Book Review

Inquisition: The Reign of Fear

by Toby Green

     If you don’t have a low opinion of humanity before reading this book, you will when you finish. Inquisition: The Reign of Fear by Toby Green is a history of The Spanish Inquisition and an analysis of why it happened. Some of the themes he covers are the use of fear for social engineering, the use of religion for the ideological unification of a society, and the Inquisition as a precursor to the totalitarian governments of the 20^th century, namely Nazi Germany. He also gives a sufficient analysis of how scapegoating is used for the purpose of social cohesion.

The Spanish Inquisition began roughly in the 15^th century. Papal Inquisitions had already taken place in the persecution of heretical groups like the Cathars and the Albigenses, as well as with the military order known as the Knights Templar. Green skips over most of the Papal Inquisitions and jumps straight into what happened in Spain and Portugal, which was part of the Spanish kingdom until the later war of separation. In their bid to unify the Iberian peninsula, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella established a bureaucracy to uproot elements of “cultural impurity” in their lands.

The first target of this Spanish Inquisition was the conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism for the sake of assimilating to Spanish culture. These conversos, who were usually wealthy, were accused of practicing Judaism in secret after being baptized. Many of these conversos fled to Portugal to escape the autos da fe, public spectacles in which these alleged heretics were burned alive in public to scare Spanish citizens into obedience. As the Portuguese set sail for distant lands, many of these conversos went abroad as colonialists to escape further persecution when the Inquisition took over in Lisbon. Later victims of this terrorist bureaucracy were Muslims, homosexuals, Lutherans, and people accused of practicing witchcraft.

Green does a good job of writing about the historical events and political context of the Spanish Inquisition. He also does an adequate job of analyzing the social and psychological forces that were related to it. He points out that the torture of the accused and the public autos da fe were effective tools of controlling the beliefs and behavior of the monarchy’s subjects; the threat of torture was enough to keep people submissive and obedient while the display of religious processions that ended with burning heretics alive gave visual proof of what could happen to anyone who stepped out of line. He also demonstrates the psychological impact of rigid ideological purity. When the Inquisition felt they held the ultimate truth, a truth that is so lofty that reaching it is impossible, they felt justified in doing whatever they saw fit to cleanse society of its impurities. The result was censorship, limitations on human rights, persecution of marginalized people, sadism, and mass murder. Being placed above the law, the Inquisition also became corrupt, adhering to a set of double standards by embezzling property from those they persecuted, and also indulging in quid pro quo sexual favors and bribery in exchange for freedom from punishment. Reading this can make you think that the writings of the Marquis de Sade were so scandalous in his time because he was merely articulating the atrocities the European aristocracy had been committing against the lower classes for thousands of years.

Some of the weaker parts of this book involve Green’s psychoanalysis of people subject to the oppression of the Spanish Inquisition. He uses Freudian concepts of hysteria, sexual suppression, paranoia, and neurosis to explain some of the bizarre behaviors indulged in by the religiously-minded in Spain. His analyses actually make sense, but he brushes over them with so little detail that they come off as a little sketchy and based on hasty conclusions. Despite being Freudian concepts, they still make sense in this narrative, but Green is no psychologist and this part of the book is an amateurish attempt at what he sets out to prove.

The biggest flaw in this history is the way the author almost leaves the Catholic church out of the story. It is true that the bishops gave control of prosecution for heretics over to the secular arm of the Spanish government, but little else is said about the church’s role in all this. Almost nothing is said about the Papal Inquisition that preceded the Spanish Inquisition and, by Green’s account, the church remained silent for the almost 400 years that the Spanish Inquisition existed. It is hard to imagine that an institutionalized form of torture and persecution would be ignored by the religious authorities it was meant to defend. The author appears to downplay the role of the church, emphasizing the political nature of the persecution, for the sake of avoiding indulgence in religious intolerance. The Catholic church obviously had opinions on the Inquisition and they were enablers at the very least, so leaving them out of the story is not fair to students of history who need to learn the whole story. What happened needs to be said and if Catholics and their apologists are offended, they should make the effort to reflect on why that might be so rather than attacking historians whose job it is to tell the truth.

