Selected Poems - Fernando Pessoa

“One of my mental complications - horrible beyond words - is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.” 

Pessoa - October 30, 1908

I’m about to embark on what I hope will be a long and profitable love affair with Portuguese poetry. The thing that I love about this canon project is that it always broadens my horizons beyond the known and expected. There are moments (this past month) when I began to wonder if eight years of this was enough…how will I know when to stop? Is there ever a good stopping point? I very obviously will never finish this project unless somehow A. I learn to read faster or the Matrix becomes real and I can just download books into my brain or B. The great minds of science figure out a way one could read while being cryogenically frozen…but since neither option seems imminent or very likely…

I almost stopped this month. I called my sister and told her maybe it was time to be done. I’ve learned a lot…maybe it’s time to throw in the towel. She wasn’t an explicit “yes”…and so almost reluctantly I picked up a book of poetry by Pessoa, and then as usually happens, was transported down the rabbit hole into a world beyond my ken or imagination. And so, Pessoa has become the perfect gateway drug into Portuguese literature and poetry and for the time being the project will continue with reignited passion with no foreseeable end in sight. I have too many questions and rabbit trails to follow at this point.          

This post will be more an introduction into Pessoa and the questions I will begin to follow than a traditional essay.

Perhaps there is no greater modernist than the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). With the modernist obsession with fracturing and dislocation, Pessoa embodies this fractured sensibility with a whole new fervor, taking on the identities of three other poets and a coterie of seventy-two different personalities. For Pessoa, identity is fluid and complex, and his heteronyms allow him to submerge himself into this complexity rather than continuously wrestle with it. 

According to Jonathon Griffin (1) “Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems.” Each of his different poets have markedly different styles and voices. Pessoa created histories for his personalities beyond the page and frequently found himself an observer to their dramatic arguments rather than a possessor of them.

According to George Steiner: 

“Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance.) ‘Heteronyms’ as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his ‘voices’, Pessoa conceived a highly distinct poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics, and most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as ‘everything that Pessoa is not and more.’ He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuouso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterizes Pessoa’s ‘own’ intimate verse.” (2)

First, as an example of Pessoa’s poetic style we’ll take a look at “Suddenly a Hand” (14.3.1917) translated by Jonathon Griffin (3):

Suddenly a hand, part of some occult haunting,

Between the folds of the night and of my sleep

Shakes me, and I awake, and in the deep

Neglect of night discern no face or movement. 

Yet an old terror I have, immanent

And unburied, as though from a king’s siege

Descends, and affirms itself my liege

Without command, without threat, without taunting. 

And I can feel my life - how on a string 

Of Unconscious abruptly tightening

I am, by some nocturnal hand, controlled. 

I feel that I am no one, only shade, 

Of a face I don’t see, being in its shade,

And in nothing exist as the dark’s cold. 

The enjambment leaves the reader with a sense of unpredictability and tension. The repetition of ‘without’ creates an echoing effect of isolation, alone with oneself in a chasm of impenetrability. The mood is haunting and somber, precariously held together by a ‘string’… The poem opens with a disembodied hand, and ends with the narrator realizing he is but a disembodied face, or rather a “shade of a face I don’t see, being in its shade.” His life is controlled by a disembodied puppeteer, and the narrator stands at its mercy; identity and “selfhood” being ambiguous, mercurial and always beyond grasp.   As mentioned above, Pessoa takes the modern movement’s preference for flux over stasis and internalizes it, he’s flotsam along his own stream of consciousness. 

Alberto Caeiro, the bucolic, “uneducated” poet, writes almost exclusively in free verse and is described by Octavio Paz as: “..the sun in whose orbit, Reis, Campos, and Pessoa himself rotate. In each are particles of negation or unreality. Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn’t believe in anything. He exists.” (4) Perhaps I will circle back and do an entire essay on “The Keeper of Sheep” but for now here are a few excerpts I found intriguing: 

To think is uncomfortable like walking in the rain

When the wind is rising and it looks like raining more. 

I have no ambitions or wants. 

To be a poet is no ambition of mine. 

It is my way of staying alone. 

[…]

When I sit down to write verses, 

Or, as I walk along the roads or short cuts, 

Write verses on the paper that is in my thought,

I feel a shepherd’s crook in my hands

And see and outline of myself

There on the hill-crest,

Listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, 

Or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,

And smiling vaguely like a man who does not 

understand what is being said

And tries to pretend he understands. 

Very Zen. I’d like to spend a lot of time on Caeiro, it’s easy to see why he’s described as the ‘master.’ His writing is stripped down and bare and yet so incredibly evocative. I love the chiastic: listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,” there’s almost a similar disembodied hand leading both the ideas and flocks on a imperceptible string. Again beneath the surface is the problem of communication, but here Caeiro is comfortable with the fact that knowledge is illusory and unattainable. 

Ricardo Reis, a physician, writes in mostly metrical but unrhymed poetry influenced in part by Horace and Catullus. The poem I picked for Reis, “Legion Live in Us” (13.11.1935) is less Horatian and more to the point of dissociation: 

Legion live in us; 

I think or feel and don’t know 

Who it is thinking, feeling. 

I am merely the place

Where the thinking or feeling is.

I have more souls than one. 

There are more ‘I’s than myself. 

And still I exist

Indifferent to all. 

I silence them: I speak. 

The crisscross thrusts

Of what I feel or don’t feel

Dispute in the I I am.

Unknown. They dictate nothing

To the I I know. I write. 

By 1914 Pessoa was aware that he was no longer “himself.” In a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues he writes: “I am no longer myself. I am a fragment of myself kept in an abandoned museum”  and  “I am like a room filled with fantastic mirrors that falsely reflect a single previous reality that isn’t in any of them and is in all of them.” (5) In answer to how he knows which heteronym is doing the writing, Pessoa says that Reis is the better writer but with a “purism I find excessive.” (6) 

And lastly Alvaro de Campos, the naval engineer/ adventurist, influenced by the Italian futurists and in constant dialogue with Walt Whitman. De Campos is the blackguard of the group, writing scathing manifestos and publicly critiquing the works and opinions of Pessoa, and occasionally writing/publishing poetry while drunk and broken hearted, such as “Ah Margarida” in which this postscript says: “Dictated by the naval engineer, Sr. Alvaro de Campos, in a state of alcoholic unconsciousness.”

