What I Know of Norway

In 2013 my good friend and founder of this blog, George Ovitt, published a collection of short stories under the title The Snowman.  Here, for your enjoyment, is one of my favorites:

Axioms

The moon shone like water on the white comforter.

I couldn’t sleep. We had finished a bottle of wine at dinner—a cheap Shiraz from Chile, not my favorite. There had been an hour set aside for reading. She flipped through the Times while I waded into another in a series of Scandinavian detective novels—brooding books written by men whose names I couldn’t recall when someone at work would ask me if I had read anything good lately. This one was by a Norwegian and had won the prestigious Nils Gunderwald Prize. On the first page the alcoholic detective is called to a small village near the town of Fredrikstad, south of Oslo. There he encounters both a decapitated body and an old school acquaintance. The body hasn’t decomposed in the winter cold. The detective, who, we are informed, smokes Gitanes and drinks too much Dovgan vodka, recognizes the dead woman as an ex-mistress, a physician with whom he had a brief affair between the second and third of his failed marriages. Her name was Kristen. The school chum—the translator has used the word “chum” as well as “corpulent” and “tendentious” to describe the detective’s friend—has also been in love with Kristen and may be the father of her son, now a young man studying archeology at the University of Gothenburg.

My wife asks me if I know the capital of Burkina Faso. I tell her Ouagadougou. I spell it. She says that can’t be right. And I say that I may have misspelled the name, but that I am quite certain Ouagadougou is correct. She looks at me through her reading glasses—she is very beautiful and, as is always the case, looking at her reminds me of my failures.  She pushes her hair back and then does that thing women do which requires them to raise their arms above their heads and simultaneously bare their abdomens and accentuate their breasts while casually tying their hair into a kind of half-knot that invites pulling, a triple-erotic whammy. Without smiling my wife points to my book and asks me if I like it. But she gets up and walks into the kitchen before I can formulate an answer that will seem both thoughtful and approving without at the same time suggesting that she should read the book since I know she has despised Scandinavian writers since learning of Knut Hamsun’s Nazi sympathies.

I pretend to read but strain to hear what my wife is saying. She is speaking softly on her cell phone, standing near the back door, right next to the Super Quiet Maytag dishwasher her parents gave us for our first anniversary. The morose detective has been attacked in his hotel room, or perhaps he has merely fallen down drunk. It is snowing and all of the usual outdoor sounds are muted. The hotel is seedy, which seems out of character given what I know of Norway. Water is rushing up through the sink, gurgling in a ghostly way. My wife is laughing and I think how she never laughs with me.  I call out to her, just her first initial, R, and ask if she would bring me a beer.  She doesn’t respond. The dishwasher is coming to the point in its cycle that I refer to as its death throes—the glassware is clinking too loudly, and I think of how upset my wife will be if anything breaks. The chum, whose name is Eriksson, discovers the unconscious detective and slaps his face to “bring him about.” The translator, I begin to feel, lacks sensitivity for English idioms. I wonder about this. There is a picture of the translator at the back of the book, but no picture of the author. This too seems odd. When my wife comes back into the room, without my beer but with a glass of water for herself, I smile and mention to her the infelicities of the translation. I’m hoping to say something witty enough to make her laugh, just as I heard her laugh a moment ago. She says that “bring him about” is fine, she’s used the phrase herself.  I ask her about the circumstances and she shrugs. I mention that consciousness involves the interconnected firings of billions of neurons as well as the leaching of chemicals, like serotonin, across neural membranes. She says that she is going to bed. I get a beer.

My wife takes her time in the bathroom. Our apartment is downtown and small. I work uptown but enjoy taking the subway. My wife is a stay-at-home wife, that’s what I call her, perhaps with a trace of irony. She feels that she has worked hard all of her life and deserves to take a sabbatical. I have three weeks off each year. During that time we drive to Ohio to visit my wife’s extended family. Every year we rent a couple of cabins on Lake Williams.  While my wife goes shopping with her mother, I teach my nephews how to play chess. They find the game boring and dislike my enthusiasm. When my wife leaves the bathroom she is wrapped in a towel. The floor is wet and her clothes are strewn about like flowers.

