Running Dog - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (1936-)

Sometime in the late 1970's when the residue of the Vietnam war can still be felt, when the Warren report is still alive and being combed through word by word, a small time erotica sales man, Lightborne, gets wind of what could potentially rock the industry: a pornographic film rumored to star Hitler himself. The countless grotesque and unimaginable sordid details this find could reveal is almost too much to hope for and Lightborne shops the rumour around looking for potentially interested parties.

One interested party happens to be a Senator, who unwilling to reveal himself and his predilection for bazaar erotic art has hired a man named Glen Selvy to be his buyer. Unbeknownst to the Senator, Selvy is a double (or triple?) agent hired by a clandestine covert branch of the military, Radial Matrix, to collect incriminating data on the Senator. As he lives out his daily life of espionage and intrigue, filled with rules and rituals, living in a hovel, completely devoted to his work, he meets Moll Robbins, a reporter for Running Dog magazine.

Running Dog, a once radical but now fairly mainstream magazine, has assigned Moll to get the scoop on the Senator, there's nothing that the American public loves more than a dirty sex scandal of sorts involving politicians or celebrities:

In the words of the Senator himself " celebrity was a phenomenon related to religious mysticism... Celebrity brings out the cosmic potential in people. And that couldn't be anything but good. What was the word? Salutary. That couldn't be anything but salutary."

And what could be better, or more intriguing than a celebrity with a hidden smut collection? Perhaps even funded with tax payer dollars! It's almost too good to be true. As Moll delves into her research, somehow Selvy finds her apartment and they begin one of those liaisons found only in literature, with lots of whiskey drinking, the periodic changing of clothes and an inhuman amount of sex, that leaves all of us non-literary characters wondering if our lives are somewhat lacking in passion.

The similarities between Libra and White Noise are abundant. The endless quest for something elusive, whether it is the cure for the fear of death, a country that will appreciate your sacrifice or a historical porno featuring the Fuhrer. Where Libra felt like organized chaos, there was ultimately an idea that propelled them all forward, the disillusionment of JFK and the American dream, in Running Dog  there is no organization, just chaos. In a way it seems like something Tom Clancy and John Updike would come up with in a brainstorming session run by Suzanne Collins.

Slowly the plots begin to unravel and the one dimensional characters begin to make their exits. Running Dog, this once radical magazine that would stop at nothing to reveal the corruption and lies swirling around us, is little more that a public interest magazine. The magazine producer/editor Grace, refuses to publish Moll's findings and winds up in bed having pillow talk with the head honcho of Radial Matrix...Selvy, after getting on the wrong side of Radial Matrix and realizing his strict rules are beginning to slip, finds himself being chased by a pair of Vietnamese. At one point along his run, he meets up with a girl whom he befriends, she asks him what his heritage is and he tells her he's Indian. She doubts him and asks if he's Indian what his Indian name is...there's a pause and then Selvy says: "Running Dog."

Running dog is a literal translation of the Chinese/ Korean communist pejorative that means lackey or lapdog, an unprincipled person who helps or flatters another more powerful. It is derived from the eagerness with which a dog will respond to its owner when called for even a scrap of food. While the magazine attempts to use this name ironically, they are little more than puppets obeying the laws of gravity. The realization that Selvy deservedly is a Running Dog, little more than a lackey or lap dog chasing his master's scraps, is the moment he accepts his fate, his disillusionment and his inevitable death.

"He realized he didn't need the blanket he was wrapped in. The cold wasn't getting to him in that way. In a way that called for insulation. It was perfect cold. The temperature at which things happen on an absolute scale. All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now...choice is a subtle form of disease."

The post-Vietnam world is one were guerrilla warfare has moved into the homes of its citizens, the enemy is indistinguishable, elusive and relentless. There is no clarity who or what the bad guy is, only a vague sense of disorganized evil. But when the most comprehensible evil moves into the mainstream, when Hitler porn is the hidden treasure...where is the normalizing level of morality. Who are the good guys? Do bad guys even exist in a post-modern world where everything is relative?

"Vietnam, in more ways than one, was a war based on hybrid gibberish. But Mudger could understand the importance of this on the most basic of levels, the grunt level, where the fighting man stood and where technical idiom was often the only element of precision, the only true beauty, he could bring with him into the realms of ambiguity."

In some of the reviews I read they described this book as funny...maybe if they meant funny in the sense that life is meaningless and we're all in the process of slowly dying? Although this book, like the others I've read were engrossing and easy to lose myself in...I would not describe this as funny, nor would it be my favorite DeLillo book I've read thus far.

White Noise - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (1936-)

Jack Gladney is the perfect postmodern hero. He believes truth is debatable, that true facts are whatever other people say they are, that "no one's knowledge is less secure than your own."  He and his composite family often debate the relativity of truth over greasy chicken wings which they devour, animal like, grease dripping down their forearms, without making eye contact. Jack is a professor at a small college, where he has created a somewhat renowned school of Hitler studies and has slowly lost himself in the persona he's created as its chair. He adds initials to his name, wears foreboding eye glasses which distort his vision but create an imposing figure.

