Book Review & Analysis: Democracy by Joan Didion

Democracy

by Joan Didion

      The lifestyles of the rich and well connected aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Take it from Joan Didion, the author who reveals how mundane people actually are by stripping away all the explanatory psychology and decorative frills that go along with literature. Her novel Democracy is about a political family that lives in the public eye. But when it comes to understanding them, the political life is little more than some details in the background.

Joan Didion herself speaks directly to the audience as the narrator in the first person. Her literary persona is immediately collapsed since her role as narrator is the same role she plays in life. Joan Didion was a journalist and as a journalist she plays the part of covering the protagonist, Inez Victor, writing articles about her for magazines and then piecing them together to form this novel which traces her life up to 1975. This postmodernist style isn’t any different from the fragmentary and non-linear style of Didion’s other novels. Along the way, the narrator provides a meta-narration, commenting on how a work of fiction is written and how choices in descriptive language are used to communicate emotions and information about characters and situations. In this way, Didion doesn’t break through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly; there is no fourth wall to begin with.

Inez grows up in Hawaii with her sister Janet. Both of them marry into powerful families. Inez marries Harry Victor and Janet marries Dick Ziegler. The Zieglers are wealthy and well-connected members of the business class in Hawaii. And Harry Victor is a rising star in the Democratic party. His involvement catapults him into the Senate and in 1972 he runs in the Democratic primaries for president but loses. Because of this, Inez, who bears a passing resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, is a glamorous socialite in the public eye. In her home life, Inez is a mother of two.

There is a darker undercurrent to her marriage though. During her younger days, she falls in love with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent and arms trafficker. Throughout their lives they admire each other from a distance. But during a family vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia the two run into each other. The family vacation coincides with anti-American riots breaking out in Jakarta, mirroring the point where Inez and Harry begin losing interest in each other. Jack Lovett helps the family to escape to a cabin in the mountains outside Bandung and while there, Inez and Jack rekindle their interest in each other.

Jack Lovett subsequently gets deeply involved in espionage activities as the Vietnam War escalates and Harry Victor runs his presidential campaign on an anti-war ticket, similar to George McGovern who, as we now know, also lost the election, unfortunately giving Nixon another term in office. Inez’s heart is torn between an anti-war politician and a CIA agent with no political or ideological affiliation. This symbolizes her weak identity and it is something that her persona, fed to the public by the media, in incapable of seeing.

The relationship between Inez and Jack comes to the forefront of the novel when Inez’s father kills Janet and a Hawaiian man in her home. After the murder, the Ziegler family gather for dinner. During the meal, Jack Lovett walks in and from there he reconnects with Inez. The murder is the turning point where Inez and Harry’s shaky relationship falls apart, revealing it to be more a marriage for the public eye as opposed to one of domesticity. As Inez’s sister dies in the hospital, it is Jack who is there for her emotional support.

Other details get revealed through the murder. One is that Janet might have been cheating on her husband and the affair complicates the relationship between the Ziegler family and the established political and economic order of Hawaii. The Hawaiian man killed by Inez and Janet’s father is tied to a powerful Hawaiian family who were about to close a deal selling low-grade swamp land to the Ziegler family for development. Because of the murder, the deal will fall through. Jack Lovett is connected with all this because his arms dealing is somehow tied in with the Ziegler family’s businesses. But all of these interconnections are murky and not fully explained. The whole mess serves to underline the disconnection between Inez’s family and the Zieglers who are all white settlers and intruders in the Hawaiian islands. The theme of disconnection among the wealthy elite is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets brought into the foreground because of the murder is the dysfunctional relationship between the parents and children in the Victor family. The son Adlai, no doubt named after Adlai Stevenson though I’m not sure why, is an underachieving student who is getting involved in the anti-war movement on his campus. The daughter Jessie works in a fast food restaurant in Seattle after a suicide attempt. She has just gotten out of rehab for heroin addiction. When Harry Victor arrives in Seattle to take his kids to Hawaii for Janet’s funeral, Jessie decides on a whim to move to Vietnam. Her motivations aren’t clear, but she seems hungry for excitement and hasn’t put any thought into her decision.

After arriving in Vietnam, Jessie gets a job as a cocktail waitress in a country club for Westerners just as the embassies begin evacuating all Americans from Vietnam due to their losing the war. Jack Lovett flies to Vietnam to retrieve her, using his CIA connections to find her and transport her out, utilizing a string of secret military bases in the South Pacific and eventually leaving her in Hawaii. Soon after, Jack Lovett dies in the swimming pool of the hotel in Jakarta where he mysteruously met up with Inez and her family while they were on vacation several years before. The important part of Jessie’s naive escapade is that she would have gotten stuck in the danger zone of post-war Vietnam if the Victor family didn’t have connections in the CIA through Jack Lovett. Jessie most likely would have been imprisoned or executed as North and South Vietnam reunited under the communist government.

