This week at CCLaP, I review the Conduct of Saints, by Christopher Davis, a historical novel set in the immediate aftermath of postwar Italy involving a self-tortured hero reminiscent of Graham Greene’s novels.
Today’s book review: Dennis Lehane and others edit “Boston Noir 2: the Classics,” bringing together a collection of Boston’s dark side, ranging from hard-boiled whodunits, out of print classics, and an excerpt from “Infinite Jest.” Says reviewer Karl Wolff: “For those unfamiliar with Greater Boston and its literary heritage, [this book] is a great place to start.”
I. Burial of the Dead
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarden,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out to sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.
Originally published as A tragédia de Fidel Castro (2008) Translated from the Portuguese by Karen Bennett and Chris Mingay River Grove Books
The Tragedy of Fidel Castro by João Cerqueira can be read as alternate history, political fable, or dark comedy. The novel finds JFK and Castro in a fatal battle. Beset by demonstrations and riots, Castro must find a way to prevent his ouster. But this is not your usual political thriller, although it is populated by spies, conniving advisers, and renegade priests. The novel is also about the limitations of faith in the modern world and the mutual shortcomings of the two dominant socioeconomic systems of the Cold War.
After an initial prologue in Heaven, the novel begins at a muddy fairground where JFK has come to exchange goods with the Cuban government. He gets quality Cuban cigars and Castro gets bourbon. Beneath all the bluster and rhetorical bombast of the two leaders, Cerqueira reveals the humanity beyond the politics. In the end, these are two men who appreciate the finer things, not because cigars and bourbon are key indicators of capitalist decadence or Cuban Communist hypocrisy, but because of the inherent human desire for pleasure.
Backing up to the prologue in Heaven, we meet God as he gets interrupted by Fátima.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” exclaimed God in exasperation.
The Fátima in the novel refers to Lúcia, the last surviving sibling from Fátima, Portugal, who witnessed a series of miracles in 1917. These miracles included “extraordinary solar activity” and that “Russia would be converted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Communism would soon come to an end.”
Tragedy follows two parallel tracks. On the temporal plane, we see the rivalry between JFK and Fidel Castro, each castigating the other’s socioeconomic system. Anyone even slightly awake since 2009 knows that unfettered capitalism has a few weak spots. Anyone with a decent memory of events prior to the 1990s realizes that Communism was far from a pro-worker utopia. In the heavenly sphere, God attempts to persuade Christ to return to earth to stop the imminent battle between Castro and JFK. Unlike other conflicts, the Cold War involved thermonuclear missiles. The end result wouldn’t mean one side would be victorious, but could very well result in human extinction.
Amidst the political wrangling and theological struggle, Cerqueira fills the novel with humor. There is a wrestling match between a priest and a prostitute, each representing a political faction as Cuba descends into chaos. Castro journeys deep into the jungle to come to terms with his military plans and collapsing popular support, only to be admitted into an insane asylum as someone who thinks he’s Fidel Castro.
When Christ and Fátima meet and journey towards the final battle between the opposing forces, both discuss what can be done to get humanity’s attention. Unlike earlier eras, humanity wouldn’t be easily swayed with miracles. Science, society, and morality have all changed drastically. Their discussions about faith and morality are introspective and melancholy without being heavy-handed. There’s enough irony and dark humor in the book to forestall any conclusion that Cerqueira is a sanctimonious scold.
Tragedy is a funny strange little book. There are some historical inconsistencies that occasionally trip up the book, but once understood as a farcical political fable, the readers can let them slide. Except for those minor things, the book possesses a lean beauty and a humane perspective, Fellini-esque in its carnival of excess.
Today in CCLaP’s essay series on subversive erotic classics, “The NSFW Files,” I look at Petronius’s first-century AD ribald romp through the Roman Empire, “The Satyricon.”
A limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society.
the body of doctrine or thought that guides an individual, social movement, institution, or group.
such a body forming a political or social program, along with the devices for putting it into operation.
theorizing of a visionary or impractical nature.
