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 & Literary Analysis: The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs

The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

      The later works of William S. Burroughs have attracted less attention than his earlier writings. By the 1980s, Burroughs was living off his reputation more than his art. He was living in an abandoned YMCA in Manhattan, hanging out in his orgone accumulator and talking to ghosts. He was also hanging out in CBGB’s with Patti Smith who claimed she admired him so much because he was so difficult to get into bed. Well y’know Patti, a gay junky pushing 70 probably isn’t the best horse to bet on, even if you are a woman with hairy armpits (see the cover of her Easter LP).But he hadn’t been forgotten. Musicians in the punk and first wave industrial music scenes had taken interest in him and his earlier works remained perennial classics in the underground art and literary scenes. He was in desperate need of money so he decided to revive his career. The Nova Convention brought him back into the public eye and he even did an introduction for the opening of a Saturday Night Live episode. Along with this he published a trilogy of novels that were not entirely palatable to most readers of the time. But Burroughs being Burroughs has never been specific to one particular time or place. It may be time for a novel like The Place of Dead Roads to be reconsidered, especially considering our current political climate.

William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.

But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.

Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.

Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.

One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.

Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.

Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.

The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.

By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.

Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.

These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.

Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology by William S. Burroughs

Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology

by William S. Burroughs

      A lot of William S. Burroughs’ readers don’t realize how much Scientology influenced his writings, especially the science-fiction novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, Burroughs was introduced to Scientology by Brion Gysin and the two of them unofficially practiced those techniques outside the cult. This actually is not as bizarre as you might think at first since a lot of science-fiction authors of the 1950s were heavily influenced by Scientology as well. This is largely because the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer and moved in the circles of those other authors. But none of those writers took their interest to such an extreme as William S. Burroughs did. In the 1970s he was still convinced of the veracity of Scientology so he decided to join the organization and receive the official teachings and methods. According to biographers, he specifically thought they could cure him of his homosexuality and his heroin addiction. Of course, he continued being a gay junky until he died so that doesn’t reflect well on the efficacy of Scientology. While being a member of the cult, Burroughs wrote three magazine articles and some brief columns about being a member. Along with a Scientology-themed short story, two of these articles were published as Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

The first articles included in this slim volume originally appeared in the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other, two underground newspapers spawned by the hippie counter-cultural generation. Burroughs here wrote polemically against the Church of Scientology because of their rightward leaning political values. He accuses them of being an authoritarian organization that is racist and politically aligned with the values of the John Birch Society. He laments this because he thinks that Scientology has a lot to offer the psychonauts of the LSD generation with their taste for drugs, occultism, meditation, yoga, and altered states of consciousness in general. He argues that Scientology would be better off aligning with the Esalen Institute rather than the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican party. Burroughs’ writings on this subject are more interesting than convincing, though he is right about the disturbing nature of the Church’s quasi-fascist political leanings.

The other article of most interest in this collection appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Previous to its initial publication, Burroughs had written an in depth article about life in the Church of Scientology for the British porn magazine Mayfair. The cult sued the publishers for defamation and all remaining copies of that issue were ordered destroyed. Under British law, that article, unfortunately, could not be included in this book. But anyhow, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology wrote a response to it which is published here. In response, Burroughs dissects the Scientology representative’s critique line by line and point by point in the article for Rolling Stone. The first thing to notice about the Church’s representative is that he has poor spelling and grammatical skills; his reading comprehension skills are almost as bad. Burroughs doesn’t comment on this, but it fits in with other things he has said in other places about the shabbiness of the whole Scientology operation. Burroughs does respond in an overly polite manner by pointing out the representative’s misinterpretations of the Mayfair article, along with criticisms that he stands by. He even points out some places where he said he felt some degree of satisfaction with the results of Scientology auditing and e-meter techniques. This article is brief, simple, and doesn’t qualify as something you would read if you wanted any real information on Scientology.

The standout piece in this book is the short story “Ali’s Smile” which previously appeared in Burroughs’ novel Exterminator. It involves a British colonial linguist, stationed in Malaysia, who takes a local boy home, presumably for sexual purposes although that isn’t clearly stated. The linguist inherits a kris from the boy whose name is Ali. A “kris” is a tribal and ceremonial dagger carried by males in some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile back in an unnamed village, which is probably in England, an aristocrat hires a private espionage agent to infiltrate the Church of Scientology and return to administer the techniques to the aristocrat who doesn’t want to join the cult. Meanwhile, a riot starts in the village center. A gang of hippies begin fighting with locals and an army of uniformed Scientologists show up to fight too. The previously mentioned linguist attacks the rioters with Ali’s kris and they all end up dead. My knowledge of Scientology is limited, but I do know that they believe negative thoughts and behaviors are caused by spirit invaders from outer space. Burroughs appears to be saying that such a spirit is possessed in the kris and it causes those who bear the kris to become violent. But this is a William S. Burroughs story so he also appears to be saying that such a spirit can be useful when used against your enemies. Making sense of this story requires some thinking outside the box. In fact, you may have to destroy the box altogether. But it’s a story that is both acerbic and horrifying for those who care to grapple with its obscure meaning.

While “Ali’s Smile” is a good story if you are a devoted Burroughs reader, the articles in “Naked Scientology” don’t add up to much. It would have been more compelling if the notorious Mayfair article had been included. I wish Burroughs had written an essay where he goes more in depth into his involvement with the Church of Scientology since it had such a big influence over his writings and most readers would concede that he had a unique mind and a wild imagination. As it stands, this book is probably best for archivists and collectors, not so much for general readers.

I remember the first time I became aware of the Church of Scientology. While walking down Yonge Street in Toronto, I passed by their building. Men wearing suits were standing in front handing out pamphlets to passersby, most of which threw them on the ground creating a giant pile of litter. The front of the building had large plate glass windows so you could see into the reading room. A bunch of men were sitting inside smoking cigarettes. This was back in the day when smoking was common and done freely in public. It looked about as inviting as a bus terminal in a Midwestern city struggling with its economy. I thought it was a trashy looking place. William Burroughs was a man of some intelligence and it seems surprising that he would get so caught up in such a scam of an organization. But he always did have a fascination for pseudoscience and pop occultism like the fake shamanism of Carlos Castaneda. But I’ll forgive him that considering he wrote some of the most imaginative and provocative books in the history of American literature. John Coltrane, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, was was deeply inspired by junk mysticism like Theosophy. Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer in Spiritualism. If this kind of stuff serves as inspiration for great art then I’m willing to set my convictions aside for a short time and tolerate a con game or two. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs

Exterminator!

by William S. Burroughs

      William S. Burroughs once famously said that, “the novel is just as outdated a literary form as the sonnet.” That goes a long way in explaining what you’re in for when you pick up one of his books. Exterminator Is one work that challenges our ideas about what literary fiction should be.

