/lit/ - Literature

before Lovecraft was anything, Melville was everything.

this, by the way, would make a pretty fabulous open-world game as well. certainly you know that Kojima read it at some point, the game is full of references. be Ahab - or, rather, be someone else. go hunting Demon Whales, and customize your ship, your crew, and the rest. give yourself a bionic harpoon in some kind of insane Gothic-Lovecraftian mashup about losing your mind on the open water. romance Queequeg (or not). cover your body with tattoos and learn voodoo. get your head shrunk. shrink the heads of enemies, collect them, and mount them on your wall. become Nantucket’s equivalent of Euron Greyjoy. whatever. a piece of cinema can *stage* a work of literature, but a game makes it infinitely ludic. if there’s no sandbox, there’s no fucking game.

the thing about Moby-Dick (or LOTR, or Journey to the West, or Blood Meridian, or any number of other great texts) is that they have a *coda.* the story isn’t really a fucking great story unless it goes all the way to the end of the line, and develops every possible theme or implication. Bandersnatch does this, in a bunch of different ways. Bandersnatch is brilliant.

what political utopias, because of the nature of revolutionary sentiment, cannot do is render the coda, or an idea of the coda. Permanent Revolution means chopping out the part of tragedy that prevents tragedy from being what it is: that is, the *consequences.* there are aspects of that even in MGS’ unfinished story: namely, the meltdown in Chapter 2 of everything that you have built. that is a testament to someone who actually understands the power of narrative, and is a pretty deep thinker also.

the worst thing about the state of intellectual life today is that it has, like so many other things, cannibalized exactly what it depends on to survive. it is like intensive farming of the psyche, or strip-mining. without literature, or a humanities education capable of reading literature without devouring it like a schizoid cannibal werewolf, we wind up becoming decadent, just as Nietzsche said. irony is only the veil of ignorance. irony sucks, and postmodernity has no cure for it. wasteland, in the midst of abundance. but wasteland-staring has its charms also.

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