Book Review & Analysis: Baby by Robert Lieberman

Baby

by Robert Lieberman

      Can good intentions lead to harmful choices? Can bad intentions result in good things happening? When faced with an unprecedented situation, it may be impossible to tell what the right action to take is. Maybe all you can do is fall back on yourself and act out of instinct, even if that instinct leads you astray. This is a dilemma posed by Robert Lieberman’s 1981 novel Baby.

It all starts with Doris Rumsey, a middle aged grammar school librarian in Ithaca, New York. As she approaches retirement she has to live with the unfortunate truth that she will never marry and have children. Aside from being post-menopausal, she also has a hunchback. But she is a kind woman who has a way with children who see through her deformity and love to visit her in the library.

In the depths of her depressing existence, Doris’s life turns around when she miraculously gives birth to a girl. Doris starts calling her Baby and so the name sticks. Even more unusual than the anomaly of the birth by parthenogenesis, is what she learns one day when she takes Baby to a city park. Even though she is only a few days old, Baby starts to sing. Her singing is enchanting and uplifting and an audience is attracted to listen. Baby continues to sing on a daily basis and it isn’t long before crowds show up for every performance. This is where trouble starts.

Irwin Shockley is a jaded music composer and professor at Cornell University who lives with his family in the hills on the outskirts of Ithaca. He scoffs when he first hears about Baby, but after listening to her sing, he decides her talent needs to be shared with the world. Through tactics of questionable legality, he takes Baby on a tour around America, trying to get the attention of scholars in prestigious schools like Eastman and Julliard. This he does and then gets approached by the devilish Danish businessman Jacobsen. They strike a deal to take Baby on an American tour. The deal is not in the favor of either Baby or Shockley, but the naive composer knows nothing about business and reluctantly goes along with Jacobsen. This also involves more tricky legal maneuverings to have Doris declared too mentally unfit to care for Baby and custody is given over to Shockley.

As the infant Baby sings for audiences all over America, a religious cult forms in which the followers believe the child to be a new messiah. This also arouses a violent mob of angry Christians who want to destroy Baby for being a false prophet.

At this point, all the major themes have been introduced. Doris fights to maintain custody of her daughter and when she loses it, she devotes the rest of her life to getting Baby back. Shockley is an artist who is motivated by the desire to bring beautiful music into the world above anything else. But this catches him in a trap between the moral purity of Doris and the greedy commercialism of Jacobsen. His ambition hurts Doris by robbing her of the only thing she loves and alienates him from his family. He can do nothing but follow Jacobsen to achieve his ambitions. But Shockley isn’t all bad. He thinks the money he makes with Baby should mostly be given to Doris and even proposes that the old spinster live comfortably with his family. He also tries to hold his family together even though he is blind to how he is hurting them. Shockley attempts to navigate a path between right and wrong, but he only does so at the expense of his own awareness. His myopia isn’t a moral flaw, but rather a personal lack of understanding. And he truly does admire Baby more for her ability to sing than the money she brings in. His belief in the power of art and music is what matters most.

More trouble comes when Baby is performing in New York City. Shockley and the whole entourage get stuck there when a snowstorm hits, making it impossible to leave. He takes a woman up to his hotel room for an affair, but he realizes afterwards that she has disappeared and taken Baby with her. We later find Baby in an abandoned apartment building in the Bronx. The kidnapper, named Fay, and her boyfriend Sloane are holding Baby hostage and demanding an outrageous amount of ransom money. While the police try to hunt the kidnappers down, the matronly Fay cares for her and Shockley brainstorms ways to raise the money. Jacobsen suggests broadcasting a Jerry Lewis style telethon on Christmas day. But on Christmas Eve, Fay brings Baby to an emergency room because Baby has gotten sick. Fay’s conscience leads her to save Baby’s life and turn herself in for the sake of redemption. Meanwhile the telethon goes on even though the public is unaware that Baby has been found and rescued. Jacobsen disappears with all the money and proves himself to be an evil character in the story along with Sloane.

But then again, is Jaobsen purely evil? He went out of his way to produce the telethon that would have raised enough money to retrieve Baby. And what about Fay being evil? After kidnapping Baby, her caring instincts came out when she tried to keep Baby healthy and safe from Sloane’s violence. Her crime forced her to confront the better side of herself and she finally did find redemption in prison. And is Shockley evil? Despite being egotistical, selfish, and callous towards everybody in his life, his intentions to bring music into the world are pure and even at his worst moments, he never stops caring for Baby and wanting to make life better for Doris. While it is cliché to say that everybody is a combination of good and evil, the author extends this idea just a bit by showing how it is possible that some evil may be necessary to arrive at a good end.