R lies across the bed nude. I have brushed my teeth thoroughly and used the last half ounce of Listerine.  I begin to kiss her, but she rolls away and pushes down under the sheets. I do the same. I say that I love her. She looks at me and rubs her hand across my face. It is a mistake to do so but I repeat the words. My wife is a quiet person, undemonstrative. Her manner of keeping still and being inward was once attractive to me. She turns toward the wall and seems to say that she loves me, but the rustle of the bedclothes makes it hard to hear what she is saying. I say ‘good’ and turn my back to her, hoping that I will sleep. I don’t.

In the morning I will take my novel back to the library, unfinished. If she has time, my wife will empty the dishwasher. We need wine so I will stop at the shop on the corner for a bottle. Perhaps white, a Sauvignon Blanc. The Times arrives early, but I will have left for work by the time the blue cylinder is tossed onto our stoop.

What our hearts most desire eludes us. Joy flies from us like the airy light of a full moon in March.  

*       *        *

To order a copy of the entire collection go to:

http://www.bluemustangpress.com/catalog.htm

 http://www.amazon.com/The-Snowman-George-Ovitt/dp/1935199161?ie=UTF8&keywords=the snowman george ovitt&qid=1458837040&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Peter Adam Nash

The Polylogical Chinese Restaurant or My Occasionally Postmodern Mind

The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

In the aftermath of World War Two, when virtually every German city had been destroyed by Allied bombing, the city of Kassel decided to postpone its reconstruction until 1955, when its citizens opted to turn their backs on the headlong industrial re-development embraced by such cities as Dresden and Cologne and devote themselves to the promotion of culture instead. It seemed to them a fitting rejoinder to Hitler and his contempt for modern and avant-garde art. 

Founded there and then, by painter and academy professor, Arnold Bode, was  the first of a series of 100 day-long exhibitions called documenta, a pioneering art festival, still running today, that initially included the works of such now world-famous artists as Picasso and Kandinsky. Writes Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel:

Again and again, the documenta has shattered the world of art, whether on poor postwar times when people thirsted for art, whether in rebellious years of revolution, whether in the lighthearted era  at the end of the 20^th century or whether at the turn of the century dominated by globalisation. The history of documenta is a history of defeats, of doubts, of scandals and, at the same time, of renewal, of discovery and artistic creativity. Above all, however, it has always been a history of success.

Indeed the most recent documenta, dOCUMENTA (13), the exhibition of which Vila-Matas writes in his novel, drew a record-breaking 904,992 visitors.

The Illogic of Kassel tells the strange, funny, consistently beguiling story of a sixty-three year old Catalan avant-garde writer who receives a phone call from an enigmatic woman one day, inviting him to participate in this selfsame festival. Perplexed as to why the committee would invite him, a writer, to take part in such an exhibition, generally the preserve of sculptors, painters, and dancers, he soon discovers that his mission, his charge, is in fact quite novel, indeed distinctly avant-garde: for three weeks he is merely to sit down every morning at his own special table in a nondescript Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel and write—a living, breathing art installation. In essence he is told: “Here’s an invitation to a Chinese restaurant, we’re asking you for art, now let’s see what you make of it.”

The puzzled narrator, long intrigued by the idea of the avant-garde, indeed curious to discover whether the avant-garde as a movement still exists, decides to accept this singular invitation to Kassel. There, he soon finds himself seated at his appointed table in the Dschingis Khan each morning, surrounded by sometimes curious, though mostly indifferent diners as he toils away at his craft, only to spend his afternoons and evenings, like the other visitors there, wandering through the many exhibitions, “that great garden of contemporary marvels”, a few photos of which are included below.

What compounds the wonder of this funny, affectionate, and highly inventive novel is that the story itself—at least the premise of it—is true: Vila-Matas himself was actually working at his desk in his apartment in Barcelona one day when he was interrupted by a call from a mysterious-sounding woman who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Featured below is the author Vila-Matas at work in the Dschingis Khan.

Enrique Vila-Matas was born and raised in Barcelona. He has written numerous works, including Bartleby & Co., Dublinesque, Montano’s Malady, and Never Any End to Paris. The Illogic of Kassel was translated by Anne McClean & Anna Milsom.

