by John Updike
Just as the shipwrecked sailor, in his extremities of hunger, thirst, and isolation, manifested a fabulous poise and capacity for observation, the clandestine filmmaker, amid the perils and strangeness of his situation, shows a breathtaking insouciance. Coming into Santiago for the first time in twelve years, in a disguise that includes a fake Uruguayan accent, plucked eyebrows, a doctored hairdo, a twenty-pound weight loss, and the fancy, expensive clothes of a momio (a conservative bourgeois; literally, a mummy), and further equipped with a fake wife—a Chilean expatriate, called Elena, actively associated with the Chilean resistance—Littín endangered the whole scheme by impulsively hopping from a cab and mingling with the crowds:
Elena tried to dissuade me, but she couldn’t argue with me as vehemently as she would have liked, for fear the driver would overhear. In the grip of uncontrollable emotion, I had the taxi stop and jumped out, slamming the door.… I was weeping when I got back to the hotel a step ahead of curfew. The door had just been locked and the concierge had to let me in. Elena had registered for both of us and was in our room hanging up the antenna for the portable radio when I entered. She seemed calm, but the moment I was inside she blew up like a proper wife. It was inconceivable to her that I could have run the risk of walking the streets alone until the last minutes before curfew.
Further, while in Chile, he stares at policemen and attracts their attention, ignores the passwords the resistance has set up, takes spur-of-the-moment excursions, neglects to remove his notes from his suitcase and his true identity card from his wallet, and pays an improvised, after-curfew visit to his mother. He stays in the country to the very last minute, after his crews are gone; the police are closing in and the underground is signalling him to “Get out or go under,” but he tries to arrange one more clandestine interview and comes within seconds of missing the plane out. He keeps pushing his luck, in short, like a good director upping the suspense in a movie.
His misadventures generate some gaudy imagery. Told to meet, at a certain street corner, “a blue Renault 12 with a sticker of the Society for the Protection of Animals on the windshield,” he jumps into the first blue Renault that comes along, without checking for the sticker, and finds himself in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven car with a woman “no longer young but still very beautiful, dripping with jewels, provocatively perfumed, wearing a pink mink coat that must have cost two or three times as much as the car itself. She was an unmistakable but rarely encountered example of the Santiago upper crust.” To this startled apparition he gives the password, “Where can I buy an umbrella at this hour?” Recovering her composure, the lady in pink mink obligingly asks her chauffeur to drop Littín off at a department store that is still open. On another confused occasion, a restaurant liaison with a member of the resistance is broken up by a punch-drunk ex-boxer, and, on a third, Littín hides from the police in a theatre where a spotlight suddenly hits him and he is made the butt of a stripteaser’s lewd banter—a scene right out of Hitchcock. Moments of magic realism fringe our hero’s hazardous travels: Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra (“this legendary place is neither an island nor black”) trembles every ten or fifteen minutes throughout the day; and at Littín’s boyhood home, his mother, “carrying a lighted candle in a candlestick, as in a Dickens novel,” leads him to an exact reconstruction, complete with furniture and disordered papers, of his old study in Santiago, just as he had left it when he went into exile twelve years before. Glimmers of fantasy play, too, about his brave fellow conspirators; one wealthy, elderly woman who hides him talks like an old gangster film:
She could not resign herself to the possibility that she had wasted her time bringing up children to be momios, playing canasta with moronic matrons, to end up knitting and watching tearjerkers on TV. At seventy, she had discovered that her true vocation was the armed struggle, conspiracy, and the headiness of audacious action.
“Better than dying in bed with your kidneys rotting away,” she said. “I’d prefer to go out in a street fight against the cops with a bellyful of lead.”
Needless to say, both Littín and Isabel Allende see Pinochet as a monster and the Allende years as happy days when land was distributed, industries nationalized, and the masses given a break from centuries of oppression. Dying in the assault that partly destroyed the Moneda Palace, Allende became a holy martyr. Littín tells how the former leader’s photograph was hidden, in one home, behind an image of the Virgin, and how in many homes floral offerings and votive lamps are placed before the small busts of Allende that were sold in the markets during his presidency. Such reported facts tell more of a story than the somewhat abstract romance and sugary socialism of Of Love and Shadows. Further, Littín’s random encounters, as mediated through the ghost authorship of a great writer, afford us a politically unfiltered picture of life, a reality wherein the clandestine visitor keeps blundering up out of the underground and can entertain, concerning a beautiful rich woman who tries to help him buy a code-word umbrella, the passing thought, “She was as charming and warm as she was beautiful and one would have wished to linger in the pleasure of her company, forgetting, for just one night, repression, politics, even art.” Without some anarchical openness to possibilities, the Latin-American novelist is in danger of writing whodunits wherein the government, invariably, did it.
* Wherein a character enters a hotel labelled “hotel macondo.” Also many of the characters—Rebecca, Father Anthony Isabel, Colonel Aureliano Buendía—from A Hundred Years of Solitude figure in the story, despite García Márquez’s claim to William Kennedy in 1972 (“The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1973) that “Leaf Storm and Cien Años are in Macondo, nothing else.”