What Toby Green is successful in demonstrating is that the Spanish Inquisition was used as a tool of political domination by the Spanish monarchy. In Hannah Arendt’s masterwork The Origins of Totalitarianism, the defining characteristics of authoritarian government are laid out in the final section. Many of them overlap with, and are rooted in, the Spanish Inquisition. These include, infallible leadership, anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, censorship, control of information, purging of unwanted social elements, fear mongering, intolerance of dissenting opinions, and encouraging citizens to spy on each other. The connections are so easy to see that it is a surprise that Hannah Arendt had so little to say about the Inquisition, especially since anti-Semitism was such a rampant part of it, and it is also a surprise to see that Toby Green had nothing to say about Hannah Arendt, despite his opinion that the Spanish Inquisition was a form of proto-fascism that reached full fruition in 20^th century Europe.

Sometimes it is all too easy to look at history and see parallels with our contemporary political climate. The human mind evolved to see patterns and sometimes those patterns are not real while at other times they are. Looking at America’s Republican party today, it is not hard to see elements of latent fascism in their mentality. We can see the presence of conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism, and the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims, scientists, and secular humanists. Most alarming is the conservative Christian idea that a national religion is necessary to unify the state. Arendt also said that the identification of one political party as the only legitimate representative of the nation is a symptom of fascism. In America that political party would be the Republicans and in the medieval Kingdom of Spain and Portugal that state would be the monarchy supported by the Catholic church. If that isn’t enough, remember that torture was used against Muslims in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those wars were wildly popular with the right-wing sector of America. That’s not to say the Democrats don’t have their authoritarian impulses because they certain do, but if another bureaucratic inquisition were to be established, it would be more likely to come from the right. Toby Green’s Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is not a book about contemporary politics, but considering it was written fairly recently, it can be looked at as a warning that we might be on the wrong path of making the same stupid mistakes the human race has continuously made. Just be careful of what you support.

 

Edward Abbey: A Voice In the Wilderness

biographical video

 

Book Review

The Gods Themselves

by Isaac Asimov

     I have a feeling that Isaac Asimov wrote his 1972 novel The Gods Themselves in response to some of the criticism that had accumulated around his writing. His earlier works were largely scientific problem solving stories that were action driven and the human element took a back seat to the situation. He enters newer territory in this novel and tries to bring out the depth in his characters, shifting away from the themes of his other writings. Asimov always claimed that his stories were about what technology does to humans and how they interact with it, but critics were right to point out that character development was lacking in most of his works. In his attempt at auto-correction, Asimov wrote a fairly good novel with interesting, if imperfect, results.

The novel, which is actually three short stories strung together the way science-fiction novels were after 1950 or so, begins with serendipity, the principle that the most profound scientific discoveries are made by chance. When a mediocre engineer named Hallam discovers that a bottle of tungsten sitting on his desk had turned into plutonium, a parallel universe reveals itself. The scientists in his company learn how to harness this exchange to make an Electron Pump that creates a limitless energy for the planet, replacing the need for fossil fuels. In explanation, we get a crash course in particle physics and nuclear fission, all of which is scientifically accurate according to what was known at the time of writing. The catch is that another scientist, named Lamont, does some calculations and learns that this exchange with the parallel universe will cause the sun to burn at an accelerating rate, eventually exploding, killing everyone on Earth. The explanation Lamont gives is, I believe, the concept of thermodynamic entropy. But this isn’t the entropy of an ice cube or a burning match; this is entropy on a cosmic scale. You wouldn’t want us all to turn into a quasar, now, would you?