"The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to "grow out" into Hitler. He himself was tall, paunchy, ruddy, jowly, big-footed and dull. A formidable combination. I had the advantages of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed, an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness. If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously. "

As the Hitler studies give Jack something to grow into and develop towards, he doesn't speak German, a flaw he is deeply ashamed of and realizes he his little more than a false character that follows a name around...he eventually realizes that helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic figures, men who intimidate and loom darkly. While some people are larger than life, Hitler is larger than death, and Jack has developed a world where the overwhelming horror would leave no room for his own death, where he would be sheltered, protected, submerged in the tragedy of another's life.

Jack lives with his fifth wife and their brood of children in an idyllic town where things happen mostly to other people and are broadcast over the air waves via the radio or television, the other members of this composite family, in a world where technology has become an extension of self or even the identifier of self. How can you know who you are and what you're worth without a commercial reminding you what you need to become the best version of yourself. All knowledge becomes filtered through some form of mass media as they create an imperial self out of tabloid aspirations.

The Gladney's take comfort in their middle class status, because truly horrific things can only happen to poor people. "Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters." And to reassure themselves of their safety they frequently shop, whether to wander around the aisles of luxurious grocery products, establishing themselves as stalwart figures in a pecuniary culture, or to binge purchase the items that will truly identify them as legitimate original individuals. While the socialists in Libra are constantly arguing against the exploitation of the masses and deriding a culture of conspicuous consumption, the Gladney's seem to thrive in a culture of manic consumerism.

Behind Jack and Babette's facade of composure, both are incapacitated by an overwhelming fear of death, although Babette does her best to hide the extent of her fear by drowning it in Dylar, an untested, unapproved black market substance in the clinical trial phase, alleged to remove the fear of death. As she stoically goes about her daily routines, she is whoring herself out to a dry and crusty, wrapper of a man in exchange for access to the drugs.

As they both live their quite lives, Jack meditating on his fear of death from an academic perspective, Babette running up stadium stairs in sweatsuits and demanding her little boy, Wilder, stay an infant forever, a looming catastrophe makes its appearance. There has been a toxic spill that now threatens anyone within its proximity. As they slowly make their way to the refugee camps stationed around the state, the fear of death becomes palpable. They realize that the people in charge of the disaster are using this event as training for the Simulated Evacuation process, using a real event to rehearse a simulation. The borders between truth and reality become hazy as the family sits in the Boy Scout cabin curling up on cots wondering if the danger is real or imagined.

When Jack finally elicits a confession from Babette about her drug use, her fear of death and the agreed system of reciprocity, Jack overlooks her unfaithfulness and slowly becomes obsessed with obtaining this miracle drug for himself. When he thinks his daughter has thrown out the bottle he paws through weeks of garbage, dissecting a palimpsest comprised of the residue of their lives, obscene cartoon characters drawn in a childish hand, a tampon hidden in a banana peel, as he picks his way through the fetid garbage searching for the remainder of a pill that has the potential to eradicate his fear of death, he wonders if we hide the parts of ourselves we wish to avoid or leave unacknowledged.

As he continues his quest for the panacea, he finds his wife's drug lord, a shell of a person wearing Budweiser shorts and living in a motel and eating Dylar like its candy, the precious drug scatter around the room and crushed into the fire-resistant carpet. The drug is obviously having a strange effect on this man, and while Jack contemplates what to do...he has a fleeting moment of compassion for his wife.

Finally he meets a cadre of nuns and priests that don't believe in God. Their faith or rather the assumption of their faith is simply for the masses. The people would be crushed if they didn't believe, so they put up a facade of belief in God, of heaven, of good and evil...all the while thinking only the truly desperate would cling to that sort of ill-founded rhetoric. There is no truth. Our acceptance of truth is only for the benefit of others. 

The book ends with a final expedition to the grocery store, which has been rearranged, leaving the patrons anxious, lost and confused. As Babette and Jack stand in the check-out lane they realize that here, in line at the grocery store, surrounded by bar codes and price tags, where the holographic scanners "decode the binary secrets of every item, where the dead speak to the living" is the last truly democratic place left. They stand, regardless of age, race and status, their carts piled high with the detritus of consumption, slowly moving forward, reading the tabloids.

"Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead."

Libra - Don DeLillo

Don DeLilllo (1936-)

As Ayn Rand once said, "No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can only be destroyed by ideas." 1  In Libra, Don DeLillo presents a moment in time when the country was primed with a sense of hostility, laying fallow, waiting for a sense of direction.  Rather than an organized conspiracy, a few disgruntled men light fire to the tinder of the emotionally unstable and desperate, those willing to do anything and give up everything for the chance of a better future.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco there are many covert operative that feel that they were betrayed by Kennedy, some feel the loss of pride, others have made investments in Cuba that are now unprofitable, although most of these disgruntled covert operatives have their own reasons for the increasing hostility they feel toward the President, they all agree that the shame of losing to Castro when they were so close is unpardonable. But as the county's politics ebb and sway it looks like there will be no retaliation. The planning, the pain and the heartache of barely surviving in Cuban prisons...all of this will be for nothing unless the country can be persuaded to declare war on Cuba and the only way that can be accomplished is if the country sees Cuba's existence as a national threat...