  

Peter Adam Nash 

The Erotics of Luck

Dostoevsky's Last Night, by Cristina Peri Rossi

That's the inside of Donald Trump's Taj Mahal, built with leveraged funds by Mr. Trump on prime ocean-front property in decrepit Atlantic City in 1978, a joint that was once the chief draw on the briefly revitalized boardwalk, a dump today, bankrupt since 2014, purchased on the cheap by Carl Icahn, who is now involved in a court battle as 1,000 former employees seek to recover their pension and health funds. As if. Meanwhile The Donald has moved to greener pastures--Bloomberg's Disney/Manhattan, Chicago, and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Why not? The golden boy from Queens who was born on third base has evinced little concern for the misadventure on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. You win a few, you get bailed out, and then you win a few more. Maybe run for president. It's a great country.

My father loved the high life and I've always loved the low, so the Taj was perfect for both of us. We went together once, in 1984, to the very room pictured above--a glitzy Crystal Palace without the optimism--faux art deco, rooms reeking of prime ribs, furtive sex, and disinfectant. A louche airplane hanger of a casino brimming with slots and roulette wheels and blackjack tables; crowded with pensioners bused in from dumps like Rahway free of charge, blue-haired ladies given a paper sack of quarters as seed money, gimpy gents wearing baseball caps and banlon slacks (as was my Old Man)  who pumped nickels into the one-armed bandits and gawked at the hookers strolling the worn carpets, cocktails in everyone's hand (you couldn't stand it sober) babes wearing too much make-up adorned in seedy evening wear stroking the necks of the high rollers at the poker tables. Nothing is as depressing as money, nothing, that is, except those who lust after money. 

I'd gambled some before. I liked horse races and spent a fair amount of time betting on the ponies at Monmouth Park. With horses you have a chance; the contingencies are under control. Handicapping is a form of scholarship, Talmudic. How does Serendipity run in mud? Who's riding her, who's her trainer? How did she run at Belmont last week? Not to mention the horses are beautiful to watch, not like staring at a dealer pulling cards out of a shoe. I'd avoided casinos most of my life. Tagging along with my father, I played a few hands of blackjack and hung around the craps table (always the best action). The drinks were watery; we saw a good show, ate steaks, and had a nice time. But gambling, casinos, the whole obsession with luck and beating the unbeatable house--this I never understood. Though I now live a few miles from three or four casinos I'm never tempted, maybe because the desire to see if I could dip my toe in the game--just once, with a limited stake--is too risky. Maybe because of the horror stories about folks who bet their houses (no bailouts for them), or maybe because there are other things to gamble on every day, like whether or not you can get through twenty-four hours intact.

Are there any great books about gambling aside from Dostoevsky's "The Gambler"? The Hustler and The Color of Money, both by Walter Tevis come to mind, but I can't find any others on my shelves--Leaving Las Vegas is a suicide novel with a gambling on the side. I'm not even sure the book under review  is actually about gambling.What I suspect is that the author, a highly regarded Spanish woman, wanted to write a book about the folly of male sexuality and used gambling as a metaphor--a vain man trying to seduce Lady Luck. What is gambling after all but a flirtation with the erotic--with intense pleasure or, more likely, with exquisite pain willingly submitted to--a fundamentally masochistic pastime. As with sex or love, you never beat the house.

Reading "The Gambler," or reading Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky's obsession with games of chance, one immediately makes the connection between desire and gambling. Rossi has paraphrased, to good effect, many of the most evocative sections of Dostoevsky's short novel. Here's the Master:

“I wanted to fathom her secrets; I wanted her to come to me and say: "I love you," and if not that, if that was senseless insanity, then...well, what was there to care about? Did I know what I wanted? I was like one demented: all I wanted was to be near her, in the halo of her glory, in her radiance, always, for ever, all my life. I knew nothing more!”

And Rossi:

"There are other days, however, when I wake up feeling a terrible anxiety and can't wait for time when I can be alone with a slot machine (as if it were a lover), when I can caress it, seduce it, listen to it sing, plug it with coins like bullets, strip it, humiliate it, rape it."

Dostoevsky's Last Night abounds in such passages (to an embarrassing extent). Jorge, the journalist- gambler at the novel's center, casts his addiction in erotic terms: he seduces, yearns for, rapes--never lusting after money--he has no interest in money, nor does he care if he wins or loses--all of his desire is directed at conquest, of Luck or of every woman he encounters.  He tries to seduce his psychoanalyst in precisely the way one asks for another card when one knows to stand pat--there's no chance of winning, it's absurd to try, but there's that momentary pleasure that comes of thinking for a fleeting second that the woman or the cards might turn your way.

