A General Theory of Oblivion
By Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Years ago, after I had re-read Oliver Twist as an adult, I decided that for my own satisfaction I had better write down my disentanglement of that tale's backstory – an effort which today remain somewhere in the bowels of the Internet. What I detected and wrote, of course, would ruin the whole novel if read in advance, but it relieved me to have written it down. Today I have followed that same approach here with A General Theory of Oblivion which unfolds with an unwieldy cast of characters and the noir complexities of a Raymond Chandler mystery.
The effort was time-consuming but in the sequel far less satisfying than I had expected. What I had hoped for was something like an underlying Shakespearean theme or at least a Nabakovian revelation. There were certainly a few revelations long the way and they were even in service of a concluding theme. But for anyone who reads this unraveling of the author's deliberately obscure chronology, I must also include a caution that the novel should be read first. Otherwise, even the revelations will lose their effectiveness.
And yet, A General Theory of Oblivion is certainly worth reading, regardless of the opinions I have come to. It is clever and put together in a most interesting fashion. The book is a slender novel of disappearance and reappearance lightly derived from the remarkable history of a real person, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, called Ludo. Ludo was a clinical psychologist born in Portugal who as a young woman was expatriated to Angola and whom circumstances caused her to live undetected for decades, a recluse in her walled off apartment in Luanda1 during the Angolan revolutionary struggles in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. After her death, her copious diaries, photographs, wall writings, etc. came to light and ignited the imagination of Jose Eduardo Agualusa, the author who produced this enigmatic story, the chapters of which are each separated by Ludo's apparently genuine writings from those sources.
In the book, Ludo's writings – those used as the basis for the plot and theme – are all indicated by italics. Other italicized quotations appear within the text of the story. There is no reason to doubt their authenticity. But in one respect, at least, one of the quotations – a published letter to a newspaper – raises a question of Ludo's reliability.
I don't intend that as a criticism. The specific story of a General Theory is far more concerned with the turbulent history of Angola beginning in the 1970s than it is with the equally fascinating details of Ludo's sequestered life, deliberately entombed in her once-fashionable apartment. It is that ambient history – an ambiguous and chaotic third world turmoil of revolutions and counter-revolutions with treachery, colorful players, mercenaries, Communists, secret police, plots, hangers-on, etc. – which keeps us reading. In short, the success of A General Theory of Oblivion relies heavily on the author's clever mingling of the ambiguities of Ludo's ethereal and sententious writings with the mad, opaque, disordered record of a third world revolution.
And yet for the disambiguation I am attempting, the letter I just mentioned must be used as the starting point. It was addressed to the Jornal de Angola, which the Internet informs me began publication in 1975, the year that Angola's independence also began. But the letter itself is undated. In fact, much later in the book we are given reason to believe that it was written in 2003. Significantly, the Oblivion author has chosen to quote it in italics, leading me to suspect – but this is speculation – that he unearthed it through his own research in the paper's archives. In the event, the significance is that the letter writer specifically gives her name as Maria da Piedade Lourenco, not Ludovica Fernandes Mano, as Ludo is identified in the opening of the story.
In fact, the letter writer expressly seeks the publication's assistance in locating her birth mother, surprisingly identified as Ludovica Fernandes Mano (i.e. Ludo herself). It states that her mother had been raped by a stranger in 1955 (apparently in Portugal) and that when born, Ludo had immediately been handed over for adoption.
“Following this tragic event [the letter says], she always lived in the house of an older sister Odete who in 1973 married a mining engineer . . . called Orlando Peteira dos Santos. They didn't come back to Portugal after Angola's Independence.”
The ambiguity begins in the introduction to the book where the author has stated in passing that Ludo died in 2010 at age 85. If this is true, then she was not born in 1955 as she informed the Journal in her letter. Furthermore, in the opening page of the book the author states, “After the death [sic] of her parents, Ludo lived in her sister's house.” Note that the objective of the letter is to locate the mother who is assumed to be alive. Much later in the book Ludo tells the boy Sabalu, “My mother died on me when I was a child. I was left abandoned.” For the malign purposes of this summary, I must reveal that the end of the novel reveals that it was Ludo herself who had been raped.
There is another pregnant item in the letter. Ludo writes that Odete and her husband Orlando, whose nickname is Spike, never came back to Portugal after Independence (November 11, 1975). So until then they had obviously been living in Angola (with Ludo), but the implication is that they were fleeing Angola to escape the growing turmoil preceding the revolution.2 Much later in the book, however, we are given to believe that the couple actually perished in an automobile accident in Luanda (unless Spike escaped to Brazil). Only towards the end of the book are we told that Jeremias Carrasco (of whom more below) deliberately caused the accident in reprisal for Spike having betrayed him in a diamond theft transaction.
As for Orlando/Spike, we learn elsewhere in the book that he was of mixed race, wealthy enough to live with Odete and Ludo in that luxurious well-stocked penthouse apartment in Luanda with a terrace and a vast and valuable library. He fancied himself a revolutionary and confidante of Angola's first president – though more significantly quite a bit later we also are told that he was no doubt a criminal, trafficking in stolen diamonds. (His and his wife's abrupt flight may actually have been related to that.) There are some other characters who also cross the stage throughout the story. These include the just-mentioned Jeremias Carrasco, Arnaldo Cruz (Little Chief), Magno Moreira Monte (always Monte), and Sabalu. In most cases, while we watch these actors play out their own significant scenes anonymously, we are not given their names until much later in the book. This effectively adds to the book's pervasive air of uncertainty.
In any event, Ludo's unnatural interior anxiety did not abate when she was taken to Angola. On the critical night of independence, therefore, when Odete and Orlando abruptly fled without notice, Ludo had not joined them at a raucous and seemingly-endless farewell party in the neighboring apartment. Outside there had been fighting and gunshots. However, making Ludo's future (and the story) much more plausible, the elegant prostitute who had been the hostess (and who also disappeared about the same time) had made a parting gift to Orlando of her endless supply of foodstuffs, furniture, wine, and household cleaning supplies. These fell to Ludo who was now left alone in Spike's apartment with no plan for the future.
The next day a man telephoned and asked for “the stones.” Ludo claimed ignorance. The man said he would give her some time and hung up. Searching Orlando's furniture she then found a handgun and some money. A day later, three men try to knock down her door. She shot through the door, hitting one of them, and the others ran. She dragged her victim into the apartment where he died. She buried him outside. Returning to the apartment, she single-handedly built the wall that would separate her from the rest of the building (and the world) for decades. To do so, she used the bricks and mortar from Orlando's unfinished swimming pool. Thereafter, except for a dog who later dies, Ludo was then without any companionship. Then begins the author's story of what has happened on the outside.
For decades thereafter Angola was wracked with violence and uncertainty. With nominal independence came eternal violence between and among local tribes, governmental factions, criminal networks, mercenaries, Communists, etc. Every incident seems to be augmented and inflamed by local customs and personal rivalries. There is a brutal police force, but little sense of its being subject to any recognizable organization.
This disorganization is fortified by the book's periodically italicized quotations from Ludo's various writings. Indeed, their random placement permit – in fact, practically insist upon – the story to be told in unrelated episodes, both chronologically out of order and contradictory, but elusively and thematically tied together. This methodology is assisted (or obscured) by the author's occasional use of verifiable dates, e.g. independence day (1975) and the genuine disappearance of a major airliner in 2003. And yet, probably for verisimilitude, he also occasionally inserts other specific but unverifiable dates within the non-italicized story line. Always constant, however, is the unending external chaos which continues as the backdrop to Ludo's meager life behind her self-constructed barricade.