Lee Harvey Oswald is presented as a emotionally unstable, dyslexic, revolutionary, obsessed with Trotsky, obsessed with freedom for the working class. As we are introduced to him, he picks up a pamphlet off the street that talks about the Rosenberg case...the seeds of conspiracy being planted. The government has become a capitalist monolith, it squeezes the life out of the working class, exploiting them for the maximum profit and then disposing of them when they reach the limit of their value. Even as a young man, Lee is frustrated by the limitations and impositions of the government, constraining him from what he knows he has the potential to become.

As he grows up, De Lillo imagines the circumstances that feed the flames of Lee's distrust and repulsion of the government, he becomes a marine, only to be abused by the hierarchy, he expatriots himself and flees to Russia, where he assumes he will be taken seriously and perhaps used to his potential, only to work a menial job in a factory which slowly feels more and more futile. He marries a Russian girl and decides he should return to the states, only to live a life of abject poverty, again, unappreciated by the country he has foolishly had so much hope for. He is erratic, sometimes abusive, a web of personalities and aliases, the perfect foil for a plot that has slowly been woven together by a cast of dissatisfied characters.

Finally, in one last attempt to survive, Lee tries to flee to Cuba, but Cuba won't have him and as he returns to the states he is met my a disgruntled agent, part foil / part plot instigator who tells Lee if only he could do something to show Castro how much of a patriot he was, how zealous he was for the cause, something like...take a shot at the president? The seed is planted and Lee needs to further prompting. And as the plot is revealed, there is no true leader or singular entity, but rather a vast array of people poised and ready to be used to their potential and advantage in a scheme that has gotten widely out of control.

Eventually another pawn is needed to remove Lee from the spotlight, and Jack Ruby, a casino/strip club owner is convinced that all it would take to become a national hero would be to shot walk up to Lee and shoot him, point blank. To show the country that he's had enough, to become the voice of public outcry. He does so, ending the vision Lee has had of living out his Trotskyesque dream of imprisonment, a life of study and writing and developing himself into the revolutionary he is destined to become. Ruby is imprisoned, and rather than becoming touted as a national hero is destined to a life of penile obscurity.

"Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you." 

Rather than a simple conspiracy theory, De Lillo presents a imaginative, plausible version of events where everyone seeks their own reward, acting on their own volition for their own separate agendas. As Nicholas Branch, the CIA operative, hired to makes sense of the overwhelming documentation and find a single thread, a single conspiracy, he is lost in the magnanimity of the details, the disparate agendas, the lack of coherence and as he spends his life, like Icarus following one lead after another only to have them lead to empty dead ends and more questions rather than answers, he searches for truth in a generation where everything is relative.


1. "The Atlas Society: The 'Lost' Parts of Ayn Rand's Playboy Interview.""

Foe - J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee (1940-)

In the novel Foe, the events of Robinson Crusoe are imagined from another point of view. While the original story cast Crusoe as an industrious hero living in a man's world, this new interpretation, from the perspective of Susan Barton, casts Cruso as an ineffectual man stripped of desire, able only to slowly over the course of fifteen years build terraces that sit idly by waiting for seeds to some day turn them into a garden.  Even after the arrival of Susan, a woman ready and willing to be the garden for the only type of seed accessible to Cruso, he lacks the gusto to pursue her even for purely physical and practical reasons.

Foe is ultimately about voice and the ability to communicate. After a year of being stranded on the island, Cruso, Susan and Friday are rescued by a passing ship, unable to sustain the journey, Cruso dies  and it is left to Susan to find a place in the world for herself and Friday. While Friday is mute, Susan is a prolific talker and yet despite her never ending verbosity, she is unheard, first by Friday who either chooses to ignore her or truly cannot understand, and then by Foe, the publisher she has taken her idea for a manuscript to.

As she fights for her voice and her identity and the right to remain true to her story, she is ultimately forced to fight for her substance as a person. Left to wander around Newington, waiting for their story to be published and they to gain monetary liberation, they exchange one island for another.

"...you will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led on Cruso's  island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day."

These are the islands of the marginalized, the cast off and forgotten, able to coexist within a world that doesn't recognize them. As Susan and Friday continue to wait for Foe to respond to her letters, they take up residence in his house and live out of the little garden plot and try to avoid the debt collectors that come often to remove more and more of the articles in the house, while ignoring the presence of the squatters. When a young girl presents herself as Susan's long lost daughter, Susan responds by telling Friday:

"It is nothing Friday, it is only a poor mad girl come to join us. In Mr. Foe's house are many mansions. We are as yet only a castaway and a dumb slave and now a madwoman. There is still place yet for lepers and acrobats and pirates and whores to join our menagerie..."

Yet Susan later in a way justifies the invisibility of marginalized when she is forced to confront whether or not she believes Friday is or was a cannibal, something she ponders regularly. She tells herself it is unacceptable to shrink from disgust from our neighbors touch because she perceives or assumes there is uncleanliness. "We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."

Yet it is exactly this ignorance and blindness that Susan must fight against to be seen. When she first boards the ship, they tell her she must refer to herself as Mrs. Cruso, otherwise society will fixate on what a single woman was doing with a single man alone on an island for a year. Next, when she tries to tell her story of that year being a castaway, when it proves less interesting than she hoped (they were not attacked by cannibals, the wild apes were relatively passive and other than the occasional inclement weather, there was little intrigue to speak of) Mr. Foe first tries to persuade her to come up with something a little more intriguing, before deciding that the castaway story should be book-ended with something more relational, her quest to find her daughter, her year on the island, her daughter's quest to find her.