I can't help but think that Cristina Peri Rossi dislikes men--who can blame her? She imagines at one point that all men "speak daily to their sex" but that women never do so. Her journalist is a pathetic creature, led about by his twin obsessions--to bet and to bed. Rossi generously allows him to seduce every woman he meets, but the couplings are not only passionless, they're routine in the way betting on roulette is routine--an activity that is simply boring.

But I liked the book in spite of its mawkishness. The pointlessness of Jorge's existence was refreshing: surely, living in Barcelona, one could live exactly in this fashion and still be happy. The novel, despite the loose framework (a cheap trick) of character revelation through psychoanalysis, lacks psychological complexity. Jorge gambles and seduces for the pleasure each affords him. A charming motivation in a world where every action appears to be reducible to a utilitarian or pragmatic calculation. Unadulterated narcissism--taking a gamble on the sheer inexhaustibly of pleasure. Freud wouldn't have condoned such a life, but he would have understood it.

"Dostoevsky took the train to Hombourg on May 4, filled more with trepidation and remorse than excitement as he left Anna in tears at the station. He wrote her a day later: 'I'm acting stupidly, stupidly, even more, badly, and out of weakness, and there is just a minuscule chance and....to hell with it, that's enough.'" Frank reports dryly that after four days of "winning and losing," Dostoevsky was "wiped out completely." He would return to Russia--escaping debtors prison--and write three of the greatest masterpieces of world literature.

"Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment." ("The Gambler")

Vera Coking beat Trump in an eminent domain lawsuit in 1995. Trump wanted to bulldoze Ms. Coking house, adjacent to his Plaza, for limousine parking. Needless to say, I never returned to the Taj Mahjal, though my father did, many times. He always enjoyed himself.  

  

Dostoevsky's Last Night is available from Picador Press; it was published in 1992.

George Ovitt (2/18/16)

The Dark Terminus Of All We Know

through the night by stig sæterbakken

Is this what death looks like? A house with nothing in it?

Driven from his home by his irate wife, Eva, following her discovery of his affair with a young woman in town, the narrator, a modest Norwegian dentist named Karl Christian Andreas Meyer, has just returned home to his sullen and resentful family after a period of contrition, when his teen-aged son, Ole-Jacob, commits suicide, shaking him to the core of his being:

Grief comes in so many forms. It’s like a light being turned on and off. It’s on, and it’s unbearable, and then it goes off, because it’s unbearable, because it’s not possible to have it on all the time. It fills you up and it drains you. A thousand times a day I forgot that Ole-Jakob was dead. A thousand times a day I remembered it again. Both were unbearable. Forgetting him was the worst thing I could do. Remembering him was the worst thing I could do. Cold came and went. But never warmth. There was only cold and the absence of cold. Like standing with your back to the sea. Ice-cold ankles every time a wave came in. Then it receded. Then it came in.

An arresting, truly brilliant study of guilt and misgiving, Through the Night is a the story of one man’s deeply affecting struggle to come to terms with his grief. Yet to say this, to state it in such prosaic, conventional terms, is to trivialize the force of such feeling, as it is described in this novel. Indeed so consuming, so total, is the loss this narrator feels that even of this commonplace objective—his own mental health—he remains fearful, unsure: “What will we do, I wondered. When this is over. When we’re finished with all the grief. When we’ve gotten through it, if we get through it, what on earth will we do then.” 

 

Perhaps one of the most frightening aspects of grief, as it is depicted in this darkly radiant tale, is its potential to isolate one from others, from the people one knows and loves. The writer C.S. Lewis captured this poignantly in his famous 1961 book, A Grief Observed, a work—written immediately following the death of his wife—in which, fumbling brilliantly for the words to do justice to the experience, he describes it as something akin to fear, though not fear itself, only to add, "At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me."

This is very much the case with Karl Meyer, the protagonist of this novel. And no wonder. Can even someone who has experienced grief firsthand truly fathom the grief of another? Is such an experience actually relative, commensurable, at all? Or is it—like its sister, love—in fact stubbornly, intrinsically personal, always and necessarily unique? For how else could we bear so many depictions of it—in the literature we read, in the films we watch, in the music to which we listen at night—but as signal variations on this grave and universal theme. 