One issue a reader might encounter is the impossibility of situating this book in any formal literary category or style. You can’t say it’s a book of short stories because the chapters aren’t really stories. They are more like vignettes or situations. Even quaint terms like “snapshots” or “slices of life” don’t adequately address what is going on since since most often there is no narrative arc. The signals in the prose are often overridden by noise from randomly inserted cut-ups or interference from nonsensical sentences that appear without warning and completely derail any train of thought you might have latched on to. You can never tell where you will end up once a scenario has begun. When you do find some traces of a story line, they sometimes, but not always, have conflicts that never get resolves or even explained. Looking at it from another angle, you can’t really say this is a novel either since there is no plot and no character development. The characters are largely defined by what they do or say in the brief moments they appear. But there are definite patterns in the recurring themes, most of which involves drug use, gay sex, and the eternal conflict between chaos and control. But I’m sure Burroughs would say you’re wasting your time by trying to fit his writing into a category. An unspoken theme in his writing is the navigation, expression, exploration, and manipulation of fluid boundaries.

The book opens with the narrator working as an exterminator. He is more preoccupied with portraying the customers and the people he works with than the vermin he is assigned to kill. You might be temped to read some kind of deeper meaning into this introduction although there probably isn’t anything there. In one sentence though he does compare cockroaches to drug addicts. If there is one theme that crops up throughout the whole book it is that the authorities in America, be they police, military officials, or politicians, think of their country as being populated by human undesirables who deserve to be wiped out.

In another story, a vigilante gang of such undesirables, made up of a gay man, a Mexican, an African American, a drug addict, and a radical anarchist conspire to blow up a military truck shipping a deadly virus across the continent. Notice t4hat the most sympathetic people in Burroughs’ writing tend to be members of minority and marginalized populations. In another story, the military authorities, as propagators of biological warfare, unleash a respiratory disease on the country after accidentally being exposed to it in an office on a military base. Also note the symbolic link Burroughs creates between military officials and viruses. What could he be saying about the military industrial complex and the American impulse towards authoritarian control?

The most memorable passage involves Burroughs in the crowd of activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 when the police stormtroopers began rioting, beating the peace activists with billy clubs, and spraying them with teargas. A colonial style boat is set up in the park where a radical political party announces they are running a baboon for president of the United States. (Did Burroughs lift this idea from the Yippies who ran a pig named Pigasus for president?) The baboon gives a speech, but as Burroughs explains it, he has had computer chips implanted in his brain so that his speech and activities are controlled by a technician stationed at a control panel. Of course, as the police enter the scene and start beating people, it turns into a riot that gets blamed on the demonstrators. By bringing a 15^th century colonialist ship into the scene, Burroughs plays with both symbolism and his characteristic manipulation of linear time to make a statement about the invasive founding of America and its relation to present day political attitudes of domination. The baboon as presidential candidate is also an obvious parody of who our presidents really are and how they are not the ones in control.

One of the weakest chapters is about an author, presumably Burroughs himself, who writes a story about a man who goes to a publisher’s office. While in the waiting room he reads an article in a magazine about a man who enters another time and place. It ends with a self-congratulatory note about how he was able to shift his character through multiple times and places within one sentence. If you’ve read The Arabian Nights or The Saragossa Manuscript you’ll know there isn’t anything especially novel about this narrative shuffling. Yet Burroughs beams with pride like a sixth grader who has just been told by his teacher that he wrote the most imaginative story in the class.

These are some of the easier parts to describe. The whole chaotic mess of a narrative is framed by a vignette at the beginning that gets reprised at the end, acting as literary parentheses to contain the book’s contents which seem to ne bursting out in all directions at once. The story is about two red haired men that have sex on a stage in a theater with an audience watching them. While having sex they turn into red haired wolves. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, but Burroughs sure did have a fondness for guys with red hair as can be seen in his other writings. Does it matter if it means anything? With William Burroughs, it is often the atmosphere that matters most and, quite often, that atmosphere is not one that is comforting.

While the content of Exterminator is continuously exciting, the actual writing isn’t. By comparison, the prose in Naked Lunch is written with carefree, wild abandon as if Burroughs is more concerned with just getting everything he has to say out in the open. The writing in Exterminator is more controlled and deliberate as if Burroughs became too self-conscious of the language he was using. Its restraint makes it lack the vitality and energy of his previous nooks.

While Exterminator is one of William S. Burroughs’ minor works, it does have enough to offer to make it worth reading. This is actually my second time through it and I got a lot more out of it with this re-read. If you feel like an outsider in American society and are also disgusted with the authoritarian and hypcritical nature of the power structure, you will probably find something to relate to as the narrative shifts between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility. In both form and content it explodes the traditional styles of literature and does so without mercy. All the while, it’s a full-throttled assault on the establishment. If you’re clean cut and have no tolerance for disorder, violence, absurdity, filth, and horrifically bad odors, you might as well avoid Burroughs at all costs. You might as well avoid me too because I’ll probably think you’re a bore. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal

His Name Was Death

by Rafael Bernal

      Don’t make the mosquitoes angry. Actually it’s probably too late. Mosquitoes worldwide think the human race is inferior to them and we don’t amount to much more than a food source for this insect we consider to be a pest. In fact the mosquito population has a plan to enslave humanity to make food production more efficient for them. There is only one small problem; without a common language between people and these flying bugs, their plan is impossible to carry out. This is the natural dilemma posed by Mexican author Rafael Bernal in his quasi-science fiction novella His Name Was Death.

