Camp Concentration 019 - Decamp

(Susan Sontag in Petra - photo by Annie Leibovitz)

“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)"—Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”

This can be a good starting point for discussing the “camp” aspect of Disch’s book. It looks like Disch, who was a harsh critic of most SF, tried to attain in his novel the problematic synthesis between high literature and pulp drama. Camp Concentration is made up from a series of SF clichés: mad scientists, the Army’s secret projects, superpowers, underground shelters, Gothic technology, a miraculous escape. It’s just as if the writer had told himself: “This is an impossible task: to write a great book from this sort of material. If I succeed, I must be a genius. If I don’t, well, that is just what I was trying to prove in the first place”.

Camp Concentration is Jean-Paul Sartre and Thomas Mann innoculated in a Van Vogt plot. Most of the criticism I have read against the novel concerns the “coup de theatre” in the last pages, which in a certain sense spoils the seriousness of the rest of the book. Those commentaries say (without any enthusiasm): “It’s too much. It’s too fantastic. It’s not to be believed”.

And yet… and yet… This final twist (the revelation of what really happened between Mordecai and Haast, and Sacchetti’s salvation) is just what made me adore the book when I first read it. Pulp clichés are, usually, a short and easy way out from a narrative corner in which the writer has written himself. Abracadabra! And the eruption of a vulcan destroys the mad scientist’s lab, or the hero is saved from death thanks to a newfound drug which hadn’t been mentioned so far.

Such solutions are forbidden in a serious novel. There must be no easy way out. High literature doesn’t admit the impossible, especially when used to solve problems of narrative. If you have an underground prison in which the narrator has been innoculated with a mortal disease and is slowly dying, well, he has to die. Not because there is no escape from underground prisons, but because there is no escape from high literary conventions. And this is just the prison Camp Concentration escapes from: a genre convention, a cliché of the mainstream. The astounding mindswap that frees the prisoners is a victory of Pulp resources against mainstream constraints.

Curiously enough, had Disch’s novel been written in a pedestrian prose, with cardboard characters and run-of-the-mill situations, the same ending would not be a triumph – it would become equally weak. What makes the success of Camp Concentration for this reader is that the novelist achieved this most improbable of balances, between the sophistication of high literature and the sense of wonder (the sense that “anything is possible”) of Pulp, a sense of wonder that most high literature has lost, because it has become too tightly bound by the Principle of Reality.

Camp Concentration is the story of the impossible escape of a prisoner, and of a writer who finds a spectacular way of extricating himself from two literary imprisonments, simultaneously.

“The act of genius is simply the bringing together of two hitherto distinct spheres of reference, or matrices – a talent for juxtapositions”. (CC, p. 62, June 13 entry)

Camp Concentration 004 - The Nausea

Camp Concentration is written in journal form, which produces a more immediate impression of reality, of facts being experienced and commented upon along the way. (A novel in the past tense sounds like a bundle of recollections put together long after the fact. Journals are better to chronicle the near-imperceptible changes the protagonist goes through, as he jots down his feelings and his thoughts in a day-by-day basis.)

A story in the past tense, told in the first person, is the product of a single mind who tells it at some moment in the future, when everything has already happened. A journal is written by several minds, so to speak, and the reader can trace the successive changes from one to the other.

The journal structure is one more thing in common between Camp Concentration and "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes (1959), the other classic SF tale about super-inteligence scientifically produced.

Novels in journal form, SF or not, are many, but one that comes insistently to my mind when I think of Disch’s book is The Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938).

In The Nausea, Antoine Roquentin goes to the city of Bouville (a thinly disguised Le Havre, as I recall) to work on his biography of the Marquis of Rollebon. There, his love affair with a woman comes to an end; there, he encounters a man, whom he calls The Autodidact, who is reading all the books in the library in alphabetical order.

Roquentin is prone to accesses of what he calls “the nausea”, a mental state in which he sees all things devoided of names, concepts and labels. He sees the things existing by themselves, without the slightest link to his own conceptual world. Sartre’s language excels in the descriptions of those moments, and it is generally accepted that this novel is an after effect of his own experiences with mescalin, which he did in 1935 (long before Woodstock, long before Huxley’s own experience which resulted in the book The Doors of Perception).

In Sartre’s novel, there’s no mention of drugs – the Nausea arrives at random, unannounced and unexpected. Roquentin, eventually, gets used to it, accepts it, and with it accepts the fact – which is at the core of Sartre’s Existentialism – that there isn’t a Plan, there isn’t a Meaning, there isn’t an Essence in the Universe. It is pure existence, and Man is an accidental consciousness that becomes aware of it.

The connection between Camp Concentration and The Nausea is not without a reason. The first title Sartre suggested for his novel was Melancolia, in a reference to Albert Durer’s famous engraving, a print of which is seen by Louis Sacchetti on Mordecai’s desk. (CC, p. 74, June 16 entry). Disch is alluding to alchemy (Durer’s theme), but may also be alluding to Sartre.

I found here a comment of the novel with mention to the print:

Ce livre paru en 1938 n'a cessé d'être pour plusieurs générations un évènement dans la conscience d'exister. En cela, il est une espèce de "mythologie". A l'origine, Sartre l'avait intitulé Melancholia, en référence à une gravure de Dürer qui évoquait le doute existentiel, le doute devant la science mais qui était aussi une réflexion métaphysique sur le besoin d'engendrer, Dürer qui n'avait pas eu d'enfant et qui a construit cette oeuvre justement à la mort de sa mère. On pourrait à partir de ce roman, retracer à la fois la période de l'année 1935 où Sartre avait traversé une grave crise dépressive en arrivant au Havre, où il avait également pris de la mescaline, et tendre le livre comme un miroir à des lecteurs ou créateurs de tous âges (écrivains, cinéastes, poètes).