This is where the human element comes in. Lamont goes on a campaign to convince everyone else that the electron pump will result in disaster. He approaches Hallam, whose head has grown oversized with his fame, but the scientist is too arrogant and vain to admit that something might be wrong. Lamont also approaches a politician and the head of another company, but they are too concerned with their careers to risk bringing this issue to the public’s attention. In terms of character development, this is as good as Isaac Asimov has ever been. Ultimately, though, this story mostly involves a bunch of men discussing and arguing about science. What Asimov gets right here is the statement he makes. He demonstrates how important science is for knowledge and technology, but also shows how it is limited in its scope by human nature. Lamont is like the man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who learns the truth and gets ridiculed for it when he returns to tell others that everything they think they know is wrong. Human society is too myopic, self absorbed, and selfish to be able to see that he is right and that the electron pump is a recipe for Armageddon.

For the next section of the book, we are taken into the parallel universe where the tungsten is being used to generate energy which these para-humans, as the other humans call them, use as a source of food. They receive nourishment from their sun, but it is shrinking and not providing them with what they need for long term survival. The writing is deliberately disorienting. Asimov uses a lot of vocabulary that he does not define, leaving us to our own intuitional skills to figure out what is going on. There are Hard Ones, Soft Ones, Rationals, Emotionals, and some other varieties of para-humans. You have to keep reading until it becomes clear who is who and what is what. You can’t just expect to show up in a parallel universe and expect to understand everything that is going on. Getting off an airplane in Istanbul, Mexico City, or Jakata can be confusing enough as it is and those places aren’t even in a parallel universe.

This section revolves around three characters. Odeen is a Rational and his significant other, Tritt, is an Emotional. These two males have an incomplete sexual relationship because, for the para-humans, a third partner is necessary for reproduction. This is where Dua enters the story. She is an outsider in her society because of her transgression of boundaries. At first, she draws comparisons to lesbians in the America of the 1970s, but as the story goes on, we learn she is a different kind of outsider. She is an Emotional who has Rational tendencies so she gets rejected by everybody. The exception to this is Tritt and Odeen who need her for sex.

Yes, that’s right. These para-humans reproduce in threesomes. Before you go getting all excited, just get those internet porn images out of your head because these para-human horndogs don’t do it quite the same way we do. They are shape-shifting creatures who spread their molecules out and mix their bodies together until they achieve some kind of orgasm in their menage-a-trois. I don’t know if this is one of Asimov’s sexual fantasies or not, but the result is more interesting than erotic from the vantage point of our side of the parallel universe. Asimov had previously been criticized for writing sexless characters, so maybe this was his attempt at eroticism. Or maybe this is an idea from the mind of a middle-aged man trying to sound like he’s on some far out sex trip to the younger generation at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. He was turning into a lecher at this point in his life anyhow. In any case, millennials who are naive enough to think that they invented gender fluidity don’t know as much about previous generations as they think. Asimov certainly conceived of gender fluidity before them and he wasn’t the first one either.

This whole section of the book is more about sci-fi world-building than anything. The author creates a parallel universe that looks like a distortion of our own. He is quite successful at this, but the plot of the novel recedes here for the sake of creating this alternate reality. The two parallel universes do meet, though. The para-humans are scientifically advanced enough to know that their use of the tungsten for their own energy pump will cause the other universe to explode. They really don’t care because, like the humans, the para-humans’ only concern is with themselves. This is where Dua comes in as an alternate form of Lamont. In her hermaphroditic nature, being both a Rational and an Emotional, she possesses both superior intuition and superior morals. So her goal is to save both parallel universes by sending warnings to the humans on the other side.

In the third section, the plot recedes eve further into the background. As a reader, you might expect some sort of connection to be made between the two parallel universes for the sake of solving the problem of the Electron Pump. Instead, whe are taken to the moon where a colony of humans has been built, making a separate society from that of Earth. A scientist from the first section, named Denison, immigrates to the moon and hooks up with a woman named Selene. He tells her of his ambition to solve the problem of the Electron Pump in order to save the universe from destruction. But that theme becomes less important as two other themes dominate the story. One of those is another exercise in world-building. The lifestyle of those living on the moon gets a full description. The other theme is the growing relationship between Denison and Selene. The complication here is that Selene’s exual partner is a surly, rogue scientist named Dr. Barron Neville who has a plan to turn the moon into a giant traveling spaceship. The world-building part is a little annoying. There are passages about climbing up hills and then running down them in the low gravity field of the moon, acrobatics done for the sake of physical fitness, and lots of naked people because citizens of the moon are simply averse to wearing clothes for some reason that never gets explained. I think there are three things going on here. One is that this novel was written soon after the moon landing of Apollo 11 and Asimov wanted to riff on this historic event. Another is that he didn’t want to make the entire story to be nothing but a lot of people talking about science, so he had Denison and Selene have conversations while engaging in other activities. Third, all the naked people sound like another attempt of the author to prove that he is cool to the younger generation who were probably his intended audience. Asimov here tries to be hip and ends uo looking more like a dirty old man.

