The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Motivational People

What is the relationship between literature and life? Or for that matter between spirit and matter? Is the answer a critical philosophical one or a doctrinal religious one? And do these questions and answers intersect with what most of us would call reality? If you’re more or less permanently high on coca leaves like the protagonist of The MacGuffin, both the questions and the answers as well as reality get a bit fuzzy, producing a kind of anti-Freudian psychology which doesn’t so much provide a theory of the case as describe the complexity of the situation.

The MacGuffin is Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the motivating force of a story: The non-existent George Kaplan for whom Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken in North by Northwest, the eponymous Maltese Falcon, and Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart’s) vertigo in the film of the same name. Although central to the narrative plot, the MacGuffin becomes subordinate to character and action in the story, a hidden force located outside the lives of those touched by it.

The MacGuffin, however, is something more than a literary device. In Elkin’s construction it offers a kind of worldview which is fundamentally opposed to that of the modern world, particularly the world of psychoanalysis. Unlike the Freudian id, the MacGuffin doesn’t arise from within, it arrives from elsewhere like a Lutheran vocation.

The MacGuffin has a life of its own that may come and go and mutate without permission or license. It can even become an interlocutor with whom to consult and negotiate if we take it seriously enough. In short we, as human beings, are its partner rather than its Freudian slave. It is a friendly force, there for us to make sense of our lives but it doesn’t demand or force action on its own behalf. And it of course collides frequently with other MacGuffins.

So, Bob Druff, City Commissioner of Streets in a medium sized, undistinguished American city, husband of the physically flawed but loyal Rose Helen, and father to the autistic but loving 30 year old, Mikey, sets forth on his MacGuffin-led adventures. Channelling both Homer’s Ulysses and Homer Simpson, Druff investigates the hit and run death of his son’s purported girl-friend, the apparent MacGuffin of the piece.

But as Elkin reminds us frequently: “life goes on, even during the chase scenes.” So the MacGuffin has to contend with all sorts of memories, neuroses, and physical failings. The most important contribution of the MacGuffin is to get Druff to stop thinking about himself, or at least to stop thinking about the world in terms of himself. Since “You learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin”, Druff learns, but not about some sort of psycho-analytical core of himself; rather he learns how he fits in the scheme of things – family, history, career. There is no fixed point to ‘himself’ because there is no stable scheme in which he, or anyone else lives.

Elkin concludes on a note that is both theological and psychological:

"If MacGuffin was the principle of structure to Druff, of pattern, of shading, and all the latent architecture of the old man’s life, what was Druff to MacGuffin? Why, raw material like pitch, like tar, like clay or sand or silica, like gravel and the trace elements of all the asphalts."

Not a bad alternative starting point really to an alternative theology and psychology.

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The Living End by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Miracle Was My Metier

Watching the new Sherlock Holmes series on the BBC last night, I was intrigued by the script's repetition of the Americanism "It is what it is" as a designation of inevitability and fatefulness. C.S. Lewis had used the phrase in his 1943 Mere Christianity, possibly for the first time. But its origin is much more ancient. It is one of the many possible translations of one of the biblical identifiers of God. Hebrew is inherently metaphorical and has only limited ways to express past, present and future tenses. Yahweh, ehyeh asher ehyeh in Hebrew, one of the principle biblical names of God, can alternatively be translated as "I am Who I am," "I will be What I will be," "He is What he is,"or indeed, at a stretch, "It is What It is."

"It is what it is" could well be the catch-phrase for Stanley Elkin's The Living End. Its protagonist is a divine being who as inexplicable as the phrase implies. From the point of view of the world this unpredictable being has created, the theme could be "No good deed goes unpunished". Or less laconically but more philosophically, "A good man in an evil world is a misfit and deserves some form of punishment." Elkin's principle human subject, Ellerbee, is just such a man. And Elkin's God has few scruples about making his life and everyone else's not only a misery but also a complete waste of time.

