Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Las Vegas Syndrome

According to urban folklore the worst thing that can happen to anyone in Las Vegas is to win first time at the slot machines. Winning out of the gate produces a feeling of hope if not invincibility that tempts one to rationalise doubling one's bet until, well, ultimate disaster.

Johanna Skibsrud is undoubtedly a skilful writer. But her 2010 prize-winning The Sentimentalists, written at age at age 30, seems to have given her the same sense of overconfidence as the novice winning gambler. She has more than doubled her bet with Quartet for the End of Time. I think she's lost.

Skibsrud's title is purportedly an homage to the 1941 chamber-piece by Olivier Messiaen. Like the musical piece, her book has four main parts - her characters, his instruments - that fit somewhat unconventionally together in terms of narrative flow. So there is a vague similarity at that level. And music scored for piano, clarinet, violin and cello is unusual. Possibly therefore the combination of the book's central characters - Sutton and Alden Kelly and Douglas and Arthur Sinclair are intended to be somewhat unconventional. The first two are establishment figures and the latter two working class stiffs. It’s a real stretch but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.



Like Messiaen, Skibsrud plays with the idea of time. He through his use of techniques like augmented, diminished and Hindu rhythms and even the use of bird song to escape temporal musical conventions; she by recycling through events from different narrative perspectives. She also eliminates entirely the conventional distinction between direct and indirect speech so that the rhythm of the text doesn't suffer from interruptions, as it were, by the characters.

The problem with this latter technique is that all the characters end up speaking like Skibsrud even if they start out like someone else. For example, Arthur Sinclair's recounting of his Siberian war experience is disconcertingly articulate and erudite in comparison with his folksy, down-home, mid-West conversation. So not revelatory of a novel concept of time, merely confusing. All her 'instruments' become drably the same, lacking Messiaen's unusual harmonies and coloration.

Both works are divided into seven sections with an additional interlude. But what correspondence there is between Messiaen's piece and the book is beyond me. Messiaen opens, for example, with a delicate dawn chorus of celestial birdsong which then makes a dramatic and unmistakeable transition to the voice of the angel who insistently announces his presence and purpose in strident musical language.

In Skibsrud, on the other hand, the first section is used, in a somewhat enigmatic but nonetheless bland way, to set up the motive force of her story: a lie told by Sutton as a teenager, vindicating her brother and incriminating the elder Sinclair. This then leads into the back-story of the Sinclairs. I detect not the slightest literary hint of heavenly birdsong nor the apocalyptic angel, just the same relentless prose on and on without variation.

Perhaps the central conceit of the book is also to be found in these first sections. Messiaen bases his work on the dramatic verses of the tenth chapter of the biblical book of Revelation:

"Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars."

Whether one interprets Messiaen as referring to the literal end of the world, the end of musical time or the entry of an individual soul into a realm of heavenly piece, it is difficult to imagine how Skibsrud intended to approach this kind of cosmic scheme. A young girl telling a lie, even when that lie ramifies significantly among a small group of people, is hardly of existential, or even generalizable import. Skibsrud’s title is a travesty. Her choice of title may indeed have been inspired by a Messiaenic(!) experience but it certainly can't be justified by that experience, which is undetectable in the story.

Towards the beginning of the book Arthur Sinclair makes an observation on his war-time trauma in Siberia: "We are always so quick, aren't we, to translate what we see - the pure material of the world - into our own image. We refuse to let it rest...as it first arrives." I agree. And I think Ms Skibsrud might have been a little too quick on the draw trying to assimilate her experience of Messiaen's music into her literary self-image.

My suggestion is to stay away from the high stakes tables for a while.

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Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis by Joseph Tabbi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Art From Lemons

Isn't it remarkable how great artists are able to use even the most sordid events and conditions to create art? This transformative capacity is akin to, perhaps even the origin of, religious liturgy, sanctifying not just the mundane and banal aspects of life, but also establishing an understanding of the underlying forces at work where there appears to be only chaos and randomness. By this criterion alone, William Gaddis is a great artist.

