Book Review: Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950 by Helena Benitez

Wifredo and Helena:

My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950

by Helena Benitez

      If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City then you’ve seen Wilfredo Lam’s painting The Jungle. It’s a work of Surrealism, depicting four figures interweaving with bamboo and leafy vegetation. The figures have bodily features that are sharply angular and round simultaneously. Their faces resemble African masks of indeterminate origin, or at least they do for those not knowledgeable about African art. The figures emerge out of the jungle background like creatures coming out of a dream, threatening and enticing at the same time. The rhythmic but disorienting painting makes it impossible to find any place of visual rest.

Wifredo Lam is Cuba’s most famous visual artist. During the decade of World War II, he and his wife Helena lived together, bouncing from Europe to the Caribbean to the United States while involving themselves in the social scene of the most prominent avant-garde artists of the era. Helena Lam, who has since changed her name to Helena Benitez, recounts the most prominent memories of those times in her memoirs Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939 – 1950.

Wifredo Lam was a tall man with a striking appearance. Being an ethnic mixture of Spanish, African, and Chinese ancestry, he was an embodiment of the three dominant immigrant groups of Cuba. In photographs you can see how those physical features contrast and interact with each other in his complex face. As such, he was truly a man who lived between worlds, a theme that defined the meaning of his paintings throughout his career.

Helena was an attractive German woman with a undying curiosity and a fascination with fortune telling and the occult despite her scientific background and career as a medical biologist.

The two of them met in France just before the German invasion of World War II. They spent most of their time in Marseilles then set sail, with a contingent of other Surrealist artists, for the Caribbean island of Martinique. Eventually they moved on to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, finally settling in Cuba as refugees once they got their papers in order.

The course of Wifredo Lam’s development as an artist depended on the place he was living in and the people he knew at the time. His early works were informed by Cubism and his friendship with Pablo Picasso. After Picasso introduced him to Andre Breton, his art matured as he pursed the theories of Surrealism while developing his own visual idiom. Breton and Lam developed a strong friendship throughout their travels and their mutual interest in non-Western art which the Surrealists believed opened doorways into the dreamworld and the unconscious.

After returning to his homeland of Cuba, Wifredo Lam began incorporating elements of the African-diaspora religions of Palo, Abakua, Vodou, and Santeria into his paintings. He added another layer into his art when he began studying the Eastern philosophies of Taoism, Confucianism, and the I Ching.

Helena was all in on the adventure. She developed a good relationship with Lam’s family, was endlessly fascinated with the natural landscapes of the Caribbean islands, and took great interest in the ceremonies the couple attended. She fit in easily with the small circle of artists in Havana and maintained a fascination for Wifredo Lam’s art which peaked in intensity and innovation during their marriage.

In frustration with the perceived cultural backwardness of Havana and Cuba in general, the couple set off for New York City where many of the famous European Modernists had settled as refugees from the war. The art scene was changing at that time because a new breed of young Americans wanted to prove their worth in the world of Modernism. The old avant-garde art movements were receding and the new wave of Abstract Expressionists were taking over. The Lams naturally fell in with this crowd, but sadly Wifredo’s immigration papers weren’t obtainable and he returned to Cuba. Helena stayed behind, advancing her career in the medical field, and stone cold dumped him like a pair of old socks. This last detail is jarring considering the upbeat tone running through the rest of the book.

Throughout these memoirs, Helena Benitez emphasizes the high points in her marriage to Wifredo Lam. As such, it mostly reads like a pleasant diversion. There is a lot of name dropping when it comes to encounters with famous artists. There are nice descriptions of Caribbean travel and the lifestyle of Cuba. The observations of her husband are light, though and without a lot of depth. Taken at face value, you might think that their marriage was almost nothing but bliss. But like so many artists, she mentions he had a manic depressive temperament and was far from being a faithful husband. Other melancholy aspects include the time she spent in a prison camp during the German occupation of France and the days leading up to Arshile Gorky’s suicide. But Helena Benitez mostly keeps the negative sides of her marriage a secret. Maybe it’s for reasons of privacy. Maybe she just wants to remember the best times. In any case, these memoirs won’t entirely satisfy anyone who wants a complete biography of Wifredo Lam.