Despite being condemned to the hell of Hell, "where even the disciplined reflexes of martyrs and stylites twitched like thrown dice", Ellerbee, a man of remarkable charity while alive, can't stop trying to make even the lives of the damned better. He digs channels to drain vomit and puss. He tries to organise community.

Until he discovers that it is precisely the need to socialise, to make contact with those in similar agony by projecting their own images into others that is the motive force, the engine, of Hell. Heaven on the other hand is filled with all manner of "high-echelon" celebrities, the Elect. A reversal that's a bit much to digest, even for a saint.

Ellerbee, like the biblical Job, can only pray in a blasphemous litany to the "Lord God of Ambush and Unconditional Surrender...Power Play God of Judo Leverage, Grand Guignol, Martial Artist...Browbeater...Bouncer Being, Boss of Bullies... Old Terrorist, God the Father, God the Godfather." Accurate names, if not particularly praise-worthy.

More insistent than the biblical Job, Ellerbee demands an explanation even after an attempt by God at intimidation. Ellerbee is informed that, although he did indeed act decently and humanely throughout his life, he technically had broken many of the commandments - keeping his shop open on the Sabbath, blasphemous usage of the divine name, and participation in various other suspect activities like dancing, driving automobiles, and smoking cigarettes.

Although more than a bit burlesqued, the God that Ellerbee confronts is no more insane than that described in the Bible, even if He is a bit more inventive. Turns out there are worse places than Hell, as Ellerbee's murderer, and lately pal in the nether regions, Ladlehaus, finds out when he sasses the Almighty. A place not of pain but of utter aloneness, one's earthly grave, from which one can plead with a completely unresponsive living world for succour.

Except eventually there is a response: from a sadistic paedophile, Quiz, who takes acute pleasure in feeding Ladlehaus misinformation about what's happening in the world. Quiz also schools his young victims in how to be interlocutors with the interred Ladlehaus, but even this concession is withdrawn by the Almighty for no apparent reason.

Ladlehaus's experience of this Hell beyond Hell is one of uncertainty, half-heard conversations, and constantly dashed hopes - more or less life without the worst parts. Until, provoking God to precipitous lethal action, he causes Quiz's death. Not bad for a twice-damned wraith.

Quiz, the paedophile, is outraged, "I make no charges, I've got no proof, but a thing like that, all that wrath, those terrible swift sword arrangements, that's the M.O. Of God Himself! ...I was Pearl Harbor'd ...December Seventh'd by the Lord." Surprisingly, this rage surprises even God. First He is surprised that he is surprised; then he is surprised that upon reflection, He thinks he might have over-reacted in killing Quiz.

God then goes into conference with Christ, His Son, to thrash out, apparently for the first time, some old, unresolved issues - like the Father's throwing the Son under the bus in Jerusalem. Christ clearly has a smouldering grudge, but not against humanity. "What did those poor bastards ever do to me?", he says. It's Pa he's got the grudge against.

Christ quickly gets to the point he's been brooding on for eternity. In a tone of "rage cornered" he says: "Absolve Me, shrive Me, wipe My slate, Put me on your tab, pick up My check. Carry Me. Forgive Us Our debts as We forgive Our debtors, Luv." Pa, however, remains implacable.

But lo and behold the juice of Hell gets turned down, perhaps even off. Behind the scenes, possibly, the woman with the "fruity womb", Jesus's virginal mother living in a sort of heavenly house arrest, has been inserting some rationality and common sense into the divine thought processes. Whatever the motivation God turns down the heat.

Respite gives those in the nether world time to consider their situation. The meaning of death for example, about which some can wax philosophical: "Death made no sense but it meant something." And the meaning of death? "The meaning of death is how long it takes."

This and other secrets, like the name of Kennedy's assassin as well as the mysteries of suffering and divine retribution, are revealed by an increasingly (and suspiciously) avuncular God. And why exactly did God engage in a creation in the first place given the all-round misery it has caused? God finally comes clean: "Because it makes a better story is why."

