It’s all about the womb. Richard Brautigan’s cult novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is one of those polarizing books that people either love or hate, or maybe you could say they either get it or they don’t. Usually the ones who hate it are the ones who don’t get it. Considering its minimalist style, it’s surprising that some people don’t get it, but then again, minimalism is all about saying a lot by saying a little. What people don’t get is that this is a book of mythic proportions, saturated in archetypes, that tell the tale of a hero’s journey in a way Joseph Campbell could never have imagined. And when I say it is all about the womb, more than one thing is meant by that.
The first womb that must be mentioned is the library. How can a library be a womb? Well, we’ll get to that. This particular library is, as the narrator says early on, not your typical library. It is a place where unpublished authors leave a copy of a book they have written where it will be stored on a shelf and never read by anybody. The author was probably probing his fears and insecurities when he conceived of this. Some of the books are oddities like a manuscript about the history of pork that is bound in bacon, or mediocrities like extensive studies on Nebraska. Each volume is delivered by the lonely misfits and non-geniuses who wrote them. It is there they are received by the ghost in the machine, the narrator, who is none other than Richard Brautigan himself. At first it might be tempting to think of the narrator as an incarnation of Hermes, the Greek guardian of sacred and forbidden knowledge, but if you really want to get mythical about it all, it probably is best to say that the narrator is more like Apollo. Despite his beatnik and hippie trappings, the narrator is a rigidly disciplined man in the way he takes care of his library. He follows every rule, receives the books ceremoniously with minimal deviation to the routine, and is as neat and orderly as a man can possibly be. He is fanatically devoted to the library in a way that borders on neurosis. And he has a flat demeanor and deadpan sense of humor that rivals the comedian Steven Wright.
The second womb of importance is located in the stunningly perfect body of Vida, a young woman who brings a in book for the library’s collection. Her tome is all about how her beautiful body is a distraction because of all the men who want to get into her pants without knowing her as a person. She is the Aphrodite of the novel, raising the reading on men’s richter scales wherever she goes. But that is not entirely why her womb is so important. When she brings in her book, she falls in love with the narrator. After doing the wild thing, getting all the way to home base, and doing the sacred dance of the snake, Vida gets pregnant. Since the events of this story take place before the passage of Roe Vs. Wade, they decide to go to Tijuana for the abortion.
Enter Dionysus. Foster is the narrator’s friend and colleague, fun and charming, he always has a whisky bottle in his hand and never stops chasing tail. He stands guard over the third womb of importance, a cave where overstock from the library gets hauled away to be stored like an ever growing cache of unfertilized eggs. These literary eggs will never leave the cave through menstruation and they will never be inseminated because they will never be read. Caves are an ancient symbol of the womb which is why the rites of Eleusis were performed secretly in Mediterranean caverns. Foster’s job is to protect them from seepage, a problem that gets mentioned three times in the story. If Vida had been protected from seepage, she would not have gotten knocked up, but maybe things happen for a reason. Foster gets called in to make the arrangements for the abortion. After all, he has had a lot of experience with this particular problem. He watches over the library while the psychopomp Vida leads the narrator along on his hero’s journey to Mexico like Virgil leading Dante through Hell, though actually its not quite that bad. Unless you consider airports and San Diego to be like Hell, which is entirely understandable, than the analogy may be a little more legit.
This is a minimalist story. In fact the plot is so minimal that it is hardly worth mentioning. The actual abortion is almost a non-event in the narration. It is tempting to think of the abortion as a McGuffin, a plot device that has no actual meaning because the story is about the people, not the device. Dashiell Hammet was the master of the McGuffin; see The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon. Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is another classic example of a McGuffin. But then again, Vida’s abortion may only be a partial McGuffin after all; the abortion can be seen in a symbolic way too. It is the sacrifice of the fetus, the removal of it from her womb, that brings the narrator out of his womb, the library where is living the life of the living dead like the books that Foster guards in his cave. The death of the fetus means rebirth for him. Don’t forget that “vida”, dervied from the Latin word “vita”, is Spanish for “life”. It is through Vida’s love that the narrator gets reborn to the world. He has gone through the cycle of the hero’s journey by entering the underworld, the library, doing the kind of unenviable task that heroes do like Hercules cleaning out the stables, going on a hero’s journey which involves accompanying Vida to the illegal abortion clinic in Tijuana, and re-emerging into the world with a newfound love for live. This is the life and death cycle, the dance between eros and thanatos, the eternal rebirth that permeates so much of ancient mythology.
The dry humor, the simplistic language, the vivid descriptiveness, and the sentences that, ahem, are pregnant with meaning all speak for themselves. They are the work of a genius wordsmith. The trio of the narrator, Vida, and Foster remind me a bit of Jim Jarmusch’s classic conedy of understatement Stranger Than Paradise in which a female outsider arrives on the scene and draws the two male characters out of their humdrum lives. In the end, it all comes off as literary playfulness, linguistic craftsmanship, celebratory youthfulness, light surrealism, a roman a clef, and confessional writing masked as an inside joke.
It is hard to tell if these mythical themes in The Abortion are intentional or not. There was a lot about Richard Brautigan’s mind that was unfathomable to the people who knew him. But he wasn’t lacking in knowledge even if he did choose to approach life with the eyes of a child. He might have accidentally tapped into the archetypes present in the writing, but it is hard to deny that those patterns are there. Some readers might scoff at the idea that there is anything of significance in this novel, but they are the ones who obviously don’t get it. The loftiness is there if you choose to see it.
No comments:
Post a Comment