While Mr. Foe continuously asks how she lost her daughter in the first place, how she survived in Bahia for two years and many other questions I was genuinely interested in knowing the answers to, Susan sticks to her guns, she is not a story that can be ameliorated to please her readers. She does not owe anyone an explanation of who she is, and she can choose to tell whatever part of her story she wants as well as choose not to tell others.

"I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world...I am as familiar as you with the many, many ways in which we can deceive ourselves. But how can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been?"

Although this is true, what right to we have in asking anyone to prove the substance of their existence...her lecture comes at a bad time. I found myself wondering if she was slipping as a reliable voice...or wondering if she ever had been. While her verbosity is potentially unrivaled, its the things she omits that begin to create the story that draws you in. Who is this person? Are there unreliable, less than truthful places in her story? As she tells the part of her story she wants to over and over again there are subtle changes. Is she changing her story? Are we having a Pincher Martin moment, where her soul is trying to come to terms with her death while she wanders around one island after another?

Her only hope and aspiration is to someday have heads turn in the street as she walks by and a low murmur throughout the crowd that says "There goes Susan Barton the castaway..." But it is a dying ambition. She can play the role of mother, whether reconciled or unreconciled, she can play the role of mistress or sometime lover, she can play the role of wandering gypsy or house keeper...but she cannot play the role of Robinson Crusoe.

While she constantly struggles to have ownership of her story and have a voice, Friday has consigned himself to not communicating in any way. While Susan talks endlessly to Friday, not needing a response to prod her along, Friday never attempts to communicate back. Even when Susan thinks they are making music together, it is her constant, frenetic attempt to communicate, not his. And when she stands in front of him playing anything she can think of to cause the most discord, Friday doesn't even look up. He is lost in a world that has refused to see him, so he refuses to acknowledge it.

When Susan begins to consign herself to her fate, she has gone from "castaway" to "muse" to "whore," while Friday is being taught to write and been given the tools to finally express himself. Will he be able to? If he finally does learn to write, to have a voice and speak for himself, will he then have to fight for the right to keep his authenticity?  He emerges as a tabula rasa, and the reader is hopeful for him, while Susan, jaded seems to drift into a ineffectual silence.

Winter Tales - Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

Originally published in 1942, this collection of 11 hauntingly surreal stories share an undercurrent of heartache, loneliness and the never ending quest to find ones soul mate.  Her characters are often drifters or a diaspora in and of themselves, constantly searching the earth for a kinsman or the place they can call home. Sometimes they meet these kindred spirits in the shape of a lover or friend or even a falcon that changes form and repays a kind deed.

Her protagonists occupy worlds impenetrable by those around them, hidden dream worlds, inaccessible to the uninitiated "as the world of music is to the tone-deaf." These worlds encompass the natural and the supernatural, they are worlds of reality and the incorporeal, a blend of the mystical and fantasy.

In the case of Rosa, the heroine in the  short story "Peter and Rosa," nobody could tell where her world lay; "neither did the substance of it lend itself to words, the others would never understand her, were she to tell them that it was both infinite and secluded, playful and very grave, safe and dangerous. She could not explain, either how she herself...was very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth. Sometimes, she felt, she was expressing the nature of the dream world in her movements and her voice, but she was then speaking a language of which they had no knowledge."

Rosa has grown up alongside her cousin Peter, who although once was a kindred spirit and rugged playfellow, over the last few years as they have both grown older has become preoccupied with his own hopes and dreams and has left Rosa to fend for herself in her own enigmatic dream world and whether or not she resents this, she casts him as the clumsy, dirty, scratched-kneed boy unrecognizable to her playfellow of old.

"She could no longer, she felt be sure of her dreamworld. Peter might find the "Sesame" which opened it, and encroach upon it, and she might meet him there any day."

She fantasizes about him going to sea and there meeting a dreadful but purely accidental death, although this scheme is unlikely, she sighs to herself, one can always hope.

And then one day Peter sneaks up to her room as he used to do as a child, sits at the end of her bed and unburdens his soul with his hopes and dreams. A creator can only be proud of what he has created when it has fulfilled its purpose. A maker of flutes must wait to hear his flute played before he can say "yes, I created that, and it is good." Peter has been waiting to fulfill his destiny, but he has been trapped here, promising to submerge himself in his studies and pursue learning with Rosa's father, he feel like he is suffocating and ultimately that God, his maker, can not be satisfied with his creation. He pauses, the air is pregnant with the expectations of infinite possibility, finally, he says, in order to chase my destiny and fulfill my purpose I must go to sea! I was created to be a sailor and every day that I'm away from the sea a small piece of my soul dies...

Rosa, for the first time, speaks: "I have often wished that you would go to sea..." (Failing to mention the rest of her wish...)And at this unexpected and amazing expression of sympathy, Peter for a moment recognizes in Rosa the friend and ally that for a long time he had failed to value...and all the while she had "been faithful, she had thought of him and had guessed his needs and his hopes." As he climbs back out of her room he is filled with the joy and excitement of the promise of the sea, and simultaneously the surprise of Rosa, that she has begun to fill his soul. "The sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salt and universal as the sea."