With that revelation, the dead of all ages begin to rise from the ground and the depths. "Like elopers they left their burials." But there is no general joy and jubilation. There are complaints. The world is cold after the fires of Hell, amputees and organ donors are left at a disadvantage, the stench is overwhelming.

But no matter. God assembles everyone and everything for a universal pow-wow. His final announcement is explicitly theatrical. "I never found my audience.", He repeats over and over to Christ, the angels, Mary (now divinely expecting once again) and the assembled masses. And then he inexplicably and summarily... extinguishes it all. He annihilates everything that exists. Including Himself.

Omnipotence is tiring after all. And it is what it is: A story. And stories must indeed have an audience.

So perhaps there is/was/will be (to be a bit Hebraic) such a God and we are but his thoughts, as some philosophers have surmised. And perhaps such a God can learn, that is, become self-reflectively conscious of his own thoughts, as he appears to do in the Bible. Is that really such a good thing? His very consciousness of Himself and the somewhat random nature of His thoughts might just be enough to provoke an Elkin-like implosion. The last unfortunate miracle.

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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Olga From the Volga

You know, the one where he takes the Russian peasants from Dostoevsky and transplants them to Mississippi. Talk about dysfunctional family-life!

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Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Adolescent Aesthetics

The temptation to compare Philip Roth and Marcel Proust is one I can’t resist. Both Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint seem to me inverted interpretations of Proust’s Within the Budding Grove. Using the same technique of relentless interior monologue, all are coming of age novels featuring sex, taste of one kind or another, and social class set against a background of contemporary manners and Jewish assimilation.

All three books assay the problems of male adolescence - hormones, separation from family, impending career - and their possible solutions. But whereas Roth views these problems as arising from perceived cultural deprivation, Proust shows how inadequacies emerge equally among the privileged in much the same way. And while Roth treats the evolution from child to adult in terms of neurosis to be overcome, Proust describes milestones in psychological and social realisation that are necessary steps to becoming a person.

Proust would likely agree with Roth’s take on adolescence: “A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” Marcel’s warring self is in essence not much different from Portnoy’s, although a tad more refined, “…our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal..” says Marcel, inverting St. Paul's observations about vice.

But the aims of each author/protagonist differ fundamentally. Roth’s ambition through Portnoy is “to raise obscenity to the level of a subject.” Marcel’s goal is to experience romantic love in which he “penetrates the soul of another.” Sexual intimacy for the latter is an expected consequence of this spiritual union but not its objective, perhaps because of his access even as a young teenager to the brothels of Paris which he found unsatisfying.

As the son of a senior government official, Marcel is exposed to ministers of state, the nobility and other VIP’s from infancy. What he learns without knowing what he is learning is protocol, how to act formally in social situations: What to say and not to say, how to stand, who to quote, the techniques of assessing relative social standing, and distinguishing the outre from the avant garde.

Roth’s characters come from the antithesis of Paris, namely Newark, New Jersey. They too learn skills, those that are equally necessary to survive in a dominant culture which is not their own and in a political environment which may be just as brutal as that of Paris but far less gentile. Nevertheless the ‘manners’ each acquires because of his background are equally problematic for all.

For the Newark boys, their lower class immigrant Jewish roots impede assimilation into middle class American society; for Marcel, his learned reserve and internalised emotional calculation inhibit his naturalness and makes him shy in the company of the relatively free-wheeling middle classes. For all, their backgrounds get in the way of relations with women, the former with Gentile girls, the latter with modern females unimpressed by ‘breeding’. All persistently pursue the same ‘types’ with predictable, disappointing results.

What Roth seems to lack almost totally, however, and which Proust emphasises, even in his stylised accounts of sex and class, is the development of taste, the aesthetic sense which substitutes in Proust's work for religious belief. It is this sense of the beautiful that provides an increasingly important guide for Marcel’s actions.

