Nigger by Dick Gregory
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How Long, Lord? How Long?

America is evil. It is more evil now than it was over a half century ago when Dick Gregory wrote Nigger, his first autobiography. Back then the racists were mostly Southern, Democratic, ignorant and at least a little ashamed. Now they are Central, Republican, just as ignorant, but firmly in charge, and proud of it.

Gregory's commitment to the 1960's Civil Rights struggle was supported by an ideal that he could use against the bigots of the day: "I told them that they weren’t just dealing with Dick Gregory when they threatened to take all the Negroes off relief, they were dealing with America. They weren’t big enough to threaten the whole country." He felt confident that this ideal incorporated justice in itself so that one could say, “Thank the United States Supreme Court,” instead of “Thank God.” And he was confident of practical help, "...the police [in Birmingham, Alabama] were on their best behavior that day because there were FBI agents in town with movie cameras."

No longer. The racists are in charge now. Whatever ideal of America as a representative of progressive and inclusionary politics there may have been before Trump now can be seen as a sham. The establishment has embraced the values of George Wallace, a figure few seem to remember but whose legacy has endured and spread throughout the country like an infectious bacterium. The Supreme Court is increasingly unlikely to provide anything but ideological claptrap. And the Justice Department, including the FBI, is run by a man who campaigned for a strict segregationist candidate for Alabama governor. Little chance for civil rights protection there.

If it were only the racist Republican political establishment that were the problem, there might be hope of the sort Gregory drew from his ideal. But the problem is not Trump and Sessions and their pals. The problem is America, its people. Roughly half of them endorse the racism of their leaders, substantially more than 50 years ago. America fears the Black Man, the Brown Man, the Yellow Man, the Gay Man, and even the Red Man as never before simply because each of these has demonstrated his equality in ability, creativeness, and drive. Gregory implies this when he,

"... felt the poisonous hate in an American city, a nice-looking little town that had a Confederate flag flying just as high as the American flag on the US Post Office. And I saw the southern white man who has nothing between him and the lowest Negro except a segregated toilet."

With that segregated toilet gone, even in the White House, a lot more white folk feel like there aren't a lot of people they can look down on.

I was born and lived half my life in America. And I know what James Baldwin said is true,

"I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it … If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.”

So I feel shame and despair for what has happened to America. Shame because I share whatever genetic defect afflicts the country and should have done more to overcome it; despair because it wouldn't have made the least bit of difference.

View all my reviews

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Deplorables

There is a jocular theory that at some time in the remote past the North American continental plates shifted and everything that was loose fell into California. Day of the Locust confirms this hypothesis.

The cast of the novel is a ménage of 1930's drifters and grifters attracted by the movies, or the climate or the chance for a little unconventional action. Mostly they are hapless obsessives who, once there, become lost in either an underworld of vice or some form of otherworldly fundamentalism.

In one way or another, everyone in Los Angeles becomes an actor in order to avoid recognising the scrape they're in. Tod acts like an artist and ends up part of the dereliction he portrays; Faye dreams of being a film star and becomes the leading lady of her own tawdry demise; Homer (apparently the inspiration for the Homer Simpson cartoon) wants desperately to be a settled householder and gets his wish - by adopting a completely submissive role to an ungrateful Faye; a transvestite is so good, he can only manage an unconvincing imitation of a male.

These are the American ancestors of today's Deplorables. Like the crowd that assembles for Hollywood premieres, these people do not fetch up in Hollywood, that worldwide symbol of America, without malice or reason:

"It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment... All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough."

But these people can't seem to find themselves and it irritates them:

They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure... Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment... They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."

This is the America of Donald Trump: a crusading mob, "a great united front of screwballs and screw-boxes out to purify the land."

View all my reviews

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Names with Power

According to Proust, proper names imply a soul, even for inanimate objects like cities. If something has a proper name, it somehow lives and has some sort of spiritual coherence. And the existence of such names has a specific effect on human beings. It provokes them to join with proper names in a sort of search for what this nominal soul, and their own, might consist of.