Taken as it is, Wifredo and Helena is a good introduction to one of the most fascinating, unique, and underrated artists of the Modernist movement. Of especial value are the high quality reproductions of Lam’s works and rare photographs, some of which are not available to the public anywhere else. Let’s hope that somebody somebody writes a full biography and critical evaluation of this painter and he gets the post mortem recognition he deserves.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Making Of a Moonie by Eileen Barker

The Making Of a Moonie:

Brainwashing or Choice?

by Eileen Barker

      During the Cult Scare of the 1970s-80s, the Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, were a lightning rod for controversy. Their interface with the public was through proselytizers with glassy eyes and smiles that were a little too big to be true. Accusations of kidnapping, con artistry, teaching false religious doctrines, deceptive recruiting techniques, and brainwashing were common. Those last two issues are examined in an academic study by the sociologist Eileen Barker in The Making Of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?

By the end of the 1970s, the Unification Church was spreading rapidly throughout North America, Western Europe, and Asia. Their belief system was ecumenical in its pursuit of uniting all religions into one under their leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a charismatic Protestant from South Korea. Church belief and ritual was syncretic, combining elements of Evangelical Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, and Korean shamanism. Moon claimed to be the Messiah sent to Earth because previous leaders of world religions have failed to save humanity. The church was famous in those days for having mass weddings in which Moon chose brides and grooms at random to marry each other.

Sun Myung Moon had a colorful past. During the Korean War, he was tortured by the Chinese Communists in a prison camp. He claimed to have met Jesus Christ who told him that the crucifixion proved that he had failed as a messiah and it was Moon’s duty to pick up where he left off. After establishing the Unification Church in South Korea and Japan, Moon opened its world headquarters outside of New York City while overseeing a vast network of corporate businesses and real estate that included a weapons manufacturing plant and a newspaper with a right wing extremist editorial bias. Moon later went to prison in America for tax evasion and money laundering. Eileen Barker neglects to mention that Moon had worked for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and liaised with members of the American CIA during the era when they were conducting brainwashing experiments in the MK Ultra program. She also doesn’t mention that the Unification Church has deep financial ties to the Republican Party through lobbying and campaign contributions.

Eilen Barker’s goal is to investigate whether accusations of brainwashing are accurate or not. “Brainwashing”, as she defines it, means erasing the contents of a person’s mind and filling it with the authority’s chosen contents thereby turning people into robots who do whatever they are commanded to withlut question. I have immediate suspicions of her definition. It isn’t hard to disprove her definition of brainwashing becase it doesn’t define what is done during thought reform conditioning.

A point of comparison could be made with the training of soldiers in the military when they are taught to obey commands from officers and to do so without thought or hesitation. This is necessary because anybody with common sense would be reluctant to walk into a battlefield with people shooting and bombing each other unless they have a death wish. But soldiers learn to do this on command. This could be considered a form of brainwashing and yet those soldiers still have the ability to make choices. The number of soldiers who go AWOL proves this as well as what they do during leisure time. Plus soldiers can and sometimes do disobey orders with the caveat that they suffer consequences for it. So I’m not convinced that brainwashing entails the idea of turning people into mindless robots. People inside high pressure control groups can still think for themselves and make choices. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t authorities setting the parameters of what choices they are allowed to make though. I’m not comfortable with the term “brainwashing” anyhow. I much prefer something like “psychological/social conditioning”. So right off the bat, there are problems with Barker’s study.

