by John Updike
Three Trapped Tigers offers to do for the Havana of 1958 what Ulysses did for the Dublin of 1904: wandering itineraries are mapped street by street, minor characters reappear in a studied interweave, a variety of voices abruptly soliloquize, a kind of “Oxen of the Sun” procession of literary parodies is worked on the theme of Trotsky’s assassination, an endless “Nighttown” drunkenness episode picks up the deliberate hungover banality of the Eumaeus sequence, and a female interior monologue closes the book. Unlike Joyce, however, Cabrera Infante packs most of his pyrotechnics and montage into the novel’s first half and winds down into a more natural narrative tone. And, instead of attentive, soft-spoken, gradually solidifying Bloom, Three Trapped Tigers has for its hero an insubstantial, logomaniacal trio of would-be writers—Arsenio Cué, Bustrófedon (who is dead), and the principal narrator, Silvestre. As these three compile reams of undergraduate gags (“Crime and Puns, by Bustrófedor Dostowhiskey,” “Under the Lorry, by Malcolm Volcano,” “In Caldo Brodo, by Truman Capone,” “The Company She Peeps, by Merrimac Arty,” etc., etc.) and tootle around Havana in a convertible (Bustrófedon is there in spirit, like the Paraclete, or—as Infante might say—Parakeats), they make little significant contact with the nonverbal world around them. Havana of this era was notoriously full of prostitution and pickups, but the only instance of achieved intercourse throughout four hundred and eighty-seven pages occurs in some tableaux vivants staged for tourists. There is a good deal of partial undressing, and the work of one long night of seduction does jimmy a girl loose from her underpants, “but, BUT, where old Hitch would have cut to insert and intercut of fireworks, I’ll give it to you straight—I didn’t get any further than that.” Later, Silvestre and Cué pick up two street flowers and proceed to bore them silly with puns and nonsense. One of the girls at last cries out, “Youse weird. You say real strange things. Both of you say the same strange things. Youse like twins, youse somethin’ else. Whew! And you talk and talk and talk. Whaddya talk so much for?” To which the reader says, “Amen,” and to which the author says, “Could she be a literary critic in disguise?”
A fearful air of congestion, of unconsummation, hangs over this book. Which may be deliberate: Batista’s Havana is about to go under to revolution. Cabrera Infante, we are told by the dust jacket, served Castro’s government as head of the Council of Culture, as a director of the Film Institute, as editor of a weekly magazine called Lunes de Revolución, and as a staff member of the Cuban Embassy in Brussels; in 1965, after returning to Havana, he “decided to leave Cuba,” and he now lives in London. So his involvement was not trivial, and his viewpoint cannot be simple. Yet the coming storm impinges on the action of Three Trapped Tigers only once, when Cué drunkenly announces his intention to “join Fffidel.” Silvestre argues that he is crazy, it’s like joining the Foreign Legion. “Nashional,” Cué answers. “The National Leshion.” The topic is then dropped, and the two spend another hundred pages driving and drinking and punning and remembering the palindromes of Bustrófedon. An American reader, especially now that Cuba is remoter than China, longs for a more anatomical portrait of this Havana that has vanished. In the first pages, such a portrait—a cross-section of corrupted and dissatisfied lives—seems to be promised. A sharp imitation of a night-club m.c.’s bilingual prattle lifts the curtain on some monologues by a kept woman, a movie-struck child, an underpaid printer. We read a letter written back to her village by a recent emigrant to the city; we eavesdrop on a psychiatric session that reappears throughout the book. Silvestre introduces himself:
I am a press photographer and my work at that time involved taking shots of singers and people of the farándula, which means not only show business but limelights and night life as well. So I spent all my time in cabarets, night clubs, strip joints, bars, barras, boîtes, dives, saloons, cantinas, cuevas, caves or caves.… Sometimes, when I had nothing to do after work at three or four in the morning I would make my way to El Sierra or Las Vegas or El Nacional, the night club I mean not the hotel, to talk to a friend who’s the emcee there or look at the chorus flesh or listen to the singers, but also to poison my lungs with smoke and stale air and alcohol fumes and be blinded forever by the darkness. That’s how I used to live and love that life and there was nobody or nothing that could change me.