Here’s an excerpt from “Triumphal Ode”: 

Ah, to be able to express myself whole as a motor expresses itself! 

To be complete like a machine! 

To be able to go through life triumphal like an automobile, the very latest model!

Be able at least to permeate myself physically with all that, 

Rip myself right open, lay myself bare completely, 

render myself passive

To all the oil and heat and carbon perfumes

Of that stupendous, black, artificial and insatiable 

flora!

I’m looking forward to the day when I can chuckle and say things like “That’s so typical of De Campos and his mechanical modernism…” (I should probably be holding a glass of bourbon while I say this.) It’s easy to see why De Campos and Pessoa were frequently at odds, occasionally rebutting Pessoa’s views in literary publications. De Campos seems to have a thing for a good simile…my quick take away from this excerpt is thus: 

Beneath the exclamations and presented awe at the mechanical age, lurks in the background the horrors of mechanical warfare and mass slaughter of the first World War. And like Pessoa, but from a different angle is the problem of identity and communication. The narrative voice is envious of being truly known in a way impossible for mere mortals of the modernist age. And while the ‘latest model’ is proud and triumphant, for a lonely ineffectual poet, there’s the hovering anxiety of being remembered and triumphant only in death. 

Notes: 

1.  Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000. pg. 9

2.  Steiner, George. “A Man of Many Parts,” The Observer, Sunday 3 June 2001. 

3.  All Pessoa poems from: Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000

4.  Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994

5.  Jackson, David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a complicated book to describe. The structure of the novel is frequently compared to a jazz composition, with themes and their riffs weaving through complicated patterns and distortions. I think that is a helpful comparison. If the title of the piece is “Invisibility” the riffs would be about the problems of vision in all its many permutations. 

The opening line: “I am an invisible man,” contrasts with the opening of Moby Dick "Call me Ishmael." In Moby Dick the quest is seemingly straightforward, i.e. Captain Ahab’s vendetta against the white whale and the hopeless quest to find him. For the invisible man the quest is amorphous, his white whale is his own namelessness. His identity is constantly in flux as he tries to make sense of belonging to a nonsensical world.  

A leitmotif running throughout the novel is the problems of mistaken identity. The protagonist “sees” himself as the next potential Booker T. Washington, an illusion that slowly dissolves. Mr. Norton, the white college trustee, has had his illusions of the peaceful cultivation of the black race shattered when he’s confronted with the brokenness and complexity of the black lives that live beyond the campus boundaries. Out of sight out of mind, he has no frame of reference for life existing outside of his imperialistic vision. 

Perhaps the most significant riff on identity is when the protagonist, after suffering a traumatic accident in the paint factory is cocooned/coffined in a small medical apparatus. The staff hover around him talking about the theoretical success the prefrontal lobotomy machine will have. As the disembodied voices talk above him he hears the voices agree that his psychology is not at risk, because it’s doubtful how much psychology he possesses in the first place…it’s a win win situation: they get to try out their new machine and “society will suffer no traumata on his account.” (366) 

“There was a pause. A pen scratched upon paper. Then, ‘Why not castration, doctor?’”

The scientific cultivation of the black person has been transformed from an idyllic college campus to barbaric medical experimentation. In each instance the black person is matter to be changed and transformed, but without personhood to tether it to humanity. As the protagonist undergoes horrific shock treatments, biting his lips to smother his screams, his body convulses with the pulsating electric. 

“Look, he’s dancing, “ someone called. 

‘No, really?’

An oily face looked in. ‘They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot boy! Get hot!” it said with a laugh.”  (368)

Despite the electric shock therapy and the unequivocal claim that the result will be a “complete change of personality,” the protagonist emerges largely intact. The only thing missing is his name. And now for the first time he must wrestle with his own invisibility. His name has become meaningless, he has been transformed from a man with a dream and the possibility of hope into “blackness and bewilderment and pain.”  (372) As he’s pressed over and over to answer questions, his lack of identity begins to haunt him: 

“I wanted freedom, not destruction. It was exhausting, for no matter what scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” (376)

Another significant theme is confusion that leads to violence. The first instance of this thematic cycle is within the first chapter when the protagonist is asked to read his high school graduation speech at a boxing match for the white spectators. His speech argues that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress,” and as he makes his way to the ballroom he’s swept up along with the young black boxers getting ready for the fight. I say “swept up” because the majority of the action in this book happens without the volition or consent of the protagonist. He’s merely flotsam in the endlessly meaningless chaos. 

As he’s pushed along with the nine others into the servant elevator, the atmosphere is tense and without solidarity. Our protagonist assesses his compatriots and finds them wanting: 

“…I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech. In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington…I felt superior to them in my way, and I didn’t like the manner in which we were all crowded together into a servant’s elevator.” (29)

As the doors open they are led through the haze of cigar smoke toward the center of the room and pushed into place. And there standing in front of them is a naked blonde woman, gyrating slowly to the music “the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils.” (32)

Only, part of the entertainment is the boxing match, the other part is the humiliation of the black male in all aspects of his personhood. Will the black boys look at the woman? Can they control themselves in the presence of a naked gyrating woman, their control or lack thereof being evident in their thin boxing shorts? The protagonist feels a wave of “irrational guilt and fear.” In Black Like Me, the author John Howard Griffin, who had dyed his skin black to experience racism in the south, was cautioned to never look directly at a white woman under any circumstances. In Mississippi he was told to avoid looking at movie posters if they happen to have a white woman on them, any direct gaze was enough to run the risk of lynching. 