the study of the nature and origin of ideas.Category: Philosphy
a philosophical system that derives ideas exclusively from sensation.Category: Philosphy
Origin of ideology: 1790–1800; cf. F idéologie
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
The Federalist Society: the Resurgence of the Judicial Conservatism
In the long and storied history of the United States, conservatism suffered two major blows in modern times. The first was the Great Depression and President Herbert Hoover’s intransigence. The Republican president believing that the market would right itself without heavy-handed government meddling. Hoover’s miscalculation created the groundswell for the Democratic Party’s decades long domination of the executive and legislative branches. The second major blow was the constellation of scandals known as Watergate. Whereas Hoover’s failure to act discredited the economic foundation of conservatism (laissez faire capitalism), Watergate exposed a corruption and moral sickness at the epicenter of the executive branch. The constitutional crisis and Nixon’s authoritarian paranoia made the party of Law and Order seem comically hypocritical. (Understandably, there are multiple causes and multiple interpretations one can find in explaining both the Great Depression and Watergate. But the point of this essay is to underscore how the ordinary American citizen comprehended these crises.) Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine highlights the conservative comeback and how a grassroots movement worked towards creating a comprehensive plan to take back the judiciary. In addition, the conservative comeback can be further understood by the in-depth investigation of the Burger Court and its ideological turf battles as chronicled in The Brethren.
The groundwork for the conservative comeback occurred with the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian think tank devoted to judicial issues. Toobin illustrates the agendas of the Right and Left in very practical terms. In 1982 the Federalist Society galvanized young conservatives into action, while the Left became preoccupied with Comparative Legal Studies. The difference is striking. Reeling from the double-punch of a discredited economic system and the morally questionable actions of President Nixon, conservatives sought one thing: power. As opposed to the armchair discussions and morally self-righteous complacency of Comparative Legal Studies, the Right is to be commended for its program and its call to action. Like it or not, results only occur when power is attained, be in the legislature, the Oval Office, or the judge’s bench. One can have a comprehensive ideological outlook and sensible solutions to social problems, but if one isn’t connected to those with power, then it is rather pointless. One can have demonstrations and petitions and eloquent public speeches, but if one can’t change the laws one is protesting, what are you doing out there?
The clarion call of overturning Roe and the Federalist Society’s agenda of limited government created a formidable opposition to the entrenched Democratic establishment. Following the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter, the Age of Reagan allowed for a full-on assault of political liberalism in both economic and social spheres. In terms of the public’s imagination, Reagan pushed back against the onslaught of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” turned into “Government is the problem not the solution.”
The Brethren sums up the conservative position in this brief description of Justice Rehnquist:
And they [the liberals on the Court] when Rehnquist began promptly to live up to his advance billing as a solid conservative vote, siding invariably with the prosecution in criminal cases, with businesses in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases and with the government in speech cases.
Through Nixon, Ford, and Reagan presidencies, the Right had created a political atmosphere conducive to nominating conservatives to the judiciary. Once ensconced on these benches, it provided future opportunities for nominations and promotions. The Federal judiciary became a minefield for any case involving liberal causes.
MARTIN: It’s a revolution in Washington, Joe. We have a new agenda and finally a real leader. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench – Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment culture. We have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix on the Oval Office? It’s possible. By ’92 we’ll have the Senate back, and in ten years the South is going to give us the House. It’s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuine American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches Tony Kushner
And the key to landing conservative justices in these positions was the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Dune Buggy Driver: Where’s the damn race? Duke: Beats me. We’re just good patriotic Americans like yourself. Dune Buggy Driver: What outfit you guys with? Duke: The sporting press. We’re friendlies. Hired geeks.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998, Terry Gilliam)
The Senate Judiciary Committee: Fulcrum of Democracy
There are few places in our government where all three branches converge. One of them is the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s importance cannot be underestimated. The committee plays the role of advise and consent on the President’s nominees for judicial posts, most importantly those of the Supreme Court. It is the greatest manifestation of checks and balances between branches. The importance can be seen in what is at stake for all involved. For the President, successfully nominating a candidate for Supreme Court will allow the President to have influence when his or her term or terms is up. (One can see this is the liberal legacy of FDR’s appointees.) For the Senate, it is a chance to wield its power. They are a guaranteed stopgap against executive overreach. The Senate fought back when FDR pursued his ill-fated Court Packing scheme. Added to this political calculus is the nature of the Supreme Court position itself. First, these are lifetime appointments. (Unlike, say, the Federal Reserve Chairman who needs to be appointed and re-elected to the position.) The lifetime appointment is coupled with the microscopic nature of the Supreme Court. Unlike the 535 Representatives in Congress and the 100 in the Senate, there are only nine Supreme Court justices. Congressional appearance fluctuates with the attitude of the electorate. The Supreme Court is (allegedly) immune from the winds of public opinion and popular electioneering. The Nine chronicles the longest period without a change in the Supreme Court’s make-up (1994 – 2005).