O.K., fine; rather lengthily said, but we obediently settle down for a tour of tropical night life. We meet a bongo drummer; we don’t quite catch his name, but it doesn’t matter, since he talks in Silvestre’s voice, though he seems to be hung up on a little gringo chick called Vivian Smith-Corona, whereas Silvestre is hung up on Cuba Venegas, a local singer who looks better than she sings. We go back to Silvestre, who is trying to tell us about a great Negro singer, La Estrella, but the story keeps unravelling on him—maybe because this is “an island of double and triple entendres told by a drunk idiot signifying everything.” Our eyes begin to sting in the smoke and stale air. Now an American tourist, a writer called Campbell, writes a funny story about a walking stick he bought fresh off the ferry from Miami, and about taking another off an outraged native because he thinks it’s his, and then his wife produces her version of what happened, and he rewrites it (or perhaps this is meant to be a translation by somebody called Rine), and the wife does a second version, and then we get pages of the anti-works of the late Bustrófedon, and the above-mentioned parodies of Cuban authors on Trotsky’s assassination, which might be the best part of the book if you’re Cuban (it seems funny even in English), but by now Arsenio Cué is revving up his convertible, and we blearily realize that, whatever happened in Havana in 1958, this book isn’t going to tell us. “Mare Metaphor is loosed upon the world. Rhetoric of the nation?” Cabrera Infante asks, as if hopeful that his stream of literary consciousness will somehow apply to Cuba. He applies it, but it doesn’t stick. Though his translators work furiously to shore up the slippage, throwing in anachronisms like space-shot terminology, the slang word “gig,” and “Agnewsticism,” they can’t keep the gobbets of “Esperanglish” and the limp avant gardisms and the liquorish 4 a.m. foolery from pulling loose from any reality we care to recognize or consent to care about.
The eclectic culture of Americanized Havana, Cabrera Infante seems to be saying, deserves an eclectic novel as its nostalgic monument. But eclecticism is itself a borrowed method by now. Ulysses, static and claustrophobic enough, is energized throughout by the tactful, evocative prose of a master short-story writer, and it draws for its allusions upon the immense perspective of European culture since Homer. Cabrera Infante writes run-on, like Faulkner but without Faulkner’s intensity of self-hypnosis, and his perspective extends little farther than the mass culture of the giant nation to the north; the horizon of felt history for him appears to be Trotsky’s murder in 1940. The book crucially lacks tact—the tension and economy that enforce themselves when method and material are in close touch. A mass of memories and a heap of verbal invention have been hopefully tossed toward one another, but confusion isn’t fusion.
That Latin America can produce adventurously original novels has been shown many times over, from Machado de Assiz on. A recent striking instance, and an instructive contrast to Three Trapped Tigers, is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Here an array of fantastic premises (substantial ghosts, everyday miracles, magic that works, a village so isolated only gypsies can find it, a man tattooed on every inch of his skin, a man who fathers seventeen sons by seventeen women, a family of repeating names and insatiable incest) is breezily set forth by topic sentences that seem jokes, and then maintained with an iron consistency and kept rolling until the amusing becomes the magnificent—a magnificent symbolic contraption expressing a family’s fate, a continent’s experience, and Time’s impenetration of humanity. The novel’s Olympian ease and its catholic acceptance of horror and splendor as they arise in this our “paradise of misery” could not have been achieved in the United States, and no European novel would contain its joyous emptiness, its awed memory of
a world “so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” The book even has a texture all its own: a dense translucence, a flow of long paragraphs that yet do not linger, that feel laconic, like stories the teller and listener already obscurely share and that are being not so much invented as called from the shadows. Such a novel, unlike Infante’s sophomoric farrago, has learned from other novels how to become itself.
Satire Without Serifs
PATRIOTISM, INC., and Other Tales, by Paul van Ostaijen, edited and translated from the Dutch by E. M. Beekman. 170 pp. University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.
THE ADVENTURES OF MAO ON THE LONG MARCH, by Frederic Tuten. 121 pp. Citadel, 1971.
