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Corbeau, Doug Dorst, Follow the Monkey, JJ Abrams, Khatef Zelh, S, Ship of Theseus, Sola, V.M. Straka, Vevoda, VM Straka
ICYMI: Straka’s original ending for Ship of Theseus may have been found. http://t.co/TJGFZ9JyRJ
— Doug Dorst (@dougdorst) July 9, 2014
The following is a transcription of Straka’s original ending for Ship of Theseus, so thought, as tweeted by author Doug Dorst himself.
The ending replaces everything in the original Ship of Theseus from the third word of the second line of p451 forward.
destroyed. But it must circulate. It must not be contained. And Vévoda is the one who contains it. Thus the task remains. When he and Sola have completed it, they will ascend these corridors and reemerge into the world. There may be Agents waiting, but there will be more workers, and they will all carry axes and chisels and any other implements they can use to destroy these barrels and let the black wine-
He sniffs: a rank smell cutting through the olfactory fog of blue-black and earth. He recognizes it at the very moment he feels the tug on his trouser leg. The monkey, somehow, looks to be in much more vigorous health, and from its toothless mouth comes a vocalization of a sort that S. has never heard from it, free from taunt or condescension or irritation. It sounds-and here, S. wonders if the air in the cellars is fogging his mind-as if the monkey is mimicking the run of notes in S’s last whistle-call to Sola.
The monkey raises one hand, showing S. a jagged chunk of dark-gray rock, turning it back and forth as if it expects the light from the naked bulb ahead of them to catch one of its facets and make it gleam. When S. whispers, “I don’t understand,” the monkey darts ahead to the next barrel and beats the rock against its face, circling the bung. The sounds are loud, sharp, and echoing; everyone in the cellars will hear, has already heard. S. lurches toward the monkey, grabs at it, but catches only a tuft of fur which comes away in his hand. Then, with surprising strength and dexterity, the monkey wrenches out the loosened bung and sets the black wine spilling, arcing out into the path where it splatters and puddles on the packed earth. The smell swirling around him is…holy. The spirit inhabits. He hears a faint, euphonious hum of voices and stills himself to listen more closely. And the blue-black sheen on the surface of the puddles-this, this is the precious thing that has caught the light. He holds out a cupped hand, to taste-
Sola’s distress call, and a masculine shout. Which came first? How long has he been wavering drunkenly? How long has he been still?
This is the choice he makes: he runs forward, deeper into the cellars, toward her. He leaves behind the monkey, who darts to the next barrel. The reports of rock on oak begin anew.
He stumbles when the path suddenly dips, cracks his shoulder against a barrel chime, and sprawls, skinning the ground with knee, chin, and palm. His first thought is of Pfeifer, of being immobilized, unable to continue, unable to save himself or anyone else, but he is able to stand. From the murk of somewhere comes a cough, a gurgle. The monkey, no doubt tasting the fruit of its work. S. hobbles, walks, then runs. No broken bones. Pain and nothing more. And the pain awakens him more fully to what he should have understood more fully a long time ago: more important than thwarting Vévoda, more important than precious story and its circulation of truth, is Sola. What is most important to him is Sola. His story.
Does she know this already? She must.
One note from her whistle, but one that he only recognizes as the first syllable of a longer call. Without the rest, its meaning is unclear.
He calls back, one note, to acknowledge. I hear you. Implied, he hopes, is: I am coming. I will be there shortly. Do whatever you must do to stay safe. He can no longer conceal his position, anyway, not with the monkey’s noise, and what matters is his message, his reaching across the murky distance to her.
Deeper into the twisted descent there are voices, several male, and hers. Forward, while somewhere behind him, somewhere in the cellars where, too, this light cannot reach, the monkey destroys and, S. imagines, prances drunkenly through its destruction.
Vévoda regards his guests, deposed monarchs who with his help will reassume their rule within the year. A husband and wife. Frivolous people, but well capitalized, and they appear to be enjoying themselves amid this unexpectedly dramatic scene. They have not before experienced such a direct challenge, physical threat. Neither has he, of course, but his Agents have, which is what matters. This first impression has left him ambivalent.
