László Krasznahorkai | Háború és Háború (War & War) / 1999, 2006

to begin is to never end

by Douglas Messerli

 

László Krasznahorkai Háború és Háború (Budapest: Magvető, 1999). Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes as War & War (New York: New Directions, 2006)

 

 Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai’s War & War (Háború és Háború), first published in 1999, is a story of a total failure, a fool named Korin. Krasznahorkai’s “hero,” who works, similarly to the anti-hero of José Saramago’s 1997 novel All the Names, as an archivist—a man who, like one of Eliot’s living dead, is afraid not only to “eat a peach,” but is fearful of literally “losing his head” which, he is absurdly told by doctors, is only tangentially connected to his spine and will ultimately break loose and fall off.

      The fiction begins with what will be a series of attacks on the “hero” as he is surrounded by members of a brutal young gang who attempt to rob him and are willing and ready to slit his throat. But the strange, incoherent story Korin begins to tell—the complexity of which the author suggests throughout his work by dividing his fiction into 2-3 page units, each consisting of one long, rambling sentence—strangely transfixes them, not so much because of its (im)possible content, but because of the intensity with which the old man speaks. To the young gang members he is a human specimen so ridiculous that they are fascinated by his absurdity, and, in listening to his tale, like Scherezade’s Schahriar, spare his life. Little do they imagine that he has a large sum of money sewn into the lining of his outdated and filthy greatcoat.

       In the very next scene Korin repeats his verbal assault, this time in the company of a good-looking flight attendant to whom he, apologetically and, once again, somewhat incoherently, attempts to tell his life story. Apparently he has discovered by accident a manuscript in the archival files that has completely transformed him. As he reads and rereads this mysterious fiction, filed mistakenly with other family records, Korin realizes a new purpose in life. Abandoning his job, selling all his possessions, and attempting to escape the authorities he believes are determined, because of his condition, to deny him travel, our hero eludes his invisible trackers through a series of meandering train rides, ultimately arriving in a Budapest ticket office in hopes of continuing on to New York.

     Because he has no visa he is forced to procure a quickly issued one at great expense. The travel agency, moreover, cannot assure him of space on a plane for the next few days. His intense conversation with the stewardess in the agency offices and his idiotic determinedness, however, work in his favor, and miraculously he arrives in New York.

     Arriving without luggage and with no clear destination in mind, he is whisked away to security where he finds himself face to face with a disinterested Hungarian interpreter, who, like the others before him, is bored and transfixed by Korin’s attempts to explain himself. The interpreter loses his job because, recognizing the incompetence of the man he questions, he hands him his personal business card, containing his home address.

     Not without further ado, Korin makes his way through the terminal and is delivered up by taxi to a Bowery flop, where for days he holds up before attempting to adventure out into the Manhattan streets. When he does leave the room, the event ends in a fearful encounter with the abject poor seemingly incarcerated in a nearby flophouse, and in horror Korin calls the number listed on the interpreter’s card. Since the interpreter now has no income he agrees to let a room to Korin and even helps him to set up—in what has been the secret aim of the man’s confused wonderings—a website where the former archivist hopes to post a copy of his discovered manuscript.

     Perhaps the most poignant and intense moments of this episodic work occur in this apartment where the interpreter lives with his mistress—an abused Hispanic woman—who, knowing only a little Hungarian, nonetheless silently endures Korin’s breakfast litanies about his life and the mysterious manuscript he is determined to post to his website for posterity.

     Gradually Korin becomes aware of the beatings she endures and the nefarious activities of his landlord, but, in his obsessive single-mindedness, he has little power to change the course of their fate. A friendship between the “hero” and the woman, however, develops, even if the words he shares with her have little meaning. Once more, the intensity with which he tells his story is what seems to matter. The reader, however, begins to perceive the nature of his literary discovery: a tale of four men (Kasser, Falke, Bengazza, and Toót) who voyage freely through time, in each story discovering a near-paradisical society (the mythical Kommos and the historical Venice) or architectural wonders (the cathedral of Cologne and Hadrian’s Wall) that in the midst of their admiration are destroyed soon after the appearance of an enigmatic figure (Mastemann). We recognize that each version of the tale reveals the same message, that cultural and societal achievement and harmony is perpetually destroyed by evil. But Korin is confused by the various stylistic maneuvers of the storyteller, particularly in the last section, when the narrator—not unlike how others have perceived Korin himself—seems to go mad, jumbling together various lists and information that transgresses against any coherent message the story might wish to convey.