Ultimately, despite the detailed descriptions of nuclear science and astrophysics, Denison is faced with another human dilemma. Since he can’t convince the people of Earth to abandon the Electron Pump, he has to find a way to introduce some new technology that will contain and deflect the inherent threat of that energy producing system. The problem here is not with the unique idea he presents about the human dilemma; the problem is that it comes off as too little too late. The Electron Pump is the thread that holds the whole novel together, but that thread becomes more and more obscure under layers of other themes as the novel progresses. It’s like a play where the main character makes an uproarious entrance, then fades away in the second and third acts only to try making another uproarious entrance again at the end and then wondering why the audience is so underwhelmed. You could almost say that the Electron Pump is a McGuffin, but considering how much detail Asimov put into describing it and how it creates a dilemma that needs to be solved, I think there is too much literary investment in it to make it function in that way.

The Gods Themselves could be considered a failure in terms of what Isaac Asimov set out to accomplish. But it is a noble, ambitious, and interesting book that is full of worthwhile ideas that pose significant questions. It left me with the impression that the aging author wanted to take his art to a higher level by making his characters more three-dimensional, thereby exploring the more humanistic territories of the scientific endeavor. He was also responding to the culture of his time. With this novel, I think Asimov tried to make a giant leap forward but ended up taking a few steps sideways instead. The result is far from perfect but that shouldn’t deter anyone from reading this unusual work of fiction, even if the plot does peter out in the end. This isn’t Asimov at his best but it is Asimov striving to be the best so the results are worthwhile after all.

 

Book Reviews

The Trial Of the Templars

by Malcolm Barber

     There have been tons of books written about the Knights Templars that are filled with garbage. The Trial Of the Templars by Malcolm Barber isn’t one of them. This is a sober-minded account of how they were taken down by church and state. In fact, this book isn’t actually a comprehensive history of this most famous of all medieval fraternal orders. It is really about their persecution and destruction at the hands of the monarchy.

The opening chapter gives a short account of who the Templars were. They rose up to be the most prominent and successful order of knights during the Crusades at the turn of the 14^th century. They built castles at outposts throughout the Middle East, provided protection for people on pilgrimage to the so-called Holy Land, and set up a primitive banking network. Admission to this secret society was highly coveted because it guaranteed rapid social advancement for the lower classes and they were considered exempt from prosecution by dictate from the Catholic church.

Then Pope Clement V and Phillip IV came to power and everything went to hell for the highly revered knights. Clement V held the papacy in Avignon during the schism when France tried to wrestle the position out of the hands of the Vatican in Rome. Clement V had plans for expanding the power of the church and part of his plot involved uniting all knightly orders into one army in order to fight another crusade. The Templars, who prized their privileged status, didn’t want to share it with others so the conflict went from there. Phillip IV was installed as King of France by divine mandate according to Clement V, who was backed by the monarchy in his bid to control the church from Avignon. Phillip IV also had big ambitions to untie France into one kingdom, taking land from England, Flanders, Germany, Sicily, and Italy. His problem was that the previous king had nearly bankrupted the monarchy by building too many castles and funding too many crusades which were becoming less and less successful due to the rise of Saladin, the commander who led the Muslims to victory over the Crusaders. The battle of Acre, in what is now Syria, was the turning point and they blamed the Templars for the defeat.

