Mostly Harmless

This book by Douglas Adams is the fifth and final instalment of his cult classic trilogy,* and before I dive into discussion I'd like to gently warn any readers that unlike the four posts about his previous four novels in this series, this post WILL CONTAIN THOROUGH SPOILERS for the WHOLE SERIES, because without giving some context for the characters and events portrayed in the books I won't be able to meaningfully reflect on their themes or any implications I may have decided to draw from them in a way hopefully efficacious in communicability to the readers of this blog - unless those readers have also already read this whole series, and are just reading this for the same reason I'm writing it,*** in which case I can only congratulate you for your evidently excellent taste in both sci-fi-comedy novels and weird niche blogs.

   I should also probably gently warn you that I love this series; this reading was my fourth time working through the whole collection of five (previously aged nine, fourteen and seventeen) and even between those occasions there have been many a quiet in-between-other-books moment where I've sauntered casually back into their pages to revisit certain poigant/funny/both/all three bits. I've also seen the film adaptation by Garth Jennings multiple times (having viewed it in the cinema as a kid, and it was one of my first ever DVD purchases), watched the old TV series (which is alright I guess) and used to listen to tape compilations of the original radio series in bed as a kid - all of which probably shed some light on the deep almost-obsessive relationship I have had with this series and, as you may gather from either knowing the series already or from what you're about to read in the following reflections (combined with the bizarre aggregation of events comprising the books as hintingly described in previous posts), its impact on my cultural tastes and philosophical sensibilities cannot be understated, in a developmental sense. Therefore I am quite apprehensive about having to try to describe and reflect upon them in such a way as this post; much like when I tried to do a systematic analysis of Salinger - and I've reached the laziest-way-of-remaining-constructive attitude of just going for it in what is already perhaps-too-strongly a stream-of-consciousness gonzo style.
   If you're going to read this whole thing, you may want to make sure you know where your towel is first. But worry not - we'll get there, you zarking froods.

   First though - key/amusing events of fifth book. Arthur - whisked away from his happy life back on Earth with Fenchurch; is hopping from planet to planet looking for anywhere he may call home which reminds him of his actual one. He finally settles in a cushy job as the sandwich-maker for a primitive but endearing tribe of people, only for Trillian to turn up to drop off their daughter - Random - whom Arthur hadn't known existed. Meanwhile, Ford has been investigating the Hitchhiker's Guide offices, where strange plots seem to be afoot, including the Vogons; a significant element of this is the realisation that to save money, the Guide is no longer actually producing the book for which it is famous, instead saving an inordinate amount of money by now just producing one single 'book' in the form of a multidimensional quasi-omniscient bird-robot thing. In any case, Ford, as well as this bird, wind up with Arthur - where he, Ford, and Random then hop through dimensions on voyages apparently determined by the bird; during this they see Elvis Presley in a bar somewhere - but I digress; and do eventually find their way back to Earth, only to quite outrageously improbably end up in a club with a name that Arthur recognises as being the place where his nemesis [see] foreshadowed that Arthur would have to encounter & kill him at before our hero Dent could, himself, die - which, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, he then does, just in time for Earth to be destroyed [again] by the Vogons, who by this point are really rather sick of all the multidimensional fuckeries getting in the way of their destruction of this silly old planet for the construction of the hyperspace bypass.

   Okay.
   Now for the dense bit.****
   The core themes of the series I'm going to divide into five chunks - appropriate, no?
   These are:

1. The human comfort zone*****
2. Meaningful perspective, and the tendencies of [1] to impinge on the attainment thereof
3. The constant froth & business of our universe, which ambiguously effects [1] & [2] as well as making life by-and-large generally rather unpredictable & stressful
4. Innate metaphysical & phenomenological tendencies within [1] & [2] mean that even when beings, natural or supernatural, are to whatever extent able to find or bestow upon others any kind of satisfactory resolution to [2], experiential limiting factors tend to render such meaningfulness either impotent or transitory
5. Reflective conclusions that given all this, the best we can do is not think about it all too much & just get on with life as best we can

   Sheesh. I'm regretting this already.