The murder also brings one other issue out into the open in the character of Billy Dillon, a man whose job it is to manage the public personae of the Victor family. He works behind the scenes to advise the Victors on what to say in order to minimize controversy and maximize their positive public image. When Inez’s father commits murder, Billy Dillon is called in to first help negotiate a lenient sentence with the Hawaiian judiciary and second to control messaging in the media to cut down on the perceived severity of the crime. Didion demonstrates the efficacy of this in the text by making it unclear why the killing happened and what it meant to the killer. There is a direct connection between the first person meta-narrative of Joan Didion, who explains her literary technique in the course of telling the story, and Billy Dillon who uses the same semantic tricks to manipulate a receptive audience’s perceptions. Billy Dillon again carries the theme of disconnection since he symbolizes the fracture between media image and the private life reality of the Victors. On a private level he is even further a representative of disconnection because he is secretly in love with Inez even though she appears not to be aware of it.

Inez, in the end, drops out of American society. She only becomes her true self after the failure of her marriage and the death of Jack Lovett. She can no longer depend on others, especially men, to support her. Her epiphany comes when Jessie runs away to Vietnam and Inez’s privilege is used to rescue her. This is paired in the story with televised media images of Vietnamese refugees desperately clinging onto American helicopters as they lifet off from military bases. It is important that these images are shown on TV since this demonstrates how cut off Inez is from the real world. She only knows about the refugees through the news media, just as the public only knows her through the same channel. The refugees don’t have the luxuty of being rescued by their own personal secret agents. They have to risk their lives en masse to even have a hope for survival. And Jessie simply gets rescued because her family has powerful connections. This drives Inez to find self-actualization by running a refugee resettlement program from a mosquito-ridden bungalow in Kuala Lumpur. She abandons her life of wealth, privilege, and fame and finds herself by saving the Southeast Asian people without privilege, wealth, or connections who are becoming displaced from their homelands and way of life. Inez ends up being no longer disconnected, no longer living an empty domestic life, and feeling fulfilled and integrated by using what privilege she has to benefit others.

This novel is not exactly a political drama. In fact, the political drama mostly happens in the background and only emerges into the main narrative at certain points. It is really about how mundane the problems of an elite ruling class actually are. Being wealthy and connected, they have powerful mechanisms to help them manage their dysfunctional relationships, but these mechanisms fracture them as human beings. Incapable of knowing themselves, they become vapid, empty husks without any true purpose. Inez and her familial relations are socially disconnected from the state of Hawaii they have chosen, as intruders, as a place of settlement. Inez is disconnected from her public media persona which is managed by Billy Dillon. She is disconnected from her husband and family. She is also disconnected from Jack Lovett who she loves, but only at a distance. She has no sense of identity because she lives through other people who have only fragmentary ties to her. It is only when she clears away all the debris of her social life and media image that she can begin to relate to herself as herself. If this isn’t a simplified version of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t know what is. The political sides of the story are like shadows in the background, partially shaped by the Victor and Ziegler family relations. The background politics are distorted shapes and only vaguely connected to them. The real politics are those internal to the nuclear and extended families. And their problems aren’t any different from the kinds of problems families outside the ruling elite have on a regular basis.

Stripped of all the political noise, this familial drama is basically a soap opera. It’s a surface level plot with superficial twists about people without much depth. Even more so, it is a soap opera because where else would you find such WASPish rich people with names like Dick Ziegler, Harry Victor, or Jack Lovett? They are such wonderbread bland characters that even the name Inez sounds exotic in comparison. Even the tropical location of Hawaii does nothing to enhance their character. This novel could be set in Ohio, Nebraska, or Iowa and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like all of Joan Didion’s novels, this one takes place almost entirely on the surface, but the interplay of those surfaces reveals something about the hidden truths of the people inhabiting a Didion world. A lot of times the hidden space that gets revealed is filled with little more than emptiness. Until the end of the story, this is true of Inez.

Democracy is the type of novel that needs to be read more than once if you want to pick up on all the subtle nuances. It is also the type of novel that needs to be thought about after you’ve finished reading it. Although its simple plot isn’t hard to follow, it was difficult to connect with during while reading. After finishing and allowing for some distance, it was easier to piece all the fragments together into a whole for clarity so that its themes could be considered. This might be a frustrating process for readers who wish to be spoon fed information with clear explanations. This is too bad because if you take a step back and allow the pieces to fall into place, it makes for a challenging but provocative novel. This isn’t Joan Didion’s best work, but it is good enough and certainly deserves a second reading.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

      She always runs away. She always leaves. This is the observation made by Warren, the ex-husband of Charlotte Douglas who is the protagonist of Joan Didion’s third novel A Book of Common Prayer. Following up on her two previous novels, ones in which the female protagonists suffer because they refuse to take command of their lives, Didion takes a turn in the opposite direction here. Maybe you can say that Charlotte doesn’t end up any better off because of her decisiveness. In fact she gets killed at the beginning of the novel whereas the wives in Run River and Play It As It Lays both survive, albeit under unenviable circumstances.

