Book Review & Analysis: Don't Call Me Brother by Austin Miles

Don't Call Me Brother:

A Ringmaster Escapes From the Pentecostal Church

by Austin Miles

      Pentecostal Christianity is just over one hundred years old. It originated in the post-Confederate South and emphasized the “presence of the Holy Spirit” as its followers would say. This includes music and singing, faith healing, and glossolalia or speaking in tongues, an altered state of consciousness in which a church-goer gets possessed by the Holy Spirit and vocalizes nonsensical sounds. Speaking in tongues is rooted in West African culture and is something that was brought over by slave communities then appropriated by white Christian Revivalists. All this is directed by the pastor of the church, a fiery speaker who brings the emotional pitch of the congregation up to an extreme. The circus, of course, is an entertainment tradition that dates back at least to the Roman Empire. The show is conducted by the ringmaster in tuxedo and stovepipe hat. So when a ringmaster becomes the preacher at a Pentecostal church, the lines between religion and entertainment get blurred. This is what happens in Austin Miles’ autobiography Don’t Call Me Brother.

Austin Miles had a miserable childhood. He came from a broken family in Indiana and ran away to join the circus when he was a teenager. As a clown, he took to the carny life with ease, being impressed with the showmanship and spectacle of the performances and the colorful characters who lived the transient circus life offstage. It was a traveling village of multi-ethnic misfits with talent. Miles moved on to become a ringmaster as he matured and again, he had a natural talent for it.

He met his wife Rose Marie in New York City. After marriage, they traveled to Switzerland to meet her aristocratic family who didn’t readily approve of him. These details of the marriage are interesting up to a point, but Miles dwells on his time in Switzerland with the family for far too long to serve the purposes of this story.

When they settle back in New York, Miles’ daughter from a previous marriage comes to live with them and everything is great, at least for a little while. Behind the scenes of the circus, a creepy German trapeze artist named Bobby Yerkes begins proselytizing Christianity to Austin Miles. Then something strange happens at a circus performance in the Bible Belt state of Tennessee. When the show is about to begin, a man in the audience has a heart attack. Being the good ringmaster he is, he asks the audience to pray for the victim’s recovery. Being a leader in such a venue means keeping the audience’s mind alert at down times like this so they don’t fret and ruin the whole show with a soured attitude. The next day, Miles learns the man recovered from his heat attack. The ringmaster attributes this to the prayer and then decides to convert to Christianity. Of course, not everybody who has a heart attack dies. But this is proof enough so Austin Miles approaches Bobby Yerkes and throws himself headfirst into the world of fundamentalist Christianity. He later learns that Yerkes is a pervert.

When the Assemblies of God ministries learn that a circus ringmaster has converted to Christianity, they see green and ask him to become a pastor. Enticed by the lure of the religious spotlight, Miles can’t resist. He meets with high level officials, let’s call them businessmen, and begins touring the country to give church services. Finally he meets up with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and becomes regular guest on their fledgling PTL Club TV show, helping to usher in the age of televangelists. The transition from circus performer to Christian evangelist is an easy one to see. In comparison to the dour and dust-dry congregations of the Protestant denominations and the solemn, downbeat masses of Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity offers an emotionally charged performance with audience participation, histrionic sermons, stimulating music, and intense visual displays of faith healing and glossolalia. The draw is that it is more of spectacle than traditional religions. Christian theology is never discussed. In a media and entertainment saturated culture like the United States of America, Pentecostalism has an advantage. The PTL Club becomes just one choice of TV shows out of a handful of others in the days when cable TV was beginning. Channel surfing rubes might pause as they run through their options when they see the showmanship of a faith healing, a band playing, or, an exorcism complete with demonic voices and foaming mouths straight out of The Exorcist.

Life starts going south for Austin Miles quickly. His wife Rose Marie rejects the Pentecostal church and eventually this drives a wedge between them that results in a nasty and humiliating divorce. His daughter converts to the church, but they later convince her that her father is satanic so she refuses to have anything to do with him.

Aside from the destruction of his family, Miles gets a behind-the-scenes view of what goes on in the shadows of Assemblies of God. The organization is little more than a Reagan era corporation complete with a board of directors and tax-free status because they are registered as a religious organization. The higher ups live lavishly in mansions, own private airplanes, and fleets of Mercedes Benzes. Miles’ work as a circus performer is cut out for him when they open Heritage U.S.A., a Disneyworld like theme park for born again Christians. By the end of the 1980s, financial scandals are tearing Assemblies of God apart; charges of tax evasion, fraud, and financial mishandling are rampant. Sexual scandals of all kinds are revealed too, including adultery, pedophilia, prostitution, wife swapping, and gay sex. Jim Bakker’s involvement in gay sex orgies and his affair with Jessica Hahn ruin his career.

Austin Miles has his own personal misgivings too. Tithing, or the donation of money to the church, is prioritized over all other religious practices. He learns that people being healed in faith healings are often shills. He also learns that ordinary stage magic is being used by some pastors to demonstrate their gift for performing miracles. With hindsight he knew all this is happening, but he doesn’t listen to his conscience because he feels he is doing something to help his congregations.

The darkest, and possibly the least credible, part of Miles’ story is that he thinks there is a conspiracy against him. For reasons he can’t understand, the Assemblies of God churches start to shun him. Vicious rumors about his immoral conduct spread and his engagements at preaching gigs are canceled one after the other. He believes he is being persecuted and blames the FBI. He claims his first wife, who he otherwise says nothing about, gave him a diary that proves the government assassinated Marilyn Monroe. That diary has since disappeared. Therefore the FBI is pulling strings with the Pentecostals to ruin his career as a pastor. This whole story sounds suspicious to me as if he is peddling a conspiracy theory to cover up some dirt he has in his past. This makes me wonder how much of his story is actually true. I suppose a lot of it is, considering the accusations he makes against Assemblies of God are easily corroborated in other sources, but I wonder if he isn’t being sufficiently forthright about other things he might have done. Anyhow, Austin Miles quits the church and successfully resumes his career as a ringmaster. If the FBI really wanted to ruin him, why didn’t they interfere with his circuses? Or true to form, why didn’t they just disappear him like you wold expect?

Aside from the conspiracy theory, possibly relayed in bad faith, the worst part of this book is its tendency to give long lists of bad things being done by the Pentecostals. Miles keeps repeating stories of scandals in different branches of the ministries, but it reads like the same story over and over again, just happening in different places with different people. Austin Miles also spends too much time on his private life outside the church. While his relations with his wife and family are relevant, the excessive detail he gives on these matters is overdone to the point where I just wish he would get on with the story and tell us about something more exciting.

