Friday Expirimental Fiction!!!! (Part II)

Note to Friends, From S. d’Lingua

My dear friends—wise men, statesmen, noblemen, and generals—I entrust this little tome to you all in hopes that you might enjoy a few laughs at the expense of many fools. I have taken my Ovid to heart, and matched meter to matter: So I present to you a text as tattered and rotten as the society it “de-picts” (I say that word with the utmost sarcasm and disdain for its unoriginal unraveler). This is a weary, ugly, frayed tapestry with more missing than showing—though it is a show of sorts. But this is the way of my age—content with no content. In short, I have given the Americans a book truly equal to themselves! (A true depiction of the Americans, however, would simply be a spectacular cover and no pages at all.) As it stands, I have four great claims, or four great waves: the greatest work of literary criticism, the longest title, the longest word, and the newest word. This, my little critique of life-styles!




TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

As I see it, there are two sorts of introductions: one that imparts a brief message and sends the reader off on a journey of their own, and another that seeks to explain the text, assuming its reader otherwise incompetent to interpret and understand the work. I think to write an introduction of the second type would be to insult S. d’Lingua, as he himself made no such introduction, and I do not wish to voluntarily violence his work.

Literally nothing is known about d’Lingua except for the fact that he existed, and what we might wish to know of him—his personality, his wit, his friends, his family, his education etc. could only be gleaned from the short work that follows this introduction. No other information exists. So again, rather than create an image of d’Lingua here, I would wish readers to form their own image from the book, with the precaution that from beginning to end, something certainly is amiss.

A bit about the book. The language the text was privately published in is a language that rarely sees use in our time: it is rarely spoken and almost never written; indeed, some have declared that it has come to its fulfillment, or, more dramatically, its end. I myself have spent most of my life dedicated to its study—I take pride in being one of the few who still does. Finally, I have made one significant change to this text, one that I am sure d’Lingua would have been against, but I felt it was a necessary one, and one that I must elaborate on for but a brief moment, and unfortunately reveal a bit of the text’s possible deeper meaning—though I think even the dullest of minds would understand the intent. The text initially read backwards, so that there was a very visible clash at the end of the text (where the text began to read in a traditional manner, or forward), between the way things are going, the way they continue to be going, and the way one individual brave enough to go against the flow, or against the weight of things, goes. Undoubtedly, d’Lingua considered the use of this “new” direction of reading to be the ultimate in gimmickry, to evoke a reaction of disgust at such absurdity in a book, but it made one of the central points of the text, and made it quite well. However, this tactic did not spare a certain level of contempt from d’Lingua. “Any ‘author’—how little value this word has anymore—who attempts to be ‘novel’ in use of ‘neodirectional reading’ hereafter should be scorned, mocked, and generally abused as the gimmick itself has only been used with the utmost mocking, sarcasm, and contempt. There is nothing novel about these novels using pictures, colors, and different ways of reading; rather, it is a very common thing. Let us be against librarians too, for they seem common in ‘novels’ today. Today, isn’t it always the worst of days?”

The text as it is, comes to us is in rough fragments. To be sure, most of the fragmentary nature of the book is intentional, as d’Lingua himself informs us, but I simply cannot imagine he meant it to be disconnected and deformed to the degree that the current and only MS is. Thus, I have done my best to place some fragments into the context where they seem to fit most obviously. On top of that, and to complicate things further, almost all of the MS is marred and extremely difficult to read, and at some points it is almost entirely illegible. Again, I have done my very best to faithfully translate the work and render it readable.

—C.S. Hand