Isn't it also remarkable how the genealogy of art is traceable not only in the specifics of style or 'isms' but more importantly to the continuity of human concerns? In this, William Gaddis stands not so much on the shoulders of but rather side by side with other American artists like Louis Auchincloss and John Dos Passos in revealing the often barely perceived changes that dominate our lives, changes that it takes social science decades to name, describe and analyse. In this historical context, Gaddis demonstrates his even broader artistic credentials.

Dos Passos, Auchincloss and Gaddis each largely devoted his artistic career to the same end: the exposure of the emerging corporate society of the 20th century. From Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer in 1925, through his USA trilogy (1930-36), he documents, long in advance of academic assessments, the existential character of the new America dominated not by the factory, or democratic government, or even conflict, but by the commercial corporation. From the social trauma of the First War and its aftermath, Dos Passos appreciates what is inexorably shaping the world, that which appears as an almost non-existent abstraction - this queer non-living thing, the corporation, and its ideology. This at a time of severe economic depression and uncertainty, coupled with the rise of European totalitarianism which effectively masked the underlying American reality from popular or even social scientific awareness.

Auchincloss, from a somewhat loftier but entirely complementary perspective, continued the phenomenology of corporate existence in fictional portrayals of upper middle class professionals. As with Dos Passos, New York City is the stage-set of his drama of continuing change from the mere corporate power created by two world wars, to the corporate culture which was penetrating and undermining traditional social structures. His 1960's novels The Rector of Justin (1964) and The World of Profit (1968), for example, represent just this change, perhaps at its moment of greatest inflexion. A comparison with Dos Passos's 1936 Big Money helps to make the point: Dos Passos describes the striving to reach the inner circle American capitalism; Auchincloss chronicles the disintegration of that same circle. The world at large may have been mesmerised by the Beatles, hippies and foreign wars, but Auchincloss saw the shifts occurring in the centres of cultural power with more subtlety and broader effect than the contemporary formulation of the military/industrial complex of Eisenhower or the New Industrial State of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Gaddis too uses New York City as the epicentre of the increasingly intense earthquake in American, and from there global, life. First in his profound, and profoundly unrecognised, Recognitions (1955), the first chapter of which takes place in a boarding school that could well be mistaken for Auchincloss's Justin Martyr Academy (with a Congregational rather than Episcopalian tinge), or with Dos Passos's memories of Choate; and twenty years later in his equally masterful JR (1975), Gaddis penetrates to the core meaning of the new corporate state of America. Falsity, forgery, and facade have been raised to the status of the authentic. The rules of corporate existence have been so naturalised that they literally constitute a child's game of bluff and counter-bluff. Politics has not so much been co-opted as assimilated without residue by corporate culture. The country saw Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator; Gaddis saw the wilful entry into a Neverland of unlimited corporate power.

Literature, then, at the hands of these three men is clearly in the van of social awareness. And their literary greatness has to do in largest part not with their innovations in style, but with their appreciation and expression of the conditions of the their lives, which are also our lives. As Tabbi says of Gaddis, "Gaddis's fiction chronicles the advanced corporatization of American culture more fully and earlier than any other post-war novelist in the United States..." His stylistic tropes and modes of expression are useful to the extent that they facilitated doing exactly this. He is sometimes difficult to read because this difficulty is essential for understanding the overwhelming novelty of the culture in which we find ourselves. Dos Passos saw it coming in his modernist idiom; Auchincloss saw it happening in his almost psycho-analytic style; Gaddis saw its consequences in a post-modernism that influenced de Lillo and Foster Wallace, not just in the way they write but in the way they see.

Turning many of the obscenities of the new corporate world into art is no easy task. Dos Passos, Auchincloss, and Gaddis didn't just see how people act, they listened to how they talk. Behaviour changes from the driven stick-to-it-ivness in Dos Passos, to gentile inaction and concern with mere form in Auchincloss, to movement which is neither stream of consciousness nor even observable by third parties in Gaddis. Likewise, talk tends to be frantic and peppered with non sequiturs in Dos Passos, bewildered and resigned in Auchincloss, and pitifully scattered and fragmented in Gaddis. These are carefully crafted epochs of speech and manners that emerge from one another so incrementally it takes great sensitivity to notice much less express them.