Guermantes is such a proper name. Guermantes is a person, in the first instance the Duchess but also her husband Le Duc. Guermantes is also a place, or rather two particular places, a castle in the country and a Parisian residence in the Faubourg St. Germain. Further removed, but also denoted by the proper name, Guermantes is a dispersed set of estates in space, and a corresponding family history which chronicles their acquisition and management in time.

All of these denotations, according to Proust's theory, have a soul to be searched for and explored. But it is not the person or place that is to be investigated; it is the proper noun itself. Thus, for example, the actress Berman, by whom the younger Marcel was captivated, no longer has a soul for him. The concrete person is vacuous and her name has no real significance except as a good actress. No longer an archetype of Woman, she has been reduced to 'that actress', not even a proper noun. Although he admires her theatrical skill, she has lost all power in Marcel's life.

On the other hand, Guermantes is a name with power, not archetypal but singular power. It is a word that, like all proper nouns, has a meaning that exceeds its denotations. It is a word that can only be described as having a life of its own. It is self-referential. And such a proper noun is powerful precisely to the degree of its self-referentiality. It is bigger than its denotation, not in the sense of suggesting something 'beyond' but because it attracts meaning to itself.

So, the Duchess Guermantes, although fashionable, is a fairly unimpressive woman. Out of the context of her proper name she might be considered merely ordinary. But her salon is the most sought-after in Paris. Guermantes castle is insignificant militarily and architecturally; but it us enmeshed in a sort of regal nostalgia which seems a part of the French national psyche since the Revolution. The Guermantes family name itself has no ancient pedigree; but it has emotional and social 'connections' which allow it to be treated as if it had. Its history is a symbol for the history of all of France.

Words with power condense inarticulate feelings into articulate myths and ideals. But however articulate these myths and ideals, they are unanalyzable, first because their articulation is never stable and second because they are infinitely interpretable. Every interpretive statement about them becomes a component of their meaning and adds to their power.

This power of proper names appears to be supernatural, even more mysterious and potent than language in general. It emanates mysteriously from human interaction but is beyond the control of any individual, as all language is. But there is a character to proper nouns which is decidedly religious, even doctrinal. As Marcel says with some obvious religious emotion,

"... the presence of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no more a mystery than [the Duchess's] house in the Faubourg being situated on the right bank of the river and so near my bedroom in the morning. I could hear its carpets being beaten. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the Faubourg St. Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was purely ideal."

It is not possible to escape the power of these proper nouns. One cannot ignore them or unilaterally refrain from using them in one's vocabulary because they intrude continuously and intimately into one's life. Encountering Le Duc, for example, without knowing who he is or without using the correct form of address will evoke a humiliating response.

On the other hand, attempting to actively resist this power is futile. The power does not exist in the concrete embodiment of Le Duc, or his castle, or even of his wealth. It exists in his name itself. Its power is that of vocabulary not of politics or armaments. It is a power that is immune from individual effort to displace it. As is always the case with language, fighting it means isolating oneself utterly from one's fellow. The name derives its potency for all intents and purposes from another dimension.

Therefore one must submit to the power of these proper nouns, either by merely accepting their mythical and ideological demands, or by assimilating these demands into one's own personality. In this matter event, one discovers the motivation of ambition for the first time: the active desire to become a part of the word with power.

The recognition of ambition marks Marcel's transition into adulthood. The grown-up world is not one of the concrete reality of things. It is a world of the symbolic reality of proper names. Of course symbolism has always been important for Marcel - one thinks of the meanings suggested by church steeples, as well as the actress in previous volumes, for example. But the symbolism of these things was directed toward an ungraspable beyondness, a primitive spirituality, that evoked searching, as it were, past the symbol to some other reality. These symbols represented something internal to Marcel, whether purpose or destiny, he knew not. But they called him forth into himself.

Marcel's emergent adult symbolism is of a radically different sort. The symbols of proper nouns point not beyond themselves but only to themselves. This is the psychic sump of their self-referentiality. Their profound self-referentiality will eventually blind Marcel to his infantile symbolic quest altogether. His iconic symbolism will be steadily replaced by a sort of heretical symbolism which narrows and closely binds Marcel's perception. This is the Guermantes Way.

