Anna Ljunggren
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the key symbol of the mask of the Minotaur (which is the titular ‘Helmet of Horror’); and the erasure of personal names, subjectivities and true identities in the creation of a carnivalesque virtual online community.
In his earlier novel Babylon (2000, of which the original title, published in 1999, was Generation ‘P’ ), Pelevin drew on Mesopotamian myth to present the world of media and advertisements as it created, and even became a substitute for, political ‘reality’ in Russia of the 1990s. Th e Helmet of Horror treats another contemporary medium – the internet – and relates it to the philosophical question of subjectivity as the ‘prison of the mind’. Th is metaphor extends back at least as far as Plato’s myth of the prisoners in the allegorical cave of his Republic book VII , as well as to Buddhist doctrine, and was most infl uentially explored in the subjective idealism of the early modern thinker George Berkeley. We can see Pelevin engaging with this philosophical question, for example, when interviewed by Kristina Rotkirch in 2007: 1
ROTKIRCH You are probably a pioneer among Russian writers in using the internet, and if I am not mistaken, the internet for you is a kind of space of freedom.
In Th e Helmet of Horror, however, the internet becomes a labyrinth, even a prison.
PELEVIN Th e internet is not a space of freedom. Only the mind can be a space of freedom. Everything into which the mind is put becomes its prison.
For Pelevin, everything – including the internet – is a prison of the human mind.
Th e Helmet of Horror reveals the illusionary nature of virtuality and exposes its limits.
As many contemporary works of scholarship (including the essays in this present volume) illustrate, the use of mythological elements in today’s global mass culture is increasingly common. 2 In Pelevin’s case, we see classical mythology being assimilated to a philosophical exploration of the potential of the virtual world expressed ‘undercover’, in the guise of rough, contemporary computer slang. Yet Th e Helmet of Horror has antecedents in writing from long before the invention of the internet. It is stylistically indebted to the Russian absurdist theatre of OBERIU (Th e Association for Real Art), a group of futurist writers, circus artists and musicians that existed in Leningrad in the 1920s–30s, 3 as well as to Joseph Brodsky’s drama Marbles (1982) with its ironic and macaronic use of antiquity. Marbles links modern technocratic civilization with the classical world in a manner not dissimilar to Pelevin’s novel: it is a humorous and absurdist Platonic dialogue, which observes the classical ‘unities’ of time and place, conducted by two individuals with the classical Roman names Publius and Tullius, but set in a prison cell two centuries aft er our own era. 4
Although Th e Helmet of Horror was commissioned by Canongate, the choice of the Minotaur myth is not accidental. Th e half- bull and half- human beast is an image in line with Victor Pelevin’s earlier work, such as the humanoid insects in Th e Life of Insects (1996) or the werewolf in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (1998). Nor is it the fi rst time that Pelevin has placed a mythical image at the centre of the story: recall the virtual Tower of Babel in Moscow during the Perestroika 1990s in Babylon . Pelevin is one of the most established and popular writers – as well as one of most controversial – of the fi rst post-Soviet generation.
He has been criticized for distorting the Russian literary language by using borrowed words and slang; he is considered by his critics to be a threshold or marginal fi gure, rooted in the unoffi cial late Soviet Moscow culture. 5 He is much indebted to the artistic strategies of the iconoclastic movement known as
‘Moscow Conceptualism’, which parodied Soviet state symbols and offi cial art. 6 It divested them of their meaning in order to reach the ‘void’, a key concept in the Buddhist theory of consciousness (on which see further below), but also of the conceptualist movement. 7 Th e aesthetic method of parody and stylization – previously used by Pelevin with great success – began to be experienced as a dead- end during the fi rst years of the millennium. Th e Helmet of Horror was written at about this time, when a certain distance from the Soviet experience had been gained, and the Soviet state and its propaganda no longer seemed to be a valid target.
Th e Helmet of Horror has a subtitle in the English translation: Th e Myth of Th eseus and the Minotaur . Th e subtitle shortens the Russian original Kreatif o Tezee i Minotavre in order to avoid the problem presented by the word ‘ kreatif ’, from Russian- language computer slang, meaning ‘an entry’, oft en a visual ‘piece.’
Th e ‘piece’ is written in the distorted non- normative language of computer slang, interspersed with obscenities that are replaced simply by ‘xxx’, but the meaning concealed by these letters is quite transparent for a native speaker.
Neither plot nor characters, in the traditional sense, exist in Th e Helmet of Horror . Th e setting is cyberspace, where the eight characters are each imprisoned in a room, which apparently contains little more than a computer screen and a keypad to write on. One of the characters, who uses the virtual moniker ‘Ariadne’, launches a discussion (or ‘thread’). Th e thread is going to take the form of series of dream interpretations. Ariadne dreams about the Minotaur, and other characters off er philosophical interpretation of her dreams by trying to discover the meaning of the myth. When the interpretation reaches a fi nal stage, Th eseus appears in the chat room. When the culmination is reached, the characters create a group, who exclaim in unison, ‘ MOO !’