The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is an obvious stand-in for Joan Didion. She lives in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande where she is connected directly to the government due to her ex-husband’s ownership of a palm oil plantation which happens to be the biggest business in the tiny country. Grace is a former anthropologist who abandons her career because she can never understand human motivations even though she has a sharp perception of human behavior. She changes to a biologist mid-career since organic molecules are easier to understand. They have no subjectivity and only respond to stimuli. This is a clear explanation of Didion’s literary style; in a truly postmodern sense, all her writings concern interactions between surface appearances as opposed to depth and inner meaning. As such, Grace bears witness to Charlotte’s life and death without examining her subjective mind. Yet despite this avoidance of explanation, meaning does emerge in the patterns of Charlotte’s behavior.

During one of the frequent revolutionary coups that make Boca Grande’s politics and economy so unstable, Charlotte gets gunned down on the street. The killing is used as an internal narrative frame. The content of Charlotte’s life up until the time of her death is the content of most of the novel.

A second narrative frame is introduced just after the killing at the beginning and closes at the end of the book after the story of Charlotte’s life finishes. This tells the story of Charlotte’s daughter Marin. This introduction of a second framing device that ends outside the parameters of the first framing device is one way that Didion creates a decentered narrative, one that makes the story feel fractured as though it is falling apart rather than coming together. The non-linear narrative that jumps around between different places and times in seemingly random order, along with reoccurring lines of dialog and thought echoing and repeating throughout the text, heighten the confusion and disorganization. It’s like the pieces of the novel are painted onto glass panels that have been shattered and you follow the story by examining each one and trying to imagine how they once all fit together. This is a good example of how a narrative structure can reflect the theme of its subject.

Marin’s presence is absent from the initial passage that introduces her character when Charlotte meets with her husband Leonard and her ex-husband, also Marin’s father, Warren in her house in San Francisco. The FBI is there because they are looking for Marin due to the daughter’s involvement in a terrorist bombing in San Francisco followed by the hijacking and destruction of an airplane in Utah. Marin has gone underground and disappeared, although it is likely Leonard knows where she is all along. Leonard is a lawyer in high standing with revolutionaries because of his dedication to defending Leftist activist groups in court. He has deep ties to revolutionary factions in Latin America. Or does he actually work for the CIA?

The ex-husband Warren, on the other hand, is the worst possible husband. A professor of English literature from New Orleans, he is obnoxious, mean, racist, manipulative, and violent. Chronically drunk, he has a nasty habit of slapping and punching women who don’t cooperate with him. He is the kind of guy who would never have survived the #MeToo movement. But Warren understands Charlotte more than anybody else in the novel. He may not have any insight into her psyche, but he does know one thing Charlotte always does: run away. As we learn more about their marriage, it is clear that he gave her good reason to run away. But he also recognizes that running away is her habitual reaction to any situation she finds herself in. That is why he has an ulterior motive in coming to San Francisco. He wants to reconnect with Charlotte and coaxes her to visit him in New Orleans to see his brother. Warren claims his brother is dying of cancer, but in actuality it is Warren who is dying of cancer. Of course Charlotte goes. Warren knows she will run away from her absentee husband Leonard. She is easy prey and he wants one last fling before he dies. The result is a predictable disaster.

Charlotte ends up in Boca Grande where she makes an effort to be sociable with everyone although she stands out and never fits in any where. It is here that she meets the narrator Grace who befriends her, protects her, and tries to understand her. That task is not easy. Charlotte spends her days at the coffee shop in the airport, believing that her daughter Marin will be arriving by plane even though she never does. Some well-connected people think she is a CIA agent since the embassy alerted them to her presence and warned that she is of protected status by unofficial US law. She also reads propaganda pamphlets distributed by the CIA and makes late night phone calls to San Francisco for Northern California weather reports. The police think these are coded messages although we never find out what they are all about. She is also friendly with a group of Leftist activists that arrive from the USA and other parts of Latin America. Yet Grace observes that she has no understanding of what any of these people are up to. Grace’s most important observation is that Charlotte lives in the mental space of how she wants the world to be which is distinctly cut off from the way the world really is.

As rumors of a coup circulate, Charlotte’s husband Leonard arrives in Boca Grande to convince her to leave before the revolution breaks out. But he fails since Charlotte has decided to stop running away from life and stay where she is, working in a medical clinic that serves the people of Boca Grande. As all Americans are evacuated from the country, Charlotte stays and continues going to work even though a bomb has gone off at the clinic. She insists she is politically neutral in any situation whatsoever and is oblivious to the danger surrounding her. All that remains of her life at this point is the stubborn refusal to not run away anymore. And that is how she gets shot dead in the street. It’s probable that the revolutionaries kill her because they think she is an intelligence agent. Whether or not this is true is unclear, but in this case perceptions matter more than reality. Grace offers no explanation for any of her of this, but as a reader I conclude that Charlotte lived an uninformed life, relying on her instincts alone and in the end her instincts failed. She couldn’t hold her life together and her intuition didn’t save her when it should have.