The next day, word that the ice in the sound has begun to break up reaches them and Peter and Rosa decide to run down to the harbor to have a look, they get to the water and the ice has begun to thin dangerously along the shore, but they manage to scramble on, their feet getting wet as they climb over the sheets of ice. Rosa realizes this is the last day she will have with Peter, and after years being unappreciative of his camaraderie, the thought of losing him now is devastating.  "Since she had only this hour of life left to her, she must, within it, enjoy, experience and suffer to the utmost of her capacity. She bounded onto the ice as swift as a boy..."   As they stand as far out as they have dared to go and look around them, they are lost in the world of hopes, dreams and the immortality of youth, only to realize the ice floe they are standing on has separated and they are drifting out to sea. As the slow realization of their fate dawns on them, the flow cracks and they are flung together into an electrifying embrace, their souls and bodies aching to be touched, they sink beneath the icy sea. 

Out of all the short stories that I've read thus far, this one seemed to be the most autobiographical. After a disastrous marriage to the unfaithful Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, Karen Blixen is left on their coffee plantation in Africa, as she attempts to put her life back together she develops a friendship with Denys Finch Hatton, an African safari guide. Perhaps they slowly realize they are both dreamers? Perhaps they realize they occupy a world, which few have access to...slowly their friendship becomes a love affair and then one day in a terrible plane crash he dies.

Blixen gives Peter and Rosa the only gift she wishes she could have had, the opportunity to die next to your loved one, the moment of looking into their eyes and realizing the next incomprehensible journey into an unknown world, is ultimately an adventure you make together.

Lazarus Laughed - Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

So, I'm not the biggest fan of plays...there are few play that's I've read and thought "wow...I bet that would have been amazing to see!" This was definitely not one of them. In fact I can hardly think of anything that would be worse to see on stage than this play, this is mostly due to the fact that act laughing is rather difficult to pull off, but O'Neill doesn't stop there he wants his actors to "laugh snivelingly" or "laugh while simpering and feeling afraid for your life" ect. I can't imagine sitting in a crowd of hot bodies, having probably paid an arm and a leg for a ticket, only to be forced to listen to multiple people laughing while sniveling.

(For the record, I though Long Day's Journey Into Night was infinitely better.)

Like many of O'Neill's plays there is an underlying current that cries "We are tragedy" or as Harold Bloom prefers, "We are farce." O'Neill often wrote of the despair of American illusions and our inability to achieve a spiritual reality because to choose hope is more precarious that to choose despair. Written in 1925, Lazarus Laughed follows the resurrection of Lazarus and the subsequent effect this has on the rest of his life and the lives of those around him.  As Lazarus is the first person to return from the realm of the dead, the response from the crowd slowly evolves from disbelief to adoration.

Although Lazarus has been miraculously resurrected, the fact that Jesus, the Nazarene, is calling himself Lord is causing extreme dissension. As the crowd huddles around Lazarus to hear what being dead for three days was like they observe the curious fact that he is laughing. Over and over again he declares there is no death, only God's laughter and the crowd begins to intently listen to his words, hailing him as Dionysus, the savior and conqueror of death.

By the second act, Lazarus is rumored to be a god, a deity of laughter and he is rumored to heal the sick by his laughter. He has also begun to get noticeably younger. Caligula's response to the adoration of the crowd is to say that man is basically the same everywhere, willing to worship any new charlatan. There are also whispers throughout that Lazarus has discovered immortality, and Caligula, hoping to become the next Caesar, disdainfully hopes this is not true, saying:

"You lie! Whatever you are! I say there must be death! You have murdered my only friend, Lazarus! Death would have become my slave when I am Caesar - he would have been my jester and made me laugh at fear!"

Lazarus responds by telling him to be his own jester and that "men call life death and fear it. They hide from it in horror. Their lives are spent in hiding. Their fear becomes their living." Slowly as time passes, the story becomes that Lazarus raised himself from the dead, assisted by his pawn Jesus. As Lazarus continues to grow younger his wife Miriam grows older, aging quickly and becoming more cast down, she is a figure of a sad, resigned mother of the dead.

In Act 3, Lazarus and Miriam are presented to Caesar who is immediately murdered by Caligula. Without taking more than a nanosecond to mourn, the mistress of Caesar, Pompeia, makes a play for Lazarus, who is now shimmering with youth and vitality. Caligula assures Pompeia that Lazarus will remain faithful to his wife, and Pompeia quickly crafts a malicious plan to get rid of Miriam and increase her odds. She picks up on the boredom of the crowd and suggests they demand another miracle of Lazarus, she convinces the new Caesar, Tiberius, to poison Miriam and test Lazarus' ability to bring back another from the dead.

As Miriam takes the poisoned peach, Lazarus raises his hand as if to stop her and the crowd wildly jeers "He is afraid of death!" Miriam eats the peach and slowly, like a wilting flower becomes weaker and more confused until she lies still. As Lazarus bends over to kiss her he quietly weeps, for a moment being shaken in his anti-death stance. And then in one last spontaneous spasm, Miriam laughs and tells Lazarus that he is right, there is no death, only laughter...and then she breathes her final breath.

