52 pages • 1 hour read
Dan SimmonsHyperion
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories written between 1387 and 1400 by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the frame story, which surrounds the narrative, approximately 30 pilgrims are traveling from London to Canterbury to see the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. They propose a contest wherein each pilgrim would tell two stories on the way there and two on the way back, with the winner, the person with the best tales, receiving a free meal on their return.
The collection of tales is not complete; however, the work is considered one of the most significant in English literature and is regarded as one of the main works to popularize the use of Middle English in literature, as opposed to the Latin or French that was more popular in the day.
Though the titles of Chaucer’s pilgrims and the content of their tales do not align with those in Hyperion, the concept of pilgrims sharing stories while in a liminal space (a place between other spaces, both geographically and metaphorically) is shared. Both groups are between their embarkation point and destination, and both have yet to receive what they are seeking at the endpoint. Both groups have either a religious or spiritual/existential reason for going on the pilgrimage. Chaucer’s pilgrims tell either moral or bawdy tales for entertainment, whereas for Simmons’s pilgrims’ “survival may depend upon [their] talking to one another” (19). To make the connection plain to readers, the character Martin Silenus quotes from Chaucer’s Prologue in Middle English in the story when Sol Weintraub suggests the idea.
Literary Context: The Poetry and Life of John Keats
The title of this novel, as well as the other three in the Hyperion Cantos series, are titles of poems by early 19th-century British Romantic poet John Keats. Simmons emphasizes the connection to the poet by making “Keats” the capital of Hyperion. He also features the character of Johnny, an AI “cybrid” of the poet who contains all knowledge of Keats’s life and works.
In the unfinished fragments of Keats’s epic poem Hyperion, Saturn, king of the Titans, has retreated to his lair after the Titans, or elder gods, have been overthrown by the Olympians. Only Hyperion, the god of heavenly light and the father of Helios (the sun), Eos (dawn), and Selene (the moon), has any power remaining. He goes to Saturn and the remaining Titans.
Then the poem moves to a weeping Apollo, the new god of the sun, as well as culture and civilization. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, tells Apollo that he is sorrowful because he has not yet achieved his full potential as a god. He looks into her eyes to receive the knowledge he needs.
Keats’s epic poem The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream was also left incomplete, published after Keats’s death in 1821. Some critics believe that it was Keats’s attempt to rework Hyperion; it starts with a lyrical introduction and the speaker, a poet, awakes in a dream at the stairs of a temple. Moneta, the Roman goddess of memory and knowledge, challenges the speaker to climb the stairs whereupon he experiences pain and misery. He keeps climbing as Moneta urges him not to avoid human suffering, as false poets do, but to embrace it. She then gives the poet a vision of Hyperion rising among the other Titans, which is where the fragment of Hyperion begins.
These poems are largely thought to center on issues Keats frequently explores in his work: the discordance between fallible human nature and the imagination, which allows one glimpses of the perfect and absolute; suffering as a normal state of being, and the role of the poet in capturing life as it is but also elevating it.
Simmons pulls several elements of Keats and these two poems into his novel. In Kassad’s story, Kassad meets a mysterious woman who tells him to call her Moneta or Mnemosyne. She introduces him to the Shrike, whom she calls the Lord of Pain. Johnny says that Brawne Lamia reminds him of Fanny, who was the woman John Keats wanted to marry but could not because he lacked the money to support her. Fanny’s last name was Brawne, and a lamia is a mythical part woman, part serpent creature about which Keats also wrote a poem. In addition, a poet is one of the seven pilgrims, connecting to the importance of poetry and the mysteries of Hyperion.