As for the political situation, Charlotte doesn’t understand it and she doesn’t want to understand it. Neither does anyone else. The coup in Boca Grande is never explained because it doesn’t serve any definite purpose. It’s led by a bunch of bored young people and gets put down by another counter-revolutionary army of bored young people. All these bored young people are attached to the wealthy family that rules Boca Grande. Mixed up in this guerilla warfare are a bunch of American kids and Leonard, the lawyer who got rich by defending political activists in court. None of these people have a coherent ideology. They just have nothing better to do with themselves. Joan Didion, the lifelong Republican, had a low opinion of the American counter culture. If you’ve read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” you’ll know what I mean.

After fleeing Boca Grande and returning to the United States, Grace tracks down Charlotte’s daughter Marin who is hiding in a safehouse for activists in Buffalo, New York. Sullen and defensive, the young terrorist refuses to discuss her parents, Charlotte and Warren. After learning both of them are dead, she reacts by spewing out rhetoric about the revolution and the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Her rhetoric is a protective armor, sheltering her from the troubles of the outside world by escaping into fantasies about guerilla warfare. When Grace pierces this armor, Marin breaks down in tears. What is revealed is the disconnection between her and her parents who never provided her with the emotional support she needed. The implication is that Warren abused her and Charlotte ran away from her. Most likely, Marin found the support she craved in the politics of Leonard, Charlotte’s second husband, and the activist movements he associates with.

This novel is Joan Didion at her best. She builds on the fractured narrative style of her previous two novels simply by adding in more thematic elements and layers. This is also accomplished by using the first person narrative of Grace as a metanarrative that explains the author’s intentions. Grace’s function is to show without telling. She offers almost no explanations of what happens and allows room for the reader to piece everything together for themselves. The story is all on the surface, but the fragments of the story all point the reader in the direction of its meaning. Grace gives up on anthropology because she can’t understand human motivations. She sees only patterns of behavior and tells the story in this way. She becomes a biologist because she can understand why molecules interact they way they do and, again, she writes about human behavior in this way. Mid-novel she begins using metaphors derived from molecular biology to describe the behavior of the characters. But it is through the reader’s observation of behavioral patterns, how some patterns repeat and then get shattered from outside interference, that explanatory motivations reveal themselves. Grace’s narrative doesn’t tell us what Charlotte’s or Marin’s motivations are, but she does point your attention in the right direction and lets you draw the conclusions. This is a successful way of writing about surfaces so the reader can see through the cracks at what lies underneath. This is showing without telling.

After finishing A Book of Common Prayer it may be obvious that Joan Didion wrote the same kind of book over and over again. Her stories are all about a shallow woman who lives by her wits and instincts alone. She has trouble making decisions and gets tossed around by unseen forces that are remote and yet more powerful than she is. She sees the world solely from her own flawed point of view. And to what extent is Joan Didion writing from an autobiographical perspective? I don’t know. Her novels are without heroes, but maybe there is some kind of strength in their weaknesses. But I do know you might be tempted to cast a critical eye of judgment on her characters. Then the question remains: aren’t her characters a lot more like us than we would like to admit? By reading her novels, aren’t we looking at ourselves in the shards of shattered mirrors whether we like it or not? How many of us truly understand ourselves or the world we live in? Maybe she’s telling us to be more cautious in our approach to other human beings.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.

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: 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.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

      We commemorate death and dying. But death is not what matters. What does matter is the life we live from birth until our exit from the world. Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz is all about the life of a Mexican business man, revolutionary soldier, and failed lover.

This story begins with Artemio Cruz lying on his death bed, surrounded by doctors, a priest, a business partner, and his family, all of which have some degree of respect for him, but no particular feelings of love. Through flashbacks, memories, reminiscences, and recorded conversations being played back on tape, the story of Mexico’s most powerful businessman is told. If it sounds a lot like Citizen Kane, that’s because the film by Orson Welles was a huge inspiration on Fuentes in his writing of this story. This isn’t just a retelling of that classic film as it goes off into so many different directions, some of which are more personal. One difference is that an early passage in the book goes into extensive detail about Cruz’s body, described both internally and externally along with all the physical pains and discomforts he suffers as he dies. At first you may wonder why Fuentes went through the trouble of describing a body in all its details, especially when physiology is such common knowledge. But the body is the center of everybody’s life; without it we wouldn’t exist so it serves as a starting point for the biography. One thing we gather is that Artemio Cruz has the same body that most people have. He doesn’t start out in life being any different from most other people in that way. At the base of this extraordinarily powerful man is an ordinary body. Fuentes starts playing on our sympathies from the start. Add to this the physical suffering of Cruz and we are forced to see his humanity before any other details are added.