If there is an intelligible chronology it begins with Jeremias Carrasco, a Portuguese mercenary who may have been one of the three men who had pounded on Ludo's door the day after independence. Within a day he is arrested outside the building by Magno Moreira Monte, a sadistic Angolan communist police detective of dubious loyalty. The accusation is that Jeremias has been responsible for torture and murder of local Angolans (apparently true). Monte suddenly shoots him and leaves him for dead. And yet, before the authorities arrived, a former nun who had heard of the incident, arrived and had taken him with her. He eventually wakens so badly injured that he will never again be able to talk. She hides him in Luanda for months and then spirits him away to a remote native town. He remains there for years. He appears much later in the book as an old man, intended to be a lesson to us all.
Ludo was not a witness to Jeremias's auto accident just described, but her writings do indicate that on a later occasion – we are actually given the date, May 27, 1977, which would be 1½ years later – she did see from her terrace a tall thin man running away from soldiers on the crowded streets. He crashes into a bicycle, is captured and taken away in a van. This was Arnalhdo Cruz, known as Little Chief, an intelligent, well-educated student, but with a history of several arrests. In fact, he has recently escaped from prison and had been living on the streets of Luanda disguised “in plain sight” as an insane street beggar. While in that state and starving, he had captured and devoured a pigeon (he thought it was the Holy Ghost) in whose entrails he discovered two diamonds. The next day he is accosted and sheltered by the same nun who had rescued Jeremias and who, not fooled by Little Chief's insanity act, secretes him for months in her home in Luanda. He thought both of these things were an act of God.
Meantime, already tormented by water and electrical blackouts, Ludo had begun to suffer the inevitable depletion of her food and fuel supply. Her apartment building, apparently abandoned by its owner, had fallen into disrepair and filled with squatters from the slums who keep chickens for food. For her own meals, Ludo cooks over small fires using broken pieces of Orlando's fine furniture for fuel. Once, in breaking up a bed for that purpose, she discovers hidden in the scaffolding a purse holding several precious stones. When she becomes desperate for food, she concocts a rudimentary pigeon trap on her terrace, using the diamonds as a lure. One day she traps a pigeon which has swallowed two of the diamonds. She finds a band attached to its leg. It contains an unsigned laconic love message arranging a dangerous meeting. Instead of killing the pigeon, she releases it. It was the pigeon that had been caught by Little Chief.
Although the novel does not do so, here is where chronology requires the story of the Pigeon. In 1974 the bird had been raised in captivity by a high school girl named Maria Clara. Her father is a Portuguese patriot but living in Angola. More important, much later we learn that unknown to her father, at the age if 17 she had married Monte, the Marxist Angolan policeman. He had been one of her teachers in high school. It was they who had communicated using the pigeon who had eaten the diamonds.
Meantime, after many months, both Little Chief and Madalena are arrested. This is the May 27, 1977 date. Although roughly questioned by Monte about the location of Jeremias, Little Chief never heard of him and cannot answer. He is jailed. A fellow prisoner is the hapless Nasser Evangilista, with whose help, when there is a prison revolt, Little Chief escapes. (They counterfeit his death.) Pressed along by the crowds he is recognized, captured again by the police, and driven away in a van. In the confusion, a man in the crowd (Papy Bolingo) hustles him into Ludo's dilapidated building and takes him to what had been the prostitute's apartment neighboring Ludo's on the 11th floor. Little Chief will live there for four years. When he re-emerges, he discovers that his friends had thought he was dead. He reunites with the nun and joins her in doing daily poverty work for several years. In this time, “capitalism rose from the ashes, as fierce as ever.” Finally, after all this time, Little Chief then sells the diamonds he found inside the pigeon, using the money to start a profitable real estate business. He then buys Papy Bolingo's apartment next door to Ludo's secret residence where he has been living.
The author then jumps us a decade to April 28, 1988 and introduces Daniel Benchimol. On that day (why the specificity?) Benchimol's editor at the Jornal de Angola assigns him and a photographer to a small rural town in the remote Kuvale region where it has been reported that 25 women had been murdered under suspicion of witchcraft after which their bodies had disappeared3. Benchimol, says the author,
“collected stories of disappearances in Angola4 . . . .[H]e preferred those of the air. It's always more interesting being snatched away by the heavens, like Jesus Christ or his mother, than being swallowed up by the earth.”
In this case, he and the photographer fly to the remote village and drive from the nearby airfield to the village and interview the chief and take pictures. The next day, however, a local helicopter pilot whom they have hired at the airport to assist in aerial shots cannot locate the village after hours of searching. So back at the airport they hire their local driver from the day before, but he too gets lost. Then it turns out that the photographs from the first day could not be developed. This mystery of the missing village and its 25 murdered women is never solved or even mentioned again.
But the Benchimol story continues. When he returns to Luanda from the village that never was, his editor then shows him the curious letter sent to the Jornal. Remember, although the letter was not dated, the book leaves clues that it had been written in 2003 – but this is 1988. And yet, “that same afternoon” in 1988, the author writes, Benchimol goes to the Predio dos Invejados, the site of Luna's apartment.
We are left hanging. Abruptly there is now a narrative break. A decade has passed when the author then simply tells us that in the late 1990s, five different airplanes from the former USSR, apparently en route to Angola, had disappeared. A passing reference adds that Benchimol was still around at that time to make inquiries. Then the author inserts that some years after these unsolved mysteries, on May 25, 2003, a Boeing 747 also disappeared.5 Much public concern, no answer. With this, he then tells us that a month earlier, on April 20, 2003, Simon-Pierre Mulamba, a distinguished lecturer had arrived in Angola and, after four days of frequenting nasty bars, also disappeared6. He was identifiable by his unique hat. In fact, all that can be found of him is his hat.
Fifteen years has now passed since Daniel Benchimol had failed to solve the puzzle of the missing village. But as though no time had passed at all -- and without any other explanation – we learn that he is now investigating what had become of Mulamba. A bar girl tells him that Mulamba had been swallowed by the earth.
At least unlike the missing women and airplanes, this event actually revives the underlying story. Monte, still a Marxist and disillusioned with current politics, has become a private detective. Presumably while Benchimol has begun making his own inquiries about Mulamba,, Monte himself is engaged from “upstairs” (i.e. by a former Stasi agent) to assassinate Benchimol, though for reasons not disclosed. (We can surmise that he may have been getting too close to solving these disappearances, but that is never said.)
Soon enough Monte learns that Benchimol regularly meets surreptitiously with a woman who is married to an important politician. (This goes nowhere.) On the other hand, the assassin whom Monte has hired to kill him during such a tryst, goes to the wrong bungalo and clumsily kills the wrong man – who turns out to be the missing Mulamba. By mischance the assassin is also killed. To save the day, Monte shows up, goes to Benchimol's room expecting to find two bodies, instead finds Benchimol alive, makes his awkward apologies, then locates the assassin's body in the other bungalo, smuggles it from the assassination site, and takes Mulamba's hat. There is no mention of what happened to Mulamba's body. The timing suggests that all this occurred on April 25, 2003.