Early in Within the Budding Grove, Marcel marks the centrality of the aesthetic even in relationships of love, “The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”

He then goes on to make love instrumental to the appreciation of beauty rather than vice versa: “…fully as much as retirement, ill health, or religious conversion, a protracted love-affair will substitute fresh visions for the old…” This aesthetic sense is the pivot around which all of Proust’s writing in this volume rotates. It is what makes the work a coherent whole. And it is the lack of an equivalent centre of gravity in Roth that makes his work somewhat unsatisfying in comparison.

Marcel is aware of himself in a way that the Newark boys can’t be without a sense of the aesthetic. In Jungian terms (and there can be little doubt that Proust is a natural if not a well-read Jungian), Marcel is an Objective Introvert, that is he is particularly sensitive to his environment and he tends to adapt himself to that environment rather than to try to change it. He comes to know this towards the end of the volume: “…contrary to what I had always asserted and believed, I was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others…[and] I feel it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives, while at the same time being unable to prevent myself pushing my own safety into the background.” That is, he learns; something that is not possible without an aesthetic standard of what constitutes learning.

But because Marcel has a developed aesthetic sense, he also has a solution to his, rather common, problem of objective introversion. He has another aspect to his personality which on its own also causes him additional and frequent trouble: he constantly projects himself onto other people. He believes that they are either like himself in terms of desires and likely responses, or that they conform to his primitively articulated ideal. This causes recurring disappointment - a famed actress is far less talented than he expects, church sculptures are less impressive than he had believed, a prospective friend turns out less approachable than he anticipates.

Marcel comes to know he does this and he begins to appreciate the consequences. But instead of trying to eliminate this tendency toward projection from his personality, something he recognises as impossible, he seeks to make it conscious as a sort of control on the other part of his personality, his natural introversion, “For beauty is a series of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short…” Projections are no longer neurotic (if they ever were), but a means to test the world, in an almost scientific way through hypotheses, to find out what is really there. This is a very clever psychological strategy that neither Freud nor Jung ever considered, a sort of pragmatic aesthetics which allows the parts of his psyche to function productively together. And it works.

Moreover, in the manner of St. Augustine, Marcel, recognises that aesthetically driven desire leads beyond itself, like a religious icon which points to a reality not yet occurring, “The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” It is this ‘something else’ which he first brings up in volume 1 and alludes to subtly throughout volume 2. Always just beyond our linguistic grasp, it is that which draws language forth. He goes even further and creates a quasi-religious ontology of that which lies beyond, “For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourselves there is a reality that conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.”

Therefore, Marcel’s/Proust’s aesthetic is, remarkably, both pragmatic and spiritual. Even more remarkably, it is also ethical. The advice of his painter friend Elstir is precise, “We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves.” Although Marcel’s aspiration is to become a writer, this advice is general. ‘Discovery’ implies that there is something new to be seen, heard, touched, painted, talked about, invented. He is able to come to several conclusions therefore, which are rather more insightful than anything in Roth.

Regarding which of a gang of girls to woo, for example, he puts all his newly acquired skills together to picture the future somewhat longer than the subsequent few hours:

“As in a nursery plantation where the flowers mature at different seasons, I had seen them, in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers, which my new friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering time.”

Innovative indeed for a man on the make.

The recognition and maturing of this aesthetic sense is the necessary next step from Marcel's insights in volume 1 about purposefulness, the capacity to choose appropriate purpose. The aesthetic criteria he is developing apply not only to appreciating beauty but to understanding what is important, that is, what is valuable. Value is not an economic category in Proust but an aesthetic one; therefore inseparable from taste. And it in taste that Marcel is more than a bit advanced over his New Jersey fellow-adolescents.