Actually, the mosquitoes are only half the story. In the center of it all is a man without a name. He wants to be an author so all of humanity can praise his genius, but they reject his works and he descends into a nightmare of alcoholism, homelessness, and humiliation. After getting fed up with the human race, he heads out into the jungle in southern Chiapas, Mexico where he encounters two villages of Lacandon people, a sub-branch of the Mayan Indians. He kicks his drinking habit and the Lacandon people take a liking to him. They give him the name Wise Owl. They convince him to become a shaman and then, while listening to the buzzing of mosquitoes in his hut, he notices patterns to their sounds. Wise Owl records these sounds as musical notations in a notebook and begins imitating them using a wooden flute. Eventually he learns to communicate with the mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, Wise Owl gets chosen to be the chieftain of the Lacandon people because he convinces the mosquitoes to leave them alone. At this point his intentions are beneficient. He commands the two villages to stop fighting and unite into one. When they are reluctant to follow his orders, he directs the mosquitoes to harass them until the villagers agree to obey. Otherwise Wise Owl leaves the Lacandons free to do as they please.

Wise Owl signifies colonialism in New Spain. Like Wise Owl, the Spanish kingdom was in turmoil when the conquistadors arrived in the Americas. Unannounced and unnamed, they landed and the native Toltecs and Aztecs welcomed them, believing them to be the prophesied arrival of the sun god Quetzalcoatl. After Wise Owl appears out of nowhere and becomes leader of the Lacandons, they designate him as Kukulman which is the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl.

But the mosquitoes are not simply passive subjects to Wise Owl, the pretender to the throne of his own invented Mexican kingdom. As Wise Owl communicates with them, he learns about the structure of their society. It is a rigidly hierarchical society led by an unknown mosquito king and ruled by a governing council supported by an intellectual class and a military. At the bottom of the hierarchy is a class of slaves. The mosquitoes claim to be more advanced on the evolutionary scale than humans and they are furious because people have polluted the waters and deforested most of the Earth. Their plan is to eliminate most of humanity and breed what remains as a food supply, a lot like how humans breed cattle and other farm animals. Since Wise Owl is the only person who can communicate with them, they offer him unlimited power over humanity if he acts as their spokesperson. And that offer is too good for him to refuse.

This novella was written in 1946, so it is possible that Bernal intended the mosquitoes to be a representation of the fascist state of Nazi Germany, though you could easily insert any totalitarian system into that metaphorical slot. Their ideology, rigid political hierarchy, and conspiracy to dominate the world certainly resonate with the trappings of fascism the world was familiar with at the end of World War II. The mosquitoes are a strong counterpoint to the Lacandons in the story and by placing Wise Owl in the center of the two, a connection can be made between the project of colonialism in New Spain and the fascist political movements of modern Europe.

While Wise Owl pursues grandiose fantasies of domination, just like Hitler, a third element enters into the story. A team of anthropologists arrive along with a company of loggers representing the encroachment of modern science and education into the world of the colonized while profiteering modern industry disrupts the natural environment that the colonial subjects depend.

The loggers are one weakness in the story. After introducing them, Bernal does not have them do anything. He misses an opportunity to further explore the conflict between modernism and environmental destruction, a major point of contention for both the Lacandon and the mosquitoes.

In any case, the anthropologists are led by a professor named Wassell. Accompanying him are his secretary Ms. Johnes and an ehtno-musicologist named Godinez. Ms. Johnes and Godinez are engaged to be married although Wassell wants her for himself. This love triangle proves to be their undoing.

Wise Owl tells them of his ability to communicate with the mosquitoes. They think he is insane, but Ms. Johnes finds him interesting nonetheless. He appears to be a benevolent eccentric who has tricked the Lacandons into thinking he is a god which is ironically only partially true because he didn’t make any attempt to take over their villages; they thrust him into that position and he just accepted it.

In fact, as a reader you may wonder if Wise Owl’s pact with the insects is merely symbolic or hallucinatory until the scientists refuse to believe his story about the mosquitoes conquering the world. Wise Owl convinces the mosquitoes to eliminate the competition for Ms. Johnes since he has also started having feelings for her. Even after proving that he can command the mosquitoes to kill for him, they still refuse to believe Wise Owl is sane and end up paying the ultimate price for their disbelief. However, their disbelief is also the undoing of the mosquitoes’ plan for world domination since if no one believes Wise Owl, their plot amounts to nothing. Through this complex of events and ideas, Bernal informs us that one weapon in the fight against fascism is to simply disbelieve that the authoritarian ruler has a right to their authority. The authoritarian’s power is diminished when people refuse to acknowledge their superiority. A king is only a king because people define him as such and not because there is anything in his nature to make him superior.

Finally, Wise Owl has a moral awakening when he sees Ms. Johnes suffering after the death of Godezin. He decides to sabotage the mosquitoes’ conspiracy by secretly meeting with the mosquito slaves. He uses religion and belief in God to convince them to rebel against their masters in order to set themselves free. But it all goes horribly wrong. This is one of the worst parts of the book because there is so little description of the battle. Bernal could have taken a cue from Henry David Thoureau who described a fight between ants in such minute and vivid language in Walden. Bernal’s lack of visual input makes the narrative fall off a cliff.

Where does all this lead? Recall the title. Just like Jim Morrison sang, “no one here gets out alive.” No one, that is, except for the worst of the mosquitoes and some of the Lacandons. Wise Owl accomplishes nothing but destroying almost everything he touches.

Bernal’s novella raises a range of interesting topics. One is the psychology of tyranny in the person of Wise Owl. He is a loser at the bottom of society so he pursues power in order to be at the top of society for compensation. Bernal is saying that there is an internal weakness and insecurity that motivates people to seek out positions of strength. Another theme is that of our place in the universe. The mosquitoes are a reflection of humanity even though we might be inclined to think of them as evil for plotting to conquer the world and farm humans as a food source. But how can they be evil when their goal is to do what humanity has done? What makes it wrong for them to do what is right for us? We look at mosquitoes and see nothing more than a pest that carries diseases like malaria. Yet we never stop to consider that we carry diseases that harm nature and we could very well be considered a pest by the vast majority of nature’s inhabitants. And maybe we aren’t justified in hating the mosquitoes for conspiring to kill most of humanity when we have been attempting to exterminate the mosquito population ever since pesticides were invented. We haven’t even been clever enough to succeed. Maybe we aren’t any better than them after all and if so, what does that say about our place in the natural world? Do we even have a metric of judgment that takes nature from nature’s point of view into consideration? Maybe such short-sightedness is a weakness on our part, one that could do us irreparable harm in the end. Finally, the story poses the question of what ethical responsibility supposedly advanced people have in our treatment of supposedly inferior indigenous people. Bernal doesn’t propose an answer to that question in this story, but the theme hangs heavy over the whole book.