The better side of this book is that it brings you close to the people caught in this Christian cult. It is an insider’s view of a lifestyle I can only see from an outsider’s view and. to be frank, I wouldn’t want to see this from the inside anyways. It is easy to dismiss Christian fundamentalists as a bunch of lunatics, but Miles shows us how even the worst of these grifters have a human side. They worry about their children’s future, they struggle with their marriages, they have health problems, a lot of them are having a hard time being comfortable with their sexual orientation. They care for each other and offer emotional support I times of distress. It shows how sad it is that so many gullible people get caught up in this religion-for-profit ponzi scheme. Some of them are born and raised with Evangelical Christianity. Some fall into it because the harsh circumstances of an uncertain world drive them to a place of comfort. Once inside that comfort zone, they are trapped by indoctrination, social conditioning, and the magical belief that giving all their money away will come back to them in the form of spiritual grace and healing. If they ever speak out against the wrong doings of the church, they get chewed up and spat out without mercy.

Assemblies of God and the PTL Club are a corporate den of thieves and the domain of narcissists and con men. It is an overblown version of the Southern revival tents which are only one step away from the carnival midway. The marks are unable or unwilling to admit that the pastor in the thousand dollar suit is a money grubbing charlatan just as much as the bearded lady in the circus sideshow is nothing more than a bearded man wearing make up and a dress.

The psychological profile we get of Austin Miles is interesting too. On one hand, he presents himself as a true believer in the gospel and someone who genuinely believes he is the only real person in a religion full of fakes. But having said that, you have to question why he played the game for so long. He is also quite an egomaniac who never shrinks from an opportunity to be in the spotlight whether that means preaching, being a ringmaster in the big top, doing radio interviews, or making television appearances with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In one passage, it is the first Christmas Eve he spends alone because his wife Rose Marie has left him. To cheer himself up, he wraps Bibles in wrapping paper and walks around Times Square handing them out to needy looking people. One woman is shivering because her coat is too thin for the winter, but all Miles can think of is how grateful she and the other recipients are because he gave them a Bible. It’s little more than a big ego trip for him to show how generous he is for proselytizing his religion. I’m sure the woman would have been a lot more grateful if he had given her a coat that was heavy enough to keep her warm, but that thought probably never crossed his mind. He is the typical kind of person who seeks out fame and popularity because he didn’t feel loved when he was a child. Still, he isn’t an unsympathetic character. He certainly isn’t a bad person. He is more like a lost soul who thought he found himself and then suffered terribly when the illusion wore off. That could happen to any of us considering we can never know for sure if we are ultimately doing the right thing or not.

Don’t Call Me Brother is good for what it is. The story is predictable and Austin Miles is an amateurish writer. But the meaning of it rings true. In the year 2025 when Prosperity Gospel megachurches are fleecing people all around and the Pentecostals are in the White House whispering into the ear of the worst president in American history, it is a message that needs to be heard more than ever.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Chase by Alejo Carpentier

The Chase

by Alejo Carpentier

      It’s easy to criticize Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution for becoming authoritarian and failing to live up to its potential. Not as many people realize what the political and economic climate of Cuba was like before the Revolution though. The post-colonial era of Cuba during the first half of the 20^th century was marked by a political style that could be called “gangsterismo”. Cuba didn’t have political parties so much as they had gangs and often the political violence spilled out of the governmental arena and into the universities, the businesses, and the streets. At the same time, Cuba was trying to find its identity as a modern nation by developing institutions of education and the fine arts. In such a small country, it is inevitable that the underclass and the rest of society would cross paths at some point. This is what happens to the unnamed protagonist in Alejo Carpentier’s novella The Chase.

The story, if you can call it that, opens with a university music student working in the ticket booth at a Havana concert hall where Beethoven’s Eroica is being performed. A man slams a bill on the counter and rushes inside just as the ticket booth is closing. Later the student is in his apartment, playing classical music on his record player. This music is heard in the distance as part of the ambient city noise a couple times throughout the novella, serving as a reminder that everything happening in between the opening and closing of the story is tethered to the concert hall.

The beginning is purposefully disorienting as the protagonist, also an unnamed student, is introduced. It takes a few pages before the narrative settles into recognizable patterns. This works effectively in portraying the lack of mental clarity suffered by the protagonist as he becomes healthy enough to evaluate his situation, realizing he has no money, and goes in search of food. He ends up stealing food from his landlady’s bedside who he then learns has died. His landlady is an Afro-Cuban woman who raised him as a nanny on his father’s sugar plantation. This transition works smoothly as his backstory is revealed. He grew up in the town of Sancti Spiritus then moved to Havana when he received a scholarship to study architecture at the university. The whole story is rooted in a theme of hindered growth and upward social mobility.

Conflict breaks out between the religious landlady and the protagonist because he develops a relationship with a prostitute named Estrella, the only named character in the whole story. Estrella, meaning “star” in Spanish, is the protagonist’s main source of hope and inspiration. He is in love with her and believes she is in love with him too. She certainly is hospitable to him, but it is hard to tell if she really loves him or if just likes him as a preferred customer. In any case, she doesn’t stop servicing clients when he comes to visit. One of those clients, ironically is the student ticket-taker at the concert hall. Estrella is in a difficult position because the Catholic neighbors want to put her in jail for prostitution, but she doesn’t believe she is doing anything immoral. She sees herself as a professional and an artist. As a strong, independent woman, she stands outside of Cuban society while simultaneously embodying that society’s conflict between high and low culture. Estrella’s house is where the protagonist goes when he is in danger. He is a fallen man in search of refuge and redemption, maybe without fully understanding what that means.

As the narrative goes on, it unfolds that the protagonist has joined a communist student gang at the university. They are involved in underworld activities like counterfeiting and assassinations. They hope to overthrow the current regime. The protagonist involves himself in an assassination plot and finds himself in jail. While being tortured he agrees to snitch on the other members of the gang and gets released. That is why he is ill at the beginning of the story. During the miseries of his illness, if you think back to previous pages, he becomes religiously preoccupied with the torture of Catholic saints. To save himself from the distress of being tortured, he seeks transcendence by reaching for the saints as if they are stars too distant to be caught, but it is possible is his indulgent fantasies about their dismemberments is what hold him back. Whatever the case may be, these visions are a result of desperation.