† Colombia, the country from which the United States filched the land for the Panama Canal and which now supplies us with cocaine, has suffered two upheavals that impressed García Márquez: the generation of his grandfathers fought in the bloody civil war of 1899–1903, and in his own youth, in 1948, the assassination of the Liberal leader Gaitán brought on riots in which hundreds of thousands died. He told The Paris Review: “I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitán had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that.”
‡ The latest Partridge dictionary of slang, I have been told, gives “joeboy” as Canadian Army slang for “someone detailed to perform an unpleasant task” (circa 1940). Still, it is not easy to come up with a better rendering. I can think only of “Joeys,” the capital letter helping us to distinguish the josefinos from baby kangaroos.
§ “… I didn’t want to write an historical work. That’s why I took it upon myself to completely distort all historical references, because I don’t believe one can mix the two genres. History as the basic material of a work of fiction is a special matter. What in Latin America we call history, that is, the history of the official historians, has no value whatsoever. On the contrary, it is precisely this false reality which we who write fiction feel obliged to contradict in every possible way” (Roa Bastos, in the Leviatán interview, translated from the Spanish by Peggy Boyers in Salmagundi).
‖ “Holy shit” in the proof version. “Jijunagrandísimas,” in the original.
a The author herself, in a charming essay, “A Few Words About Latin America” (translated by Jo Anne Engelbert), claims that in Latin America “everything is so disproportionate that it borders on falsehood. The truth—when it exists—is found hidden in this tangle of multicolor threads with which we embroider reality, as if we were victims of a perpetual, collective hallucination.” She claims a continental tendency “to walk along the borderline of fantasy, to incorporate the subjective into daily life,” and tra
ces it back to the first Spanish explorers: “Excited by what they saw, they tried to describe that new land, but the words of the Spanish language were not sufficient; they began to flounder desperately to express their ideas, inventing, exaggerating, creating fables. They thought they had seen cities of pure gold where children played jacks with diamonds, and human beings with a single huge eye in their foreheads and one leg in the middle of their bodies provided with a toe so big that at siesta time they raised it up and it gave them shade, like a parasol. The fantastic realism of Latin American literature began with the Chronicles of the Indies.” The Guatemalen novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, traced magic realism back to the Popol Vuh, a compilation of ancient Mayan legends set down shortly after the Spanish Conquest. The phrase itself was coined by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in his book of 1925, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, which was published in Madrid in 1927 under the title Realismo mágico. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier may have had this phrase in the back of his mind when, in 1949, he wrote of “lo real maravilloso.”
THE EVIL EMPIRE
How the Other Half Lives
MOSCOW CIRCLES, by Benedict Erofeev, translated from the Russian by J. R. Dorrell. 188 pp. Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative and Norton, 1982.
THE JOKE, by Milan Kundera, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. 267 pp. Harper & Row, 1982.
THE POLISH COMPLEX, by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie. 211 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.
Wouldn’t it be nice to forget about the dreary old Iron Curtain and to read fiction from the Communist countries purely for its aesthetic and informational charms? In a few instances—Stanislaw Lem, for one, and the late Yuri Trifonov—political side-thoughts can be pretty well suppressed; we read a Pole’s science fiction and a Russian’s novellas of domestic distress much as if an Italian or a Canadian had written them. But this cannot be the case with the three novels at hand—the first published in samizdat in Russia; the second legally published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, to great success, but banned two years later, and the author eventually expatriated; and the third written by a well-established Polish author and filmmaker but denied official publication in Poland. All contain political grief. If fiction from Communist countries is to be read as prisoners’ outcries, the first is a bellow, the second a complicated groan, and the third a lively shriek.
The bellow, or yelp, is Benedict Erofeev’s Moscow Circles.* A strange stark photograph of “Erofeev” which might do for the face of a million young Russians appears on the jacket’s back flap; a biography on the front flap gives some plausible information (born in 1939 in the region of Vladimir, Erofeev was expelled from the University of Moscow for “exaggerated ideas,” and worked for many years as an underground-cable layer) together with some that seems fanciful: “Written in one go in the autumn of 1969, this work was the result of a wager for two bottles of liquor. The loser forfeited not only the two bottles, but had to read the manuscript as well.… Animated by [his] success, Erofeev embarked on his Dimitri Shostakovitch. Unfortunately this manuscript was stolen on the Pavlovo-Moscow line—along with two bottles of vermouth, the object of the theft.” The author’s preface continues this jocular-bibulous tone, alleging that one chapter originally consisted of the words “And then I had a drink” followed by a page and a half of obscenities, which have been now deleted because “all readers, and especially young ladies,” turned immediately to this chapter and skipped everything else. Moscow Circles describes the inner monologue and external encounters of Benny Erofeev, a hard-drinking cable layer, as he travels by train from Moscow to Petushki, a town in the Vladimir region where his white-eyed sweetheart and his three-year-old son, unknown to each other, reside. He is carrying chocolates for the one and walnuts for the other, but by the time his train gets there—a distance of about seventy miles—Petushki has become a nightmare Moscow, and the transcendentally drunken Erofeev is pursued by four ominous men whom the translator in a footnote identifies as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. One of them carries an awl. Stalin’s father was a cobbler. God, not infrequently invoked in the course of Benny’s delirium, is silent. Angels who have been intermittently talking to Benny cruelly laugh. The book ends with the unconscious narrator’s assurance “I have not come to since and I never shall.”