And now another time lapse. About two years later Ludo breaks her leg in the sealed apartment, leaving her not only having to crawl but also on the brink of starvation. One day, in this desperate situation, she discovers that a street child, Sabalu, has stealthily entered her apartment by climbing a scaffolding on a neighboring building and has left her food. They develop a friendship and he begins to live there with her. Sabalu tells her that he is an orphan whose father had never come home and that his mother had been a nurse who was killed by her corrupt co-workers because she opposed their surreptitious trade in disappearing human corpses. Since then, Sabalu says, he has been living as a thief, dominated and abused by an older street kid named Baiacu. Eventually Sabalu contrives to break through the wall Ludo had built 30 years earlier. This is how they meet Little Chief who had been living on the other side.
By now we are concerned about the chronology. Benchimol's failure at the village of the murdered women was in 1988 and we have been given to believe that upon his return “that afternoon” the editor showed him Ludo's letter. But I have just noted above that 15 years then elapsed before we get to the Mulamba story and still another two years until Ludo breaks her leg and Subalu shows up. That has put us in 2005.
Over these years Ludo has gone virtually blind. And only now, about 180 pages into the book, do we come across a chapter titled “Daniel Benchimol Investigates Ludo's Disappearance.” Virtually the first thing we are told is that pursuing this inquiry, on the eleventh floor of the Predio, Benchimol finds a door with a bullet hole and Sabulu speaks to him. From what we have already been told, this could not have occurred “that same afternoon” that Benchimol was shown Ludo's undated letter in 1988.
In the event, this is the climactic moment. (Were this a play, the following scene would teeter dangerously on farce.) Simultaneously, Benchimol confronts Ludo and Sabulu at Ludo's door on the 11th floor; downstairs, Subalu's criminal sponsor (Baiacu) pushes past the doorman (Nasser Evangelista) and races up the stairs to recapture his juvenile slave; and Jeremias (now an old man) arrives with his grown son by the 11th floor by elevator. Then Monte appears, hoping to capture Benchimol, and unexpectedly finds himself confronting Jeremias,“the man who, twenty-five years back, had questioned and tortured him.” Hearing the commotion from his neighboring apartment, Little Chief comes out and also recognizes Monte as his former captor and tormentor. For his part, Benchimol immediately figures out that it was actually Monte who had intended his, not Mulamba's, assassination. The inept Evangelista, also recognizing Monte as his former torturer in jail, then stabs Monte with a fake retracting circus knife. Whew! This is where the scene ends.
With no transition, we move to the next chapter. It appears that time must have passed in its normal way because now we find Maria da Piedade, Ludo's real daughter, calling on Ludo. Her apartment is described as having been newly furnished by the friendly Little Chief. But chronologically this actually is out of order, because the next chapter jumps us back to the chaotic scene at the apartment vestibule. In the confusion of that moment, we are told, Monte and Biacu immediately fled and Benchimol, apparently unfazed, proceeded to read that deceptive letter to Ludo – who we had been led to believe originally wrote it herself -- and who now listens in tears. So we conclude that the mysterious letter actually had been written by her daughter and that Ludo was hearing it for the first time.
But wait. Jeremias is still standing there with his son. Those two now step forth and by means of notes read aloud by his son (remember Jeremias himself has been unable to speak for decades) seek forgiveness for the auto accident by which Jeremias had killed Odete and Spike as retribution for Spike's treachery on a diamond deal. He then explains through his son that from his years in the bush he has become a new man specially integrated into the world, “reborn as many other people.” (This is not intended as treacle, but . . . ).
So much for Jeremias. Gradually through the book the author has already tried to rehabilitate Monte. Little Chief, of course, has become respectable, and Ludo, reunited with her daughter, comes to find that her own blindness has revealed to her a damaged world which is nevertheless worthwhile. This is how the book ends, an anticlimax which is almost a cliché. The mountain has delivered a mouse.
Glossary
Benchimol, Daniel – journalist who writes about unexplained disappearances in Angola; he is having an affair with the wife of a well-known politician; it is he who he finds Ludo; the Marxist generals order Monte to “silence” him
Baiacu – “King of Quinaxixe” (a large market area in Luanda); he calls himself “King Gingo”; he is a young hoodlum who describes himself as a “street businessman”; he captures Sabalu and teaches him to be a thief.
Capitao, Horacio – Maria Clara's father; see “Little Chief"; he is an ardent adherent of the Portuguese cause and anti-independence; on several occasions he is quietly saved from imprisonment by Monte, his son-in-law who, of course would be his natural enemy
Carrasco, Jeremias – a Portuguese mercenary; he is shot on the orders of Monte (q.v.) and left for dead; but he only suffers a would leaving him permanently unable to speak; he is rescued by Madalena and taken to a remote part of Angola to recover; he lives there for years and grows old; his son is Antonio; near the end, he claims responsibility for an auto which killed Odete and her husband, Spike; he and Spike were once involved in a criminal diamond theft operation; Spike had secreted their stolen diamonds in Ludo's apartment
Cruz, Arnaldo – see “Little Chief”; he eventually buys Ludo's apartment, but permits her to live there.
Diogo – Siamese twins?; he (they?) works for Baiaco (q.v.)
Evangilista, Nasser – he shared a prison cell with Little Chief whom he helps escape; he stabs Monte in the abortive assassination attempt; later Little Chief hired him as the doorman at Prediodos Invejados at Quinaxixe; described as “a reader”
Fofo – Papy Bolingo's pygmy hippo
Gaviao, Vitorino – a poet said to be Orlando's (Spike's) cousin, but Vitilino, the old diamond prospector, describes him to Benchimol as a “tramp”; he is associated with the communist revolution; he once looked like Jimi Hendrix, but has now gone bald; his skin is white
Kianda – a sea goddess, but not a mermaid; an “energy” capable of good or evil, expressed through the winds or sea waves
Little Chief – Arnaldo Cruz (q.v.), later referred to as “the businessman”; he is tall, thin, and athletic; an orphan, he is raised by his grandmother, old Dulcinea; he becomes a law student; though imprisoned following Portugal's Carnation Revolution, he escapes and hides “in plain sight” as an insane street beggar, during which he kills Ludo's pigeon (thinking it is actually the Holy Ghost), finds Ludo's diamonds, and reads the message; rescued by Madalena, he agrees to supervise her small farm, believing it is the will of God; eventually he and Madalena are arrested; he is again imprisoned and interrogated and shot by Monte who is trying to find Jeremia Carrasco; with the help of Evangelista Nasser, he simulates his own death and again escapes; while escaping, he is rescued by Papy Bolingo and kept hidden for four years in his apartment adjacent to Ludo's; he eventually emerges and sells the diamonds, using the proceeds to set up a business; he also buys Papy's apartment.
Lourenco, Maria da Piedade. Ludo's real name; it is also given as the name of her daughter
Ludo – the Portuguese woman living in Angola upon whose notes and drawings this novel was supposedly derived; (in her diary we discover the title for this novel); early on, the novelist identifies Ludo as the younger sister of Odete, but see the letter which Ludo later writes to a newspaper; in it, she says that she is adopted, that her real name is “ Maria da Piedade Lourenco,” and that she is asking for help to locate her birth mother, named Ludovica Fernandes Mano; in the letter she identifies Odete as her birth mother's older sister; but toward the end we meet her daughter who is named Maria da Piedade Lourenco; thus in the letter, Ludo appears to have deliberately altered the facts in an effort to locate her own daughter
Madalena – a former nun who acts as a nurse and who rescues both Jeremias Carrasco and later Little Chief;
Mano, Ludovica Fernandes – Ludo's biological mother; see also “Lourenco, Maria da Piedade”; she was apparently Ludo's birth mother who put her up for adoption because the pregnancy was the result of a criminal rape; Ludo's diary says that she lived with “an older sister, Odete.”