“I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V. I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes.” (32)

Their looking creates a layering of objectification. The subjugation of a black man in the south circa 1950 is almost taken for granted…but with the arrival of the blonde, the objects are equally engaged in objectifying the woman standing before them as the white men surrounding them. The protagonist sees the woman before him as a sexual object and as such he dehumanizes her. The description of the woman exposes the irony of the American “dream”. Although the woman has the American flag tattooed across her belly, her “V” is not for victory, but an ironic reminder of subjugation.

In Shelly Eversley’s essay “On Female Invisibility in the Novel” she argues that one of the most under explored aspects of Invisible Man is the concept of vision. 

“More than a literal question of seeing, the protagonist’s life depends on his ability to ‘learn to look beneath the surface’ and discern reality despite ‘mirrors of hard, distorting glass’ (153, 3). Such discernment requires he learn to distinguish salient meaning from stereotype.” 1

The protagonist imagines this blonde woman as a type of mythic siren, “calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea.” (32) This image presupposes a level of agency, but as a clarinet begins to softly “moan”, something about the song snaps him out of his reverie and allows him to see the world around him more objectively. Both the black men and the woman are pawns in this horrific game of chess. He notices now specific men in the throng of lascivious white faces. One man, in a particularly disturbing simile is described as “clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow obscene grind.”(33) 

Gradually, the focus of interest shifts from the physiological predicament of the boys to the dancing blonde and as the circle tightens their “beefy” fingers begin to reach out for her flesh. Mistaken at first for a siren, the protagonist now sees her lack of agency. Her inability to escape and her equal subjugation. She tries to gracefully dance away from their groping fingers but is eventually caught and carried out of the room, hoisted above their heads like a prize. And as she is carried away he sees her for the first time: 

“…above her red, fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys. As I watched, they tossed her twice and her soft breasts seemed to flatten against the air and her legs flung wildly as she spun. Some of the more sober ones helped her to escape. And I started off the floor, heading for the anteroom with the rest of the boys. Some were still crying and in hysterics.” (34)

This has just been the prologue to the fight. The theme of distorted vision and confusion has been set up and now we circle back for a riff. In the first rendition the boys think they are about to fight each other, but instead are forced to contend with themselves and their own sexuality. In the second rendition the boys again think they are about to fight each other, but being blindfolded individualizes the experience where they are battling blindly against a bloody melee of flesh. And once again they are goaded by the white onlookers: 

“See that boy over there? one of the men said. [before being blindfolded] “I want you to run across at the bell and give it to him right in the belly. If you don’t get him, I’m going to get you. I don’t like how he looks.”(34)

The irony here is the emphasis of vision. The boys won’t be able to see anything blindfolded. This is the black man’s predicament: There is no solidarity in a ‘dog eat dog’ world. He has been fear-mongered into an automaton, mechanically obeying another’s commands based not on rationale but biased opinion; the white man controls everything by his preferences: he doesn’t like how the other boy “looks.”

Within this paradigm there is no sight. The protagonist feels “blind terror” he “wanted to see, to see more desperately than ever before, but the blindfold was as tight as a thick skin-puckering scab and when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, “Oh no you don’t you black bastard! Leave that alone!” (36)

Throughout the novel this will be repeated over and over again, the idea of pushing aside the “white” in order to be able to see. And always in response the disembodied voice of a white man unwilling to relinquish control. There is a dichotomy between those who have the power to see and be seen and those who do not.  With vision comes dignity. 

“Blindfolded, I could no longer control my emotions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or drunken man…A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the floor. Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold.” (37)

Ellison said once that he didn’t set out to write a protest novel, and I think the “black world behind the blindfold” is what is the differentiating factor. This isn’t simplistic racism, it’s not as easy as black vs. white. It’s a broken system that throws all interactions within the body politic into confusion. Throughout the fight everyone fights everyone hysterically in “complete anarchy.” “No group fought together for long.” Embedded within the text is an allusion to the failures of both Marxism and Black Nationalism that the protagonist will contend with throughout the novel. 

For Ellison, the problem of the Invisible Man is complex. He argues that invisibility comes from two basic facts of American life: The first is racial conditioning which leads white people to make judgments about black people as inferior and ultimately subhuman. The second is the “formlessness of Negro life wherein all values are in flux.” 2  

“The boys groped about like blind, cautious crabs crouching to protect their midsections, their heads pulled in short against their shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smoke-filled air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails.”  (38) 

The values are in flux, not because they lack solidarity as the Black Nationalist would argue, but because they have lost their dignity as humans. The protagonist realizes slowly the fighters have been pulled off the mat one by one until it’s just him and the largest brute in the group. As they dodge and parry he leans in and whispers “Fake like I knocked you out, you can have the prize.” But in this moment his opponent has come to believe that this fight is worth fighting for, that despite the puppetry, he chooses to fight: one black boy against another. 

Ultimately, the protagonist will find himself again in the same predicament, blindly fighting against another black man for the right to live, only to find himself buried alive in a coal cellar, left alone with his nightmares. 

Written in 1952, this book has a timeless quality about it, which perhaps isn’t a good thing. Ellison challenges the reader to go beyond discussions of racism and begin to ponder what disembodied voices are guiding our societal prejudices for better or for worse. 