So finally, who is Baby supposed to be? At the most basic level, she is a doppelganger for her mother Doris. Baby represents the purity of Doris’s soul. She is the beauty and inspiration that Doris wishes to bring into the world but can’t; because people judge her according to her physical deformity, they won’t accept who she really is as a person. Therefore she externalizes Baby to fulfill her desire. This point is driven hard in the conclusion because Doris dies when Baby loses her ability to sing.

Beyond that, Baby is an innocent toddler thrown into a world of corruption and tossed around the narrative like a football. She has to maintain her innocence by first being dragged into the tacky world of show business and then surviving the ordeal of vulnerability in the hands of the kidnappers. Finally she loses her ability to sing when she gets old enough to begin talking. If that isn’t a statement about the corrupting power of language, I don’t know what is. Aside from some basic symbolism though, Baby appears to mostly be a MacGuffin. The novel is all about the characters surrounding Baby more than it is about Baby herself.

The story does present us with some moral questions, but they aren’t questions that will shake up the way you think about motivations, desires, or pragmatics. This is not a commanding investigation of ethics. It is more plot and action driven than anything and actually succeeds on a technical level more than a thematic one. The characters are well-drawn even if they are a bit ordinary. The author also weaves together a lot of plot and sub-plot elements effectively. Suspense is built up well although the outcome of every conflict introduced to the novel is predictable. It is a tightly wound novel that doesn’t leave any loose ends in its resolution. It is far fetched though and stretches your ability to willingly suspend your disbelief. Maybe you can’t buy the premise of the virgin birth and the singing infant, but it is fiction after all. But the legal proceedings and courtroom drama were outside the limits of plausibility, especially when it comes to how easily Shockley pried Baby from the arms of Doris.

Robert Lieberman most likely wrote Baby for the best-sellers audience. It’s actually better than most best sellers, but it’s also not good enough to be a great work of art. But Baby is fun to read. It could possibly serve as an accessible introduction to existentialism and its relation to moral relativism, but if you’ve studied the classic existentialist authors, the morality of this book won’t be anything mind blowing. As for existentialism in general, the author leaves the question of what or who Baby is unanswered. Is Baby a messiah sent by some god or a false prophet? Is Doris telling the truth about the virgin birth or is something else going on? Is Baby’s singing a deception? Or is she nothing more than a literary device? By leaving these questions unanswered and unanswerable, Lieberman forces the reader into existentialism since the only way an answer is possible is through the reader making their own choice. Whatever you may choose, it is impossible to verify the truth or falsity of the choice. The answer can not absolute. That’s because we live in a world of uncertainty and that means we can only guess at what is right or wrong when it comes to questioning meaning. Making moral decisions based on uncertain truths means you can only do what you and hope it is for the best.

 

Book Review & Analysis: IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog

IQ 83

by Arthur Herzog

      By the end of the 20^th century, psychologists had discovered something called the Flynn Effect. This meant that intelligence levels had been rising steadily and rapidly over the past century. If we fast forward to the 2020s, psychologists have discovered an alarming trend. Over the past two decades, the Flynn Effect has been reversed and intelligence levels are now dropping at an alarming rate. There is no consensus to why this is happening; the most obvious causal indicator appears to be the introduction of the internet, but as of yet, this connection is inconclusive. One thing is for sure: with the immediate problems of climate change, economic instability, a collapsing educational system, and the threat of political totalitarianism working in conjunction with AI systems, this is not a good time for all the intellectual and scientific progress we have achieved over the centuries to retreat.

If we backtrack a bit, there were artists who saw this trend coming before anyone else. The dystopian 2006 movie Idiocracy porrayed a world where popular culture has made people so stupid that their existence is threatened because they forget how to grow food. It’s a silly comedy that mocks the kinds of people who would find it funny. Maybe it’s worth watching once. 1968’s Planet Of the Apes was a more serious science-fiction dystopia that showed human evolution going in reverse, with an upsurge in religion and despotism, after the banning and forbidding of science. Then there is Arthur Herzog’s overlooked novel IQ 83. Written in the 1970s, it is a hard science-fiction story showing what happens when an experimental virus escapes from a laboratory, spreads throughout the whole population, and makes everybody’s intelligence level decline rapidly.