His Name Was Death is jam-packed with a lot of complex ideas. Despite being a quick and easy read, it is the kind of story you have to analyze long after you finish reading it to flesh out everything it has to offer. It has a few clunky parts in the writing, but the wealth of ideas and their presentation override any of its imperfections. It should make you uncomfortable in subtle ways if you give it the time to allow its philosophical implications to sink in. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Falling Angel by William Hortsberg

Falling Angel

by William Hjortsberg

It’s midtown Manhattan, 1959. A private eye is called to a meeting with an elegant and mysterious man to search for a singer who disappeared after returning from World War II. The detective’s name is Harry Angel, the man who hires him is Louis Cypre, and the missing musician is Johnny Favorite. The names themselves should give you enough to think about. While William Hjorstberg’s Falling Angel is written with the elements of a neo-noir thriller, the underlying theme is that of a search for a lost identity...maybe. Possibly it is more of a search to lose an identity.

The literary trick that Hjorstberg plays is to give away the solution to the mystery at the beginning of the story. The discerning reader should have no trouble figuring out that Louis Cyphre is Lucifer, otherwise known as Satan. Harry the Falling Angel is an all too obvious reference to Satan, the falling angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost (that epic poem that foreshadows almost every literary theme that has been explored since the 18^th century). Johnny Favorite references Milton too since Satan was God’s favorite angel before he got kicked out of paradise for not staying in his place and trying to usurp the throne of God. Combining the names “Favorite” and “Angel” should provide a huge clue as to where this mystery is headed. So should the fact that Johnny Favorite fought in Algeria during World War II, received a facial injury that required plastic surgery when he returned, was committed to an asylum, and then was taken away. Harry Angel also fought in Algeria during World War II and had plastic surgery to repair his nose. There are further clues all throughout the book indicating the relationship between the two.

Angel’s whereabouts after returning from the war are barely mentioned. Cyphre sets him the task of finding out what happened to Johnny Favorite after he was taken from the asylum. The surface mystery of the plot is solved for any reader who can put two and two together. That is deliberate. Hjorstberg wants that part to be obvious because Harry Angel’s investigation is about a deeper issue.

Angel’s hunt for Johnny Favorite starts as standard noir detective work. Each character he encounters gives him a new piece of the puzzle and the people he encounters become more colorful as he goes along. He starts by questioning the morphine addicted doctor at the asylum where Johnny Favorite lived. Then he meets with a pianist in a blues band that once played in Favorite’s band before the war. This leads Angel to an Obeah cult led by the manbo Epiphany Proudfoot, the light-skinned daughter of Evangeline Proudfoot who was Johnny Favorite’s Afro-Caribbean lover. Epiphany’s light skin is of major importance. Figure it out for yourself.

On the caucasian side of town, Angel pays a visit to Margaret Krusemark, the one time fiancee of Johnny Favorite. Margaret is an astrologer and practitioner of black magic. She is also a key character in understanding why Favorite was taken from the asylum and what happened after he left. Just as important is Margaret’s father, Ethan Krusemark, who is the CEO of a maritime shipping company with an office on the top floor of the Chrysler Building.

The characters who provide Angel with the most information about Johnny Favorite all get murdered in brutal ways. Note that none of them recognize Harry Angel when they meet him even though, knowing the secret of his identity, they probably should. Other people that Harry Angel questions are mostly musicians who played with Favorite before the war. As minor characters, they have less to say and likewise end up surviving.

Harry Angel’s detective methods are creepy but standard for noir fiction. He impersonates people, he lies, he breaks into homes and offices, and he spies on people by watching them through windows or eavesdropping. He also shows up, secretly and uninvited at an Obeah ceremony and a black mass a la J.K. Huysmans’s La Bas. Is he just a curious voyeur or is he unwittingly being summoned by the cultists? Harry Angel also spends a lot of time in the lower sections of New York, going to bars, visiting Coney Island in the off season to talk to carnies and sideshow freaks, patronizes Epiphany Proudfoot’s herb shop in Harlem, and watching Louis Cyphre perform a magic show at the legendary Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus on 42^nd Street (the space is now occupied by Madame Tussaud’s wax museum). It’s almost surprising that Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe book store is never mentioned, though I suppose it didn’t exist in 1959 when the novel is set. These dwellings contrast starkly with Angel’s luncheon with Cyphre at an upscale French restaurant and Ethan Krusemark’s corporate office at the top of the Chrysler Building. Remember the title is Falling Angel in reference to Satan’s fall from paradise. Also don’t forget that Milton portrayed Satan as a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost.

On a side note, there is a subtle anti-racism theme in that Harry Angel mixes freely and comfortably with the African-American characters who are also portrayed almost entirely in a positive light. The police following Harry Angel are also bigots in an ugly way and are just as offended by Angel’s sexual affair with the mulatta Epiphany Proudfoot as they are with the homicides they investigate. And Louis Cyphre gives a sermon to an all-Black congregation of Pentacostals while Harry Angel sits unnoticed in the audience.

If Harry Angel is searching for Johnny Favorite he is also searching for the identity of Louis Cyphre. The surface connection of “Louis Cyphre” and “Lucifer” may be obvious from the start, in fact so obvious that’s it’s hard to understand why Harry Angel never makes the connection, but a deeper semiotic unpacking of the name reveals more. In cryptography, the word “cyphre” or “cipher” means a key that unlocks a code. It translates a scrambled coded language into a decoded language that is understandable, hence the word “decipher”. So understanding Louis Cyphre’s identity and the role he plays in Angel’s life reveals what the dilemma is all about. Looking deeper into the name, “cyphre” is a French word derived from the Arabic al-sifr. In old Arabic, this word means “emptiness” or “nothingness”. Note that when Cyphre addresses the Pentacostal congregation he appears under the name Al-Sifr while wearing an Arabic style turban. When applied to a person, a cipher can also be an unimportant person or a person of no consequence, a persona non grata. Yet Louis Cyphre seems to be the deus ex machina, the puppet master, of the whole story. So what does it mean if the puppet master is a nobody? Hjorstberg appears to be telling us that Louis Cyphre isn’t real; in other words, he is an imaginary projection of Harry Angel’s darker motivations. Harry Angel, in his inner struggle of good against evil, believes Cyphre is killing the associates of Johnny Favorite and arranging circumstances to implicate him. But if Cyphre doesn’t exist, it must be Angel doing the killing and tricking himself into thinking he is innocent by displacing the crimes onto an imaginary antagonist. Or maybe Harry Angel actually knows what murders he is committing and Louis Cyphre is a symbol of his sadistic impulses he is unable to control.