As with any fresh depiction of grief, indeed with the fresh depiction of any emotion in fiction at all, the devil lies squarely in the detail. One has only to think of Joyce’s story “Araby” with its ‘high, cold, empty, gloomy rooms,’ its ‘dark, dripping gardens,’ its rusted bicycle pump, and the ‘brown imperturbable’ faces of the houses in the streets to reminded of this fact. Sæterbakken himself is especially adept at stringing his protagonist’s grief upon the nails of so many stark and original details. Undoubtedly one of the most effective, most jarring of his touches in this novel, that single detail that opened up this character’s grief to me, that made me feel it in the pit of my stomach, in the marrow of my bones, is the narrator’s habit, started almost by accident one day, of calling his dead son’s cell phone number, which continues to glow, to implore him, in the directory of his phone.

Ole-Jakob. I know that you’re there. You’re there somewhere, and I’ll find you.

Stig Sæterbakken (1966-2012) was one of Norway’s most acclaimed contemporary writers. His novels include Siamese and Self-Control, both published by Dalkey Archive Press. He committed suicide in 21012. Through the Night was translated by Seán Kinsella.

Peter Adam Nash

Wandering Soul

The River Below by François Cheng

Lifting my gaze, I scan the horizon:

The longed-for return, when will it come?

The bird takes flight to regain its nest:

And the fox, dying, turns to its lair,

Upright and loyal, yet I live in exile,

When shall I forget my fate, what day what night?

                                                          Qu Yuan

“French writing continues to emerge from unusual sources,” writes John Taylor in his 2008 essay on the matter in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a fascinating piece in which he introduces the reader to the work of three prominent Chinese-French writers, Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, and François Cheng, whose extraordinary novel, The River Below, is the subject of this post.

In The River Below Cheng “uses the conceit of the medieval dit to let one Tianyi, a Chinese artist, tell the story of his life, as he travels from China (where he was born in 1925) to Paris (where he lived in the 1950’s) and then back to Communist China.” The dit is a form of storytelling believed to have originated in late 12^th Century France as a means of distinguishing allegorical tales, tales that concealed a truth within a purely fictional story or conte, from other more popular tales. Typically the dit signified a moral or instructive story, what soon proved to be a successful compromise “between the heaviness of didactic treatises and the lyricism of courtly poetry…”

No doubt this was precisely what Cheng had in mind when he wrote The River Below. As one reviewer describes the novel: “It unrolls like an allegorical scroll, its characters at once individuals and symbolic figures, as in the I Ching, in which the individual reflects the universal,” making the novel seem both ancient (timeless) and distinctly, significantly modern. 

In fact one of the most remarkable characteristics of this layered, deeply sophisticated novel is the constant interplay between these different narrative modes—that of allegory and that of the anxious modern Bildungsroman. It is the nearly seamless interplay of these different narrative styles that gives the novel its unusual resonance, its force.

Early on in the story, the protagonist, Tianyi, in a line straight out of a fairy tale, reflects upon his discovery of the powers of traditional Chinese calligraphy: “…I was won over by the magical power of brush and ink. I sensed it was to be a weapon for me. Maybe the only one I would have to protect me from the overwhelming presence of the Outside.” Now contrast this passage with the novel’s modern, distinctly Tristram Shandy-like opening in which, with the same casual disregard with which Tristram’s mother—at the very moment of Tristram’s conception—interrupts his father at his business by asking him if he remembered to wind the clock, the young Tianyi makes the foolish mistake one night of calling out to a grieving wid0w in the voice of her dead husband, not knowing that “If by chance someone among the living answers her cry with a yes, he loses his body, which is quickly entered by the dead man’s wandering soul that then returns to the world of the living. And the soul of the one thus losing is body becomes in turn the wanderer…” Near the end of this opening section the elder Tianyi, looking back over his long and rootless life, remarks, in words that Laurence Sterne himself might have penned (if with no intended humor): “I was convinced that from then on everything in me would be perpetually out of joint.”

And so it is, as we follow young Tanyi in his wandering throughout China, to France, to Paris, then back again to China, a nation torn asunder by the zealotry of Mao Tsé-Tung. Juxtaposing an artist’s lyrical sensibility against the violent upheavals of revolutionary China, The River Below is a subtle, broadly challenging novel of ideas that is rich with rewards for the patient and talented reader.

