaited his last breakfast: he was to be hanged.

The cell suddenly darkened, and a blast of hot air, mixed with fine ashes
--the stevedore described it
as "hot, dry sand" ---penetrated the grating. He was dressed at the time in
hat, shirt and trousers,
and these remained untouched. Nor were his hair and face scorched. But neck,
back and legs were
horribly burned, his feet swollen, his hands covered with yellow offensive
matter. Blood oozed from
his burns..

Four days he spent in agony, until rescuers--or possibly looters--heard his
feeble cries. Saved from
the gallows, and nursed back to health, his death sentence commuted, he
became famous:

Auguste Ciparis toured with Barnum and Baily Circus until his death in 1929,
his days spent
displayed in a replica of his jail cell....

>From Paul Metcalf's "The Island"



and also there are some cavern related images in my web-based "novella"
experiment at http://www.hevanet.com/solipsis/qin.htm closer to the end
and then at qin1.htm mostly
also at
http://www.hevanet.com/solipsis/roentgen.htm
there is a description of a tunnel you might be interested in

not necessarily for the quality of the writing you understand
but just for ideas....

GSZ

Hope that was some kind of help






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