     Safely ensconced in the interpreter’s apartment, where he is forbidden late afternoon and evening use of the computer, Korin ventures out, gradually exploring the unfathomable city around him. When, accordingly, he has finished posting his tale, and, after suffering, along with the interpreter’s lover, a series of strange events wherein intruders suddenly remove all the apartment’s contents, followed, a few days later, by new intruders delivering boxes that fill the small living space, the “hero”—piecing together these events with his discovery of a large cache of money hidden behind a piece of tiling in the toilet—escapes what has been his only home in this new world in order to seek someone in the Hungarian community who will sell him a gun, presumably to accomplish the suicide he has promised earlier in the narrative.

      But even here, Korin reveals his incompetence. Hooking up with a slightly mad figure of the streets (a man who places manikins in various artfully life-like positions throughout the neighborhood) our “hero” stays the night with his newfound friend, awakening to discover photographs of work by the real-life artist Mario Merz upon the walls of the man’s apartment. One of Merz’s tent-like environments so moves Korin that he determines to travel to Zürich where he believes the author resides to seek out one of the structures in which to kill himself. If he has previously been blessed by a sort of innocent madness, armed with his new, negative resolve, Korin is no longer blessed and is finally robbed and left for dead on the streets; without money, he returns to the interpreter’s apartment to discover that both the man and his mistress have been brutally murdered. Now perceiving (or perhaps only sensing) what the murderers have sought, he removes the money from behind the tile, and uses it to pay for his final journey.

     In Zürich he discovers that Merz himself does not live there, but that one of his artworks—pictured in the photographs—is housed in a nearby museum. Korin, however, has grown even more deluded—interpreting the strange disintegration of his manuscript’s narrative as an evocation and expression of madness that has overtaken the world and believing that the characters from the fiction have joined him in person to seek “a way out.” He finally finds a way to purchase a gun and makes his way to the museum. Arriving in the middle of the night, Korin attempts to enter the museum, while the guard explains that the building is closed until the morning. Fearing, however, that the late-night stranger may be an artist or even a guest curator, the guard calls the director. Unable to gain access to the museum, Korin seeks shelter in at all-night bar, where, brandishing his gun, he shoots himself in the arm. Even in suicide he fails, although the shot so terrifies him that he collapses, remaining unconscious; the book ends without answering the reader’s questions about Korin’s condition: “Later they took him away.”

     What we do know, however, is that Korin ultimately does succeed in suicide, for a plaque within the Schaffhausen Museum testifies: “This plaque marks the place where György Korin, the hero of the novel War and War, by László Krasznahorkai, shot himself in the head. Search as he might, he could not find what he had called the Way Out.” The plaque, strangely enough, seems to indicate that, finally, someone has made sense of Korin’s story, that his life has mattered; if nothing else, it testifies to his heroic attempt to escape from the horrible fate of the world revealed in both the archivist’s manuscript and in the novelist’s fiction wherein the tales are embedded.

     In fact, the sensitive reader—and anyone who has persisted in reading Krasznahorkai’s bleak tale, perhaps by definition, is such a reader—has perceived, Korin may be an idiot, but like Erasmus’ man of folly, he is a Christ-like figure, a man of deep compassion, belief, and hope. He is a wise-fool, desperately seeking in a world of fleeting fragments a unified vision that will give meaning to life. Even if his magnificent posting will never be read—and with the death of the interpreter who has sworn to keep the website alive, one can only suppose that eventually that website will disappear (indeed a visit to www.warandwar.com results in the message: Please be informed that your homepage service has been called off due to recurring overdue payment. Attempted mail deliveries to Mr. G. Korin have been returned to sender with a note: address unknown. Consequently, all data have been erased from your home page.)—it is the effort to share his discovery that truly matters. In his reading—even his misreadings of the work—Korin has himself become a creator, and in that creation, that recreation, he has brought purposefulness to life. Through each of his absurd attempts to relate information, Korin reveals the transformative power of storytelling itself. It is not just the story that matters, perhaps not even the story that is important, but the telling itself, the very act of creating fiction can completely change lives.

     The reader perceives this already in the first scene, where the gang of young thugs, seemingly entranced by Korin’s storytelling even as they disdain it, begins to tell their own tales the next morning about the old man and his bizarre behavior. The stewardess has her own tales to tell about the silly man who entertained her while she was waiting to accompany a disabled traveler; but we perceive also how she is touched and moved by Korin’s words. Even more affected by the storytelling is the interpreter’s companion, who in the midst of abused life, waits patiently each morning just to hear the boarder’s words, touchingly revealed several times in the work, particularly as she turns her bruised face toward him and, in the last scenes, they lay together upon a bed in a gentle conspiracy of hope against what they both recognize are destructive acts by the master of the house, who parallels the Mastemann figure of the War & War fiction.