François Cheng Is a Chinese-born French academician, novelist, poet, calligrapher, and translator.

Peter Adam Nash

Only This Silence

Days in the History of Silence by Merethe Lindstrøm

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

                                                                           Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Some days I cannot remember the distinctive character his voice had, whether it was as deep as I believe, I cannot imagine it.  His silence.” So broods the narrator, Eva, about her increasingly estranged husband, Simon, in this intimate and haunting tale about the ineluctable wages of the past.

Set in contemporary Norway, Eva, a teacher, and her husband, Simon, a respected physician, have led a life with their children that has all the hallmarks of modern, middle class success. While as imperfect as every family, not a one of this family’s members has ever wanted for anything—except perhaps for the truth, the truth about Simon’s past.

It began with some letters arriving, several letters. He [Simon] found out more about what happened to his relatives during the war, almost all his relations apart from his mother, father and brother were sent to extermination camps in the course of the war years… The others are crossed out of history.

Instead of sharing this information with their daughters when their daughters were young, Eva and Simon, unwilling to ruffle the still waters of their otherwise tranquil life together, put it off for another time, a time that—no surprise—never comes. By then, by the period in which the novel takes place, the past has already wreaked havoc on their lives, taking its mute if insidious toll on their hearts, their psyches, their nerves. Thinks Eva, “It is surprisingly easy not to say anything, not to tell, to remain silent.”

  

Yet in the end it is their very silence that haunts them in their alienation from their now-grown children and in their alienation from each other. So still, so cold, so silent is the house they share, that sometimes Eva thinks she hears her husband speak:

 

Eva.

Perhaps I hear him from the living  room, and I go in, and he is sitting with his  

      eyes closed.

I hear his voice, because I want to hear it, a hallucination of sound, like an echo of

      music or noise than lingers when you have been to a party or concert and return 

      home, as though  the brain continues to transmit the sound, as though the inner ear

      continues to repeat  the oscillations, in the place where sound is converted and

      interpreted as something meaningful.

Eva.   

As Simon sinks further and further into the tragic silence of his past, the most Eva can hope for is the truth—grim, unforgiving, as that may be. “Like the story about two trolls,” she reflects sadly, “…the one says something, then a hundred years pass, and the other one replies.”

Merethe Lindstrøm has published several collections of short stories, novels, and a children’s book. She lives in Oslo, Norway. Days in the History of Silence was translated by Anne Bruce. 

Peter Adam Nash

Only Submit

Michel Houellebecq, Submission

. . . The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The melancholy and misanthropic Jacques ("Jakes") possesses the gift of truth-telling that might be the only succor of old age; why delude yourself when you stand on the edge of a vast chasm into which you are about to tumble? Dylan Thomas's "Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight/ Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, /Rage, rage against the dying of the light" captures the rage of the person whose life is receding into memory, but provides at least the comfort of defiance. Aging is frightful, death is terrifying, but how much more terrifying and horrible when one's dying coincides with the passing away of the order of the world, with "civilization" itself? The misreaders of Houellebecq miss this nuance in his work--easy enough to do with a writer who sets out to offend, and does.

Cultural pessimism has a long and distinguished history, beginning with Thucydides and traveling a great arc through the rise and fall of nations and empires--even in the midst of the Enlightenment, the age of optimism and belief in continuous liberal progress, there was Vico to remind us that the  glorious age of humanity had passed with Rome, and that sour-puss Joseph de Maistre, whose reactionary attachment to absolute authority--in an age that embraced personal liberty as the only gospel--anticipated Oswald Spengler and the fascist movements of the twentieth century. (Fascism is the only possible resolution of cultural decadence this side of suicide). But pessimism about the products of a rationality unchecked by religious belief and political hierarchy was routed by both the material and cultural products of enlightened cosmopolitanism. Capitalism appeared to supply proof that reason deployed in the service of material progress would make a paradise of this world; the romantics offered the hope that a purely personal spiritual vision could transcend any use people might have for a providential God; and liberalism--the struggle to extend the promise of democratic empowerment--seemed to fulfill the Western dream of individual autonomy sketched out by Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Kant.