The details that get added are not always favorable to Cruz. As the narrative alters between past and present, we understand how terrible he could be as a businessman. We get taken back to the end of the Mexican Revolution when Cruz marries Catalina in order to inherit her father’s estate, an hacienda and a treasure trove of material wealth. Due to the laws of primogeniture, the estate should rightfully have gone to Catalina’s brother who died in the Revolution. She blames Artemio Cruz for his death, but marries him anyways. Cruz had originally joined the Revolution because of the promised agrarian reform, but in the end he uses that reform to acquire wealth and property, betraying the ideals and the other soldiers who fought by his side. As a shrewd and ruthless businessman, his empire grows The more successful he grows, the more callous he becomes until he is unable to have feelings for anybody, possibly not even for himself.

Artemio Cruz’s thick skin serves him well as he fights in the Revolution. Several flashbacks from his deathbed tell the stories of gunfights, battlefields, imprisonment, and how he connived his way out of getting shot in a duel. His actions could almost be seen as heroic even though he leaves one soldier to die when he could have saved his life. That incident is the big turning point in his biography. He abandons that wounded soldier to return to a village he had spent the night in before. He had fallen in love with a young lady named Regina and spent the night with her. Upon his return he finds that she has been hung from a tree, along with other villagers, by troops of Federales. Distraught by her murder, Cruz carries memories of her throughout the rest of his life.

If there is anything we can have sympathy for in Artemio Cruz, it is his inability to fulfill his desire for love. His wife Catalina does’nt love him and only stays in the marriage to hold on to her wealth which she I inherited through him. His daughter does not love him either and her sole concern is inheriting his money when he dies. One humorous scene has Cruz sick in his bed. His wife and daughter ask him where he keeps his will and he amuses himself at their expense by lying about where it is kept while watching them frantically dig through his possessions in search of it and then crying when they can’t find it. Catalina isn’t without love though since she does love her daughter and she loved her son whose death she blames on Artemio Cruz. Otherwise, Cruz spends his life pursuing misstresses who don’t reciprocate his love or who hold on to him for a short time because they want his money. He was luckless with love and this failure casts a melancholy tone over the whole story.

This all comes back to Regina. Cruz revisits her name throughout his life story in the way the word “rosebud” keeps reappearing in Citizen Kane. For him , she is the only woman who ever said she loved him like she meant it. She died the day after they met. After all his romantic failures, he ends his life with nothing more than a memory of one night. It is hard to tell if Regina even loved him. His memory could be inaccurate or he could be deceiving himself. She could have just been a prostitute that he hired for one night. We can never be sure how she truly felt. But he clings on to the memory of his love as if that one victory were the only one that ever mattered in his life, a memory that would crush him if he ceased believing in it.

The only other source of love in Cruz’s life is his son Lorenzo. When they travel together back to the derelict hacienda on the beach in Veracruz where Artemio Cruz grew up, they bond as father and son. And yet, the young Lorenzo tells his father that he has chosen to go abroad to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. (This might be a nod in the direction of Hemingway) It is there where Lorenzo dies. Catalina blames Cruz for the tragedy, but through a clever narrative device, we have to infer why from a later passage in the story.

At a ball thrown by Artemio Cruz for the upper classes where he lives, we learn how he has no friends. The attendees are nothing but entertainment for him. They are puppets and he pulls their strings. That is all he wants from other people. He wants to make them dance since his sole amusement in life is control over others. A young man approaches him and asks for a loan to start a business. Cruz lectures him on his philosophy of life. Power is the result of rebellion. Power has to be earned. During this explication, there are flashbacks to Cruz and Lorenzo riding horses in the jungle of Veracruz. If you put this conversation together with the cause of Lorenzo’s demise, you can deduce why Catalina blames her husband for their son’s death. The same narrative device is used to narrate the death of Regina. Cruz returns to the village and learns about the hanging of the villagers. He sees a body hung from a tree. One of them has the feet of Regina and he sees the hem of her dress. It is never explicitly stated that she died, but your mind is directed to a blank space in the narrative that is inevitably filled in. It is all the more horrifying because the brutality is shown indirectly, leaving your mind to see it subjectively. This technique is used in film. Notice that in the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you never actually see the knife stabbing into the woman.

The closer we get to Artemio Cruz’s death, the farther back in time the flashbacks go. The story of his childhood is the last thing we learn about him before his demise. Although surrounded by the lush jungles of Veracruz and the paradise of the nearby beach, it is a childhood of poverty where he was raised by a mulatto on an hacienda that was burned down during an uprising. His unenviable childhood at the bottom of society comes full circle as Artemio Cruz dies as one of the richest and most powerful men in Mexico. As the birth and death of this man are tied together at the end of the narrative, Carlos Fuentes writes some lyrical passages portraying all the natural landscapes and the varieties of people inhabiting the land of Mexico. He thereby makes Artemio Cruz a cipher for the nation of Mexico and its entire history up to the modern era.