The fieldwork was done using two methods. One was participant observation in which Barker attended Moonie recruitment workshops. The other was having workshop participants fill in surveys. The workshops were held in attractive-looking buildings in rural areas outside San Francisco and London. Participants are brought in from cities on buses owned by the Moonies. Initial workshops run for three days with subsequent workshops running for one week or one month before a member commits to joining full or part time. Barker makes the observation that no one tried to leave the workshops, disproving the accusation that the church holds people against their will during the recruitment process. But I find her conclusion to be hasty as I think something more subtle was going on. It may be true that anybody could leave the premises any time they wanted. The doors weren’t locked as she pointed out. But being in a rural area without transportation was a factor she didn’t consider. Most people would be smart enough not to walk the long distance back to the city, especially when they didn’t have sufficient directions. Hitchhiking might be an option, but by the end of the 70s, violent crimes against hitchikers had made the practice almost obsolete. It would make the most sense to put up with the remainder of the workshop and be taken back at the end. So yes, the individual who wantsedto leave had a choice, but the parameters of the choice were limited, something that Eilen Barker never took into consideration.

The workshops consisted of group discussions, meals, walking, game playing, singing, group prayers, and listening to sermons. Sleep time was limited and potential recruits were woken up early to walk and play sports before breakfast. All activities were closely monitored and guided by Unification Church recruiters. Critics of the cult have made accusations of sleep deprivation being used to make members too fatigued to think clearly. But Barker dismisses this by saying she didn’t see any evidence that workshop attendees weren’t thinking clearly. Of course, the attendees weren’t allowed to have any in depth conversations during the workshops so it is hard to know what evidence she based her conclusion on.

Another accusation made by critics is that the Moonies brainwash people by inducing altered states of consciousness. Barker also dismisses this by saying she saw no evidence. But she never operationalizes the concept of “altered states of consciousness”. She doesn’t consider that singing or praying in groups could fall into this category. During the act of singing, for instance, the individual’s ego can get dissolved into the collectivity of the group, making the individual more susceptible to peer pressure and suggestion from outside. That doesn’t mean every time people sing they are being brainwashed; it means by submitting to the activity they can be softened up and made more receptive to suggestions, some of which may not be in their best interest. Singing and prayer can also be a way of creating an emotional bond between the individual and the group as well as being a means for controlling and regulating moods and emotions. Something similar can be achieved through group prayer or playing team sports, activities in which the group’s solidarity supersedes the importance of the individual in a goal directed task. Combine sport activities with sleep deprivation and some people can be turned into putty in the hands of an authority figure. Sleep deprivation works in the military and it is commonly used in cults too.

Also the constant supervision and guidance of recruiters was dismissed by Barker as being harmless, but it is easy to see another perspective. Aside from maintaining regulation of the groups through a daily organized program of activities, recruiters monitored and guided conversations so that potential members couldn’t discuss and evaluate their situation freely without someone watching over them and steering the conversations. Barker didn’t feel this direct control over the socializing of attendees had any influence over whether or not they chose to join. Even if you take the subjectivity of each workshop attendee out of the equation, the strict scheduling of workshop activities without sufficient time for unguided socializing indicates a high level of environmental control on the part of the Moonies.

Eileen Barker’s other method of data collection involved surveys of participants in the Unification Church’s recruitment workshops. These surveys were given accodring to rigorous scientific standards, including control groups and peer review, and were, in my opinion, the strongest and most interesting part of her study. One survey petitioned participants to explain why they chose to join or not to join the Unification Church after having attended the workshops. The most common reason for those who joined was that it potentially would fulfill the spiritual purpose they felt they lacked outside the cult. Most of them were spiritual seekers. For those who refused to join, reasons varied so widely that it was difficult to draw a definite conclusion. But for Barker, the larger point is that they didn’t join which to her means that they weren’t brainwashed and, further, this means that the Unification Church never brainwashed anybody or even had any intentions of trying to brainwash members.

Of more interest, from a legitimate standpoint from my perspective, were the second set of surveys which categorized the personality types of people who did join the church. The majority of recruits were white, middle class or working class young people. They came from stable and comfortable homes, claiming to have had happy childhoods. Contrary to public perception, none of them suffered from mental illness or trauma. They tended to be religious but not fanatical. Most of them were unhappy with the wider society, but were too conservative to become part of the hippy movement. The ambiguities of life outside the comforts of their childhood homes caused them distress and they sought comfort and stability in a protective and tightly structured group that sheltered them from that outside world with its conflicts and uncertainties. They were people with a low tolerance for ambiguity. You could say they were people who weren’t well-prepared or tough enough for the world the rest of us live in.