Phillip IV needed money and guess who the richest and most unpopular people were at the time?The Templars. Clement and Phillip conspired together to take the order down. The pope declared them heretics and the French aristocracy was put in charge of the trial. Accusations of satanism, blasphemy, and homosexuality were leveled against the Templars and many confessions were obtained after some of the knights were tortured. Many of them retracted their confessions, and those who did were burned at the stake.

Malcolm Barber does an outstanding job of explaining the legal, theological, and technical aspects of the trial and points out how the government and church were able to manipulate the French populace and turn them against the Templars. Part of Barber’s methodology is to repeat over and over again what the Templars confessed. It was the same thing every time: spitting and walking on a cross, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, worshiping idols, kissing men’s anuses, indulging in sodomy, and practicing witchcraft. By repeating the confessions continuously, the words get seared into your brain. This is awfully annoying for the reader, but it seems Barber has done this to make his point. After reading the same thing so many times, you tend to forget that these confessions were the result of torture. We should know by now that during torture, people will confess to anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, to make the torture stop. Imagine how the medieval illiterates who watched the trials would feel after hearing confession after confession without even knowing the knights had spent so much times in the dungeons. While this might be a mind-numbing writing technique, it goes a long way in helping the author to make his case.

Barber breaks up the painful monotony with one interesting chapter that traces the folkloric roots of the accusations against the Templars. He examines myths, legends, and folk tales that were circulating at the time that contributed to the public’s perception that the Templars were Satanists. Other than that, this book is thankfully devoid of any of the occult or conspiracy theory crap that usually gets attached to the name of the Holy Order Of the Knights Of the Temple.

Malcolm Barber’s The Trial Of the Templars is a stone cold attempt at presenting the facts surrounding the liquidation of the Knights Templar. While it isn’t a thrilling read, he succeeds in demonstrating how the real evil happening in this historical legal drama was on the throne and in the church. None of the skullduggery going on had anything to do with what the Templars were actually up to; it was entirely the result of a plot hatched by those in power who were greedy for more wealth. Don’t say it can’t happen here in America during the 21^st century. Human nature hasn’t changed at all since the Middle Ages. 

 

Book Review

The Godmakers

by Frank Herbert

     It’s probably safe to assume that most people who read Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers are big fans of Dune who want to expand their reading of this famous author. When I decided to read this, I thought the best approach would be to put Dune completely out of mind and encounter The Godmakers on its own. Easier said than done. This short novel introduces characters and themes that are so obviously precursors to Herbert’s well-known masterpiece that I found it impossible to separate them.

Sometime in the future, all the inhabited planets at the edge of the galaxy get destroyed in a disaster called the Rim War. The survivors spread out to other planets and begin new processes of environmental adaptation, some of them speciating away from humans. The main character is Orne, a genius rookie government agent who gets sent to a planet to look for signs of possible aggression and the kinds of warnings that might indicate the start of another destructive war. He calls his commanding officer, a grim and serious man named Stetson, to the planet because something doesn’t seem right. Orne follows his hunch and uses Sherlock Holmes style deductive logic to explain why he thinks the inhabitants might be hostile.

Stetson is so impressed with Orne’s abilities that he promotes him to a position in the I-A, a kind of espionage agency that sends agents to newly discovered planets. In the next section, Orne visits a planet with thick jungle and tree-dwelling ape-like creatures with advanced technology. The I-A wants to destroy them because they are violent and hostile, but Orne, who is inclined towards pacifism, negotiates with them to avoid war.

After Orne almost dies in an explosion, doctors reconstruct his body, possibly a bit of Christian symbolism, and send him on another espionage mission to spy on a family of politicians in order to find out if they are plotting to overthrow the government. The women in the family belong to a secret society called the Nathians and Orne finds out he was born as a Nathian too, giving him powers of second sight and precognition. Here we see a direct link with the Bene Gesserit and Paul Atreiddes, the messiah in Dune. A theme of family conflict is also introduced here. Orne had a troubled relationship with his family who were also friends with the people he is staying with. Herbert misses an opportunity here to introduce an interesting subplot, but he never goes anywhere with it after its initial entry into the narrative. These first three sections are the best part of the book.