The woman sips while her husband helps the Agent complete the arrangements. “You’ve quite a collection,” she says.
“The wine attracts them,” Vévoda says. They raise glasses to each other, celebrating their understanding.
The husband rises, blots at his vest with a handkerchief. Mops his forehead. Frowns at the blue-black streak that comes away.
The Agent straightens his hat. The resistance had knocked it a degree off true. The next time the whistle blows, Vévoda nods to him, sends him off to do his work.
The voices now sound conversational. Silence would have concerned him, but to hear their calm is terrifying. The sound of an Agent approaching is merely annoying, as it requires his stillness. He crouches in the shadow of a barrel in the darkest part of the passage, midway between the light at one end and the light at the other. These are the footsteps of a man who walks unafraid, who is certain he will have the best of any opposition he encounters. S. withdraws his knife from its sheath. He wishes the Agent would quicken his pace. Sola is all that matters.
His nose fills with the rich, rank smell of unwashed fur soaked in blue-black. He turns his head and finds the monkey there, at eye level. It opens its mouth but makes no sound, as if it knows better. Its breath, despite the wine coating its mouth, is the foul smell of decay. But here in the shadows the monkey sits, and S. has little choice but to sit silently beside it and listen to those voices ahead. Where is the rage, the sound of confrontation and struggle? Or even of triumph?
The Agent strides past them, in duster and fedora. He is a young man, tall and athletic, all confidence and jutting jaw. What he lacks is care, and S. dispatches him before the Agent even knew he was in danger.
As the man’s body trembles into its last, as life slips into earth, S. does nothing but wipe his blade. In the next moment, the Agent is nothing, and S. remains-what? A fury? A purpose? A fitting end?
S. moves on.
Through the dark: a scatter of whistled notes, as if they were flung carelessly into a wind. It’s not a signal he understands. It’s not their language.
The rightful princess laughs quietly to herself. What fun it is, to be full of the loveliest of wines and tootling away like a canary!
But their host suddenly appears put out. He is a delightful little man, immaculate of dress, and with that perfect white Charlie-why, the tips of the mustache fairly wink at her when he offers that sly smile! He is their host, and as such his discomfiture is, to be perfectly frank about the whole thing, more than a bit inconsiderate. She hopes it will not worsen and become rude. She does not want to like the man so. He will be extraordinarily helpful to them, and she would not like to feel indebted to a rude person. And now-a pretty pistol in his hand! Waving about!
“Dear me,” she says quietly to her husband. “Where did he come by that?”
Her husband does not respond. She ought not have expected him to. He hasn’t looked away from the rack since he finished helping the Agent in that most exciting business. It’s understandable, she supposes, but it’s still a bit rude, even for him.
Forward.
The monkey runs along with him, so closely as to be nearly underfoot, but they never tangle, never even touch. The two of them might well be one.
They make errors as they follow the voice-it’s now just one voice, and S. is certain it’s Vévoda’s. They follow pathways that run to dead ends, hesitate at forks before choosing incorrectly and having to double back. S. resents the monkey for not having a more finely-tuned animal sense of direction. He imagines-even as he runs, even as he strains to fix the voice’s location-the life he and Sola might find waiting when they return to the surface, the wine spilled, their work complete. He pictures them boarding the ship to soft-spoken expressions of admiration from the crew, paddling out through the pirate’s passage, and letting the wind send them freely skimming over the seas. He stills this vision in the most perfect of settings: an orange sky, just shy of dusk; a sturdy warm breeze filling the sails; their wake whitening to the water behind them, ever and always marking where they have been but need never go again. This is what awaits, if they can find her in time.
But in stilling the vision, he has corrupted it: standing on that imagined ship with her, dread swells within him. The sun, the wind, each other-none of it can beat back the dread that rises when he realizes that these waters are heavily mined. He knows this, somehow, knows that it is folly to pretend they are safe, that they are anything but doomed. It won’t be long before they hit one. The deftest of pilots could not steer them through. These devices, one of which saved his life an age ago, will kill him, and it will kill him at the very moment at which he most wants to live.