Act 4 opens with Tiberius post-rationalizing what various life experiences have caused him to become a lecherous old man. Caligula, growing tired of the never ending monologue kills him and finally has claimed Caeserhood for himself, crying "Do not take pain away from us! It is our only truth! Without pain there is nothing!"

Caesar demands than Lazarus be burned at the stake to prove once and for all that there really is death, and while Lazarus is burnt alive he laughs, spitting out "The hope of God is eternal laughter..." At the last second, Pompeia, who is now completely infatuated with Lazarus throws herself into the flames.

Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen (Part 3)

Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

"The Road Around Pisa" is the forth short story in the collection and like its name the story weaves around, each character passing the narrative batten to the next, creating a chain of events that is almost incomprehensible. It is ultimately the story of misunderstanding and as the pieces of the puzzle slowly are fit together and the characters are confronted with the extent of their mistake, the reader is finally able to glimpse the entire spectrum of the narrative.

An old impotent prince is about to marry a young beautiful woman, afraid that she will run away with her cousin Mario and demand an annulment, he asks his friend Count Nino to take his place in the marital bed and impregnate his wife. Unbeknownst to the prince, his wife has asked her hand maiden to do the same, leaving her to occupy the marital bed while she runs to find Mario and have one final night to say her goodbyes.

When the prince's young wife fails to become pregnant (obviously not understanding the complication involved with the birds and the bees making little birds and bees) the prince challenges his now ex-friend to a duel. At the last second, the wife's handmaiden, who has been dressed as a young boy and following the chain of events from afar runs up to the prince before they begin to take aim and quickly mentions that is was she in the bed that night and not her mistress, the old prince has a stroke and as he gasps, clutching his heart he says "Always we fail because we are too small...Too small I have been, too small for the ways of God." As he dies in one last impotent gesture his gun misfires, shooting skyward and he takes his last breath.

Next in the collection is "The Supper at Elsinore," the story of three siblings struggling to hold onto their grasp of fate. Morten, the only brother, jilts his bride and runs away to become a pirate and live a life in the shadows of adventure and debauchery, alleged to have five wives in different ports around the world. Slowly the family resigns themselves to quietly paying penance for his behavior, and his two sisters dote over his jilted fiance until she is finally betrothed and married to another man.

Madam Baek, who looked after the girls when they were children, and who now tends to the estate when the family is away for the season, makes her way one evening through the snow to the sister's winter estate. She tells them she has seen the ghost of their brother and that he would like to have one last conversation with them. The sisters at first reeling in shock and horror, finally consent and head back to the family estate for one final confrontation.

The sisters are torn between resenting Morten for his irresponsibility and at the same time envying his liberty and freedom. While Morten has lived a full life in defiance of any and all societal norms, the sisters have stayed home, choosing to remain unmarried, perhaps the only decision they have to direct their destiny, yet ultimately resulting in a lonely and dreary existence.

Next, is "The Dreamers," this story, although told through a series of narrations, was much more engaging then some of the previous more complicatedly woven tales. The story opens on a boat with a few men sitting around the mast exchanging stories of their lives under the moonlight.

"The waves looked solid, as if one might safely have walked upon them, while it was into the vertiginous sky that one might sink and fall, into the turbulent and unfathomable depths of silvery worlds, of bright silver or dull and tarnished silver, forever silver reflected within silver, moving and changing, towering up, slowly and weightless."

Lincoln and Mira sit and contemplate the art of storytelling and the meaning of life."What is life, Mira, when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn."

Lincoln tells his story, he once fell in love with a prostitute in Rome. He finally persuades her to come away with him and when he shows up the next day to embark on a new life together she has vanished without a trace. He searches and searches for her to no avail and then one night while at a hotel he meets an insecure non-entity of a friend of his, who has stopped along with a self absorbed companion. As the three sit and exchange stories, slowly his friend begins to tell of a recent tragedy that has befallen him. In a comedy of errors, this a-political friend ends up joining a band of militant revolutionaries and shooting and old priest, all at the behest of a beautiful milliner. He is wounded and the milliner ends up nursing him back to health...and then she too disappears. The cocky self absorbed acquaintance at this point is overcome with boredom, being uninterested in anything but himself and begins his story which he is sure will trump the others. He had been impressed with a young virginal nun, and one day on a dare to travel to three cities, drink three bottles of wine and bed three women attempts to take the innocence of this young nun...

Lincoln has a strange suspicion that these two women that have just been described are none other than his precious Olalla. As he ponders this coincidence, who should hurry by in a long cloak with barely a glimpse of her face visible, but this mysterious women that all three men have had chance encounters with. As the three men realize she is the heroine of each of their personal tales, they jump up and head out into the snowy night to follow their muse.

Ultimately the woman they each chase does exist for each of them as they remember. She has become a chameleon of a person, masking her identity to cope with an intense personal tragedy. She has taken on different roles, become different people, constantly donning her endless masks. By living in a world of dreams, fueled by her imagination she is enabled to escape the pain and heartache of life's troubles. "For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide."  Finally when she is able to face the reality of who she is, she dies, her last breath solidifying her reconciliation with self.

"The Poet" is the last of the short stories, and describes one man's attempt to direct fate, believing he has the power over destiny. An old councilor has adopted a young couple, the man a young poet and the woman a young widow. As he playfully toys with them, realizing he has them both in his power he realizes that he will marry the young widow and the young man will remain faithful to his master while he pines away. He gleefully unfolds his demands and pleasure, thinking to himself how like an author he is of the lives of those around him, he the protagonist of this small play.