It is impossible to talk about this novel without mentioning its literary technique. Such a technique can be said to be nothing short of cinematic. In fact a lot of film techniques are used in the narrative construction. A craeful analysis reveals not only the use of flashbacks for narrative layering, but also camera techniques like overlays, close ups, panning, montage, and rapid cuts. The action sequences have the visual impact of western movies too. This is not accidental as Fuentes consciously used film techniques to write. It isn’t just visually cinematic though. Fuentes adds in the subjective dimensions of literature that are inaccessible through the medium of film. The sensation of feeling internal physical pain or the sadness one feels when haunted by the memories of failed love affairs can only be delivered through dialogue in cinema, but literature as a subjective form can use language to deliver these sensations in a direct way that other mediums can not. This is done successfully in this novel.

But as entrancing as this whole book may be, it does have its flaws. In a postmodern sense, the narrative has the feel of a collage incorporating different author’s styles in different passages. While Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway were previously mentioned, there are other passages that mimic the styles of Faulkner, Joyce, Sartre, Neruda, and others. At times this mimicry feels too obvious and derivative. Another flaw is that in the attempt to make Cruz an all-encompassing symbol of Mexico in the same way that James Joyce made Leopold Bloom a symbol of Ireland, doesn’t quite work. Although Cruz experiences Mexico at all the levels of its social strata and embodies the contradiction at the heart of the Mexican Revolution in the way he betrays its ideals, he isn’t quite big enough as a symbol to contain all that Mexico has to offer. The pre- and post-Conquest eras of Mexico up to the Revolution barely figure into his story, for example, and it’s not convincing to say that Mexico is as unlovable as a country as Cruz is as a person. Mexico really is a country that has a lot to love in its culture, its history, its geography, and its everyday people. Despite these flaws, this is still an amazing novel and one of those books that you really must read before you die.

The Death of Artemio Cruz is a landmark, a turning point, and a cornerstone in the development of Latin American fiction. The writing style is tricky and off-putting at first, but the effort to understand it is worthwhile. Against your better judgments, you may find yourself sympathizing in part with Artemio Cruz as he suffers while dying. Just give in to those feelings, but don’t forget the terrible things he does as well. That’s what literature is for. The world is a messy and confusing place and experiencing that through the written word can only enhance our understanding of it if we take the time to think.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: Miss MacIntosh My Darling by Marguerite Young

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

by Marguerite Young

      It’s all about the isolation of the individual. It’s also about the interrelationship between life and death. More or less. That’s it. But such simple concepts get stretched out into 1,321 pages of dense, long winded, and sometimes opaque text that is written less like a novel and more like an extended prose poem. Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is like atomic fission. Just as a nuclear physicist takes a microscopic atom and smashes it against anothet atom to make a bomb explode, Young takes the tiniest of ideas, clashes them together like cymbals, and the result is an explosion of contemplative language.

Vera Cartwheel is the narrator. At the start of the book, she is a thirteen year old girl, living with her invalid mother and being raised by a nursemaid named Miss MacIntosh. Vera thinks of Miss MacIntosh as her mentor and hero. The elderly woman is described as being plain, practical, and pragmatically opposed to any embellishments or flights of the imagination. The education she gives Vera involves doing chores in preparation for her future as a housewife and making her memorize the facts in an almanac. They live in a mansion owned by Vera’s bedridden mother on the ocean shore in Massachusetts. Then one day, Miss MacIntosh wanders off into the sea and disappears.

Soon, we find Vera Cartwheel on an old bus, traveling at night through Indiana, going in the direction of Miss MacIntosh’s hometown in Iowa. Aside from Vera and the bus driver, there are two other passengers, newlyweds named Madge and Homer. The two have a long discussion about Homer’s ex-girlfriend who, according to Madge, is dying of tuberculosis. Homer had never heard this news and Madge chatters on about it all throughout the bus ride. We never find out if Homer’s ex is really dying or not, but it is quite obvious that Madge is jealous of her. In this conversation, we get introduced to a theme that gets examined throughout the whole novel: the relationship between marriage and death. Closer to the end of the bus ride, the couple also discuss other people in their town and the themes here morbidly involve poverty, incest, mental illness, suicide, and the possibility that a woman who had married two brothers in two separate marriages had murdered both of them. Another interesting thing to notice abput their conversation is that the two of them hardly know each other. Madge and Homer’s discussion about the dark side of their hometown is one of the only instances of actual dialogue throughout the whole book. Thus, the two characters who display the deepest level of intimacy are two people who barely understand each other. Other character speak in the forms of soliloquies or monologues, sometimes with Vera listening with only minimal participation.

The bus driver is another example of this. While drinking whiskey throughout the entire trip, he drunkenly talks endlessly about why he never cuts his hair, how he is unmarried and lives with his mother, and then obsessively rants about a senile doctor who tries to drive a car that is falling apart and has delusions about delivering babies. The doctor delivers babies that never exist. Death, life, presence, and absence are all intertwined. You can’t even be sure that the doctor is real as the bus driver’s babbling seems to veer off into delusion too. In fact you can’t even tell if the bus driver and his leaky bus are real or figments of Vera’s imagination. Throughout the prose, from beginning to end, the interpenetration of reality and fantasy are just as prevalent as the mixture of life and death or presence and absence. One thing is for certain: this bus ride represents to Vera a journey into the unknown and a place where all reference points of familiarity recede. But then again, nothing in the novel, from the start, can ever be known with certainty.