Here the very process of interpretation replaces action and the plot. Th e text grasps at the myth to fi ll the void, the absence of meaning, and it rejects it at the same time. All of the elements are marked with questions: Who is the Minotaur?
What is the labyrinth? And Th eseus? It should perhaps be added here that Victor Pelevin positively enjoys mysteries and mystifi cations. Th e author avoids being interviewed, is usually pictured wearing sunglasses, and likes to bewilder or joke with the reader. Th e text of Helmet of Horror actually ends with a disclaimer: 8
Not a single fi ctitious Ancient Greek youth or maiden was killed during the creation of this text.
(274) Here the ontological status of the actions not only in ancient myth, but also in cyberspace discourse and the modern novel, becomes the source of ironic humour.
Interpretation and inquiry play a central role in Th e Helmet of Horror . In a world where there is no single answer, inquiry itself is parodied. One should also bear in mind the omnipresence of irony as an idiom in youth culture at the time when the novel was written. Indeed, according to the code of the youth subcultures of the 1990s and early 2000s (including rave and internet culture), there was almost an obligation that serious questions should be asked ironically. 9 Th e opening lines of Th e Helmet of Horror contain a riddle: at the very beginning, Ariadne, the initiator of the chat, types on the screen, thus starting her ‘thread’, by proposing a labyrinthine game: ‘I shall construct a labyrinth in which I can lose myself together with anyone who tries to fi nd me – who said this and about what?’ Th is puzzle refers to a recurring image of a labyrinth in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, both in prose ( Th e Garden of Forking Paths [ El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan] , 1941 and ‘Th e House of Asterion’
[‘La casa de Asterión’], 1947) and in poetry (a diptych ‘A Labyrinth’ / ‘ Labyrinth ’ (‘El laberinto’ / ‘ Laberinto ’) from the ‘ Eulogy to the Shadow ’ (‘ Elogio de la sombra ’, 1969), where the Minotaur is treated as ‘the other’ who will be discovered in the darkness. Pelevin reveals his debt to Borges when his epigraph to Helmet of Horror explicitly salutes the older writer, before the reader (‘anyone’) is invited to play the game of the riddle, the riddle of the labyrinth and Minotaur. Th e characters are trying to interpret the dreams of Ariadne in order to fi nd the way out from wherever they are. So, where does Pelevin place them within his virtual labyrinth?
Topos
Each of the characters is sitting in a cell, dressed in a Greek tunic ( chiton ); inter- cell communication takes place via computer screens. Every cell resembles a hotel room: it is somewhat individualized, but not a home, being a so- called heterotopia (to use the term Michel Foucault defi ned and explored in his infl uential 1967 essay), 10 a virtual counter- site existing in ontologically unstable relationship to material reality. Th e toilet paper in each room is decorated by the imprint of a star pattern, a sort of asterisk, which reminds the reader of Greek myth, since Asterion was both the name of a Cretan king who was ancestor of the Minotaur, and an alternative name for the Minotaur himself. 11 But it is also a reminder of the story which is the seminal literary ancestor of Th e Helmet of Horror , since in Borges’ ‘La casa de Asterión’ (1947), aft er evading the reader, the narrator, Asterion, is ultimately revealed to be indistinguishable from the Minotaur himself. It is little surprise that Pelevin’s characters wonder at fi rst whether they are dead or just dreaming, with heterotopia being a way to represent both death or a dream as a diff erent place. Th ese anonymous ‘other places’ stand for ‘virtual reality’ in the game that they play.
Each participant fi rst explores his or her diff erent yet similar cells, then the adjacent parts of the labyrinth, which is modeled on the Labyrinthe de Versailles with its statues, as described by the super- intellectual ‘IsoldA’:
Yes, I forgot to say. Th e plan that was hanging everywhere looked more like an old engraving than something modern . . . And written on it in this strange oblique typeface was: plan du labyrinthe de Versailles . What could that mean? Is it from the word ‘verse’? Because there are characters from fables in the fountains?
(63) Th ere each one encounters their individual visions, projected ‘mirrored’ images.
While Borges’ ‘Th e Garden of Forking Paths’ off ers an image representing the relativity of time and its multiple possibilities, Pelevin’s labyrinth is about the ‘self ’ and about projecting fears and desires: the dialogue between IsoldA and Romeo- y-Cohiba, for example, suggests that they swift ly become intimate with and desire one another, raising readers’ hopes of secret assignations. UGLI 666, on the other hand, is a Christian fanatic, who yearns for a canon to explain the meaning of labyrinthine ecclesiastical mosaics, while an alcoholic called Sartrik comes across two refrigerators of alcohol and almost disappears from the text.