     Korin’s great discovery, the source of both his joy and desperation, evidenced in his suicide, is that all of life matters, all life is “of equal gravity, everything equally urgent,” a fact that any artful storyteller and reader recognizes as the truth. It is no wonder that Korin hardly knows where to begin and has no comprehension of how to end once he has started. As for Scherezade, once the telling has begun, once one has embarked upon the perilous voyage of the imagination, there can be no end but in death. 1001 nights do not cease in a mere two years and nine months; for the ancient Egyptians the hieroglyph for 1000 represented “all,” and one more than all, accordingly, stood for an infinity. There is, alas, no “way out,” no ultimate redemption for Scherezade. The characters of Korin’s discovered fiction are blessed as well as doomed to begin again and again in their search for paradise, in their foolishly wise search for a world in which everything matters and all is of equal importance.

    

Los Angeles, August 9, 2006

Reprinted from First Intensity, No. 22 (Fall 2007).

 

 

While recently teaching this work in the Otis College of Art + Design M.F.A. program, I discussed with the students the final coda, which appears after the page with a black block, evidently symbolizing Korin's death. In this last section it appears that, although Korin attempts to shoot himself, he survives. As I reported above, although he's unconscious, in the end Korin is simply taken away. Some students felt irritated by this ending, as if everything that had come before had been, perhaps, only a dream.

      In the midst of our discussion, I suddenly realized that Korin's "adventures"—if you can call his timid encounters with life, true adventures—are not unlike those of Don Quixote, another wise-fool, a man of folly battling for the ideals of life. In that sense, I suggested to my class, War & War is also a picaresque, a series on ongoing adventurous events, often with few narrative links. The picaro, so Northrop Frye reports, often dies, but always has the potential of being reborn, his adventures having the possibility of starting up once again. In that sense, Krasznahorkai has given us, in this section, a possibility that Korin also did not truly die, remaining true to that genre's structures.

 

Los Angeles, November 18, 2009

Cormac McCarthy | The Road / 2006

the ultimate road trip

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cormac McCarthy The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006)

 

The other day at a brunch, I happened to mention that I had just completed perhaps the bleakest book I’d ever read. Two of the other diners quickly chimed in, “I know exactly which book you mean!” And for several moments we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, careful to steer our conversation away from the most horrific of the book’s descriptions, while simultaneously recommending it to all except the faint of heart. The same thing had happened to me earlier that morning in a telephone conversation with another friend, Martha Ronk.

     At one time in American culture such synchronicity of reading might not have been worth mentioning. I still recall in 1960 when everyone seemed to be reading To Kill a Mockingbird; my mother, generally a reader of the literary guild titles—the pop fiction of the day—even held a meeting of a reading group in her home to discuss the book. But in today’s world of a superabundance of new book publications, it is rare—particularly among my well-read and literary friends, many of whom teach and, accordingly, spend a great deal of time reading and rereading classics—to find any shared reading experiences among new works of fiction or poetry. We may share with each other our enthusiasm for new movies, but when it comes to fiction we often speak of writers like Beckett or Borges or….numerous other established—and often dead—writers.

     As a publisher, of course, I am always reading new works, and I attempt to share those with as many of my friends as I can, but the daily demands upon their time preclude any immediate reaction. I sometimes receive their responses to books I published years after my initial enthusiasm.

     Accordingly, I was quite delighted to find common ground, to have read a new literary work which I could immediately share. Given the dark subject matter of McCarthy’s novel, it might have been predicted. Many of us feel, while recognizing the greater horrors of both World Wars, the Korean War and Viet Nam, nonetheless, that we are living in the darkest of times, as we face our own ongoing war abroad—in which young soldiers and often innocent Iraqi citizens are daily beheaded and bombed—and the potential development of nuclear bombs by nations that seem to have paranoid perspectives of the rest of the world, while recognizing in our own country a frightening constriction and loss of human rights and individual freedoms for which generations of Americans have struggled throughout the last century.

     McCarthy’s powerful fiction is not directly about any of these issues. As the narrator makes clear, however, in the post-apocalyptic world we witness in this book, the cry of any Isaiah in the wilderness, indeed the doom sayings of all previous prophets have become reality. Accordingly, McCarthy proves all of our fears—those from the left, middle and right—to be justified.

     We are never told what happened to create this ash-covered landscape in which all living matter—with the exception of a few straggling and struggling human beings—has been destroyed. All we know is that at 1:17 all the clocks stopped, “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” Trying the light switch the hero finds the power already gone, “a dull rose glow in the windowglass.” Is it a nuclear explosion, a series of nuclear bombs, or a huge meteor crashing into Earth, which might explain the ever darkening sky years later, as the father and son search for warmer climes? Does it matter? The world as we know it (as the characters knew it) has been destroyed.*

     From the beginning, the central character of this book shows himself to be a survivor: soon after the electricity goes off, his wife asks, “Why are you taking a bath?” His answer, “I’m not,” speaks volumes, for suddenly we know that he has had enough foresight to give them several days’ drinking water. Soon there will be no more water, and, eventually, no food.