Sans-serif type belongs to one of those futures that never occurred. Elegantly simple, jauntily functional, it was everything the Bauhaus thought modernity should be, yet except in posters and telephone books it never really caught on. As with so many oddities a revolution would sweep away, serifs exist for a purpose: they help the eye pick up the shape of the letter. Piquant in little amounts, sans-serif in page-size sheets repels readership as wax paper repels water; it has a sleazy, cloudy look. Yet now we have two works of fiction so printed—the first in a 9-point sans fainter than sandpiper tracks, and the other in a narrow-column boldface sans that fairly stamps itself on the retina. What is being signalled? A defiant chic, a refreshing change.
By printing Paul van Ostaijen’s Patriotism, Inc., and Other Tales, the University of Massachusetts Press, itself obscure enough, has rescued a poet, proseur, and seer of the twenties from obscurity. E. M. Beekman, the translator, in his rather defensive and fancy introduction, blames van Ostaijen’s obscurity on his writing in “Dutch, that poor relation of Northern European languages.” He adds, “Van Ostaijen’s work is an indictment of the Monroe Doctrine in the world of literature.” This false hare (the implication that American foreign policy of some sort has kept the Dutch language down) is but one of several that Mr. Beekman starts; in the high-flown style of easy indignation associated with “black humor” and its apologists, he terms this century “the fool of history.” “Never before has there been such an unrelenting succession of absurdities.… When a pertinaciously sensitive and sensible mind encounters such a world he is horrified and terror-stricken.” Supposedly, however, the century has, in compensation, produced “a flowering of satiric literature” that includes such rich-relation-language types as Mann, Joyce, Gide, Brecht, Beckett, Grass, Nabokov, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Defining satire, Mr. Beekman asserts:
To expose an ulcerous growth the surgeon must be dextrous with his scalpel. A hatchet job does little to relieve pathology. But control, skill, and a passionate immunity to suffering can chance to alleviate the pains of man. Confronted by an ailing society these authors dissect in order to heal.
This trite opposition between a sick society and a dexterous, antiseptic-handed satirist/doctor does not do justice to the complexity of the humorous impulse. I doubt that many satirists since Voltaire have hoped to change the world even a bit. If a satirist is an entertainer, he is gunning for laughs, in those target areas just to one side of the audience’s really sensitive spots; if the satirist is an artist, he is venting a disgust mixed with love, a scorn hard to distinguish from fascination, an indictment that includes himself. Satire less than this is one-dimensional journalism that cannot outlive its object; L.B.J.’s retirement turns MacBird! into trash, or, rather, reveals it as the trash it always was. Nineteenth-century America was prolific of vitriolic lampoons, yet the one book with verifiable political repercussions was a sentimental melodrama, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mr. Beekman is wrong to call the satirist “kin to the ideal revolutionary.” The ideal revolutionary—Washington, Robespierre, Lenin—is humorless. Illusions are destroyed not by ridicule but by better, more fiercely held illusions. Indeed, insofar as satire fosters the impression of an enemy met and dealt with, it reinforces, like philanthropy, the status quo; an abundance of satire typifies a reactionary and helpless society, such as imperial Rome. In all times, humor is a form of resignation; in modern times, it comes peculiarly charged with self-doubt and moral ambiguity. Kafka can be said to satirize the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy as something frozen, ornate, inscrutable, and cruel. But his art begins, not ends, there; satire is the mere crust of his real matter—his own confession of incapacity, his heroes’ lust for punishment and their pathetic willingness to enlist, if they can find the right official, in the workings of an absurd universe. Society is sick, no doubt, but only the coarsest modern writer would exempt himself as healthy.
Mr. Beekman does, later in his introduction, place satire in the right focus: “Its intention is to cut the reader into awareness.” This seems to me excellent, and all that any art should be asked to do. Also excellent, at a guess, is Mr. Beekman’s translation from the Dutch; at any rate, van Ostaijen’s prose comes over as elliptical and limpid and unlike Mr. Beekman’s own overwrought English.