   Here we go:

ONE

   This is the driving force of Arthur Dent's character - and while the inciting event of the first book, the wholesale destruction of first his actual house and then his entire planet, are obviously quite extreme versions of the threat to this - his desire to rediscover some semblance of generic human comfort is what keeps him hopping across time and space as he does throughout the series, but for his brief respite in the fourth book. It's also a root to the developmental arc - expressed primarily through his relationship with Trillian; his initial attraction to her in the pre-first-book bit stemming I think from an allurement to her sense of adventure, which as we all know was too much for him to match up with, and she ended up going off across the galaxy with Zaphod while he went home alone from that fateful Islington party. The nature of the pair's budding romance is hindered by Trillian's blunt fact of just coping better with interstellar life, and though Arthur does grow across the series in this regard, he still never quite gets much of a handle on how to navigate all this mess with much aplomb, hence the meta-fuckup with Fenchurch [with whom the almost-normal re-settling in the fourth book is as close to Arthur gets in the whole series - but it was not to last; we'll return to Fennie later on] and the literally 'Random' [good subtext-disguising there Douglas] daughter stemming from the series' main human romance - since the other factors thematically at play here render the pursuit of [1] and [1] alone totally unviable, if not for us in real life, then certainly for the characters in these stories.

   Humans though do generally live with this as their chief pursuit - a fact I'm not confident enough to go as far as to say Adams himself disapproved of necessarily, but certainly one he saw the drawbacks to, hence the low regard more intelligent races tend to hold humanity in - namely, dolphins and mice.

TWO

   Given that life, what with the universe and everything, can make the maintenance of a properly-comforting comfort zone somewhat difficult, it is an innate tendency among the intelligent species to seek deeper meanings, or proper perspectives. This is always best as something sought rather than thrust upon you - as the Total Perspective Vortex to which Zaphod is submitted in the third book is literally a high-degree punishment - but even the cleverest of advanced races do tend to seemingly consistently only get so far before then lapsing back into the baser pursuits of [1]: even by the End of the Universe itself, all the richest and most successful of the cosmos's inhabitants don't seem to have anything better to do than go to a restaurant to watch the firework display of The End... these dalliances with outrageous excessive luxury also lie precedent to the planet-construction business of Magrathea, where the wealthiest citizens of the universe could order custom-built worlds to their exact specifications - if nothing else this is a superlative caricature of [1] taken to its maddest extremes. And one is left wondering if there weren't something perhaps more meaningful they could have been doing with their efforts?

   But of course, there is - and the pursuit of meaningfulness in perspective is still very much sought by the hyperintelligent beings otherwise known as mice, as they commission the Magratheans to build a computer to answer these kinds of questions - namely, The Question, that ultimate bottomless 'why' of life, the universe, and everything - and the computer they built, Deep Thought, does in fact come up with an answer, but then necessitates the secondary building of an even more complex computer - so vastly intricate that even life itself would be part of the meta-calculatory mechanisms - in order to work out The Question to which the answer was of course forty-two, and this computer was, of course, Earth.

