Dictatorship of Flies

El Señor Presidente by Miguel Ángel Asturias

                               When the trumpet sounded

                               everything was prepared on earth,

                               and Jehovah gave the world

                               to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,

                               Ford Motors, and other corporations.

                               The United Fruit Company

                               reserved for itself the most juicy

                               piece, the central coast of my world,

                               the delicate waist of America.

                               It baptized these countries

                               Banana Republics

                               and over the sleeping dead,

                               over the unquiet heroes

                               who won greatness,

                               liberty, and banners,

                               it established an opera buffa:

                               it abolished free will,

                               gave out imperial crowns,

                               encouraged envy, attracted

                               the dictatorship of flies…

                                          Pablo Neruda

                                   “La United Fruit Co.” from Canto General (1950)

Modeled after the brutal Guatemalan dictator and corporate henchman for the American-owned United Fruit Company, Manuel José Estrada Cabreras (1898-1920), the nameless tyrant of Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias’ most influential novel, El Señor Presidente, achieves a nearly mythical stature in this surreal and brawling tale as an aloof and evil god, the mysterious source of all suffering and death. What we learn of him we learn principally through the eyes and mouths of the poor and the mad and the dispossessed, as well as through the political jockeying of his many sycophants and jackals. Alternately praised as “Beloved Deity,” “First Citizen of the Nation,” and—in a single breath, without a trace of irony—“Constitutional President of the Republic, Benefactor of the Country, Head of the great Liberal Party, and Liberal-hearted Protector of Studious Youth,” this reclusive tyrant—with his toothless gums, pendulous cheeks, and pinched eyelids—is compared daily by his wretched subjects to none other than Pericles, Jesus Christ, and “the Sun King at Versailles.” 

Yet, ultimately, this novel is a less a satire of a particular man and regime, a particular Banana Republic* (for which Asturias had no shortage of choices, most notably Jamaica and nearby Honduras) than a broader, artistically ambitious study of the brutal effects of plutocracy, no matter the era, the people, the place. Indeed if one were to change the names, switch the props, adjust the lighting here and there, this novel could be set almost anywhere today (forget Iraq and North Korea and Iran; think of China, Russia, and Germany, think of England and France, think especially of the U.S.A.)—any place where, in the hallowed name of This or That, the elites of business, politics, and the military have gladly joined hands. 

In a story reminiscent of the gory productions of the popular, turn-of-the-century Parisian theatre, the Grand Guignol, there is one character, a man known as Miguel Angel Face (Miguel Cara de Ángel), who serves as a lifeline for the reader throughout the plot’s many twists and convulsions and turns, a moral, starkly human gauge of the corruption and tyranny that reigns supreme in this nameless Central American nation. 

Known as one of the first “dictator novels” (see also Fecundo by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Nostromo by Joseph Conrad), a genre that would inspire such other Latin American greats as Autumn of the Patriarch; I, the Supreme; and The Feast of the Goat, El Señor Presidente is additionally remarkable as a novel for its clear break from the historic and realist style that dominated the period, both in Europe and Latin America. Cleary influenced by surrealism, Asturias, in his effort to more deeply probe the human psyche under tyranny, achieved a new style at once mythical, dreamlike, and incantatory, an innovation soon to inspire the “magical realism” boom of the 1960’s and `70’s, for which the literature of Latin America remains widely, if imperfectly known. 

* The term was coined by coined by American author O. Henry around 1904, following his travels in Honduras.

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) A Guatemalan by birth, Miguel Asturias studied the myth and religion of Central America at the Sorbonne.  While living in Paris (1923-1933), he worked as a correspondent for several Central American newspapers.  He then pursued a diplomatic career, representing the Guatemalan government in Argentina, El Salvador, and Mexico. He then served as the Guatemalan ambassador to France from 1966 to 1970.  In 1967 he was award the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Thanks in part to Atheneum)

Peter Adam Nash

"Life is impossible"

Zundel's Exit by Markus Werner

"It is in the literature of small countries that one learns that life is impossible."  Michael Hofmann

What an intriguing notion.  How counter-intuitive. I would have said that life is impossible in large countries, in the United States for example, or Brazil, or, heaven knows, in Russia, and that I would move to a cozy nation like Switzerland or Ireland or Portugal tomorrow if only I were able to do so. But Markus Werner's translator, the distinguished German scholar Michael Hofmann, thinks otherwise.  Life is impossible--in Switzerland?  I spent a happy month in Geneva, Bern, Interlaken, and Hunibach many years ago; "impossible" didn't come up.  I wasn't bored with Swiss politeness and civility, with the crystal-clear lakes or mountain vistas, and I wasn't appalled by the homogeneity of the people, many of whom spoke four languages and all of whom treated me like a distinguished guest (I would guess things are different now, post War-on-Terror).  The family who took me in, who drove me around the country, gave me the keys to their mountain chalet and car without knowing a thing about me--how could I have guessed at their true feelings?  What did I know of this small, peaceful nation's ennui?  Max Frisch, Robert Walser, Paul Nizon, and Peter Stamm are the only Swiss writers I've read, and none of them exudes the sort of cold, bright airiness that one associates with Bern or Geneva or glorious Interlaken. Perhaps it is the comfort of Swiss bourgeois life that is soul-crushing, or the relentless sublimity of the Alps, or the wealth, or the accuracy of the time-pieces.  In any any case, Zundel's Exit is a cheerless book, funny-sad in parts, but mostly mad and quirky and reflective of the sort of impossible life Hofmann cites in his introduction. 