The most brilliant thing about this non-linear narrative is the way it folds in on itself. After finishing, the story, it fits together in a linear fashion, but the pieces have to fall together in the right order in the mind of the reader. The narrative revolves and reflects rather than sequentially laying the details out. This can be seen not only the way his thoughts about the saints during his illness foreshadow his torture in prison even though the illness sequence comes first in the narrative. It can also be seen in the disordered references to his nanny/landlady as a marker of the distance between his youth and his young adult years at university. The novella also starts with the ending of the story, but that ending is split into two with the second half of the ending coming at the end. It is easy to see how Carpentier used musical theory to compose the structure of the narrative.

The protagonist spends his last day wandering around Havana. He returns to the sight of a bombing and gets an urge to seek salvation in the confessional of a Catholic church. But his salvation is postponed because the tired priest is ready to go home for rest and tells him to come back in the morning. The internal monologue of the priest reveals his contempt for the protagonist since he is carrying the type of prayer book that is sold to practitioners of Santeria, something the priest considers to be a low form of spirituality. In the priest we see how racism, classism, and religion are mixed together in Cuban society.

After leaving the church, the protagonist realizes he is being followed. As night descends and the rain begins, he walks around Havana trying to find a place of refuge from his pursuers. We never learn who is chasing him. It could be associates of the communist gang he betrayed or it could be government agents or the police. It could be a combination of all of them considering the sleazy nature of Cuban politics in the 1950s. Ultimately, we return to the beginning with the protagonist sitting in the concert hall, listening to the symphony while nervously scheming what to do when the concert ends. Symbolically, Carpentier is saying that after political, educational, economic, religious, and social institutions have failed to save the protagonist, it is the fine arts that remain as his only chance of salvation. And even that falls short in the end as the student working at the ticket booth lets the protagonist’s pursuers into the theater so they can capture him. The arts represented by the concert hall are only a temporary respite from the chase that results in his inevitable demise. Salvation, like everything else he strives for out of desperation or misguided ambition, is an impossibility.

One interesting detail is the banknote that flits in and out of the narrative. The protagonist pays Estrella with a bill which she then uses to pay a taxi driver. Being an honest man, the taxi driver refuses to take the bill because he thinks it is counterfeit. After some arguing, she takes it back and later gives it to the protagonist because he is broke and in need of money to buy food. That is the bill he uses to pay for his entrance to the concert hall. In the end, the ticket seller gives it to a police man who wants it for evidence of counterfeiting, although the police man’s internal thoughts reveal that he recognizes the money as legal tender. Remember that the communist gang is involved in making phony money. Two things are going on here. One is that the money being passed around links several minor characters together as they cross paths, showing a cross section of Havana’s anonymous inhabitants. Second, the ambiguity of the money’s legitimacy is emblematic of the uncertain nature of the Cuban mind. The money reveals something, even if only briefly, about each person who handles it, and you can never be sure if what they are doing is honest or dishonest or if they even know what is true and what isn’t. Guessing what direction the people’s moral compasses are pointing in is nothing but a crap shoot. That can be said about any society, but in this context it serves to underline the unsettling uncertainties of Cuban life. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick who says that it is not possible to have an unambiguous moral system because morals are rooted in reality and our perceptions of reality are ambiguous. I am paraphrasing an idea from his novel The Man In the High Castle.

The Chase works because the main character’s inner turmoil is a reflection of the political corruption and social chaos of Cuba in the pre-Revolution years. Ironically, it was written before Carpentier knew the Revolution would even happen. Like the character himself, the country is rapidly sliding towards collapse and everything happening to him is directly linked to some facet of society that is going wrong. It’s a sad portrait of a promising student who get sidetracked in his studies and led astray on a path to destruction. It’s also a portrait of a city that is trying to assert itself as an upstart first world metropolis but failing because the sordid muck of vice, crime, and political corruption is holding it back. The main character and the city of Havana are progressing toward an apocalypse that shouldn’t be happening, but is anyways.

The Chase is a good book overall. It reads more like an extended prose poem than a narrative novella. But then again, this is Modernism and the plot is secondary to the progression of its elements. My main complaint is that it should have been longer and more developed. But if you are interested in the theme of the individual’s existential crisis, it serves it purpose well. And it also gives a good snapshot of how it would feel to be in Havana during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the dictatorship that unfortunately led to Castro’s Cuban Revolution and the establishment of a totalitarian communist state.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

      William S. Burroughs’ Cities Of the Red Night trilogy was his most thematic literary project. The first novel in the series used pirates as a central theme while the second, The Place of Dead Roads, drew on cowboys, outlaws, and the Western genre. Both books portrayed the world as a rotten and unjust place. The protagonists set out to establish utopia as a solution to the problems of human existence. They also allude to the need for humans to eventually escape from planet Earth since the whole place is doomed to self-destruction. Since humans aren’t physically or psychologically evolved for life in space, and possibly never will be, the only means of escape from the rottenness of humanity is in death. But for Burroughs, who actually had a strong desire to live, the afterlife stands as the only option available. That is where The Western Lands begins. Only this time, the theme isn’t pirates or outlaws; it is Egyptian mythology.

The novel begins with the self-referential William Lee Hart, a solitary writer living in a boxcar converted into a home on the bank of a river. This should tell you immediately that the whole book is autobiographical in the way that only William S. Burroughs can be autobiographical. I actually would argue that all his novels are autobiographical, but that is a matter for another essay.

The concepts of ancient Egyptian religions are introduced in the beginning too. According to The Book Of the Dead via Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, every living body has seven souls that perform various functions to whoever they inhabit. One is the director or managers of the other souls, one is a body double, another is a shadow self that hinders what the other souls are trying to accomplish. These souls are separate beings that don’t always work together for a common purpose and in fact, sometimes they are at war with one another.

The discerning reader can recognize that the seven souls are represented by different characters in this novel although Burroughs doesn’t make it clear which characters match with which souls. True to the nature of his writing, the links are slippery, ephemeral, and difficult to grasp and hold on to. It doesn’t matter so much though because the characters in his novels are rarely developed beyond what they do upon their initial appearance in the narratives. They tend to be more like spirits or elements, floating through the world in a haze of hallucinations which says a lot about how Burroughs experienced the world. But what the seven souls and their representation all come down to is the relationship between the author and his literary personas. The people written into the prose are all personifications or projections of different sides of the author. Jack Kerouac wrote about the different sides of his personality through the brothers in The Town and the City, Ken Kesey wrote about two sides of his personality with the two brothers in Sometimes a Great Notion, and Dostoyesky examined three sides of his psyche through the three main characters in The Brothers Karamazov. Here Burroughs is driving the point home that authors, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, mostly only write about themselves.