Maria Clara – Magno Moreira Monte's wife; as a girl, she named the pigeon “Love”
Monte – Magno Moreira Monte; a communist, now a Portuguese police detective of uncertain loyalty; early in the book, he shoots Jeremias and leaves him for dead; his wife is Maria Clara (q.v.) who had been his high school student; it is he who wrote the love note to Maria Clara which Jeremias found when he captured and ate the pigeon; the Marxists ordered him to “silence” Benchimol, though Monte actually likes Benchimol; years later when Monte is an old man he actually encounters Jeremias in the bush; he dies when he is felled by falling satellite dish which some saw as an allegory.
Morte, Marcelino – Benchimol's editor
Mulamba, Simon-Pierre –a French mulatto writer who is said by the natives of Luanda to have been swallowed by the earth; on his fourth day in Angola (2003), he disappeared after having drinks with Elizabela Montez; see “Uli Pollock”
Agustinho Neto – communist poet; a real person who was Angola's first president beginning 1975; he died in 1979; Orlando boasted to have lived with him
Nova Esperanca – a small town in rural Angola which had been the site of the murder of 25 women; the day after Benchimol visits it for the first time, he and his companion (KK, a photographer) are unable to locate it either by driving or from a helicopter; KK's photographs cannot be developed
Odete –in the first paragraphs of the novel Odete is identified as Ludo's older sister whom she lives with; she marries Orlando and they supposedly leave Angola; on the other hand, in the middle of the novel there is quoted a letter by Ludo to a newspaper (undated); this letter seeks help in locating Ludo's own biological birth mother, Ludovica Fernandes Mano; in the letter she identifies Odete as her mother's sister, but she was obviously Ludo's own older sister; toward the end we are told that she and Spike, her husband, were actually killed in an auto in Luanda attributable the Jeremias
Orlando Pereira dos Santos – sometimes called Spike; a childless widower, a mining engineer, whom Odete falls in love with and marries; they live together with Ludo; he is of mixed race, but explicitly identifies himself as Angolan; he calls himself a revolutionary; owns a vast and valuable library; he and Odete abruptly leave Angola for Portugal when the revolution gets menacing, leaving Ludo alone in their well-stocked apartment; later it is reported that he and Odete were killed in the auto in Luanda which occurred as Jeremias was escaping prison
Papy Bolingo – the nickname of the guitar player of a popular bolero of the same name; his real name is Bienvenue Ambrosio Fortunato; ethnically he is apparently Zairean and wanted by the Mobutu regime; his father was a priest; he sells his Luanda apartment (apparently located adjacent to Ludo) to Little Chief ; see “Ritinha”
Phantom – the albino German shepherd who lives with Ludo
Pollock, Uli – one of Monte's best friends; he gives Monte a poisonous snake intended to kill Benchimol in an assassination to be conducted by Nasser Evangelista; through mischance, however, the snake kills Simon-Pierre Mulamba and then Uli himself
Predio dos Invejados – one of the most luxurious residential buildings in Luanda, though it falls into disrepair over the years; translated as “the building of those who inspire envy”; Ludo lives there, first with Odete and later alone for decades behind a wall she made for privacy and security
Ritinha – Rita Costa Reis; a high class prostitute who lived in the apartment adjacent to Ludo; see “Papy Bolingo”
Sabalu – Sabalu Estevao Capitango; he is an orphan boy whose mother, Filomona, had been a nurse; she was murdered; his father, Marciano Barroso, had disappeared on a military mission; escaping from Baiaco (q.v.), the boy creeps into Ludo's apartment after she has broken her leg and is starving; he brings her food and stays with her; she teaches him to read
Sara – this is the fanciful name which Ludo has given to what she believes was a woman who used a pigeon to deliver a message to her assumed lover; to Ludo, “she looks like she's out of a canvas by Modigliani”; eventually we learn that Sara is Maria Clara; see also “Little Chief”
Spike – Orlando, Odete's husband
Splendour – the name Little Chief gives to his pet rat when he is in prison; as chief of the prison, Monte kills the rat in a rage
Vitorino Gaviao – Orlando's cousin; described both as a poet and a tramp; in the days before independence, he had actually met Ludo at Spike's apartment; he is interviewed by Benchimol as part of his inquiries for Ludo based on the letter; he describes himself as part of Angola's “Greek chorus”
1 Predio dos Invejados, translated as “the building of those who inspire envy.” It was one of the most luxurious residential buildings in Luanda, though it fell into disrepair over the years of Ludo's self-exile. After an initial year or so living there with her sister and brother-in-law who then abandon her, she is then alone for decades behind a wall she surreptitiously builds for privacy and safety.
2Independence, however, merely signaled the beginning of civil war.
3Perhaps this is a stretch, but if there is some wider significance here, the Kuvale region was the center of the Herero tribe which was essentially eliminated by a German genocide in the early 20th Century.
4 Much earlier the author has mentioned Kianda, an Angolan sea goddess who would occasionally kidnap people, although they would often appear days later, very far away.
5The news article I found on the Internet indicated that it had taken off from Florida; the book says it was leaving Luanda.
6On Google I was able to locate a person with this name, but nothing suggesting any connection with Angola or a disappearance.
James Dixon, an insecure starting teacher at an unnamed English college, hates his boss who is the head of the history department. He is distracted by two completely different women, one a suicidal co-teacher, the other the sometimes girlfriend of his boss's son. There are amusing incidents such as the protagonist's drunken misfortunes with his cigarette, but for the most part the novel reminds me of the sort of confection turned out 20 years earlier by Waugh. Dixon does one thing that I suppose most people, but not most people in novels, do: like a Dickens character, he makes faces when he is alone. This certainly individualizes him, though not much else in the book does. There is eventually the author's central ruminations about luck, but somehow the whole book seems to have passed without making much of an impression on me.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice --
My first love was named Elizabeth, second daughter of a large family of girls whose oldest was a mild and sweet angel named Jane. There were other similarities to the Bennet family as well, but Pride and Prejudice would be a wonderful novel had everything been different with them and with me.
It is wonderful because of how effortlessly careful Austen is. This novel has quite a large number of characters, each of whom has an important part to play, and each of whom in the Shakespearean manner has his or her specifically individualistic personality. Added to that is Austen’s sense of placement, by which I mean the movement of her characters reminds me of the elaborate dances that they perform from time to time. A reader of Austen should take care to remember the names of the houses and villages where each act is performed, and note the exits and entrances of the players.
