The true meaning of the alzabo

OK, I guess this is obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me until recently.

Nonexistent books

Here’s the background: The other day we went to the Grolier Book Club, which had an exhibition on lost, incomplete, and imaginary books. The fun gimmick was that they made mock-ups of physical books representing various books that no longer exist or never were. Examples included a lost play of Shakespeare, a never-finished novel by Sylvia Plath, the complete version of Kubla Khan, a monograph by Sherlock Holmes, the legendary Necronomicon, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, the code of the Bene Gesserit, and that famous original work which is a word-for-word remake of Don Quixote. I was pleased to see a copy of the “original” Garden of Forking Paths but disappointed not to see anything by Nathan Zuckerman, and really disappointed not to see some version of The Book of Gold, but I understand, as there are so many lost, incomplete, and imaginary books that any library of them would overflow beyond the space allotted to the exhibition.

When I was at the Grolier looking at these real objects representing unreal books–actually, the objects were just the outsides of the books, I’m pretty sure they weren’t filled with text on their pages–I was thinking that there must be a wikipedia entry with a long list of famous books that don’t exist. Wikipedia has its flaws (see also here and here), but . . . a list of fake books, this seems like it would be right in Wikipedia’s wheelhouse, kind of like if you want the plot of every Simpsons episode or a list of all the flavors of Pop Tarts.

Some googling led to the wikipedia page for “fictional book”. It’s not as comprehensive as I was expecting, but it does include The Grasshopper Lies Heavy—I’d forgotten about that one! Wikipedia also has this list, which is even more disappointing.

What’s up, Wikipedia? I was gonna say that the editors are so laser-focused on modern pop culture that they can’t be bothered to collect a list of old-fashioned books . . . but then I checked out the page on “lost literary works”, which offers an impressively comprehensive list starting with antiquity and going through the centuries since then, ending with this:

Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works were destroyed in 2017 after his death, fulfilling his last will; his computer hard drive containing his unfinished works was deliberately crushed by a steamroller.

The list of lost works includes novels by L. Frank Baum, plays by James Joyce, August Strindberg, and Leon Trotsky (!), treatises by Adam Smith, all sorts of things. It’s a list worth reading. Wikipedia also has an entry on unfinished creative work, which includes things like Mozart’s requiem and Schubert’s eighth symphony as well as various books.

The alzabo

As noted above, when I saw nonexistent books, I thought of The Book of Gold, and that made me think of the alzabo, that fictional animal who, if it eats a person, will ingest his or her personality as well, and then if you kill the alzabo, prepare it in a certain way, and swallow its extract, you will retain the memories of the person who’d been eaten.

Seeing the exhibition of the books gave me the sudden understanding that the alzabo is, very directly, a metaphor for literature:

– When, as an author, you pour your memories, ideas, and emotions into a book, that is like feeding yourself to the alzabo. As Paul Gallico said, “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.”

– When, as a reader, you dive into a book, this is like eating the alzabo. The characters, themes, and events of the book become part of your memory.

In the Book of the New Sun, there are times when Severian is overwhelmed by the memories he’s absorbed from Thecla, and there’s a point where he gets lost among the accumulated memories of all the past autarchs. When I read that, I recall thinking this was implausible (even in the science-fiction context of a willing suspension of disbelief)–how would there be room in his head for the memories of thousands of people?–but then I realized that my head contains memories of many thousands of books that I’ve read (not to mention TV shows and various other story-delivering mechanisms), so, yeah, that’s how it works. The alzabo is a beautifully poetic representation of this two-stage transfer, first from author to book, then from book to reader.

In one of history’s greatest fish-out-of-water stories, a retired Hollywood actor became president of the United States. Ronald Reagan was notorious for confusing his memories of movies with reality–but, at some level, all of us can relate to this, as we all “know” fictional characters who seem realer than people we know, we remember fictional stories that are scarier and more tearjerking than real events in our lives, and so forth.

Connection to statistics

And then, writing this, I realize that something similar happens in statistics! Measurements are performed that abstract complex reality into “data,” which are then analyzed by the researcher, who uses these data to reconstruct the world. Wow. I’d never thought of it that way before.