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In Parenthesis 
by 

David Jones, 

 

W.S. Merwin (Foreword by), 

 

T.S. Eliot (Introduction)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Aug 04, 2016  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: favourites, british, historical-fiction, philosophy-theology 

The Liturgical Transformation of War

David Jones was a visual artist who also wrote poetry. His most important poetic work, In Parenthesis, is a profound memorial of his experience of the Great War. Critics have read the message of In Parenthesisas both pro and anti-war, the former largely because of its apparent celebration of the armed man through the ages, the latter on account of the detailed depiction of the suffering and oppression of the common soldier. But it is more likely that In Parenthesis is not a commentary on the desirability or inevitability of war as it is Jones's effort to create a plausible theory of his experience, a theory which provides a judgement not on war but on God. T. S. Eliot captures this in his preface, "We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly inimical, hateful to us." Put another way, the poem is a theodicy, a reconciliation of the ways of God to man, a form not used with greater effect until the literature of the Holocaust, which it anticipates.

In Parenthesis was first published in 1937, almost 20 years after the events that it recounts. Although highly emotional in parts, this is not a work of the immediate or unmediated emotions of the trenches. And although its structure appears as a straightforward chronological history of Jones's life from his initial military training in 1915 to the Battle of the Somme in 1917, the underlying form is one of religious liturgy in which time is contained in an eternal timelessness. The liturgical pervades the work and creates a particular kind of theodicy, one which is merciless in its judgement about the imbecility of the created world but which is conducted from a stand of faith in its creator. This is what gives the work its ambivalent tone of irony and respect. It is also what makes the poem profound and not merely moving.

Jones converted to Catholicism in 1921. By his own judgement he was first attracted to Catholicism not for dogmatic or intellectual reasons but because he happened upon the celebration of the Mass one night while he was at the front. He experienced not just a place of calm within the chaos of war but a set of actions, a ritual, that had a reality of its own while being part of the other reality of filth, pain, and fear. Jones seems to allude to this event in an early part of In Parenthesis as a moment of revelatory import when a shell explodes without warning near Pvt. John Ball:

"...out of the vortex, rifling the air it came - bright brass-shod, Pandoran; with all air-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all bursting's out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through - all taking-out of vents- all barrier-breaking - all unmaking, Pernitric begetting - the dissolving and splitting of solid things. In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess tin and hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw."

This alternative reality became, after his conversion, a controlling aspect of his life. Jones joined the Ditchling Community, a Dominican-inspired fraternity initiated by the artist Eric Gill. The community combined artistic work with Catholic religious practice and Jones was known to abruptly leave whatever he was busy with to attend various daily offices and devotions. In the preface to his other major poem, The Anathemata published in 1952, Jones points out that the work is structured around the Catholic Mass. It would clearly be an overstatement to say that Jones was obsessed by liturgical ritual but not that this ritual provided something fundamental in his appreciation of the world.

Ritual is a constant theme throughout In Parenthesis. It is a ritual of military parade that opens the poem. The rituals of the common soldier in daily life, the rituals of entry into, survival within, and relationships shaped by the trenches are on every page. Rituals are what brings some sort of order amidst the chaotic environment of the front-line. They bring some sort of peace during the crisis of bombardment and death. They constitute a place of retreat and regeneration. During the move from camp to ship transport Jones's attitude toward ritual is made clear: "...the liturgy of their going-up assumed a primitive creativeness, an apostolic actuality, a correspondence with the object, a flexibility." The respect for tradition-driven action is explicit. It is creative. It is reliable because ancient. It is in some mysterious manner capable of eliminating the Kantian separation of subject and object. 

The expression is, unlike that of other great writers who reflect their religious background in their work - like Milton, Melville, Thoreau, or even Hopkins - Jones's concern is not with dogma, metaphysical explanations or biblical directives. It is a liturgical transformation of war. Hence its objectivity, it's detail, it's routineness even in crisis, one might even say its flatness. To learn that Cockney is the lingua franca in the ranks consisting of diverse, often mutually incomprehensible dialects is not just interesting, it is a reference to liturgical Latin as a binding force in the Catholicism of the period. We get almost nothing of feelings in the first six parts but rather are overwhelmed by behavioural specifics: how to walk, how to stand guard on a firing step, how to set the range precisely on ones rifle sight, how to clean the 63 parts of the Enfield rifle, how to treat NCO's and commissioned officers, how to submit creatively to direction, how to be around death. In short, how to live.