Ultimately his playthings turn against him and the foils of his matchmaking inadvertently murder him, the young man drunkenly shooting him and the young women afraid for the life of her young lover grabbing a rock and ending what little life the councilor has left. Before he is fatally crushed he cries:

"My poor girl, my dove...listen. Everything is good. All, all! Sacred Fransine," he said, "Sacred puppets."

There is more to say, but no time to say it and as he dies he realizes that this story is better than the one he was creating himself, and that although we have volition, we are not wholly the authors of our fate.

Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen (Part 2)

Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

The third story in the Seven Gothic Tales is "The Monkey," and perhaps one of my favorites. The plot is relatively simple and easy to follow, allowing the reader to sit back and enjoy the unpredictability of the events as they unwind.

A young boy, Boris, is on the verge of moral decline and whether this prompts him to pursue a new fate or the fact that he has run out of things to do, he decides to seek out his old Aunt, the Virgin Prioress of Closter Seven in northern Europe and seek her advice. He would like to marry and hope his aunt can provide a good match for him.

The aunt, overjoyed at this prospect, quickly dashes off a letter to an old Count and friend of hers, the father of Athena. And as Boris, gets ready for his visit to the Count and his future bride, he is impressed with the strength and cunning of his Aunt and women in general.

"Women, he thought, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world..."

Similar to the protagonist of "The Old Chevalier," Boris has a fascination with women, in a sense they exist for his pleasure and to do his bidding. He sets in motion his desire and sits back as his aunt weaves her web. When he asks if there's a chance Athena might not have him, his aunt quickly dismisses the idea. Athena, she says, has no other options, probably has never been within close proximity of eligible men of any kind, and would be a fool to deny such a brilliant match. She goes so far as to say if Athena won't have him then she'll marry him herself!

Athena though, like her namesake, has no desire to consort with a lover or marry, and like the goddess proves to be a formidable challenge, choosing to fight and proclaim war rather than consent to marry Boris. She is a tall, strong, burly woman and Boris is completely shocked when she refuses his proposal, just as he is beginning to warm to the idea and envision their future stocky children.

The aunt proposes to lure Athena into a trap by getting her drunk on champagne in the guise of a quite dinner party and then leaving her to hash out her differences with Boris. Athena, slightly drunk but still able to reason, decides she needs to go to bed, and Boris eventually follows her to her room, where he figures the best course of action would be to profess his undying love, which he has just recently tried on for size and found that he is particularly adept at playing the role of unrequited lover.

"Athena, he said, "I have loved you all my life. You know that without you I shall dry up and shrink, there shall be nothing left of me. Stoop to me, throw me back in the deep. Have mercy on me."

Athena's response to his profession of love is to strike him, knocking out two of his teeth, as they wrestle each other, fighting tooth and nail for the right to impose their will on the other. As they fight, Boris thinks that nothing happier in all the world could have happened to him, and his soul is overjoyed like the the souls of the old Teutons, "to whom the lust of anger was in itself the highest voluptuousness, and who demanded nothing better of their paradise than the capacity for being killed once a day."

His mouth dripping blood, as he dodges punches and kicks, Boris somehow manages to kiss Athena and in a moment emerges the victor of their physical dispute. Athena, having never been kissed before, receives the kiss like the deadliest blow and sinks to the floor like a stone effigy.

The nest morning after taking further advantage of Athena's innocence and naivete, the prioress and Boris extract a promise of marriage from Athena. After she consents to marry Boris, she includes in her oath a further promise to kill Boris the first chance she gets, and then before she can finish speaking a monkey comes shrieking in through the window and dishevels the old aunt.

Although this short story seemed more random and chaotic then the previous two in the collection, I think the moral of what we desire most often has the propensity to kill us, is a relevant one. Boris defines Athena not as a person with her one volition and preferences, but almost as a continuation of his desires, there only to conform to his will. Boris wants to be married and the person to fill the role of spouse is veritably inconsequential. Women, in the world of Isak Dinesen are often misunderstood and unrepresented, but in Athena we are given one woman who is a true warrior of her own independence who manages ultimately to emerge the victor.

Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen (Part 1)

Isak Dinesen, (1885-1962)

Karen Blixen, a  Dutch baroness, began writing under the pen name Isak Dinesen in the early 1930's. Among the most well known and highly regarded of all her works, Seven Gothic Tales, has become enshrined in the archives of modern literature. Her tales hearken toward the grotesque and unexpected and have at times an almost magical quality about them. Dinesen is primarily concerned with the nature of fate and destiny, emphasizing the story rather than the characters and searching a deeper understanding of personal identity.

The first story in the collection is "The Deluge at Norderney," a tale of a flood that takes place along the Atlantic coast of Holstein in 1835. Four people are trapped in the loft of a barn and as the story opens they look at their compatriots and ask themselves "How will these people do to die with?" The castaways are comprised of a rabidly virginal old maiden of great wealth and of an old illustrious race, Miss Malin and with her a young, perpetually quivering and perhaps somewhat mousy girl of 16, the Countess Calypso van Platen. The third person, Cardinal Hamilcar, bandaged and bruised from his escape from the whirling maelstrom of the sea and lastly Jonathan Maersk, a young Dane suffering from an extreme bout of melancholia.