There's a little of Aspen in Interlaken, but, having been to both the petit bourgeoise resort in Colorado and the haute bourgeoise resort in Switzerland, there can be no comparison.  No, life is far more impossible in large countries than small.  But then consider the sad case of the gymnasium teacher Konrad Zundel, who believes his wife to have been unfaithful, who has a morbid fascination with Italy (in just the way Thomas Mann obsessed over the malarial canals and back streets, the prostitutes and hustlers of Venice, so does Konrad spend much of the novel slumming in Genoa), and who pushes himself with breathtaking rapidity (the novel is a mere 124 pages) into madness.

Though Zundel's breakdown feels underdetermined--could he really believe his wife is unfaithful on the basis of a slanderous comment by his landlord?--he takes the path of many contemporary European malcontents, from Bernhard to to Frisch:

"I want my feeling raw, not spoon-sized, I want action, not the book, I hereby declare--until further notice--that unfiltered reality is my aim, and I mean it.  The mind--and I say it with all respect, and I have proof--the mind chokes off pleasure in living.  The fact that the female praying mantis (mantis religiosa) bites the head off the male at the onset of copulation and thereby heightens his sexual prowess (the head contains inhibitor nerve centers) can surely come as no surprise. The spontaneous life is--headless."

It's thinking that undoes us--we need to take on the world in all of its raw, unmediated terror to be sane.  I ask myself, "What sense does this make?"  I have little patience, at least in my literary life, with those who push themselves into madness in the name of enhanced experience. This deliberate flirtation with craziness is among the most unattractive legacies of romanticism, this equating of madness with insight.  Last year, rereading Celine's Journey to the End of Night I was close to thowing the book against the wall in frustration.  I feel the same way about the Beats (except William Burroughs, who was at least funny); the whole Rimbaudian "systematic derangement of the senses" leaves me cold.  Then again, one can see a kinship between Rimbaud and Zundel, for in both cases it is "Woman" (Rimbaud's scare-caps) who must be overthrown.  Zundel's wife Magda has many annoying habits, mostly having to do with her shallow feminism and the way she drops her hair clips carelessly about the flat--and this is more than Konrad can take.  When his malacious landlord suggests that Magda has been hosting gentlemen callers while Zundel was lurking in Italian train stations, Konrad Z. falls off the deep end, or rather, he falls into what passes for his own depths, which are, unlike Rimbaud's, not so much frightening as incoherent.  Zundel enjoys falling down, peeping through keyholes, sponteneously travelling to foreign places, and writing down his fragmentary thoughts. 

Rimbaud, who gave up literature at nineteen, wrote, in "Sensation":

"Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rein:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'ame, 
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohemien, 
Par la nature--heureux comme avec une femme."
["I won't speak, I will have no thoughts:
But infinite love will grow in my soul,
And I will go far, far off like a bohemien--a gypsy,
Through nature--as joyous as a woman."]

And these sentiments come close to describing much of the story of Zundel's Exit.  A chaotic wandering through Genoa in search of something (a gun, a prostitute, the owner of a missing finger, a bit of lost dignity)--and then a breakdown.  I didn't much care if Zundel's woes were real or imagined, but I persist in thinking that perhaps he should have taken Magda on vacation in lovely Interlaken, eaten a bit of Swiss cuisine, gone for a hike, enjoyed a bit of carnality, and sought to discover if life, in the shadow of the Jungfrau, might not be possible after all.  I didn't dislike this book, but I found it, well, a little bit impossible.

Zundel's Exit, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by the Dalkey Archive, which also publishes other Swiss writers like Paul Nizon and Gerhard Meier. 