In this novel, the Bennet family is in actual financial jeopardy because of an authentic peculiarity of British law, the entailment. Unfortunately for the droll but passive Mr. Bennet, he has only produced daughters, meaning that the family home at Longbourn, will pass to the next male relative upon his death. This individual turns out to be the clumsy, pompous Mr. Collins, a clergyman of no obvious merit, whose idea of condescension is to appear at Longbourn in the beginning of the novel to make love to whichever daughter will have him. But the oldest daughter Jane is well on her way to being smitten by a well-off young bachelor, Mr. Bingley, who for the season has suddenly leased Netherfield, a house in the neighborhood, moving in with his sisters and a disagreeable friend, the aristocratic and proud Mr. Darcy. A third venue for the action is Meryton, a nearby regimental town which is the home of Mrs. Bennet’s agreeable sister-in-law and her husband where they have made a social center for the young officers quartered there.
The “pride” and the “prejudice” of the novel obviously pertain to Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, the Bennet’s clever second daughter. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to consider how important it is to the author to reveal the character of the other actors as well. The famous opening line of the novel, for example, overtly pertains to Bingley and Jane and Mrs. Bennet’s assessment of their situation: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Bingley, in fact, does need a good wife, though he probably doesn’t realize how great the need is. He is a good gentleman, but with no obvious purpose in the world and inclined to impetuous decisions (such as taking a house in the country with little consideration as to the reason why). Even his obvious and growing affection for Jane Bennet is subject to being swayed by his sisters who clearly are angling to have him marry Darcy’s younger sister, chiefly because she is rich.
For her part, Mrs. Bennet, though a foolish and prattling mother hen, is actually far more farsighted than her husband in one respect: appreciating the dismal future her daughters will have to endure if they are not married before he dies and Collins gets the house and evicts them all. As another reflects on it, marriage
was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.
By contrast, Mr. Bennet, passively wise but a refugee from his own ill-considered marriage, does nothing to advance his family’s security except by not dying. Austen never says this, but the conclusion is unavoidable.
And the greatest example of the perils of misunderstanding the merits of a person is the case of the handsome Mr. Wickham. As Darcy has come to Netherfield in the apparent wake of Bingham, Mr. Wickham has come to Meryton to join the regiment. This man of easy manners is immediately attractive to all whom he encounters, particularly Elizabeth, to whom he tells his story. The story confirms Elizabeth in her distaste for Darcy, for Wickham, it seems, is the son of the elder Mr. Darcy’s late steward and Darcy has thwarted him in his father’s desire to give him the stewardship of Darcy’s own home, Pemberley. All of these intricate considerations and many others are put before the reader in the first third of the novel, then to be followed by equal detail and movement through the very end. Various couples are brought forward and then dance aside while others appear, each presenting a different aspect of men and women in love and in some cases of the varieties of marriage itself. Each couple is defective in its own way, although a hierarchy is plain enough and Elizabeth and Darcy are at the pinnacle, because theirs is love achieved. (Compare the dismal observation of the woman who eventually marries Collins:
Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the last. They always grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.)
Although the comparison of these couples is the chief intention of the novel, it is also worthwhile to consider the character of Elizabeth. I have said she is clever, but her penetration is not perfect. If it were, there would be no novel. She actually reminds me of another of Austen’s characters, the slightly less acute heroine of Emma. This can be seen in Elizabeth’s imperfect assessment of Wickham (she finds “truth in his looks”) and particularly in her prolonged misunderstanding of the genuineness of Darcy. The latter situation is the “prejudice” of the novel’s title and there is an irony that her sister Jane’s passive willingness to believe the best of people produces a more accurate appreciation of Darcy’s true character than Elizabeth’s more combative intelligence can permit. Darcy’s true character, of course, is presented in the package of an austerely proud man. Pride is commonly regarded as a cardinal sin and Austen works with this preconception from the very beginning of the novel when the third sister remarks that pride must be distinguished from vanity, the former having to do with our own self-regard, the latter with “what we would have others think of us.” The observation is not entirely off the mark when it comes to Darcy, particularly as the novel proceeds and it seems that he has very little vanity at all.
But Austen returns several times to the various ways in which pride can be understood. Collins, for example, is said to be “a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.” Elizabeth, even in her early distaste for Darcy, admits that he is probably “too proud to be dishonest.” (Had she listened to herself, she would have been on to Wickham much earlier.) And even in his response, Wickham allows that Darcy’s pride often approaches virtue, having led him to generosity and filial affection. When Elizabeth appears to have finally rebuffed him for all time, Darcy himself turns the matter on its head by saying that the faults she has discerned in him “might have been overlooked had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design.” Ah! The burden of pride now begins to shift to Elizabeth and the reader can also reevaluate Darcy’s motives as “scruples.”
The novel has begun its pivot and within pages Elizabeth laments that she mistakenly “prided” herself on her discernment, that in reality she had “gratified [her] vanity,” and confesses that until this moment “I never knew myself.” And then, when Elizabeth learns 50 pages later that Darcy has privately done her family a deed of the utmost kindness, Austen completes the turn altogether: Elizabeth becomes proud of him.
Within this context, I must now return to the implication of the novel’s first line which doesn’t concern love, but marriage. Marriages can be good or bad, as the novel illustrates. For Elizabeth’s absurd sister (I kept imagining Sarah Ferguson) her eventual marriage to Wickham will be unrecognizable. With Jane and Bingley, “they had for basis the excellent understanding and super-excellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity or feeling and taste between her and himself.” And as for Elizabeth and Darcy, their perfect union is described by Austen herself, and not by Hillary Clinton:
His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both: by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.
A while back, my brother asked what I was reading. "A French novel." "Who wrote it?" "Balzac." A pause. "In The Music Man they mention Balzac. They seemed to think there was something wrong or funny about him. Why is that?"
Cousin Bette no doubt answers that question as well as any of Balzac's scores of other novels.* Indeed, Balzac refers to this particular novel as a "history of morals" and thus sets himself up as one who is entirely conversant with his topic — which he periodically demonstrates, using confidential observations to the reader. Here is an instance in which he helpfully "reminds" us that
"[c]omplicity in vice is the true Holy-Alliance, in Paris. Worldly interests always end by breaking asunder; vicious people always understand each other."
In fact, Cousin Bette opens with an outrageous scene in which M. Crevel — a former merchant of perfume now become vastly wealthy through his own greed — propositions the baroness Adeline Hulot, the mother of his daughter-in-law.
It would be pointless to recite the complex history which preceded this opening scene or even the environment in which the act will be seen as plausible. The book is a series of such incidents, as characters, family relationships, debts, and liaisons are added, one upon the next. I confess that it took me entirely too long to realize that this was in fact a comic novel in the French idiom: told more seriously than Dickens, who loved his characters more, and with an irony that never degenerates into sarcasm**.
Balzac is utterly indifferent to character growth but he is fascinated by jealousy and greed — and the deceptions that go with them. He tells his story in the years of Louis-Philippe, mostly in the early to mid-1840s. Young men from throughout France who as soldiers had survived Napoleon's wars and the later revolutions are now well into middle age. The less principled among them who have remained in Paris notwithstanding their provincial origins and have succeeded in business or public service by craft, will have also picked up a title or two on the way up†. They and their nouveau riche families‡ thrive (and fail) on the brittle foundations of self-interest, easy credit, and fortune's whims.
One of these is the aging, but still handsome Baron Hector Hulot d'Ervy who after many years has achieved a notable public status as a councilor of state — mainly under the sponsorship of his genuinely talented elder brother, a war hero. But the Hulot family is living beyond its means. The adult son, Valentin (married to Crevel's daughter) is an up and coming lawyer with prospects, but it appears that he too has over-extended himself and counts heavily on his father-in-law for capital as needed. The Hulot daughter Hortense should be bait for a wealthy man of her younger set, but so far nothing has worked out. As for the baron, he is a philanderer whose priapic adventures are the main source of his poverty and drive most of the plot.
