Category Archives: Critical Appraisals

Critical Appraisals: A Spy in the Ruins, by Christopher Bernard

Posted on October 2, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Described by Anna Sears as “A Bildungsroman hallucinogenic in its intensity,” A Spy in the Ruins by Christopher Bernard constructs a postapocalyptic anti-narrative replete with verbal richness, political aggression, and erotic tenderness.  The back cover blurb by Jack Foley asserts Spy “is a book not for the faint of criticism.”  A book this intense, word-drunk, and ferocious demands a proper dissection and investigation.

Spy is an idiosyncratic book about the Sixties and the moral consequences.  At the same time, it encompasses much more in formal experimentalism and in vicious verbal assaults.  The only other fiction where one encounters lacerating indictments “our vexed, complicated, technomiserable situation” (again, Jack Foley) are in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Alexander Theroux, and Thomas Bernhard.  Despite the formalistic challenges presented in the text, an almost physical immediacy haunts the text.

While the current trend in literary circles is to bow before the Cult of the Sentence, crafting polished gems befitting the pages of the New Yorker, Bernard rips apart and defiles the sentence.  It takes a while to adjust to the flow of the novel.  Bernard creates scenes with run-on unpunctuated sentences followed by.  Brief.  Breaks.  In the text.  This is off-putting at first, but eventually this becomes a means to instill a specific tone for the novel.  With the breaks and the run-ons, Bernard’s style balances between that of a prose poem and an epigram.

The plot of the novel follows the life story of “the solitary one,” an unnamed (for the most part) male whose formative experiences include some political activism in the Sixties.  Divided into ten chapters with an overarching framing device, Spy follows the Solitary One from birth to death.  Besides the narrative style, the first half of the novel is notable for its insistent vagueness.  There are discrete scenes and characters, but lacking in proper names and location.  It creates a mythic, dream-like quality, apropos since Foley (again) compares Spy to Finnegans Wake.  (In his blurb, Foley likens Spy to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, a comparison the novel almost achieves.)

The only time the novel really fails to deliver is in passages obviously set in the Sixties but seemingly clouded in a willful vagueness.  The Kennedy assassination is described as a leader killed in a Southern city.  It is only when the accretion of historical facts lean against the mythic edifice of the novel that things begin to strain.

The Solitary One endures a brutal upbringing, only leavened by his nascent sexual experiences with a female schoolmate.  But his upbringing drain these erotic scenes of their joy and later corrode and curdle in his later relationships.  The last sections involve him enduring a one-way conversation with his former lover.  The scene possesses a vicious mood with the Solitary One desperately wanting to answer, but prevented by his deteriorating health.

Prior to that, Spy has chapters increasing in specificity.  A screenplay has a Him and Her where we see a relationship fracture amidst the earnest political discussions one witnesses in bright-eyed college students.  The ninth chapter begins as an espionage novel and ends as a Therouvian indictment of modern culture’s shallowness and rot.  Characters get specific names, but we are unsure whether this is a realistic depiction or whether the hospitalized Solitary One is making this up in his head, retconning the past to make his mistakes more palatable.  The chapter is less Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than Malone Dies.

Bernard marries the formal experimentalism of James Joyce with the unflinching emotional brutality of Samuel Beckett.  Written in 2005, A Spy in the Ruins has a bold experimentalism welded to a strident and intelligent point of view.  It stands toe-to-toe with Infinite Jest, Angels in America, and The Savage Detectives as an epic that has a lot to say and does so in a new invigorating way.

 

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Years of Renewal (1999) by Henry Kissinger

Posted on June 25, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The Benefits of Hindsight

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.

Groucho Marx

Henry Kissinger wrote his final volume of memoirs, Years of Renewal, in 1999, at the cusp of the new millennium and in the final years of the Clinton Administration.  Why did he wait nearly two decades to publish this volume?  White House Years came out in 1979 amidst the foreign policy disasters of President Jimmy Carter.  The book’s tone, coupled with its colossal size, exudes an Ivy League public intellectual’s not-so-veiled justification for his service in the Nixon Administration and its foreign policy successes.  It is a classic example of using the genre of the political memoir to explain why Kissinger was on the right side of history.  In the late Seventies, with the Gas Crisis, the Hostage Crisis, and an earnest, honest, utterly inept Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office, it seemed Kissinger made a compelling case.

The second volume, Years of Upheaval, arrived in 1981, ready for the bookshelves of Reagan Revolution apparatchiks.  With the Gipper residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue playing the greatest role of his career (not counting the movie he did with the chimp), America was ready for a change, including deregulating the banking industry and a little missiles-for-hostages do-se-do.  The Nixon Crew was never well liked among the Movement Republicans, with Watergate as the Five O’clock Shadow of Executive Privilege Run Amok.  Richard Nixon, the Grand Poobah of Red-baiters, poor Quaker son from Whittier, California, entered the White House on a strong platform of Law and Order, ended up dragging nearly his entire administration to the slammer in a political apocalypse of criminality, corruption, and paranoia.  Kissinger gives an insider view of the slow-motion train wreck of Watergate and how the Nixon White House under siege undermined its foreign policy goals.  The best bits are the conversations with the various dictators, despots, and deranged authoritarians, all comforting Henry K. by saying, “In our country, Watergate would never happen.”  They should know, since they have the disappearances, mass graves, and Black Marias to prove it.  But hey, at least those murderous psychopaths with absolute power weren’t Communists.

The first and second volumes each topped out with at one thousand pages (White House Years is a ludicrous 1400 pages long).  Years of Renewal, by contrast, has only 1079 pages (not counting the Notes and Index).  Besides the short length, Kissinger spends ninety pages summarizing Nixon’s foreign policy legacy, Nixon’s personal background, and justifying the crimes of Watergate.  By all accounts, Years of Renewal comes off as rather slight.

“Our long national nightmare is over.”

Kissinger’s final volume recounts his years in the Ford Administration and the array of foreign policy challenges ranging from apartheid to ethnic wars and even a little piracy.  The post-Nixon White House is a chronicle of a foredoomed presidency, the end of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, the unraveling of détente, and the rise of the neoconservatives in the Republican Party.  Kissinger regales the reader with his trademark style, an admixture of academic pedantry, sly wit, and diplomatic genius.

Shuttle Diplomacy, the End of Détente, and Arab Spring

Alliance, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce

After the smoke from Watergate dissipated, Henry Kissinger found himself the only survivor of the previous administration.  The constitutional crisis created something unique within the annals of foreign policy and executive power.  Kissinger became a de facto “foreign policy president,” with his dual role as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and institutional symbol of continuity and stability during the rocky transition period.  Besides negotiating the end of the Vietnam War, the other major area Kissinger lent his considerable diplomatic skill was the Middle East, still a tinderbox after the Six Day War.

While Kissinger goes into minute detail of the difficult negotiations, the geopolitical aftermath of the Six Day War provided an opportunity for the Administration.  With Nixon out of the picture and Congress temporarily assuaged with his resignation, the re-stabilized domestic sphere gave Kissinger a better chance at negotiation with the various belligerents.  But it wasn’t all wine and roses for the globe-trotting Secretary of State, since Congress sought to cut the purse strings on any new-fangled military adventure the Executive Branch might use as a bargaining tool.  The post-Watergate Congressional elections also brought in a massive influx of anti-Nixon Democrats, or in Kissinger’s words, “McGovernite peaceniks”.  This made Kissinger’s job more than a little difficult, since he the stick of American military intervention would be unavailable.

The situation became even more complicated with the Rabat Decision, when the Arab nations agreed to defend Palestine’s right for self-determination.  The irony was all the knots into which the United States tied itself during the Peace Process.  Kissinger, acting on behalf of the White House, engaged in personal talks with the various Middle East leaders, working tirelessly to end the belligerency in an effort to get both sides together to sit down and talk to each other.  In the process of this goal, Kissinger helped forge numerous new alliances with the Middle East powers.  While the despotism remained, the various leaderships switched their alliances from the Soviet Union to the United States.  Unfortunately, the pro-US stance did not alleviate the anti-Israeli sentiment.  Their championing the Palestinian cause added new layers of irony and difficulty.  Since the Middle East isn’t really a place for compromise and sensibility, both sides asserted the right to exist alongside a theological desire to annihilate the other side.

Amidst the negotiations, the foreign policy of détente began to crumble.  The changing international situation merited a reassessment of foreign policy goals, further exacerbated by the rise of Republican neoconservatism.  For decades, the Cold War’s diplomacy fit under two interrelated concepts: brinksmanship and containment.  The first was a matter of strong defense and the nerve of a duelist, the United States going toe to toe with its adversary, the Soviet Union.  The Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis are examples in popular folklore of brinksmanship.  (In reality, the Cuban Missile Crisis involved long-term negotiations and trading missile bases for accepted security guarantees.  The book, When President’s Lie, by Eric Alterman, describes the situation in much more detail.)  Containment involved the United States using diplomatic, economic, and military measures to contain the expansionist aggression of the Soviet Union.  It involved sending troops to such places like South Korea, West Germany, and South Vietnam.

By the mid-Seventies, the American people and Congress were getting sick of bankrolling “containment,” least of all when it didn’t work.  Détente was the Nixon White House’s brilliant idea for ending the Vietnam War.  It involved Kissinger negotiating with the Soviet Union and China, the former the economic and military patron of North Vietnam.  The Middle East, long a bastion of Soviet support, was the other puzzle piece.  Included in détente was the associated issue of nuclear annihilation.  Anti-nuke protesters and the Nixon Administration both wanted the same thing, the means to that goal involved radically different methods.  Nixon and Ford wanted a strong defense, but they also wanted to avoid wiping out humanity because of some regional conflict escalating because both superpowers have enough nuclear warheads to re-create the end credits of Dr. Strangelove and no horse sense to stop it from happening.  The road to warming relations between the two superpowers involved numerous handshakes with dictators and other human rights abusing monsters.

L: Augusto Pinochet, human rights violating monster, dictator, psychopath; R: Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner.

This necessary dictatorship-coddling is something neither the Right nor the Left understood.  Kissinger tried to achieve something unheard of in American foreign policy history: the institution of a foreign policy based on the concept of the balance of power.  Again, to quote Eric Alterman’s When President’s Lie:

The country’s history until then [meaning, the Second World War] involved a counterproductive swing between viewing foreign policy as akin to commercially profitable missionary work and the equally implausible desire simply to withdraw from world affairs whenever the natives failed the appreciate America’s plans to improve them.

The balance of power alludes to the disappointing fact that the United States, a global military, economic, and cultural superpower, has operational limitations.  In Years of Renewal, Kissinger is forced to handle numerous diplomatic crises with an eviscerated intelligence community; a hostile Congress, public, and media; and the tragic foreknowledge that, because of Watergate’s omnipresent taint, Ford will not be re-elected.

The Rabat Decision and the rise of American neoconservatism become key factors in détente’s decline.  The foreign policy apparatus becomes a target for Congressional attacks and the rhetoric of the Right involves the accusation that the Ford Administration is “soft on Communism.”  The self-righteous bellows from the ideologically pure clashed with the necessities of running the Department of State and the Foreign Service Corps.

The events in the Middle East mirrored the events in recent years, the culmination of which was the Arab Spring that began in December 2010.  Kissinger attempted to bring order and stability to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Six Day War.  Today, the United States government is trying to make heads or tails of the still ongoing revolutions, protests, and social unrest covering the Middle East.  In both cases, the government was reactive to the crisis.  The Arab Spring was a populist uprising against the despots coddled by détente-era Washington, useful pawns ruling petro-tyrannies organized as a geopolitical bulwark against Soviet expansionism.  How the United States will answer the developments of the Arab Spring is hard to discern.  It’s simply too early to tell.  Most of the region remains a question mark, as the future is unwritten, unless one subscribes to the apocalyptic fictions of Tim LaHaye and Jerry P. Jenkins, hackmasters behind the anti-Semitic bestselling Left Behind series.  (Just read the plot summary of Glorious Appearing and tell me the series isn’t the Protocols of the Elder of Zion rewritten as a Dispensationalist fantasy.)

Mr. Kissinger Goes to Africa

At least the South Africans aren’t Commies!

[C]oming to Rhodesia from South Africa is like moving from Wagnerian tragedy to paperback thriller.

“War, Peace, and Allegory in Rhodesia” (1977), Jan Morris

Under Ford, Kissinger finally travels to sub-Saharan Africa.  In his continental tour, the most notable visits were to the countries surrounding Angola and the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa.  Sub-Saharan Africa represented another facet of the United States commitment to combat the spread of global Communism.

