“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny



“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny

Characters:

Gallinger: 6’6” arrogant poet/linguist, translator of Martian language, who is granted the right to translate the sacred Martian scriptures. Red hair, thin, father was a fundamentalist preacher [531]. His pose of arrogance really a defense mechanism, a means of keeping others at a distance because he had no mother, his father’s fundamentalist coldness trained him, and he was used and discarded by Laura, the blonde who just wanted to show off the beat poet [545-546].

Braxa [534 ]: Performs the 117th of the 2,224 Dances of Locar for Gallinger and he immediately fall for her red-haired beauty and grace. Her dance evokes opiate poetry of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe with dance, sex, and even religion through reference to his father. She is over 250 years old [543].

Emory: The captain of the expedition. He married a Japanese woman & they lost a child, so he understands Gallinger’s love for Braxa.

Betty [528]: Top linguist, whom Gallinger assumes is in love with him [like all women]. Despite her education and intellect, Zelazny still portrays her as “giggly” and with “furry talk.” She leads him into the Martian Matriarch’s quarters as Beatrice led Dante.

M’Cwyie [528]: The Martian matriarch, who looks in her fifties, but is actually incalculably old.

Ontro, Fist of Malaan [553]: 7 feet tall and overweight guard whom the awaited hero must defeat to fulfill the prophecy. Malaan spat and created life as “a disease in inorganic matter” [533] and created dance as the only legitimate reply to the organic, love being nothing more than a disease.

Morton: Crew member who studied Gallinger in college and is disappointed that he has had only a few words with him.

Kane [540]: The hydroponics expert. He grows the rose for Gallinger over a three month period.

Tamur [541]: Martian historian whose text alerts Gallinger to the plague that is leading to the death of the Martian race through sterility of the men.

Overview: Virtually all of Gallinger’s allusions point to those who challenged the norm, challenged authority or the gods, and succeeded or survived or those like Rilke and Shelley who produced romantic poems validated experience though emotion and love. In the end, Gallinger “wins” by forcefully showing how the human race has mocked its own gods, its own pessimistic books, and survived, even succeeded in coming to the stars. The message of his reading of Ecclesiastes is that we can progress, survive, create the new, celebrate the wonder of life; however, Gallinger doesn’t himself believe the message any more than he believed his father’s preaching. The irony is that he has lost Braxa, never even had her love, and has therefore lost the will to live and attempts suicide.

The story, then, promotes the fundamental message of most SF: Struggle to survive, strive to better the culture and the human race—there is something new under the sun.

Allusions:

Ecclesiastes: Directly mentioned on 533 as a “pessimistic” book; the opening lines on “vanity” are quoted [2-5]. When Braxa summarizes the lines from the Book of Locar, they clearly resemble the message of “Ecclesiastes” [552].

“Let not ambition mock thy useful toil”[526] is from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard,” lines 29-32. Gray: 1716-1771. This is ironic given the events that follow & Gallinger’s downfall due to his own ambition. See 555 and Gallinger’s assumption that the human race’s surviving despite Ecclesiastes’ mocking of human vanity as inspiration for the Martian race to continue.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile,

The short and simple annals of the poor.

Saint-Exupery [527]: French, b. 1900; d. 1944. He was a French pilot, poet, and author who joined the French air force in 1921, flew the mail route from France to Dakar, Morocco, then left France when it surrendered to the Germans in 1940 and lived as a writer in America until 1943, when he joined the U.S. air force to fight in North Africa and was killed in action in 1944. His most famous work, of course, is The Little Prince.

If you want to build a ship

Don’t herd people together to collect wood

And don’t assign them tasks and work

But rather teach them to long for the

Endless immensity of the sea

Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupery

Terza Rima [527]: Dante’s Divine Comedy employs this three line stanza with rhyme scheme of aba, bcb, cdc, etc…Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” provides an example. Here are the first two stanzas:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintery bed

The poems end with a single stand alone line that rhymes with the middle line of the final tercet: yzy z.

Ulysses in Melebolge [527]: Zelazny misspells “Malebolge,” the 8th Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, where the Sin of Fraud is punished. In Ditch Eight of this Circle, Dante sees Ulysses and Diomede, the instigators of the Trojan Horse ploy.

How does this effect a comment on Gallinger and his deception enacted on the Martians? Note that Dante followed Beatrice into Hell—He was drawn there by love for a woman.

Samson in Gaza [528]: At Gaza, as described in Judges 16: 1-31, Samson meets and falls in love with Delilah [of the valley of Sorek], who is paid 1100 pieces of silver by each of the lords of the Philistines to get Samson’s secret and help them to destroy him.

Mahabharata [528]: One of the two sacred texts forming the basis of Hindu culture, it is initiated as connected folk tales and stories collected around 500 BCE and was written down in its entirety first around 350 CE as 100,000 stanzas in Sanskrit. It is the second longest work in the history of the world [after the Gesar epic of Tibet]; the Ramayana is the other primary text of Hindu culture. Prakrit and Sanskrit [530]: Prakrit translates as “normal” and was the spoken language in India from 100BCE to 500 CE; sanskrit is the “High Tongue” or intellectual, written language in the imagery of this story.

“I was the Schliemann at the Troy” [529]: Heinrich Schliemann [1822-1890] was an anthropologist fascinated with Homer’s Odyssey and intent on discovering Homer’s Troy. His fascination began around the age of 7 when his father gave him an illustrated history of the world. In 1868, after a number of visits to America, he became an official citizen of Indiana. Discovered the remains of Troy in 1871-72 while deceiving the Turkish government and shipping treasures out of Turkey before announcing his find.

Havelock Ellis [534]: 1859-1939. Ellis was a member of the Fabian Society, like Wells, and advocate of “sexual liberation”; his book, Studies in the Psychology of Sex [six volumes 1897 to 1910 and a 7th in 1928] created considerable controversy. In reference to him, Gallinger uses “dance” as a substitute for “sex.”

Etruscan Frieze [434]: Gallinger’s first description of Braxa compares her to Etruscan art and mosaic friezes, of course , implicitly comparing her to the mosaics on the floor of the dance chamber. The Etruscans were pre-indo-European peoples occupying part of the northeast shores of Italy and the most northwest corner of the country, as well as scattered other regions. They were the only pre-indo-European culture to survive long into the Roman period. The mosaic frieze is their best known art form.

St. John Perse [535]: Pen name of Marie René Auguste Alexis Léger, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. He was a French diplomat who wrote under the pen name to keep his two lives separate. His rhythmic poetry was well received by the like of W.H. Auden, who declared each Perse poem a piece of a single lifelong work. At his Nobel speech, Perse said, “in these days of nuclear energy, can the earthenware lamp of the poet still suffice?” This sentiment echoes Gallinger’s situation.

Rilke [544]: References his poem about a Spanish dancer from the Duino Elegies.. Another romantic poet allusion. Rainer Maria Rilke [1875-1926]. Chosen because of the lines from the Elegies cited on 545:

“It is strange to inhabit the Earth no more,

To use no longer customs scarce acquired,

Nor interpret roses…”

Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” [545]: Percy Bysshe Shelley [1792-1827].

Anathema maranatha [546]: If any man love not the Lord, let him be cursed for the Lord is coming. [1st Corinthians 16:22]. Anathema means “cursed” and maranatha, “the Lord is coming.”

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