In the fourth section, Orne is sent to a planet called Amel where he is trained in the use of psi, a type of psychic-spiritual mind force that only few people are able to master. Their intention is to train him to be a god so that he can start a new interplanetary religion. Orne is given a series of tests which prove he can control his powers. The theory Herbert uses behind all this is a mixture of Taoism, Islam, and Jungian psychology, emphasizing awareness of the shadow-shelf, developing the will, and integrating the personality. Where Dune focuses on what Paul Atreides does after becoming the messiah, The Godmakers is all about what Orne has to do to become a god. Maybe Herbert wants to say that the successful patient in psychoanalysis will become like a god. Who really knows? The meaning of this is vague.

The first three sections are exciting, even if they are a bit too short, because they are stories of intrigue with a narrative structure that builds suspense. The characters of Orne and Stetson are also well drawn so that I expected something really exciting to happen later in the novel. But that never comes to be. The fourth part just kind of drifts along without any major events or peaks in the narrative to make it feel complete or give it closure. It has a lot of half-baked psychology and theology and the tests that Orne has to pass are not that exciting. The first one, for example, involves him lying on the floor and resisting the temptation to move. Exciting? It’s a good thing his balls didn’t itch. After that it gets kind of cartoonish and flat. The worst part of it all is that Herbert never gives a clear explanation of what it means for Orne to become a god. He just becomes a god and then the novel ends.

The Godmakers is one of those novels that starts out strong with a lot of potential and then starts fading away half way through. It might be of interest to Dune fans who want to see where Herbert was coming from before he wrote his classic epic series, but beyond that it isn’t much. 

 

Book Review

The Decameron

by Giovanni Boccaccio

translated by Richard Aldington

     What would you do if a deadly pandemic began ravishing your country? Alright, don’t answer that. I know what most people would do now. Wallowing in misery while staring at a cell phone for eighteen hours everyday isn’t the best response you could come up with. Following Qanon wasn’t too bright either. Take it from Giovanni Boccaccio. During the Black Death he sat down and wrote a classic collection of short stories known as The Decameron. It turned out to be so good that it influenced some seriously big names in literary history like Chaucer and Shakespeare. There are a few of us who still read it now. What is interesting about this book is that Boccaccio captured a certain kind of response that some young people in Italy had to the plague. If people had been reading this book in 2019, you might imagine that the American response to Covid-19 would have been a healthier one.

As The Decameron opens, ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, decide to leave the miseries of the city and go out to the Tuscan countryside where they settle in a chateau. While the urban Black Death is thoroughly miserable, the group seeks happiness in escapism by gathering for a span of ten days in a garden with a fountain. Each succeeding day, a new person is given a crown of laurel to wear and, as king or queen, takes a turn at directing the entertainment. Every person tells a story each day and that amounts to 1000 stories for those of you too lazy to do the math. They also have fun singing, dancing, playing music, eating, and enjoying the natural scenery of Tuscany’s countryside. Note that their response was one of participation and creativity, not passive submission to mindless fluff entertainment.

On each day, a different theme is chosen. On the first day, they tell stories relating some sort of religious moral. These get boring pretty quickly; Christianity has never been a reliable source of excitement. Things pick up on the second day when slightly shocking tales of horny monks, priests, and nuns begin to capture their imagination. From then on, there are a lot of stories about adultery or illicit sex, a few about crime, and a handful of grotesque narratives involving cannibalism or jealous husbands getting revenge by murdering their wives’ lovers or even, sometimes, their wives. In one such story, later adapted for a poem by John Keats, a husband cuts off his spouse’s lover’s head so she puts it in a clay pot and grows basil out of it. Another adulterous wife is given her dead lover’s heart in a goblet so she cries into it, fills it with wine, adds some poison, and drinks it all down. Other stories are a little more upbeat. One interesting section is all about tricks that husbands and wives play on each other to either conceal or reveal a sexual affair. The book ends with stories of generosity and heroism.