View all my reviews

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The God of Accidents

Only God knows all of time as if it were the same instant; only God can annihilate the Universe; only God knows our innermost thoughts: so contends Judaic, Christian, and Muslim theology. For God, therefore, there is no cause and effect; everything just is. And because there is no cause and effect, there is no issue of free will. Free will is an idea created by human beings who can't imagine any other way to escape the mechanical inevitability of causality.

In Slaughterhouse 5, the alien race of Tralfamadorians are not just god-like in their ability to transit the Universe, they are collectively God in their power over time and existence itself. The book is a subtle and very clever theology that has fundamental implications for morality and ethics.

Billy Pilgrim is the recipient of important revelations from the divine Tralfamadorians. The first revelation is that although death is a real certainty, it doesn't matter because one can revisit moments in one's life ad infinitum; resurrection is part of existence.

Second, God is neither external to the Universe, nor pantheistically distributed throughout it; rather God is a very discrete presence in the Universe, as well as in charge of it. Importantly for the fate of everyone, God is also as hapless as human beings; he can't change himself or his fate.

The most significant revelation is that Kilgore Trout, the famous science fiction writer and newspaper delivery boss, is God's prophet, whose every pronouncement is sarcastic.

It's difficult to say what portion of these revelations come directly from the divine source and what portion comes through Kilgore Trout's explorations into Billy's consciousness. Nevertheless the bottom line is clear: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does.” In other words, life is so screwy that it can neither be analysed nor rationalised. Not the best of all possible worlds, but the only one possible. Accident willing.

View all my reviews

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Secrets of the Money River

Vonnegut knew stuff about corporate life that most folk don't. Namely that 1) no one owns the corporation and 2) that the essence of the corporation is the separation of control (dominium in legalese) and benefit (usufructus). The corporation is essentially and magnificently useless. It is an arrangement that would have driven Roman lawyers insane, mainly because they equated control and benefit: if you got the use of something, you owned it. Breaking the link between control and benefit was to them dangerous, not to say impossible.

But medieval lawyers (mostly priests) found a way round the Roman legal tradition. So in Vonnegut's novel the shares (but not the assets) of the Rosewater Company are owned by the Rosewater Trust. The only thing the later can expect from the former is an 'equitable' flow of dividends, which is exactly what it gets. Otherwise the Trust has no say in what the Corporation does or how it does it. The Rosewater Corporation is, in itself, useless.

It is the Trust that gives the Corporation its usefulness. The chairmanship of the Trust is hereditary but that has no influence on who runs the company. An excellent summary of the modern corporate condition. As Vonnegut says about his main characters, "Almost all were beneficiaries of boodles and laws that had nothing to do with wisdom or work." They treat themselves as merely extensions of the corporation and as such useless, that is, as making only decisions of control not benefit.

The separation of corporate control and benefit opens the way for what Roman lawyers feared most: fraud. Who can say whether those in control, the corporate managers, are really doing their best for the beneficiaries? In fact what can 'best' mean when it is merely the superlative for an infinite number of quite different possible 'goods'? The opportunity for fraud is immense, and historically irresistible. This is the main theme of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: corporate fraud and how to combat it.

Fraud pervades the book: from Norman Mushari's attempts to wrest control of the Rosewater Trust to Amanita Buntline's affected passion for Beethoven, mistakenly played at the wrong speed. The big fraud of course is that those with corporate control create social benefit. They don't. As Selena, Buntline's maid says, "It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors." This includes, "... the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution."

Some folk do benefit by the legal arrangements of corporate capitalism. There are "about seven" in Rosewater County, Indiana for example. But aside from them, it's the fraudsters who end up on top. Legal arrangements being what they are, the corporate world is, as the Romans knew it would be, like the "1812 Overture played on a kazoo." That is to say a false representation of something magnificent: the instinct to do something beneficial for ones fellow man.

Vonnegut suggests two options for overcoming the power of the false representation in corporate capitalism, insanity or generosity. The fact that Donald Trump is president of the United States suggests that most people, most Americans anyhow, prefer the first option.

View all my reviews

 

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It Begins and Ends in Bad Politics

It is possible for human beings to justify all behaviour, no matter how irrational and cruel. Because this is so, some philosophers justify their view that moral norms must lie outside of human control, that there must be a God who knows what good behaviour is. This justification is also irrational and frequently just as cruel.