Their host cocks the pistol. Such a potent but discreet little weapon! His rudeness aside, it’s all quite thrilling.
The physics of sound cooperates, finally, and when the sound of the cocked hammer reaches S.’s ears, he knows precisely where the sound came from. He can see, ahead, the path splitting into a T; when he and the monkey turn the corner to the left, they will find the man holding the pistol. It is too late, and he is too close, to bother with stealth. His advantage will be in his speed, in his ferocity, in his absolute need to find her. The monkey screeches, it sounds like a war whoop. S. tightens his damp grip on the knife, and they turn the corner.
S. sees the pistol, waving erratically as it is brandished; he notes four wine barrels arranged haphazardly in one corner, startles at how well-lit the room is, intuits that the room is a rectangle and that he and Vévoda-this white-haired and white-bearded and anxious and tiny man-are facing each other at its only point of entry or exit. He hurls himself at this man with a firearm, noting two other people in the room and a dumbwaiter on the far wall and knowing that if Vévoda manages to get off a shot, the bullet will miss him because Vévoda has no training and little nerve; he makes weapons but has never had cause to use them.
It is not until the pistol fires and pain rakes his collarbone that he realizes what his instantaneous reconnoitering did not reveal. Where is she?
The bullet sails beyond, carrying his skin and blood. It ricochets off an earthen wall, punches through a barrel, and comes to rest in the liquid inside.
The knife slides from his grip. It clatters across the floor, a surface of smooth, polished stone.
The pistol does the same.
They collapse as one, S. above and Vévoda pinned below. Close, closer as the small frame struggles beneath him, a pain rippling through his trunk and into the incandescent room. S. hears a furious growl issue from someone’s throat, though he cannot tell if it is Vévoda’s or his own.
The monkey appears beside them, shrieking, raising itself up with the rock in its hand. S. sees clearly the animal’s face, its small proud chin extending, its simple mouth wide, all the force in its body ready to spring. Time pitches forward as the monkey brings the rock down at them. S. turns his head and hears the sounds of rock against bone, and bone giving way. Once, twice, several times more. On and on.
S. rolls himself aside, wipes his face, waits for his breath to return.
Sola. He has not seen her and he has not heard her because she is no longer there. They will not ascend to sunlight together, they will not board the ship together. He will never have cause to dread where mines might lurk in the water; he will never have the fortune of concern.
He stands, sways. There are paintings on the walls here. There is a low table set with a decanter and crystal. Across the room, there is a woman in a purple gown, tugging at the hand of the man beside her.
“Well,” the woman says. “I hope you’re not…” She does not finish.
S. stares, slow to understand what she means. She yanks the man along with her, marching him past S. and the monkey and the remains of Vévoda. She is wearing Sola’s whistle about her neck, yet S. cannot think of a reason to stop them, and so they vanish into the cellar maze. He moves himself toward the space where they had been, in front of the barrel rack, because he sees now that it is not all empty. The rack cradles three bodies, each lying face up, each with feet to the wall and heads tilted back over the rim. Gravity arches the throats. The faces are swirled and spattered and streaked in blue-black. On the smooth stone are spatters and streams and the fine settled particles of a blue-black mist. On an adjacent wall, a spray of blue-black, patterned like a shotgun blast. He knows-without even registering the servant’s costume-that the body closest to it is Sola’s.
Black wine is still dripping from her mouth. Her lips are still wet.
The voices rise again, double him over, but he straightens and moves closer, one hand clamped over the wound on his shoulder. The faces are too darkly inked for him to make out the features until he stands close. Sola. Khatef-Zelh, still young, unchanged from when he met her in El-H___. Corbeau, as she was on the wharf, in the hills, in the cave, in midair. And now, he sees, a fourth body, tiny, nestled between the girl and Corbeau: an infant. The baby from the Territory, he feverishly decides, though it’s difficult to say.
Sola should not be here. None of them should be here. But they are here, and it is because he failed them. All of them.