  The pillars of modern cultural pessimism--Nietzsche and Thomas Mann and T. S. Eliot--understood that the shucking off of the Old Order, however desirable, must have its cost. In Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche's scathing indictment of bourgeois Christian (and, perforce, hypocritical) morality is so entertaining that the careless reader, inclined to agree with Nietzsche, is likely to miss the undertone of nostalgia that seeps into Nietzsche's aphorisms. With Mann, there can be no mistaking the sense of loss; the long Scholastic arguments that occupy the final third of Magic Mountain both dismiss as superannuated and defend as essential the unifying vision of the Middle Ages--the vision that held Europe together, according to Mann, until the catastrophe of 1914. It became fashionable during the decadent years leading up to the Great War for disillusioned intellectuals, their youthful folly spent, to convert to Catholicism (or Anglicanism), finding in Holy Mother Church the meaning that personal liberty could not supply. The reek of incense and the Latin chants of celibate priests guided many thoughtful but unhappy men and women to the oblivion of Faith.

Among those who made the journey back to the Church was Joris-Karl Huysmans, pictured here as an oblate of the Benedictine order associated with Liguge Abby in Poitiers. Huysmans, a clerical worker in the French ministry, was of course the author of the scandalous A Rebous (Against the Grain, 1884), the literary model for Michel Houellebecq's Submission. Huysmans's literary alter ego, Jean de Esseintes, a decadent Parisian noblemen, a Nietzschean aesthete, a dandy who loathes the hollow pretensions of middle-class life, passes his time in pursuit of ever more esoteric sensual and aesthetic pleasures. The tone and mood of the novel are, to put it mildly, overwrought, self-conscious to the point of neurasthenia--in other words, just like virtually any contemporary memoir: 

"When all was said and done, the future was the same for all, and neither one nor the other class, if they had had a particle of common sense, could possibly have desired it. For the rich, it was, in different surroundings, the same passions, the same vexations, the same sorrows, the same diseases, and likewise the same poor satisfactions, whether these were alcoholic, literary or carnal. There was even a vague compensation for all the sufferings, a kind of rude justice that restored the balance of misery as between the classes, enabling the poor to endure more easily the physical sufferings that broke down more mercilessly the feebler and more emaciated bodies of the rich." (Chapter 13)

A bit too didactic--precisely in the voice (whiny, hectoring, self-absorbed) of Houellebecq's narrator. De Esseintes quotes Baudelaire, grows poisonous flowers, and loads a tortoise's shell up with enough gems to crush the poor beast. He drinks too much and ruins his health; mocks the Church, but in the tone of a jilted lover. Throughout the novel the abiding questions revolve around the problem of meaning--what to make of this comfortable modern life of ours? Now that God is dead, superstition is vanquished, reason is triumphant, and "freedom" has been achieved--what do we do until we die? There appear to be only three options: suicide, political engagement (but with Communism dead this option appears cut off), and submission to one of the three overweening monotheisms available to modern persons. Decadents don't do politics and they generally enjoy something enough to stay alive (sex or food or reading), so what's left is the Temple or Church or, in this case, the Mosque.

Baudelaire, who could well have been Huysmans's model for des Esseintes, smoked opium and drank himself to death, and proclaimed (like Rimbaud) the "derangement of the senses," saw fit to take the sacrament of extreme unction on his deathbed, hoping, perhaps, like Pascal, to hedge his bets. This, I think, is real decadence.

Submission's plot is fairly straightforward: In the near future (the 2020's) a close election and an alliance with the disillusioned French Socialist Party hands the presidency of France to a presentable representative of the Muslim Brotherhood (no talk of jihad; western business attire). The narrator, a disillusioned professor at the Sorbonne, a specialist in Huysmans, a decadent himself, looks on with cynical disinterest as France quietly accepts Islam as its new religion/ideology--an Islam cloaked in terms of traditional family values (women out of the workforce, back into the nursery), a new Mediterranean empire with Paris as its capital (Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and the Arab Middle East are quickly admitted to the EU), and an abandonment of secular education (the Sorbonne becomes a center of Islamic scholarship; all professors must pronounce the Shahada). The narrator, a half-hearted atheist, is retired on a generous pension. The trouble is, his life has no meaning. He is alone--his lover has left for Israel, as have many other French Jews--he is friendless, alienated from politics and dismissive of his former life as an intellectual. He still has his prostitutes--there's a generous amount of raw sex sprinkled throughout the book, but it's entirely joyless. Fucking and eating and drinking--like de Esseintes, Houellebecq's narrator finds nothing much to attract him in any pleasure, and mulls over the meaninglessness of life in the style of an angst-ridden teenager, without much belief even in despair. Eventually, after an abortive journey to the scene of his hero's Benedictine monastery in Poitiers, the nameless narrator is offered a chance to return to the Sorbonne, to revive his study of Huysmans, to take up a well-paid academic existence. Is he interested? Not really. But the other attraction, the lure of submission, that is tempting, almost irresistible.  Why think or feel when you can surrender to Creator of the Universe?