James Heaaley is the central character. The story is divided between his family life in their New York City apartment and his employment as the head of a research team in a hospital in Central Manhattan. The research team is trying to save a girl named Cathy who is a permanent patient in the children’s ward. She should be of normal intelligence, yet she contracted a disease that caused her IQ to drop. As the biologists’ work brings them closer to a cure, experimental gene editing brings Cathy’s intelligence level back up to normal. But just when Healey makes plans for Cathy’s discharge so that she can attend public schools, everything goes to hell.

Wallon is a Belgian lab technician working on Healey’s project. Since creating a vaccine for the disease involves the use of a virus as a vector, precautions are imperative. Yet Wallon thinks the safety regulations are too stringent so he cuts corners during his work, doesn’t follow safety procedures, and accidentally takes the airborne virus out of the lab and begins spreading it throughout New York by coughing and sneezing.

After Wallon visits the Healey family for dinner, James Healey begins noticing some unwanted changes in everybody, including himself. He has problems with his memory and nonsensical thoughts from his childhood intrude into his thoughts, disrupting his concentration and making it difficult to work as a scientist. His wife Ruth becomes hypersexual and his two academically gifted children start struggling at school.

As Healey grows more aware that something isn’t right, he meets with Orenstein, the hospital psychiatrist. They discuss the possibilities and potential consequences of a sudden drop in intelligence across the whole world. Of course, the prognosis is not good. They agree to test their hypothesis by administering IQ tests to all the members of the research team. To their dismay, they find that everybody’s IQ had dropped and that it will continue to drop with the progression of time.

Healey contacts the hospital director, a doctor with an IQ of 200 and the curious name of Herman Hermann. The director, by this point, has already begun to succumb to the virus. Rather than expressing grave concern over the crisis, his defenses drop and he sees this as an opportunity to conquer the world, becoming a totalitarian leader who enslaves all those who he decides are inferior to him. But since the virus has taken hold, he resembles Healey in the way nonsense intrudes into his thoughts. Only with Hermann, the nonsense intrudes into his speech as well. As he holds meetings and conferences laying out his plan to dominate the world, he constantly interrupts himself in Turrette Syndrome-like attacks where he belches out obscene limericks and makes a fool of himself. This is not only a little comic relief, but also one instance of the author making social commentary. There is no doubt that Arthur Herzog believes fascism to be a form of politics for fools and clowns.

Subplots and social commentary run throughout the whole novel. There is a wide range of characters and each offers their own angle on society. What happens with most of them is that, like Herman Hermann, their inhibitions drop and their true motivations are revealed. James and Ruth Healey’s marriage is falling apart while Wallon is sexually pursuing Ruth. Healey’s son drops out of high school, takes up a marijuana habit, and becomes a biker. In Healey’s nuclear family unit, his bourgeois lifestyle sinks into the hedonistic excesses of the American counter-culture scene. Also the once harmonious multi-ethnic lab technicians become irritable and make racist comments towards each other. Rather than addressing this issue constructively, they bicker and match insults with insults. Similar things happen with the female nurses on the children’s ward. Before the virus struck they were dedicated, honest, and nurturing in the way good nurses should be, but afterwards they fall into petty man-hating and irresponsibility. Feminists start complaining in the letters column of a scientific magazine about the word “helix”, insisting this is sexist and should be changed to “herlix”. Herzog’s message in all this is that the social reforms of the 1960s are legitimate, but when approached without intelligence and proper analytical thinking, these issues of social justice can’t be approached in a meaningful way. Notice how he anticipated the childish arguments surrounding politics we find on the internet these days.

This social commentary is most developed in the character of Vergil Buck, a labor union leader and ambulance driver who makes impossible demands on the hospital management during a strike that happens just as the low-IQ virus begins attacking all of New York. During collective bargaining sessions, Buck demands that hospital employees get paid massive amounts of money without being obligated to do any work. He is inflexible in his proposal and refuses to negotiate. Later when James Healey goes to a rural retreat to develop a vaccine for rhe virus, Vergil Buck kidnaps him. Buck is the kind of person who thinks the world owes him something because he was born white, dumb, ugly, and poor (thanks to the Butthole Surfers for that description). He is also an annoyingly arbitrary character, more of a literary device than a meaningful symbol of the socially discontent. Herzog uses him to inject some action and suspense into a novel that doesn’t have much of either.

Herzog brings real science into this fictional story. The process of editing DNA to cure the disease that Cathy suffers from is described in detail early in the story. If your knowledge of genetics and virology are limited, these passages might be off-putting. Even with some knowledge of these disciplines, they are still clunky and out of place as though the author just wants to show off how much he knows about science. Some of the information does become relevant at the end when James Healey is struggling to find a cure for the idiot disease his team has created.

