by John Updike
Rio Gonzaga’s family is upper-middle-class and, amid country-club games and muffled adultery and anxious rumors from the society’s power structure, feels like many well-off households portrayed in the fiction of young Americans and Europeans. Filipinos, however, seem to take their roles rather theatrically: Rio’s beautiful mother, who tints “her black hair with auburn highlights, just like Rita Hayworth,” lives in mauve rooms with all the windows boarded up and painted over, the air-conditioner running twenty-four hours a day. Her mother, Lola Narcisa, is a small brown woman from Davao, in the south, who eats with her hands, walks with a stoop, has a childish giggle, and fills her room with the “sweet gunpowder smell and toxic smoke of Elephant brand katol, a coil-shaped mosquito-repellent incense.” Rio’s paternal grandmother, Abuelita Socorro, is a thick-waisted widow who lives in Spain with her effete son, wears a scrap of the Shroud of Turin pinned to her brassiere, prays before and after eating, and owns a miraculous rosary that glows in the dark. Rio’s maternal grandfather is an American, slowly dying in the shabby American Hospital, whose “melancholy American doctors” are, like him, “leftovers from recent wars, voluntary exiles whose fair skin is tinged a blotchy red from the tropical sun or too much alcohol; like his, their clothes and skin reek of rum and Lucky Strikes.” He and the family friends the Goldenbergs are among the few non-movie Americans in the novel; Americans are not villains in this novel, though the Philippine atmosphere is villainous, and the government slithers through film noir shadows. Among the Gonzagas’ network of upper-echelon friends is the charming “Nicky,” General Nicasio Ledesma, who turns out to be a conscientious torturer and to have as his mistress a drug-addicted actress, Lolita Luna, adored by millions but unable to realize her dream of emigrating to the United States, where she “can study acting and stop playing so much.” The interconnections in Manila society ramify as the novel ranges from the First Lady’s dreams to the squalid world of “shower dancers”—young men who lather up and get it up for the delectation of a homosexual nightclub audience.
Dogeaters has a teeming cast of characters, and their multiplicity somewhat dissipates the reader’s involvement. The book, prefaced by excessive thanks for help in its composition, feels a bit boiled down, as though its scattered high-energy moments were edited from a more leisurely paced panoramic work. The Avila family, representing Manila’s liberal aristocracy, especially seems skimped, though Senator Avila’s assassination is the book’s political climax, bringing a number of threads together, and his daughter Daisy’s triumph in a beauty contest is its most magic-realist moment. “Our country belongs to women who easily shed tears and men who are ashamed to weep,” the chapter called “Epiphany” begins. “During the days following her extravagant coronation, something peculiar happens to Daisy Avila.… Each morning, as Daisy struggles to wake from her sleep, she finds herself whimpering softly. Her eyes are continually bloodshot and swollen. The once radiant beauty cannot pinpoint the source of her mysterious and sudden unhappiness.” As the press and the beauty-contest sponsors clamor at the Avilas’ door, she finally wakes with dry eyes and agrees to be interviewed on television. In the course of the interview she “accuses the First Lady of furthering the cause of female delusions in the Philippines.” From this scandalous indiscretion it is a short step for her to marry a publicity-conscious English playboy who sees her on television. Without much delay, she separates from him, takes a rebel lover, and is captured by the government, interrogated, raped, and released; next, she smuggles herself back into the rebel terrain and is reborn as the heroic, dedicated Aurora. But her transformation takes place mostly offstage, glimpsed through a series of news items, and her surreal siege of weeping remains the image we treasure, a distillation of this sad land of beauty contests.
Ms. Hagedorn allows herself more space in the underworld of young male hustlers, and in her impersonation of the novel’s other narrator, the nightclub d.j., homosexual prostitute, and cocaine addict Joey. Piercingly she brings off his jaunty voice of cheerful bravado and wounded scorn. Joey’s father was a black American soldier, his mother a beautiful whore who drowned herself when he was small. He was adopted by, or had already been sold to, a petty crook called Uncle, who trained him as a pickpocket and arranged his sexual initiation at the age of ten. “I’ve had my share of women since, but they don’t really interest me. Don’t ask me why. To tell you the truth, not much interests me at all. I learned early that men go for me; I like that about them. I don’t have to work at being sexy.” During a week-long tryst with a German film-director brought to Manila by one of the First Lady’s ambitious art-film festivals, Joey’s interior monologue is a running illumination of how sexual traders scheme, fantasize, and suffer flares of desire and pity. Looking at the German, he thinks:
He’s around forty, who knows. Pale and flabby, baggy clothes, a drooping moustache and the smell of cigarettes, straggling reddish-blond hair. I’m not sure I can bear to see him naked. It’s one thing if he was just an old man. I’d expect to see his flesh hang loose like an elephant; I’d be prepared.… The old man with elephant skin drools. Maybe he’s God the Father, lost in paradise. He can’t get over how perfect I am; he can’t get over the perfection of his own creation. He falls in love with me. They always do. I’ll admit, I can get off with some old man that way. I need my own movies, with their flexible endings. Otherwise, it’s just shit. Most sex is charity, on my part.
