“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman

First appeared in Frederik Pohl's Galaxy. It won the Hugo, Nebula and Prometheus awards. Reprinted in several major retrospectives by Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr, Frederik Pohl, Dick Allen,  Willis E. McNelly, Leon E. Stover, Thomas E. Sanders, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Roselle, Bernard C. Hollister, Charles W. Sullivan, Leo P. Kelley, Martin H. Greenberg, Patricia S. Warrick, Bonnie L. Heintz, Frank Herbert, Donald A. Joos, Jane Agorn McGee, Rich Jones, Richard L. Roe, Leslie A. Fiedler, Arthur C. Clarke, Jerry E. Pournelle, John F. Carr, Ben Bova, Martin H. Greenberg, Applewhite Minyard, David Hartwell, Orson Scott Card, David G. Hartwell, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, Rob Latham, Veronica Hollinger, Joan Gordon, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Arthur B. Evans, Carol McGuirk, John Joseph Adams.

Summary:

The Harlequin is disrupting a future dystopia ruled by time or, rather, the Ticktockman. He holds the cardioplates of its citizens and can end peoples' lives prematurely if they are late to work, etc. The Harlequin slows schedules with a $150,000 in jelly beans gumming up slidewalks, badgers shoppers not to be slaves to time, and eludes capture (getting would-be captors caught in their own web).

Analysis:

This has one of Ellison's patent-pending titles that simultaneously intrigues, conjures the story and its theme if obliquely. This tale provides an intriguing contrast to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which has a similarly loaded title.

The latter story, however, at first appearance seems simple enough but proves to be thematically elusive or at least complex. This story's theme, on first glance, feels elusive but turns out rather simple if compelling. It is spelled out immediately from Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines.... there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement...they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones."

Men choose to become machines--as they did in "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," albeit to a different effect.

What surprised and disappointed as a lad yet empowers me as an adult--coming midway into the story--was that the Harlequin was an ordinary man, in love with an ordinary woman. They have a spat about his extracurricular activities and lateness (later, when he's told that his wife or girlfriend ratted him out, the exchange about whether she did or didn't takes on a different flavor).

Although the theme is somewhat clear, the ending is elusive. It involves at least three possibilities:

1. Harlequin confesses, gets killed, yet somehow infects the Ticktockman with anti-clock mentality. This seems least probable since most in power would want to cling to that power.
2. Harlequin somehow escapes, forces the Ticktockman to believe he is the Harlequin, gets the Ticktockman to confess as if he were the Harlequin and gets killed while the Harlequin becomes the Ticktockman. We aren't witnesses to this complicated event. While Harlequin might be trickster enough to pull this off, is the Ticktockman truly gullible enough to fall for an identity switch? Nothing in the story really leads us to this.
3. Harlequin is the Ticktockman. Both mask their identities. The Ticktockman's irregularities at the end match the Harlequin's usual habits. We don't know if this is unusual for the Ticktockman, but being in charge, he could probably get away with it. 

Additional confirmation of the lattermost interpretation comes at the opening where to whom the narrator is referring--Harlequin or the Ticktockman--gets confused. We open with an unknown, unassigned "he" pronoun. In fact, even after the Ticktockman is introduced, most readers will assume the narrator is speaking of the Harlequin, yet the last "he" mentioned after the Ticktockman's mention is the Ticktockman. So grammar rules dictate that the Ticktockman should be the "he" referred to.

Finally, there is a temporary irony (or hypocrisy) that loses its meaning if Harlequin is the Ticktockman:

"[H]e was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask.

"The cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but whom named, merely what named."

We know what the Ticktockman is--the Master Timekeeper--but not who he is since he is masked.