     Before going any further in this review, following the lead of today’s newscasters, I should perhaps warn the reader that what I am about to describe is going to be unpleasant; moreover, for those who love plot, I will detract from that pleasure by sharing the story. Frankly, I find the reading experience itself so different from the description of a fiction that such revelations seldom bother me. But I know there are many who prefer to journey through fiction and film in virgin territory; those readers should put down my essay at this juncture.

      McCarthy’s fiction, however, is not really about its story. For the plot is as simple as it can be: years after the original explosion, millions of individuals have died, some, as the central character’s wife, by suicide, most others presumably by starvation and illnesses such as cholera, pneumonia, rickets—all those horrific diseases which would inevitably follow upon such a holocaust. The few who live are not only survivors, but, in most cases, humans in name only, beings who have become animals, many of them existing only through cannibalism. The father and son at the center of this book are on a seemingly endless journey to move south in search of a warmer climate, but also out of the necessity to rummage for any scraps of canned or bottled food that might not have already been looted. Accordingly, they have no choice but to "hit the road.” Unlike Sal’s joyfully pagan journey in Kerouac’s On the Road or even Johnny’s pleasure in just “going” in The Wild One, the father and son of The Road embark upon a kind of road trip, the ultimate road trip, growing out of desperation. While it may be safer to hide away, without food and with only two bullets left in their gun, this father and son have no choice but to move on; “to go” and “to discover” have no longer any place in their vocabulary.

      Certainly, there are discoveries to be made—of the most horrific kind. It is through the young boy that we most clearly see just what has been lost of humanity and the horrors any survivor must face. The father describes himself and his son as the “bearers of light,” as “the good guys.” And, at first, we recognize the rightness and necessity for such self-adulation. Around them are people who, as the wife and mother had observed before her death, would first rape the boy and then eat him. Recognizing this, the boy is nonetheless appalled by the fact that when they encounter another boy his age, there is nothing they can do to help; they cannot, as he would wish, take him with them; he may be one of them, and besides, they haven’t food to share.

     Although they often suffer from near starvation, they also occasionally have the good fortune to discover hidden troves of canned goods (one in a hidden bunker clearly constructed by a survivalist-thinking family); but even with their newfound supplies, the father will not/cannot allow them to make contact with others they encounter along the road. It is too dangerous, as the most terrifying scene in the novel reveals. In a beautifully furnished house they discover a locked cellar wherein, when they break the padlock, they discover maimed but living humans, who are obviously being cut up and eaten by the tenants night after night. What might have been a black-comic moment in the hands of a postmodern writer like Steve Katz, presents itself as a grim nightmare in the hands of a realist such as McCarthy. I admit I did not sleep easy while reading this book.

     After their small store of goods is stolen and they track down the thief, the father forces him to undress in retaliation for his act. The boy, in turn, begins to understand that, despite their representation of themselves as “good,” they necessarily are agents, in their struggle for survival, of evil.

 

            They made a dry camp with no fire. He sorted out cans for their

            supper and warmed them over the gas burner and they ate and the

            boy said nothing. The man tried to see his face in the blue light

            from the burner. I wasn’t gong to kill him, he said. But the boy

            didn’t answer. They rolled themselves in the blankets and lay there

            in the dark. He thought he could hear the sea but perhaps it was just

            the wind. He could tell by his breathing that they boy was awake and

            after a while the boy said: But we did kill him.

 

 

It is this gradual recognition of their own involvement with events that gives the greatest moral dimension to The Road.

     Yet, we also recognize that the father has no other choices; through his selfishly determined actions he expresses such a deep love of his son—a love that must be recognized also as sexual (body to body contact is necessary as an altruistic protection from the elements as well as a physical expression of the father-son love)—that it encompasses McCarthy’s entire picaresque, explaining the central character’s mad determination to stay alive and move on. Without this love, the father would long ago have died or, at the very least, become something akin to the old prophet they meet along the way, a blind Oedipus-like figure who survives only because he presents himself as worthless of any human contact. Appropriately, he is the only one with whom the boy convinces his father to share their food.

      The father’s determined survival, however, also reveals the great flaw of McCarthy’s The Road—and perhaps his other fictions as well. For however much we might admire this “carrier of the fire,” he is, like the figures from other fantastically epic adventures such as Lord of the Rings, not an entirely credible human being. And we are reminded in his actions that McCarthy is still writing a kind of Western, with all its heroic possibilities. I know that I, who cannot shoot a gun, who would be unable to light a campfire from flint, who would be unable to determine even what tools I needed to survive the ordeals this man and his son encounter, would have long before died. Most of us—not of the survivalist ilk—would never have had a chance.