With Angola, a former Portuguese colony, a domestic civil war took on global political dimensions.  The situation proved to become chaotic with three different patrons (the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba) and numerous neighboring nations harboring anti-government guerrilla groups.  The situation was confusing at best, since it is easy to get lost amidst tricky alliances, countless players, and many acronyms.  Kissinger asserts the need for intervention, especially in light of the Soviet Union’s lack of influence in the Middle East.  The predominantly non-aligned African nations would become potential puppet states to an emboldened Soviet expansionist policy.  Cuba’s participation adds another fold to the already delicate situation, since a Cuban Communist victory would be yet another trophy for Castro to wave in the face of the US intelligence community.

South Africa and Rhodesia represent the redheaded stepchildren for American foreign policy.  Kissinger finds South Africa’s apartheid morally distasteful, politically counterproductive, and a public relations embarrassment.  The mineral rich country of South Africa was the African equivalent of Saudi Arabia: a nation located in a pivotal location for trade run by a hyper-wealthy claque of theocratic bastards.  (The Sa’ud Family running Saudi Arabia like their own personal possession and South Africa run in a quasi-dictatorship by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party.  South Africa had a democracy with an executive, judiciary, and legislative branches, but all power resided in the hands of the white minority, itself split between the descendents of the Dutch and English colonials.  When it became demographically possible, the Dutch regained political control from the English, declared independence from the Commonwealth, and instituted the barbarities of apartheid, the system Jan Morris aptly characterizes as “part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick.”)  In both South Africa and Saudi Arabia, mineral wealth, pivotal location for world trade, and staunchly anti-Communist political ideologies made them useful allies, although both nations have embarrassing human rights records.  Then again, Kissinger sees the left’s focus on human rights as a “fetish.”

Rhodesia is South Africa’s counterpart, albeit the farce to the latter’s tragedy.  Unilaterally withdrawing from the British Commonwealth in 1962, the Prime Minister Ian Smith instituted an apartheid system, only with a much tinier white population.  White rule in Rhodesia seems as foredoomed as Ford’s chances at re-election.

The challenge for Kissinger was to aid South Africa and Rhodesia along into multiracial democratic states without falling to Communism.  While organizations like the African National Congress were undoubtedly leftist, if not openly communist, the premise that Communism will spread to South Africa is pretty weak.  The Soviet Union had military strength, but seeing South Africa as potential Soviet satellite state borders on the absurd.  History has shown that the Soviet Union concerned itself with its European satellite states and its Central Asian republics.  The limited Soviet range existed because the Soviet Union possessed a vast geography, small population, and limited economic means.  The talk of South Africa or a Central American republic becoming a bastion of Communist aggression sounds like the ravings of a lunatic in a tinfoil hat.  Robert Littell put it best with his magisterial spy epic, The Company, when he compared the Soviet Union in the Eighties to “Upper Volta with missiles.”

In the end, Kissinger’s ideals are in the right place, but he is hamstrung by his own amoral balance of power foreign policy.

Evo-Devo of the Right: Conservatives, Neoconservatives, and Tea Party Conservatives

Cut off from the mother country, they remained unaffected by the rationalistic heritage of the Enlightenment or by the democratic dispensation of the French Revolution.

Henry Kissinger on South Africa

On the domestic front, we see Kissinger’s foreign policy assailed on two separate fronts.  The McGovernite peaceniks of the New Left and the self-righteous ideologues of the New Right.  The mid-Seventies see the birth of the neoconservative movement, a political movement that inherited the passionate rhetoric of the Sixties protests and channeled them into a scathing critique of détente.  Without the benefit of public service, the young upstarts accused the Ford Administration of being “soft on Communism.”  They were technically correct, but tone deaf to the concept of the balance of power.  In Years of Renewal, we meet some rising stars of neoconservatism, many whose names should sound familiar, including Richard Perle and Dick Cheney, then Ford’s Secretary of Defense.  To these political fanatics, détente was tantamount to treason, since negotiating with Communist powers was morally anathema.  In this way, they are similar to the New Left, although the New Left concerned itself with human rights and anti-nuclear crusades.  In both cases, a self-righteous morality could not comprehend the complex realities involved in operating the State Department.  The world would be a much better place if all nations were representative participatory democracies with free markets and a robust investment environment.  The problem is it’s just not possible.  The United States, especially after the disaster of the Vietnam War, wasn’t in the mood to bankroll any more military adventures to topple despots.  The problem was this has led to a revival of American isolationism in both wings of the American political system.

The abrupt swings from the zealous missionary desire to convert the world into democracy loving capitalists and the equally strong desire to hole up in our geographically protected shell when those measures fail simply fail to work anymore.  Terrorism is a global problem.  The free market, despite the halleluiahs from lovers of Ron Paul and Ayn Rand, is riddled with inherent weaknesses that require prudent government regulation.  Communism fell in the 1990s and the Great Recession has proven that capitalism is the last man, just not standing, at least not with any superior confidence.

While neoconservatives undermined the Ford Administration, dooming his chances for a second term, the latest variation of conservative ideology, Tea Party conservatism, comes off as a misnomer.  The movement began as a grassroots reaction against Big Government and the specter of Socialism, it has mutated into a racist, nativist, anti-intellectual, anti-government party that espouses a ridiculous theocratic anarcho-capitalism.  This socioeconomic ideology has one minor flaw: it makes no damn sense!  But that’s a rant for another time, suffice to say economic de-regulation cannot coexist with cultural hyper-regulation, at least not for long.  Within the United States we have a multicultural participatory democracy whose citizenry is composed of more than the straight white heterosexual conservative evangelicals who think they speak for the whole nation but whose knowledge of the Constitution and the Bible remain, shall we say, a tad on the slender side.  Hate to break it those of the self-anointed Elect, but the United States is a nation of laws based on the Constitution, not those of Moses or the Holy See.  Ironically, those politicians bolstered by the support of the Tea Party embody this Biblical quote rather accurately:  “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.  If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” (Luke 4: 6-7)  Now who said that?  Jesus Christ or Satan?

Final Thoughts

Are we having fun yet?

Zippy the Pinhead

Reading 5000 pages of Kissinger’s memoirs has been a multiyear project of endurance, frustration, and illumination.  While I personally disagree with Kissinger’s political ideology, I can’t help but respect the intelligence, passion, and skill he brought to the positions of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and his “balance of power” foreign policy makes a lot of sense, at least in the abstract.  But this admiration goes hand in hand with a vengeful hatred and commitment that Kissinger should stand trial for war crimes, specifically those involving Cambodia, Laos, and Chile.  (Although making a stink about this is useless unless he has specific charges filed against him, preferably by the World Court or the United Nations.)

While the hatred and admiration commingle into a curdled froth, one has to perform the duty of book reviewer with a careful unbiased eye.  Draining an assessment of Republican foreign policy without any personal or political bias would be an exercise in futility (and boredom).  The other realization is that Kissinger’s role, while influential and powerful, did not make him the Global Puppetmaster of every atrocity from 1968 to 1976.  One has to be careful of anti-Kissinger critiques devolving into thinly veiled anti-Semitic blather.  Remember how our government actually works: Kissinger, as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, acted in the name of the President and in the interests of the United States.  One sees in the lunatic scribbling of the extremists Left and Right, turning Kissinger into a latter-day caricature of the All-powerful Conspiring Jew.  This is not only inaccurate, but it misses the point.  The United States proceeds towards multicultural enlightenment at a glacial pace, battered by the pendulum swings of ethnocentrism and moral relativism.  Because Kissinger was from a Jewish family living in Germany, fled to the United States, worked in Army Intelligence, and later enjoyed a successful academic career, all these facets provide targets for anti-intellectual attacks.  His intellect, Ivy League status, and foreignness deflect the justified and necessary questioning of his actions on behalf of the US government.  Luckily, everyone from the National Security Archive to the late Christopher Hitchens have worked tirelessly to pry documents from the NSA, CIA, and other agencies to shine a light on Kissinger’s misdeeds.

Even after trudging through 5000 pages of whitewash, I realize that the balance of power foreign power philosophy makes sense.  The United States has limited capabilities, especially in terms of nation-building.  Our culture is too infatuated with military technology and power to understand that we have to fix the apple cart after he kicked it over and given the vendor a televised show trial.  The United States needs to understand the limits of its capabilities in geopolitical terms.  Once these limits are understood and accepted, then one can go about pressing palms and organizing alliances.  The forward thinking helped Kissinger open China.  This foreign policy coup would be similar to President Obama “opening” Iran.  Since the Arab Spring is still a work in progress, one needs to facilitate other options, because the tide may strike the shores of Saudi Arabia with Arab youth unhappy with being thought of as Sa’ud Family property.

The world’s future is unwritten, but Kissinger’s memoirs provide a fascinating document of the inner workings of American foreign policy and the global political personalities that shaped the paranoid Seventies.

And now for some singing …

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Critical Appraisals: Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Posted on February 20, 2011 by | 4 Comments

During the Thirties, Louis-Ferdinand Céline shocked the literary establishment with the release of two novels: Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936).  Both novels acted as companions to each other, focusing on different parts of re-imagined autobiographical material set within fictional narratives.  Ralph Manheim, the translator of Death on the Installment Plan, dubbed the genre “creative confessions.”

The original French title is Mort à crédit, a staccato-sounding title that became translated as Death on Credit by John H. P. Marks.  The book braids together the strands of comedy, despair, and debt, since nearly all the characters suffer personal and financial ruin.  Reading the book today has a special resonance is Céline’s being “profoundly affected by the mentality of the petits bourgeois and lumpenproletariat among whom he grew up, by their cynicism, their deep distrust of their fellowmen, their persecution mania.”  The current economic and political situation, combined with the common American experience of crushing personal, school, and medical debt, make Death on the Installment Plan especially resonant and relevant reading.  Céline transfigures suicide-inducing despair and calamity into Rabelaisian comedy.  Faced with debt, war, and hypocrisy, sometimes all one can do is point and laugh.

Céline combined scabrous wit, unsentimental depictions of human behavior, hallucinations and rants.  While Journey tells the tale of Bardamu-Céline’s experiences in World War I, French colonial Africa, and postwar Paris, Death focuses almost entirely on the childhood experiences of a fictional character named Ferdinand.  Journey is written with standard paragraphs and sentences, whereas Death introduces the reader to the reader to the notorious three dots (…).

To readers unfamiliar with Céline’s style, the three dots can be a point of contention.  Unlike English, where the ellipses are seen as pauses and breaks, the French read it in the opposite manner.  The three dots function as a means to push the reader forward.  As Céline’s later works testify, he pushes the forward momentum of the reader to near delirium, practically sacrificing continuity and comprehensibility.

The plot of Death is that of a bildungsroman, a picaresque series of events in Ferdinand’s childhood.  The novel begins with the adult Ferdinand suffering hallucinations from an illness and the hallucinations gradually transitioning into his childhood memories.  Young Ferdinand is one of the great charismatic bastards of modern literature.  A walking Id.  He cheats, he steals, he screws around, and still comes across as a charmer.  Part of Ferdinand’s charm finds its genesis in the impoverished slums of Paris.  His parents sell antiques, although it seems like they peddle junk to the gullible.  His father is a benighted employee at an insurance company, slaving away and enduring the persecution of co-workers.  His mother works on lace and tries to get rich customers to buy her wares.  Instead of the upward bound trajectory in something like Horatio Alger, the situation remains Sisyphusean.  All the labor, effort, sweat, blood, and tears yielding nothing but a desperate attempt to avoid total ruin.

Throughout the novel, Ferdinand has to deal with persecution manias of the petit bourgeois and the accusations made against him.  Through an act of carelessness, he loses an expensive golden brooch made by his employer.  In the end, Ferdinand is unable to explain what really happened and his parents suffer the penalty of having to pay back the employer.  His critique of the Symbolist-style decorative arts sold by his employer, Monsieur Gorloge, is hilarious:

Everything we opened was horrible … nothing but gargoyles and bottle imps … made out of lead, turned and tortured, fussed and finicked … it turned your stomach … The whole Symbolist orgy … Chunks of nightmare …  A putty “Samothrace” … more “Victories” in the shape of little clocks … Necklaces made out of Medusas, coils of snakes … More chimeras … Hundreds of allegorical rings, one crappier than the next … My work cut for me … All those things were supposed to be put on fingers, on belts, or stuck on ties.  Or hung on somebody’s ears … It was unbelievable! … Somebody was expected to buy them?  Who?  Great God, who?  No form of dragon, demon, hobgoblin, or vampire was missing … A complete collection of nightmares … A whole world of sleepless nights … The manias of whole insane asylums served up as trinkets.  I was going from punk to horrible … Even in my grandmother’s store on the rue Montorgueil the most moth-eaten white elephants were things of beauty by comparison.