In recent years, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings for Supreme Court nominees have been televised, turning the TV-watching populace into amateur Court watchers. Newspapers, magazines, and more recently the Internet become abuzz with speculation, hysteria, and analysis. Nominees are confirmed, others denied. Over the past decades, the hearings have taken on a different pallor. Instead of denying nominees for being too conservative, nominees have been denied for not being conservative enough. Hence, the Senate Judiciary Committee becomes a kind of ideological litmus test. The slow transition from a liberal-leaning Supreme Court to a more conservative-leaning Supreme Court has taken decades. This has also changed the mindset of the electorate, the Congress, and politicians. The events of 9/11 cemented a rightward tilt in the populace, at least until the economic meltdown of 2009, again putting the free market fundamentalists on notice.
Toobin, to his credit, illustrates the importance of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the rightward tilt of the judiciary throughout the Seventies and Eighties. But he seems to put to much emphasis on ideology alone. Because the Supreme Court is such a small government body, demographics also plays a key role. The Supreme Court will always be a body given to firsts. Amidst the recently confirmed nominees, the Supreme Court has seen its first female Hispanic justice. And now the Supreme Court has a majority of Catholic justices. Now there are six, instead of three. This has given the secular-minded pause. Alas, anti-Catholic hysteria has followed these nominations, especially in more extremist circles.
The Court’s nominal Catholicism should not be caricatured. While it is too early to tell what the judicial philosophy of the newer Catholic appointees will be like, one shouldn’t characterize the Catholic justices as a religious monolith. There are left-leaning Catholics (Sotomayor) and right-leaning (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy). So let’s play the demographics game: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito form a solid conservative bloc. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg are women. Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer are Jewish. And Kennedy, Breyer, and Souter are reliable swing votes. The best way to comprehend the votes of the Court is to consider not just ideology, but the race, sex, and religion of the nine justices.
Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets.
Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock (Pilot episode)
The Trouble with Clarence Thomas: the Contradictions of Modern Conservatism
Like it or not, Justice Clarence Thomas may be the most fascinating personality on the Court. Catholic, African-American, Southern, ultraconservative, and a bit of a porn aficionado. His complex profile is on par with the late Reverend Peter J. Gomes, a gay black Republican Baptist who was Harvard’s Dean of Divinity. Gomes and Thomas represent challenging personalities, one not easy to wrap the mind around. Thomas is erudite, passionate, an ideological firebrand, an extremist, and, most recently, totally silent on the bench.
Nominated by President George H. W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate to replace the vacant seat of Justice Thurgood Marshall, Thomas appeared as the polar opposite of Marshall. Ironically, it is these ultraconservative values that make him such a contradictory figure. Thomas adamantly opposes affirmative action, yet his entire career has been based on its tenets. A devout Roman Catholic and crusader for family values, his nomination was one of the most controversial in decades. Amidst allegations of sexual harassment and of renting porn videos, his nomination was confirmed. Added to this rather curious interpretation and practice of Catholicism, he is a die-hard advocate of free market capitalism. In addition, in speaking engagements, Thomas has repeatedly mentioned his disgust at “the elites,” the wonderful catch-all term beloved to Right and Left. It is ironic, since Thomas, a Supreme Court Justice, is a member of one of the most elite institutions in the United States government. It seems his high position and ideological extremism has made him immune to such obvious ironies. Toobin pointed out how Thomas would have his clerks watch The Fountainhead, the film based on the “philosophy” of atheist Ayn Rand.
While Thomas and Scalia are darlings to the Right, their ideological extremism makes them only so useful in the decision-making process of the Court. In the operations of the Court, strong decisions happen when there is a consensus (Brown v Board, Nixon v U.S.). Divided opinions are more contentious (Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore). In the end, an agenda must be taken: remain faithful to one’s ideological base or get things done. Chief Justice Roberts has now received the ire of the Tea Party because of his consensus-building activities on the bench. But in the end, the Supreme Court, like all political entities, derives its prestige not from passing arbitrary ideological purity tests, but from getting results. The words of the fictionalized Roy Cohn seem apt, “You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it. Choose.”
Ideology provides a comprehensive philosophical framework for political action and social change, but without those in power getting their hands dirty it remains useless, a bauble, a hobby, a passing fancy.
A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.