Of greater significance to the story, and your own education as well, is the chapter where Healey and Dr. Ornstein discuss the science of intelligence. Ornstein gives a detailed explanation of what an IQ test measures, what it doesn’t measure, and why it isn’t the most important metric for human intelligence and human worth there is. Still, a class of people with higher intelligence and expertise are necessary to maintain the stability and progress of a society. A decline in the average collective intelligence level could make a population barely functional and constantly on the verge of collapse if they survive at all. Then Dr. Ornstein and Healey have a discussion about their high IQ’s. Honestly though, listening to two men comparing their IQ scores is a lot like listening to two men comparing the length of their johnsons. It doesn’t impress anybody except the dumbest people who get preoccupied with things like that.

But the story recovers ground when Healey takes an IQ test to see if his intelligence quotient has dropped. What’s clever about this passage is that we see the test through his eyes while being aware of our own ability to answer the questions. We see Healey, a man with a higher than average IQ struggling to answer test questions that most readers would be able to answer. But you can’t feel too superior over this since as the test gets harder and Healey gets more and more answers wrong, we get hit with a vocabulary question that is so difficult it would be impossible for most intelligent people to answer. So the reader gets humbled and can only sympathize with Healey as we realize our own intellectual limitations. It’s a unique and effective way of harmonizing the reader with the main character through the use of scientific methodology.

Otherwise James Healey is out of step with the logic of the novel. Herzog does well in depicting the rapid decline of intelligence in the other characters while this stripping away of their higher intellectual functioning reveals their inner personality cores. Healey doesn’t follow this path to such an extent though. While other subjective symptoms of the illness are shown, he doesn’t display such a big drop in intellectual functioning as the other characters do. His character remains stable throughout the whole story which feels like a serious flaw in the narrative.

The novel is also flawed in that it is such a formulaic work of writing. It’s the story of a hero who is racing against time to save the world from imminent disaster. It’s a basic story-telling template that has been used seemingly forever. But at least half of the material used to fill in that template is interesting enough to carry the whole novel. The only other major problem is some of the dialogue. You’ve heard of hammy acting before, but some of the conversations here are like hammy writing. You know a writer has made a mistake when their dialogue is so over the top that it is unintentionally funny. Occasionally that happens here.

IQ 83 was published in 1978. It’s been almost three decades since scientists have learned that the Flynn Effect is operating in reverse while digital technology and AI appear to be infecting the minds of the young. If you look at the way people interact on social media, you get a clear sense that Arthur Herzog knew what he was talking about when explaining what the effects of a drop in the collective intelligence level could result in. On top of that, it’s only been a short time since the COVID pandemic hit and that certainly brought out a lot of stupidity in people, spawning all kinds of conspiracy theories, social dislocation, and a noticeable decline in critical thinking skills. Add in the election of a mentally challenged president twice with the fanatical devotion of his followers and the future of humanity is looking pretty grim at the moment. Arthur Herzog had no way of predicting any of this. He was writing a book based on observations of the time he was living in. IQ 83 has its many flaws, but when he gets things right, he really gets them right. This is an underrated novel that should be given reconsideration despite its weaknesses. It certainly feels relevant to the times we live in, even if it does depend on formulas and cliches to get its message across.

 

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: 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 & Interpretive Analysis: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

      The 1950s were a time of repression, or at least that’s what popular media would have you believe. Married couples on television shows had separate beds in those rare instances when bedrooms were allowed to be shown. When people got shot in the movies they didn’t bleed. Elvis Presley could only be shown on TV from the waist up. Interracial social relationships of any kind were forbidden while lynchings were common in the South. But they would never put that on the evening news. Politics were a taboo subject. Simply saying you disagreed with certain politicians could get you labeled a communist and your career could be ruined even if you weren’t actually a communist. Any discussions about sexuality of any sort were censored either by law or by choice. The use of narcotics was hidden from public view and Cold War era paranoia about the nuclear bomb was rampant and even encouraged by the government through the spread of propaganda.

But all this was going on fifty years after the publication of Ulysses. The ideas of Freud and Nietzsche were no longer new. People were aware that a chthonic, underground world existed and there was a whole lot more going on in America just beyond the surface of what was socially acceptible. But things were bubbling up to the surface. One of them was the Beat Generation, a new manifestation of the bohemian tradition in which poets and criminals listened to jazz, experimented with drugs and free love, and lived the life they wanted according to their own rules. Out of this counter culture came the gay, heroin addicted author William S. Burroughs, who may or may not have accidentally shot his wife in Mexico City, and his ground breaking novel Naked Lunch. The title says a lot because it is a work that reveals the hidden and the suppressed without restraint in all its naked glory. But glorious it isn’t, and in fact most would say it is a literary expression of all that is vile and repulsive.