THREE

   But the universe is a strange, and busy place - neither basic comfort zones nor quests for any kind of meaningful perspective can expect to persist long entirely unhindered by all of the cosmic traffic flowing unceasingly left and right and back and forth and through whatever prepositions are most appropriate to use of journeys in hyperspace. A poignant embodiment of this fact is Agrajag - the being who self-styles as Arthur Dent's nemesis, on the really quite reasonable, if imponderously improbable, grounds that every time Agrajag lives a life, Arthur Dent kills it, only for it to be born and reincarnated in myriad forms to once again meet its death at Arthur's hand, slippers, fishing rods, or sheer happenstance proximity. Things do just kind of happen and we won't always know why, and to expect a kind of cosmic fairness to be naturally emergent from all this doesn't hold much water in the grand scheme of things. Another example I'll give for this is the planet of Krikkit - its inhabitants being a race so warlike, so mindlessly destructive, that its surrounding powers had to construct for it a concealment lock to keep the world completely separate from the rest of the universe; and without wanting to delve deep enough that I'll need to try to explain the entire plot of the third book, neither this scheme nor the planet's inhabitants was, in the sense of cosmic justice, entirely cricket. It's an exceptional series of dense subtextual points made in a kind of stupid pun, which is entirely forgiveable when you layer in the consideration that it also leverages a weird but effective & unique angle on talking about all of this in relation to English culture. But I won't get into that here.

   So this particular thematic chunk obviously routinely upsets [1] and adds all kinds of odd complications to [2]; though there are a couple of these latter type woven into the series that I'll discuss a bit more fully. The computer designed by Deep Thought to work out The Question, which later came to be named by its inhabitant-components "Earth", seemed to be doing its job more or less fine as far as anyone could tell until the second book. Here it is revealed that during the prehistoric periods of Earth's operations, a spaceship full of the most useless middle-class off-scrape of a race biologically very similar to humans called the Golgafrinchans crashed on Earth, and it is heavily implied that by weight of numbers, superior technology, and generic idiocy, these people pretty much wiped out the cave-dwelling actual humans who had been part of the planet's calculation system - though the further questions as to whether interbreeding or some other systemic operational factor may have rendered the Golgafrinchans' offspring as being the new Earthlings and so having the developmental capacities necessary for continuing the working out of The Question - alas, Douglas doesn't tell us these things. What we do know though is that even if they had, and I think there's good reason to suspect this [see notes on Fenchurch below] - it would have all come to naught anyway, as the Vogons then destroyed the Earth; in the first book and again in the fifth. An interesting aspect of the Vogons' part in all the mess of the universe is also worth touching on, as they aren't necessarily what one would call evil - they're very much just unimaginative bureaucrats doing their jobs. Which isn't to say that one couldn't consider them evil - I think they largely are, but not like they're bloodthirsty destructors of the typical trope - it just opens an interesting meta-ethical door here.

FOUR

   This one is partially emergent from [2] but also features a number of metaphysical and cosmic points that I think are more just reflective of Douglas Adams's humanistic agnostic worldview generally. We'll start with the paradox of advancement - that as beings get to be more technically and whatnot 'developed' it doesn't necessarily have anything like any kind of meaningful concurrent 'advancement' in those beings' general levels of contentment as is the root of [1]. One place where this is brilliantly comedically sketched is in the bit-part character Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged - a being who, through a ridiculous and irreplicable mishap, found himself immortal, and promptly got extremely, horrendously bored of it all, eventually making it his mission to fly around the whole entire universe personally insulting each and every other living being, for no other reasons than that he can, and it seemed to him a worthwhile endeavour - one which nobody else would have the time to commit to. Another is of course Marvin; the manically-depressed robot who is one of the series' main characters. While we're never given a huge amount of insight into the extent to which [2] or for that matter [1] are salient elements in Marvin's life, it is, he makes abundantly clear throughout, a matter of fact that his immense cognitive capacity does nothing to alleviate the crushing sense of depression he lives with; and while you'd do well to point out that this is an innate feature of his Genuine People Personality programming by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, it does also seem throughout that at points that the possible apprehensions of a rational holistic explanation for why the universe was in actuality all okay would have been a balm to his cybernetic mind; but we will come back to this in a moment.