The passage is reflective of Céline’s playful propulsive style.  Ferdinand detests the sensational and claustrophobic style of Symbolism, prevalent during the corrupt rule of Emperor Napoleon III.  The recent defeat suffered by France into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870s still lingers over the novel.  The military defeat, the aristocratic decadence, and stylistic garishness would push many to seek solutions in other forms of government.  But in this work, Céline’s later political transgressions remain in embryo.


Disaster and financial ruin are commonplace in the novel.  What would seem like raw material for a work of agonizing despair become bawdy comedic set-pieces.  All of this set against a writing style by turns poetic and obscene.  For a piece written in the Mid-Thirties, it sounds eerily similar to that of Goodfellas and the Wire.

After time spent interned in an English boarding school, Ferdinand gets a job with Courtail des Pereires.  Courtail runs a scientific journal called the Genitron that caters to inventors and owns a hot-air balloon, the Enthusiast.  Courtail and Ferdinand barnstorm the country, putting on ballooning exhibitions, until the fixed-wing aircraft puts an end to that lucrative business.

Courtail is yet another victim of technological progress.  Stubbornly grasping his dream, he refuses to believe that the airplane will succeed.  He calls it a fad and presses on.  But it is a motif that drives the novel, whether it is his mother trying to sell her bolero jackets even after they have fallen out of style or his father refusing to use the new-fangled contraption called “the typewriter.”  Obsolescence and ruin follow the characters like Death itself.  Sometimes the only escape the characters have from creditors hounding their ankles is the sweet embrace of death.

Near the end of the novel, one feels the jagged wheels of change overtaking society.  Ferdinand has become physically fit from his misadventures.  He yearns to escape the hell of poverty and desperation.  The escape hatch would be entry into the military service.  The greatest joke remains the one unspoken because its horror is too great.  The book began in the fetid twilight following the ruin of the Second Empire.  The book ends with the promise and glory associated with the War to End All Wars.

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Years of Upheaval (1981) by Henry Kissinger

Posted on December 8, 2010 by | 2 Comments

A Second Term and a Third-rate Burglary


Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth.

“Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)

 

Years of Upheaval, the second volume of memoirs by Henry Kissinger, continues his personal account of public service, spanning the time of Nixon’s re-election to Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.  The memoirs record a short span of time although it encompasses a plethora of geopolitical, domestic, and personal events.  In the words of Homer Simpson, this volume has it all, “the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.”

Riding on the triumph of the Paris Agreement, the document that began the peace process in Vietnam, Kissinger returned home to the United States.  In a few short months, he witnessed President Nixon win the 1972 Presidential Election in a record landslide victory.  The afterglow of re-election victory began to fade when papers began reporting about a burglary in the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.  The office was in the Watergate building.  The imperious tough guy edifice of Richard Nixon, personifying the dam that held back the onslaught of international Communism, had a hairline crack in it.  If Nixon could re-imagine Cold War foreign policy, with the help of Kissinger, his National Security advisor, surely this third-rate burglary needn’t worry a President who opened China, ended the Vietnam War securing “peace with honor,” and defused the menace of nuclear annihilation with détente.

Years of Upheaval chronicles Kissinger’s ascension to the post of Secretary of State, negotiating with the various parties in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur, and dealing with the challenges of foreign policy while executive power eroded in the prolonged hydra of scandals called Watergate.

Inside/Outside

The State Department: Now with 30% more ominousness.

Presidents privileged enough to have a second term usually reshuffle their staff.  In this case, Nixon dismissed William Rogers and nominated Henry Kissinger for Secretary of State.  Following his confirmation, Kissinger assumed the dual role of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.  President Ford later terminated Kissinger’s special situation, preserving Kissinger in the Cabinet position and letting Brent Scowcroft take over the role as National Security Advisor.

The recent maelstrom of current events, from the resurrection of the Far Right to the Wikileaks fiasco, makes this an invaluable book.  A major component of its value it is specific bias.  One usually associates bias with a lack of worth and this makes it easy to dismiss works that may merit reconsideration.  This behavior happens all too often in our hyperventilating political culture with its calls for “fair and balanced” reporting, not listening to critics, and hating everything that falls outside our tunnel vision.

After one recognizes the bias of a work like this, one should work towards divining the grain of the bias.  Because Kissinger specialized in foreign policy, it afforded him a unique position to witness the spreading Watergate fiasco.  It also allowed him a means of justifying a way out of getting swept up in the scandal, containing the damage to “juvenile and illegal” activities perpetrated by campaign workers and those staffers associated with domestic policy.  This memoir is self-serving in an entirely different fashion than the Haldemann Diaries or Chuck Colson’s Born Again.

The perspective is also unique in that the Secretary of State receives the resignation letter of the President.  While Kissinger engaged in shuttle diplomacy, the executive branch suffered from multiple disruptions.  Watergate began as the Vice Presidency became threatened by Spiro Agnew’s monetary shenanigans.  The verbal warhammer of the Nixon Regime, Agnew uttered some of the greatest one-liners, usually penned by that paragon of tolerance, Pat Buchanan.  Raging against the nattering nabobs of negativity and the impudent snobs, Nixon’s heir apparent left amidst accusations of bribery and fraud.  The Silent Majority hadn’t yet metastasized into the Moral Majority.  In another unique instance in this paranoid time, the circumstances gave Nixon the opportunity to nominate his own successor.

From an institutional standpoint, Upheaval offers a firsthand look at Kissinger’s transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State.  The former is an advisory position with no confirmation necessary and an office within the White House.  The latter involves Senate confirmation and is the most prestigious Cabinet position, heading the Foreign Service, and occupying a massive bureaucracy from Foggy Bottom (the Harry S Truman Building).  The prestige and responsibility of the Secretary of State is further enhanced by Kissinger’s status as a foreign-born immigrant.  (During World War 2, Kissinger worked in Army Intelligence, returning to Germany a decade after fleeing in the Thirties.)  At the height of the Watergate scandal and the dissolution of executive authority, Kissinger acted as a “surrogate President for foreign policy.”  Once Ford became President, Kissinger fell back into a more traditional capacity.

A Shalom and a Salaam


The Americans & Russians are sending bombing planes tanks

Chinese Egyptians Syrians help me battle for my righteous

house my Soul’s dirt Spirit’s Nation’s body’s

boundaries & Self’s territory my

Zionist homeland my Palestinian inheritance

The Capitalist Communist & Third World Peoples’

Republics Dictatorships Police States Socialisms & Democracies

are all sending Deadly Weapons to our aid!

“Jaweh and Allah Battle,” Allen Ginsberg, 1974.

White House Years provided a glimpse into the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement and the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War.  It was the foreign policy showpiece of the first volume.  In Years of Upheaval, the Yom Kippur War is given the same showpiece status.  Southeast Asia faded into the background only to have the Middle East flare up with Egypt and Syria attacking Israel.  Kissinger took the lead in the disengagement negotiations with the dual aims of bringing about a coherent peace process and locking out the Soviet Union from exacerbating radicalism in the region.  Existing as a geopolitical archaeology of sorts, one witnesses how the United States came to treat the grab bag of absolute monarchies and dictatorships as our allies.  Like a sequel to World War 2 with the Soviet Union and United States exploiting “our Germans” versus “their Germans,” the despots and tyrants became “our Arabs” to combat the threat of Soviet expansionism, manifest in the loaded yet vague term “Arab radicalism.”

Despite the cynicism, hatred, and despair one feels towards this region and its seemingly unending conflicts, Kissinger’s account reveals the specific context that resulted in the resulting military and diplomatic actions.

In the early Seventies, the Middle East lay dormant with Israel sitting precariously atop conquered territories wrested from Arab hands in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  The Arab nations, specifically Egypt and Syria, festered with resentment and impotence.  The recent assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser created a power vacuum Anwar el-Sadat filled.  The United States did not consider Sadat a real threat or a leader of promise until the Yom Kippur War.  According to Kissinger, Sadat did not send Egypt into war against Israel for conquest, but to prove that Egypt was not impotent against Israeli arms.

Herein lays the paradox facing any peace process in the Middle East.  Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, maintains occupied territories of its three neighbors, as a means of maintaining security.  Egypt and Syria have portions of their territory occupied by Israel.  In order to assuage “the Arab street” – a euphemism for the sociopaths and maniacs who cloak a bloodthirsty ethos in “fundamentalist Islam” – and the more established oligarchies (usually military), leaders have to walk a fine line between appeasing the base and making sensible decisions.  It is a delicate dance that can have fatal consequences for all involved.

Jordan is a special case.  The West Bank, prior to Israel’s occupation, belonged to Jordan.  Jordan, throughout this prolonged crisis, remained a stalwart ally of the United States.  It did not press as hard as Egypt or as passionately as Syria, because it had to hold off the designs of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat.  The rocky land and the half of Jerusalem dubbed “Palestine” belonged to Jordan.  Kissinger, trying to keep this precarious situation as simple as possible, worked with King Hussein to block any unwarranted influence from the PLO during the peace negotiations.

In addition to this complicated set of challenges, the Middle East is a region that has several thousand years of political history and long-simmering blood feuds.  The region came into existence following the arbitrary set of lines and arbitrary set of leaders concocted at the Versailles Treaty following World War 1.  One can dig deeper and find Arab occupations, Turkish occupations, Crusader occupations, and on and on.  Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt hearkens back to the Book of Exodus and big-haired Charlton Heston movies.  Now it is Anwar Sadat saying, “Let my people go!”  Instead of Hebrew slaves, it is an Egyptian Army surrounded on all sides by the Israeli Army, without supplies.

Prior to negotiations, Kissinger recounts the delicate task of supplying Israel.  The airlift operation comes across like a transcontinental Rube Goldberg Machine, endlessly complicated by wary European nations, Soviet saber rattling, and a nation rapidly spinning into a frenzy over Watergate.

Charting this dangerous course ends with the historic Kilometer 101 meeting.  In a tent in the middle of the desert, military negotiators from both sides begin the arduous task of actually taking to each other.  The faint glimmer of hope presides when leaders from the belligerent nations meet in Geneva.  Drawn together by the prospect of giving the region a lasting peace, one understands the motivation since the Middle East had been in perpetual warfare since 1949.  Kissinger labored extensively with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel to detach political issues from disengagement.  As per usual with Kissinger, it involved the creation of a bogus-sounding organization under whose auspices the disengagement would take place.  Kissinger did the same thing with the North Vietnamese when they pressured the United States to create a coalition government with representatives from the Communist Party.

The challenges to begin a Middle East peace process had become further exacerbated by the unraveling of executive authority due to Watergate.  Under normal circumstances, the Secretary of State could use the tried-and-true tactic of carrot and stick.  With Watergate eroding Nixon’s authority, Kissinger had less authority to cajole or threaten the leaders, even those like Sadat who actively sought an American alliance.

The Middle East represents a Gordian knot of paradox, atrocity, and war.  Kissinger gives a succinct analysis of the history, diplomatic challenges, and personalities involved in the region.  In that case, it is useful for anyone seeking to understand a complicated situation and its history that spans millennia.

The Valley of Bones

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones.  And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.  And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”

Ezekiel 37: 1 – 3

The memoirs of a government official in the upper echelons make it easy to forget what a high-stakes game diplomacy can be.  Buried beneath mountainous prose that describes numerous meetings between dignitaries drenched in minutiae and bonhomie, the reader can become overwhelmed or bored.  Middle East leaders, Arab and Israeli, that worked towards creating a working peace occasionally found themselves in the valley of bones.

Anwar Sadat met the fate of his predecessor in 1981 following his historic meeting with Israel.  This ushered in the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.  King Faisal, another personality in this volume, met his end with assassination in 1975.  Yitzhak Rabin, who played a role in Golda Meir’s government, died at the hands of an Israeli religious fanatic in 1995.  One laments that the yearning for peace often gets destroyed by the faith-based initiative of bloodthirsty fanatics, or, in Kissinger’s witty phrase, “apostles of the ordinary.”