As they make themselves comfortable in the hay they begin to tell each other their stories. Miss Malin starts, she was once, despite her fanatical virginity, still a favorite in society. She took the biblical passage "whoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his hearth" quite seriously and made it her moral imperative to avoid being looked at as much as possible. Despite her somewhat extreme views, a young prince falls in love with her, having already attained everything in life there was to attain and that rather cheaply. Because she poses a challenge he becomes charmed and eventually impressed.

"About Miss Malin there was nothing striking but price. That this thin, big nosed, penniless girl, two years older than he, would demand not only his princely name and a full share in his brilliant future, but also his prostrate adoration, his life-long fidelity, and subjection in life and death and could be had for nothing less,-this impressed the young Prince."

Eventually her would be lover is killed within a fortnight of his proposal on the battle field of Jena, leaving Miss Malin now more than ever married to the promise she had made him, prepared to pursue a life of fidelity and honor and slightly mad. Having assumed that a multitude of men had indeed committed adultery with her, she devoted  the rest of her life to paying penance for being an accomplice in their sins.

After Cardinal Hamilcar tells his story, Jonathan tells his. He is basically too popular and despite his loathing of the aristocracy has somehow become their poster-child. Even while standing on a bridge, contemplating suicide, he knows if he carries out his plan it will become all the rage, with young people wandering around in black, sick with melancholia and jumping off bridges just to keep up with the veritable Joneses.

As his story finishes Miss Malin says,"You complain of people looking at you. But what if you were bent down by the opposite misfortune? What if nobody could or would see you, although you were, yourself, firmly convinced of your own existence?"

She then tell the story of Calypso, a young woman whom no one has taken the time to see, who has grown up under the impression that only men were valuable members of society and if the unfortunate fate of being a woman befell one, the best remedy was to shroud all traces of womanhood and try your best to disappear. Calypso's uncle, who has charge of her, does his best to remove all traces of the feminine, hoping to salvage her spirit. "But when he lectured to her upon the infinite loveliness of the circle, she asked him : if it were really so fair, what color was it - was it not blue? Ah, no, he said, it had no color at all. And from that moment he began to fear that she would not become a boy."

The Cardinal and Miss Malin decide the young people should not have to die alone and quickly put together an impromptu wedding and as the dusk fades and the water rises, the young, now married couple shyly fall asleep in the hay, just the tips of their fingers touching, leaving the elders to finish drinking their gin and waiting for the continually rising flood to engulf them.

Each character tells a story, opening themselves up to a vulnerability that allows them to step back and ascertain who they really are. As each of them discover, we are more than our stories would lead us to believe and even our stories can sometimes deceive us.

As the water makes it's way to their feet, swirling about their shoes, the Cardinal removes his bandages and reveals that he is not actually the Cardinal, but the valet and actor Kasparson. He has killed the Cardinal and it was in this instance that "mated his soul with destiny." And the destiny granted him was to play one more role, and perhaps the finest role left to play.

Although momentarily shocked, Miss Malin realizes that none of us are truly who we pretend to be and she accepts the solipsistic Kasparson for who he is. As the water reaches the hem of her skirt he kisses her and the "proud old maid" does not go to the grave unkissed.

The next story in the collection is "The Old Chevalier," and it tells the story of a young man who after just parting from a lady he adores who attempted to poison him, wanders through the rainy streets  and meets a woman, equally as wet and extremely beautiful. He somehow convinces her to go back to his room with him, unable to believe his good luck! Truly this innocent young woman must have stepped down from heaven, sent by the gods for his good pleasure!

"I thought it after all only reasonable, only to be expected that the great friendly power of the universe should manifest itself again, and send me, out of the night, as a help and consolation, this naked and drunk young girl, a miracle of gracefulness."

He blushingly undresses her by the fire and they proceed to have champagne, half clothed sitting by the warmth of the hearth. Eventually after sharing their souls, he realizes all other relationships, all other loves truly pale in comparison to what they have shared, they make their way to the bed, where he takes away her presumed innocence and breaths a satisfied sigh, there is or rather must be a sort of karma. He has deserved this woman! And as he sits mulling over his good fortune, the woman rises and as she gets dressed says "Maria said that- she said that I should get twenty francs."

Again the theme is that life is unexpected and that we can never truly anticipate what fate will bring. After he realizes this woman is a prostitute he tries to rationalize what could have driven such a young innocent woman to such a dire lifestyle. For the first time he recognizes her as a human being, with an "existence of her own, not as a gift for me." The play is over.

Two of my favorite quotes from this short story are: "most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick." The implication is that for all truly interesting and original women, they must be willing to think for themselves and be willing to defy the expectation of society.

"I remember that she told me, rather sadly to begin with, a story of a very old monkey which could do tricks, and had belonged to an Armenian organ-grinder. Its master had died, and now it wanted to do its tricks and was always waiting for the catchword, but nobody knew it."

I feel like I can totally empathize with the monkey, I have tricks and talents just waiting to be appreciated, but they go perpetually undiscovered. Perhaps, since I have been given the gift of language I can someday teach someone the catchword.