     Oddly enough, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Western involves very few weapons. As one of my brunch companions, film writer Chris Hauty, mentioned, he didn’t find the book entirely believable on that account. In reality, he argued, everyone who was still living would have had guns. A quick visit to several sites on the internet revealed, for example, that it is estimated that there are enough guns in the US for every man, woman, and child. If such a holocaust were to occur—presuming that individuals would also loot weapons from gun stores and police stations throughout the country, adding immense quantities of arms to their cache—most armed Americans, particularly the survivalists, would have killed one another; those who remained would be so thoroughly armed that it is doubtful that a father and son, with only two bullets in their gun, would have been able to endure the trip.

     Even heroes have to die, moreover, and with the death of the boy’s father, his son is released to embrace human encounters his father had previously denied him. In a world where women bear children only to roast them upon the spit soon thereafter we realize that the boy can never be certain in his trust. 

     Fortunately, it appears his first such encounter is with a family of “bearers of the fire,” of enlightened beings who will bring him from the road into the arms of a survivalist and, evidently, religious community. But as readers of this book, we are left with haunting questions, questions which the boy must continue to ask if human morality is to be sustained. How have they survived, this group of survivors? How will they continue to survive? Will they remain “good guys?”  Can he?

     

*Actually I think it very much does matter. If the world has been destroyed by natural forces, the near-extinction of the human race—the novel even positing the possibility of its total extinction—is simply a matter of fate, and, in that sense, the father and son’s desperate struggle to hold on to any moral values is quite insignificant within the context of the forces of the cosmos. That does not mean the values have no meaning for the individuals still struggling to survive, but simply that they would ultimately no longer mean anything. Can we not admit that with the death of all human beings, God (and whatever values the concept of God encompasses) no longer exists, or, at least, no longer has any significance?

     If, however, this apocalypse has been created by human beings, then any remnant of human guilt and retribution expressed in the love and hope of this intrepid couple is crucial—particularly if the species were incredibly to survive. Without survival, obviously, it again makes no difference, but—as Derrida might have argued—to the living that is the difference. To those who eat flesh and those who don’t, for the carriers of the light as opposed to the forces of the dark, this is no slight semantic slip of tongue, but an existential chasm of belief and act.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2006

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).

Dennis Barone | Precise Machine / 2006

precise imprecision

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Barone Precise Machine (New York: Quale, 2006)

 

Often when reading the fiction of Dennis Barone, I feel that there are three different writers behind his work, the first being a sort of postmodern fantasist, presenting us in very short, surrealist-like fables, cartoon figures standing in outrageous opposition. In the book of his I published for my Sun & Press, for example, the title story “The Returns” begins with a young boy at the Thanksgiving dinner table with his family; suddenly out the window he observes a hovering plane; when he runs out of the house to find out what’s happening, he sees, through the dark and foggy night, an X-15 rocket and suddenly encounters its pilot; the pilot picks him up, bringing him to face level, shouting: “Don’t let them know I’m flying!” A few minutes later the young boy and the pilot are in a prison cell, the pilot bruised and in pain; a salesman soon joins them, and the story ends with the pilot and the salesman in conversation, planning their escape. Interwoven into this story are scenes in which the narrator is awakened by an assured knocking, each time ending with the would-be visitor turning away, a door slammed shut. In short, a young boy, perhaps now the dreamer-author, experiences a fantastical world, which in opposition to his placid home-life, consists of dangerous secrets and acts, events that lead to adventure and probable imprisonment.

       In his most recent collection, Precise Machine, Barone begins with a short tale, “Treasure”—one of four pieces collected under the title “Precise Machine”—a story of twin brothers caring for a problematic goat. From the ocean-side pasture where he is kept, the goat often seems to enjoy staring out to sea. Perhaps in a former life, the narrator suggests, he had been Captain Kidd. One day, as he stares off into the horizon, the goat refuses to return home, and the boys are faced with the quandary of either returning home without the goat or being late for dinner, a special roast. When the billy goat begins to paw the ground underneath which he stands, the boys begin to dig. Suddenly they are scared half to death by the appearance of a helicopter containing their returning father, rifle in hand, determined to claim the buried treasure which might have helped the boys and their mother survive. This father, like the pilot of the previous work, stands outside and against family life. And the secret the boys uncover seems, once again, to threaten their present existence. In both these strange tales, the father/hero is perceived as both dangerous and magical, a kind of immoral (or, at least, nonmoral) force that possibly endangers the dream of childhood.    