The noise in his head: all the voices of all the cities, all the scream and static from the skies over the sea, all the thunder of bombs falling to earth. All the noise of this life of failures, a life that was never even his own to begin with.
You toss your rock away, watch it bounce and spin across the floor. You stretch your stiff limbs. The stove-in man’s eyes are open, but you ignore this. You know when a thing is dead. Why would you even think to gaze into a dead eye?
Across the room the transparent man raises his hands and presses them over his ears as the wound on his shoulder bleeds freely. He shakes. He shakes so hard you can see a thousand man-shaped outlines within him flutter and blur. He drops to one knee, to the other, to the ground.
Your senses are acute-you are made of senses-and from across the room you can hear the voices in his head. So many voices, desperate, raging, pained, hopeless, and all of them are his own.
A thousand outlines flutter, but the man is still. His clothing is blood and black wine. You call out and he does not move.
His stillness unsettles you. Why sit with the dead?
It occurs to you for the first time that this man has never known that he is transparent. But why should it have occurred to you? How could any creature fail to understand such a fundamental thing about itself? You met the transparent man long ago, and that has always been what he is.
But as you watch him, slumped, the thousand outlines fluttering, you can sense the space inside him darkening, thickening.
You are old. You have seen everything. You have not seen this.
The man now has only two wants. His scent carries them to you. He wants to pick up the knife and carve a strange shape into the stove-in man’s face, or maybe into the pale, white-furred skin of his belly, but he does not want that enough to do it. His second want is to strike a match. This alarms you. You are soaked in black wine, and you understand doom. It is instinctive.
You stretch again, then approach. Poke the man with your finger. Screech in his ear. Stand, you tell him. Move. He does not know your language but he knows its meaning. Move. Stand. Walk, because this is what must be done. You do not stay underground with the dead. You ascend, you emerge, you breathe. Then you find your way to the water. Where there is water there is a ship, so that is where you go.
You pinch his skin. Swat his face. You grab the arm that is not bleeding and tug. Walk, you man, walk.
But he does not move, stand, walk, and so you sit, you still yourself, and you think. You wonder if, all this time, there has been something essential about him you have failed to understand.
Jon Wallis said:
Even if written by Dorst, it really doesn’t seem stylistically consistent with the rest of the original SoT.
Brian Shipman said:
Agree. It took me months to accept it as “the original” because of the stylistic differences. Only after DD’s second tweet did I look closer. It seems to correspond well with the margin notes on p452 between Jen and Eric about the original version they received from Ermelinda Pega. “All those women…” and feeling like he had failed them all.
More interesting to me is how Eric and Jen obtained the original manuscript – in the unopened envelope that Ermelinda Pega received from Desjardins in the mid-70s (p422). Desjardins presumably received it from his wife, Signe Rabe (p361) who is the (inferred) daughter of V.M. Straka and Amarante Durand.
Katie said:
I thought asigne Rabe was the daughter of Ekstrom and Durand?
Brian Shipman said:
That is the theory at face value, but there is another thought that perhaps Straka is the actual father, and if so, would make Signe a target for all of Straka’s enemies.
jonathangaskill said:
Wow, that was really trippy. A few things popped out at me, so I’ll list them here for others’ consideration.
1. CHARACTER IDENTITIES
S. and Sola are both linked with other characters here. S. is linked with Vévoda and the monkey. Sola is linked with Corbeau and the baby from the Territory.
S. is described as being “transparent”, having a “thousand man-shaped outlines” and the “space inside him darkening, thickening” (which for me brings up the image of the “bird of negative space”). I believe this is a clue regarding S. being symbolic of something more than just one person. The cycle continues, and there was more than just one book in the shack at the top of the Obsidian Island.