This novel also begins with some references back to early works of this author. The passage where arguments break out in a film engineering studio refers back to the subversievely chaotic attempt at broadcasting the American national anthem fron a television studio in Naked Lunch. The gun fight that opens and closes The Place of Dead Roads is rewritten here too. From there, the book goes on to examine themes previously introduced and repeated throughout the entire catalog of Burroughs’ writings. A rebel secret agent establishes an espionage agency that acts independently of any nation. Their purpose is to sow chaos throughout the world with riots, bombings, and assassinations. An escaped Nazi officer runs black market operations, surviving by impersonating Arabs, Jews, and Mexicans. Exotic weaponry is described excessively in a way that could possibly be considered pornographic in its details. Also there are drugs, sex, inhuman creatures produced asexually, sewers, violence, men who ejaculate while being hung, hideous centipedes, and everything else you would associate with Burroughs by the end of his career.

One memorable passage involves a team of seven men tangentially related to the medical and veterinarian professions even though none of them are actually doctors. But they all have skills that could be useful for a medical experiment. One of them is an expert in building ships in bottles. They are given the task of disassembling wild animals, rearranging the parts, and then randomly putting them together with the intention of creating new forms of nature. This is a kind of self-satire in which Burroughs repurposes his cut up method of writing by applying it to the unfortunate creatures in the laboratory. This is emblematic of the author’s whole purpose: to take the mind into inconceivable territories, dismantling reality, and recreating it in new ways that would never be possible with with conscious intent.

Another memorable passage involves patients in a hospital burn ward who start a riot because the uncaring doctors refuse to give them painkillers as part of their treatments. This could be representative of Burroughs’ experience of morphine or heroin withdrawal in a society in which those drugs are illegal and sometimes unobtainable when the pain of withdrawal is at its most intense.

Yet another passage keys you in to Burroughs’ way of thinking by writing about a literary critic as practicing black magic with the intent to kill the author. The critic posts reviews of books without reading them, but then a mysterious dog shows up and follows him around. Soon after, he is dead. The same dog appears for a spy and a member of high society. The dog is revealed to be a spirit from ancient Egyptian mythology who arrives to lead an individual to the doorway of death. The critic reveals a way of approaching Burroughs’ work by showing how he is both a literary critic and a black magician at the same time. It’s like seeing one man though two different angles so that the angles interact and cut into each other, covering and revealing parts of the man while making it possible to see the whole figure for what he is. It’s like the paintings of Cezanne with his experiments in shifting visual planes and angles.

Then there is the Egyptian mythology itself. Some passages are scenes of a pharaoh’s life and his interaction with Egyptian priests. Wars between Pagans and monotheists break out because for the Pagans, life after death is a privilege that has to be earned whereas for the monotheistic religions that later turned into Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, any person, no matter how insignificant, is capable of attaining life in Heaven just as long as they have faith in God. These monotheistic religions are portrayed as a ruse to make human society more conformist and easier to manage by the priests and kings whose ultimate goal is the enslavement of the whole human race. But the Pagan priests enslaved their societies too, just in different ways. Burroughs doesn’t appear to take any definite stance on which version of the afterlife is best although he does express more contempt for the monotheistic religions. His comments on Islam are quite harsh.

Then there are the mummies. Burroughs explains how the process of eviscerating, wrapping, and pickling dead bodies is a method of making batteries. Yes, batteries. The soul that survives in the afterlife needs a life force to sustain itself. Previous to death, that life source is the living body. Therefore the body is mummified to remain a supplier of life force to the soul the way a rechargeable battery keeps a light bulb shining. But since the mummified body is dead it needs to draw life force from someplace else and that source is the souls of the living. Therefore mummies are a type of vampire that drains life out of the living. If you ever want to read an anti-mummy rant, look no further. No one ever argued that Burroughs isn’t unique. After thinking through this, you might consider it to be another commentary on drug addiction. A junky under the influence of opiates is little more than a breathing mummy. A junky in withdrawal is like a person having the life force sucked out of them. The addiction is like a spirit that survives by sucking all the life out of the junky.

At some point, the narrative moves on from ancient Egypt to modern Cairo and then off to the city of Waghda. Readers of the previous two books in the trilogy will recognize Waghda as the last city out of seven you must pass through before embarking on a journey to the Western Lands, the land of the dead, the land of the afterlife, so called in Egyptian mythology because the sun sets in the West. Waghda is located near the crater where an alien spaceship once crashed, unleashing the virus that infected the larynxes of primates and evolved to become human language. The crater is now inhabited by a tribe of people who can’t escape and are close to starvation but sustain themselves by keeping their souls alive by smoking an herb and playing music. Mixed up in all this is a long explication of the science of virology that reads like a university professor’s lecture. It examines the links and similarities between viruses and humans. This is typical of Burroughs. He starts with a new train of thought and it ends in some place you never could have predicted.

Waghda is a city inhabited by a large population of lower class people who indulge in all manners of vice, especially those involving sex and drugs. A small population of upper class puritans lives there and hopes to one day exterminate all the lower class people who they regard as vermin. Yet again, this is another place with exotic weapons and people with magic powers. One man uses magic to find a guide to take him to the edge of the Western Lands. But somewhere in Waghda there are imprisoned animals and when a lion escapes it gets out to the edge of the city where it sneaks up behind a man. The man’s friend tries to shoot the lion but shoots his friend instead. Then he goes home and cries to his mother because he feels so guilty. It’s hard not to see a parallel between this passage and Burroughs’ shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer. It’s like the author is taking one last literary opportunity to express the misery he felt after killing his wife while trying to diminish the responsibility he had in the accident. Meanwhile, as the aforementioned individual is leaving the outskirts of Waghda, he contemplates how the world is a violent, dangerous place where somebody or something is always trying to kill you.

The narrative circles back to William Lee Hart in his boxcar home, writing and poring over books with pictures of wild animals. He identifies with and admires the most unusual looking animals in the book, a definite statement on how alien Burroughs felt as a member of the human race. As an old man, he begins to detach from the previous parts of his life, letting go of memories of the dream machine and pretending to be an intergalactic secret agent as if they are nothing more than scraps of ideas he no longer needs. Death is a process of leaving behind former aspects of himself. The tone is one of resignation and finding peace with himself in solitude, away from the human rabble, writing articles he expects no one will ever read and not caring. Then a mysterious cat appears and then disappears. Hart vanishes when he tries to find the missing cat. The implication is that the cat is a spirit who has come to lead him to the threshold of death.