By this point, it becomes clear that this Herclitean dichotomy, this clash and harmony between opposites are a defining element of Young’s writing. Norman Mailer uses this dichotomy to a different effect, but with similar results in terms of expansive prose. Once you latch onto this theme, the ideas become easier to follow. The writing remains dense and heavy until the end though. It moves slowly like a Stanley Kubrick film, say Barry Lyndon, and reading it slowly but steadily helps to move it along with consistency. If compared to music, you could say it moves, possibly at the pace of a glacier or tectonic plate, not with the verse-chorus-verse structure of a rock song, but like the movements of a symphony. It is an exercise in variations on a theme, and the theme is repeated rhythmically like calm waves on a gentle shore.

So as the bus driver pulls into the destined town, Young takes us back to the New England mansion where Vera lives with her mother and Miss MacIntosh. Vera’s mother is bedridden and addicted to opium so that she floats in and out of hallucinations so freely that it is impossible for her to tell what is real and what isn’t. The porous boundary between the real and illusory allowed for visitations of guests from ancient times and the presence of the dead. Through her we get introduced to a whole constellation of objects that may or may not be symbols depending on the context in which they appear. Doorknobs, apples, moths, stars, fireflies, starfish, seashells, and all kinds of other things appear in conjunction in ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes confuse you. It is possible that a state of confusion is what the author is sometimes trying to achieve, especially in some passages relating to her friend Mr. Spizter. Otherwise, the presence of horses is another constant in the text as is the presence of water in all its forms, especially in the form of fog as an element of concealment and confusion, and also the ocean which sometimes acts as an element of consciousness. In any case, water in its varied forms is closely related to revealing and concealing hidden aspects of the writing.

While Vera’s mother lives in the flux of her fantasies and realities, her friend Mr. Spizter lives a life of restraint, rarely ever venturing outside his self-imposed limitations. He hunts butterflies, capturing them and then enclosing them in glass cases for his own private collection, symbolically killing the free spirited creatures of flight to be permanently imprisoned, like Mr. Spitzer is inside his own head. Mr. Spitzer also composes music in his head that no one will ever hear because he never plays it for anybody. Instead he writes it on scraps of paper and cloth in hopes that when he dies, someone will piece them all together to form complete works of music. Is that an indication of the author’s intention? She feeds us loads of information and leaves us to our own devices to piece it together to make a coherent whole. As readers we may never be certain if we put the pieces together in the right way or not. Mr. Spitzer is also a lawyer and executor of last wills; his job is to hunt down lost relatives who, without knowing so, are heirs to abandoned estates. He never succeeds though, so the man who hunts and captures butterflies is never able to track missing ancestors of the deceased. It probably doesn’t matter anyways because the deceased, being dead, can’t know that their relatives are absent. And Mr. Spitzer’s mind is saturated with silent music.

The most distinctive thing about Mr. Spitzer is that his twin brother died. His brother’s first name is Peron and his first name is Joachim. Peron is the opposite of Joachim who lives his life though the avoidance of taking chances while Peron lived by doing nothing but taking chances. He earned a living by being a professional gambler. There is a catch to all this because Vera’s mother was in love with Peron even though Joachim is in love with her. She doesn’t love Joachim though and his presence in her life represents the absence of Peron because Peron, allegedly, committed suicide. The suicide is alleged because we never find out if it really happened or not. It is possible that Joachim and Peron are actually the same person, a point driven home by the complete absence of any references to Joachim’s life before Peron’s death. The way that life and death and presence and absence dance around each other in this book takes on a dizzying pace at times.

Through Mr. Spitzer, we also learn about Cousin Hannah, a suffragette and union leader who traveled all around the world at a time when women rarely left their homes. Mr. Spitzer is the only person present as Hannah lies on her deathbed, a strange paradox considering her supposed fame and distinguished life. Hannah was once a woman who appeared in the newspapers and now she is dying forgotten and alone. Like Vera’s mother, she is in opposition to Mr. Spizter who stays within his own boundaries. While Vera’s mother goes outside her boundaries mentally in opium induced hallucinations, Cousin Hannah went outside her boundaries through travel and activism.

Hannah’s romantic relationships are a prevailing thought at the time of her death. She was once on the verge of getting married and then disappeared from the public on the day of her wedding. There are overt hints that she is a lesbian. She once fell in love with another woman. They were climbing a mountain together during the winter. After ascending to the peak and starting down the other side, Cousin Hannah lost her skirt. Her lover was waiting for her return and when Hannah came back over the peak without her skirt, her romantic interest insisted on going up and over to get it and bring it back, only she never returned, presumably dying in an avalanche or from something else like hypothermia. Here we are again with love-death-marriage-life-presence-absence and the ubiquitous water in the form of snow, ice, fog, and tears.