Van Ostaijen is principally renowned in his native Belgium as a poet; his prose pieces, which he called “grotesques,” were written after two books of verse had made him a conspicuous presence on the Flemish literary scene, and were not published until after his death, at the age of thirty-two, in 1928. Much of his short life was spent in circumstances of constraint: he began his career in the blockaded port of Antwerp, fled to Berlin in 1919 to escape imprisonment for political offenses against the Walloons, returned to Antwerp only to be drafted and sent back to Germany in the occupation forces, and, after a few years spent struggling with poverty and an addiction to cocaine, died in a Belgian tuberculosis sanitorium. His “grotesques” were mostly written in the Berlin years (1919–1921), and they illumine a bizarre Weimar world of huge inflation and savage political competition, of brothels and cafés, of Dada and jazz, of Dietrich bluebirds singing to Grosz audiences. Van Ostaijen worked for a time in Antwerp’s city administration, and the theme of corporate organization runs through his work: “The City of Builders” describes a city where ordinances foster a mad accumulation of buildings; “The Lost House Key” shows a thriving “free city” where syphilis has become the sine qua non of citizenship; “Ika Loch’s Brothel” and “Hierarchy” are concerned with the organization of whorehouses; “The General” proposes organizing armies by sexual character, in battalions of sadists, masochists, homosexuals, fetishists, and so on; and “Patriotism, Inc.” imagines an international conspiracy, among the conservative parties of Teutonia and Fochany, to rig provocative incidents in each other’s countries and thereby promote mutual chauvinism. Though politically obsessed and a convicted activist, van Ostaijen did not think of his satire as social therapy; in a Berlin letter he noted, “Wrote a novella in which I try to make monkeys of people. Positive criticism: baloney.… People aren’t worth criticising. Only material for burlesque novellas.”
All these stories are rather schematically developed, with few sensual details and turns of characterization. Though resembling Kafka in his obsession with officialdom, van Ostaijen is incapable of such a passage as this:
I was not at all certain whether I had any advocates, I could not find out anything definite about it, every face was unfriendly, most people who came toward me and whom I kept meeting in the corridors looked like fat old women; they had huge blue and white striped aprons covering their entire bodies, kept stroking their stomachs and swaying awkwardly to and fro. I could not even find out whether we were in a law court. Some facts spoke for it, others against.
Here are a deep, puzzled humor, vivid particularization, and incalculable, dreamlike turns. Van Ostaijen’s mind, at least in his fiction, tends to travel straight to the mark. His pages yield a harvest of acute if dispiriting epigrams:
For values are only safe when he who is entrusted with their preservation stands above them, when the preserver is not a dupe at the same time.
Hypochondria is eroticism in atrophied form.
Do not forget that masculine eroticism has an un
dertone of melancholy, even when this masculine eroticism is heterosexual. If it is homosexual, however, then the melancholy is both in the object and in the subject.
Expatiating on the subject of war in the persona of “The General,” van Ostaijen teems with dark ideas:
War is the clashing of two parties with the goal of separating the conqueror from the conquered. There is no significant child’s game that does not spring from the love of war. Nonsense to believe that we suggest the idea of war to children. A warlike element resides in the sperm.
The most meaningful and universal trait of humanity, more so than love, is the urge for battle.… The essence of every law is to aspire to curb instinct. Instinct wants to kill. Clearly.
The British psyche … has conquered its warlike instinct with a rationally individualistic philosophy of life. They don’t know what war is. They only know plunder.
Actual wars are a cheapening of the ideal war.… Actual wars are a test of economic conditions, not of martialism.
With striking contemporaneity, van Ostaijen finds the alternative to war in drugs. “When negotiating for peace,” the General tells us, “narcotics are unquestionably important. The so-called primitive peoples have already taught us this.… The chieftains gather together and immediately a pipe with opium or Indian hemp is passed from man to man. A peaceful mood cannot be far behind.… Next to war, gentle peace is therefore dearest to me. And so I am willing to smoke the opium pipe. And so will all those others who have only waged war to actualize the personality they contemplated.”
“To actualize the personality they contemplated”—this is the talk not of a satirist but of a visionary. Van Ostaijen is fascinated by organization because he detests it. Ika Loch, the proprietress of a brothel, is a play on the Dutch logika (logic), and her authoritarian mismatching of customer and whore results in the murder of the lovely Promethea, who symbolizes art; the scandal enhances the fame of Ika’s establishment. Though in “questions of business management” Ika possesses “a real talent for organization,” she cannot perceive that “a head and a neck, as a totality, are still not the same thing as the sum of the two parts.”