Not an especially good book--Houellebecq is more of polemicist than a novelist, and Submission is full of the sort of long speeches on the absurdity of life that are the mainstay of French literature--the book does hold out the attraction of timeliness and painful relevance. It was published in France around the time of the Charlie Hebon massacre; I read it during the weekend surrounding the most recent ISIS atrocities in Paris. It's nonsense to accuse Houellebecq of being "anti-Muslim": he's against everything, religion, academics, women, men, and even the pleasures his characters so mindlessly pursue. He is a nihilist, and for the reviewers at the Times and other publications to wring their hands over his depictions of sodomy and his mockery of religion (Houellebecq has a "twisted outlook on the sacred" according to Adam Gollner of the New Yorker) misses the point. This isn't a book about Islam or even about religion--it's a work of cultural pessimism, a lament for the end of Western civilization, an ending that has been announced often in the past, but never before with as much conviction that this time we're not kidding.

I have two immediate reactions to the criticisms of Houellebecq as (frankly) an unpleasant writer and person: first, when did book reviewers become so complacent about the ideas expressed in novels? The main outlets for cultural opinion in this country appear to have tacitly agreed that no work of fiction that is "offensive" can be taken seriously, no matter how serious its intentions (see my review of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones from October 20th). Second is the fact that the media in which these reviews appear are replete with respectful essays on the trashiest products of Hollywood, the misogynistic music churned out by hip-hop "artists," and the sex-and-violence-laden pulp fiction that graces the New York Times bestseller list every week. Put simply, books and movies and music that make money are treated with respect, no matter how ghastly and immoral their content, while literary fiction, committed to awakening readers' senses to some of the difficult truths of life, are dismissed on moral grounds. (He insults Islam? He's contemptible; but if Houellebecq were a member of the Republican Party he could be running for president). Or perhaps the upside-down values of our age are a sign of our decadence. Kant's "dare to know" has become "don't you dare," as we close our eyes to what is difficult in favor of what affirms our fantasies.

Reading Submission, I kept seeing the benign countenance of Ben Carson in my mind's eye: Carson became Ben Abbes, Houellebecq's Muslim President of France, also a benign-seeming man, whose brand of low-volume politics was pitched exactly right for a France that had (fictionally) tired of the indignities of the contemporary world. Gentle Ben's platitudes, reducing their disguised ideological fervor in the mush of banalities that we seem to prefer. Here's Spengler:

"A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirtuality of ever-childish humanity and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. . . It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts to the proto-soul." (Part III, "Cultures as Organisms)

Spengler doesn't mention this, but it seems clear that the universalizing aspirations of the Enlightenment--a French inclination, born in the wars of Louis XIV and at the heart of the Revolution, systematized by Diderot in the Encyclopedia, and detested by Germans like Herder, Hegel, and Fichte--are what led to the "decline of the West." If Culture at its foundation is a set of spiritual aspirations that generate a particular cultural soul (Europe in its golden Roman and medieval periods), then decadence arrives with the rejection of this universalizing spirit in favor of an atomized individual. All of the great decadents are loners--the flâneur, the solitary poet wandering the countryside in search of lost gods, the despairing intellectual alone in his chateau with his books and tortoises (Huysmans), or the despairing Frenchman pumping himself dry into a woman he's paid for the privilege.  How do we reverse this decline and fall, how do we restore hope if not meaning to the declining West? Find another universal, another great spiritual truth. Ben Carson has the Lord and Houellebecq imagines France with Ben Abba's Allah. Decadence dissolved in the Absolute; Mind in mindlessness; politics in Authority; love in reproduction; thought in blessed ignorance.

All will be well. Only submit.