Set forth in paragraphs with white spaces between, and in short chapters titled with the names of the railroad stations on the Moscow-Petushki line, the tale reads speedily and has the feverish, centrifugal verve of Gogol and Bely and that doctrinaire French alcoholic Alfred Jarry. In something of Jarry’s spirit of berserk calculation, Benny offers cocktail recipes involving calibrated amounts of purified varnish, antiperspirant, verbena, and anti-dandruff shampoo. Weird efforts at precision approximate the spotty perceptions of drunkenness. Of a simpleton encountered on the train it is said, “He didn’t speak with his mouth, because that was always peering and was somewhere at the back of his head. He talked with his left nostril, and with such an effort—as if he had to lift his left nostril with his right nostril to do so.” Though its ambience is intoxication, the little novel has been soberly executed: a brisk pace is maintained, and the implication of an entire society soused and despairing is made to emerge gradually, with a certain force of horror. Everyone on the train accepts and gives drinks. The conductor is bribed with grams of vodka. Russian history is travestied as one immense, morose binge: “No wonder all Russia’s honest citizens were desperate, how could they be anything but! They couldn’t help writing about the lower classes, couldn’t help saving them, couldn’t help drinking in despair. The social democrats wrote and drank, in fact they drank as much as they wrote. But the Muzhiks couldn’t read, so they just drank without reading a word.… All the thinking men of Russia drank without coming up for breath, out of pity for the Muzhiks.” Soviet slogans and the Revolution itself are parodied amid the hazy vacillations of Benny’s consciousness; early in his ride, he ironically echoes the claims for spiritual superiority that Soviet propagandists have adopted from the nineteenth-century Slavophiles:
The passengers looked at me with something akin to apathy, eyes round and apparently vacant. That’s what I like. I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride. You can imagine what eyes are like on the other side. There, where everything can be bought and sold. Over there eyes are deep set, predatory and frightened.… How different from the eyes of my people! Their steady stare is completely devoid of tension. They harbour no thought—but what power! What spiritual power!
Yet, though jokingly, Moscow Circles shares in that same power—a directness, a fury, a humor, a freedom from self-pity that seem Russian. There is nothing whining about this portrait of self-destructive muddle and descending alcoholic night: a dark exhilaration, rather. If Erofeev has indeed allowed a photograph of himself and biographical facts to be published here, for the KGB to take note of, then we must feel some exhilaration of our own at such bravado and at the courage still alive after sixty years of the Soviet system.
The picaresque hero—the rogue, the loser—is a traditional vehicle whereby an author conveys subversive thoughts. For Benny Erofeev, there is only a vague, unreachable “they” to blame: “Oh the bastards! They’ve turned my land into a shitty hell. They force people to hide their tears and expose their laughter!” But Ludvik Jahn, the hero of Milan Kundera’s The Joke, was a student proponent of Communism when it came to Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, and a youthful Party functionary; so his disillusion with this system, and its with him, are traumatic matters that form a suitable central topic for a thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel. The Joke was Kundera’s first novel, composed from 1962 to 1965, published in Prague in 1967 without a touch of censorship, and then banned (among many other books) when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and crushed Dubček’s brief “Prague spring.” Having made and unmade Kundera’s
name in his native land, The Joke has enjoyed a considerable career abroad. Louis Aragon wrote a foreword for the French translation, calling it “one of the greatest novels of the century,” and translations appeared not only in all the languages of “free” Europe but in Polish and (though banned as it came off the press) Hungarian as well. The first English translation, in Great Britain, was sufficiently abridged and, in the author’s opinion, “mutilated” to warrant a letter of protest to the Times Literary Supplement; in spite of apologies and adjustments, the English versions have remained incomplete until the issue of this new translation, prepared by an American professor and overseen by the author, who since 1975 has been a resident of France.
It is an impressive work, if not altogether great yet with the reach of greatness in it. Like Kundera’s most recent work of fiction, the widely admired The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the novel contains a hero “fallen” from a socialist “paradise,” a running imagery of angels (perhaps traceable to the wealth of Counter-Reformation statuary in Czechoslovakia), a robust and subtle eroticism, a fervent and knowledgeable musicality (extending to fugal ingenuities in the narrative’s organization), and a philosopher’s concern with the importance that illusion and forgetting have for man and his systems. Less flashy and etherealized than the later novel, The Joke seems to me more substantial—more earnest in its explorations and less distractingly nimble in its counterpoint. Written within and for a society controlled by Communists, The Joke contains none of the frivolous bitterness and nihilism common in the West; its bitterness has been hard-earned and is presented at risk.