In the end, he steals his lover’s drugs and money, having already stoked up on a big breakfast: “Scrambled eggs over garlic-fried rice, side of longaniza sausages and beef tapa, kalamansi juice, and fresh pineapple for dessert. My last good meal for the next few days … The German is amused.”
Food and romantic fantasies crowd these famished pages. Everybody wants to be loved, especially the torturing general. With little overt editorializing, Ms. Hagedorn sketches a nation that has never had much to be proud of, where even the natives feel like strangers. “Two generations, three generations, it really doesn’t matter,” Rio’s father says. “What matters is I feel like a visitor.” A humiliating poverty undermines the First Lady’s dreams of cosmopolitan elegance. She dreams she is in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, having just chatted with Cristina Ford: “The third elevator’s door slides open without hesitation she steps in she holds up her long terno skirt to keep her precious beads from dragging on the floor she looks down at her bare feet the red polish on her toenails is chipped the skin between her toes is cracked and blistered streaked with dirt she is horrified.” Though the narrative at the end flies off into a flurry of artiness, including a prayer to the Virgin and a letter from Pucha to Rio Gonzaga as the author of Dogeaters, Ms. Hagedorn’s novel is generally dense with felt observation. Worried upper-class family life, seamy and hypnotic nightlife, suffocating and sinister and impotent political life—it is all here, set down with poetic brightness and grisly comedy. The author sees her native land from both near and far, with ambivalent love, the only kind of love worth writing about.
As Others See Us
THE TENNIS PLAYERS, by Lars Gustafsson, translated from the Swedish by Yvonne L. Sandstroem. 92 pp. New Directions, 1983.
MASKS, by Fumiko Enchi, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 141 pp. Knopf, 1983.
A MINOR APOCALYPSE, by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie. 232 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.
Lars Gustafsson is a Swede who has read, among much else, Nietzsche; from the German rhapsodist he has learned to combine philosophy and play, a sense of homo as both ludens and in extremis. The first of his intricate, slim novels to be translated into English, The Death of a Beekeeper, took the form of a dying man’s diary, and presented piquant apian facts and the soft gray winter landscape of rural Sweden intermingled with the drastic pain of terminal cancer. The second, entitled The Tennis Players, is also in the first person, a reminiscence by an affable professorial type who calls himself Lars. He remembers “a happy time” as a Vis
iting Professor of Swedish Literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1974; besides edifying innocent young Americans in the dark ways of Strindberg, Brandes, and Nietzsche, our hero works hard on his tennis game and gets involved in a spooky doubles match whose other participants are: Abel, a former pro and tennis mystic in a wide-brimmed leather hat; Polly, a tiny girl who turns out to be a Texas princess in disguise; and a math whiz called Chris, who works part-time for the Strategic Air Command, monitoring the Southern Air Defense District’s operations computer in Fort Worth. One of Lars’s students, a “very tall, very skinny, and quite mad” black called Bill, has located, in the remote top reaches of the university library (housed, as it happens, in the nineteen-story tower from which the deranged Charles Whitman shot and killed thirteen people one June day in 1966‡), a book printed in Paris in 1899, Mémoires d’un chimiste, by one Zygmunt I. Pietziewszkoczsky; Pietziewszkoczsky’s memoirs indicate that in fact Strindberg was really being poisoned and was not just paranoid during the crisis described in his well-known (in Scandinavia) novel of 1897, Inferno. At Lars’s suggestion, Chris tries to collate Inferno with Mémoires d’un chimiste on the giant government computer, precipitating a brief crisis which coincides with a university strike over the political implications of performing Das Rheingold and not Aida in a campus production, and with a local bigwig’s being caught committing an immoral act in the batter’s box of the local ballpark.
It is farce, but underplayed, and swiftly over, leaving a certain resonance of the personal; the conjunction of sunstruck Texas realities with the intellectual murk of fin-de-siècle northern Europe—“a time of coal smoke and absinthe, when Europe starts to give up hope”—is of course one the author lived through. Such cultural simultaneity is a campus commonplace, here especially embodied in the person of Doobie Smith, a Lou Salomé look-alike from Dallas so immersed in her reading that for her “Berlin was still a city of gaslights and dark hansom cabs going through cobbled streets.” Lars, who has been to Berlin, tells us, “She would get impatient with me because I didn’t know literary coffee shops that now exist only as building materials for some hundred feet of the Wall.” Doobie, with her blond hair and chubby hands, was “one of the most committed Nietzscheans I’ve ever met.” It is always interesting to see yourself as others see you, and Mr. Gustafsson’s impressions of America, though not notably harsh, are bracing:
There are hundreds of Reserve Policemen in every American city. They carry a special kind of heavy, watertight flashlight that can be used as a nightstick. In the sixties, they always used to be called up every time there were racial disturbances: they were drawn from approximately the same group as the subscribers to those brightly colored gun magazines one sees on all the newsstands.