Sadat’s martyrdom occurred shortly before Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982.  Israel still occupies the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (1967 to present).  The growing influence of the Palestinian cause has complicated the peace process.

Besides the deaths of Middle Eastern leaders, the United States endured the impeachment crisis shortly after Vice President Agnew resigned.  Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, Kissinger remains standing.

Strange Interludes

Interviewer (Eric): From the plastic arts we turn to football.  Last night in the Stadium of Light, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football.  Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catennachio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino.  Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism and outstanding in the fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield cognoscento, Jimmy Buzzard.

Buzzard (John): Good evening Brian.

“The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes to the Bathroom” (1.11), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Literary Football,” airdate December 28, 1969.

The inordinate length of this book allows for the occurrence of some strange interludes.  One encounters situations from the menacing to the ridiculous.  Because Kissinger is an Ivy League academic and a career diplomat, his writing comes across as lapidary, overdetermined, and always polite.  He finds a way to say kind words about nearly everyone he meets, friend and foe alike.  His description and justification of Nixon’s anti-Semitism or King Faisal’s anti-Zionism are marvels in grammatical acrobatics.

Following the afterglow of Nixon’s re-election, Kissinger is whisked to Hanoa, capital of North Vietnam, to hammer out the remaining minutiae in the Paris Accords.  It is one of the strangest trips in American diplomatic history.  Hanoi comes across like a small provincial town rather than a towering fortress, the monolith acting as bulwark against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.  The battle-scarred landscape and the empty streets say more about the agonies of the Vietnam War than any writer does.  The entire experience has a strange otherworldly feeling, with Kissinger negotiating with Le Duc Tho and others in a building only a few blocks from the notorious Hanoi Hilton.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, during one of Kissinger’s many trips to Israel, he had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem.  Yad Vashem is the museum and memorial to the Holocaust located in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.  In an uncharacteristic act of silence, Kissinger says nothing about the experience.  Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no more poetry after Auschwitz.”  Given the monumental scope and horror of the Holocaust, it would seem trite or futile to attempt to write about it.  The silence seems out of character with Kissinger’s gregarious nature and his penchant for cheerleading for American ideals and power.

The geopolitical context further complicates this visit, since Israel’s military conquests bring to mind associations of Germany’s quest for Lebensraum (“living space”).  Additionally, Kissinger’s repeated endorsements of America’s quest for freedom and liberty come across as vacant gestures when openly courting the support of the brutal regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.  The United States, in decades to come, will tie itself into an incomprehensible knot of alliances with both Israel and the Middle Eastern tyrannies.  During Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”, many of the pro-Soviet Arab tyrannies eventually tilted to become pro-US Arab tyrannies.  (Or in the words of our youth, “frenemies.”)

Kissinger describes King Faisal’s position thus:

The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Western visitors, was clearly deeply felt.  At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the Kingdom.  The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim on protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, armed by the Soviet Union).  The virulent opposition to Zionism reassured radicals and the PLO and thus reduced the incentive to follow any temptation to undermine the monarchy domestically.  And its thrust was vague enough to imply no precise consequences; it dictated few policy options save a general anti-Communism.

During that meeting between Kissinger and King Faisal, the King asserts that Israel was the result of a plot between Jews and Communists, “put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.”  This kind of rhetoric may sound odd to Western ears in the mid-Seventies, with the rise of the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck’s popularity, not so much.

The travels of Kissinger become accidentally hilarious when he describes a football (i.e. soccer) game he attended in Munich.  It was the final game of the World Cup.  He attended with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new Foreign Minister for West Germany.  He describes the strategies of the soccer teams in foreign policy terms.  While Kissinger does pepper his memoirs with the occasional joke or two, (at least one suspects those are jokes, since they are usually devoid of any humorous content).  Germany “used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd.”  “The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail.”  (Oh, snap!)  “England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament.”  Has anyone contacted Kissinger to provide color commentary for World Cup tournaments?  Then again, if Kissinger provided commentary in a Madden-like video game for soccer, young kids everywhere might put down their Funyuns and Mountain Dew to actually go outside.

My Country for a Horse


“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Richard Nixon, The Nixon Interviews with David Frost, airdate May 19, 1977

“L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the State”)

King Louis XIV of France, attributed.

Watergate remains the other grand narrative in Years of Upheaval.  It haunts his journeys like a grim specter.  With executive authority rapidly evaporating, his power to negotiate became diminished.  As per usual with political memoirs, he places a lot of blame on “professional Nixon-haters” and “McGovernite peaceniks,” while giving short shrift to the actual disturbing implications a scandal of this sort presents to the very fabric of participatory democracy.  In the simplified folklore that passes for historical knowledge, Watergate remains the “Mother of All Scandals” both in terms of actual malfeasance and it is closer in living memory.  Unlike the XYZ Affair and the Teapot Dome scandals, our parents and grandparents remember (or mis-remember) what happened.  Watergate also put a close to a disastrous decade in foreign and domestic policy.  The Vietnam War took down three presidencies, one by assassination (Kennedy), one a single-term catastrophe (Johnson), and one by impeachment (Nixon).

While it is easy to turn this is a partisan affair, Democrats gloating over Republican misbehavior and the ruthless Nixon finally being put down like a rabid dog, Watergate represents something more malevolent and disturbing than just electoral shenanigans.  Despite the nature of the cause, placed under the umbrella of “national security,” Watergate destroyed the moral credibility of the Presidency.  The enemy lists, the bugging, COINTELPRO, and using intelligence agencies to cover-up an investigation all reeked of political tyranny.  This was behavior fitting for Pinochet, but not for a leader of a democracy.  “The center will not hold,” to William Butler Yeats.  Watergate was one step too far.

Unfortunately, the creeping forces of authoritarianism never quite held, since Nixon never went to trial.  President Ford, in one of his first acts, preemptively pardoned Nixon.  The ensuing impeachment trial would have grievously wounded an already divided nation, but the pardon created a dangerous precedent.  It gave the President an aura of invincibility.  Do whatever crimes and atrocities are necessary to secure your power and have your successor pardon you.  Something no Jacobean dramatist could have dreamt up.

Legacies and Their Discontents

Senator Pat Geary: I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.

Michael Corleone: We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family.

 

The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

From Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon

When the Nixon administration went supernova and collapsed in on itself like a dying star, the United States preserved his legacy in its foreign policy.  Despite the scandal and humiliation of resignation, the world is still cast in terms of Nixon’s radical realignment.  The push towards opening China is one of the reasons the Communist regime still exists.  The Middle East remains allied with the United States, the tyrannies contending with the oppressed masses and the occasional terrorist flare-up that might damage tourism and military aid shipments.

Nixon’s foreign policy legacy should be seen by the successor administrations less as a prison (what it is now) than as a strategic innovation (what it could be).  A border clash between the Soviet Union and China created the impetus to play the Communist giants off each other, making it possible for the US to extricate itself from the Vietnam conflict.  Can the same be done with the tyrannical monarchy of Saudi Arabia, our nominal ally, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a faux democracy?  Nixon provided the necessary strategy with détente and linkage, defusing the confrontations of the Cold War, and leading it towards the inevitable endgame.  With the Cold War finished, the legacy is the free market on a truly global scale, but the practical alliances created against the Soviets has created a rogues gallery of tyrants, dictators, and absolute monarchs who pay fealty to the United States.  Is it time, now that markets are free, to work towards making people just as free?  Maybe the politicians, only caring about their re-election and personal enrichment, see cheap commodities as a greater priority than individual liberty?

Another legacy of the Nixon administration is in popular culture.  Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine postmodern kaleidoscope of paranoia, perversion, and war atrocities, was published in 1973.  In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola released the Godfather: Part II, a film that was both sequel and prequel to the Godfather.  The second film charts the immigrant beginnings of the Corleone Family.  Vito Corleone rises to power, while the film charts the Corleone Family in the Fifties and Sixties.  Michael Corleone, heir of Vito, has power, wealth, and influence.  Senators do his bidding and power is extended from New York to Nevada and into Cuba.  Castro’s Revolution cuts short the Mafia plutocracy.  Michael retreats to his eyrie in Lake Tahoe, consolidating power again in another periodic Mafia purge, whacking the disloyal.  But the power corrupts him, rotting him from the inside, when he puts a hit out on his brother, Fredo.  The Godfather: Part II is an American fable about immigration and the corruptions of capitalism.  It also works as a metaphor of the Nixon Presidency with its paranoia, seclusion, and ruthlessness.

It’s Nixon’s world; we just live in it.

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Critical Appraisal: The Landscape of Hell

Posted on November 14, 2010 by | 3 Comments

The representation of Hell as a cartographic region has its origins in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Dante adapted the imagery already present in medieval painting and sculpture to comment on his political situation and his own scientific and theological beliefs.  He populated it with real people, including political heroes and villains, good popes and bad popes, adulterous princesses, and monsters human and mythological.  On Dante’s spiritual journey, he traveled with the Roman poet Vergil down the various circles of Hell and then up Mount Purgatory.  Finally, led by his beloved Beatrice, he journeyed through the heavenly spheres until he was in the presence of God.

The Divine Comedy remains a challenge for readers, since the intricacies of 14th century politics of Italian city-states is not an easily accessible avenue.  While Ezra Pound used the Divine Comedy as a template for his epic, labyrinthine, and fragmentary work The Cantos, the artists profiled here use other means to gain entrée into the darkness and tortures of the Inferno.  Seymour Chwast adapts Dante’s epic by creating a world full of characters from noir films.  Gary Panter takes his beloved character Jimbo into the Inferno and Purgatory, studding the surreal punk odyssey with characters from pop culture.  Finally, Wayne Douglas Barlowe travels to Hell to paint landscapes and portraits of the inhabitants.  He creates malevolent views and horrifying visages with the steady hand of a disinterested observer, more naturalist than moralist.

Hell, like art, depends on the tastes and temperaments of the creator.  We create our own hells, as the clichéd saying goes.  Those hells can be inhabited by contemporary politicians, pop cultural footnotes, or biological horrors.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, adapted by Seymour Chwast (2010)

Seymour Chwast of Pushpin Studios has adapted the Divine Comedy in a series of illustrations.  Given the scope and ambition of Dante’s epic trilogy, Chwast has had to economize.  But the poetics of visual economy are what make this work stand out, because the artist is famous for his graphic design.  (Chwast is one of those graphic artists many have seen, yet few know him by name.  His 1967 “End Bad Breath” anti-Vietnam poster is a classic.)

Placing the Divine Comedy in a noir setting places the work in a time more familiar to modern readers, at least in terms of the visual grammar.  Flapper girls and pipe-smoking detectives exist in our collective memory more easily than the political machinations and theological debates of 14th century Italian city-states.  The Black and White Guelphs are now rival gangsters.  Beatrice is a demure dame.  Chwast makes the monsters and the tortures playful looking, an ironic visual commentary to the horrors of the Inferno.  With the horrors of Treblinka, Abu Ghraib, and My Lai, a three-headed dog seems a bit gauche.  While the medieval theocratic world of Dante has long since faded, at least in post-Enlightenment Europe, the horrors will be all too familiar.

Chwast’s adaptation is no substitute for Dante’s original, although that was probably not his intention.  A familiarity with the original will give readers a better appreciation of the illustrations.  But a familiarity will be necessary, since there is little in the way of commentary or notes.  In that department, check out Penguin’s annotated editions.

The playfulness and economy of Chwast’s images place him in the tradition of William Blake and Gustave Doré, both illustrators of the Divine Comedy.

Jimbo’s Inferno by Gary Panter (2006)

Gary Panter came to prominence in the heyday of the punk movement.  His style is dense, jagged, and darkly humorous.  In the Eighties Panter created the sets for Pee Wee’s Playhouse (1986 – 1990, CBS), providing a surreal and anarchic take on tacky postwar pop culture.  Panter also worked with Art Spiegelman in the seminal comix magazine RAW (1980 – 1991).  Under the creative direction of Spiegelman, RAW offered a venue for avant-garde, international, and underground cartoonists and visual artists.  The decade saw the emergence of comix as legitimate visual art.  (The more mainstream comics owned and published in DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, etc. being considered “art” is a separate but interrelated debate.)  Gary Panter’s cover for Raw Volume 2, No. 1 (the issue subtitled “Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Comix. ”) reduces the Ernie Bushmiller character to a Picasso-esque smudge.

