Camp Concentration/Book Two

Summary

As his thought processes speed up, Sacchetti becomes lost in a flood of literary free-association. When he returns to a narrative form, all the other prisoners have died; Dr. Busk has disappeared; Haast has become reclusive; and the project is now run by Skilliman, a nihilist who has deliberately infected himself with Pallidine to speed up his own research. Skilliman plans to build weapons to destroy the human race, but unknown to him, it is already facing destruction by the outbreak of a general Pallidine epidemic. Just as Skilliman moves to eliminate Louis, rescue arrives from a hidden ally.

First section

The eleven pages before the first numbered entry in Book Two.

Though the cryptic, hyper-allusive style of this section is related to Sacchetti's mental state, it's worth keeping in mind that here he is writing to himself, not to us or to Haast. Louis already understands all his references, so when he briefly notes a source it's just to jog his own memory, not to make it easy to look up—and there are no narrative events to provide a context for the references. Hence the annotations here are very incomplete. Disch described this section as an act of "stage magic" intended to "suggest the possibility of exponential increase [in intelligence]"; he acknowledged that to depict such a thing directly would be impossible, and that the connections were meant to be impossible for the reader to follow, so that the remainder of Book Two by contrast would come across as Sacchetti "deliberately reining back his genius and telling his story so that people could understand it."

A note from an unnamed editor (the only time this voice appears in the book) mentions several of the major sources: "the Bible, Aquinas, the Kabbalah, various alchemic texts, including the second part of The Romance of the Rose, Richard (and George) Wagner, Bunyan, Milton, de Lautréamont, Rilke, Rimbaud, and any number of modern English poets."

One author surprisingly omitted from this list (but named in the dedication of the novel) is Thomas Mann, whose Doctor Faustus (1947) is very prominent throughout the rest of Camp Concentration. In Mann's retelling of the Faust legend, the composer Leverkühn becomes an artistic genius while gradually losing his mental and physical health due to syphilis; he believes that he intentionally acquired the disease for this purpose, as part of a deal with the Devil, who explains that the spirochete bacteria are the agents of this transaction. Whenever Doctor Faustus is cited from here on it is the Mann novel, not the Marlowe play.

The citation of "the second part of The Romance of the Rose" as an "alchemic text" deserves some explanation. This 13th-century French poem, describing courtly love and its associated virtues and vices, begins as a fairly straightforward allegory of the lover and the object of his desire; but its much longer second book, contributed by a different author, wanders somewhat from this subject and adds a large cast of characters personifying various intangible forces. This has led some scholars to look for deeper symbolic content in the second book—including, inevitably, assertions that it is an alchemical allegory either in the standard sense (that the author was referring to acts of physical magic, but being very indirect to hide this from uninitiated readers), or in the broader sense proposed by Carl Jung (that "alchemy" was really an early attempt to understand psychological archetypes).

doleful voices and rushings to and fro

From The Pilgrim's Progress, when Christian approaches the "company of fiends," after crying "O Lord, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul."

Whatsoever the Lord pleased, He hath done

Psalm 135.

It is because of the wooden tub that one believes

Paraphrase of a passage in Disch's poem "An All-Day Poem", referring to a detail in the Isenheim Altarpiece. The nativity scene described is from the central panel of the outer wings.

It is dull .... art must court tedium

These remarks are also from "An All-Day Poem", whose final lines are: "I have courted tedium, / And tedium is my bride. Good night."

nature morte

French for a "still life" (as in a painting), but literally means "dead nature."

they flee roaring to and fro

From Doctor Faustus, a description of what the damned experience in hell: "...it leaves its denizens only the choice between extreme cold and an extreme heat which can melt granite. Between these two states they flee roaring to and fro, for in the one the other always seems heavenly refreshment but is at once and in the most hellish meaning of the word intolerable."

the Pumpkin and the Hollyhocks

This is a prose rewording of Disch's poem "A Pumpkin for Claude Lorrain".

Amfortas' lament ... Nie zu hoffen / dass je ich könnte gesunden

These lines are King Marke's in Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, II.iii: "without hope / that I might ever be healed." Amfortas is from a different Wagner opera, Parsifal: the leader of the Knights of the Grail, he has been wounded by the same spear that pierced Jesus and the wound will never heal.

Birds of a strange nature

From the opening scene of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, in which von Aschenbach has a waking dream as "his imagination ... pictured all the marvels and terrors of a manifold world which it was suddenly struggling to conceive."

Vito Battista

A New York politician and perpetually unsuccessful mayoral candidate, known for a particularly flamboyant and quotable brand of right-wing populism.

Here everything leaves off

From the Devil's description of hell in Doctor Faustus.