George Ovitt (1/10/14)

Gaddis, Abad, Knausgaard, and Others

The Recognitions, by William Gaddis

Recipes for Sad Women, by Hector Abad

My Struggle, Parts I and II by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Zane Grey, and others

I've hit the more-than-half-way point in William Gaddis's The Recognitions--I was encouraged to push on after sailing (minus a week of the doldrums mid-passage) through Carpenter's Gothic in just a few weeks.  Honestly, once you get acquainted with a handful of Gaddis quirks--like figuring out who is speaking and separating dialogue from third-person narrative--he mixes the two in his idiosyncratic paragraphs--reading Bill Gaddis becomes much easier.  I've been assisted in my comprehension of The Recognitions thanks to Steven Moore's "Gaddis Annotations"--on-line, free, and a very helpful labor of love.  I have mixed feelings about needing comprehensive annotations when I'm reading a book, but I have to admit that I understood almost nothing of Ulysses until I read it with Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated on my desk.  [e.g. "Boss Coker--Richard Coker (1843-1922)....12:196"].  If you decide to try The Recognitions--and I suggest you do--use Moore or else the Catholic Encyclopedia on-line--the first hundred pages are full of arcane reference to Catholic theology, martyology, and Spanish iconography.  I have (felix culpa) some passing familiarity with this material, but still needed annotations to make it through the first two chapters.  I also recommend a good volume of art history, (Janson will do), an encyclopedia (Gaddis used the famous Britannica, 12th ed. for much of his remarkable erudition), and of course the OED.  Reading Gaddis also has the advantage of making William Gass and Thomas Pynchon seem like walks in the park, and he opens up many of the secrets of the writings of David Markson (pictured below with Gaddis).  What is The Recognitions about?  Jacket copy mentions forgeries (in art and life), and I accept that, but on a deeper level I think Gaddis was after something more profound--I think he was debunking Western civilization, not any one part of it, but the entire history, structure, and all of the so-called rational aspirations of the thing--from the moment Socrates heard about his wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi to the commencement of the Cold War.  The whole thing, in Gaddis's view, was a sham.  And who could argue with him? David Foster Wallace, fond of footnotes, wrote a great novel, Infinite Jest, that was itself a footnote to Gaddis.

One of my pleasant discoveries of this past year was Hector Abad, whose memoir Oblivion I wrote about in the spring.  His slender book Recipes for Sad Women cheered me over the holidays, full as it is of easy irony and graceful wit.  The conceit of Recipes is simple: sad women need medicinal relief that can be supplied through the application of sympathetic magic.  Here's an example:

"You believe you loved him once upon a time. To put it a better way, you loved him.  But now, just thinking of him gives you shivers, disgust.  It was like loving a warrior in armour from which emerges, all of a sudden, the weak, slimy jelly of an abominable being....A sorceress of the high plains, a haughty bookish sorceress once gave me the recipe for dissolving the unpleasant memory of a bad past love affair.  To cancel that ignominious memory, it would seem, requires a return to savage rituals...You must acquire a slug, a snail without a shell...Place the slug on top of a pastel-coloured lined handkerchief and take a generous handful of finely ground salt, Throw the salt and watch how it begins to writhe and while squirming to dissolve into nothing. Don't watch anymore, tie the handkerchief closed and bury it twenty centimeters underground. With the slug dissolved in salt that disgusting memory will also fade." 

 Recipes for Sad Women can be read in a couple of hours--it's delightful and rich with deeper meanings about the losses that love brings and how, in the end, there is no way to cope with heartbreak, except, perhaps, by reading good books.

Speaking of sad women, that's Linda Knausgaard, long-suffering wife of Karl Uve, he of My Struggle, whose first two volumes I have just now finished reading, with considerable astonishment at my perseverance.  His ex-wife Tonje, and his current wife, Linda, come in for some brutal treatment at his hands--their physical attributes, their moods, and Linda's mental illness are all part of Karl Uve's story.  As a narcissist, he reduces the lives of other people to the forms of his perceptions; his empathy appears to be limited to himself and to his own tumultuous life.  At one point, when he is in love with Linda and she is not, it seems, in love with him, he cuts his face to ribbons with a piece of broken glass.  His "best" friend Geir (a real person, as is everyone in the two volumes) is used by Karl Uve as an informal confidant, drinking buddy, and perpetual ego-booster but never, it appears, as a friend (we hear nothing of Geir's life).  Karl Uve, let's face it, is not an attractive figure; he'd have done well as a character on "Friends"--he might be the brooding, self-flagellating nutcase from some obscure north European country, say, Norway, who shows up in the coffee shop, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and scowling at Jennifer Aniston.  And yet, dammit: there's something compelling about these books; there's quires of dullness to be sure, and a kind of madness that couldn't be further from the arcane richness of Gaddis or the relentless sanity of Abad, but when he's writing well--on the effect that poetry has on a person for example--Knausgaard is very good.  I'm not sure what I'll do in May when volume three is published; probably I will read it, just as I've watched nearly all of "Breaking Bad" despite my reservations. 