It’s a fallacy that racism is on the wane. Racism is a protean entity, always in flux. “A changing ideology with the constant and rational purpose of perpetuating and justifying a social system that is racialized.” 3 Our standards must evolve with the times rather than being permanently entrenched in a Slavery/Jim Crow era paradigm. Three years after Invisible Man was published 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered for having a conversation with a white woman in a grocery store. In 2014 a 12 year old black boy, Tamir Rice was shot repeatedly by a police officer while playing with a toy gun in a park. When black bodies are objectified as predatory it creates a vision problem. Christian Smith And Michael Emerson argue in Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America that our framework for describing racism needs to change. Instead of racism, they argue for a more complex understanding of racialization: 

“It understands the racial practices that reproduce racial division in the contemporary United States are ‘(1) increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites.’ It understands that racism is not mere individual, overt prejudice or the free-floating irrational driver of race problems, but the collective misuse of power that results in diminished life opportunities for some racial groups.” 4

In the prologue, the Invisible Man says that what ultimately leads to his invisibility isn’t something inherent in his biochemical makeup, but rather something intrinsic in the eyes of those he comes in contact with. It’s an “inner eye” problem. A choosing to not see by choosing to not look. In the end, the relevance of this book is a reminder to choose to see. To wrestle with our own identity and the visibility of those around us. No matter what echelon of society you belong to, whether visible or invisible, we humans in our “absurd diversity”  all have a role to play.

Footnotes: 

1. Eversley, Shelly.  "Female Invisibility in the Novel." Bloom's Guides: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, ed. Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, New York, 2008, pp 57-58.

2. Ellison, Ralph. "Working Notes for Invisible Man." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp24

3. Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford University Press, 2000.

4. Ibid.

An Imaginary Life - David Malouf

Reading An Imaginary Life right now seems entirely appropriate. According to Amy Chua in Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, “America is beginning to display destructive political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: ethnonationalist movements; backlash by elites against the masses; popular backlash against both “the establishment” and “outsider minorities” viewed as disproportionately powerful; and, above all, the transformation of democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.” 1

In a system of zero-sum political tribalism, group identity is fostered by the rhetoric of threat and fear of the "other," resulting in the insular “us” beginning to demonize the external “they”. The "other" often becomes the simplified scapegoat for complex societal problems. This demonizing and pejorative myth making of a subgroup then serves to legitimize hostility and aggression. 

This increase in polarizing rhetoric and hostility isn’t a modern problem, first century Rome controlled her vast empire comprised of disparate people groups with the fear of the "barbarian. "According to Diodorus (2) the Galatians/Gauls were savage barbarians, little better than wild beasts. They were wild and untamed with hair so thick from their “lime-water” treatments that it resembled the mane of a horse. These barbarians were blonde haired and blue eyed with “rippling muscles” and a predilection for fighting naked…but most of his grievances come dangerously close to the pot calling the kettle black. Coveting “gold and heavy jewelry of which they own a great deal” (5.28) Or my favorite example of a barbarian: “They are also sexually promiscuous and transgressive, men and women alike. The men “rage with lust, in outlandish fashion, for the embraces of males,” and they do not see it as a dishonor to prostitute themselves freely to one another.”(5.32)…Um…

In her provocative book Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished Brigitte Kahl discusses the visual aesthetics that emphasized power over the vanquished, such as the denarii issued by Julius Caesar that showed the armor and weapons of a defeated Gaul. Even their places of worship had depictions of Gauls/Barbarians being defeated by the pantheon of the Greco-Roman Gods. Visually the oppression of the barbaric/ other was inescapable. 

“Roman authors frequently used the Latin term terror when they discussed Gauls/Galatians. We should understand the Gallic War not as a singular event under Julius Caesar but as part of an ongoing, multistage Greco-Roman campaign against a Galatians ‘global terrorism;’ an archetype that has informed later occidental warfare as well.” 3

The one thing a Roman citizen could agree upon was that barbarians were less than human with little to no favorable attributes and that the last place you would want to be is in barbarian country, surrounded by horselike promiscuous men and women…

And this is where An Imaginary Life(4) begins. Ovid finds himself banished to Tomis in 8CE for a “poem and an error.”  In exile from his rhetorically beloved Rome, he is surrounded by recently “tamed” barbarians in the furthermost corner of the Roman Empire. 

Written as a letter in five parts to an unknown reader, Ovid tries to make sense of his life and his surroundings in the far reaches of modern day Romania. When it isn’t bitterly cold their encampment is being pillaged by hordes from the north, and for the few short months of the year when it is temperate enough to be endurable, it stinks and the horde of barbarians is exchanged for campaigns of warring insects. 

“I have found no tree here that rises amongst the low, grayish brown scrub. No flower. No fruit. Even the higher orders of the vegetable kingdom have not yet arrived among us. We are centuries from the notion of an orchard or a garden made simply to please…The grasslands and beyond all lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with the snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings. 

But I am describing a state of mind, no place. 

I am in exile here.”  (p.11)

For one of the most prolific writers of the first century, to be in a place where language has failed him is a more crushing exile than his physical displacement. He cannot communicate. These barbarians speak their own form of gibberish and even their poor attempts at Latin are incommunicable. Perhaps for the first time in his life he is left entirely alone with his thoughts. And slowly the reality of where he is and who and what he has become begin to creep into the confines of his soul. No longer is he a court poet of the patrician order, none of that matters here. In Tomis he is a doddering old man, a “crazy, comic old man, grotesque, tearful, who understands nothing, can say nothing, and whose ways,…are absurdly out of keeping with the facts of our daily existence.” (p.13) 

For nearly a year he has been rendered dumb. Wandering “in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species.” An old man, Ryzak, has been appointed his caretaker, and slowly Ovid begins to translate the nonsensical way of the barbarians one gesture at a time. 

Part I weaves Ovid’s waking life with his dream life. His dreams still tether him to a semblance of reality that grounds his identity. He reminds himself of who he was and the legacy that he has had, all meaningless now, but the memories serve as a talisman to ward off the barbarianism. His dreams are filled with frenzied searching at the edge of the world for something he can’t quite conceptualize. He digs and claws at the earth, begging it to reveal it’s answers: 

“I fall to my knees and begin digging with my long nails in the earth. Sometimes wolves come, and they claw at the earth besides me. Howling. We dig together, and they pay no more attention to me than they would a ghost. But I know that whatever they are scratching after, I must discover before them, or I am lost. So I dig harder, faster, sweating, with the moonlight greasy upon me. Unable to tell myself: this is a dream.”  (p.14)

This nightmare is reminiscent of the story of Nebuchadnezzar.(5)  Another exile, driven away from his people, who slowly devolves into a wild animal “eating grass like an ox, his body drenched with the dew of Heaven until his hair grew like feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.” While left in an animal like state he is forced to wrestle with his dependence on God for even his sanity. When Nebuchadnezzar acknowledges God his sanity is restored and he returns to his rule as king of Babylon. 