        The second writer behind Barone’s output is a kind of lyrical moralist, often an artist, historian, or researcher, a character like the hero of his short novel Temple of the Rat and The Returns story “The Middle Distance.” In "And Also with Your" (Precise Machine) Barone presents us the story of an Italian artist during the bubonic plague, determined to finish his “Miracle of the Banner” painting, inspired by nightly visits from the Virgin. It is doubtful he will survive, but his feverish imagination recounts his alternating struggles with faith and doubt in a terrifying present, mitigated by a vision of a future in which he has attained international acclaim when the Spanish Ambassador demands a work from the same brush. Seemingly, half in and out of consciousness, the narrator weaves a spellbinding tale that ends suddenly in the aural sensation of the “melodies of heaven.”

      Yet, Barone’s tale continues, completely altered, as he begins a new story, this one about a Congress Avenue, New Haven minister, an immigrant to the New World determined to convert the locals to his personal beliefs, become a haven for the dispossessed and oppressed, and, simultaneously, fill his pockets with great wealth. His bag containing his contributions ebbs and flows, “but never ebbed so much as it seemed to fill itself….” Indeed, the minister, his family and charges, and the village appear to prosper, until a woman arrives to assassinate the minister for his conversion of her son. The minister’s message however, converts her, as she is filled with doubts and self-recriminations, ultimately determining to kill herself. The gun accidentally discharges, killing a loyal follower of the sect, resulting in an attack from the community that is only vaguely described—“And then out of nowhere an artillery barrage sent out its cruel greetings, shrapnel flying all around”—but which we can imagine as being similar to the attack by federal troops at the Waco compound of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians. Ironically, the event of Barone’s story is captured in the sketchbook of Ercole, the minister’s youngest son. So continues this tale of the relationship between belief and art.

     In stories such as this and “Cairns,” Barone often mixes history, politics, religion and poetic story-telling into a heady mix in which all are transformed, history becoming fantastical, religion transforming into fear and doubt, politics resulting in a story of mythic proportions. While not always as magically compelling as his briefer post-modern fantasies, these short epic-like morality plays are perhaps the most ambitious of Barone’s vision, and when they succeed, as in “And Also with You” and, in part, “The Middle Years,” they represent some of the most interesting writing of our time.

     The third Barone seems to be a kind of inattentive realist. As the author notes in his newest collection, “All facts are fables,” which seems to require Barone to empty some of his stories of both fantasy and poetry. “The Firebug,” for example—the second of his “Precise Machine” tales—relates a story that reminds one of a comic sketch in which a bicyclist gets a flat tire. He carries with him tools, an air pump, a bottle of water, and matches—nearly everything he needs but duct tape. At a nearby house, being repaired for fire damage, he borrows some electrical tape, pumps up his wheel and rides a bit further. But once again the wheel goes flat. He reattaches the tape, pumps up the tire once again, and moves a few yards further before the tire goes flat a third time. He attempts to catch a ride to a nearby town, but no one will pick him up, and he is forced to walk the whole way. At the town’s bicycle shop, announcing a “Fire Sale,” he begs and cajoles the man behind the counter for a new tire (he has carried with him no money), and promises to return with the payment. Later that day, he returns via automobile, but before he can reach the store, the car’s tire goes flat. Armed with the same tools—an air pump, a bottle of water, and matches—he presumably sets the building on fire.

     Told in a tone nearly devoid of emotion, Barone’s story depends entirely upon its ironic form—“things come in threes.” But the joke is just that, a joke. The story is as slight as its message. Presumably, it is this “inattentive realist,” this deadpan comedian that lies behind the fevered and poetic moralist of the other two sides of his personality. The author himself is a quiet-spoken person whose mouth often turns up in conversation into a kind a naughty-boy grin. It is perhaps this kind of ironic realism that also lies behind the title of his book, the “precise machine” of Barone’s art. But I prefer thinking of his writing as a kind of precise imprecision, a confusion/profusion of ideas that swell up into a near obsessive reality wherein all is linked, the kind of world with which the personal, interlinking tales of present and past, with which “Cairns” ends:

 

                    With everyone crowded in space, we became also crowded

             by time. Star, Song of Solomon, you are limestone in New Jersey.

             Forgive me, my bike is almost flat. Aloha, Dairy Queen and

             Flamingo Golf. Many flowers bloomed and died. It became almost

             an obsession.

 

Here, religion, myth, popular culture, the past, the present, and, yes, that fire-happy bicyclist coexist. It’s a world I prefer to what Barone presents as the “real” one.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 7 (January 2007).

 

Brian Evenson | The Open Curtain / 2006

a torn curtain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Evenson The Open Curtain (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006)

 

Brian Evenson’s new novel, The Open Curtain, begins with what increasingly has become an almost predictable plot: a basically good boy—in this case the son a Mormon widow—at puberty begins to explore the past along with new ideas that gradually alter his personality. In this case the young Rudd uncovers a letter sent to his father by an unknown woman, claiming that he was the father of her son. Rudd’s father—who later committed suicide by slitting his own throat—denies any paternity, and when Rudd confronts his mother with the letter, she can only repeat the denial, claiming to have no knowledge of any such event.