Burroughs started out writing short pieces that were like bursts or explosions of verbiage depicting the underworld life he was familiar with. Some are like vignettes or prose poems. Sometimes they are almost like stories. But Burroughs couldn’t get his life together enough to put a whole novel together so Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin pieced some of these into a montage that came to be known as Naked Lunch.

The book begins with descriptions of heroin addiction and the lifestyle that accompanies it. The unpleasant tactile sensations and smells of filth, grime, slime, stickiness, and bodily fluids are ever present. Insects and other vermin are more numerous than people. The difference between people and vermin is hard to distinguish at times. Also the boundaries between the body and all the rotten mess is permeable and sometimes hard to identify. The reader is immediately plunged into a pool of sewage.

And as far as ugly creatures go, some of the ugliest are the Mugwumps. These are humanoid beings straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting that are half insect and half man. They secrete a substance that is addicting to some other creatures that suck it off their skin. This may be a metaphor for the relationship between the drug pusher and their buyers with a gay element thrown in. If that creepy image is what Burroughs meant to represent, you might say he isn’t comfortable with fitting into either category. The term “mugwump” by the way, refers to a constituent of voters in the 19^th century at the end of the Reconstruction era. They were disgusted with both the Democrats and Republicans and insisted on voting according to a candidates policies and moral character rather than partisan alliance. The word itself is derived from an Algonquin word meaning “superior man” or “boss”. It’s hard to tell if a political statement is intended here, but the concept of Mugwumps as a voting bloc would fit in with the passages later in the novel that satirize American political parties, none of which are made to sound appealing from Burroughs’ point of view.

As the passages take on more form, we are introduced to the recurring character of Dr. Benway, the sleazy surgeon who massages a patient’s heart with a toilet plunger while dropping cigarette ashes into the incision. He gives an unnamed narrator a tour through his hospital where he performs arbitrary operations of no medical value whatsoever. The tour ends with a visit to a locked ward where patients have been reduced to a vegetative state of idiocy because of Dr. Benway’s experiments with behavior control. The passage ends when inmates of a psychiatric ward break out, have a riot, and do all kinds of foul and disgusting things to each other and the people on the street. In another scenario, Dr. Benway does surgery on a stage in front of an audience as if he is a practitioner of the performing arts just as much as he is of the medical arts. The term “operating theater” actually goes back to the Renaissance when surgeries were performed for educational purposes in front of an audienc. But Dr. Benway’s arbitrary and pointless surgery is interrupted by what we might call a heckler with a scalpel.

Dr. Benway is the crux of a lot of Burroughs’ writings post-Naked Lunch. He is an agent of control whose medical practices serve two purposes. One is mind and behavior control, although he usually fails in this by either destroying his patients or unwittingly causing outbreaks of chaos. The other is art. Dr. Benway performs surgery for surgery’s sake the way artists creates art for art’s sake. He is amoral, unethical, has no interest in helping his patients and his surgeries make no sense from a rational point of view, but he does them because that’s all he can do. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He is just an agent, an elementary force who acts out of inner necessity. You can say a lot of artists, especially in the modern era, do the same, channeling what they do, letting the artistic process guide their hands rather than creating with definite intention.

Dr. Benway makes a further appearance near the end of the book when he brings Carl Peterson, another recurring character in Burroughs’ works, into his office to run some tests designed to uncover any hidden traces of homosexuality in the ex-soldier. Carl struggles to repress any evidence of an affair he had with another man while in the military. Here again we have the element of control and chaos because Dr. Benway represents the attempted institutional control over sexual behavior while Carl Peterson’s sexual orientation is something outside the scope of psychiatric domination. For lovers of obscure literary references, the passage ends with Carl trying and failing to approach a green door; the term “green door” is a military terminology meaning “top secret” or “highly classified”. Carl wants to open the door and reveal his sexual secret but he is unable to because he is a rat caught in Dr. Benway’s maze. The theme of control through repression is on full display here.