The structure of In Parenthesis is, although not explicitly stated, similar to that of Jones's other major work, Anathemata, namely the Tridentine Mass which begins with a procession before the altar. The procession is accompanied by the Asperges me, sprinkle me, during which the congregation is blessed with holy water, just as the soldiers of Company A are rained upon before their departure during part 1. Part 2 describes the initial period of deployment in France, a time of instruction in the practicalities of military life at the front. This corresponds to the Mass of the Catechumens, the first major part of the Tridentine Mass, which is also a period of instruction for the uninitiated. It is at the end of this part that Ball has his experience of the enemy shell, his baptism of fire, through which he, and the rest of the company, become different people. War has entered their souls. They have been baptised through fire, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, and are now ready to proceed.

Part 3 opens the Canon or essential portion of the Mass, the first act of which is the Offertory during which the objects that are to be given (back) to God are identified and presented at the altar. In the Mass, these objects are the unleavened bread and the wine. In the poem the objects in question are the men themselves, who are now part of the sacrificial community, "And you too are assimilated, you too are of this people." They are to be offered, not just to the Enemy but also to the trench rats: "You can hear his carrying parties rustle our corruptions through the night weeds - contest the choicest morsels in his tiny conduits, bead-eyed feast on us; by a rule of his nature, at the night-feast on the broken of us."

The central mystery of the Mass is the Consecration, the divinely authorised human action through which the eternal enters into time. Although dogmatic tradition since the early Middle Ages has emphasised the action of the priest in calling the Body of Christ into existence, a parallel tradition that the congregation simultaneously forms the Body of Christ through its liturgical solidarity is equally valid. Both traditions are reflected in the poem. "An eastward alignment of troubled, ashen faces" (facing the westward German trenches; but the traditional alignment of Catholic Churches is toward the East) awaits expectantly the Consecration. Rifles are cleaned with oil and water in emulation of the cleansing of the priest's hands in preparation for his consecratory act. Suddenly the act is done and an ontological change has occurred, "...up shrouding, unsheafing - and insubstantial barriers dissolve. This blind night-negative yields uncertain flux....The flux yields up a measurable body." 

At this point the Roman ritual calls for the Elevation of the consecrated bread and wine, its exhibition to the congregation. The equivalent poetic moment occurs in sequence, a call to attention, "Stand to, Stand to, Stand to arms." But it is also the congregation that is the object of (self) sacrifice, to itself, each on behalf of the other, "The hanged, the offerant: himself to himself on the tree...honouring this rare and indivisible New Light for us, This concertina'd Good News of these barbarians, them bastard square-heads." The imagery edges on the blasphemous: the gospel as barbed wire, those whom we sacrifice ourselves for, as well as to, namely the enemy.. These front-line soldiers are honoured as, "scape-beasts come to the waste-lands." Rations are distributed but this is not yet Communion. "You could eat out of their hands..." but the food is inedible: tepid tea, hairy cheese and sodden bread. Real Communion awaits.

It is at this point that Jones speaks directly to the reader, "You ought to ask: Why, what is this, what's the meaning of this..." The ambiguity is profound. What is the object of the question? This war? All war? The consecrated bread? The troops as sacrifice for each other? Or for the enemy? He makes no clarification but simply points out, "You live by faith alright in these parts." He then alludes to the prayer in the Mass that addresses the Body of Christ in all its forms, the Agnus Dei, sacrificial Lamb of God. The men have become little more than "bleating sheep [who know not] the market of her fleece."