Ovid doesn’t believe in the gods, he has no one to call on that could rescue him or unravel the algorithm that has brought him here. He is stuck in the quagmire of Cartesian materialism. Cogito ergo sum seems unhelpful when surrounded by the desolate wasteland at the edge of civilization. There is no recognition of a truth that will reinstate him to his former life of conspicuous living. He is stuck here. Stuck asking one question after another, trying to find himself, trying to find a way to survive. 

One of the questions Ovid is seeking an answer for is what makes us human and what is our place in this vast cosmology. Ovid defines his humanity in terms of his place within Roman society; all others are compared and found wanting. The Getae have a language that sounds barbarous and guttural, even as Ovid contemplates the sounds of this foreign tongue he feels himself slipping back “a step in the order of things”  toward a lower species. This lower order of beings he describes as having “not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human, who have not yet entered what we call society and become Romans under the law.”(p.16)

As Part I comes to a close, Ovid has exchanged the gods of the pantheon for the gods of human potential. “We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for whose delight we have prepared a landscape, and who can only be god.” (p.26) With enough time and the Roman predilection for cultivation, they (humans) will graft and transform the landscape slowly until it reveals “to us the creatures we long for and must become.”

Over time Ovid begins to assimilate into the culture around him and grudgingly he begins to admire aspects that had originally felt foreign and barbaric. He begins to admire his caretaker, the old man that each day seems more noble and gentle than any Roman. Idealistically he makes a 180 degree turn: 

“I now almost understand these people’s speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving. It isn’t at all like our Roman tongue, whose endings are designed to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling. This language is the raw life and unity of things. I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principles of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are and changes them into what they would be.” (p.60)

The hopeless pessimism of Part I has been exchanged for almost blind idealism in Part II. The natives are still being classified but this time on the other end of the spectrum, reminiscent of Rousseau’s noble savage. In a sense Ovid has past the first test and has been able to see beyond the presumed rhetorical savagery and has come to respect these tribal people as a type of fellow human. His next test is another proverbial step down the ladder: he will convince the tribe to adopt a wolf boy he has found while on a hunting expedition. 

Here’s his chance at cultivating and sculpting a human tabula rasa. An eleven year old boy, raised by wolves, unsullied from the politics of man. Ovid takes this boy on as a project and his life is renewed with a sense of vitality and purpose. While Ovid believes he is rescuing the boy, albeit for a science experiment, he admits that he cowardly refuses to trap and truss the boy. As the boy is being “rescued” by the hunting party Ovid looks on: 

“When he suddenly stumbled into the clearing and stopped before me, he was in a state of utter panic, exhausted, half-crazed, his shoulders torn and bleeding where twigs had caught them…”(p.63)

Ovid justifies a bit of brutality in the belief that speech, i.e. Latin or Getaen will humanize this young person and allow him to experience reality in a far superior way. Very slowly, in fits and starts Ovid begins to form a type of trust with this wild boy. As Ovid begins to teach the boy the language of men the boy in turn teaches Ovid the language of the birds, mimicking with perfect accuracy the language of the world around him: 

“All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks.” (p.88)

Ovid begins to have doubts about who is teaching whom. This wild-boy slowly begins teaching the language of the landscape, exposing the secrets buried deep within the earth, that have always remained on the periphery and inaccessible to the “cultivated” mind. The boy reveals a world beyond Ovid’s imagination, beyond his capacity to dream up or conceive. “I think therefore I am” seems isolating and narrow in a world of possibility. Perhaps “I see therefor I hope” begins to creep into Ovid’s epistemology. 

Despite his best intentions, Ovid has plucked the boy out of his world and enforced his own upon him. When the first snowflakes begin to fall the boy is desperate to return to the wild and has to be physically restrained and for the first time Ovid begins to feel a sense of overwhelming guilt: 

“All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my will, a figure in my dream. Now as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me.”  (p.102)

The story doesn’t end here though. There is another important lesson for Ovid to learn about his “noble savages.” He has almost neutered them in his idealistic rendering of their society and now must confront the fact that these tribal people are complex and mercurial, like all human societies, with rites and rituals outside of his purview. 

During the winter the wild-boy gets sick and as he lies on his pallet for days battling a fever, the matriarch cautions the family members to keep their distance. The boy contains the spirit of some animal being that is trying to escape in order to devour one of their own. Despite the matriarch’s disapproval the young mother offers care and compassion to the sick boy, a cup of cool water, a cloth across his brow. But as the wild-boy gets better the young tribal boy, Lullo, gets sick. The old woman believes that: 

“…the Child’s spirit has worked all this (sickness) out of malice, and that the boy’s mother has indeed been made the carrier, but through her own weakness and pity. In turning aside to care for the Child she has betrayed her son’s life to him. She has permitted the death spirit to pass between them.”  (p.116)

In the end it is fear of the unknown other that galvanizes the tribe into action. Thankfully Lullo gets better before the wild boy can be sacrificed or murdered, but then the old man, Ovid’s friend and protector gets sick and the matriarch again claims it is the fault of the boy and his evil animal spirit. The old man gets sicker and then is bludgeoned to death by the tribal men so he will die fighting and be victorious in death. While the funeral rites are taking place Ovid and the boy sneak off into the wilderness and run for their lives across the edge of the known world into the endless void at the ends of the earth. 