Himmler ... last of the great chiliasts

Chiliasm, or millennialism, is the belief that Jesus Christ will rule on Earth for 1,000 years prior to the Last Judgement. Sacchetti is referring to the Nazi belief that Hitler's rule would usher in a "thousand-year Reich."

mute overthrownness

From Rilke's third Duino Elegy. "Overthrownness" is one translation of the German Gestürztsein, which is rendered as "overthrow" in this translation: "Loved his inward world, his inner wilderness, / that first world within, on whose mute overthrow / his heart stood, newly green." This passage describes a sleeper who is "fevered ... tangled in ever-spreading tendrils of inner event."

Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico, early 20th century painter who influenced the Surrealist movement. The text here does not seem to refer to any specific writing or image by de Chirico, but his ideas about the creative experience parallel those of Rilke and Sacchetti.

My entrails are trodden down like mire in the streets

Trampling someone like "the mire of the streets", "dirt of the streets", etc. is a recurring image in the Bible: Isaiah 10:6, Micah 7:10, 2 Samuel 22:43, etc.

All things are Hoa .... Microprosopus

This passage refers to the writing of the 17th-century Christian occultist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. In his Kabbalah Denudata, von Rosenroth created his own interpretation of concepts from Kabbalah, in which he renamed two of the aspects of God as Microprosopus and Macroprosopus. Hoa (possibly an alternate spelling of hawa, Aramaic for "to be"), is used as another name for God in Kabbalah Denudata.

The body of a 'hog' cannot annihilate anything

Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, addresses the idea that God "cannot annihilate anything" and responds that even if such a limitation were meaningful, God could still cause things not to exist by simply no longer making the effort to keep them in existence. In the same passage, Aquinas refers to Psalms 134:6 which is quoted earlier in this chapter.

Given the earlier mention of de Lautréamont, the "hog" may refer to this passage from The Songs of Maldoror:

I dreamed I had entered into the body of a hog ... Was this a reward? I no longer belonged to humanity, one of my greatest desires! .... There was not remaining the least morsel of divinity.

Gra netiglluk ende firseiglie blears

Unknown. With its words that don't exist in any language but that use tantalizingly almost-English letter patterns, this looks very much like it might be a substitution cipher (and double letters are a major clue in any simple cipher); however, these days computer software makes it easy to prove that there isn't any letter substitution that would make this into an English phrase. This is unsurprising: using such a simple code, just to dare readers to solve it, would have made no sense in terms of the story—since Louis is aware that Camp Archimedes uses computers to scan for any hidden meaning in the prisoners' writings. Instead, the point may have been to create something that looks like a solvable puzzle, but isn't. This could be seen as Disch toying with his readers, or Louis toying with his captors... or Louis thinking on a level that we can't access.

The science fiction author and editor David Langford seems to agree that this phrase isn't meaningful (or at least to concede defeat), since he included it in a list of "nonsense phrases" from fantasy literature in his piece "Logrolling Ephesus".

Entry 6

a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and a book

From the Edward Fitzgerald translation of Omar Khaiyyam's Rubaiyat: "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread— and Thou".

Entry 10

St. Denis is the patron saint of syphilitics—and of Paris

Numerous possible explanations for this fact include the idea that Europeans generally thought of syphilis as a French disease. St. Denis also fits in Camp Concentration in other ways: he is often confused with Pseudo-Dionysius, and he is reputed to have walked for six miles after being decapitated—carrying his severed head and continuing to speak, as Louis is metaphorically doing now while his own brain gradually dies.

Entry 13

nuclear testing undertaken in ice caverns

Skilliman's alleged invention is intentionally far-fetched; there is no scientific theory that suggests underground nuclear tests could ever be hidden from seismographic detection. At the time the novel was written, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 still allowed underground tests—they were not outlawed until 1996; the "moratorium" Sacchetti refers to is probably a fictional one of the near future, since the voluntary moratorium of 1959-1960 was broken by a Soviet above-ground test.

Entry 15

quats

Quaternary ammonium cations, a category of simple chemical compounds that are sometimes used as disinfectants. Unlike bleach, they are odorless and colorless.

All this can be yours

Satan's temptation of Jesus in Luke 4 and Matthew 4.

Entry 22

Rube Goldberg mechanism of the soma

Goldberg's famous cartoons typically depicted an extremely complicated mechanism for accomplishing some relatively simple task. As mentioned earlier, the soma is the body (either the whole body of a creature or, more specifically, the central part of a nerve cell).

Entry 25

His Io, he called her

The nymph Io was changed into a cow by Zeus.

Riesman

David Riesman, a sociologist best known for The Lonely Crowd (1950). Riesman did not exactly argue that a population explosion was impossible, but pointed out that historically such sharp increases had gradually levelled off. The Skilliman character in Louis's story goes on to argue that Riesman was wrong and Malthus was right: population will continue to grow out of control until resources are exhausted. The "real" Skilliman, though, never shows any interest in this subject at all, nor in the well-being of the world in general. Ironically, the parody of Skilliman commits only a single murder, while the "real" one has much worse goals.

Entry 26

wrestle it to a standstill. The angel would have to reveal himself

In Genesis 32:24-30, Jacob wrestles with a stranger who turns out to be either an angel or, in some accounts, God.