The theme isn't much altered in the first two ending possibilities. But the third suggests that the revolutionary and the problematic cogwork-makers sprout from the same scarcely sane source. The theme alters considerably. It might be paraphrased by The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again":

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

Review: First We Read, Then We Write Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson

First We Read, Then We Write: 

Emerson on the Creative Process  

Robert D. Richardson  

University Of Iowa Press

As Richardson points out, Emerson is the master of the sentence, influenced by the book of Proverbs.  I put up many of his quotes earlier this year (see the Ralph Waldo Emerson tag below).  "[Emerson] talked and wrote," writes Richardson, "especially in his journals about the art and the craft of writing.  But he never wrote an essay on writing."  This slender volume might be considered  a corrective.  Richardson pillaged Emerson for writing wisdom and collated it into this book--an Emersonian craft-of-writing book, packing more information than most at twice the length.  The author even manages to convey a sense of the man behind the writing--and his peculiar take on the art.  

Who was Emerson?  Emerson was an essayist and minor poet of the early nineteenth century.  He formed a group of Transcendentalists as well as The Dial. After changing hands, it eventually became a paragon of modernism. Its contents listed a Who's-Who of the era--from T.S. Eliot to Pablo Picasso.  

Emerson would encourage the first modern poet, Walt Whitman, as well as Henry David Thoreau.  But beyond his wide-spread influence and Trancendentalism, Emerson had much original thought, which Richardson captures much of in the topics:  Reading, Journaling, Practical Hints, Nature, Natural Language, Words, Sentences, Symbols, The Art Path, and The Writer. (I have altered titles slightly.)  

The first section talks of Emerson's views on reading.  He advocated active reading.  You don't read widely but deeply.  If it is too absorbing, the reader should stop.  The reader is in charge of what he puts into his mind.  "Each book I read invades me, displaces me."  He skimmed until he found something of use, something he found true to himself, and poured himself into that passage.  He pointed out that great writers are human, so don't put them on pedestals.  He would not read entire categories of literature.  Reading was personal, and he accepted as many interpretations as there are readers.  Reading was allied with and inseparable from writing, so lazy writers need to be avoided. 

The next section treats journaling.  He advised Henry David Thoreau to do so, and Emerson's system at first was to make a list of topics to fill in.  Later, though, it was random, full of dreams, the best parts of one's life and one's reading.

"Practical hints" are advice such as approaching writing as if it were a battle where you've lost your ammunition and all that's left is throwing yourself at the enemy.  He advised writers to write--and without a plan, following an organic form.  We should aim for prominent objects, not make something prominent.  Writers avoid adjectives in favor of nouns.  Writers should not satisfy readers but leave them guessing, thinking.  Moreover, coherence and consistency were anathema to Emerson.  These are the job of the reader.  Failure and inconsistency were part of the game.

We approach "Nature," in the following section, by using words that lead us to symbols.  Since words have lost their connection from the nature it sprouted from, it is "the writer's job to 're-attach things to nature.'"  Writers leave what is given to us to find the symbol which is more real.

In "Street [or Natural] Language" Emerson wanted to capture the world as it is lived, not that he wanted to live the life of a common laborer, but to capture the man's essence.

The "Words" Emerson disliked were abstractions, polysyllabics, and the wrong word.  "[I]n writing, there is always a right word, and every other that is wrong."

On "Sentences", Emerson writes, "[E]very new sentence brings us a new contribution of observation." Because of Emerson's love of the sentence, he moved away from essays to  sentences not unlike those in Proverbs.  But he also played games where he reversed expectations.

The poetic effects "Emblem, Symbol, Metaphor" stretch toward the spiritual.  And humans, even, are symbols.  The text refeerences Paul Scott's use of this in his Raj Quartet.

Emerson considers his "Audience":  "You must never lose sight of the purpose of helping a particular person in every word you say."  In fact, Richardson suggests that Emerson gained his style from public speaking.  In "Art Is the Path" Emerson values process over product.  He believes all men are creative but only half a man if he does not access it.  Finally, "The Writer" discusses Emerson's influences and influencing, as well as his place in the canon.

I have no complaints.  It's an excellent little book to spur the writer, the historian curious about the nineteenth-century thinkers, and fans of Emerson.