Perfecting the machine that's the world?

Beyond sharing title openings, two books I just read crossed paths, or, conversed with each other.

The one, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick has been a commercial and critical success. Prior to the beginning of 'his story,' the eponymous horologist/magician/thief's life has been a string of mischance and accident leaving him alienated, alone and removed from the everyday world.

For reasons that are initially unexplained, Hugo spends his days tending and winding the twenty-seven clocks in a Parisian train station. Daily, Hugo slips behind the walls of the station, behind the faces and working of its clocks, and makes sure they are all calibrated and in working order. While he exists at the heart of a great machine of modern times, the train station. He is as a central cog in that machine, maintaining it's central, regulating organ, the clock. However, his own life seems to lack any order, structure, or direction.

Indeed, Selznick depicts Hugo as quite literally on the other side of, or outside, time and the world governed by it. He repeatedly shows Hugo behind clock faces, hidden, looking out into the world that looks to the clock face for direction and orientation.

In a similar vein, at the outset of his story, we learn that Hugo is "waiting for his story to begin." So described, Hugo is again placed outside time. A story has a beginning, middle and end linked by some type of logic. Hugo's life at the outset seems to lack these elements. His days are a repeating cycle, without recognizable logic or progress and forward movement. Hugo endlessly circuits the station in the service of its clocks, in the service of its trains, and ultimately in service of the city and the points to which the station connects it. While the station is a locus of connection to the outside world, a beginning and end of journeys, it is Hugo's shell, and he leaves it reluctantly.

Not surprisingly, Hugo finds solace and possibility in machines. He confides to Isabel, a young girl is own age, who helps her grandfather at a toy stand in the station: "I like to imagine the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too." Also, machines can be fixed, made right, restored.

For similar reasons, Hugo finds, or presumably learns to find, comfort in story. At the end of the book, Alcofrisbas, the teller of Hugo's tale, is revealed as Hugo grown up. Furthermore,the adult Hugo, the magician Alcofrisbas, we learn that the story has been told through the mediation of a machine, an automaton. This mediation, this story-telling by machine, further underlines the parallels between machine and story: like machines, stories have an elegance, have shape and purpose. Like machines, they are perfectings of the world.

Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else is an odd and magpie creation that has met with considerably less notice than Hugo. It too speaks to the prospect of fixing and tinkering with the world but takes a less sanguine view of the prospect.

Mixing fact and fiction, Hunt's novel focuses on the life of the inventor/physicist Tesla by imaginatively reconstructing the last week of his life. Its full of love stories, but two non-traditional loves are prominently featured: a platonic one between Tesla and a young cleaning woman, Louisa, and another between Louisa and her wacky father Walter. Walter's attachment to Louisa is poignant, strong, and founded on a tragedy: the love of Walter's life, Louisa's mother, dies giving birth to her. Walter's never quite gotten over the death of his wife, and is kind of stuck in a time warp till he becomes involved in a weird attempt to build a time-machine. Yes, this book is out there, in terms of it's story. At times, it reads like a B science fiction movie from the fifties. Yet, it is sentimental as Dickens, quite sweet and lyrical in spots, and contains a surprising amount of history and fact related to Tesla and Edison.

The book is preoccupied with time-travel. Whereas in Hugo the Parisian trainstation with its clocks serve as a stand-in for modernity, for progress and sciene, time travel serves the same metaphoric purpose in The Invention of Everything Else. Time travel is a fantasy/possibility/invention potentially offering the possibility to go back and fine tune the present by correcting past 'mistakes.'

Late in the story, Louisa imagines going back to an early period in Tesla's tragic life and meeting him. She imagines "standing there with him all the way back at the beginnining" and wonders, "Maybe we can start over...maybe we can go the right way this time."

Louisa's not alone in harboring this impulse. This book is peopled with inventors tinkering with the world in hopes of bringing it closer to some kind of perfection. All seem to think that with a touch here, a tightening of a screw there, possibly an adjustment to this or that.....who knows. Sometimes, the book is a little precious, a little outlandish, but if the reader is laid-back, prone to imagination, it is not that hard to catch the hope and wonder Hunt and her character's bring to the idea of invention.

However, while it plays with this notion/hope that the world might be perfected it questions the very concept at the same time. Although they pursue it or harbor it as a hope, at the same time they are suspicious. When Walter walks through Hell's Kitchen with his true love, the present falls away from him and he's transported back to a time when this area of New York was a verdant forest with a clear stream running through it, and this falling through time causes him to wonder "if time is so porous that a full-grown man can slip inside it while holding fast to the hand of his wife, what then can he rely on at all? The solidity of a hand? He doubted it." Yet, five paragraphs later, despite his fears, Walter is intent on searching out a time-travelling device so as to reconnect to his now deceased wife.

On the other hand, Louisa is equally suspicious of time travel and the way it suggests the present might not really exist. That, it's not a done deal. For time-travel doesn't just suggest that a perfect moment might not last. It suggests that the perfect moment might ultimately be affected by some re-working in the past in cease to exist in the process of time. The event or moment might not just no longer exist, but at some point in the future simply be removed from existence, simply never exist. And, in love in the present, she ultimately eschews time travel. Maybe not entirely. Hunt herself leaves the possibility and benefit of time travel an open question.

On another level, it simply questions whether and what is meant by perfecting the world. Louisa, Tesla, Walter begin by harboring a belief that somewhere along the line they took a wrong turn launching them down the wrong or less than perfect path they presently trod. They feel as if they exist in an imperfect or lacking 'here' and that a 'there' much better than this 'here' is out there if they could just find the path to it. Although he wavers in his faith, Tesla most eloquently rejects this and suggest instead, "People can make beautfiul mistakes...each one is an arrow...pointing out the right way to there."