While Eileen Barker raises some interesting counter-arguments to the accusation that the Unification Chrch brainwashes its members, her study seems naive and short-sighted. You could say that her study proves her conclusion according to her definition of brainwashing, but her argument is based on a false premise if you don’t accept her definition of brainwashing to begin with. I find her definition to be too narrow to be of use in a study of this kind. Her fieldwork and collection of data yield some significant insights, but she draws some hasty conclusions without fully examining the full range of possible explanations. For example, she claims that the large number of people who decided not to join the cult after the workshops proves that no brainwashing took place, but she doesn’t take some things into account like the possibilities that brainwashing is not effective 100 percent of the time, or that some people are resistant to it, or that the workshops might even be designed to weed out the people who don’t fit into the church’s social dynamics. In other words, it is possible that they don’t want everybody to join and limit their recruitment to finding those who fit a certain personality type. The fact that potential recruits are monitored so heavily during activities like sports or group discussions makes me question whether they apply recruitment pressure equally on all members of the workshop. Maybe they target certain individuals or even alter their approach to nudge potential members into joining while simply letting those who don’t fit well to leave without a fuss. In a cult based around mass conformity and mind control, they don’t want people who are going to go against the grain. On top of all that, from what I have read about other high control groups, the process of mind control is incremental. Social conditioning isn’t something done instantly. Barker’s conclusion that brainwashing didn’t take place is based on observations made of two different workshops and doesn’t take long range membership in the Moonies into consideration. From my perspective, it looks like the workshops are designed to lay the groundwork for stronger, long range conditioning and control over time and she says almost nothing about what happens to members once they have joined. Her study is like judging the quality of an 800 pages novel after only reading the first two pages.

The Making Of a Moonie is limited in its scope. The subject of whether or not the Unification Church brainwashes its members can’t be conclusive on her testimony alone. She doesn’t gather enough information to have a final say. Even if the Moonies don’t practice mind control, there are plenty of reasons to stay away from them. Like so many other versions of corporate Christianity, the church has been wracked with scandals including sexual abuse, fraud, and ties to extremist right wing politics. Sun Myung Moon died a few years ago and now the cult is run by his two sons who are fighting over who should inherit their father’s kingdom in just the way that sons of the Messiah would. Considering that Moon claimed Jesus Christ failed because he died, I wonder how they explain that the church is legitimate now that the Messiah Sun Myung Moon is dead. One son has formed a subsect of the Unification Church called the Rod of Iron. No that isn’t the title of a cheesy porno movie from the 1970s. It is a church that worships guns. You can watch their sermons on Youtube. The preacher wears a crown made of bullets and talks about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the need to end democracy in America delivered in a voice that alternates between a conversational tone and hysterical screaming. This church sent busloads of members to Washington D.C. for the attempted coup on January 6, claiming that the Democrats are controlled by demons. It’s best to stay away from these kooks. Nothing good can come from this.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

by Graham Greene

       You might be inclined to think the term “intelligence agency” is an oxymoron. Graham Greene, possibly the world’s most famous author of spy novels in the English language, probably thought so when he wrote Our Man in Havana.

Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, Cuba. With a name and occupation like that, you couldn’t possibly be more inconspicuous. That is probably why Wormold gets tapped to be an intelligence agent by the British secret service. But politics and international intrigues aren’t Wormold’s passion. He spends his days managing his mostly empty shop and drinking daiquiris in bars with his friend Dr. Hasselbach. What actually matters most in his life is his teenage daughter Milly. For her birthday, the demanding prima donna wants a horse and a membership at a country club so she will have a good place to stable it. Wormold is strapped for cash due to lackluster vacuum cleaner sales, but he’s a bit of a pushover and gives in without having a clear sense of how he can afford this venture.