Narratively, the stories of Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah are told in the first person omniscient by Vera who probably isn’t even present in the room as Mr. Spitzer patiently waits for Hannah to die. This is a strange trick to pull off since the narrator presumably has no access to the inner workings of the others’ minds. The two of them do soliloquize parts of their story, but these passages are largely told from Vera’s point of view. This is strange also because, even though the two characters sometimes speak in monologues, neither of them actually interacts with each other. This is true throughout most of the book; characters mostly overlap while their actual interactions and conversations are minimal. What this does is highlight the individuality and solitude of each character, emphasizing the empty and impenetrable spaces between people despite how proximate to each other they might be physically. Each character is like a tightly sealed container with massive spaces, heavy with emptiness, between them.

The central passages about Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah get to be redundant, excessive, and sometimes confusing. But we get a break from all that when Mr. Spizter goes to a funeral for a frog that once lived in a deaf mute’s mouth and did all his speaking for him. Presence and absence. After that, Mr. Spitzer has a transcendent experience, reminiscent of James Joyce, in which he finishes composing the silent music in his head and “hears” it in the form of hallucinations. It is like French Symbolist poetry where you need to interpret it according to how it feels rather than what it means.

And then the last 400 pages are the strongest, and weirdest, part of the novel. Vera reappears in her mother’s house and learns the darkest secret of Miss MacIntosh before she disappears into the ocean. The secret involves her inability to grow hair and the absence of one breast. In an earlier part of the book, Vera had a dream in which she learns this secret. Learning the truth in a dream is another plunge into uncertainty and also emblematic of how close fantasy and reality are in our consciousness. This secret acts as a broad framing device in this maximalist novel. After the disappearance of Miss MacIntosh, some odd characters enter into the narrative. One is an insane old woman who insists Vera’s mother hired her to be a new nursemaid even though Vera no longer lives there. And when I say this trollish woman is odd, I really mean she is odd.

Then with another broad framing device, we return to Vera on the bus as it pulls into a town at daybreak in front of a hotel. Vera checks in and encounters more weird people. One is a devout Christian farmer who claims to be making the world a better place by being a professional hangman. His wife committed suicide by hanging herself from a peach tree and his kids amuse themselves by hanging dolls, teddy bears, and a sick dog from the same branch. His moral dilemmas run between the same points of certainty and uncertainty that so much of the book is about. He resolves this moral contradiction by pegging it to the certainty of his religion.

Vera also encounters the senile doctor that the bus driver talks about obsessively at the start of the book. This ties in with a waitress Vera encounters in a diner named Esther Longtree. The waitress tells her life story and we learn she has a unique problem. She gets pregnant over and over again, but each term ends in a miscarriage. Now she is pregnant again, but the baby is long past its due date. Esther’s problems are deeper since as she tells her story it gets more and more contradictory. Her miscarriages may be self-induced, they may be abortions, or she may have committed infanticide, killing the babies after they were born. But she so desperately wants to have a baby even though she may have gotten pregnant while being raped. We never know if she was actually raped or not because she has always been eager to get pregnant even if that means sleeping with complete strangers. She repeatedly gets raped or willingly seduced, we can never know for sure, by different men although some of them might have been the same man wearing different disguises. Esther spends her life in the presence of absent babies, each one stillborn or dying at the time of birth. Death-life-absence-presence-confusion-clarity-fantasy-reality-sanity-insanity-certainty-uncertainty. It’s a whirlwind that never stops until the novel ends.

Overall, Young’s novel is an extended meditation on the previously mentioned themes. And by extended, I mean extended to the limits. This is a maximalist novel if there ever was one. By establishing separate points divided by vast open spaces, say stars and fireflies on the beach or starboard and larboard, a vacuum is created to be filled with an influx of semantics, signs, and symbols to be unpacked and analyzed, but then again, sometimes it is a novel to be experienced more than understood. The contemplative themes are basic enough, but if this novel says anything definite through the way it portrays people, it is that we live ghostly existences permeated by nothingness. We barely exist except in the traces we leave behind in the memories and impressions left in the consciousness of others. Notice how other people like Peron, the senile doctor, and Homer’s ex-girlfriend are all explained through the narratives of characters in the narrative of Vera Cartwheel. In a Hegelian sense they may be real people with imaginary stories, alter egos, or pure delusions. We can never be certain and we can never know what separate, incomprehensible lives we may be living in the minds of other people. And if we live in solitude, we may barely even exist at all. We are barely anything more than nothingness that passes away into death anyways, eventually to be forgotten as all the people we knew in our lives die too. And as Esther Longtree explains, we are largely defined by everything we’ve lost. Isn’t this what Derrida’s deconstruction is all about?

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an acquired taste. It is not easy to sink your teeth into and it is not easy to digest. Sometimes it is like eating a sandwich that is bigger than your head. Probably most people who attempt to read it will give up. But it’s not impossible to understand and it is rewarding if you make the effort.