On the other side of the control through repression theme is the continual outbreaks of sex and violence that permeate the novel. The riot resulting from patients’ escaping from Dr. Benway’s psychiatric hospital has already been mentioned, but other passages have things like “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”, where a surreal, unresrticted orgy takes place, and the film introduced by Slashtubitch is shown. (I’ve read this book several times and still have no idea who Slashtubitch is supposed to be. Hassan is possibly Hassan I Sabbah, another recurring character in later works) The film is pornographic and shows a love making scene between Mary and Johnny involving the use of the Steely Dan dildo. And yes, the rock band Steely Dan did lift their name from Naked Lunch. The film ends with Mary hanging Johnny who ejaculates when he dies. Burroughs is obsessed with this image since it appears ad nauseum in almost every book he ever wrote. Mary then eats his face reminscent of the way a female praying mantis eats the head of the male after sexual intercourse, something that also preoccupied the Surrealist pioneer Andre Breton. Here we have another recurring theme in Burroughs’ works, that of the female as a destructive force of control. His portrayal of women is unapologetically misogynist and his obsessive, hyper-masculine writings about guns and exotic weaponry can be interpreted as a defense against what he perceives to be the controlling instincts of women.

One other interesting chapter is that of “The Talking Asshole”. A man discovers that his asshole can talk. At first the novelty of this amuses people and he becomes famous, but then his asshole takes over his life and he turns into nothing more than a giant asshole that never shuts up. This is obviously a satire of people who “talk out their ass”, be they politicians, drunks, college students, or other varieties of know-it-alls who don’t know what they’re talking about. The internet is bursting with these types and in the days of Fox News and the Trump presidency, the Talking Asshole rings more true than ever. In the twisted mind of Burroughs, there is also an element of opiate addiction in this passage since the asshole starts out by being amusing and then grows so large it consumes the man’s entire life. Kind of like heroin addiction. What Burroughs is getting at is that talking, especially bullshitting, can be an addiction like anything else. This comes back to Dr. Benway who is characterized as a control addict with the commentary added that control serves no purpose other than control in the same way that heroin addiction serves no other purpose than addiction. Burroughs may be projecting his own problems onto the world, but when elements of his problems correspond to reality, it feels like a revelation.

On the surface, a lot of Naked Lunch appears to be little more than obscene drivel. It’s true that some parts are nothing but surreal imagery, nonsense, and literary diarrhea. By the way, this was written before Burroughs began using the cut up technique so anything that confuses you is done on purpose; it is meant to be disorienting. But then the passages about control are those that are most clearly written and those are surrounded by other passages of explosive violence and chaos. The explosive nature of those passages serves to illustrate the results of repression. Burroughs’ obsessions with guns, orgasms, orgies, defecation, dismemberment, hangings, and all other outbursts of violence can be seen as the repression of his homosexuality and drug addiction coming undone and bursting out into plain sight. The repressive nature of American society creates a pressure cooker leading to explosions of everything we aren’t supposed to see. The more American society tries to repress the underground cultures of sexual expression, drug use, and criminality, the more those cultures try to undo their repression and the result is the rise of counter cultures concerned with free expression of desires and artistic projects like the novel that is Naked Lunch.

This novel doesn’t represent Burroughs’ best writing. What makes it so great is that it introduces so many themes that pre-occupied him in his later years when he went in the direction of more science-fiction type books. It is also a lot more accessible than his later works, at least for the first time reader. Even if you don’t understand everything written or struggle to put it together as a whole, it still has a strong impact that will stay with you for years to come. Even after 70 years, the wild and untamed nature of this legendary book can still blow your hair back the other way. Burroughs’ ability to write great sentences that create imagery is first rate as well. The language he uses is like a mixture of surrealist poetry and bare bones, pulp crime novel directness. In fact, during the obscenity trial in which the government tried to censor and ban this book, one of the things that saved it was the lyrical use of vocabulary that sometimes captured snippets of haunting beauty.

Finally, I’d like to address a couple stray thoughts. The first is that of the racism depicted in the book. Some people have complained about it, but I feel they are misreading what Burroughs is saying. The racist comments are sick, but you have to consider the context and who is making them. They entirely come from the mouths of police, bureaucrats, rednecks, and other boorish kinds of people. If you understand the author, you know that he despises these kinds of people. Their offensive racist humor is depicted here as more shit and garbage flowing through the sewer world being portrayed. He isn’t celebrating the world he is writing about; he is showing us how terrible it all is.

