Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès | Where Tigers Are at Home / 2011

unraveling the fiction

by Douglas Messerli

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès Where Tigers Are at Home, translated from the French by Mike Mitchell (New York: Other Press, 2011)

 

 When Rain Taxi publisher Eric Lorberer asked me if I might be interested in reviewing a novel about Brazil, I readily agreed, having been to Brazil twice and having a deep interest in Brazilian literature. He did mention, vaguely, something about it being a long work. But when I received this book in the mail, I was a bit taken aback. The “novel” was not only 817 pages in length, but had been written by a French author and scholar Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès who had taught in Brazilian universities. The idea of reading a roman (the French word for novel), which its cover declared it to be,* disinterested me. Like many writers and colleagues who in the 1960s declared the “novel” to be dead, I have long been disinterested in “romances” that focus on one or several heroes involved in a series of plotted adventures and even less interested in what the novel has more recently become, now often a kind confessional work or a series of semi-linked stories told through a realist perspective.

  

    Fortunately, by the time I had read the first chapter I perceived that, despite its cover’s proclamation, Blas de Roblès’ Where Tigers Are At Home was not a novel, but an encyclopedic fiction in the manner of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and, in the 19^th century, of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Péchucet. Like most encyclopedic works, such a fiction attempts a summing up of knowledge, which is quite perfect for this book’s central figure, the German Jesuit scholar of the 17th-century, Athanasius Kircher, who is often described as “the last Renaissance man,” a figure who, during his day, seemed to be able to brilliantly write on all subjects, from history, geology, microbiology, physics, mechanical inventions, languages, and, of course, religion, with special added interests in all things Egyptian (including his attempt to translate the hieroglyphs) and Chinese. The fact that nearly everything he believed has long since been dismissed as nonsense is perfect for this dark comic encyclopedia, at the center of which is a sizable book on which the work’s major character, Eléazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent living in Brazil, is at work on translating and editing, a hagiographical study of Kircher by his assistant Caspar Schott.

      Floating around this encyclopedic fiction are numerous other kinds of fictions, mostly anatomies over which various other pedants rule the conversations. The anatomy, as in works such as Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and most of Wyndham Lewis’ fiction, is centered on a pedant who mostly spends his time entertainingly speaking at characters gathered round him, who represent various aspects and levels of society, from the highest to the lowest, at dinner parties and other events that bring the characters together. Perhaps the most notorious of anatomies is Petronius’ Satyricon, a work I’ve often read. I myself have attempted writing just such a fiction, adding an epistolary structure.

     Spinning out from the central story, where Eléazard and his knowledgeable friend, Eucilides dominate the conversations, are various other linked anatomies, the first of which features Eléazard’s wife, Elaine, who has recently left him, who, along with a younger student Mauro and two professors from her university, Dietlev and Milton, embark on an archeological voyage into the Amazon in Brazil’s western state of Mato Grosso. The second of these small “anatomies” centers on Eléazard’s disaffected daughter, Moéma, her lesbian lover, Thaïs, and their university professor, Roetgen, who move in and out of each other’s beds as they travel—a bit like the figures of Kerouac’s On the Road—about the country in a constant state of being drugged and drunk. A further story involves Mauro’s corrupt politician father, José Moreira da Rocha, Governor of Maranhão, his dissatisfied and abused wife, Carlotta, and various bankers and pentagon observers with whom the Governor is involved in an illegal scheme. Yet another spin-off concerns a young club-footed beggar, Nelson, and his benefactor, a truck-driver, Uncle Zé. Eventually, many of the figures from these separate strands become intertwined with each other, while Eléazard’s private notebooks bring together various knittings of ideas expressed in the adventures. At one level, accordingly, this book presents a series of dark and often bleak actions, while on another level the work explores vast areas of thinking. In Where Tigers Are at Home we get full discussions of almost anything you might imagine, from the names of various native Brazilian tribes and their languages to readings from cheap rhymed-romances sung, like troubadours, by the that country’s poor. Discussions of various automobiles are alternated with theological treatises. Listing and descriptions of animals—various cats, snakes, birds, and larger beasts—push their way into a ceremonial terreiro or macumba. Information about how to deal with gangrene alternates with interpretations of Goethe. Drag queens and cokeheads go elbow to elbow with Queen Christiana of Sweden. This is, after all, a wonderful encyclopedia!

       Translator Mike Mitchell, moreover, should be given an award just for juggling so many languages, including the original French, Latin, Portuguese, native tribal languages, and Arabic!

       Ultimately, what seems like distinct stories, each headed by a kind of pedant who satirically leads the other figures into ridiculous danger, begin to coalesce in the terrifying logic of Kircher in which everything in God’s world is interrelated—with the absurd priest at its center!

       Blas de Roblés’ work depends highly on its net of plot, so I will not reveal how these events begin to wind down, as—even in such a mammoth work—we know they must. Let me just hint by suggesting that I felt “let down” or even betrayed in the end by the author’s somewhat nihilistic unraveling of his own fiction. Even though such a work always reminds us that it is, in fact, a fiction to even attempt to bring so much of what we believe as “knowledge” together, it is always a bit painful when Penelope, at day’s end, undoes the entire fabric. Where Tigers Are at Home, however, is a great enough work that I would gladly travel through its treacherous pages all over again.

 

 *Although the words “A Novel” appeared on my advance uncorrected proof, I see from reproductions of the actual book cover that it was later removed.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2013

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (XVIII, Summer 2013).