An Australian author, Malouf wrote An Imaginary Life in 1978, when issues with the systemic treatment of the indigenous people of Australia was beginning to be questioned. Ovid’s blatant attempts to colonize his indigenous wild boy and cultivate his little plot of soil reveal the brokenness of such narrow perspectives. Unfortunately, this lesson is not easily learned. The tendency to gravitate to “us” vs “them” language is almost an inherent human quality. While it seems Australia has made a few steps forward in recognizing the sovereignty of their indigenous people, in the United States tribalism is fostering group hatred and fanaticism. 

Perhaps we should all spend less time getting sucked into political tribal rhetoric and more time reading books. 

1. Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2018),12.

2. Diodorus, Library of History (80-29 B.C.E.) You can find the complete text here

3. Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010)

4. All quotes from: David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (London: Vintage Books, 1978)

5. Daniel 4:33

*Beloved - Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an exercise in traumatic haunting and the impact of slavery on both the individual and the community. Dedicated to the “sixty million and more,” the book operates as a type of monument to the unspeakable tragedy that was institutionalized through systemic slavery. 

Told through shifting perspectives in both narrative and chronology, one of Morrison’s major themes throughout the novel is the subsequent fragmentation created by trauma, and the text itself embodies this fragmentation. There are gaps in the story as characters attempt to rationalize tragedy and communicate their past.  These gaps create a space for the reader to engage, to reconsider details and attempt to reconstruct the lives of the characters in an active rather than passive way.

Another one of Morrison’s major themes is “unspeakableness.” The title character, Beloved, functions as both the individual ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter and all those lost and disembodied throughout this tragic history. Her tragedy is a microcosm of all the tragedies that have come before and will come after. Yet, as a narrative voice Beloved remains to some extent silent.  We have but a glimpse of her internal turmoil in her brief monologue, within that narrative space her language is layered, fragmented and broken.There is no language that can describe her tragedy and so she speaks in a multiplicity of voices throughout time and space, exchanging the unique specificity of a two year old girl murdered in a woodshed for the generalized “Dearly Beloved.”

The ambiguity of who is speaking, as well as the layering of text, creates a type of narrative columbarium. We see in Beloved’s monologue the suggestion of characters we caught mere glimpses of now given a line of text to memorialize their death. We recognize Sethe’s mother crouching from the men that will impregnate her on this voyage. We recognize the girl locked away since she was a “pup” in a house “over by Deer Creek,” watching herself break into pieces as: 

“he hurts where I sleep  he puts his fingers there    I drop the food and break into pieces …” (246) 1

The chorus of the ‘Dearly Beloved’ pour out their stories in scraps and whispers, the narrative is broken and in ‘pieces’ just as the lives it tries to describe. Syntax and structure metaphorically have been thrown overboard along with the dead bodies. 

The impact of slavery and it’s residual trauma was not something you could leave behind. It not only destroyed human bodies, but it was also something that distorted identity and fragmented human minds. For Morrison slavery has distorted everything.  Her characters must cross not only the physical Ohio river, geographically separating them from freedom, but also the metaphorical Ohio river psychologically separating them from healthy wholistic conceptions of themselves. Each one haunted by the ghosts of slavery in a unique and individualized way. 

The shifting perspectives create vignettes into the many permutations of ‘freedom’ and what it has cost. Baby Suggs is the only character to be manumitted, but the cost was to leave her son behind. As the novel opens she is waiting to die, contemplating different colors, because to let her mind wander through the memories of a lifetime of pent up grief would destroy her. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Denver is born into ‘freedom,’ and yet represents the dysfunction of generational trauma. She has spent her life in isolation and fear. The details of Beloved’s murder seem to have never been fully communicated and so she has no context in which to interpret them. The only thing she knows is that the murder happened outside, and so while Sethe believes she has woven a cocoon of safety for her daughter, Denver avoids leaving the house so that: “it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me.”(273) The thing Sethe has tried to create: i.e. safety, is exactly the thing missing from 124. 

For Sethe, as the novel opens her grief has been manageable. Their house is merely haunted by a baby ghost, and they consider themselves lucky. (12) When Paul D. shows up he threatens this manageable grief by offering hope. Hope will destroy the structure of grief she has created; hope that she won’t exist in isolation, that someone will care enough to take responsibility for her breasts and put his story next to hers. Hope is enough to enrage the demons of grief, guilt and shame, and although the baby leaves the house, she comes back, a full grown ‘Beloved’, the past literally haunting the present with it’s physical presence and accusatory gaze. 

When Sethe realizes that Beloved is her murdered daughter, she becomes enslaved by grief. She is consumed and devoured by Beloved one story at a time as she attempts to explain and justify her actions to a ghost. Slowly, Sethe walks away from her job, from the last exposure to the outside world and tunnels, in isolation, into her grief.

“She began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered…none of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind.” (278)

Left alone with her grief, her words are ineffective. Both Beloved and Sethe are communicating in different vortices, their words never quite reaching each other. Beloved says dead men have laid on top of her, that “ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark.” These accusations slip past Sethe, who tries to untangle the meaning of each word, tries to justify how the unspeakable could have happened. 

Beloved operates as a foil to expose each character’s greatest fear and brokenness. For Paul D. his life is a representation of the emasculated and impotent black male. Unlike the sexually aggressive black men in “Birth of a Nation” that haunted the American imagination in 1915, or the equally haunting “super-predator” of the 1990’s, the men of Sweet Home have been taught that “one step off the ground they were trespassers among the human race…gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into a language responsible humans spoke.” (146)

Paul D. has grown up in a petri dish of abuse. His formative sexual experiences were with cattle, and now years later, having escaped the horrors of Georgia, he is still enslaved to a broken sexual narrative. Cattle come up over and over again as his sexual standard: 

“..he had become a rag doll- picked up and put back down anywhere any time by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Fucking her when he was convinced he didn’t want to. Whenever she turned her behind up, the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve.”  (147)

