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Dynasty vases, the flying machines of Lilienthal, Hieronymus, Leonardo, the suicide balloon of André and the balloon of General Nobile. (The incidence of cannibalism during Nobile’s expedition has its own deep, special significance in the novel; it represents, as it were, a place in which a certain fatal weight has fallen into water and disturbed the mirror surface; so, then, the spreading concentric circles of the waves surrounding
Gigamesh
are the “sum total” of man’s existence on Earth, going back to Homo javanensis and the Paleopithecus. ) All this information lies inside
Gigamesh,
concealed, but retrievable, as in the real world.
    We understand the compositional idea of Hannahan thus: with an eye toward outdoing his great countryman and predecessor, he wishes to encompass in a belletristic work not only the accumulated linguistic-cultural wealth of the past, but in addition its universal-cognitive and universal-instrumental heritage (pangnosis).
    The preposterousness of such an objective would appear to be self-evident; it smacks of the pretensions of an idiot, for how can a single novel, the story of the hanging of some gangster, possibly become the distillation, the matrix, the key, and the repository of that which swells the libraries of the globe?! Perfectly aware of this cold, even sneering skepticism on the part of the reader, Hannahan does not confine himself to making claims, but proves his case in the Commentary.
    It is impossible to summarize it; we can only demonstrate Hannahan’s method of creation with a small, rather peripheral example. The first chapter of
Gigamesh
consists of eight pages, wherein the condemned man relieves himself in the latrine of the military prison, reading—over the urinal—the countless graffiti with which other soldiers, before him, have ornamented the walls of that sanctuary. His attention rests on the inscriptions only in passing. Their extreme obscenity turns out to be, precisely through his intermittent awareness of them, a false bottom, since we pass through them straight into the sordid, hot, enormous bowels of the human race, into the inferno of its coprolalia and physiological symbolism, which goes back, through the Kamasutra and the Chinese “war of flowers,” to the dark caves, with the steatopygous Aphrodites of primitive peoples, for it is
their
naked parts that look out from underneath the filthy acts scrawled awkwardly across the wall. At the same time, the phallic explicitness of some of the drawings points to the East, with its ritual sanctification of Phallos-Lingam, while the East denotes the place of the primeval Paradise, revealed to be a thin lie incapable of hiding the truth—that in the beginning there was poor information. Yes, exactly: for sex and “sin” arose when the protoamoebas lost their virgin unisexuality; because the equipollence and bipolarity of sex must be derived directly from the Information Theory of Shannon; and now the purpose of the last two letters (SH) in the name of the epic becomes apparent! And thus the path leads from the walls of the latrine to the depths of natural evolution ... for which countless cultures have served as a fig leaf. Yet this is but a drop in the bucket, because in the chapter we also find:
    (a) The Pythagorean quantity pi, symbolizing the feminine principle (3.14159265359787...), is expressed by the number of letters to be found in the thousand words of the chapter.
    (b) When we take the numbers designating the dates of birth of Weismann, Mendel, and Darwin and apply them to the text as a key to a code, it turns out that the seeming chaos of that lavatory scatology is an exposition of sexual mechanics, where pairs of colliding bodies are replaced by pairs of copulating bodies; meanwhile this entire sequence of meanings now begins to interlock (synchroMESH!) with other sections of the work, and so through Chapter III (the Trinity!) it relates to Chapter X