So if Johnny Favorite became Harry Angel after the war, as Ethan Krusemark explains, and Louis Cyphre is a disassociated projection of Angel’s evil urges, what exactly is Harry Angel searching for? He probably isn’t searching for anything but an escape route from his past. Johnny Favorite sold his soul to the Devil for fame and success then he thought he could trick the Devil by transferring his soul into the body of Harry Angel. He succeeded to the point where the people who know the most about him are unable to recognize his current form as Harry Angel. So Angel has to murder them to erase any last traces of memory attached to Johnny Favorite. But Angel can’t escape from Louis Cyphre because Cyphre is an aspect of himself. But if this interpretation is wrong and Cyphre literally is Satan, where does that leave Harry Angel? The hapless detective is little more than a marionette being manipulated by Cyphre to do the Devil’s work without realizing it. But in any case, Harry Angel is a man trying to leave his past behind. At the age of 39, he is entering into a midlife identity crisis while trying to come to terms with his past by eliminating anybody he was connected to in a meaningful way. In this endeavor, he fails. Once you’ve sold your soul there is no escape. Maybe there is no cure for evil. Maybe Harry Angel is an embodiment of Satan himself. Maybe he has too much pride to repent.

How can we be sure any interpretation is correct? We can’t. William Hjortsberg has given us what I call a Devil’s Ending. When the first and second layers of the mystery are solved, we are left with a deeper mystery that can’t be resolved. The deeper certainty is in territory that is too murky and so far beyond our grasp that we can only shoot in the dark when trying to solve it. You can twist your mind into knots trying to make sense of it all, but there can never be any closure. The Devil’s Ending is a good literary device that, when used effectively, makes a book stay with you long after you finish reading it simply because it leaves some questions open ended.

Speaking of writing style, this novel evokes the sensations of Art Deco in its use of language and story telling. Without a doubt, New York is the greatest city for Art Deco architecture in the world. Art Deco has smooth and shiny surfaces, sharp lines, bold curvatures, and planes of flatness that are layered to create the illusion of depth. It draws you in by suggesting the presence of something hidden beneath the surface. It uses occult motifs borrowed from astrology and Pagan pantheons. It is a style that reaches back to the ancient statuary of Babylon and the angularity of Egyptian hieroglyphics while maintaining the slick appearance of an eternal modernity. The author tells this story in a way that reflects this Art Deco attitude. It is hard to explain why, but his sentences are short, sharp, simple, and direct. The plot flows smoothly like steely water, turning sharp corners, rounding bends, and moving in and out of layered facades. And those surfaces are turning grimy from all the exhaust and smog coming from heavy traffic. All of this is like a chrome plated urban environment, a setting for living, breathing human beings of flesh and blood. William Hjorstberg really captures a slice of New York City’s soul in both the style and substance of this novel.

Enough can’t be said about all the clever details in Falling Angel. It is also impossible to ignore that it is just plain fun to read. It will probably be worth reading again. But that all depends on how long the Devil lets me live. That shouldn’t be a big problem though since I’m certainly not an angel, falling or otherwise.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton

The Secret Life Of a Satanist:

The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey

by Blanche Barton

Back in the 1980s, there were two books my friends had that they would leave out for people to see. One was The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell. The other was The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Nobody took these books seriously. They were just for show and as far as I know, no one from back then ever used the former book to build any bombs although I do know a couple people who took the book’s advice and tried smoking banana peels. Don’t bother. The bombs don’t work and neither do the banana peels. Regarding the latter book, I also don’t know anybody who read it who became a Satanist, although I do know some who got into Wicca but that had nothing to do with The Satanic Bible. In fact, I’d say The Satanic Bible amounted to little more than bathroom reading. If you dug into the pile of dirty magazines stashed under some guys’ sinks you might find a copy and having a good read while doing what all humans do at the end point of their digestive systems.

Believe it or not, some people really do care about the biography of the Church of Satan’s founding father. The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton theoretically fulfills that need. There are better sources for legitimate information though.

This authorized biography starts out with lies and half truths about Anton LaVey’s ancestry and childhood. He was born in the 1930s to parents he claimed to be of Romani and Jewish heritage, having grandparents who emigrated from Transylvania, Romania. They were actually exclusively Ukrainian Jews according to immigration records. There isn’t a whole lot said about his upbringing except that he got bullied by his classmates and, according to him, it was because he was hung like a horse and they were jealous. Reading between the lines, I get more of a sense that they beat him up for acting like he was better than everybody else. Guys who carry the biggest baseball bats don’t ordinarily talk about it and those that do are usually just insecure. In any case, this pobrecito had a lonely childhood. In his teenage years, he had a striking appearance, not exactly handsome, but striking and photogenic. He liked wearing zoot suits and I can imagine people used to tell him he looked like the Devil which is something he probably took a little too close to heart.

The story gets interesting as he learns to play the organ, lives the life of a carny, and works for the Clyde Beatty circus as a lion tamer. I’m a real sucker for stories about carnies and circuses, but then I was sad to learn from other sources that the Clyde Beatty circus has no records of LaVey ever having been employed by them. The same can be said for other jobs he claimed to have had like being a crime scene photographer for the San Francisco police department, a psychic detective, and an organ player for the San Francisco ballet. Regardless of his dishonesty, LaVey says one significant thing about being a psychic investigator: people willingly want to be deceived. People sincerely want to believe their house is haunted when in reality the eerie moaning sound they hear is nothing but wind blowing through a small crack in an attic window. This insight is all you need to know to understand where Anton LaVey was coming from.