Beloved has “cracked” more than just his resolve. He is forced to recognize the reality of who he is: a play thing, a rag doll, with little volition and no agency. He mistakenly believes that virility can absolve shame, but what he actually needs is not virility but the freedom to love big. Whatever capacity he had to love before was fully and equivocally stripped from him in Alfred, Georgia. He sees Sethe’s love for her children and envies it: 

“He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose- not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.” (189)

Eventually, by putting his story next to hers he recognizes that he is no longer capable of judgement. To pretend that they managed to escape from a world that treated them as less than human with their humanity intact is now no longer feasible. After both of them have been in some sense destroyed by Beloved, they are now able to coalesce with honesty about what their own specific tragedies have cost them. Sixo's description of his Thirty-Mile Woman makes sense in a new and tangible way: 

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order..”(314)

Morrison’s perspective is powerful. It doesn’t allow the reader the comfort of distance, but rather drags the reader into a dialogue about trauma. Grief in isolation destroys the human spirit. It isn’t until a community of women come to her aide, that Sethe is set free. In the same way, the stories that haunt our past in isolation are allowed to grow and metastasize, unfettered and without restraint. Morrison’s thesis is that healing from our wounds whether singular or communal will never happen in isolation. That we need a community to speak truth to us when we are too blind to see the battleground laid out before us. These stories need to be told, remembered and recognized in both their past and present day permutations so that we don’t repeat them in our ignorance or pass them on to our loved ones. 

1. All quotes taken from: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2006

Operation Shylock- Philip Roth

In modernist novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of language and the impossibility of communication. In postmodern novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of reality. Operation Shylock is perhaps one of the most creative postmodern novels I’ve read in a long time. There is such a masterful blending of fact and fiction as the novel is  framed within a distorted version of a true story. The moments of fact are more of a mirage than anything that could ground the reader to an objective reality, and the polemic set up between fact and fiction thread their way throughout the narrative in a web of unnavigable complexity.

“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that mainly involve details of identification and locale and are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude…” 1

This is how the preface begins. 

At the end there is a note to the reader, after the reader has lost all hope of deciphering any shards of objective reality, that says: 

“This book is a work of fiction…names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.”

Which confession is false? The specific note to the reader? The entire work? The frame is ambiguous and we find ourselves lost within the complexity of a frame within a frame. It’s perfect. 

The book opens with Philip Roth learning of an impersonator making his way throughout Jerusalem (this actually did happen) and arguing for a policy of Diasporism, or the return of European Jews back to the European heartland. (Where he is sure they will be met, as the cattle cars, now repurposed agents of transportation, arrive at the station and the civilians meet the refugees with the cry of “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!”) As the real Philip Roth processes this news of mistaken identity he remembers how he almost lost his mind a few months back to a Halcion induced mental disintegration after knee surgery. 

This impersonator is obviously suffering from some mental collapse, but as Roth ruminates on his own recent mental collapse the line between sanity and lunacy seems to dissolve. 

“My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATE seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painful unpronounceable non syllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled. and the agony of it was excruciating.”  (20)

“Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.” (22)

The drug, Halcion, has led to hallucinations and intense nightmares, and as Roth begins to try to make sense of this impersonator in Jerusalem he wonders if this is just his mind playing tricks on him once again…if perhaps the temporary insanity was only partially due to the pharmaceuticals and partially the result of his own exhausted mind. He calls the hotel and hears the voice of the impersonator, but even this doesn’t feel definitive. Who is this new Philip Roth? Could he be“…a specter created out of my fear of mentally coming apart while abroad and on my own for the first time since recovering - a nightmare about the return of a usurping self altogether beyond my control.” (29)

This fear of losing power to one’s double is played out frequently in literature, most notably for Roth in Dostoevsky, Kafka and Gogol. My favorite being Gogol’s short story “The Nose.” Kovaloff finds his nose missing one morning and as he goes about his routine in a state of shock trying to piece together how he has lost such as estimable portion of his face he witnesses a carriage pull up, a gentleman disembark…only this gentleman turns out to be Kovaloff’s very own nose! 

“The hat, adorned with a plume, showed that it held the rank of state-councillor. It was obvious that it was paying “duty-calls.” It looked round on both sides, called to the coachmen “drive on,” and got into the carriage, which drove away.” 2

Finally Kovaloff makes up his mind to approach the nose…even though it seems that his own  nose somehow now outranks him and he approaches with an attitude of deference. 

“Honorable sir,” said Kovaloff with dignity, “I do not know how I am to understand your words. It seems to me the matter is as clear as possible. Or do you wish- but you are after all my own nose!” 

The Nose looked at the Major and wrinkled its forehead. “There you are wrong, respected sir; I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relations between us. To judge by the buttons of your uniform, you must be in quite a different department to mine.” So saying, the nose turned away.” 

Despite Kovaloff’s protestations the nose will not relinquish its independence. As Kovaloff attempts to track down his nose and make sense of this new disorderly world his ontological framework slowly begins to collapse. 

Roth recognizes in his impersonator the childlike imp of Jewish folklore Moishe Pipik, loosely translated as “Moses Bellybutton” and for the rest of the novel this how the two Roth’s are distinguished. Philip Roth and the unruly and out of control ‘bellybutton” bent on usurping the identity of the real Roth and exposing his mental fragmentation. 

Roth calls his imposter to try and expose the farce. He pretends to be a journalist, Pierre Roget, the author of the Thesaurus, “the definitive book of synonyms.” And while Pipik is pretending to be Roth, Roth is pretending not to be himself. Initially this seems to be a hilarious caper, but then the sincerity of his imposter throws Roth into a small existential crisis. If this fake so truly believes himself to be the real Roth, if he’s so committed to this identity that it is not pretend but the most extreme version of truth he knows…then the only one pretending is the real Roth. As he argues with “himself” on the phone the only thing that seems definitive is the absurdity of the whole situation. 