Panter has taken a different track than his fellow artists with Jimbo’s Inferno and Jimbo in Purgatory.  While Spiegelman tackled his inner demons and the legacy of the Shoah in the award-winning autobiographical Maus I & II, Chris Ware dealt with the interior life in the austerely drawn Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth.  Panter goes in the opposite, using the ubiquitous Jimbo to travel to the depths of hell and the terraces of Purgatory.  Jimbo resembles Bart Simpson with his spiky hair and snarky naïveté.

True to his punk heritage, Panter chooses a mall as the location of the Inferno.  “Don’t try to pass a pop quiz on Dante’s hell based on a reading of this comic: it won’t work,” says Panter in the opening passage.  “[C]anto by canto, characters are fused, action inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions and my odd whims, sentences are clipped.”  Instead of Vergil, Jimbo travels with Valise, his parole robot.

During his journey, Jimbo encounters drug addicts, monsters, robots, traffic jams, and space aliens.  Instead of the Western Canon that Dante “sampled,” Panter uses the grammar of pop culture.  And at the end of the volume, Panter lists “thirty-three best loved vinyl recordings” (the Inferno had thirty-three cantos).

Fantagraphics has produced a lavish volume with huge pages and a gilt cover that oddly reminiscent of Gustav Klimt (if Klimt was in a Los Angeles punk band).

Jimbo in Purgatory by Gary Panter (2004)

Jimbo’s Inferno charted the journey of Gary Panter’s eponymous hero through the hellscape of the modern mall.  Jimbo in Purgatory continues with Jimbo and Valise, his parole robot, this time traveling through a Purgatory re-imagined as an “infotainment testing facility.”  Panter opens the volume with a short introduction on the life and times of Dante.  He lays out Dante’s literary legacy, since the Divine Comedy directly influenced Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, and James Joyce.

The book is a scant thirty-three pages and measures even larger than Jimbo’s Inferno, but the cover retaining Inferno’s faux Klimtian gilt highlights.  Jimbo and Valise travel and encounter various pop cultural icons as they quote excerpts from Dante, Boccaccio, Joyce, dirty limericks, and numerous other sources.  The sources are referenced at the bottom of each page, but are unnumbered, adding a challenge to interpretation.  Dante’s Purgatory begins with Dante and Vergil meeting Cato.  Panter has Jimbo and Valise meeting Cato Fong, Inspector Clouseau’s houseboy and martial arts expert.  Jimbo and Valise also converse with the disembodied head of the Westworld character played by Yul Brynner.  At the end of Dante’s tour of Purgatory, he finally meets his long lost love, the luminous Beatrice, the personification of beauty and innocence, a terrestrial counterpart to the Virgin Mary within Catholic doctrine.  Within the subversive grammar of Panter’s vision, Beatrice is portrayed as Twiggy (real name: Lesley Hornby).  Twiggy fame and notoriety originated in her thinness as a fashion model.

Throughout the book, Panter maintains a rigid almost mannerist division of panels.  On some pages, the narrative moves forward.  On others, the panels split up a massive picture.  The division of images and architectural design harkens back to another monument of Christian doctrine, the Sistine Chapel, itself an innovative amalgamation of Christian and Greco-Roman classical imagery.

The volume ends like Jimbo’s Inferno: with a list of thirty-three albums that Gary Panter fancied, from the well-known (Electric Ladyland, The Jimi Hendrix Experience) to the rare (Science Fiction, Ornette Coleman) to the just plain odd (Music for Robots, Forrest J. Ackerman).  Using the grammar of pop culture and sampling the Western Canon like an encyclopedic DJ, Panter spins an epic journey.  A hallucination and a dream that plays like a labyrinthine knock-knock joke.

Barlowe’s Inferno by Wayne Douglas Barlowe (1998)

Wayne Douglas Barlowe has a successful career as an illustrator for fantasy and science fiction books.  Even if one doesn’t know him by name, his style is unmistakable.  While fellow illustrator Boris Vallejo takes his cue from the noble tradition of the American pin-up, Barlowe renders his subjects with the disinterested expertise of a natural history illustrator.  Barlowe’s pictures retain the flavor of John James Audubon.  What Audubon did for birds, Barlowe does for Guild Steersmen, dinosaurs, and Overlords.  The Audubonian emulation continued with the publication of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979) and the companion volume Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy (1996).  In each book, the aliens or mythological creatures possess a physical presence that bespeaks a plausible reality.  He designs these beings with a meticulous anatomical accuracy.  Beneath the fantastical exteriors (scales, skin, fur, etc.), one can observe the bones and muscles.

Barlowe gave vision to his own imagination, not the ideas of others, in Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage of Darwin IV (1990).  The world and creatures are entirely fabricated, but the book itself has a feel of a National Geographic feature article.  Writing as a participant on the voyage, Barlowe and a fellow alien species travel to Darwin IV.  The planet presents an alternate evolutionary track with varieties of animals in a coherent ecological system.  Unlike Earth, the animals lack jaws and eyes, Barlowe theorizing Darwin IV experienced a prolonged period where the sun was blocked by clouds or fog.  The results are visionary, beautiful, and thought provoking.  (Barlowe brought this same artistic and scientific rigor to the creature design of Avatar, the only saving grace in that otherwise overlong, tedious, morally simplistic cinematic train wreck.)

Barlowe’s Inferno brings together the two strands of his previous work and welds them into a uniquely innovative version of Hell.  He reprises his role as the artist-traveler, in this case working like a netherworldly John Singer Sargeant painting portraits and landscapes.  Instead of the Post-Reconstruction nouveau riche and the Grand Tour, we see Belial, Lilith, and Molech.  Instead of cathedrals and canals, we see the teeth of Leviathan crushing cities made of bricks, the bricks made of souls hammered and smashed into place, Procrustean and sadistic.  Because Barlowe’s work espouses a natural history ethic, he also included the portrait of an Australopithecine demon, a kind of Darwinian Cain and a wry callback to the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.  A “firstborn” chews a soul in the desolate landscape, the creature a remnant of the original inhabitants of this alien environment.  Barlowe posits that Hell was colonized following Satan’s Fall in the same manner of human colonizations.  The fallen angels became demons and then dominated the landscape in the manner akin to human deforestation, urban development, and gentrification.  Demons have designer handbags, this time made from filleted human skin.

Barlowe renders the textures with haunting precision.  Demons have skin like stone and the damned have bodies warped like funhouse mirrors, their stony bodies morphed into ironic tortures.  The book, a combination travelogue-natural history catalogue, makes, to paraphrase Milton’s description of Hell, “darkness visible.”  Barlowe’s darkness is culturally diverse, physically horrific, and uniquely visionary.  It represents a modern homage to Dante’s Inferno and a daring extrapolation on the theme of damnation.

Brushfire by Wayne Douglas Barlowe (2001)

Wayne Barlowe returns to Hell in this slim volume.  Subtitled “Illuminations from the Inferno,” he presents the reader with a series of frightening visions, simultaneously horrifying and erotic.  A civil war brews in Hell between the Demons Major Sargatanas and Astaroth.  The reader is shown Astaroth’s Herald and Standard-bearer.  The Herald is “marginally humanoid” with two wings sprouting from a malformed mouth sitting within the middle of its chest.  It appears like a wicked parody of the term vagina dentata.  On another page, a succubus beckons with stony skin and cloven feet.  The eroticism is alienating, since one can’t escape the fact her skin is cold stone.  We see Hannibal and his Army of Souls, reminiscent of the Deadites from the classic film Army of Darkness.  The picture gives no quarter to anything like camp or humor as in the Bruce Campbell cinematic masterpiece.

Continuing the multicultural aspect of Hell, Barlowe depicts a group of Behemoths, huge beasts of burden to Sargatanas.  Stabled like giant horses, the Behemoths used to be chamberlains, viziers, and court officials of Chinese emperors.  One need not go far these days to find an appropriate public official deserving this treatment in eternal damnation.  One might be less eager to start pointless wars if one had this punishment as a reward.

One of the most frightening visages Barlowe depicts is that of a Scourge.  It is “a winged and limbless enigma” with the face like that of an African mask.  Morphologically perverse, its classification remained that of a demon.  Its purpose was to subjugate souls.  “Without flocks of them there could, and probably would, be complete chaos in the streets of Dis.”  While the inhabitants of Hell exhibit bodies bent, broken, and battered, twisted into incoherent shapes, and subject to chaotic tortures, its leadership and organization is rigid, authoritarian, and orderly.  The stark contrast between these two phenomena gives Barlowe’s vision a ferocious punch.

One on the last page, the reader sees a battle-scarred veteran from wars in Hell.  He gives General William Tecumseh Sherman’s expression that “War is hell” a physical form and then turns it into a sick joke.  One is thankful that soldiers only have to die once when they are involved in armed conflicts.  In Hell, soldiers are given no such luxury.  They unquestioningly obey the fickle orders of their sadistic superiors, suffer horribly, and then fight again and again.  The prospect of such an existence is numbing to even contemplate.

Wayne Barlowe again delivers with his dark illuminations.  Even today, with our myriad horrors and catastrophes, our everyday sadism and incompetence, art can show us there can be something even more horrifying.

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Essays on Capital, First Series: Essay One

Posted on September 28, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Essay 1: Capital and the historical moment

From commodities to citizens.

O garment not golden but gilded,
O garden where all men may dwell,
O tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven from hell;
O mystical rose of the mire,
O house not of gold but of gain,
O house of unquenchable fire,
Our Lady of Pain!

“Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)”, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1866)

The Civil War: Revolution in Labor Relations

The Civil War ended in 1865 bringing about the cessation of hostilities between the United States and the Confederacy.  After four years and more than half a million casualties, the South surrendered to Federal rule.  Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments giving citizenship and equal protection to the formerly enslaved black population.  Two years later, in 1867, with the afterglow of freedom and the ideals of a hard-fought war still in the air, Karl Marx published the first volume of Capital: a Critique of Political Economy.  Marx even mentions the American Civil War seven times in the text.

More than thirty years later, a monument was erected commemorating Union victory.  The monument depicted General William Tecumseh Sherman, flanked by Victory, and gilt in gold.  Placed near the 59th Street entrance of Central Park it stood outside the Plaza Hotel.  The current building is the second to have that name and was built in 1907.

While much has been written about the Civil War and about Capital, this essay seeks to explore the “historical moment” (or Zeitgeist) of the book’s publication.  The Sherman Monument will be used as a prism to analyze the interrelationships between the commodity, modern warfare, and economic relations.  These interrelationships will be investigated in Sherman’s March to the Sea and the 1973 Oil Embargo.

The Sherman Monument: Gold, Cotton, and Capital

The Sherman Monument stands as a testament to the victory of the Union over the Confederacy.  Its tone and materials make it unique among the many Civil War monuments dotting the landscape.  Sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a luminary in the American Renaissance (c. 1876 – 1914), it was erected in Central Park in 1903.[i] Belligerent, not conciliatory; gilt in expensive metal, it is simultaneously austere and opulent, similar to Swinburne’s poem “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)” written in 1866, a year before Capital.  The gilt bronze monument is a nod to the wealthy elites who populated New York City during the Gilded Age, providing countless characters for Henry James novels.  The materials also signify the commodities the Union had its disposal.  The Union had one commodity in particular that helped its victory over the Confederacy: gold.  The Confederacy had cotton and an unpaid labor force.  The monument becomes less a solemn salute to a destructive war than a middle finger aimed directly to the rebellious South.  The Gold Rush ushered in a flood of capital to the industrial North, allowing it the ability to transform an agrarian economy into an industrial economy.  Taken as a whole, the United States in the post-Civil War years could be called an industrial economy, but a more precise picture reveals stark regional differences.  Beyond the industrialized North and the agrarian South, the West remained in a pre-capitalist economic state.  Only until the railroads reached the open spaces, connecting farmers with consumers in the cities, the frontier economy remained in a primitive state.  In the film adaptation of David Mamet’s play, Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin plays a verbally abusive sales strategist.  Confronting a salesman played by Ed Harris, Baldwin has him look at his gold watch.  Baldwin says to Harris, “See this watch?  This watch costs more than your car.”  The monument of General Sherman, gilt and belligerent, says the same thing to the defeated South.

“See this watch?  It costs more than your car.”

Gold is a commodity, but it possesses the rare attribute of being a commodity one uses to trade commodities for other commodities.  The North not only had a large industrial sector, but a monopoly on the means of exchange.  Meanwhile, the South had cotton in plentiful supply.  In Capital, Marx discusses the effects of the Civil War on the United Kingdom’s cotton supply.  The resulting “cotton drought” threw thousands into unemployment and destitution.