Originally published in 1990 as Cocuyo Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried Archipelago Books (Available March 2013)
Lauded by French semiotician Roland Barthes as a creator of a “paradisiac text,” a “teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure,” Severo Sarduy recreates a pre-Castro Cuba in his late novel Firefly. Unfortunately, Barthes premature death in 1980 prevented him from reading Sarduy’s slim novel. (He did however praise Sarduy’s earlier novel Cobra in the seminal work, The Pleasure of the Text.) Linguistic pleasures abound in Firefly, about the misadventures of a child named Firefly whose giant head and poor sense of direction get him in all sorts of trouble.
Sarduy creates a kind of decadent picaresque, painting a Cuba immersed in occultism, decay, and danger. We meet Firefly’s aunts “all in shining silk” and wearing “crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing.” After faking his death from rat poison, Firefly ends up in a hospital where he gets examined by two doctors, Gator and Isidro. Gator, “lean and olive-skinned”, wears a pinstriped suit, rimless glasses, and “a silk tie decorated with four-leaf clovers.” But his footwear is most disturbing, since “His shoes are made of his own skin.” His rotund counterpart, Isidro, teaches anatomy, and “owns a mouse-infested grotto” that functions as a makeshift medical school, where students gather to learn “his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.”
Once freed of the machinations of the two doctors, he goes to live with Munificence, sleeping on a couch below an office used by notaries and situated next to a charity school. Sarduy creates an atmosphere of decay and corruption as Firefly becomes employed as a gofer for the notaries and falls in love with Ada, a beautiful redhead student at the charity school. Unlike the decadent works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sarduy leavens the atmosphere with color and energy. As Firefly matures, he desires escape from the claustrophobic atmosphere.
The setting is asynchronous, existing in a hallucinatory past, with slave markets, mysterious cults, and Soviet advisors. A dream logic persists throughout, with patterns repeating themselves, or reconstituting into different identities. The novel is filled with mismatched pairs, usually one thin and one fat, whether it is Gator and Isidro, along with the two ladies who seduce him.
Along with Reinaldo Arenas (1943 – 1990), Sarduy belongs to the Gay Cuban literary heritage. Both were expatriates, although Sarduy left in 1960, shortly after Castro dictatorship overthrew the Batista dictatorship. Firefly is a meditation on exile, a sensual love letter to a Cuba of a childhood imagination, its exuberance and wit poking holes into the gummy haze of nostalgia. Sarduy misses the Cuba he had to flee, but the hothouse corruption and rot, as evidenced in the notaries, the quack doctors, and the legacy of the nation’s slave trade, remind one that nostalgia can inform as much as delude the writer and reader. Prior to Castro, Cuba was every bit as hellish for the poor and blacks as after. Sarduy meditates on the knot of Catholicism, race, and slavery:
The catechumens always returned to their venerable orishas, hidden on the top shelf of their armoires – the inheritance, along with the cinnamon skin and thick lips, of some maroon ancestor if not of a great-grandfather who, being from Africa itself, was respected in the neighborhood as a man black by birth. [Emphasis in original.]
Written in 1990, Firefly can be seen as a parody of the novels of the Latin American Boom and a harbinger of things to come (Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías). The novel’s tone and structure have it swinging between a kind of magical realism (the opening chapter involving the hurricane) and long-form dream sequences (the chapter with Firefly in The Pavilion of the Pure Orchid, a Lynchian nightmare in cloying tropical heat). Sarduy’s verbal richness sets it against the now-standard Magical Realist novels (One Hundred Years of Solitude, etc.) and Bolaño’s tricksy epics like The Savage Detectives and 2666, works exploring the post-NAFTA socioeconomic situation through a combination of flat journalistic prose and gut-wrenching horror and violence. Sarduy’s pre-Castro Cuba is far from idealized, but he deftly avoids devolving into simplistic agitprop.
An overly nostalgic interpretation of the past can be crippling in its construction of false idols, assuming one doesn’t take Faulkner at his word when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”* The carnival of grotesques, the decadent corruption, and the dreamlike atmosphere dissolve into a mélange of beauty, cruelty, and comedy. Sarduy is unencumbered by chronological exactitude and the evangelizing obsession to assert that the past was better.
Firefly and Severo Sarduy are worth the time, especially given Mark Fried’s luminous and playful translation. Sarduy is a master stylist, his writing radiating the refined sensuality of Jean Genet, the formalist experimentalism of James Joyce, and the verbal richness of Joris-Karl Huysmans. A gorgeous and decadent seam of literature is revealed in the pages of Firefly, offering yet another aspect of Latin American literature.
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.
This week at CCLaP, I review the Conduct of Saints, by Christopher Davis, a historical novel set in the immediate aftermath of postwar Italy involving a self-tortured hero reminiscent of Graham Greene’s novels.
