Subject
Re: Query: Bend Sinister's Lake Lagodan (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Robert Cook <rcook@rhi.hi.is>
We know that VN read Swift. Could the Lagodan Mountains be an altered form
of Lagado, the metropolis of the mountainous island kingdom of Balnibarbi
in Book 3 of Gulliver's Travels? Balnibarbi is known, like the floating
island Laputa overhead, for its devotion to abstract learning (which Swift
despised), and Lagado is the home of the grand Academy, a parody of the
Royal Society and the home of many projects, such as the reduction of human
excrement to its original food, or the softening of marble for pillows and
pincushions, or the propagation of a breed of naked sheep. It is a place as
treacherous to VN's way of thinking as the dictatorship in Bend Sinister.
Robert Cook
We know that VN read Swift. Could the Lagodan Mountains be an altered form
of Lagado, the metropolis of the mountainous island kingdom of Balnibarbi
in Book 3 of Gulliver's Travels? Balnibarbi is known, like the floating
island Laputa overhead, for its devotion to abstract learning (which Swift
despised), and Lagado is the home of the grand Academy, a parody of the
Royal Society and the home of many projects, such as the reduction of human
excrement to its original food, or the softening of marble for pillows and
pincushions, or the propagation of a breed of naked sheep. It is a place as
treacherous to VN's way of thinking as the dictatorship in Bend Sinister.
Robert Cook