So what The Western Lands presents us with is an elderly author looking back on his life and commenting on his literary works. It’s an exercise in meta-narrative and self-reflection/explication that is easier to see by readers familiar with his work and life, but not necessarily easy to interpret. An interpretation might be more mundane than you would think considering how opaque a lot of Burroughs’ writing is. Simply put, he sees human society as a shithole and the older he gets, the less he wants to engage with it. But he takes great delight in creating his own world, one in which linear time and causality are irrelevant and anything, including magic, is possible. To be trite about it, literature and art are the ultimate means of liberation from the world and there isn’t any alternative. “All is permitted, anything is possible,” are the words he puts in the mouth of Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man Of the Mountains and leader of the Ismailite sect known as the Assassins or the Hashishim as they are sometimes called. Burroughs explicitly says in this novel that he is an incarnation of Hassan I Sabbah and he controls the characters in his writing the way the Old Man Of the Mountain controlled his followers. He is the Guiding Soul overseeing the other six literary souls, the personas created by the author. As for the immortality of the author in the Western Lands or the afterlife, isn’t this just another way of saying that the author’s soul lives on after their death through the books they write? Life in the Western Lands is a privilege to be gained after a lifetime of preparation in a human body. The Book Of the Dead was written to prepare the seeker for the journey to the afterlife and The Western Lands is a document that shows how the author did what he could to earn the privilege of dwelling there.

The novel’s biggest shortcoming is the way Burroughs introduces the concept of the seven souls, starts to make it clear that different characters represent different souls, and then dissolves the theme into the chaos that happens throughout the rest of the book. Either the theme just gets dropped altogether, or I just didn’t work hard enough to draw connections between the souls and the characters. In any case, that is a difficult task considering that so much of this book is like being blasted in the face with a firehose of vomit, diarrhea, animal guts, sewage, toxic sludge, and anal mucous. And William Burroughs is the only author I know of to date who has dedicated any serious literary space to the subject of anal mucous, though I do think J.G. Ballard briefly mentions the subject in The Atrocity Exhibition. Then again, Burroughs constantly expressed contempt for linearity in narratives so this problem of narrative dilution may be an intentional writing technique.

William S. Burroughs died ten years after The Western Lands was published. It not only closes out the themes introduced in the Cities Of the Red Night trilogy, but it also acts as a final statement about the man’s life and works. It’s his last major effort to explain what all of it was about, but Burroughs being Burroughs, the explanation may be just as confusing as what he wants to explain. Like his other books, all the disturbing ideas and imagery are undercut by a mind that sees beauty in nature, creativity, the unfamiliar, and the incomprehensible, a beauty that can only be achieved through art and its interaction with the real world. There is always a sad optimism in his writing that tells us a better world is possible if only we listen to right people, find the right formula, and mind our own goddamn business. But we do none of that and so condemn ourselves to the scumpits of human society instead. The tone at the end of this book is one of clinical detachment and resignation with a bit of magic thrown in. One thing is certain: there’s never been an author like William S. Burroughs and there never will be again. If he was successful at anything it was in creating new visions of the world and its possibilities that you will never be able to access anywhere else.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Cracking Jokes by Alan Dundes

Cracking Jokes:

Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes

by Alan Dundes

       Back in the 1980s, teenagers used to tell dead baby jokes. “What’s red and squirms in the corner? A baby playing with a razor blade. What’s green and red and squirms in the corner? The same baby three months later.” We recited these jokes like catechisms. Being able to tell at least one or two of them meant you were part of the club. Sociologically speaking, that probably meant more than the actual jokes themselves. I’m not even sure if anybody thought they were funny. By the time I reached the age of 16 though, telling a dead baby joke would only be met with eye rolls and people telling you your jokes were old. You weren’t cool because you weren’t keeping up with the social trends.

The dead baby jokes were part of a joke cycle, meaning a cluster of jokes centered around a common theme. Other joke cycles are grosser than gross jokes, knock knock jokes, leper jokes, light bulb jokes, and jokes targeted specific ethnic or racial groups. Since these are circulated orally through society and their origins are unknown, joke cycles qualify as being a branch of folklore in sociology, particularly in the category of socio-linguistics. Alan Dundes, once one of America’s most prominent and controversial folklorists, examines offensive joke cycles in the collection of essays called Cracking Jokes.

Dundes approaches his subject matter theoretically through a Freudian psychoanalytic framework. That essentially dates his work and delegitimizes some of his findings from the start. But what this means is that he analyzes the content of jokes in order to understand what they reveal about unconscious processes and what the popularity of these jokes say about the society in which they circulate. I personally don’t reject Freudian thought outright since it does provide a framework and a language for making sense of the content of thought; it depends on what the researcher does with it. The most legitimate idea in this book is how jokes indicate symptoms of neurosis and insecurity through the process of substitution and sublimation, thus helping a folklorist to understand sources of anxiety in any given population Scholars who stick too closely to the Freudian method and accept the theoretical method without question tend to sabotage their own studies though. This is a problem I ran into with Dundes.

In one essay he writes about a joke cycle from the early 1960s centered around elephants. “What’s big and grey and comes in gallons? An elephant.” I have to say most of the jokes Dundes lists aren’t funny. Some of them I didn’t even get. Many of them are sexual in nature though in the way they compare the size of an elephant’s trunk to the size of a penis. Some of them aren’t though. The connection between elephants and sexual inadequacy is easy to see, but Dundes’ conclusions go downhill from there. His contention is that elephants in these jokes are symbols of African-American masculinity, something that represented a threat to white men in America at the time. Aside from the pairing of the trunk and penis, elephants live in the jungle and Black people come from Africa so Black men get paired with elephants (never mind that a large portion of Africa is desert). From there he makes an error in thinking that the link between elephants and Black men is legitimate because this joke cycle circulated at the time the Civil Rights Movement was happening. But that might be an error of linking correlation with causation. His analysis leads into the Oedipus complex where Black men become a stand-in for the father who has to be killed so the white male can possess his mother thereby inheriting the father’s domain. It just degenerates into Freudian psychobabble at that point. In Dundes’ defense, he isn’t trying to encourage racism here; he is trying to diagnose the neurotic symptoms of racist anxieties under the premise that the first step in curing an illness is understanding its pathology. His analytical method just leads to a dead end as far as I can see. He would have benefited more from providing data on the demographics of people telling these jokes and the social groups in which they circulated. Would these elephant jokes mean something different depending on context? Do we know that only white people told these jokes? Would their meaning change if they were told by Black people or some other ethnic group?