 

    The incident is forgotten for a while, but as some time passes, Rudd looks up the address written on the letter, uncovering his half-brother Lael. At first the boys, radically different from one another, do not particularly get on. Indeed, Rudd is frustrated by Lael’s lack of communication skills and, more importantly, his manipulation of Rudd as he maneuvers the two of them into increasingly dangerous situations. In one instance, for example, Lael determines that they drive Rudd’s scooter far beyond the point in which they will run out of gas and be forced to walk several miles in return. But it is precisely Lael’s going beyond the limits that both attracts and repels Rudd; being the psychologically weaker of the two, he cannot resist his brother’s entreaties. Rudd clearly feels a sense of near-powerlessness around Lael, with whom, as he rides clinging to him on the scooter, he seems gradually to develop an attachment that, if not actually homosexual, borders on the kind of relationship that one might compare to the famed Leopold-Loeb friendship, a love ending in a murder, explored from the various viewpoints of Hitchcock’s film Rope and Levin’s novel and play Compulsion.

     It is not long before Rudd begins to lose faith in the church. An English class project for a research paper results in Rudd (and Lael, who joins his half-brother in later treks to the local university library) uncovering a turn-of-the-century murder of a woman, Anna Pultizer, by Mormon founder Brigham Young’s grandson. The murder, which implicates not only the young boy, Hooper Young, but his homosexual friend Elling, was also connected to a little known doctrine of Mormon theology—utterly denied by the church—of Blood Atonement, a doctrine that suggests when sinners have become so guilty of sin that they cannot be forgiven, a ritualistic murder (in which their throats are slit and blood, let to drain from their bodies) is not only justifiable, but that the murderer may be forgiven and awarded in the Mormon afterlife. With its mysterious story and its gruesome details, it becomes quickly apparent why two young Mormon boys, in a time of confusion and disbelief, might become fascinated with the tale; but the mystery surrounding the form of the murder and the relationship between Young and Elling attracts the boys in ways that might be inexplicable if Evenson had not carefully developed his story to suggest both their own relationship to one another and to their dead father. The books in Rudd’s father’s home library are marked, moreover, with marginalia on the very pages describing the Mormon Blood Atonement theory!

    Before long, Rudd is having difficulties in school and, more importantly, in paying close attention to anything around him. He and Lael are somewhat involved in drugs, but what is even more horrifying are the long stretches of time in which Rudd later can remember nothing, periods which he describes as “blackouts” or “holes” in time. Part one of this sophisticated horror tale ends with the boys together on an adventure in the woods, with Rudd feeling “himself crowded out of his senses and into oblivion.”

     The second section quickly shifts the action to the aftermath of a multiple murder of campers, their bodies placed carefully in positions suggesting a ritualistic act. There is only one survivor, a young boy whose neck has been severely cut. The daughter of the murdered family—who had stayed home during the camping trip—is strangely attracted to the survivor, a boy close to her own age, and watches over his comatose recovery. As the police are pulled away from his protection—the murderer still at large—the girl, Lyndi, pulls him into another room and watches over him until he finally awakens. The survivor is Rudd.

     No perceptive reader observing the developing relationship between the daughter of the victims and Rudd can move forward in this tale without great discomfort, for we know instinctively that Rudd was in some way involved with the deaths. Strangely, we have no choice now but to hope that Lael—the evil twin, so to speak—is the guilty party, that Rudd will somehow be brought back into sanity. Rudd has, however, no memory of the events.

     After a period in which Lyndi’s aunt encamps within the family home, hoping to cheer up her grieving niece, but having quite the opposite effect, Lyndi is only too happy to let Rudd, whose mother has forced him to escape his own home, move in with her; the two set up an awkward household outwardly, perhaps, suggesting a sexual relationship, but, in fact, consisting of a kind of brother-sister or roommate situation. Rudd is painfully confused, sometimes gentle and solicitous, clearly feeling the need to protect his new friend, but at other times he remains aloof, secretive and protective. He insists that she never enter his (formerly her sister’s) room uninvited. As time passes, the two grow further apart until Lyndi confronts him, ending in Rudd’s attempted suicide and his insistence that they get married.

      The Mormon marriage ceremony described is perhaps one of the strangest passages in the book. As the couple, who have previously remained outside of church ritual, are taken through the various steps of the ceremony—the ritual washing, the awarding of a secret name, the various questions asked as they sit on opposite sides of a veil marked with symbolic slits in positions not unlike those in which Lyndi’s family were placed by their murderer—the reader feels nearly suffocated by being enwrapped in such ritualistic acts. The couple themselves seem about to flee, as Rudd, breaking with the ceremony, denies Lyndi the use of her “secret” name Rachel, insisting it is Elling—and, in so doing so, feels he has cheated the blessing of the church, has torn the veil.