Wormold is a mediocre man with financial troubles and this makes him easy prey when a British agent stationed in Kingston, Jamaica approaches Wormold with a solution to his problems. He railroads Wormold into accepting an assignment to run an espionage station in Havana. The task is to recruit a team of agents and pay them to gather information about any suspicious activities going on in Cuba. This is of prime importance to the British government since the 1950s were a time of political turbulence on the island and they were paranoid about the spread of communism throughout the Third World.

But none of that matters to Wormold. His preoccupation is with making easy money and he does what any ordinary man in his situation would do: he juices the fools for as much as he can. The agents he recruits are either people he made up or members of the country club who have no idea they have been hired as spies. He sends the secret service a diagram of a vacuum cleaner, telling them it is a new weapon being built in Oriente province, the hotbed of revolutionary activity since the 19^th century Cuban Wars of Independence and beyond.

Back in London, Hawthorn meets with his superior officer and instead of putting two and two together to figure out that the diagram is a prank played by Wormold the vacuum cleaner salesman, they marvel at the ingenuity of the communists and decide they need to ramp up their intelligence gathering operations in the Caribbean. Occam’s razor has failed. Wormold rakes in the cash, getting all he asks for to run his agency in Havana while the secret service expose themselves as incompetent dolts.

The story pivots when fiction collides with reality. Wormold learns that one of his made up agents named Raul has just been assassinated. Since Raul is not a real person, that means a real person named Raul, who probably had nothing to do with espionage games, got killed. The gravity of the situation hits home when Wormold realizes that the intelligence he shipped off to London has been intercepted. We never learn for sure who intercepted it or who they work for, but it is certain that Wormold’s life is in danger.

The narrative offers many possible culprits for the interception, but evidence appears to point in the direction of Dr. Hasselbacher, Wormold’s drinking buddy. We can never be sure that Hasselbacher is a spy, but he has a copy of the book Wormold is using to encode and decipher written communications between his office and the agency in London, although Hasselbacher claims he only has it for leisure reading. Hasselbacher is unusual nonetheless. In an early chapter, he has a discussion with a man in a bar in which he tells the man that he is a creation of Hasselbacher’s imagination as if the old man is having a conversation with a character he wrote into a novel. Hasselbacher therefore primes the reader for the theme of fiction intruding into reality and the consequences of that dilemma. Later on we learn that Hasselbacher has spent his life feeling guilty because he killed one man while enlisted during World War I. Throughout the novel, he expresses disillusionment with the Cold War and the games played by espionage agencies which casts doubt on him being an intelligence agent. But there are other reasons why he can’t be dismissed as innocent.

Another possibility is Segura, a captain at the Havana police department who is in charge of torturing political prisoners. He is involved in one of the novel’s subplots since he wants to marry Milly, Wormold’s teenage daughter. We learn that Segura knows everything that Wormold is up to and has a list of all the espionage agents in Cuba, something Wormold decides he needs to get ahold of in the name of duty to his agency.

Making matters worse, Wormold learns of a plot to assassinate him. He becomes suspicious of an English businessman named Carter who he encounter both at a banquet and one night when Wormold invites him out to go drinking and whoring in the sordid backstreets of Havana. It is in this second half of the novel that Wormold proves himself to be more than just an everyday man. He outsmarts both his assassin and Segura. Ultimately he humiliates the secret service when they catch on to his deceptions, figuring out that he is doing little more than exploiting them for money by making up nonsense.

Much of the novel’s meaning revolves around Wormold falling in love with Beatrice, an assistant spy who is sent to Havana to help him run his office. Initially the agency in London chooses her because she speaks French and Cubans speak Spanish so the ignoramuses decide she will be the best choice for Wormold’s secretary. Through their collaboration and conversation we learn that she doesn’t take Cold War espionage any more seriously than Wormold does. They agree that international politics are just games played by adults who are little more than children who never grew up. The big political issues aren’t what is important. What really matters is how the little people of the world run their day to day affairs, at least until the big powers intrude into their lives. That’s when action must be taken. This is Voltaire’s idea that satisfaction only comes from tending one’s own garden, but Greene adds his own twist by saying sometimes necessity calls for engagement.