In a more successful essay, he analyzes the dead baby joke cycle. After analyzing some of the different reasons why these jokes might have appealed to teens, he arrives at the conclusion that the dead babies symbolize aborted fetuses. This might sound crazy at first but after following the train of logic it makes more sense. Puberty is marked by the onset of child bearing capabilities. Hormones begin telling adolescents to reproduce. However, in the context of modern society, they aren’t psychologically mature enough or financially equipped to raise children. So one consequence of sex for teenagers is unwanted pregnancy. One of the ways of dealing with this is abortion, an issue that became a prominent controversy after the passing of Rose Vs. Wade in the 1970s. So Dundes concludes that dead baby jokes are a social way of relieving anxiety around the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

If I could add my own thoughts to this, I would say that the disgusting images of dead babies in these jokes did not come out of nowhere. I remember anti-abortion activists handing out pamphlets on city streets in the 1980s that had photos of bloody fetuses in toilets and garbage cans. No doubt this shock value was used for propaganda purposes. Of course anybody who knows how abortions are actually performed would recognize this propaganda as nonsense as well as anybody who knows the difference between first, second, and third trimester fetal development. Third trimester abortions are performed less than five times per year and only allowed in cases of extreme danger. But once you’ve seen the horrific images in those pamphlets, you can’t unsee them regardless of what your beliefs about abortion are. Of course there is no technical way to prove that dead baby jokes result from sexual anxiety in teenagers, but at least the connecting thread from the joke to the explanation is clear and plausible.

The rest of the book mostly analyzes offensive jokes revolving around ethnic or sexual stereotypes. Joke cycles about the Holocaust, Polish people, Italian people, gay people, and so on and so forth get covered. Dundes comes up with the amazing insight that ethnic jokes are rooted in anxiety caused by the presence of people who are different from the ones telling the jokes. Well, I guess I knew that already. To build on that, I’d say there is an element of sadism in the telling of sick jokes. One thing I gathered from reading the Marquis de Sade is that when people feel superior to others, they feel like they are justified in doing anything they want to them. Outside of acts of physical violence, one means people have of expressing superiority over others is by offending them through the medium of humor. This might even appeal to ordinary people who aren’t necessarily capable or interested in committing crimes like physical violence to begin with. Other scholars have examined whether or not racist humor is a form of verbal violence.

Sexual jokes are treated by Dundes in a similar way with a similarly underwhelming effect. The cycle of jokes told by women about why cucumbers are better than men are little more than a laundry list of things about men that bother women. A cucumber is better than a man because you don’t get hair stuck in your teeth when you put a cucumber in your mouth. A cucumber doesn’t whine if you ask it to wear a condom. Haha. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh. It doesn’t take a Freudian sociological analysis to explain why this joke would appeal to the people who tell it and not so much to the rest of us. Of more interest would have been a discussion on why sexuality causes the kind of anxiety that needs to be relieved through humor in the first place. Actually, Steven Pinker has done a good job of that already.

Another subject the author overlooks is that of ethnic intra-group joke cycles. For example, when I was in Poland a few years ago I was surprised to find that Polish people were telling some of the same Polish jokes I heard when I was a kid. This isn’t any different than Jeff Foxworthy telling redneck jokes to a redneck audience. “You know you’re a redneck if you go to family reunions to pick up women.” He does address Jewish American Mother and Jewish American Princess jokes which he demonstrates are inextricably linked. These jokes are told in Jewish communities and especially appeal to Jews from second generation immigrant families. Dundes points out that they address anxieties about childbearing and growing up in a culture where family styles of childcare don’t match with the dominant host culture. On a side note, I was surprised to learn that Orthodox Jews tell jokes based on their own stereotypes of Reform and Conservative Jews. Now there’s something I never knew before. Over all though, Dundes doesn’t sufficiently deal with self-abnegating humor which, from what I’ve experienced, is common in Europe and especially the U.K. A stereotype of Americans that many Europeans hold is that we can’t laugh at ourselves because we have no sense of irony. An essay on self-abnegating humor would have made for a good point of contrast.

Of more value than the truisms presented about ethnically offensive jokes analyzed in this book is the taxonomic approach to categorizing types of humor. It should be obvious that there is a difference between story telling jokes and riddles, but observations about motifs and themes, when grouped into categories, work to undermine and neutralize the damage racist jokes can do. Dundes points out that common motifs are stupidity, linguistic miscommunications, and unhygienic habits. The last one makes me wonder if ethnic stereotypes about people being dirty are rooted in theories of eugenics and ethnic hygiene from the early modern era. Note how Hitler said that immigrants were “polluting” the blood of pure Germans or how some Americans tell jokes about Muslims not using toilet paper.

Dundes also rightly points out that many ethnic groups are interchangeable in stereotype jokes. “What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral? There’s one less drunk at the funeral.” (I first heard this joke told by an Irish man when I was in Ireland, by the way.) The slot filled by “Irish” in that joke could be filled with any other ethnic group you choose and the joke would still be the same. Knowing this exemplifies the way in which stereotypes work to create distance between the user of the stereotype and who it is meant to represent.

Another class of joke cycles refers to ethnic characteristics that are less general and refer to specific physical features, linguistic patterns, or cultural traits. Jokes about Jewish or Scottish people being thrifty are commonly used as insults, yet the author points out that there is nothing inherently bad about not spending excessive amounts of money. In fact, in many cases it shows virtuous behavior. People complain about excessive government spending constantly but if a Jewish person doesn’t buy a book for $100 because he can buy the same book at another store for $20 that is a cause for offensive humor and accusations of being cheap. It’s like some people think that person needs to be put down for asserting his self-control, self-restraint, and wise decision making. All this brings Dundes to raise the question of whether ethnic stereotypes arise from cultural patterns in specific ethnic groups or whether they just misrepresent such groups without regard for how they actually are. Dundes leaves this question unanswered.

Alan Dundes is at his best in this book when he doesn’t pursue Freudian cliches too far. Otherwise I feel that too many of these essays do little more than state the obvious. Too much of the time he sticks too closely to the formula of anxiety that needs to be relieved by telling jokes. I didn’t come away from this book feeling like he had provided any great insights. But I did get a chance to see how folkloric studies can work. Joke cycles reveal repetitive patterns that can be aggregated for drawing conclusions about the people who tell them whereas individual jokes that aren’t contained in cycles don’t give enough data to work with. I also think a shortcoming in these studies is that he mostly limits his analysis to the contents of the jokes and doesn’t say enough about who tells them. That social dimension is largely missing and it could have led to more significant insights. I give him credit for having his heart in the right place though when it comes to combating racism.