      But if Lyndi is merely confused by the event, we know that within Rudd’s mind the symbolism of that veil is interwoven with the events of both the 1902 murder and the murders of Lyndi’s family; and the two begin to converge in a way that becomes increasingly frightening. As Rudd and Lyndi attempt to begin life as a married couple, he retreats even further, ultimately moving into a kind of makeshift tool shed, the entrance of which he has now covered over in a veil—a real sheet that serves as a symbolic separation from the world at large. As Lyndi grows more and more troubled by the course of events, she explores the shed, realizing in the process that Rudd was indeed involved in her parent’s murder and discovering something that is too horrible for words.

      The third section of Evenson’s unholy trinity relates a near-surrealistic series of events in which Hooper’s murder of Anna Pultizer, his determination to hide the body, and his attempt to send off her clothes in a large chest is played out again and again, as each time Rudd—living like a drugged man in a time warp—is coached by "Elling," actually Lael, apparently have returned. Gradually, the reader realizes that the seemingly murdered body is, in fact, Lyndi, still living perhaps, but bound and suffering as the boy enacts, again and again, the events from the distant past. When suddenly the deus ex machina return of Lyndi’s aunt interrupts this horrific passion play, Rudd refuses to let her enter, and Lael/Elling announces his departure. At that very moment, we suddenly are faced with the possibility that, in fact, there has been no Lael, no half-brother, ever in Rudd’s life (Lyndi has previously sought out the brother, who insists his name is Lyle—an incident repeated from Rudd’s first encounter with the boy—and that he has no knowledge of Rudd), or, even worse, he has been himself sacrificed to Rudd’s horrific myth. With the policeman in tow, Lyndi’s aunt gains entry to the house, but neither she nor we know what she may find. Even if Lyndi is still alive, we perceive that Rudd has lost his life to the demons of the past. We can only imagine that he sits somewhat like Psycho’s Norman Bates, wrapped in a sheet, living in a world from which he can never return.

     Evenson has created a compelling horror tale that is not as much an indictment of Mormonism as it is a warning of the dark sides of all religions and the willingness to (con)fuse the power of faith with the power of controlling other people’s lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2006

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, IV, no. 2 (April 2007).

 

Jens Bjørneboe | Kruttårnet (Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol) / 2000

between fire and ice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jens Bjørneboe Kruttårnet (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1969). Translated from the Norwegian by Esther Greenleaf Murer as Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol (Chester Springs, Pennsylvania: Dufour Editions, 2000)

 

Set in an asylum for the criminally insane, Powderhouse—the second volume of Norwegian novelist Jens Bjøneboe’s History of Bestiality series—begins with all indications that this work, like several of his others, will be ideologically driven. Indeed, the narrator threatens a lecture in the first chapter, and, in retrospect, the reader perceives the structure of the book to be centered around three such lectures: the first devoted to the Church’s persecution of heretics and witches, the second focusing on the methods and lifestyle of public executioners, and the third on the motivations of heretics and others who are publicly punished. For all of its didactic impulses, however, Powderhouse is perhaps Bjørneboe’s most emotionally-charged and forgiving work, and, at least in my opinion—as opposed to what Gary Kern has described as one of a series of “great failures”—is a complete success, a study of human evil that has the potential to transform all but the most doctrinaire of its readers.

 

    The highly unorthodox treatment of Lefevre’s patients results in a murder and possible closure of his institution. But from the vantage point of the work’s narrator, Jean (self-proclaimed “caretaker” and possible patient himself), Lefevre's methods nurture a sense of humanness and peacefulness among these madmen and women that is closer to sanity than the world outside as presented in the horrible series of historical events outlined in the lectures. Against the backdrop of human atrocities recounted by Bjørneboe’s lecturers, the petty emotional explosions and occasional violence of the “Powderhouse” represent an almost utopian world where love and respect for one another prevail. Particularly powerful in their expression of human behavior at the opposite pole from the horrible histories described in this work are Jean’s nightly encounters with nature and his sexual activities with the nurse Christine.

     All this is not to say that Bjørneboe’s fiction is an “easy” read. The book’s recurring depictions of human barbarity are as painful to endure as in any fiction I’ve read. But between the fire below and the ice above—the metaphors of human behavior that dominate this work—Bjørneboe proffers, through his narrator, enough hope to imagine alternatives to the horror of what we know is human history.

 

Los Angeles, 2001

Reprinted from Exploringfictions (August 2009).