Entry 29

the very heart of Antenora

In the Inferno, Antenora is one of four sections of the lowermost ninth circle of hell. It specifically contains people who were traitors to their homeland. Skilliman is an extreme example of this, since he lacks any affection for or loyalty to not only the U.S., but the whole human race.

Entry 31

A thought that must have been of great comfort ... to Damocles

Damocles was a courtier who was allowed to rule in the king's place as long as he could ignore a sword that was hanging by a thread directly above his head.

Entry 32

Ineluctable modality of the in-visible

In chapter 3 of Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus considers "the ineluctable modality of the visible"—the forcefulness with which the world convinces us of its presence through sight, though Dedalus proceeds to explore other ways of investigating his surroundings: listening, knocking his head against things, etc.

Entry 33

in the manner of Ripley

The "Believe It or Not" newspaper feature created by Robert Ripley has run continuously since 1918.

Entry 36

Adrienne Leverkühn, the East German composer

The most blatant reference to Doctor Faustus so far: a female version of its composer protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn.

Entry 44

Cheeta

The name of a chimpanzee sidekick in numerous Tarzan movies.

Entry 46

what happened accidentally at the Mohole

Project Mohole was a deep-sea drilling experiment with the intention of tunneling all the way through the Earth's crust to the mantle. It was abandoned in 1966 and no one has attempted to reach the mantle since then (though a new project was proposed in 2012), but Disch seems to be suggesting that the experiment was later resumed and triggered some small-scale disaster.

Entry 50

a book by Valery

Paul Valéry's Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895).

Entry 51

Eichmann's ghastly glass box

During his war crimes trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann sat in a bulletproof transparent booth for his own protection.

Entry 55

Theresa's transports, behind the convent walls

St. Teresa of Ávila, known for ecstatic visions of encounters with Jesus, which she described in terms that could easily be interpreted as sexual.

Entry 59

not, after all, my buckler and my shield

From the King James version of Psalm 91: God's truth is a "shield and buckler" (a buckler being another type of shield).

no better argument for his Tempter than Go Away!

Referring again to the temptation scene in Matthew 4, where Jesus says "Away from me, Satan!" Sacchetti says that Jesus has "no better argument" in this scene, even though Jesus does make several arguments based on Scripture; his point may be that the devil does not actually go away until given that direct command.

Entry 60

Save me, O God

Psalm 69.

Entry 65

Lee Harwood, the noted Anglo-American poet

The real Lee Harwood lived in England for most of his life and only briefly in the US. Disch claimed to have had a brief affair with him while writing Camp Concentration: "For not more than six weeks love was requited, and then Lee explained, firmly but kindly, that our romance was at an end since he was returning to heroin." In light of this personal history, the fictional Harwood's condition here could be taken as either homage or revenge.

Entry 69

rate of progress of the epidemic

Sacchetti's thoughts on how Pallidine would spread through society are in some respects dated and offensive: he lists "sex crimes" as one of the "areas where homosexuality is thickest," but this is only true in the sense that homosexuality itself has often been illegal; in the usual sense of assault and molestation, it is a myth. It's hard to say how much this is a reflection of Sacchetti's own less than enlightened attitudes and how much is simply Disch reflecting the beliefs of his time.

However, in a way, Disch predicted the early years of the AIDS epidemic—a disease whose first known case in the U.S., though not recognized at the time, appeared only two years after Camp Concentration. HIV did spread disproportionately through the gay and bisexual population, and in urban cultural centers it decimated another of the "areas" Louis mentions, the performing arts. As Sacchetti says, the fact that syphilis, the only dangerous sexually transmitted disease most people were aware of, could be treated with antibiotics, and that non-barrier methods of birth control were fairly effective, meant that most people—regardless of sexual preference—regarded condoms as unnecessary. Medical science was somewhat aware that an untreatable disease transmitted through blood or sexual contact could be a very serious problem, based on the example of hepatitis B (HBV), but this was not seen as a major public health priority—and one of the many failures in the early response to AIDS was the failure to apply what was already known about the epidemiology and prevention of HBV.

HIV and HBV have already taken a horrible toll, but there are plausible reasons for a Pallidine epidemic to be even worse: Pallidine is invariably fatal within a year; its victims, before they become debilitated, are manic and grandiose, so it's easy to imagine them following Dr. Busk's example and having as much sex as possible; and most importantly, neither HIV nor HBV is nearly as contagious as syphilis.

Entry 74

Ah, que la vie est quotidienne!

"Oh, life is so day-to-day!"—"Complainte sur certains ennuis" (1885) by Jules Laforgue.

Entry 75

Brightness falls from the air

"In Time of Pestilence" (1593) by Thomas Nashe, also quoted in entry 85.

Entry 79

a titration

In chemistry, titration is the process of adding one substance to another in very small increments until the desired affect is achieved.

Entry 94

The Lord is my light and my salvation

Psalm 27.