You can make a few inferences about medieval Italian society if you follow the repeating motifs in these tales. One is that people who get buried alive or thrown into wells always get rescued. Maybe this is a riff on Christian symbolism. The rescued men are often victims of betrayal and get their revenge in the end. Regarding religion, church authorities are chronically scummy, dishonest, and hypocritical. They seduce women, often through trickery, and extort money. They often care more about hedonistic pleasures than the ordinary citizens who, themselves, are often preoccupied with sex, not much different from today’s sleazy evangelicals. But these medieval Italians are religious despite their disgust for the church. Both husbands and wives have affairs outside their marriages and the story tellers make it clear that they all approve of adultery. The women are especially vocal about a wife’s right to cheat on her husband because, according to them, one man does not have enough potency to be able to satisfy one woman. Hence, having a string of lovers is the only way for a wife to keep herself happy. From what I have experienced, the world of Southern Europe hasn’t changed much since Boccaccio’s time when it comes to sexuality. And why should it?

While these stories have simple themes and their meanings are easy to grasp, this is not the easiest book to read. True to Latin Mediterranean writing styles (yes this includes all you classic French writers, and I do mean the likes of you, Marcel Proust), it is an understatement to say that this writing is wordy. And by wordy, I really mean wordy. Some dialogues involve two people taking turns delivering speeches that run on for two or three pages at a time before turning the conversation over to the other person. This happens, for instance, in the story where a man traps a nude woman on a tower to starve and almost die of sunburn in revenge for a trick she played on him. When people argue, they don’t talk this way; they interrupt each other, cut each other off, and devote very little attention to listening. When Boccaccio’s couples argue, it can be a trial for the reader. This is the worst thing about reading this book. My other major criticism is that some of the stories only work because the characters are incredibly stupid, sometimes so stupid that it is hard to willingly suspend your capacity for disbelief. After one man gets told about a stone that makes people invisible, he believes he has found it and proceeds to act as if he were invisible while everybody laughs at him. He is not the dumbest one in this collection either. Some of Boccaccio’s humor also does not translate well into the 21^st century American mind.

The Decameron is long and dense with unnecessarily detailed prose. This is literature for people with a lot of time and a lot of patience. In a lot of ways it really shines by capturing the joie de vivre of ten young story tellers from Florence who seek affirmation for life during a dark and terrible time. It is saturated with the thrills of carnal indulgence and the Pagan celebration of nature that characterized this turning point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet these story tellers never lose sight of the tragic side of life. Boccaccio’s response to the Black Death was one of optimism and renewal. Maybe if we learn from him, our world will see another Renaissance. We are about due for some positive change. 

 

Book Review

The Abortion:

An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

     It’s all about the womb. Richard Brautigan’s cult novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is one of those polarizing books that people either love or hate, or maybe you could say they either get it or they don’t. Usually the ones who hate it are the ones who don’t get it. Considering its minimalist style, it’s surprising that some people don’t get it, but then again, minimalism is all about saying a lot by saying a little. What people don’t get is that this is a book of mythic proportions, saturated in archetypes, that tell the tale of a hero’s journey in a way Joseph Campbell could never have imagined. And when I say it is all about the womb, more than one thing is meant by that.

The first womb that must be mentioned is the library. How can a library be a womb? Well, we’ll get to that. This particular library is, as the narrator says early on, not your typical library. It is a place where unpublished authors leave a copy of a book they have written where it will be stored on a shelf and never read by anybody. The author was probably probing his fears and insecurities when he conceived of this. Some of the books are oddities like a manuscript about the history of pork that is bound in bacon, or mediocrities like extensive studies on Nebraska. Each volume is delivered by the lonely misfits and non-geniuses who wrote them. It is there they are received by the ghost in the machine, the narrator, who is none other than Richard Brautigan himself. At first it might be tempting to think of the narrator as an incarnation of Hermes, the Greek guardian of sacred and forbidden knowledge, but if you really want to get mythical about it all, it probably is best to say that the narrator is more like Apollo. Despite his beatnik and hippie trappings, the narrator is a rigidly disciplined man in the way he takes care of his library. He follows every rule, receives the books ceremoniously with minimal deviation to the routine, and is as neat and orderly as a man can possibly be. He is fanatically devoted to the library in a way that borders on neurosis. And he has a flat demeanor and deadpan sense of humor that rivals the comedian Steven Wright.