Emancipation: opposing viewpoints.

Besides regional and culture differences the North and South possessed entirely different economic structures.  In the aftermath of the Civil War, with slavery abolished, Marx asserts,

“every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic.  Labour in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.  The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.”[ii]

One needs to remember that this is 1867, only two years after the Civil War has ended.  The next hundred years of American history would show that Marx’s enthusiasm and faith in the progressive nature of revolution could be easily dashed in the name of capital and political compromise.

The Civil War did represent a real revolutionary change in labor relations.  Those previous held as chattel property and considered less-than-human were given the status of citizenship equal to white Americans.  It only took a little while for white property owners to get wise to the new ordinances.  Even when status changes, resentment survives.  Blacks, now free, had to deal with the Ku Klux Klan’s domestic terrorism and their new status in the workplace as debtors.  Chattel slavery became replaced with the system of debt-slavery.  While the Constitutional amendments forbade chattel slavery, there was no mention of how much one had to pay former slaves.  Once again, the repercussions of this shortsighted economic revenging would have untold consequences.  The practice of debt-slavery initiated one of the many waves of internal migration.  Northern cities would once again absorb cohorts of migrating blacks.

Modern Warfare and Commodity Fetishism: Sherman’s March to the Sea and the 1973 Oil Embargo

V. To army corps commanders alone is intrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or bridges. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.

– William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864

[Emphasis mine.]

The American Civil War saw a revolution in waging warfare.  For most of the 19th century, nations waged war on a Napoleonic model.  Armies in bright uniforms lined up on an open field and then shot at each other until one side decided to surrender.  By the end of the Civil War, things had become desperate for both sides.  General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” became one of the more notorious engagements undertaken under the auspices of the Union.  Unlike a standard military engagement, General Sherman had his forces participate in destructive actions aimed at crippling the Confederacy.  This included burning cotton fields, tearing up railroads, and supporting runaway slaves.  In order to defeat the Confederacy, General Sherman undertook the task to destroy the economy.

War as commodity destruction.

The March to the Sea destroyed not only cotton, the basic commodity of the South, but the few railroads existing in the region, cutting off trade and communications.  In a macroeconomic sense, it involved the industrial North bringing the medieval agrarian South to heel.  General Sherman’s actions also predict the concept of “total war.”  What this means is that a nation’s commodities and manufacturing base would become legitimate military targets.  War, like commodity production, became subject to the same forces inherent in mass production.  President Roosevelt’s speech calling the United States the “arsenal of democracy” meant that victory not only lay in the military actions of troops and generals, but in nations that can produce enough war materiel to overcome the enemy.  Like trade, war meant out-producing the competitors and creating a corner on the market.

The forces of production and consumption played havoc with the global economic system during the Oil Embargo.  Following Israel’s victory in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC decided to enforce an oil embargo and cease production.  Oil prices skyrocketed to over 300% and created a flood of new wealth for Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries.  In the 1950s, United States oil consumption was a domestic issue, controlled by the Texas Railroad Commission.  Similarly, oil companies owned majority control over the product.  Two things happened that hastened the end of cheap oil, exacerbated by the Yom Kippur War.  The first is that oil companies were slowly edged out of majority ownership by the producer countries.  The result meant that the producer countries owned a majority share of these companies, turning them into government entities.  The foreign company staff then ended up focusing on things like marketing and technology.  The second involved greater and greater oil consumption.  The margin for maneuverability rapidly diminished, leaving the oil consumer nations in a state of submission to the whims of the oil producers.

Compared to Sherman’s March, the Oil Embargo involved withholding commodities.  This created higher demand.  The interconnections between oil companies, financial institutions, political parties, and foreign policy has created a crisis that has not been adequately solved to this day.  The demand for oil, an infrastructure built around the automobile, and a money-based political system create a situation where no real reform is possible, at least not with the two parties willfully subservient to big corporate donors that feed their campaign chests.  Unfortunately, questioning the economic basis of this system is seen as heretical, free market capitalism having been turned into religious dogma.

Guess who bankrolls the campaign chests of both parties?

Marx began Capital by analyzing the smallest molecular element, the commodity, and then expanding to larger and larger systems, until he came to mass production.  Less than two centuries after the publication of Capital, the instability of the capitalist again reveals itself.  While capitalism remains the “last man standing” from the Manichean battles of the Cold War, many fail to understand that this is not synonymous with total victory.

At the beginning of the 21st century’s second decade, could the United States even afford to erect a gilt statue to its victorious generals?  Or would we have to borrow the credit from China?

[i] The sculpture was erected a couple years after the end of the Gilded Age (1865 – 1901).  To clarify, the American Renaissance is an art-historical term while the Gilded Age, named after the book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (published in 1873), and is a term used in sociology and social history.  Both terms will be useful in discussing the historical, political, and economic impact of Marx’s book.

[ii] Marx, Karl, Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume One (London: Penguin Books, 1976), translated by Ernest Mandel,  p. 415.

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Essays on Capital, First Series: Essay Number Zero

Posted on June 10, 2010 by | Leave a comment

By way of an introduction …

“It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station and many others have done, that he was really a latter-day prophet[.]” – “Piety without content,” Susan Sontag [1961]

“Marx’s thought marks a watershed.  Its roots reach back to Joachim of Fiore and further, to the inspired utterances of the Old Testament prophets.” – Reasons for Our Rhymes: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of History, R. A. Herrera [2001]

“Better dead than Red.” – Anti-communist saying [c. 1950s]

Karl Marx is a controversial, misunderstood, and often maligned figure.  Prolific author, political activist, philosopher, economist, and theorist, his writing runs the gamut from newspaper articles to large-scale theoretical treatises.  This essay series will explore a variety of issues pertaining to Marx’s magnum opus, Capital: a critique of political economy.  More specifically, it will focus on the first volume.  (The plan is to include a similar series of essays for the second and third volumes.)

The Great Recession provides an entrée into Marx’s masterwork.  The second decade of the 21st century gives the reader a unique vantage point to investigate Marx’s theoretical assertions.  Despite Manichean pronouncements from free market fundamentalists and the nostalgia of unreconstructed Stalinists, the world has a few peculiar examples of political economy at work.  The former Soviet Union currently embraces cowboy capitalism shoulder to shoulder with a traditional authoritarianism.  The People’s Republic of China continues its one-party totalitarian rule, leavened with a recent acceptance of the market economy.  Battle lines are not fought against tanks in Tiananmen Square but over Google searches and the rights of people in Hong Kong.  The United States battles the economic cataclysm wrought by deregulatory exuberance with a mixture of lemon socialism and crony capitalism.  Meanwhile, the small Asian city-state of Singapore adopts a blend of command-and-control economics to industrialize with ferocious speed and efficiency, then transitions into a tiny quasi-autocratic capitalist paradise.  Allende is overthrown in Chile and General Augusto Pinochet assumes power, “disappearing” dissidents with brutal efficiency.  The United States preserves diplomatic relations so long as trade and business remain unaffected.

The People’s Republic of China: Most Favored Nation trade status.

These historical events remain in the background when one reads Capital.  These essays will come from a historical perspective, since my training and experience involve the practice of history.  I am not an economist, although a historian who does not understand basic economic principles cannot approach the challenges of the discipline with a full quiver.

Due to recent and past events, Capital has been much maligned and not read beyond the halls of academe.  Combined with more than half a century of the Cold War (and even further back, going back to the 1920s and the Palmer Raids), the very words “socialist” and “Marxist” have been irrevocably tainted.  Unfortunately, when an economic debate is necessary, both sides end up misinformed, angry, and comical.  The Tea Party movement and its proponents turning its talking points into hysterical self-parody is endemic of the situation.  Only in this lunatic hot-house atmosphere can government-subsidized check-ups for the poor become equated with Gulags.

The goal of these essays is to examine Capital as a historical and literary work.  It must be approached at an aesthetic and intellectual level, devoid of entrenched misperceptions, emotional hysteria, and fallacious arguments.  Blaming Marx’s critique on capitalism for modern atrocities is akin to blaming the Bible on the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Thirty Years War.  Simple accusations reap simple answers.  The relationship between the horrors of the 20th century and the economic philosophy of the 19th is a complicated, labyrinthine, and contingent one.  The series is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of Marx’s works.  (It’s a pity to find the addition of this disclaimer necessary.  Even more ironic considering this nation constantly crows about embracing differences in opinion.)  One does not have to be a devout Catholic to appreciate Chartres cathedral.  It is also a sign of a rigorous intellectual temperament to test one’s commonly held ideas against opposing systems.  When one is not questioning what one thinks, one is not thinking.  The art depends on asking the questions the situation demands.

The essays will examine different aspects of Capital.  These include the historical moment of its publication (1867), its sources, its structure, its style, and the idea of the revolutionary versus the bourgeois.  What can we learn from Capital now that free market capitalism and socialism both lay hobbled and bloody like two obese professional wrestlers in protein comas?  The cries of “socialize” ring as hollow as those who cry “deregulate.”

Like a Town Hall Tea Party meeting on the health care debate, only less ridiculous.

The various topics will demand a variety of styles.  The essays will vary from historical to philosophical to allegorical to free-associative to polemical.  While oceans of ink and forests of trees have gone into the exegeses of Marx’s work, I hope I can add a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of how the braided challenges of politics and economics confront the modern work force.

“If there are regulations against the use of child labor, then our entire economy will collapse!”

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Dollhouse Riffs: Special Edition: Victor’s Chin and Sierra’s Cheekbones: Dollhouse and the Reinvention of Beauty on TV

Posted on May 30, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Author’s Note: I wrote this for the Smart Pop Books essay contest featuring Joss Whedon’s beloved-but-canceled TV series Dollhouse.  Since they did not choose my essay, I am posting it here on my blog.

Introduction


“A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony.” – “Garbo’s Face,” Mythologies by Roland Barthes


Dollhouse is revolutionary television in its depiction of beauty.  The beauty presented on the program encompasses the social, economic, and visual.  We get the exotic beauty of Sierra and Victor, Bennett Halverson’s nerdy beauty, the damaged Dr. Saunders, Alpha’s nice guy good looks, and Mellie as the archetypal Girl Next Door.  In the end, Beauty is a subjective, exclusivist concept.  Like money, one possesses beauty or not.  There’s a reason Donald Trump can date models.  He represents the moneyed clientele serviced by the Dollhouses.

This essay will explore how Dollhouse pushed and played with the concepts of beauty.  Society’s interpretation of a specific personality type and capital will also come into play, since beauty is a challenging concept to quantify, let alone define.  The thrust of the essay will be aesthetic, since aesthetics is primarily concerned with beauty, but ethical, political, and economic considerations will provide additional nuances to an idea one can misinterpret as a purely visual judgment call.

Why do we consider these people beautiful?  In the end, it will be a variety of factors beyond the nebulous cluster of personal opinions we call “good taste.”

Victor, Sierra and “the exotic”


“He will have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty.” – On Beauty, Umberto Eco


Picture two things: Victor’s chin and Sierra’s cheekbones.  Victor has a chin that juts out from his face, the line from his nose to his chin forming a hook.  The Albanian-American Enver Gjokaj plays Victor, slipping in and out of personalities as divergent as a serial killer, a college girl, and Topher with chameleonic ease.  Sierra has high cheekbones and a large mouth.  Dichen Lachman plays Sierra.  Lachman’s father is Australian and her mother is of Nepalese descent.[1]

Sierra and Victor represent opposite poles of the Eurasian, especially if one considers Europe a glorified peninsula of Asia.  In interviews, Enver takes pride in his Albanian heritage.  Until recently, those of Central European descent have dominated the visual landscape.[2]

In the 1950s, television programs included ethnic fare that fit into nice little niches, like The Goldbergs, Marty, and in the Seventies The Jeffersons.  Everyone fit into their little box, whether on the TV screen or on the US Census form.  Dollhouse is not necessarily post-racial, but multiracial.  With a biracial President and the stigma of interracial relationships joining the growing trash heap of outdated evil ideas, the faces of Victor and Sierra point towards a beautiful horizon that will make a mess of preconceived categories like race and ethnicity.  The South Park episode “Goo Backs” satirized the concept of a society comprised of a people who combined all races.