With the exception of baroness Adeline — who has little to do except behave like an implausible saint in the face of the wreckage that the baron brings to his family —none of the other characters in Cousin Bette is particularly admirable. Indeed, the ones who are most reliable are the courtesans. Paris produces these women
"because of the incessant concubinage of luxury and poverty, of vice and virtue, of repressed desire and recurring temptation which makes that city the legitimate heir of Ninevah and Babylon and imperial Rome."
Like the nouveau riche shopkeepers who over the years have essentially bought their way into the new French society, these girls have also begun with nothing. Whether or not they are from the provinces or just the streets of Paris, if they are pretty enough and ambitious enough, starting at a shamefully early age, they can contrive in the course of a career to enlist serial sponsors of such wealth that by the time they have come to their mature years, their own voluptuous salons are virtually regal.
So what is to be said of the "thin, meagre old maid," Cousin Bette, the title character? She is an Alsatian who uses the surname "Fischer" in place of the more ethnic Vischer — as do what remains of the rest of her Alsatian family. By marriage, however, this "peasant of the Vosges" has also become a poor relation of the Hulot family because her father was Adeline's uncle. In other words, the baron's wife had also begun life as a poor peasant girl whose beauty, rectitude, and lucky marriage to Hulot (at that time a Napoleonic provisioner) brought her to Paris at the time of the restoration. Bette — more than once Balzac calls her "a Corsican" — has always hated and envied her.
And this is essentially the plot, as compounded by Bette's long term intention — which she candidly shares with the family— of eventually marrying the pusillanimous baron's respectable, wealthy, clueless (and totally deaf) older brother, plus her uncanny ability to keep her hatred of the Hulot family secret from them. In her own shrewd way, Bette has played her part to perfection:
"[S]he laughed with the young people, with whom she put herself in sympathy by a sort of wheedling manner which always attracts them, she divined and espoused their wishes, she made herself their interpreter, she seemed to them to be a safe confidante, for she had not the right to scold them. Her unvarying discretion [also] won her the confidence of those of mature years . . . . As a general rule, confidences are made below rather than above. One employs one's inferiors much more frequently than one's superiors in secret affairs; they become the accomplices of our innermost thoughts . . . . Richelieu looked upon himself as a made man when he acquired the right to be present at the council."
Otherwise, it would be pointless to rehearse the countless situational scenes of intrigue and infidelity of Cousin Bette. Eventually as I ploughed on the only question was how the author would end this wry story of hedonism in which every character is a prisoner of his or her flaws. The answer should have been obvious. They all die unfulfilled.
FOOTNOTES
*I have about 78 others on the shelf — unread — to prove this supposition wrong.
**Furthermore, there is probably plenty of parody that went over my head. I think I was supposed to understand an outrageously expensive dinner attended by Paris's wealthiest and titled men with their courtesans as mimicking The Symposium.
†There are a couple of passing references to a "Count Rastignac," who would be the young upstart from Pere Goriot. I also have no doubt that there are other such references from those as yet unread novels I mentioned.
‡In the France of this time, Balzac says, there are no more great families. "Everything bears the stamp of personal character. The fortune of the wisest is ephemeral."
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot –
I think it may have been the same summer in college that I read both The Red and the Black (q.v.) and Pere Goriot. Having now recently gone back to each of them, I find I remain bemused about the French attitude toward love, as they see it, and how foreign it still seems to me.
The French are all so sophisticated, of course. But the notion of love as being just another French adventure of one-upsmanship is as distasteful to me as it would have been to Jane Austen. Eugene Rastignac, for example, although initially portrayed as a naive law student from the provinces, is French to the core. This is not exactly Balzac’s point, however, since he goes to some pains to emphasize how Paris is the “country within a country” with its own peculiar mores and expectations.
Love in Paris is a thing distinct and apart; for in Paris neither men nor women are the dupes of commonplaces by which people seek to throw a veil over their motives . . . . Love, for [the Parisian woman], is above all things, and by its very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, thriftless charlatan. . . . You must have youth and wealth and rank; nay, you must, if possible, have more than these, for the more incense you bring with you to burn at the shrine of the god, the more favorably will he regard the worshipper. Love is a religion, and his cult must in the nature of things be more costly than those of all other deities; Love stays for a moment, and then passes on. Like a wanton boy, his course may be traced by the ravages that he has made. The wealth of feeling and imagination is the poetry of the garret; how should love exist there without that wealth?
Balzac assures us that this is a “true” story. Rastignac is eager to move in the highest society and make love to the most dazzling of its women, and, like the other characters, is completely indifferent to whether such people might already have been bound by a marriage. The novel, set in 1819, has him lodging in an unfashionable Parisian boarding house in a little known quarter of the city, populated with a variety of city-types, including the curious “old Goriot” on the top floor.
Goriot, we are told, is a retired merchant. Perhaps his retirement fund is dwindling, because in the six years that he has lived in Mme Vauquer’s house, he has moved to more and more modest quarters and has begun selling his possessions. He dines regularly at the communal table, but has little to say for himself and is an object of both curiosity and satire among the others by reason of nocturnal visits from two stylish young women whom he describes as his daughters.
Rastinac, meantime, is on the make. A relative – Mme de Beauseant – has procured for him an invitation to a fashionable salon where he has met and become entranced by Vicomtesse de Anastasie de Restand to whose home he impulsively takes himself on virtually no invitation. Here, he encounters not only the Victontesse’s husband (of whose existence he had no doubt) but also her obnoxious lover, Maxime de Trailles, whose gambling debts will later move the plot. Second, Eugene innocently but catastrophically mentions his acquaintance with Pere Goriot, which produces a perplexingly cold reaction in his hostess. This, we learn, was because Anastasie actually is Goriot’s daughter and that she is embarrassed about him. Goriot, it seems, had been a war profiteer in the time of the Directory and had bestowed his wealth on both of his daughters as a dowry for their fabulous marriages. The French being what they are (though Balzac seems to think this is the way of all flesh), the daughters and their husbands have now found Goriot to be gauche and unnecessary.
In short order, Rastignac makes the acquaintance of Goriot’s second, younger daughter [1], Dauphine de Nucingen, and seems to enjoy more success, both with her and also in cracking the social circles which are his desire. Furthermore, he innocently tells his co-lodger, Goriot, about the new liaison and gets nothing but encouragement. Meantime, the other lodgers at Rastignac’s boarding house also become significant, none more so than M. Vautrin. This insinuating but seemingly sophisticated rascal is obviously a man of the world – or some world. Somewhat abruptly, he takes Rastignac aside, and essentially informs him that he will also sponsor the young man’s success. Vautrin’s objectives, however, are far more intricate than Goriot’s simple efforts to ensure that his daughter Daupnine has a more reliable lover than her husband. Vautrin says that Rastignac should also make love to the young, repressed Mlle Victorine Taillefer, another lodger in this house of not-so-wealthy residents. Victorine, he reveals, is likely to be quite a rich heiress if things fall out as Vautrin intends – and that intention we and Rastignac soon learn includes the “accidental” death of her older brother who would otherwise get the estate when Victorine’s cruel father dies.