The other stray thought is related to some obscure details regarding Burroughs’ wife Joan, the one he shot in Mexico City. In one paragraph, and without any context, Willy Jr. gets angry because the unnamed narrator eats his sugar skull on the Day Of the Dead. Then the narrator says that after he moved to Tangier, someone told him that his wife had died. Those in the know will recognize the reference to the unwanted son Burroughs had with his wife and his move, minus his wife, from Mexico to Tangier. Another subtle reference to Joan comes when Carl Peterson is in Dr. Benway’s office being accosted about his gay tendencies. Dr. Benway says that sometimes gay men get married and the result is...here Dr. Benway’s speech trails off with the implication that gay men who marry women sometimes murder their wives. It is fair to consider that William S. Burroughs is arguable one of the most autobiographical authors in history, something that becomes clear if you know his biography and understand how to decode his writings. But if this is so, why are there so few references to the killing of his wife as some critics have said? The answer is that they are there all over the place. He hides it in plain sight and if you understand how psychological displacement operates, you can see it more clearly.

Naked Lunch is an ancestral work that rides on the coattails of Freud and James Joyce. Freud said that being a member of society means suppressing the selfish desires of the individual where they get left to fester as the id, sometimes breaking into consciousness in the form of dreams. James Joyce in Ulysses used stream of consciousness writing to turn away from the public and go inwards to portray the inner workings and linguistic free associations of the human mind with no restrictions on what that might be including any bodily functions or disturbing thoughts. Naked Lunch is an expression of the id, the inner landscape, the unconscious, and everything we aren’t supposed to see in public. William S. Burroughs ingested elements of human society, disgested them in the inner workings of his mind, and then expressed them in the dream state of writing without holding anything back. It’s too easy to say it’s all a projection of his inner landscape onto the world because what he projects is a product of what he experienced in the world. He reminds us that vomit and feces started out as food. In this way, Naked Lunch is like shitting on a plate and serving it to you as a meal as to remind us of what we do that we wish to hide. Hell isn’t in some dimension we go to when we die. It is in the hidden recesses of our minds and all around us wherever we go and in whoever we meet. You are a part of it, like it or not.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs

The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

      By the time William S. Burroughs wrote The Soft Machine, the first novel in the Nova Trilogy (sometimes called the Cut Up Trilogy), he had developed a coherent world view and theoretical framework for his literature. It is a world view that incorporates linguistic theory, sexuality, gender relations, drugs, altered states of consciousness, secret agents, space aliens, a dark view of science, and the conflict between control and chaos that will eventually lead to planetary demise. Yet while his world view takes on a semblance of consistency, its realization in his fiction is anything but orderly. That’s all a part of his artistic vision. In contrast, the conventional linear narrative of his first novel Junky is pure autobiography while his most famous novel Naked Lunch is a montage of vignettes depicting the misanthropic hellscape of life for modern humans. It introduces Burroughs as the inventor of a new style without providing any definite hypothesis for how he views the world. The Soft Machine initiated the next phase of his literary career and set the tone for everything that would come after.

Like Naked Munch, this novel is in part a series of vignettes that are grotesque and arresting in their impact. None of them are complete stories in the ordinary sense of the word, but more like situations that only on occasion contain a narrative arc. The plot is as basic as it can be. Alien forces have invaded the Earth, operate through authoritarian systems of control, and manipulate people through the use of words and images. Another alien force, the Nova Mob, is engaged in constant warfare to create chaos and destruction in an attempt to drive the world to self-annihilation, probably with nuclear weapons. In the middle, there are the Nova Police who try to balance the control and the chaos to prevent global catastrophe. On first encounter, this plot is evasive and takes some effort to see. Some background information on Burroughs’ life and theories does a lot to make it easier to understand how the different pieces of the novel fit together. Or does it fit together? Part of Burroughs’ intention is to disrupt the lines of communication being utilized by the controlling machine to enslave us. Therefore, disrupting the linear patterns and structures of language are meant to be liberating. Despite this intention, patterns do emerge even if they are rough and incomplete.

The vignettes are easy enough to follow in the beginning. Some junkies meet in a Manhattan restaurant to buy and sell heroin. A secret agent beats up a gay drug user in a subway bathroom claiming this violence to have been ordered by his superiors while admitting he doesn’t know where the instructions came from or what the larger purpose of his mission is. In a vision of near-paradise, a multi-racial group of youths have an orgy in a river.

Then things take a turn towards the bizarre as two separate passages depict a man who travels back in time to Yucatan to live among the Mayas. In the first passage, he joins up with some agricultural workers, finding out that they are being controlled by priests who own codices full of hieroglyphs and calendars that are utilized like knobs to manipulate the population’s behavior. In the second passage, a man takes hallucinogenic drugs that allow him to return to the Yucatan so that he can liberate the workers from their slavery. Crab men, priests dressed in lobster costumes, and a foul smelling giant centipede are part of the action.