As for the dead baby jokes, looking back on it now I’m not convinced that the content of the jokes mattered all that much to us. Telling the jokes was like a social ritual that bonded our group of friends together. It worked by creating an in-group/out-group dynamic. The in-group was the teenagers telling the jokes and the out-group was the adults in our lives who we never shared the jokes with. Dead baby jokes were only funny because of their shock value. But they didn’t shock us though we thought they would shock our parents and teachers. It was our secret that bonded us closer together. I’m not convinced we were anxious about unwanted pregnancy. It’s true that we were a bunch of horny teenagers, but we were also too shy and awkward for sex, and far too young. We sure talked about it a lot, but at that age sex was still something that only adults did. But as Freud would have said, jokes make people laugh by making people uncomfortable.

We bonded together socially in our knowledge that our parents would be offended by sick jokes. The 1980s were the era of the latchkey kids. That meant that the cost of living had risen to the point where both parents had to work to support a family. So kids returned home from school to empty houses where they gathered with friends in the absence parental supervision. Working parents worried about what their teenagers might be doing at those times and their biggest fear might be that the kids turn out to be monsters. So dead baby jokes played on those fears since some of the worst crimes imaginable would involve the torture and murder of infants, the most innocent and vulnerable members of the human race. The thought that your kids might be thinking of or doing something of that sort in the absence of parental guidance could be quite distressing. Furhter, it is important that these jokes were not shared with adults because knowing how offensive they were is what made them appealing as secrets worth keeping. If we knew that adults knew these jokes, and actually a lot of them did as I found out later on, the spell would have been broken and they would cease to function as a social bonding ritual. It’s also interesting to note that, as far as I know, none of the kids telling dead baby jokes never turned into sadistic baby murderers so possibly the jokes also functioned by regulating and containing potentially harmful unconscious drives and desires.

After reading Cracking Jokes I’m not sold on the idea that this kind of folkloric research has much value, or at least not in the way it was presented by Alan Dundes. He was obviously a smart man, but these essays didn’t yield any significant insights and were a little too general in their scope and methodologies to be of much value. I still think there is a place for folklore in sociology, but this book just doesn’t convince me of that on its own.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis; Explosion In a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion In a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier

       “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.

Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.

The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.

The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.

They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.

The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.

The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.

A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.

In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.

Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.

Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.

Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.

Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.

When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.

From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.

The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.

The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20^th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.

In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.

The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.

Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted. 

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: The Job by William S. Burroughs

The Job

by William S. Burroughs

      Do you have trouble understanding William S. Burroughs? That’s not exactly your fault. A lot of his writings throw you into a labyrinth of sewers without a life jacket or a set of instructions. You may be able to grasp ahold of whatever chunks of garbage float by, but those will dissolve soon after being touched. If you are perceptive enough, you will know somewhere in the back of your mind that there is something being said, however. It just isn’t obvious. So it might be helpful if you have some sort of roadmap or outline to make all the filthy mess a little more comprehensible. That is where The Job comes in.

The Job is mostly a collection of interviews Burroughs did with Daniel Odier, a Swiss author and teacher of tantric yoga. The interviews are blended in with essays, short stories, and pieces of experimental writing in a way that is true to Burroughs’ desire to explode the traditional forms of writing. The lines of demarcation between the passages aren’t clearly marked so the writing drifts from one passage to the next like globs in a lava lamp. Burroughs’ himself said this book is intended to read the way you might experience a documentary film. The form reflects the function since a big part of Burroughs’ theories is that boundaries of any kind are soft and mutable; any kind of rigid structuring is arbitrary, resulting from a sick desire to control and dominate the nature of reality.

Topics covered include the usual things Burroughs always discusses. The nature of narcotics usage and addiction to opiates fill up one section. If you think he intends to glamorize morphine or heroin use, you’ve missed the point. Burroughs would be the first to tell you to stay as far away from heroin as you possibly can. Having said that, he also advocates for addicts by claiming they are essentially harmless people who interfere with nobody else as long as they have access to their drugs. Given the hallucinatory nature of his writings, it’s interesting that he doesn’t like LSD.

He also explains the cut up method and the dream machine for about the thousandth time. Fortunately he doesn’t dwell on these for too long since they have been explained in depth in so many other places. Other topics covered are the biological function and meaning of viruses, ancient Mayan society, and the relationship between matriarchy, family, nations, and control. As he sees it, matriarchies are inherently authoritarian since families are dominated by mothers and nations are essentially extensions of the family unit. His belief is that control and domination can be eliminated by destroying the family which will inevitably makes nations an impossibility. Reproduction should be asexual and children should be given over to the state to prevent parents from passing their neuroses down to their children.

You might be tempted to say that Burroughs’ misogyny is rooted in his relations with his parents, but that is a little too easy. It is true that he had an overbearing mother and an effeminate father, but he is said to have had a warm and loving relationship with them. Familial conflicts were minimal. He was also deeply attached to the family’s nanny who introduced him to witchcraft at a young age and biographers have say that he used to have temper tantrums when she wasn’t around to watch over him . The source of Burroughs’ misogyny is a mystery that can’t easily be traced back to the places you would ordinarily think to look such as childhood trauma or poor family relations. But of course, this is William S. Burroughs and his program is that of chaos magic. He immerses you in a cyclone of filth then leaves you alone to see what is left after the storm has passed. It’s not about making sense in the conventional meaning of that term.

The big ideas in The Job relate to the connection between sound and image, and the language virus as a mechanism of control. Regarding sound and image, Burroughs claims that how we interpret what we see is dominated by what we hear. Sound is a dominant force and shapes vision and imagery without our conscious consent. He gives the example of a film clip showing people in a city running to catch a bus. By removing the accompanying soundtrack and replacing it with a recording of machine gun fire, the viewer will see the running crowd in an entirely different light, one in which they are running for their lives.

Any film maker will tell you this is a truism, but Burroughs’ extends this idea into the realm of experimental art with his tape recorder experiments. Peoples’ perceptions of reality and time can be altered by using his cut up method to randomly splice sound and image recordings together. But Burroughs doesn’t stop with film studio experimentation. He advocates taking the technology into the streets by hiding tape players on body under a trench coat and walking along crowded city streets while they play. The tapes should have the sounds of riots. The idea is that the sound of riots can override the reality of what people see and cause them to act as if a riot is really happening. Any skeptic would deny the possibility of this working and the ethics of carrying out such an experiment are dubious. Still, it makes you wonder what would happen if you tried it. More importantly, the undertone of humor in this should not be ignored. Burroughs may be pulling your leg, but then again maybe not. He probably would say that disregarding the illusions of linear time and causality make magic possible. Or is that theory just the drugs speaking? Iny any case, he draws out attention to the way that media channels like film, TV, and radio are designed to manipulate our perceptions and behavior while conditioning us for obedience.