If this is not enough plot, it then must be added that we eventually learn that Vautrin is really an escaped convict, with both another agenda altogether and a dashing alias of “Trompe la Mort,” and that he is being pursued by the police who have enlisted the covert assistance of two other lodgers, M. Poiret, a retired civil servant, and Mlle Michonneau an elderly spinster. Vautrin having unfortunately been taken off stage with his arrest (I say “unfortunately” because, as ever, the devil always gets the good lines), the attention shifts back to Goriot and his sacrifices for the happiness of his daughters. This is a bit much, since Balzac without apparent irony refers to the old man as a “Christ of paternity” against whose apparent perfect love for his daughters must be measured Rastignac’s more human doubts about what he is doing with his own life. And then we must also contend with Mme de Beauseant’s own impending catastrophe vis-a-vis her quondam lover, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, which will force her to leave Paris forever.
Well, all of it except Goriot’s cartoonish love for his daughters is too cynical for words. When I finished the novel the first time, I was too young for the ending in which Rastignac, retaining some sense of French honor, spent his last cent to bury Goriot and then threw his glove down to Paris and “went to dine with Mme de Nucigen.” Today, I am not even certain I wish to understand it. [2]
ENDNOTES
1. But not younger than he. Both daughters would appear to be 9-12 years older than the hero. How French.
2. At this writing, I have read nothing else by Balzac. In The Razor’s Edge, I learn that Eugene continues to appear in his books.
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet --
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein –
Saul Bellow’s metier is fiction, not journalism or history. His memoir of Allan Bloom is therefore put forth as fiction, but it has a strange feeling to it, as though the author could never really get comfortable with the project. (It also has an unedited, repetitive quality to the anecdotes, some of which, however, are deliberately repeated.) Indeed, the entire work, until the very end, seems less a fiction than a narrative of “what happened” with no more than name changes and approximate quotes.
I would not say that this leaves me bitterly disappointed, because not every life is a novel -- or at least Bellow is not the one to render every life in that form. But it is a bit puzzling, since Bloom in real life offered at least some of the qualities that I recall Bellow using to good effect in his efforts: an intelligent Jewish protagonist who has emerged into a progressive American world from inauspicious beginnings. It seems to me that the reason that the effort fails in Ravelstein is that Bloom was not merely intelligent, but brilliant, not neurotic but self-confident, not struggling for something better, but in sole possession of the best. His flaws, which would be cavernous in other men, were virtually beside the point in a man like him. Hence the conflict which informs good fiction is consequently almost wholly absent from Ravelstein. The protagonist grapples with nothing of significance, even death. If there is conflict, it is because he creates it for others. And he creates it on the highest plane -- Plato’s level – one frankly admitted by Bellow to be beyond his grasp.
In the novel, Abe Ravelstein, like Bloom in real life, is a professor of political philosophy who has astoundingly hit the jackpot with the publication of a scathing but highly refined critique of American education which Bellow calls “spirited, intelligent and warlike.” (The book is not named in the novel; Bloom’s bombshell was The Closing of the American Mind[1].) The novel opens in Paris where the newly-rich Ravelstein has set himself up in the Crillion, with Bellow (called “Chick”) in a nearby suite. Part two of the novel is set in Chicago where Ravelstein sickens and dies of complications from AIDS. Part three, the best part, is an account of the narrator’s own close brush with death some years later and his love for and dependence on his young wife (Ravelstein’s former student) who essentially saves him. The experience is both his epiphany and the catalyst for his finally writing Ravelstein’s story.
From part three, I suppose, we can look back with greater understanding on Abe Ravelstein as we have seen him in the earlier two segments. As I have said, this barely works on the level of a novel, at least the sort of novels I am fond of, and cannot really work as a memoir since it is portrayed as fiction. Now since I was only Bloom’s quondam student over about six years near the beginning of his career, I am hardly as well situated as Bellow to make a dispassionate appraisal of who he was. Writing of a different character in Ravelstein, Chick says,
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely human-creature.
This is a perfectly sensible observation, but it strikes me as uncomfortably close to the problem that memoirist Bellow doesn’t entirely solve with Ravelstein-Bloom. But of course the novelist’s mission goes beyond this and I do not intend to overlook the fact that Bellow’s effort is to make a deadly serious point by means of a hero who is really quite funny. Elsewhere I have remarked that it was Bloom who pointed out to me that comedy is deeper than tragedy precisely because to laugh at something you must know something. Bellow obviously grasps this point.
But to return to the biography riddle, Bellow’s struggle with it is actually an explicit element of the book. At Ravelstein’s urging, Chick had previously written a biography of John Maynard Keynes; it is to be preparation for the biography of Ravelstein himself (the latter to be “on a bigger scale”). So Ravelstein is not a novel, not a biography; it is a biography within a novel -- and when we encounter such Nabokovian layers, let’s give them their due. In any event Chick is emphatic that the biography is not to deal with the man’s ideas, which as I see it makes the whole project dubious. It’s clear to me that because Bellow felt overmatched in dealing comprehensively with Bloom’s ideas (nothing to be ashamed of, really), his Chick was equally at a loss with Ravelstein’s. Furthermore, Bellow was a generation older than Bloom and not emotionally able to be a disciple, which is the way Bloom’s students inevitably see themselves. And Chick dismisses any effort to write a “psychobiography” in favor of “piecemeal” anecdotes.
So is the book serious at all? I think that it is, although no more serious than Bellow ever gets. The seriousness dwells on the risks of transcendence, which is pictured pleasantly enough throughout the book and then smashed in the end with an unexpected murder. For there is no understanding this book without understanding its view of death and no understanding Abe Ravelstein without understanding that he is a Jew. They are related, for it is perilous to be a Jew. This will always be Bellow’s subject matter, but for me, to whose callowness and Puritanical Catholicism Bloom seemed to give approval (almost wistfully, it seemed to me), it is an insight. Chick quotes Keynes’s report of an incident in which Lloyd George’s anti-Semitism got the best of him in a vital post-war conference. A Jewish minister from France had opposed a desperate German request to make food purchases that might interfere with its reparation payments to France. “Lloyd George had always hated and despised him. And now he saw in a twinkling that he could kill him.” He thereupon did a grotesque Shylockian parody to the man’s face to the apparent amusement of the others present. Elsewhere, Chick says, “As a Jew, you are also an American, but somehow also not.” And Ravelstein himself observes that “I’m no mere Jew but, even worse, an American one -- all the more dangerous to civilization as [the French] see it.”
As for death, Ravelstein dismisses the fear of it as bourgeois[2] and Chick acknowledges that it is little more than the end to reality. Then follows this almost Pauline conundrum:
In children this impression – real reality – is tolerated by adults. Up to a certain age nothing can be done about it. . . . But Ravelstein might have argued that there was a danger of self-indulgence in it. Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics. . . . . This is one of the traps that a liberal society sets for us – it keeps us childish. Abe would probably have said, ‘It’s up to you to make a choice. Either you continue to see as a child, or else.’