The meaning of the Soft Machine as a metaphor for the human body is revealed in a night club where a man changes into a woman while being covered in gelatinous ooze. An audience of men in a movie theater masturbate while watching movies of men ejaculating while being hung from a gallows; a technician makes the audience speed up and slow down by operating a control panel as if they are on a film strip. A junky, suspecting that the two detectives who have come to arrest him, are undercover agents from the Nova Police, kills them just as he is about to shoot up. At the heart of the novel is the classic sequence where the battle between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police becomes so fierce that the Nova Police recall all agents and the notorious Doctor Benway is called in to restore order and exert control over the crowd. Memorable passages towards the end of the book involve the destruction of a control machine located in the office of a news agency and the invasion of a virus from outer space that attacks the larynxes of primates, causing them to make sounds in agony that will later evolve into language. Burroughs portrays a world that is strange, disturbing, and permeated with paranoia. But every once in a while he gives us a glimpse of a better world and if you really look closely enough, you might conclude that he is motivated by a hidden morality. After all, Burroughs isn’t celebrating all the filth, violence, and absurdity he portrays; instead he is showing us how humanity has failed miserably to live up to its potential for freedom and dignity.

These vignettes are separated by, and sometimes overlapping with, passages of cut ups, surrealistic imagery, and nonsense. My favorite image was of a man ejaculating Montgomery Ward catalogs while sitting in an outhouse. These parts may be frustrating at first, but the effect of orderly or semi-orderly narratives alternating and emerging out of an back into the non-linear language has an interesting effect. If anything, the cut ups, which are made by splicing together texts that have been cut into four pieces and reassembled forming random word patterns, provide some interesting imagery. If you are already familiar with the texts being used in the cut ups, it feels like reading scrambled messages or codes that emerge and fade away before you can fully grasp their meanings. I’ve often compared the cut ups to French Symbolist poetry which is meant to convey pure emotion through imagery without any interference from rationality, but French Symbolism is composed deliberately while cut ups are experimental and any meaning that emerges out of them is random, accidental, and purely by chance. Thus Burroughs has no control over the outcome of the cut ups. There can be no semantic connection between the sender and the receiver of the language. The signals carry minimal content, if any. Burroughs believes that by cutting the lines between the sign and the signified object, we become less vulnerable to control by outside forces. I can’t say this is scientifically valid, but it does illustrates an artistic vision, supplementing the easier to follow prose of other passages. And keep in mind that Burroughs is an author of fiction, meaning he has less restrictions on his portrayal of reality.

This novel is a satire of human society. My interpretation is that institutions like government, media, corporations, and law enforcement seek to control and dominate society. Meanwhile, people pursue freedom from this domination in drug use, sex, dreams, altered states of consciousness, crime, insanity, imagination, art, literature, and nature. But the pursuit of these means of liberation carry their own risks and can enslave or destroy us in other ways if we aren’t careful. Thus, true liberation from the forces of domination is an impossibility. We are stuck in the mechanized slime pits of the world whether we like it or not so we might as well have a dark sense of human and write a book or two. In the middle of it all is the single human being, the Soft Machine, the body and mind that are malleable enough to be shaped by the Control Machine, but also malleable enough to shape itself in ways that don’t fit with the Cotrol Machine and can possibly even disrupt or destroy it. The idea that the Nova Mob, the Nova Police, and the language virus all originated in outer space and invaded the Earth, thereby creating all the problems of human existence, conveys the sense that we aren’t living as nature intended us to be. We got hijacked by alien forces beyond our control and those forces are preventing us from living out our true potential. Finally, I think the theme of secret agents says something about who the author is. A secret agent is a shadowy figure, operating clandestinely in a foreign land to transmit and receive coded messages that possibly have grave significance for the course of the world. He operates between worlds, taking on different disguises and personae to accomplish his tasks. It is a lonely, solitary life too and full of risk. Could you possibly think of a better metaphor for an author or a better symbol for the gay, heroin addicted author that Burroughs was?

The Soft Machine is one of William S. Burroughs’ best novels. It takes a re-reading or two in order to see that though. It’s one of those books that demands multiple attempts in order to really make sense of it even though you probably will never understand it in entirety. That’s by design. And I highly recommend hunting down a British impression of this book since it contains chapters that were never included in the American editions; those extra chapters really do a lot to tie the whole chaotic literary mess together. By the way, did I happen to mention that William S. Burroughs was completely nuts? Knowing that will help you to unlock the enigmas of his writing.