 I've just dipped into the third volume of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Years of Insight, which is must reading for any Kafka-lover (and who isn't that?), and I want to commit to the other volumes (II is out; I is in the works) as well as promise myself that this year I will finish Joseph Frank's monumental Dostoyevsky.  And I also wanted to make a top-five list of non-fiction works that I read this past year, books that are worth a devoted fiction reader's attention: 

1)  James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865.  Forget "My Twelve Years as a Slave." Read this great work of scholarship instead.

2) Kevin Jackson, Constellations of Genius: 1922, Modernism, Year One.  Worst book title ever, and a dubious thesis--modernism actually began in 1900 with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--but a provocative book, full of fascinating anecdotes.  A little like Markson, with its brisk staccato of cultural histories.

3) Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc. The sequel to Alexis De Tocqueville's hopeful classic. The story of the destruction of American democracy.

4) Timothy Mitchell, Rule of the Experts. The history of neo-liberalism in Egypt.

5) Manning Marable, Malcolm X. I should have read this when it first came out. Not just a biography of Malcolm, but of the American underclass. 

As I get older I ask myself--will I ever finish Middlemarch? (No) Shall I read (one final time) The Brothers Karamazov? (Probably not).  How about Peter Nada's Parallel Stories? (I'll check with my doctor). And, will I ever read all of Balzac, Zola, Trollope, or Zane Grey? (no, no, no, and why not)?

Happy New Year!

Here's the Steven Moore annotations for Gaddis.

http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/preface.shtml

Gaddis is found in the Dalkey Archive.  Abad in a lovely little Pushkin Press edition.  Knausgaard in Vintage (England) and Zane Grey in many places and formats. Start with Riders of the Purple Sage.

George Ovitt, (1/3/14)

The Eye of Ra

God Dies By The Nile by Nawal el-Saadawi

Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

“Nawal el-Saadawi,” writes Katherine Roth, in a piece for the on-line journal, The Best of Habibi, “is perhaps the best loved, most hated, and best known feminist in the Arab world.” Indeed El-Saadawi is like a latter-day Eye of Ra in the might and violence with which she (and this novel’s protagonist) confronts and subdues her enemies—those bloated, hypocritical, essentially male defilers of ordinary people and their homes who continue, Quran in hand, to define the fate of Egyptian girls and women to this day.

An ardent political and social activist, as well as an accomplished physician who has devoted much of her career to serving the rural poor, El-Saadawi is also a writer—an intellectual and artist who has committed much of her power to writing fiction as a means of speaking her mind. For it is through her novels, in their unflinching portrayal of the oppressed and often wretched lives of ordinary Egyptians, that she truly makes her mark, an authority perhaps nowhere more apparent, nowhere more affecting, than in her still-startling 1974 novel, God Dies by the Nile.     

Set in the fictional Nile village of Kafr El Teen, sometime in the long and unstable period between Egyptian independence from British control (1922) and the 1952 Revolution, led by the Free Officers Movement of Gamal Abdel Nasser (though distinctly the story has the timelessness of allegory, of myth) this provocatively titled novel tells the simple, if bracing tale of a widowed peasant woman, Zakeya, and her helpless struggle to protect her beautiful young nieces from the ruthless predation of the local mayor. The world of Zakeya is a grim, fatalistic world in which the rich and pious exploit the poor, and the men (be they rich or poor) exploit the women and girls—and all in the name of Allah, of God. 

In fact the lives of the women in this tale are all but entirely circumscribed by the whims and pleasures of men whose misogyny thrives in direct proportion to their piety and power. While there is no doubt that the routine tyranny, harassment, mutilation, and rape suffered by the women and girls in this story are an Egyptian, Muslim problem, a religio-cultural oppression decried again and again (and often smugly) in the popular Western press, it would be a shallow reading of this novel indeed if one were to close the book and not think long and hard about the different, if still pernicious effects of patriarchy and poverty here in the U.S. 

For the wonder of a novel like God Dies by the Nile lies not simply in its ability to show us the lives of others (that alone would be voyeurism, tourism), but also in its power to move us—men and women alike—to consider with fresh eyes the very terms by which we live and relate to each other, to examine daily all we hold “righteous” and “natural” and “true.” Grim as it is, this novel is much more than a catalogue of cruelties, for great fiction is always—indeed necessarily—redemptive. For a writer, a feminist, like El-Saadawi, merely describing the status quo could never be enough.

Nawal el-Saadawi, like her protagonist, Zakeya, was born on the banks of the Nile. As a young woman she refused to accept the limitations that both religious and colonial oppression imposed on most rural women, qualifying as a doctor, only to be awarded the post of Director of Public health before she was dismissed for writing Woman and Sex. Undeterred by this experience, the banning of her books, and even a period in detention under Sadat, she continues to write about Arab women’s problems and their struggles for liberation. (Thanks in part to Zed Books Ltd.) God Does by the Nile was translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata.

Peter Adam Nash