   'Deeper' meaning or insight is sought by most of the characters throughout the series, in a range of forms and places, and to a variety of successes. An interesting and thoroughly amusing exploration of the nature of spiritual questing can be [it may or may not be there intentionally to this point, but it's certainly there if you wish to smell it as thus] sub-read into Arthur's encounters with oracles in the fifth book - he goes wanting easy answers or a handy hint at where he might at least start looking for them, and comes away having only been bamboozled by nonsense, impossibilities, and overpowering bad stinks. Adams was, as I mentioned, an agnostic - and while religion/God and the skewering of thus is dealt with by the Guide itself in excellently flippant but not entirely irreverent manners [ed. I say not entirely because it posits its points on the grounds of both comedy and generic experiential logic, and given the absolute borderline-irrelevant mess that English Christianity looked like - especially from the outside - in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I think it's entirely reasonable to take his points as a jocular but sincere critique of Christendom at face value, which of course, to the shock of absolutely nobody, the Church of England hasn't: in much the same manner as Monty Python's critiques] - the only times we really see religious figures do much in the series are still pretty interesting, but do little to deeply or seriously aid the [2] problem. The first of these is when the prophet Zarquon - a pretty obvious sci-fi analogue of Jesus/Mohammed/Zarathustra/etc - shows up at the Restaurant just before the universe is about to end, only to be interrupted before he can divulge his final revelations, by the context itself. The second is a phrase inscribed in thirty-foot high fiery letters on the Quentulus Quazgar mountains - purportedly God's final message to creation: it just says "WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE" - which in absolute cosmic terms is obviously a joke, but in the context of the plot it does seem to be some consolation to Marvin, who dies at peace shortly after having it read out to him.

   Okay, and one last bit - Fenchurch; and here we'll be going back to the whole of Earth's original programming for the finding of The Question - on the very first page of the first book, we're told that "a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." While I'm not confident we're ever told this explicitly, I think Douglas leaves enough breadcrumbs throughout the series that we can infer that A. this girl was Fenchurch and B. this realisation was her cognizance of the ultimate Question, or at least something close to its developmental approximation. In bleak reality however - Douglas Adams did not know The Question, or if he did he didn't include it in anything he wrote; and got around this contrivance for plot purposes by the space-time wobblange that happens somewhere between the first and fourth books, as by the time Arthur meets Fenchurch, we are told that some time ago she had a profound realisation - as well as noticing that the Earth was destroyed - but whenever things then got rebooted she had forgotten the realized truth-bomb that prompted it, and is now only slowly recovering psychologically from the whole thing.

   Here's where my reflections get really weird though. Imagine if you will, the generous benefit-of-the-doubt extended: the quantum entanglements of all manner of improbable nonsense where life may imitate art or art life or both-and - and of course I'm not saying this having had some kind of specialist secret insight, it is a purely fantastical but deeply intriguing speculation: I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams really believed that humankind were clever enough, and weird and crazy enough, that the positing of an idea such as that Earth is a computer designed to calculate The Question, as well as the selection of a specific number [42] as 'the answer', would sow psychosociocultural seeds of an ilk capable of someday, utterly uncontrollably and yet as if inevitably, sprouting into the real possibility that someone who'd overthunk things, or just happened to string together a brainful of requisite connective elements - using this jocular springboard as an inspirational fertilizer - somehow manage to phrase the problems faced by sentient life in such a manner that it could be formulaically or whateverwise simplified as such and the whole existential mash of Life, the Universe and Everything cogently brought to fruition in a single Question; probably something rather simple, when you've boiled it down that far. I have no evidence to support this hypothesis but sheer paranoid excitement, and I most certainly amn't claiming to have 'cracked' it. But that brings me onto the final point...

FIVE

   So - yeh, life is a beautiful hot mess and it can be tough.

   That's the driving undercurrent to Ford and Zaphod's characters, I think - though Zaphod deals with it by pushing himself ever deeper into [2] as well as the attainment of a higher state of luxurious [1] - while Ford: he's a pure-bred Taoist, if you ask me, plain & simple; he seems to have mastered the artful navigation of a mad, unpredictable universe with all the poise of a - well, an experienced interstellar hitchhiker who's so good at the game he makes his living writing contributions for the very book that helps people who want to do what he does as well as he does it, and so the book of the Hitchhiker's Guide itself also is a balm to these other stranger plot elements by helping simplify the mess and madness, to facilitate easier travel. This is why the betrayal of the bird-guide in the fifth book hits home so well, as well as the spectacular applicability of its cover-slogan DON'T PANIC.