Part 5 is the beginning of the act of Communion which then continues on in Part 6. During Communion first the priest then the congregation consume the consecrated bread and wine. They also enter into one another, paradoxically dying to themselves. This is not just mysterious, it is unnatural, " ...they've tampered with the natural law...We all want the Man hanged." Who is this Man? The Kaiser? The officer class? Mankind? Christ? Ourselves? 

It is at this point that the first company deaths occur, two dead, two missing on patrol, one German prisoner. One of the deaths is an officer hung up on the wire, the Communion of the priest perhaps before the congregation is served. Jones makes a further nod to the physicality of Communion emphasised by Catholic doctrine in his reference to the old Latin daily office said by priests and religious. The rubric specified that where possible these prayers should pronounced not just read contemplatively, "...to watch the lips move beneath the beaver's shade, where a canonical wise nests conserved in an old man's mumbling, the validity of material things, and the resurrection of this flesh."

Communion is intended to be catholic, that is universal. Hence "...all these types are catered for, but they must know exactly how to behave ...there's neither bond nor free in this outing, Greek nor Bulgarian." Once again Jones is concerned about action, correct action. The men then consume the gifts of food they have received from home. Seed cake becomes the substance of their shared life under the apocalyptic din of an artillery barrage. This is simultaneously a trivial and solemn moment, "...how is a man to know the habits of his God, whether he smiles suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of his people he is jealous of. You sit with circumspection and you rise with care." At this point the litany of names of those about to go over the top is parallel to the brief litany of the saints in the Leonine prayers (now suppressed) of the Tridentine ritual.

Part 7 might be considered a more developed view of Communion. But given its depth of emotion and feeling, it seems more likely to be a sort of recapitulation of liturgical ritual in the 'real life' and death of the men of the company. The Mass is now put into the attack whereas the prospective attack was included in the Mass up to this point. This is signalled, among other places, in the oblique reference to the prayer Quam Oblationem, Bless and approve our offering, from the Latin Canon. The men have been sanctified as they walk toward the German lines, "Each one bearing in his body the whole apprehension of that innocent...." The designation of this 'innocent' is vague but it includes them certainly. The description of their deaths is almost unbearable in its understatement:
"By one and one the line gaps, where her [Sweet Sister Death's] fancy will - howsoever they may howl for their virginity
She holds them - who impinge less space
And limply to a heap
nourish a lesser category of being"
And finally we are led back to the beginning of the poem and start again as, " ...and dew apserges the freshly dead."

Like any great work of art there are countless interpretations that can be made of In Parenthesis. The one above has the (perhaps sole) advantage of allowing the work to be free from political presumption. Like any theodicy, the poem cannot come to a conclusion which abandons God without plunging into a Manichaen abyss. So it leaves open its theological interpretation. By concentrating on ritual rather than metaphysics, Jones promotes an investigation and judgement which is beyond dogmatic logic. This is I think its essential and enduring genius.

Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Tale of Loose Ends

To say this book is pointless is of course only to admit that I can't see the point. There is a geo-political narrative, inter-laced with a personal narrative, overlaid with a narrative of Jewish sectarianism. None, however, is either developed or resolved. Important events in all three are described and then left without explanation or consequence. The Soviet Union and the United States conspire to make a neutral buffer state in Saxony as a Jewish homeland. An interesting premise; but it leads nowhere. The protagonist loses a week of her life in an apparent abduction, an event which doesn't trouble her further, nor does it have any relevance to the development of her story. A key piece of historical evidence, introduced in unlikely circumstances, is made even more unlikely when the heroine re-discovers it in plain sight after extensive secret service searching. Hasidim, 'black hats', operate an independent country within a country which is suddenly and without explanation ex-populated. A small child enters the narrative, plays an unessential role, and disappears; as does a Stasi agent, several co-workers of the protagonist; other characters from her past appear and vanish without contributing to the plot or character. Is this a new form of post-modernist story-telling using quasi-Murdochian metaphor or a very badly constructed piece of incipient but cramped imagination?

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