The book continues on with more lies. LaVey tells stories about a love affair with Marilyn Monroe, something which has been denied by people who knew both LaVey and Monroe. He claims to have had an affair with Jayne Mansfield which is a half truth. LaVey says she was in love with him but others say she thought he was a dork and she liked to tease him so she could laugh behind his back. Oh the cruelty of women. The interesting part of this story is that LaVey claims to have accidentally killed her. He says he put a curse on her jealous husband and then while cutting a clipping out of a newspaper, he accidentally cut through a photograph of her on the other side. The slice went through her neck and then she died in a car crash. You can believe that if you want, but beliefs aren’t facts. Besides, autopsy reports show that Jayne Mansfield’s head was not severed from her body in the car crash as many people believe. That was simply a rumor that spread after she died.

In Barton’s version of the founding of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the 1960s. LaVey was making a living by giving lectures about dark subjects in the living room of his house which he painted black and kept a pet lion in. Since this attracted all kinds of eccentrics he came up with the idea of starting the world’s first Satanic church and began performing rituals involving pentagrams and nude women on altars for audiences. The media got excited about all this and drew the attention of hippies and other counter culturalists who LaVey despised. He also attracted a few people who were more sincere and possibly more clever than he was; when they challenged his leadership, he was unable to maintain control over the church and excommunicated them. Many went on to form their own cults and LaVey wrote them off as fakes. In reality, this exposed his weakness as a leader so he became a recluse and had minimal contact with other Satanists throughout the rest of his life. His daughter Zeena Schreck says he did little else at this time in his life besides lying around in his living room and barking out orders to his wife who kept the Church of Satan running mostly on her own. She divorced him in the 1980s which drove LaVey into bankruptcy. I guess his curses and spells couldn’t prevent that from happening.

The first half of this biography is a somewhat interesting story even if it buried under a half ton of bullshit. The second half isn’t so much of a biography as it is Anton LaVey making an awkward attempt at explaining his “philosophy”. I use the word “philosophy” loosely because there is no structure or well-thought out stances in it. It is more a rambling collection of thoughts and ideas that don’t add up to anything definite.

LaVey had some odd ideas. He believed trapezoids could be used to bring demons into our dimension from who knows where. These demons are like the monsters in H.P. Lovecraft stories. Never mind that Lovecraft wrote fiction and never tried to convince anybody otherwise. LaVey talked about what kinds of music and movies are sufficiently satanic for him. I’m not sure how Irving Berlin or Cole Porter were satanic; I guess he heard something there that the rest of us don’t. Although he believed in right wing politics, authoritarianism, and eugenics, he also didn’t like racism, censorship, or homophobia. Science fiction movies and TV shows are meant to program people to live in outer space and in the future, people will mostly have social and sexual relationships with androids. Isn’t this a somewhat accurate prediction of AI? Despite being a quasi-fascist ideologue, LaVey shared some views with counter-culturalists like a hatred of TV, a dislike of consumer culture and the soulless, mechanical lifestyles of mainstream Americans who do little more than work, sleep, and then go to work again. How any of this is a satanic philosophy, I don’t know. It’s just satanic because it’s what he thought and that’s all there is to it.

Speaking of androids and soullessness, Anton LaVey’s main hobby, aside from performing satanic rituals, was building androids which the rest of us would call “mannequins”. He talked about himself as if he was a modern incarnation of Michelangelo sculpting statues in his basement. But really he was just a guy making mannequins and dressing them up. He put all his androids on display in a speakeasy scene in his cellar. I admit it might be an interesting installment piece to see, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. I guess these androids make a good substitute for the friends he didn’t have. At least they wouldn’t challenge his authority or talk back when he was being a dick the way real people would. Female mannequins never say no either so he could always get what he wanted from them. You’d think a guy who claimed to be the John Holmes of the San Francisco occult scene would have had a better sex life than that.

LaVey admits near the end of the book that he is nostalgic, particularly for the years prior to World War II. The way I see him now is that as a kid, he was fascinated by the world of adults and probably fantasized about what he would do when he came of age. Then he suffered an unremarkable adolescence in the blandly conformist restraint of the 1950s, invented a fabulist biography to cover it up, tried to get in on the counter-culture scene of the 1960s by starting a satanic cult but didn’t approve of the kinds of people he attracted. So he dropped out of society to be a solitary king in the castle of his house, a replica of the life he imagined adults having when he was a child, never growing up and ruling over a court of mannequins while peddling Church of Satan merchandise to pay the rent. Anton LaVey reminds me a lot of Jean des Esseintes, the eccentric aesthete in J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against Nature who can’t handle living among the nobodies of the real world and so retreats into the isolation of his chateau. I find a certain kind of appeal in living that way but it is undercut by a certain kind of cowardice and social incompetence too.

Anton LaVey always said that being satanic meant embracing the role of adversary. I’m not sure what he was adverse to or why he rejected it. It can’t simply be Christianity. Although he pointed out some of the hypocrisy in its followers, like the way Christians go to burlesque shows on Saturday night and then show up at church on Sunday, he didn’t display enough of an understanding of Christian theology to truly be against it. Was he an adversary to the entire world? That’s just too vague to be valid. His attitude was like a blind, knee jerk reaction to life without any depth of understanding behind it. LaVey tried to make himself look menacing and powerful, but he sounded more like a sloppy drunk sitting next to me in a bar, babbling about whatever came into his mind. Since I admit I like hearing from and reading about weird people, some of this is amusing but none of it is anything I can take seriously. The Secret Life Of a Satanist didn’t convince me to join the Church of Satan or any other cult. I’ve always thought Anton Szandor LaVey was a dork and this biography further confirmed that opinion. He’s like a strange guy at a party that takes his own oddity seriously when in reality, people just like having him around for the freaky kicks.

Anton LaVey claimed P.T. Barnum as an influence and so I will leave you with two paraphrases from that iconic American con man. People don’t mind being ripped off if they have fun in the process of being cheated. There’s a sucker born every minute. And that’s all you need to know to understand Anton LaVey.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

Terra Nostra

by Carlos Fuentes

      In literary and historical studies, we hear a lot about post-colonialism. We hear far less about pre-colonialism and what led colonialists down their destructive paths towards the domination of their conquered territories. In his monumental novel Terra Nostra, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes tackles this subject, taking into account a myriad of byways, sidestreams, and subplots that all feed into this massive literary undertaking.