His concept of obedience is lifted directly from Scientology in what is dubbed the Reactive Mind or RM as he calls it throughout the text. The RM is the impulsive, motivational center of our mind. It reacts in response to external stimuli, but it is fractured and rendered ineffective through contradictions accumulated during childhood. The contradictions are encoded in the RM with language and as long as these contradictions remain fossilized in the RM, the individual is limited in their potential for self-determination. Therefore, erasing the language codes in the RM will liberate the person, making them less vulnerable to control from outside forces.

This brings us back to Burroughs’ concept of the language virus. His theory of language is heavily influenced by the linguist Alfred Korzybski who is considered to be a founding father in the branches of semantics and semiotics. Korzybski articulated the arbitrary connection between signs and what they signify. There is nothing in the nature of a cat to determine that the signifier “cat” is an accurate representation of the signified animal. But a drawing of a cat bears a closer resemblance to the authentic nature of a cat than the word we use to described it.

Since language, sound, and image can be so easily manipulated to control human perceptions and behavior, Burroughs’ solution is to disconnect language from any signified images. Burroughs suggests liberation by utilizing either a pictorial language in which images without connections to sounds are used to communicate or else a scripted language that doesn’t signify visual images can be used as well. He demonstrates the latter in an experimental writing piece that makes it impossible to attach an images to the written words he uses. You could argue that this kind of abstract writing doesn’t communicate anything at all though, making the purpose of language ineffective, maybe even making communcation impossible. Enter Jacques Derrida. The ultimate goal is to think solely in images without any words attached to them. Burroughs belives we should evolve to replace spoken and written language with telepathy. This could be the next step in evolution, something that won’t take place until we leave the planet. It’s kind of like a sea animal evolving into a land animal by losing its fins and scales and evolving into gorwing lungs and limbs to adapt to its new environment.

Another linguistic concept of Burroughs involves the elimination of binary opposition which he says limits the human capacity for interpreting reality. Pairs like hot/cold or tall/short foreclose the possibilities for any kind of nuanced understanding. But he completely ignores the use of other words and concepts we use to describe temperature like freezing, burning, warm, cool and so on. Also concepts of tall and short can vary depending on who you are considering. Being five feet in height would be tall for a three year old, but if that individual is still five feet at the age of forty he would be considered short by American standards. So the meaning of tall and short is nuanced and dependent on context. I would say that eliminating pairs of binary opposites would further limit our ability to express concepts rather than heighten our awareness of nuances since it would provide less language to work with.

He also wants to eliminate the pairings of the definite and indefinite articles “the/a” and use only the indefinite article “a”. But he doesn’t recognize that those articles each represent different categories of specificity and generality. “A book is good to read” has a different meaning than “the book is good to read”, the former referring to any one unspecified book out of all books in existence while the latter refers to one specific book, the title of which was presumably given in a previous sentence. Thus eliminating the definite article “the” would greatly reduce our ability for nuanced discussion rather than liberating us from semantic restrictions. Burroughs also doesn’t appear to know that many languages, especially Slavic languages, don’t contain any articles at all so unless he wants to argue that people who speak Slavic languages are dominated less than people who speak Latin or Germanic languages, or even Arabic or Albanian, he doesn’t have much to go on here. Russian was the language of the Soviet Union, so drawing a direct connection between the semantics and syntax of a language and the degree of individual liberties possessed by the speakers of the language isn’t a connection that can be made.

Burroughs’ knowledge of linguistics was superficial, but we aren’t talking about ontology here; we are talking about literary theory combined with fictional world building and in the context of his science-fiction novels it clarifies some of what he is trying to accomplish, or at least it indicates why some of his writings are deliberately meant to perplex you.

The universe Burroughs’ creates is one that is deterministic. Humans have no free will as we are motivated internally by genes, hormones, and unconscious drives. We are pushed and pulled through life by reacting to external stimuli in our surrounding environments and the ones who have the most control over our environments have the most control over us. And their motivations don’t take our welfare into consideration. Humans, as biological agents, have very little free will and very little chance of escaping from the prisons of our lives. If we decimate all systems of linearity, logic, and mechanization then we might have a chance to build on whatever shapes emerge from the ruins. But probably not. Burroughs doesn’t think it’s likely, but we might as well try. There is nothing better to do. You have to wonder how much of his philosophy is meant to convey the truth as he sees it and how much is just the result of being unable to control a drug addiction or alter his sexual orientation. I have long wondered if William Burroughs was a solipsist.

The Job is important for anyone who wants to understand Burroughs. All of the ideas contained in this book are theoretical frameworks for his fiction which can be disorienting and sometimes hard to follow. He says the same things here that he says in all his other books; he’s just laying it all out in plain language so you can grasp ahold of the concepts more readily. It is a good strategy to read his biography, read his fiction, and then read The Job. After that, go back and re-read his fiction. It will be easier to see how it all fits together and when you come to the parts that are incomprehensible, just remember that incomprehensibility is a part of what he is trying to express. Don’t forget to look for hidden messages though. Sometimes there are signals submerged in all the noise. Sometimes those signals emerge in part or in whole.

In conclusion, The Job is a key text for those who are serious about studying William S. Burroughs. It is like a Rosetta Stone that unlocks the meaning of all his other fiction. His explicitly stated literary theories and philosophical worldview are supplemented with short stories and essays nested within the interviews. This succeeds in clarifying some his more obscure ideas. And if you don’t agree with some of it, or any of it, don’t despair since his ideas are all about world building in the realms of science-fiction and surrealism. That may be a cop out when it comes to defending a system of unjustifiable beliefs, but it functions well when you want to interpret the more evasive aspects of his literature. You have to understand it before you can accept or dismiss it. If you don’t make the effort to interpret it, you can’t contribute much of any value in a discussion on what its value is. Besides, being the stubborn individualist that William S. Burroughs was, you can conclude that he probably didn’t want you to agree with a lot of it anyways. His philosophy can be seen as a defensive measure against the riff raff of humanity so if it was easy to understand and easy to agree with, it wouldn’t be strong enough to serve its purpose.

As clearly articulated as the ideas in The Job are, I only have one major complaint. If you’ve heard William S. Burroughs speak, you know that he was avuncular and authoritative in his mannerisms. You might have found it hard to disagree with him when in his presence. When these interviews are written out in text, his unique form of magnetism is partially lost and the words lose the kind of gravity they carry when he speaks. Therefore, it may be more convincing to listen to him explaining his ideas rather than reading them in this book. But whatever works best for you is what works.

Now if only I can get my head around the idea of an author whose intention it was to eradicate language...