This novel is a comedy in the Shakespearean sense of the word, meaning it ends with a marriage rather than a death as it would in a tragedy. The marriage of Wormold and Beatrice plays off against the failure of Segura in his pursuit of Wormold’s daughter Milly. In the latter case, Milly and Segura are linked in that they both represent facets of class consciousness and class mobility. Milly wants to rise above her station in with her pursuit of the horse and membership at the country club while Segura represents class mobility through politics. Being notorious in Cuba for torturing prisoners, Segura is an unsympathetic character. But at the end, he tells Wormold of his family’s poverty and his father’s involvement in activism. The secret he reveals makes him a slightly more sympathetic character in the end. But still, he is repulsive to Milly who uses him just like Wormold uses the British secret service. Their marriage is an impossibility.

In the former case, Wormold, the divorcee, falls in love with Beatrice and the two make plans for a new life after being relocated to their homeland of England. Neither of them are interested in class mobility and find happiness together in building a relationship around satisfaction with what they have. Their success in marriage contrasted with Segura’s failure in courting Milly indicates the values expressed by the story. To paraphrase Hawthorn when he tells his boss why he chose Wormold for the position of spymaster, Womrold is the kind of man who minds his pennies while letting the dollars take care of themselves. For the agency, this means he won’t interfere in the business of his superiors, but in the parameters of the story, it means he has what it takes to survive and find success and do his job despite all the absurd conflicts of world governments. Graham Greene confronts us directly with what he believes is important in life.

Our Man in Havana parodies the trope of the spy as superhero. The idea of Western governments locked in a battle between good and evil with communism gets deflated and turned upside down by portraying the intelligence agency as being managed by dunces engaged in a political game that nobody can win. Jim Wormold is an ordinary man who turns the whole system inside out with mistakes. By day he is a mediocre vacuum cleaner salesman, but by night he masters the danger he got sucked into. His motivations are humble. He simply wants to buy his daughter the birthday present she wants. After the whole situation blows over, he finds solace by returning to a life of humility in marriage where politics are of little relevance.

The novel is a little improbable. It’s a fantastic story that isn’t easy to believe, but this shortcoming is overshadowed by the message the story delivers. Besides, the plot twists are gutsy and unpredictable, never short of suspense. The characters are also well written and built almost entirely through effective dialogue rather than description. On the other hand, some of the characters are introduced for no specific purpose like Beatrice’s office assistant for example. What’s great about the characters is how Greene makes all the main players sympathetic in one way or another. Even Carter gains some sympathy as being just an ordinary man being used as a tool in a spy game; his social awkwardness, insecurity, and shyness around women make him out to be more of a victim than a villain. The only characters without sympathetic qualities are Hawthorn and the other superior officers in the spy agency.

As a novel, it succeeds with the kind of ironic humor you find in Alfred Hitchcock combined with the character arcs and ethics you find in Shakespeare. References to Shakespeare are laced throughout the narrative too. The book used by the agency for code writing and code cracking is one in which an author updates Shakespeare’s plays using modern language and prose while characters make references to Shakespeare throughout. It would be interesting to hear how a scholar with more expertise in Shakespeare than me would interpret these references.

I fear that Graham Greene’s message in Our Man in Havana might fall flat in our age when people are more politically engaged then ever while simultaneously being more ignorant about how governments work. Somehow, political discourse these days has more to do with being loud, ideological, and popular on social media than being right. Managing what’s right in front of us has become less important it seems. The style of the novel is somewhat dated too. But that isn’t a reason to avoid it since it advocates for a worldview that should at least be taken into consideration. And this is done in such an entertaining way. At least it offers a good break to those who are weary of overblown postmodern maximalism where conflicts are impossible to resolve.

 

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.