This is one of those densely written novels that immediately confuses the reader with layers of symbolism, non-linear narrative, characters that appear in multiple times and places without any clear explanation as to whether they are the same or not, shifting time frames, dream sequences inside of dream sequences, multiple characters with the same name, improbable anachronisms, and so much more. I could write an entire essay alone on all the things in this story that are deliberately meant to throw the audience off track. Fuentes repeatedly pulls the magic carpet out from under your ass so you find yourself tumbling through the air into disorienting labyrinths of prose without giving you many clues as to how to get out or where you will be if you ever do.

The best way to approach this monster of a novel is go straight into its heart and summarize thmain character Felipe el Senor. Please note that this summary does not go in the order in it follows in the narrative. He is the king of Castile in Spain and successor to his father, also named Felipe. The kingdom is a feudal estate so that the king is entitled to everything produced by the peasants. The king is also entitled to have sex with any bride on the night of their wedding. This is what happens when the elder Felipe rapes a peasant girl named Celestina before she can consummate her marriage with her husband. This sets all of Felipe el Senor’s life into motion. The younger Felipe inherits not only his father’s kingdom, but also his father’s syphilis which is called “the French disease” throughout the novel. Felipe thinks of his father as a disgrace so he becomes preoccupied with ending the familial dynasty by not having any children thereby not having a son to put on the throne when he dies according to the law of primogeniture. Felipe el Senor also turns to religion and theology to purify himself in order to get closer to the Christian God.

As Felipe el Senor is coming of age, he runs off to a beach where he has a chance encounter with four subjects if his feudal estate. All of them have utopian dreams. Celestina, the same woman who was raped by Felipe’s father, dreams of a world where carnality is not considered sinful and dirty. The monk Simon wants to live where there is no sickness or disease. Ludovico is a student who wants to see a world without religion. Pedro is an old man who is building a boat to sail off to another land. In this, the foundations are laid for exploring the attitudinal themes current on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that led to the impulse of colonialism. Felipe tells them to forget their dreams because he can bring paradise to his home in Spain. They go through the villages, telling everyone no matter their age, race, gender, religion, or class status that utopia has arrived and takes them to his castle. They indulge in a massive orgy complete with food and wine. Then Felipe tells his four friends to leave and has his knights slaughter everybody partying in the castle. This passage is derived directly from alchemical symbolism and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Felipe’s motivation for this mass murder is that he wants to prove to his father that he can be powerful enough to be king.

In the first third of the novel, another plot element that gets introduced is that of the Three Bastards. When Felipe takes a deer hunting party to the hills near a beach, presumably the same beach where he previously met his four utopianist friends, three identical men wash up on the shore. Each has a red cross permanently marked on their back and each also has twelve toes. They are also accompanied by three green-glassed bottles with rolled up parchments inside of them. We learn more about the Three Bastards, who they are and what they represent, later in the third section.

As mentioned previously. Felipe turns to mystical Christianity to cleanse himself of the filth of existence. His initial impulse is to invade Flanders, hire a mercenary army of Teutonic knights, and slaughter a heretical sect called the Adamites. We later learn that this cult was founded by Ludovico and Celestina and boasted the painter Hieronymous Bosch as a member. After the Adamites are killed, the Teutons celebrate by ransacking a church, getting drunk, fornicating, pissing, shitting, and vomiting all over the floor. This is the first of Felipe’s existential crises because he sees first hand that you can not rid the world of filth by killing people you deem to be unclean. The second component of his crisis is that he meets Ludovico in the church who explains the Adamite philosophy to him. Sex can not be sinful because it was not sinful in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Therefore, Heaven can be reached by living the way Adam and Eve lived before she ate the fruit. Remember that Felipe has sexual hang ups due to the impurity of his syphilitic body and his desire to end the Castilian dynasty by not producing a son to be crown prince. He usually lives a life of celibacy.

The alternative version of Christian practice causes Felipe to return to his partially built castle and meditate in his private chapel on a painting of Jesus and his disciples that anachronistically moves around like a television screen. Felipe explores alternate interpretations of the New Testament like the possibility that Mary was promiscuous and her cuckolded husband Joseph made up the story of the virgin birth to hide his disgrace. Another idea is that Jesus escaped crucifixion by having another man substituted for him on the cross at Calvary. These ideas come from Gnostic Christianity, a heretical theology that gets examined in other parts of the book. Felipe doesn’t believe in these theories, but they cause him to consider that there might be different ways to interpret the Bible and it also causes a theological rupture for him too. His mind is steeped in Augustinian thought so he believes both that getting close to God means cleansing oneself of the filth of existence and that the eternal represents divine purity and perfection while the temporal and ever changing world represents impurity which is evil. Whatever doesn’t change is eternal and divine therefore the only things in the world that don’t change are death and literature. Since the medieval Bible manuscript he owns doesn’t change, he erroneously believes that the written word is eternal and perfect. Whatever dies stays dead, so death is also eternal and perfect. He has realized that killing heretics does not cleanse the world of filth and evil, so he turns inward, building a castle with a private chapel where he will isolate himself from his kingdom and the rest of world. The chapel contains a necropolis housing the relics of his dead ancestors and stands as a monument to eternal death which he thinks of as perfection and divine purity.

All is not well in the necropolis-castle. Felipe’s wife Isabella is sexually frustrated so she brings a homunculus to life in a mandrake root and tries to create a golem using body parts she steals from the necropolis reliquary. Meanwhile, two monks who live in the castle tower use their religious practices as a cover for secretly pursuing their passions for art and astronomy, again indicating the coming of the Renaissance. The peasantry, due to their rotten living conditions, begin discussion on rebelling against the king. And in the middle of all this is Guzman, Felipe el Senor’s chief advisor, who despises both the king and the peasants yet plans to play the two sides off against each other to exert his own power. Felipe falls further into crisis as he begins to doubt the accuracy of the Bible and could possibly be losing his mind due to syphilis. By the end of the third section, it is obvious that Felipe’s desire to get close to God is little more than a massive ego trip. He feels no remorse for killing innocent people be they heretics, Jews, Muslims, or peasants and grows more and more into obsessive self-absorbtion as a quest to reach God by separating himself from the world. His attempt at redemption has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with escapism into a fantasy world that negates all that exists.