Before going any further, it would be prudent to unpack the term “exotic.”  It is a loaded term, like “civilization” and “culture.”  Exotic has the prefix exo- that means outside, different, and “not us.” What standard should we use to measure exoticism?  The Dollhouse viewership, TV viewership at large, Corporate America’s conception of the (stereo)typical consumer?  For the purposes of this essay, the presumption will be that Dollhouse is written for a predominantly white middle-class, albeit geeky, demographic.[3]

The casting of Victor and Sierra represents Whedon’s evolution in worldbuilding.  In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy appeared as the stereotypical blonde-haired suburban white girl.  It was a very white show.[4] In Angel, the addition of Gunn was a welcome improvement, albeit as a racial token figure.[5] Firefly (and Serenity) saw a watershed in its depiction of ethnicities.  The program had white characters of all classes speaking fluent Chinese.  The mash-up of Chinese and Western (read United States and British) cultures provided opportunities to challenge the expectations of the viewers.  Dollhouse takes things a step further by casting Victor and Sierra not as racial tokens, but as members of an organic whole.  (The viewer does see other white people as dolls, but they have not received the same level of emotional investment or a long-term story arcs.)  This is in opposition to the “Five Token Band” trope[6] where “The general impression left by this practice is that what the characters are is noticeably more important than what they do.”

Another connotation of the exotic is that which one sees on the skin or in the face.  This superficial reading relates to the concept’s exteriority.  Victor and Sierra are more than their skin tones and faces.  On further investigation, all the main characters have a multiethnic heritage.  Eliza Dushku (Echo) is half-Albanian; Harry Lennix (Boyd) is Creole; Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard) is half Native American, specifically half English Canadian and was from the Yukon.

Besides their beautiful appearance, Victor and Sierra’s romantic relationship is also a thing of beauty.  The relationship transcended their imprints and continued to bloom with their “real” personalities.  If the relationship crystallizes into something multigenerational, their offspring will represent the future face of the United States – multinational and multiracial.

Bennett Halverson and Nerd Beauty

“It’s time for the odd to get even!” – Tagline for Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

Beauty is a social construct.  Like Art, it only exists when society deems it so.  Bennett Halverson is unaware of her beauty until she meets fellow wunderkind Topher Brink.  Granted, Whedon alum Summer Glau plays Bennett.  Regardless of how thick her glasses are or her social awkwardness, it remains a challenge to make Summer Glau unattractive.

Bennett and her male counterpart, Topher, embody Nerd Beauty.[7] An amalgamation of intelligence, appearance, and social mores, Nerd Beauty contrasts the supermodel looks of Sierra and Mellie’s Girl Next Door.  The Nerd remains one of the stock roles in the high school caste system.  The object of ridicule and previously embodied by TV icons like Urkel and Screech, the Nerd represented everything antithetical with the American Experience.  Guys want to be like the football players, not the nerds.  Girls want to be cheerleaders, not bookish and mousy.

Saved by the Bell and Family Matters drove the matter home.  Their depictions of the Nerd approached blackface in its comedic exaggeration.  While that parallel is broad and a bit crass (it seems shameless to equate 400 years of African-American oppression to people with pocket protectors getting swirlies and wedgies), one should remember the proud American tradition of ridiculing, tormenting, and oppressing the Other.

The rise of Geek Culture, Bill Gates, and the Internet provided a tectonic shift in Nerd Representation.  The nerds were now driving Ferraris in Silicon Valley while the jocks that tormented them remained trapped in their small towns selling insurance.  Subcultural solidarity and sci fi conventions also helped.  Like minds created a unified demand.  When network executives realized a section of the viewing population found geeky girls and geeky guys hot, it was only a matter of time before network representation shifted the standards of appearance.

Dr. Saunders: Scarification and disgust


“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.” – “The Favorite Game,” Leonard Cohen

Played by Amy Acker, Dr. Claire Saunders exhibits the dangerous consequences of beauty.  According to Adelle, Dr. Saunders, aka Whiskey, used to be the Number One Doll of the Los Angeles Dollhouse.  Left scarred following Alpha’s attack on the Dollhouse, Dewitt relegated her to the house doctor, uploading her with the imprint of the murdered Dr. Saunders.

On the surface, the retasking of Whiskey as Dr. Saunders seems like a downgraded or at least removing the damaged goods from the high-paying clientele.  Dollhouse has been consistent in showing the deceptions of reality as appearance and essence become unhinged.  The scarred Whiskey would probably not attract the same clientele since she represents damaged goods. Considered as attractive commodities, the dolls offer Beauty and Reality in one nice expensive package.  It is not some prostitute feigning love but an actual person in actual love with you, the client.

The superficial reading sees Adelle imprinting Whiskey with another imprint, thus preserving her use-value even as her facial scarring diminishes her exchange-value.  The Los Angeles Dollhouse and the Rossum Corporation function as businesses, thus a doll’s exchange-value is important to keep the capital rolling in.  Hence, no one would want a doll with the physique of Paul Giamatti or Camryn Manheim.  Aesthetic decisions reinforced with vast swaths of capital end in personally merciless decisions.  In the end, we’re simply not attractive enough to work in the Los Angeles Dollhouse.

Peel back another layer and we reveal Adelle’s matriarchal pride in her dolls, like a lioness with her cubs.  She has no tolerance for the freaks and sickos who request or demand their needs satiated.  Whether it is an arms dealer like Martin Klar, would-be serial killer Terry Karrens, and manipulative psychopath Nolan, Adelle has to keep her dolls safe and undamaged.

Los Angeles is where the pretty people come to work in the Dream Factory, entertaining millions on television or the movies.  At least that is what is promised.  It attracted Cordelia Chase.  The Los Angeles Dollhouse provides a metacommentary on this Dream Factory, giving those who want the dream a temporary and expensive taste.  With the high demand comes the high cost.  The costs include attractiveness and the discipline involved in keeping the Dollhouse’s commodities in optimal condition for exchange.  However, the demand for Beauty is a random thing.  Who knows what pop star will become the next Flavor of the Month?  Entertainment companies spend millions attempting to gauge the thought processes of the public.  In the end, the public’s decisions remain arbitrary.  A key area of arbitrary standards is the face.  One commonality in the public’s decisions is to desire an undamaged face.

Beauty and the Beast Next Door: Alpha and Mellie

“No more Mr. Nice Guy.” – Alice Cooper

Beyond the exotic and the damaged Beauties on Dollhouse, the program also cast a couple of individuals who do not fit the normal television standard for glamour.  Miracle Laurie plays Mellie, Paul Ballard’s one-time love interest.  Alan Tudyk plays Alpha, the bête noir of the series.

Casting Tudyk as Alpha was a brilliant coup.  Prior to work on Dollhouse, Tudyk worked as Wash on Firefly.  Seeing someone viewers recognized as a nice guy playing a psychopath with multiple personalities threw people for a loop.  Wash and Alpha represent diametrically opposed poles in terms of morality.  Alpha also does not look like a serial killer.  (Neither does Michael C. Hall as the eponymous Dexter.)

Alpha’s actions constantly play havoc with our preconceptions.  Alan Tudyk’s face reads, “Hey, this is a nice guy.”  Then he says something quasi-Nietzschean and slashes a face with a knife.  The scenario becomes more chilling when the psychopath looks like your next-door neighbor.

When Alpha led Paul down into the bowels of the Dollhouse, he acted like a nebbish, talkative and weak-kneed.  It plays like a mash-up of Vergil leading Dante into the Inferno and Abbot and Costello, with Paul Ballard as the humorless straight man.  The situation is complicated when Alpha reveals he houses dozens of personalities within his head.  His nice guy good looks mask a mind on the constant verge of collapse.

To FBI agent Paul Ballard, Mellie is literally the Girl Next Door.  She appears sensual rather than glamorous, exuding warmth rather than a beauty built upon exclusion and coldness.  In the absurd world of TV standards, Mellie can be considered “TV fat.”[8] However, one should take this appellation with a massive grain of salt.  Remember, we live in a world where the media describes Jennifer Love Hewitt as “voluptuous.”[9] Saffron (Christina Hendricks) from Firefly represents a truer example of the voluptuous female, with the character combining deception with a fleshly sensuality.

Just because Mellie has some body fat on her upper arms, therefore she exists outside the microcosm of the Supermodel.  The Supermodel, like the Supercar, is a commodity both exclusive and ridiculous.[10]

When Paul finds she was a doll, the Girl Next Door image shatters.  The destruction of the illusion has many aspects.  In the first place, the trigger initiated by Adelle robs Mellie of her free will.  She can be switched on and off at the discretion of someone else.[11] Her Dollhouse programming usurps her social programming.  The second aspect destroys Mellie’s benevolent image as a caring mother.  The programming turns from Madonna to Whore, since Paul is well aware of what the Dollhouse provides to its clients.  When Mellie warns Paul, she does so as a remotely controlled body, not as a self-controlled individual.  Mellie’s tragedy reaches its climax when Senator Perrin, himself augmented by Dollhouse technology, exposes Mellie as someone mentally instable and denies the existence of the Dollhouse.

Mellie’s Girl Next Door voluptuousness sharply contrasts Adelle Dewitt’s austere ice queen persona.  Adelle’s beauty originates in her power.  The icy woman in power is a very old trope, since beauty relates to its availability.  Dewitt is unapproachable and inaccessible.  Her seduction of Stewart Lipman, head of the DC Dollhouse, began as a stereotypical powerful-woman-using-her-sex-appeal shtick.  Like a chess master, Dewitt turns on a dime, switching from seduction to threats, clenching Lipman’s family jewels.  The Dewitt squeeze differs from Mellie’s “switch”, when Dewitt’s “three flowers in a vase” phrase turns her into a finely tuned killing machine.

The genius of Dollhouse is in its deft manipulation of age-old tropes, turning the Girl Next Door into an expert fighter.  It creates a story arc where an ice queen like Adelle Dewitt becomes an empathetic lioness fighting for her charges against the fascist excesses of Rossum.

Conclusion: Beauty, capital, and television


“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” – SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas


In its deft casting choices and finely crafted storylines, Dollhouse comments on the promiscuous intermingling of beauty, capital, and television.  We all enjoy seeing prettier versions of ourselves on TV programs.  The moral muddiness of Dollhouse makes these desires uncomfortable.  It forces the viewers to question these desires.  The Dollhouse facility offers its high-paying clients services ranging from prostitution to assassination, making it as dangerous as any CIA station embedded in a United States embassy.  (The fact that numerous other nations embed intelligence personnel in their embassies for the same purpose of committing illegal acts does not really salve the conscience.)

For Dewitt and Harding, the Rossum CEO, beauty is a freely traded commodity.  People will pay large sums for the dolls.  By extension, the TV executives and audience did the same thing, since we demand to see these pretty faces week after week.

Victor and Sierra represent a positive trend in casting.  Instead of the casts’ whiteness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the non-white and non-European faces exist not as tokens, but as fully formed characters in plots where it makes sense.  The majority of the show takes place in Los Angeles, itself part of the Spanish and Mexican nations for several hundred years.  Slowly TV is revealing itself as a non-white medium beyond the racial and ethnic broadcasting ghettos of the WB and Telemundo.

Dollhouse works its best when it takes a common character trope – the Nerd, the Girl Next Door, the Psycho Killer, etc. – and takes it to a new strange place.  While Beauty is a challenging concept to quantify, let alone define, Dollhouse engages the viewer by both meeting and confronting expectations.  On a narrative level, it explored the issues of self, ethics, and corporate intrusion into the government.  On a purely aesthetic level, the show populated the TV screen with beautiful faces and beautiful bodies.  The show became more than the usual “pretty faces with problems” (Joss Whedon is not Aaron Spelling) in its magisterial handling of both narrative and aesthetics.  TV is a visual medium and Dollhouse revolutionizes the small screen in its casting, creating a future-present filled with gorgeous nerdy girls, exotic men and women with coherent, long-term story arcs, and showing us a future where “race, taste, and history are overcome.”[12]

[1] Liza Lapira plays Ivy, Topher’s assistant, is of Filipino descent and was born in Queens, New York.  Fran Kranz (Topher) was born in Los Angeles.

[2] It is worth noting that studio executives pushed for someone like Robert Redford to play the part of Michael Corleone in the Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972).  In the 1970s, people did not look like Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro in popular cinema.  Casting Enver Gjokaj as Victor represents another small shift in the public’s perceptions of what the European male looks like.  Ironically, Victor’s “real” personality is named Anthony Ceccoli, an Italian American from New York City.  One should also stop to ask why the term “ethnic” gets attached to those members of population groups not Central European?  The answer may have to do with the combination of history and habit.  Our short attention span and cultural naiveté do not help things either.