Vévoda is described as being “white-bearded” and having a “white Charlie”. The white Charlie is supposedly a reference to his mustache, but the only reference on Google I could find for a Charlie mustache is the Charlie Chaplin/Hitler mustache. But with the inclusion of “white” it brought up a pub in Grand Junction, CO called Charlie Dwellington’s – for which there is a T-shirt sporting their logo of the Charlie White Mustache (http://skreened.com/charlied/charlie-white-mustache?). The interesting thing is that Vévoda’s mustache is described as having tips that seem to wink when he smiles. The Charlie Chaplin mustache does not have tips, but the mustache in Charlie Dwellington’s does have tips. Is this a possible location where there are more clues to be revealed about the book? When I tried to find some history on the pub, I found this at http://www.gjsentinel.com/special_sections/articles/biz-buzz-nov-11-2012 – [Who is Charlie Dwellington? He is whoever you want him to be.]
Also, the phrase “stove-in” was applied to Vévoda after the monkey smashed his skull with a rock. “Stove-in” is a nautical term meaning “crushed in, as a hull that has hit a rock” (http://www.teampetrakliba.org/alphabet/term2297.html). Does this mean that Vévoda and the ship in the story are linked symbolically?
If Vévoda is the ship, then S. as the thousand transparent men is the most recent incarnation of the continuing Story (of which the book on the Obsidian Island called “S.” is just one among many books) and that in S. is found the culmination of all the books found on Obsidian Island–always coming across his muse Sola but never finding peace and rest with her (that is, until Jen and Eric as the readers of the Story–and the highest incarnation of S. and Sola–and therefore on a layer of reality outside and above the book they are reading, which enables them to transcend the ever-repeating cycle). Vévoda is the ship, S. is the story of the ship, the monkey is the senses, and Sola is the muse. The Archer’s Tales is the Book that contains all the other books and is therefore the center of the bullseye as Mystimus has pointed out.
2. MISSED, ADDED, AND/OR INCORRECT LETTERS
There were also some grammatical errors in the text that may or may not have been on purpose for the sake of being coded. I couldn’t make sense of them, but I’ve listed them below in the order they appear in case some of the other code-minded readers can find a pattern if there is one.
INCORRECT LOWERCASE LETTER – s [sola instead of Sola]
MISSING LETTER – e [nakd instead of naked]
INCORRECT LETTER – a/i [Neather instead of Neither]
MISSING LETTER – h [is instead of his]
INCORRECT LETTER – y/n [whey instead of when]
DUPLICATED WORD – it [“it it” instead of just one “it”]
INCORRECT/ADDED LETTER – s [besides instead of beside]
ADDED LETTER – e [One instead of On]
MISSING LETTER – r [He instead of Her]
Brian Shipman said:
Great thoughts! I made all of the corrections you indicated were needed. Great catch on “stove-in” and the connection to the ship. Something to contemplate.
Athene Cunicularia (@CFish6) said:
Interesting. I got some anagrams from the letters Jonathan identified. SEAHYITER
-says it here
-say it here, s
-tis a heresy
-it’s a heresy
Athene Cunicularia (@CFish6) said:
one more.
-here I stay, s
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frfly said:
the khan academy video (you linked to) describing the historical ship of theseus consistently used 1000 years and 1000 planks, “pretend its a simple ship made of 1000 planks.. ” so the transparent man with a thousand outlines, seems clearly to say S is the ship. its an identity question, not a ship story, said abrams. from birth to death, there is not a single atom that is the same in any human being, presumably, though i think here the idea is incarnations.
the monkey can see all these lives. but S from the beginning did not know who he was.
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/wi-phi/metaphys-epistemology/v/ship-of-theseus
frfly said:
since we are instructed to follow the monkey, and since he has the last word in the book –
i was looking at the monkey on the eotvos site, the “prize” monkey. no expert, but i believe its a capuchin monkey, a native of south america. its a very low resolution photo, 580 x 480. he has a coat on, i guess like an organ grinder monkey. may have pants on, not a normal torso. something not right or covering his ear. has a big white blotch which is probably the note he delivered. has too much dark facial hair compared to other capuchin images i looked at. he appears to have a square pixelated forehead that gives the impression of a receding hairline and a toupee. doesnt look like a hat but could be. the whole thing may have been photoshopped and the desk used to hide his legs and provided in low resolution.
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frfly said:
the book version and this version both have him falling and thinking about pfeiffer. so allegedly FXC who wrote the later version at least had the first missing page.