In the second section, a story is told by one of the Bastards, known as the Pilgim, about a journey to a new world across the sea. He gets on board a ship with Pedro, the elderly ship builder introduced earlier in the novel who dreams of sailing away to a new land. They use the planet Venus as a navigational guide since it appears in the western sky every dawn. This is a subtle hint of the Pilgrim’s identity since the indigenous Azteco-Toltec people associated Venus with their returning sun god Quetzalcoatl. If you are familiar with the mythology and Mexican history, you can already see where this is leading.

The ship gets caught in a whirlpool and sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. This is obviously symbolic of a passage through a birth canal. They land on the shore of what is now Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico. Pedro, a symbol of the Old World, gets killed while the Pilgrim is welcomed into a community of indigenous people who treat him as a hero meant to replace their elderly dying chieftain. That chieftain is kept inside a basket that just might resemble a cradle, but in any case, he gives the Pilgrim some clues as to his true identity and what he must do to fulfill his destiny. Before going off on a series of adventures and encounters, the Pilgrim meets with a young witch whose physical appearance links her to Celestina. On their first meeting, she is a young woman who promises him love if he pursues her into the interior of the New World, Eros in pursuit of Thanatos. Along the way he encounters monsters who we later learn represent his dark side which he must incorporate into his being. This involves Quetzalcoatl’s alter ego the Smoking Mirror. Mirrors, self-reflection, and death are closely linked throughout the whole novel.

The second time the Pilgrim encounters Celestina, she is on top of a pyramid where various rituals are performed including a human sacrifice in which the victim’s heart is cut out of his living body. At this point Celestina has aged into maturity and takes on the aspect of a goddess who devours all the filth brought to her by the community for the sake of disposal. Again, she gives further information and instructions to the Pilgrim.

The third time he meets with Celestina, the Pilgrim is being hailed by the Aztec people in the city of Mexica as their god Quetzalcoatl who is prophesied to return and bring peace to their empire. They give the Pilgrim access to everything in the city but he rejects all of it for Celestina who appears for the final time. This time she is an old hag and tells him he can only receive her love temporarily before he is sacrificially killed.

This whole second section is heavy in mythological symbolism, alternate time dimensions that pop into the narrative occasionally, and parallels with other themes in the first and third sections of the book. One example is that the Pilgrim on his journey purifies himself, eliminating his filth, and eventually rejects the world’s wealth to be in solitude with his goddess in a way that parallels the crisis of faith suffered by Felipe el Senor. As we learn in the third section of the novel, the elder King Felipe is actually the Pilgrim’s father and his mother is Celestina. Recall how Felipe rapes Celestina at the beginning of the story. The cycles of death, birth, and return are constant throughout this whole book.

In the third section, the trajectory of Felipe el Senor’s life and ascetic rejection of the world continues. The story of the Three Bastards takes on more prominence. One of them , Don Juan, arrives and seduces Felipe’s wife, Queen Isabella and then moves on to all the other women in the castle, namely nuns and duennas. The second Bastard, the Idiot Prince, marries a dwarf and the two of them retreat into a relic filled coffin because he can’t handle the complexities of life. The Pilgrim tells his story to Felipe, who doesn’t believe it, but it inspires Guzman and others to build a ship and sail off to New Spain which we now know as Latin America. Before leaving, Guzman leads a failed peasant rebellion against the King and then takes the peasants who lost the battle overseas to colonize the Americas.

But then there is the backstory of the Three Bastards who are all sons of the elder King Felipe and the brothers of the younger Felipe el Senor. They are raised as wanderers by Celestina and Ludovico. All three boys represent different characteristics of Castilian Spanish society. Also, some characters speculate that the Three Bastards are actually all the same person since no one ever sees the three of them together.

That carries over into another theme. While living in a Jewish village, Ludovico gets a job translating between Hebrew and Spanish. While working with the rabbi, he begins studying the cabbala. The rabbi goes into a long discourse on numerology. These long passages can be a challenge for those of us who are not inclined towards mysticism, but the important part that applies to the rest of the novel is the first three numbers. Number one represents totality but also solitude. Number two is a factor of conflict because two individual entities can not synthesize into one. Therefore three is necessary to unify one and two , holding them together in a trinity. This goes on until number 24 or so, but the explanation of the first three numbers plays out throughout the entire novel. Whether this has symbolic meaning or if it is simply a narrative device is debatable.

Lastly, the colonization project of New Spain and the settlers’ return to Spain is given marginal literary space. Colonialism turns out to be a disaster for both the Spainish and the indigenous people who live in the colonies. But despite the extreme length of this text, the colonialism really emphasizes what the novel is all about. Before leaving for the New World, Spanish society was in a state of crisis as it transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. They were emerging from feudalism, religious backwardness and hypocrisy, poverty, disease, and a desire for impossible utopias to be reached into democracy, economic mercantilism, science, rationalism, and social justice. Fuentes demonstrates how this flux in social changes was transferred over to the colonies of Latin America, a traumatic birth for a new society that left it in a mess that only replicated and exacerbated the failures of the Old World.

Felipe el Senor does not believe any of this is happening because it is not written in a book. Aside from depicting the conditions that lead to the troubled birth of Latin America, this novel forces you to ask the epistemological question of how we can know what we know with certainty. Memory and the written word are imperfect and inaccurate, so how can we be certain of anything if we rely on these to make judgments about truth? Fuentes plays a sly trick when he has one character say that the Jews had preserved Greek scientific manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and yet, all the historians I have read say it was the Muslims who preserved those ancient Greek writings. But what if those historians were wrong? Fuentes forces us to confront the limitations of our own ability to know.

There is so much more that you could spend a decade or two explaining all the different ideas contained in Terra Nostra. Another point that Fuentes makes is that one lifetime is not long enough to reach completion as a human being. Is he suggesting reincarnation? Maybe. But one idea I get from that thought is that since we can only experience one life within our lifetime, through the lives contained in books we can have access to an infinite number of other lives lived either in fiction or reality. Even if the written text is inaccurate, those fragmentary understandings can still help us to live more than once, at least vicariously. Terra Nostra is not a book for everyone, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s worth the effort.