   One arena where the series takes this attitude to its max is in the meta-implications of how Douglas deals with the scientific quandaries involved in making any faster-than-light travel work in ways explicable to skeptical readers - which is to say, he just doesn't bother, instead devising cop-outs that are still cop-outs but that are so ingenious that you don't need to care & you certainly can't deride them for creative laziness because they're some of the funniest most original concepts in science-fiction - for one, the Heart of Gold's infinite improbability drive [which is also the catchall source to explain literally everything that may seem outrageously improbable which happens to its passengers throughout the series] and the bistromathics used later on by Slartibartfarst's ship for number two. How do they work? As far as the reader should be or need be concerned, they just do, so calm down and don't think about it too closely. A similar approach underlies the Somebody Else's Problem generators.

   Final thought - all of what I've said here can be brought to its fullest, most insanely perfect genius in the scene in the second book where they go to meet the man who, so it is apparently the case, makes all the decisions that run the whole universe. He's just a man, without notably superior intellect or wisdom or other such faculties, with no capital or infrastructure or otherwise resources to his name but a cosy shack on a rainy planet where he lived with a cat. The sole things that stand out about the man are his childlike curiosity and humility, taking nothing for granted and always willing to believe he could be wrong about anything and everything, even things he already thought he might have in some time or place thought he knew to be true. As Zaphod and Trillian concede as they leave the man's shack; "I think the Universe is in pretty good hands, don't you?"

And whatever kind of faith Douglas himself had in Earth or humankind or anything beyond the realms of our own knowableness, I myself can attest quite assuredly that I do indeed, that is, think the Universe is in good hands - as with respect to the many, complex and strange caveats we must append to this consideration with all that humanity have built, done, destroyed, thought & said & written - God alone is in charge, and God is good, and though perhaps not the easiest of presences to see or hear at work in the Creations there is, if you listen, much more than radio silence there.

   And I hope, if you've read this far with your brain intact, you've learned the same main lesson that I have from all this: don't over-analyse escapist fiction through any systematic holistic philosophical lenses. It's arguably some kind of satisfying fun, once you've done it; but you'll almost certainly sprain summat in the process.
   Not to mention the backlog you'll accrue on your blog...

* See following links for the first, second, third and fourth. The first post contains a bit of a probably-less-thorough-than-this-one** explanation of how I approached the series as a whole in order to write reflective responses about it - basically, the first four are little more than rough random-detail-selections to give flavours of what each book is about while not going into much actual synoptic detail about actual plot or themes or anything, because I'm going to do All of That in this post.

** I don't know, I haven't written most of it yet. Such are asterisks.

*** Why not?

**** Full disclosure - this post, though dated February 2018, is being written in June 2020, as for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, this blog suffered something of a backlog over the last couple of years and this fucking post was - not the lynchpin, nor the critical mass, of this, but certainly kickstarted the whole thing as I realised that to even begin to do justice to my own attempt at a synchronized systematized analysis of my reflections on the meanings underlying this insane, sublime trilogy in five parts was a task not easy to rise to. But I'm ready, I've worked through most of the backlog, and refreshed my thoughts on Douglas Adams's crowning work - and hence, above.

***** Which, for sake of simplicity [as we're never actually informed exactly what race Ford or Zaphod or etc are, and the series was written by a human so obviously will subconsciously be applying innate human tendencies as projected features of alien psychonormativity] I here use as an inclusive term for the comfort zones of pretty much all the chief characters we're meant to empathize with throughout the pentalogy, regardless of whether or not they're technically human; with the sole exception of Marvin.