In this version is the line that S and the monkey might well be one. the monkey is a sense animal, it sees the thousand outlines of S. all the voices S hears are his own. It seems like the monkey has to be symbolic of a primal self, a non-verbal sensing self with abilities lost to later versions.
S hears all the voices of this life, a life that was never even his own. not sure what that means.
Somewhere Dorst or Abrams said it was a book about identity. The Ship of Theseus legend is a riddle about identity. It doesnt really matter if something that has had everything replaced is the same or a different thing, it is what it is. Dorst seems to have found a more interesting idea that S is all of them, a thousand selves. There are a lot of sub-themes, such as writers as resisters to authority. The call to love or duty. But the central theme that he had to address is the identity of S, and of Straka.
frfly said:
This alternate ending begins right at the point i think is the climax of the book. after the list of wines with place and dates where terrible massacres occurred, their stories wiped clean, the wine somehow containing their voices, or being the weapon against them, imprisoned in barrels, only for Vevoda’s use, not all of humanity. These voices in S.’s head return to the ground when he touches the ground. silent. He is grounded. The revelation about story – fragile and easily destroyed. Then the versions go their own way. The published version talks about writing, creating but also resurrecting, using the words of those who came before. Everything rewritten. Part o’ the tradition.
Joseph Campbell’s first book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” published 1949 – same as fictional Theseus – says the great myths of the world, no matter their origin, “will be always the one, shapeshifting yet marvelously constant story.” The hero goes out, he struggles in a region of supernatural wonder, he wins, he comes back to bestow a boon on his fellow men and women. The first story Campbell tells is Theseus slaying the beast in the labyrinth. This is clearly what S. is doing. The most important feat of the hero “had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know in our dreams”. The realization S has that everything is rewritten, in the original published version, this is the hero tale re-told, rewritten a thousand times with a thousand faces.
“The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending…” The most obvious difference of the two endings is the happy ending/ not happy ending. Clearly to my reading, there is much more art in this alternate unpublished not so happy ending. It is more believable, it does not sweep aside the reality that has been created. Vevoda acts like Vevoda, he does not suddenly become uninterested in his wine. “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, is to be read not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man,” Campbell tells us. Fundamentally the mythical hero’s passage is inward and underground, the story is not told in lifelike but in dreamlike configurations. This is why i think the moment where the voices stop, when the realization of story, its reoccurrence, it cannot be permanently repressed (which book did i get that quote, not sure), and then his dedication to Sola, his story, that is the climax, because that is the hero’s inward journey.
Theseus had no chance of finding his way out of the labyrinth, just as S was confounded by the wine cellar. Ariadne gave him a simple winding of linen thread to unroll behind him. FXC gets S out of that cellar, but he cannot get himself out.
The voices in S.’s head return to ground. Campbell talks about a common motif where the hero is not to touch the ground of a magical land, but to stay insulated from it, for instance to stay on his horse. to touch it is to lose the magic in his being as it flows to ground.
All these references are in the first pages of the Campbell book. Campbell died on October 30, 1987. October 30 is a date heavily referenced in Theseus. That doesn’t solve all the problems certainly, but i believe a “Thousand Faces” contributed some core ideas.
frfly said:
not sure if this is relevant or coincidence, because i do not see it used in the book – the Sola river flows out of the Czech highlands northward into Poland and past the Auschwitz extermination camp. The German Nazis dumped the ashes of nearly a million people in to it.
Straka, as a Czech, would have been profoundly affected by WW2. The Germans overran his country in 1939. Its hard to imagine that he would be writing a novel of struggle and resistance, have it ready in 1946, and not have anything to say about the world as it was.
frfly said:
p. 29 Hero with a thousand faces
Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward – into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.
p.412 Ship of Theseus
He lays down his pen, cradles his head in his hands, concentrates for what might be hours or days, but he just cannot see it, and finally he understands that he is not meant to see it, not here; he must descend into the dark maze himself, before he will find Vévoda, this man who has had more influence over S.’s life than S. himself, find him and write the ending.
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