[3] Dollhouse is more than its target demographic.  TV demographics should not be confused with a show’s artistic merit, since popularity is handcuffed to market demand.  Ratings mean increased market revenue, hence the gradual whittling away of show time for advertising time.  Half hour sitcoms now become twenty minutes, hour-long shows now last forty minutes.  Technology and alternate distributors (DVR, Hulu, etc.) force viewers and advertisers into an adversarial relationship, since twenty minutes is a serious chunk of time to waste, regardless of a show’s inherent worth.  It would try the patience of a saint.

[4] The term “white” is another loaded term.  For the sake of simplicity, the term “white” means European.  However, one should remember that various ethnic groups abandoned their ethnic tags and opted for the general “white” during the Fifties and Sixties.  The struggles of African Americans to regain their rights, following the devastation of the Post-Reconstruction South, led many Americans of various European backgrounds to seek solidarity in the term “white.”  Outlier groups like the Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews still had a difficult time getting accepted into the exclusive club we call “white people.”
For those interested in the genesis of “whiteness” as a community identifier, a good place to start is the book Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books, 2005) by David R. Roediger.  An alternative perspective of “whiteness” is explored in Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995) by James Ridgeway.  The history of the United States becomes a contentious, schizophrenic, and nativist amalgamation of mythology, cultural amnesia, and hollow catch-phrases due to each cohort of immigrants claiming to be “the original” or “the real” Americans.  As the late Robert Anton Wilson asserted “‘Reality’ is what you get away with.”

[5] South Park exposes the condescending paternalism of the concept by naming the African American classmate Token.

[6] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveTokenBand

[7] Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an early example of the Nerd Beauty.  One can contrast Willow’s intelligence (and computer-savvy) with Buffy’s superpowers.  Along with Bennett, Nerdiness comes from the combination of smarts and looks.  Intelligent girls intimidate some guys while some find it a turn-on.  The popularity of Whedon’s shows proves a lot of guys find the latter favorable.  Victor: “Librarian glasses on the chain.”  Topher: “For the win!”

[8] “TV Fat” (see the website TV Tropes — http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HollywoodPudgy — for a comprehensive list and definition of the term.)  On the definition page, the author states, “If you took the Hollywood Pudgy character out of her movie and plunked her down among a representative sample of real women, she’d be positively svelte.  … [M]any men find women more attractive, not less attractive, at this weight. Not so the tabloids and fashion magazines, in which one can readily find complaints that these women have put on too much weight.”

[9] “Love Hewitt’s voluptuous hour-glass figure provides the perfect vehicle for Joseph Porro’s creative genius as the costume designer on Ghost Whisperer.” From Wikifashion entry on Jennifer Love Hewitt(http://www.wikifashion.com/wiki/Jennifer_Love_Hewitt).

[10] Stephen Bayley, a design consultant, gives this description of the 1971 Lamborghini Countach as supercar: “‘Countach’ is Piedmontese voce de gergo, the gasp of astonishment made, for example, on sight of an exceptionally attractive woman.  …  Just as this period [the late Sixties and early Seventies] saw the invention and separation of powerful and charismatic supergroups from the swill of ordinary pop, so the supercar became a type when the mass market had been satisfied by waves of ingenious small front-wheel-drives.  …  Supercars might be ridiculous … but they are never boring” Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything (New York: Octopus Books, p. 326).

[11] In Serenity, Simon Tam uses a trigger word to stop River from her asskicketry.

[12] Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika, Tony Kushner (New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1994).  From the description of Heaven by Belize to Roy Cohn.  Belize, in his description of Heaven, also says “And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion.  …  And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers.”

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Critical Appraisals: The political economy of the Dark Knight

Posted on November 21, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I have written a lengthy essay on the political economy of the Dark Knight. The essay is at a companion site to the Driftless Area Review called Coffee is for Closers.

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Vineland and the Pynchon Canon: A Critical Appraisal

Posted on August 24, 2009 by | Leave a comment

vineland_cover

Introduction: “The bums lost.”

the-big-lebowski-1

The Big Lebowski: Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The Dude walks out and shuts the door.

The Big Lebowski: The bums will always lose!

Brandt: How was your meeting, Mr. Lebowski?

The Dude: Okay. The old man told me to take any rug in the house.

The Big Lebowski (1998) – Los Bros. Coen

In 1990 saw the publication of Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon.  The novel concerned the exploits and misadventures of burnt-out hippies, insane DEA agents, and a monomaniacal FBI agent, taking place in the Orwellian year 1984.  It truly seemed that “the bums lost” and “would have to get a job, sir.”

After a long hiatus, following the award-winning Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland seemed like a mere trifle, an afterthought and utterly inconsequential to the Pynchon Canon.  This will attempt to dispel the stereotypical reactions that Vineland is Pynchon’s weakest work and critically unimportant.

History is a great leveler.  Pynchon’s newest novel, Inherent Vice, requires we re-examine his Canon.  New works have a way of re-contextualizing everything that came before it.  In this case, the key to the re-contextualization is the much-maligned and misunderstood decade, the 1960s.

(Full disclosure: I have not read any Late Pynchon – Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Inherent Vice.  Hopefully this will not negate the value of this essay’s assertions.)

History and re-assessing the artistic work

the-march-of-time

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

“Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (1944) – T.S. Eliot

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Requiem for a Nun (1951) – William Faulkner

Time marches on.  History exists as the delicate dance between interpretation and time.  With the luxury of time separating us from the events, historians can interpret what happened.  The same holds true for literature.

The publication of Gravity’s Rainbow represents a landmark in both modernist and postmodernist literatures.  A rara avis that changed the novel-writing game forever.  It stands alongside monumental experimental novels like Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and 2666.  In the words of Claude Debussy: “Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.”

Gravity’s Rainbow is a labyrinthine, darkly comedic epic involving Tyrone Slothrop’s relationship with V-2s.  The novel seems plotless, involves hundreds of characters, and reverberates with Nixon-era paranoia.  Not an easy read by any estimation, it also represents the form of the novel at its most terminal since Finnegans Wake, except funnier.  Expressed another way, if you showed a medieval peasant a day-glo painted SR-71 Blackbird, he would express the same reaction the reading public had to this novel in 1973.

Therefore, it was with great disappointment that Pynchon’s next work was Vineland, a novel about hippies, the FBI, and female ninjas.  After the genius of Gravity’s Rainbow, anything would be a letdown.  It had been seventeen years and anticipation can become agonizing.  The same happened between the release of The Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999), thankfully, Vineland, for all its cartoonish aspects lacked midichlorians and the minstrelsy of Jar Jar Binks.

The latest novel from Thomas Pynchon is Inherent Vice, a short novel following his epic Against the Day. While this pattern of large novel followed by short novel is typical of Pynchon, we have to explore the subject matter and the effect of history upon the Pynchon Canon.  There are relationships and parallels running through the various novels that reflect back upon Vineland.

Triad I: The Magnum Opus, the Miniature, and the In-Between

First, some statistics:

The Magnum Opus

V. (492 pages)

Gravity’s Rainbow (760 pages)

Mason & Dixon (773 pages)

Against the Day (1085 pages)

The Miniature

Crying of Lot 49 (183 pages)

The In-Between

Vineland (385 pages)

Inherent Vice (369 pages)

Vineland and Inherent Vice exist in a peculiar category among Pynchon’s novels.  Obviously not epic works, they are also not written with tightness and efficiency like Crying of Lot 49.  Both also followed the publications of epic works, although Inherent Vice followed only a couple years after Against the Day.

Triad II: The Contemporary, the Nostalgic, and the Zeitgeist

Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Vineland (1990)

Inherent Vice (2009)

Vineland becomes important to the Pynchon Canon when we look at the transmutations of history.  Besides Past and Present, history also contains mutations like Nostalgia and Zeitgeist, subjective transformations of the events.  As memories grow fainter, do our childhoods – those eponymous Good Old Days – get better?  Or is it another lie to keep ourselves sleeping well at night, even if existence involves defeat, compromise, humiliation, desperation, and futility?  History can be weaponized like everything else.

Let’s examine three interrelated Pynchon novels: Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice.  Crying of Lot 49, written in 1966, tells the story of a suburban woman and her run-in with conspiracies real and imagined.  It was written in the Sixties on the Sixties, specifically Southern California.  It was also written before the Boomers deified (or demonized, depending on who you talk to) the decade, turning the decade into an Idea, an Ideal, and a Lost Revolution every bit as resonant as the Lost Cause to the South.

The losers of this Lost Revolution appear in Vineland, hippies, burnouts, and other nonconformists trying to survive the predations of the Reagan Era.  Vineland is unique because Pynchon makes his political allegiances passionate and obvious.  No love is lost on Nixon and Reagan, since he sides with hippie burnout Zoyd Wheeler.  He makes his living from an annual performance of personal insanity, much to the chagrin of DEA agent Hector Zuñiga, who, it turns out, is actually insane.  Zoyd’s archnemesis is FBI agent Brock Voyd, a man who fell in love with Zoyd’s wife Ferensi Gates.  Ferensi, living as a snitch for Brock’s mobile grand jury, exists as the symbol of American idealism.  Both her parents and grandparents were active in American left-wing organizations, from the IWW to the pro-socialist production unions in Hollywood.

Nostalgia for the Sixties informs the entire work.  The reconnection with the past and Prairie, Ferensi’s daughter, reconnecting with her mother, are a major through-line in the novel.

Inherent Vice returns to the Sixties, this time as a reconstruction of the Zeitgeist.  Vineland has the Past creeping in to the Present, whereas Inherent Vice is written about the Past from the vantage point of the Present.  Even with the same subject matter (Southern California in the Sixties) the results will be different, since one can not walk through the same river twice.

Vineland links both Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice, a trio in minor key compared to the major works like Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.  Reading Pynchon does make one hyper-aware of connections between things, events, and personalities, even if the connections do not actually exist.

Brought to you by the letter v …

V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, Inherent Vice. The letter v, like several characters, appear and reappear in several novels.  Is this evidence of some greater connection or is it all in our heads?

Conspiracies Real and Imagined

Bush Family Flow Chart

“One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach stress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.”

Vineland (1990), Thomas Pynchon

In Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas works to uncover a conspiracy which may or may not exist.  In Vineland, the conspiracy is the history of the United States.  Brock Voyd and Ferensi Gates represent the two poles of that United States conspiracy, since each event and actor (“Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy … CIA, Reagan, Kissinger”) becomes the manifestation of Good or Evil depending where one stands in the political spectrum.

“You one of those right wing nut outfits?” inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. “They accuse us of being paranoids.”
“They?” inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
“Us?” asked Oedipa.

Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Thomas Pynchon

subgenius_big

Both Pynchon and the Church of the SubGenius realize that the political spectrum is circular with the extremists of both “sides” indistinguishable from each other.  The only differences, much like the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties, cosmetic and superficial.  If you in front line infantry, does it really matter which autocrat will shoot you in the back for retreating?  Both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR possessed penal battalions.

Today we can add more names to that litany, shout and spit and froth, and interweave them into that constellated leaf on the forest floor.  Then again, no one possesses the cajones to actually lift up that leaf.  Can’t do that, since that would disrupt the incumbent’s crusade for “bipartisanship and healing.”  How can one heal when wounds fester?

Vineland’s genius is that it explores what one finds beneath that leaf on the forest floor.  The exploration comes from the misadventures of people with funny names doing crazy things and female ninjas.  The most subversive, rebellious, and anarchic voices are the comedians and the pranksters.  Comedy offers an easier entry point for readers as opposed to a preachy treatise.  Mark Twain said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

Conclusion: “The Dude abides.”

The Stranger: I like your style, Dude.

The Dude: Well, I dig your style too, man. Got the whole cowboy thing goin’.

The Stranger: Thankee.

The Pynchon Canon has had its ups and downs, its haters and its fandom, but the Dude abides.  Pynchon has succeeded where few author have, writing novels on his own terms and at his own pace.  No one compels him to churn out bestsellers or to down down his complex, usually plotless, tales of outcasts and (possibly false) conspiracies.  He can write low comedy or craft beautifully poetic passages, arguably the best in the language.

What does this mean for the Pynchon Canon?  What will he come up with next?

“Obviously you’re not a golfer.” – The Dude.

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