As for example when the philosophers and theologians of Nazism preached radical anti-Semitism based on universal genetic imperatives of tribal competition. Inhumanity, therefore, is what human beings are good at. As one of Littell's characters has it, "... there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity." This from a man whose job it was to kill wounded German soldiers who were of no further usefulness.

Nevertheless, irrationality and cruelty have to be arrived at incrementally. One's political and legal culture cannot be radically altered too suddenly lest irrationality and cruelty become obvious and rejected as such. It takes time to create new, not to say contradictory, social attitudes. War is a tried and true method for cultural change. War is preceded by exclusionary politics to prepare the collective psyche. War then has its own inevitable agenda of escalating brutality. The aftermath of war requires its own victims. These are supplied by another sort of exclusionary politics. The definition of justice, a reliable barometer of social norms, invariably changes to accommodate the times. Littell has Adolph Eichmann summarise the situation: "...politics change people."

The Kindly Ones is a fictional exploration of the process of radical cultural and political change in Germany from the 1930's to the 1950's. The protagonist and narrator, Max Aue, is a gay SS officer. This irony is compounded by the fact that he is a lawyer and classically educated into a culture of civility and reflective empathy. He writes like a German Vassily Grossman: not to defend but to merely describe his actions and motivations. Slipping slowly from unconcern to acceptance to assimilation to diseased monster, Max isn't German or inherently psychotic or evil; he is Everyman.

It is as Everyman that Max plays a role in the Final Solution for the Judaism of Eastern Europe - in fomenting 'retribution' of Jews by Poles and Ukrainians, in the Einzatsgruppen, whose job it was to murder all Jews found in Russian territory conquered by the Wehrmacht, and in the preparation and supply of victims for the death camps. The scenes depicted are well rehearsed in many other books on the Holicaust.

Littell's take is innovative only because it is created from the point of view of the murderers, capturing their experiences and mental states as the war is prepared for, progresses, and ends. What they see is the terror of their own lives in the dystopia they have created. Meditating briefly on Auschwitz, Max muses, "Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?" The camps are the source of a new German culture: "a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations."

Max knows he is participating in a war like none before, "... when the State is democratized —then all of a sudden war becomes total and terrible ..." Only modern democracy is capable of the atrocities of war on a scale which would not have been tolerated in any other form of government. The democratic state has powers of coercion over its own citizens that could never be claimed by any monarch.

Democracy also possesses the cultural force necessary to turn evil into good through purely social sanctions. The murderer of wounded soldiers, for example, "...killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities?"

Judging by the evidence of the 20th century, democracy uses its powers more frequently and with less cause than any other form of government. Democracy inhibits conscience and promotes evil just as effectively as the alternatives. In fact by legitimatising greed for reputation and ambition for power, democracy provides a welcoming framework for their development. This is one of the principle messages of the book. A message as relevant in the age of Trump and Putin as it was in the age of Hitler and Stalin. There may be no Cosmic Organizer but there should be at least a few resistors who can stand against the flow of insanity that pops up from time to time in democracies. As Max knows, "The past is never over."

View all my reviews

Bullet Park by John Cheever
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So Very Sixties

A bizarre book full of absurdities and unfathomable details of travel and personal description.

An upper middle class New York suburb is chosen by an apparent psychopath for the location of a senseless murder. The target is the son of a local resident, undistinguished except for his smug racism, boredom and moderate alcohol and drug dependency. The motive appears to derive from a suggestion by the murderer's estranged mother that "...nothing less than a crucifixion..." will wake the world.

A metaphor for the perceived attack on or deterioration of middle class values during the 1960's? Possibly but then why would Cheever put such an attack in the mind and hands of another middle class nutcase? And what do the repeating tropes, like the white threads on clothing, the yellow room, allusions to homosexual panic, and the unaccounted for drowsiness of both would-be murderer and his victim, signify?

Locations - Rome, the Italian Alps, Switzerland, Cleveland - come and go without need or apparent purpose. Historical events - a political assassination, the translation of an Italian poet - are mentioned without context or consequence.

