Copyright © 1992 by Matthew Belmonte
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Some people like to judge a book by its cover. Others prefer a review (reprinted with the kind permission of The Ithaca Times).
Full Abstraction is a first novel, and first novels usually aren't published. I was lucky enough to hook up with a small press that could do it. I look back upon this book with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, a sense of having conveyed a message, but in what now seems rather a muddled and poorly articulated form. To say that I wouldn't be able to write it now would be an understatement.
What I was trying to embody with Full Abstraction was my sense at the time of how deterministic life is, the result of influences and accidents not under one's own control. This control hangup of mine has a lot to do with having grown up with an autistic brother. My parents tried to manage him and did as well as anyone could have, but in the process life became managed, planned, and orchestrated for all of us. Because they were constantly on the go, I think they had to make assumptions about what was good for my sister and me, instead of playing it by ear and finding out what we thought.
The quintessential control hangup is the fetish, and you'll find a great deal of fetishism in this book. We're all fetishists, really, in that we see the world through the lens of perception. We invent meaning and significance in a universe where objects are inherently meaningless. The resulting regularity is comforting, it helps us make sense of the world and keeps chaos at bay, but it is fundamentally limiting. This is the dilemma that confronts Miles Purebeard, who is profoundly disgusted and guilty about his sexual fetishism. He knows that his objectification of women is what separates them from him and prevents him from truly loving, but he's afraid to let go of that objective view because it protects him from all the unpredictabilities of human interaction. In this regard I find much in common between fetishism and autism, both of which have obsessive-compulsive features. (Read Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. He knew more about it than you'll ever see here.)
I've been called sexist for writing about fetishism, but I disagree with that evaluation. Purebeard's fetishism is ugly, but I think it's as demeaning for Purebeard himself as it is for the women whom he uses and manipulates in his fantasies. I tried to say that in the narrative, and in hindsight I'll admit that it isn't expressed as well as it should be. It was a case of my skill with words outpacing my skill with life, and my inexperience with relationships. Having said all that, I do still think that Full Abstraction conveyed something of value, a way of articulating the human fascination with order and fear of entropy and death.
La Recherche, the short play embedded in Full Abstraction, was first performed at Risley Theatre, Ithaca, New York, on 6 December 1991. The cast was as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belmonte,Matthew,1969-
Full abstraction / by Matthew Belmonte.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-881258-00-9 (acid-free pbk.) : $9.95
I. Title.
PS3552.E53378 1992
813'.54--dc20 92-15485
CIP
also by Matthew Belmonte: Computer Science, and Why: Science, Language, and Literature (1989) (Trillium Press, Unionville, New York, 1992) -- an introduction to basic theoretical computer science, along with discussions of the underlying philosophical notions and their appearances in history and literature. The thesis that science and literature are two facets of the same fascination: creation within the system of a language, a culture, a formal specification; the game of symbols and encodings.