#98: Illusions by Richard Bach

Richard Bach is a pop-philosophy sponge who soaked up the 1970s and wrung it out into a bucket of platitudes.  If Ayn Rand, the Dalai Lama, Plato, and Billy Graham went to Philip K. Dick's house, took all his drugs, and wrote a book together, that... would actually be pretty awesome.  But if that book were then rewritten for people who have never come into contact with any aspect of philosophy, theology, or metaphysics besides a high school civics class, you'd end up with Illusions (1977).  

The protagonist is a fictionalized version of Bach himself, who's now making a living traveling from town to town on his biplane, giving people rides for a few dollars a head.  In a field, he comes across another man doing the same thing, one Daniel Shimoda, who it turns out is the Messiah, but, as the full title (Illusions: The Adventure of a Reluctant Messiah) suggests, he's none too happy with the gig.  Nevertheless, he teaches Bach what he knows.  Basically, the universe is all an illusion, and we exist in some other truer reality (like Plato's theory of the forms), although there is an monotheistic god in this cosmology, and we tend to be reincarnated into many different lives, and also we can control 'reality' if we accept that it's an illusion (like the spoon-bending scene in the Matrix), oh, and you're only duty is to be true to yourself and seek your own peace and happiness, even if that means hurting other people.  Yeah, when Bach tries to argue that you should pursue your own happiness as long as you don't hurt others, Shimoda conjures up an illusion of a vampire who needs Bach's blood to survive in order to prove Bach's point wrong while simultaneously dodging the serious implications of this philosophy.  

This isn't my first exposure to Bach's brand of "philosophy."  His previous novel, Jonathon Livingston Seagull was published in 1970 and became the bestselling novel in the US for the years of 1972-3. While that was an excruciatingly didactic fable, Illusions is more or less a string of excruciatingly didactic lectures, interspersed with excerpts from the Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul.  This handbook is a collection of aphorisms that are equal parts pithy, inspirational, and vague, balanced in such a way that they appear profound if you don't actually think about them.

"Learning is finding out what you already know.  Doing is demonstrating that you know it."

"You teach best what you most need to learn."

"The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got responsibilities.'"

Bach got himself a reputation as a spiritual guru with a massive fanbase for Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and he followed it up with Illusions.  It's popular for the same reason inspirational posters and feel good sitcoms where everything always works out in the end are popular. Most of the positive reviews I see for it follow the formula of "I was in a tough place, then I read Illusions, and [insert particular aphorism her] really spoke to me!"  If you throw enough affirmations at the wall, eventually one of them will stick.

 I try not to begrudge others their happiness, and nothing in this post is meant to challenge the sincerity of people's reactions towards or attachment to the novel.  If its sole purpose is to inspire people, it seems to have accomplished that.  That doesn't mean it's a good book, though, any more than an inspirational poster is good photography.  

Just the stats:

Published: 1977

Nationality: American

Pages: 143 (Delacorte Press Hardcover edition)

Sales:  #3 bestselling novel in the US of 1977; #7 bestselling novel in 1978

1972-3: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

The Author:

Richard Bach (1936-     ) was born in Oak Park, Illinois.  In 1955, he attended Long Beach State College (now California State University, Long Beach), before joining the joining the US Air Force as a pilot.  In 1957, he married his first wife, Bette Franks, with whom he had six children.  (They divorced in 1971.)  His first three books were non-fiction works about aviation: Stranger to the Ground (1963), Biplane (1966), and Nothing by Chance: A Gypsy Pilot's Adventures in Modern America (1969).

His first and most popular novel, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, was published in 1970 with only a limited run (the publisher was not optimistic about its success).  From here he had a long (and continuing) career in fiction, his next novel, 1977's Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah placing on the top ten annual bestseller's list in 1977 and 1978.  Bach has continued writing fiction and non-fiction up to the present, his most recent book being 2014's Illusions II: The Adventures of  a Reluctant Student.

The Book:

Length: 127 pages

Genre/Subject: Fable/Self-Improvement

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is about a seagull named, well, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Unlike the rest of  his flock, Jonathan loves flying for its own sake.  This attitude ends up annoying the flock, who are only concerned with the day-to-day tedium of catching fish, and Jonathan ends up being exiled from the flock.  In solitude, he learns to fly faster and higher than any other seagull alive.  Then he dies, but he's escorted by two golden seagulls to the next plane of existence.  It turns out that there's a reincarnation system, where a love of flying for its own sake gets you to the next level.  Eventually, Jonathan learns to fly instantly, to any point in space or time (because the only thing between the rest of the universe and you is your own inhibitions).  He decides to go back to the first plane and teach the seagulls there.  He becomes a Jesus figure, complete with disciples, raising the dead, and persecution from among his own people.   