The second womb of importance is located in the stunningly perfect body of Vida, a young woman who brings a in book for the library’s collection. Her tome is all about how her beautiful body is a distraction because of all the men who want to get into her pants without knowing her as a person. She is the Aphrodite of the novel, raising the reading on men’s richter scales wherever she goes. But that is not entirely why her womb is so important. When she brings in her book, she falls in love with the narrator. After doing the wild thing, getting all the way to home base, and doing the sacred dance of the snake, Vida gets pregnant. Since the events of this story take place before the passage of Roe Vs. Wade, they decide to go to Tijuana for the abortion.

Enter Dionysus. Foster is the narrator’s friend and colleague, fun and charming, he always has a whisky bottle in his hand and never stops chasing tail. He stands guard over the third womb of importance, a cave where overstock from the library gets hauled away to be stored like an ever growing cache of unfertilized eggs. These literary eggs will never leave the cave through menstruation and they will never be inseminated because they will never be read. Caves are an ancient symbol of the womb which is why the rites of Eleusis were performed secretly in Mediterranean caverns. Foster’s job is to protect them from seepage, a problem that gets mentioned three times in the story. If Vida had been protected from seepage, she would not have gotten knocked up, but maybe things happen for a reason. Foster gets called in to make the arrangements for the abortion. After all, he has had a lot of experience with this particular problem. He watches over the library while the psychopomp Vida leads the narrator along on his hero’s journey to Mexico like Virgil leading Dante through Hell, though actually its not quite that bad. Unless you consider airports and San Diego to be like Hell, which is entirely understandable, than the analogy may be a little more legit.

This is a minimalist story. In fact the plot is so minimal that it is hardly worth mentioning. The actual abortion is almost a non-event in the narration. It is tempting to think of the abortion as a McGuffin, a plot device that has no actual meaning because the story is about the people, not the device. Dashiell Hammet was the master of the McGuffin; see The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon. Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is another classic example of a McGuffin. But then again, Vida’s abortion may only be a partial McGuffin after all; the abortion can be seen in a symbolic way too. It is the sacrifice of the fetus, the removal of it from her womb, that brings the narrator out of his womb, the library where is living the life of the living dead like the books that Foster guards in his cave. The death of the fetus means rebirth for him. Don’t forget that “vida”, dervied from the Latin word “vita”, is Spanish for “life”. It is through Vida’s love that the narrator gets reborn to the world. He has gone through the cycle of the hero’s journey by entering the underworld, the library, doing the kind of unenviable task that heroes do like Hercules cleaning out the stables, going on a hero’s journey which involves accompanying Vida to the illegal abortion clinic in Tijuana, and re-emerging into the world with a newfound love for live. This is the life and death cycle, the dance between eros and thanatos, the eternal rebirth that permeates so much of ancient mythology.

The dry humor, the simplistic language, the vivid descriptiveness, and the sentences that, ahem, are pregnant with meaning all speak for themselves. They are the work of a genius wordsmith. The trio of the narrator, Vida, and Foster remind me a bit of Jim Jarmusch’s classic conedy of understatement Stranger Than Paradise in which a female outsider arrives on the scene and draws the two male characters out of their humdrum lives. In the end, it all comes off as literary playfulness, linguistic craftsmanship, celebratory youthfulness, light surrealism, a roman a clef, and confessional writing masked as an inside joke.

It is hard to tell if these mythical themes in The Abortion are intentional or not. There was a lot about Richard Brautigan’s mind that was unfathomable to the people who knew him. But he wasn’t lacking in knowledge even if he did choose to approach life with the eyes of a child. He might have accidentally tapped into the archetypes present in the writing, but it is hard to deny that those patterns are there. Some readers might scoff at the idea that there is anything of significance in this novel, but they are the ones who obviously don’t get it. The loftiness is there if you choose to see it.