What did I learn about Abe Ravelstein that I didn’t know about Bloom? He “took no stock in kindness.” He had a “shadow government” of contacts (former students) in Washington and the media, for example. He was a willing prisoner of ungoverned appetites not only for immediate gratification (e.g. grocery store candy) but also for unnecessary tokens of the high culture (cut glass, Cuban cigars, etc., etc.). He had been a house guest of Mrs. Thatcher’s. He acquired a live-in houseboy. But as Chick remarks of Ravelstein, these are just “his eccentricities or foibles, his lavish, screwy purchases, his furnishings, his vanities,” etc. The other side of this is that Bellow has nicely identified and apprised Bloom’s view of what he always called “eros.” Eros and the partnerships it forms were often the subject of Bloom’s asides in class. Bellow also appears to have heard Bloom on the subject.
He rated longing very highly, Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn’t Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. . . . [G]eneration after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again. . . . To be human was to be severed, mutilated. Man is incomplete. . . . The work of humankind in its severed state is to seek the missing half. And after so many generations your true counterpart is simply not to be found. Eros is a compensation granted by Zeus . . . . The sexual embrace gives temporary self-forgetting but the painful knowledge of mutilation is permanent.
This is exactly on target. And what a message: That love is a permanent mutilation. This is true, and it is not solace.
1. The narrator tells us that its working title was “Souls Without Longing.”
2. Bloom himself comments on death and health in Love and Friendship:
[P]leasure is wild and frequently destructive. . . . [M]edicine wants to reduce man back to the nonhuman science of bodies. . . . The doctor represents man’s self-preservative instinct, which is essentially unerotic and inimical to wild, death-defying Eros. . . . [D]eath is inevitable and . . . all kinds of things, like lightening, are beyond [the doctor’s] power to predict or help men escape. . . . [Men] have to recognize that their individual existences are of little concern to nature.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron –
The first 20 or so pages of this 14th century fiction is the author’s first-hand factual description of the effects of the plague on Florence. It not only sets the scene for the stories that follow, but also appears on its own to be an entirely credible account of how widespread and unexpected death takes an odd toll on human behavior. The descriptions are not unfamiliar and in fact I would not be surprised that the modern accounts which I have read of the plague in this period were derived from Boccaccio’s observations.
But this is simply by way of introduction, for the work itself is not a history but something like the Canterbury Tales (which I believe drew upon it). Ten young people, refugees from the plague, pass 10 days diverting themselves by telling tales (hence the title). Their asylum is positively Arcadian, giving emphasis to the classic themes that develop as the book progresses. But first the author is set on a mission of destruction, for much of The Decameron is a merry attack on hypocritical Medievalism.
Setting the cynical tone is the very first story, that of a wicked man who contrives on his deathbed to be recalled as virtuous and ultimately is remembered as a saint. In fact, many of the stories depend on the same ironic twist for their point, and as the tales are frequently quite brief, the effect is often what you might get if Aesop’s Fables had been written by Voltaire. But I do not intend to leave the impression that The Dacameron is the origin of deMaupassant or Bret Harte, much less the ironies and emotions of the modern short story. Its overall value and intention is in the collection as a whole. As the days go on, we are introduced to local Florentines, many of whom, in the Dantean style, were no doubt real people (I only recognized Giotto), and some of whom, such as the clown Calandrino, are recurring figures.
But notwithstanding deep skepticism about a spiritual life (endless cuckoldry, insouciant treachery, cruel practical jokes, venal and lustful friars, etc.), The Decameron has the same boisterous vitality, in the Italian idiom, as The Canterbury Tales. Along the way I was pleased to discover that I recognized the origin of both “Cymbeline” and “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Moreover, as I have suggested, the book concludes with two or three extended chivalric Renaissance stories (one of them not accidentally set in pre-Christian times) in praise of honor and classic virtue. And then there is the Epilogue, written in the sort of guardedly cryptic style that Machiavelli, Hobbes and others were later to use.
What other books, what other words, what other letters, are more sacred, more reputable, more worthy of reverence, than those of the Holy Scriptures? And yet there have been many who, by perversely construing them, have led themselves and others to perdition. All things have their own special purpose, but when they are wrongly used a great deal of harm may result, and the same applies to my stories.
So my tentative general conclusion is that Boccaccio, only a generation or so after Dante, had shrugged off virtually all of the inspiration that made the poet great and was contentedly looking back to a mythical time of alternate nobility uncomplicated by post mortem rewards and punishment. I cannot say that my conclusions are final. The Decameron is quite long. I read a translation. I know nothing about Florence.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh –
An average character grapling earnestly with an average problem can be a object of pathos or humor depending on the mood of the author. It is “the way of all flesh”: everyone struggles with the same problems, though each has his own idiom.
This is commonplace treacle in most hands and yet comedians make a career of the knowledge – and writers, who have more wisdom in their wit, make art. When I began this book, therefore, knowing nothing more than the ominous title, I actually expected high Victorian melodrama. Well, all I can say is that it would be, in more sober hands. For that matter, I will even concede that Butler’s approach is sober, or seems to be, though perhaps “British” is a better way of putting it. What he does in telling his apparently autobiographical tale of the life of a clergyman’s son is to keep a straight face in delivering some hilariously mordant asides, some of them not always to the point, but all of them delicious in their observation. Indeed – and this is not a complaint – sometimes the asides bid fair to consume the story line altogether. For that matter, there are even asides to the asides. (My favorite digression – reminding me, I confess of George Carlin – is Ernest, the hero’s, ruminations on why the scriptures do not enjoin tobacco and whether St. Paul would have smoked cigarettes if he had known of them.)
The structure of the novel is also worth some note. Butler is not the apparent author. The story is actually told by a narrator, Ernest’s godfather, who has a tendency to become invisible for long stretches in the beginning of the book. Although from the outset we realize that this fellow is personally acquainted with the characters, it is not until about a quarter of the way into the book that we even learn his name, Overton, and that he is a playwright. By the final quarter of the book, he is an active character in the plot.
Maybe this is beside the point, but I have always been fascinated about the way different authors tell their stories. Butler uses several twists which I have not seen elsewhere. For example, much of the plot involves a large trust of money which the hero is to inherit in his 28th year. For Jane Austen, this would provide all the motivation necessary for the characters in 3 books; but the novelty here is that although the readers know of the trust throughout the novel, none of the characters except Overton does until the end. So not only does Butler take away one of Austen’s most reliable tools, he also eliminates the possibility of an unforeseen Dickensian deus ex machina to resolve the plot. Furthermore, the fictional Overton reveals periodically that he has actually consulted the fictional Ernest later in his life for guidance on the writing of certain details that the author is a bit unsure of, and so we have a story told in long sections by an omniscient author, who evolves into a percipient witness, who occasionally becomes the vehicle for a first-hand account by the hero. Finally, in the closing chapter, Overton reveals that he is writing it in 1882, a gap of 15 years after the events he has just finished relating. (The novel was published in 1903.) This is all very neatly accomplished and almost – but not quite – as quirky as Ford Maddox Ford’s triumphantly queer narrative in The Good Soldier.
There is another feature to the plot that I want to mention. Early in the story, young Ernest performs a gallant act for a pretty servant girl who has been expelled from his father’s household. Several years later they encounter each other by chance, fall in love, marry, and have children. It would be a conventional happy ending but for the fact that this happens in the middle of the tale. What then develops is that the girl, a pretty Victorian beauty, turns out to be no better than her dubious background always suggested; she falls into drink, petty theft, and degradation. For Dickens this might be the source of one of his pre-history mysteries. For Butler it is just an episode to relate before moving on.
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