The whole thing is interspersed with photographs of seagulls.  That is to say, there are nearly as many pages of photographs as there are of text.    

Bach himself said that there wasn't much of an underlying message to the novel besides to find what you love and go at with everything you've got, but I'm not one for the intentional fallacy.  Unsurprisingly, this book has been seen as everything from a simple self-improvement story to spiritual text.     

Honestly, to me it seems very dated to the 60s-70s period, with the pseudo-spiritual appropriation of Eastern belief systems (consider popular figures like John Lennon, as well as the resurgence of Siddhartha among young readers, the burgeoning popularity of transcendental meditation, among numerous other trends), combined with a pretty stinted Christian aspect, and a message of 'society just needs to focus on what it loves' message.  Don't get me wrong, it seems to be completely in earnest, but I think the entire thing can be summed up in an inspirational poster.  

I'm being a bit cynical.  Bach, after all, never claimed to be some spiritual leader, and was in fact dismayed at the amount of mail he got from people asking what the novel was really about.  Is it any wonder his next novel is about a man who, after being proclaimed a messiah by the public, gets tired of it and starts a career selling biplane rides?  I try not to grudge people their joys, and while I may find the novel trite, someone who hasn't been exposed to any of the philosophies above mentioned could find it revelatory.   

Jonathan Livingston Seagull's place on this list is interesting for two reasons.  1. It was the bestseller for two consecutive years. 2. It was first published in 1970.  Like I mentioned in the author section, the publishers of JLS didn't have much faith in it, and only printed 7,500 copies in the initial run.  It became popular quickly, and as the book wasn't immediately available, it became mysterious and desirable.  The media kept reporting on its popularity which, in a sort of positive feedback loop, caused it to be more popular, causing more reporting of its popularity, etc. etc.  (This is a tried and true technique.  Consider the unaccountable popularity of last year's film The Purge.  At least the reporters of JLS waited until the book was released to start publicizing it.)   

So of course there was a film. 

The film used remote control planes designed to look like pigeons for many of the aerial shots, was nominated for best cinematography and best editing, and had a soundtrack by Neil Diamond.  Those are the high points.  The film was almost universally panned, to quote Roger Ebert:

      It is based, to begin with, on a book so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have 

      seen through it. "The Little Engine That Could" is, by comparison, a work of some depth and 

      ambition. Consider that the movie made from the book has now been made the object of a 

      lawsuit by the book's author and you have some measure of the depths to which we sink as 

      Jonathan dives.

Bach did, in fact, sue Paramount due to the discrepancies between the book and film.  It turns out the director had a clause in his contract requiring any changes to be accepted by Bach, which wasn't honored, leading to court-ordered rewrites.  Not only did Bach sue, but Neil Diamond sued, claiming that too much of his music was cut from the film.  All in all, it was a disaster.    

I'm at a loss of who to recommend this book to.  Anyone who is reading a lit blog with an emphasis on the history of popular literature will probably be familiar enough with everything in the book to find it pretty lackluster.  I rarely use this summation paragraph to recommend other books, but I'm going to do that now. It's Julio Cortazar's From the Observatory (1972). Like Jonathon Livingston Seagull, it's short (in the 100-120 page range) and uses photographs (in this case of a bizarre 18th-century royal Indian observatory).  There isn't much of a narrative to it, and it's been called everything from a novel to a book of poetry.  As pretentious as it may sound, it's more like a long philosophical musing on man's place in the universe, examined through the constructs of this observatory and the life cycle of eels. It's a pretty neat book.

Bestsellers of 1972:

1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
2. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
3. The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth
4. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
5. The Word by Irving Wallace
6. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
7. Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell
8. Two from Galilee by Marjorie Holmes
9. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
10. Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins

Bestsellers of 1973:

1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
2. Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann
3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth
5. Burr by Gore Vidal
6. The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart
7. Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw
8. The Matlock Paper by Robert Ludlum
9. The Billion Dollar Sure Thing by Paul E. Erdman
10. The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

Also Published in 1972 & 1973:

Watership Down by Richard Adams
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Sula by Toni Morrison
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Sources:

Bach, Richard. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. 1970. New York: Avon, 1973. Print.
"Jonathan Livingston Seagull." Roger Ebert Reviews. Ebert Digital LLC. Web.
"Richard Bach." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.