If this book had been written 30 years later, I would have pegged it as authored by an experimental AI programme. Perhaps Cheever was prescient enough to anticipate the technology. But I'm doubtful. Clearly I need someone to give me a skeleton key to Bullet Park.

View all my reviews

The Names by Don DeLillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Vaulting into eternity ... well perhaps not that high

Pushing the logic of hippiedom to its extreme, The Names suggests an end point - a nihilistic cult whose reason for being is to murder people whose initials correspond to the names of their locations. Bizarre, senseless, and intentionally without benefit to anyone. Helter Skelter played out in the regions that produced Western civilization, Greece and the Middle East.

This cult fascinates James, a member of the international financial gang whose roles are just about as rational as those of the cultists; and Frank, a film-maker, who wants to exploit as much irrationality as he can; and Owen, an academic who is unaccountably swept into the spiritual maelstrom of the Indian branch of the cult. Who can blame any of them? Their lives are an empty wandering without any conscious intention. Only the bizarre and senseless seems to make any sense. They obsessively move toward the cult but with nothing as directive as desire. The cult is a kind of tar baby, an inert web, that traps the protagonists for no point whatsoever.

Everyone sounds the same in The Names, men, women, children, adults, bankers and archaeologists. Without 'he saids, she saids' it is often difficult to follow conversations. And since DeLillo doesn't do reflective internal dialogue except to confuse, it's also difficult to decipher motivations. Why do couples stay together, or not? Why do the men persist in their questionable businesses and resist returning to America? What attracts his characters to the distributed cult? DeLillo's not saying.

Then there are the literary non-sequiturs. "It never happens until it happens again. Then it never happened." Does this phrase have meaning? "There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravens." I should think artlessness was implied by such a scene, which has no obvious connection to trust or distrust. Or "In this century, the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth century writer that he aspires to madness." This would certainly qualify for the Pseuds Corner section of Private Eye.

My problem is that I think I share much of DeLillo's experience of the world and his gripes about corporate life, American interference in the world and the casual destructiveness of global finance. But I can't place myself anywhere in his writing. I get lost, as if I've become one of his rootless, bored, superficial characters who is "vaulting into eternity." I suppose this is his intention. If so I'm left with the question 'Why?'.

View all my reviews

The Financier by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nothing New Under the American Sun

There is scarcely any internal dialogue in The Financier. All is surface, not to say superficial. Frank, the protagonist, is driven entirely by the opinion of others and is yet entirely self-centred in defiance of all Jungian psychological types. He cannot be analysed, only observed and documented by Dreiser's hyper-realism.

Morality exists for Frank as an abstract category but not as a demand for doing the right thing. The right thing is the commercially and, especially, financially most expedient thing. No other criterion is allowed to intrude. Slavery is evil, war is destructive, democratic government is a sham, but evil, destruction and duplicity are actually necessary for progress of the world and in it.

Written with the driest and subtlest of irony, The Financier describes but it doesn't condemn. Frank calculates, he does not live, love, or care other than for awaiting the chance to calculate. His existence takes place among others who also calculate, especially politicians, whom Dreiser recognises as the source and guarantors of commercial and financial success. These are the insiders without whose tips and legislative legerdemain, Frank's abilities are useless. Corruption is not incidental to the system; it is the system.

The Financier is a real 'how to' become a Wall St mogul, as relevant now as it was a century ago. The only real difference today is that the aspiring captain of finance has fewer choices for realising his ambitions. Frank is able to worm his way into the big deal on financing the American Civil War under the noses of the then dominant Drexel & Co. of Philadelphia. Today's Goldman Sachs would crush any such impertinence. Frank would therefore have to ply his nefarious trade within its ranks to get ahead.

Loyalty, of course, is defined as expediency in Frank's world, as it is in today's financial culture. All relationships are expendable. Even the 'word is my bond' culture is in force only as long as it is expedient for the participants. When disaster threatens, if an agreement is not in black and white, and properly witnessed, it doesn't exist. Frank is the model for the likes of Donald Trump and Anthony Scaramucci. Except Frank is more civil and articulate.

View all my reviews