Throughout the novel the doubling shifts, with the pretending frequently distorting reality and always saturated in the absurd. At one point when Roth learns that his imposter was a detective, as ludicrous as this seems, the explanation makes contextual sense. Then when Pipik disappears, supposedly heading back to the states, (after being defeated intellectually by the real Roth) the real Roth makes his way to the hotel room of Pipik and begins some detective work of his own. “If he could disguise himself as a writer, I could pretend to be the detective.” (252)

As Roth combs through the pristine room, looking for clues in a space that looks un-lived in, the beds still have that fresh laundry scent about them, nothing looks out of place or disordered, he finally finds a singular pubic hair on the underside of the toilet seat and a small pile of beard trimmings. He puts his findings in an envelope and then a trickling fear begins to run through his mind: what if these are simply his hairs? What if Pipik has done the same thing to him that he is know doing to Pipik? What if he came to his room and collected these samples simply to leave behind for the anticipated sleuth. 

“These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented appearance was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.” (253)

While Pipik is offered as the double of Philip Roth, the uncontrollable appendage wandering around and wreaking havoc, Shakespeare’s Shylock is offered as a double for Jewish identity as a whole. For four hundred years Jews have been living within the shadow of this literary imposter, introduced to the world with the lines “Three thousand ducats.” Lines pronounced in such an oily and innuendoed voice by Mr. Charles Macklin that he “instantly aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race.” (275) 

“Today a Shylockless Venice, tomorrow a Shylockless world. As the stage directions so succinctly puts it after Shylock has been robbed of his daughter, stripped of his wealth, and compelled to convert by his Christian betters: Exit Jew…” (276)

This whole treatise on Shylock is given by a bookseller, Supposnik, in the lobby of the hotel (after Roth’s detective work has been completed) as Roth is attempting to make his way back to the trial of Ivan the Terrible. Like so many climactic moments throughout the novel the movement forward is impeded by an immense digression. Here in the lobby, person after person presents themselves to Roth who finds himself trapped in constant dialogue while trying to escape. School children pepper him with questions: “What comes first, nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.” (268)

Identity is voiced over and over again, the refrain for the inevitable mental implosion. 

The oily hatred directed historically at the Jew is reexamined throughout the trial of John Demjanjuk, who is argued to be none other than Ivan the Terrible, the infamous guard and champion of brutality that personally was responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Jews at the death camp of Treblinka. 

The defense argues that Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible are two different people, the evidence is worthless and the identity photos are unreliable…but at what point does the absurdity of the trial breakdown into merely a show trial, an attempt to find a singular scapegoat for the atrocity of the holocaust? Will a single scapegoat ever be enough? The defense buries the trial in meaningless details, they spend two days “arguing over the paper clip on the identity card to establish if the paper clip is authentic or not.” (340) If the identity and authenticity of a paperclip can not be determined how likely will the trial ever come to consensus about the identity and authenticity of a real person? 

The trial is reimagined in a dream sequence Roth has about the water company demanding he pay $128 million for his water bill. He wakes up, slumped in a chair, his skin has become the physical diary of the last few days, collecting every smell along the way and the stench of must and feces is overpowering. Smell is objectively true, a sense you can’t manipulate and he smells of all of “them”: 

“The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.” (261)

But after a shower, when the smell has been eradicated…he contemplated whether it ever actually existed, or did he simply dream it? 

I bathe. 

Two words. 

I dress in clean clothes. 

Five words. 

I no longer smell. 

Four words. 

Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse. 

(261)

So, in a Rothian style, we are confronted with the reliability of memory. Do all the eye witnesses of Ivan the Terrible truly remember this senior man sitting before them? This family man from Ohio with the unblemished record? When Roth walks into the courtroom and is first confronted with John Demjanjuk he says “There he was,” and begins a two and a half page imagined reverie of Ivan the Terrible, as a young twenty-two year old Ukrainian, crushing skulls and bludgeoning to death his victims. Roth is riding the hatred, bottled up and waiting for an unleashing, a focus for its wrath and vengeance. But John Demjanjuk, as he sits there chewing his cud, seems so harmless. So meaningless…so banal. Has he changed? Is he a different person? After a six part repetition of “There he was.” he ends with “Or wasn’t.” 

As Roth is caught in this paradox between “Was” and “Wasn’t” he thinks the only thing that is certain is that while justice may be served by this trial, John Demjanjuk’s children will be plunged into a world incensed by hate- and the curse will be revived. 

Roth’s dream of a $128 million water bill becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of the trial. How can one man be responsible for a water bill of $128 million? How could any one person use that much water? The enormity of the accusation becomes the perfect obfuscation to hide behind. The suburban father can hide all the transgressions and regrets of his youth behind a bill that is too enormous to fathom. “Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened.” (261) How can he be both? Was he there or wasn’t he? 

Either way the trial has morphed into something unmanageable.  Demjanjuk sits there unconcerned, with the occasional smile on his face he seems to say: 

“…$128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying  that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do…but do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million?…There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!” (262) 

In the end what we are left with is a compilation of parodies. The detective novel, seeking to unravel a mystery or a crime, is left with two envelopes containing ambiguous pubic hairs. Nostalgia becomes a joke, as unreliable as memory and fed on our current preoccupations and hatreds. And lastly, and perhaps most dishearteningly, justice has become little more than a parody, a circus act, an illusion of smoke screens and tightrope walkers. Zionism, Diasporism and all the other “isms” have been submerged in the most “powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is “Pipikism”, the anti tragic force that inconsequentializes  everything.” The radicals and truth tellers, the prophets and sages are little more than disembodied noses and bellybuttons, walking around as autonomous individuals, so removed from their contextualized base that everything they espouse has become meaningless. 

Or is it? For postmodern novels there really is no such thing as a simple thesis statement. And after 398 pages as we have witnessed every serious thing get turned into a farce, we are left struggling with the ambiguity of everything. 

1. All quotations from: Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock. New York: Random House, 1993. 
2. Nikolai Gogol "The Nose": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol/Field)