Art is obviously not meant to rationalise much less to justify the conditions in which it is created. But neither is it meant to change those conditions by identifying some external enemy or threat which needs to be overcome in order to improve, let's say, social justice. Art identifies; literary art names. It names what we are at the moment. Usually what we are is what we value most. And what we value most is usually the cause of the conditions in which we live, no matter how absurd. In the 1930's, it is ambition which is most highly valued in order to raise us from economic depths; in the 1950's, the sober, responsible shepherding of wealth is necessary after the ad hoc-ism demanded by 30 years of war and the threat of more war; in the 1970's it is the cutting-edge managerial techniques that are required by global business. Each successive obsession being the solution to the previous and the reason for the next. This is certainly a dynamic, but it can't be called progress. Hence the necessary progression of art.

Tabbi's title comes from a title originally used by Gaddis for a section of JR. It refers to the idea, common in corporate business, that the purpose of corporate life is quite independent of human needs. Corporate existence, it is contended in our culture, depends on measures of financial success. These measures relate not at all to needs for food, or shelter, or community, or even pleasure. They are entirely abstract, and equally arbitrary, measures that may be manipulated to rationalise the actions and outcomes of corporate power. Dos Passos, Auchincloss and Gaddis knew what we were up to and they each reacted in the only way possible: by transforming the ghastliness of corporate life into art. The moral seems to be that you don't have to make lemonade if all you've got is lemons.

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The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art by Luke Timothy Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

God but Not as We Know Her

For those of us who find themselves in opposition to the ideology of power inherent in much Christian theology, Luke Timothy Johnson, an eminent Christian theologian, has written a remarkable book. His thesis is incontrovertible, that is, that divine revelation, no matter how such is defined, must be channelled through human beings. In this sense, the human body is the instrument of revelation and its interpretations in creeds and commentaries.

This simple premise - that our ideas about God must be articulations of human experiences - has profound implications when taken seriously. For a start it implies that theology is, only can be, an attempt to capture in language the spiritual and divine, those things that transcend rational thought but which are nevertheless real to those who experience them. Theology, that is, is per force inductive, as are the fundamental scriptures on which it is based.

Perhaps more significantly, theology and its associated creeds and commentaries become idolatrous when their inductive character is ignored. They then transform from an attempt to communicate experience into a statement of required belief. At that point, they have become instruments of institutional power rather than expressions of faith.

Johnson is a serious and committed Catholic who has written some of the best biblical and credal commentaries in existence. In The Revelatory Body, he has taken very careful aim at those who mis-use scripture and theological tradition to further an agenda of political power rather than of religious truth. This includes a former pope, John Paul II, and his views on sexual morality, which Johnson finds deplorable in his selective use of scripture.

Johnson leaves much unsaid and unresolved, among which, whose experiences 'count' in theology, the place of 'privilege' when it comes to scriptural and credal texts, and the way in which diverse expressions of belief can be synthesized into anything coherent. Nevertheless, The Revelatory Body has the potential to open a new debate in Christian theology. Who knows, such a debate might even result in a new revelation.

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The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Challenging Power

The Knowledge Illusion is a demonstration of the thesis it articulates: "Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind...the hive mind." Each of us, as the 18th century philosopher Frederick Leibniz proposed, contributes to what we perceive and conceive as reality. In fact everyone who has ever existed contributes to that reality. We each contribute but none of us can know all that is known. Human knowledge floats in a world beyond human understanding.

Plato implies this same idea in the earliest Western philosophy. His eternal Forms are one way to express the inscrutable reality that is shared but not controlled by conscious beings. There is more than a hint of divinity in the potentially infinite power of this shared knowledge. We can only define it in the way that Anselm devised in the 12th Century, as that of which nothing greater can be conceived.

This reality is not necessarily true. In fact, it cannot be true because it is continuously changing as new minds emerge and affect other minds through communication. But the idea of an ultimate reality, truth, is essential in order for conscious beings to function in the world without going mad. Truth is that reality which has been constructed, or revealed if one happens to be religiously oriented, by the collective mind at the end of time. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce proposed just this definition of truth in the mid-19th Century.

In the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein recognised that language itself is the carrier of reality. We are born into it and cannot escape its independent power. Language manipulates us every time we use it. Through language, we progress (or not) but as Wittgenstein's contemporary, Martin Heidegger, quipped "Language speaks man" as much as man speaks language.

Sloman and Fernbach have given a modern sociological voice to this ancient philosophy. In an age of increasingly ideological politics, this voice is crucial. It is a voice that reminds us that no one has the right to claim a privileged view of reality, much less truth. It undercuts both the individualists by insisting on the social foundation of our existence and the collectivists by pointing out the necessity of individual experience. Taken seriously, this is a voice that continuously exposes power of any sort for what it is - coercion - and calls it into question.

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The War of the End of the World 
by 

Mario Vargas Llosa

 

Practical Eschatology

At precisely the time that Fyodor Dostoevsky was writing of the Grand Inquisitor and his confrontation with a Jesus returned to the world (1879-80), the events he was fictionalising were playing themselves out in the scrublands of the Brazilian State of Bahia. In fact, the Brazilian drama surpasses Dostoevsky’s plot by including all the celebrities from the original biblical stories. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself?

Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World is a docu-fictional account of the so-called War of Canudos and the events leading to it from 1877 to 1897. In Vargas Llosa’s account it doesn’t take much imagination to identify Antonio, The Counsellor, as Jesus; the revolutionary Scotsman, Galileo Gall, as St. Paul; the local administrative power, Baron de Canabrava, as Pilate; and the psycho-fanatic, Big Joao, as Judas. The Mystic, The Revolutionary, Satan, and The Betrayer could be playing out their cosmic roles rather than merely bit parts in a provincial theatre.

Antonio’s disciples (the wretchedly poor, the dispossessed, criminals, the psychologically needy), followed Antonio in increasingly large and militant groups as he roamed the Galilee of Bahia State. Wherever they went both plagues and miracles were reported, thus combining Old and New testament references. The disciples had no means of support but lived off the contributions of food and water offered in the villages they entered. Antonio preached and the band grew.

What he preached was a kind of repentance: the rejection of political republicanism and the return to monarchy (Brazil became the realm of the Portuguese king after the Napoleonic putsch of his country in 1807). The details of things to be held anathema were derivative: irreligion, taxes and the metric system. Let the Samaritans of the South in Rio and São Paulo have their republican apostasy, Antonio and his followers knew the joys of the true Kingdom of God (ruled by Dom Pedro of course) with its capital in Salvador. They resisted the forces of the state like the Maccabees at Masada. Their attack formation was that of a religious holy day procession; they used whatever weaponry available in close combat. They did not mind suffering casualties of ten to one for the cause.

Galileo Gall was the (mythical, unhistorical) Osama bin Laden of his day. He represents how the movement was shaped by cultural forces outside of Brazil and often quite opposed to the teaching of Antonio. Gall was persona non grata in his native Britain, jailed in Turkey, Egypt and the USA for proletarian agitation and unionising, and wanted for murder in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. His gospel was that of the anarchists Proudhon and Bakunin. Gall's anthropological vision was only slightly less radical than that of St. Paul. He was convinced that phrenology, the study of the shape of the head, told all. For Paul, only belief mattered, for Galileo it was hat size.

As with the movement of Jesus, Antonio’s went well at first. But success, as so often, was its own undoing. As a fiction structured around historical events, there is never any doubt that everything will end in tears and death. Vargas Llosa’s brilliance lies not in creating suspense about the outcome but about the development of the characters as they realise what they are themselves creating. For me this is the magic of The War of the End of the World.

It is also a rather splendid allegory of the early development of Christianity. Vargas Llosa's insertion of the Paul-character in the form of Galileo Gall suggests that he meant such an allegorical interpretation. The rebel who ensures both the dissemination and the distortion of the message of hope was an ideological as well as literary temptation he couldn't resist.