Some things about [the students] never cease to amaze me. Their emotional brittleness, their perfect tennis serves, their almost frightening capability of grasping things: Gunnar Ekelöf’s Akrit poems, non-Abelian groups, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, almost in the same breath; their strange conviction that the world outside of Texas is meant for war and tourism.
It is such postcards home, rather than the Nordic basketwork intertwining themes from Strindberg, Wagner, and Nietzsche, that catch the American reader’s eye. Mr. Gustafsson is himself both affable and semi-opaque; he uses himself as a prism, deflecting light into unexpected corners. The net effect combines high seriousness and offhand charm. If Susan Sontag were to meet Woody Allen halfway, we might get jeux d’esprit of such gently skewed vision and good-natured intellectual effervescence.
Fumiko Enchi is, according to her American publisher’s flap copy, “generally regarded by the Japanese as their most important woman writer.” She was born in 1905, and Masks has waited twenty-five years for its publication here. The daughter of a well-known Meiji scholar and the author of a ten-volume translation of Lady Murasaki’s classic Tale of Genji, Mrs. Enchi in this short novel describes “a crime that only women could commit” and sheds, in passing, considerable scholarly light upon Nō masks and “spirit possession in the Heian era.” Psychological possession in the modern era enables Mieko Toganō, a poet and widow in her fifties, to manipulate her beautiful widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko, in a simultaneous romance with two men—Tsuneo Ibuki, a gaunt, married teacher of literature, and Toyoki Mikamé, an overweight, unmarried psychologist. Akio, Yasuko’s husband and Mieko’s son, was killed in an avalanche on Mount Fuji four years before, a scant year after his marriage. Mieko, it develops, conceived Akio and his feeble-minded female twin, Harumé, not with her own late husband, Masatsugu, but with a nameless lover who died in 1937 with the Japanese Army in China. Other characters include: Sadako, Ibuki’s businesslike wife (in whose honor he coins the epigram “A rational woman is as ridiculous as a flower held together with wire”); Yū, the elderly maidservant who has been witness to all that has transpired in the twisted Toganō household; Toé, the daughter of Yorihito Yakushiji, a dying Nō master; and the Rokujō lady, a sinister figure from The Tale of Genji who haunts Mieko’s thoughts and the spectral level of this novel. Some of the Nō masks are almost characters in themselves, and the novel’s three chapters are titled after masks: “Ryō no Onna,” “the spirit woman” and emblem of female vengeance; “Masugami,” a mask representing a young madwoman; and “Fukai,” meaning “deep well” or “deep woman,” a mask used in roles depicting middle-aged women.
“It’s very Japanese,” a character says at one point, and so Masks does seem. The descriptive prose sometimes has the evocative precision and quickly shifted perspective of haiku:
Patches of snow a few days old lingered here and there in the shadows of buildings and around tree roots in hollows in the ground. The sight of the snow, frozen hard now in odd shapes, reawakened in his senses the soft chill of the new-fallen flakes.
Other passages have the flatness of Japanese paintings, full of carefully indicated textures and angles:
Yasuko sat up so suddenly that the quilt fell back in a triangle, revealing Mieko’s slim figure lying gracefully draped in a sleeping-gown of patterned silk crepe, her legs bent slightly at the knee.
Viewed from the bathroom window, overlapping rooftops on a steep and narrow alleyway formed a succession of triangles tumbling down to where the sea (this, too, a triangle, standing on its head) lay softly blue and sparkling.
Sometimes the prose seems as hard-breathing as a sumo wrestler:
Her expression was calm and unflickering as always, but beneath the chill weight of her sagging breasts her heart raced in a mad elvish dance, while from hips to thighs a powerful tension enveloped her, anchoring her to the floor.
Perhaps the translator should share the blame for the effortfulness of a sentence like
The road down which she must blindly grope her way, helplessly laden with that unending and inescapable burden, seemed to stretch before her with a foul and terrifying blackness.
But the author alone has produced the overload of symbols and melodramatic insistences and dei ex machina lowered creakily out of the classic literature and drama of the past. Mrs. Enchi’s interpolation of a ten-page essay on the character of the Rokujō lady and the frequent depiction of her own heroines’ faces in terms of Nō masks—“[Mieko’s] was a face like a Nō mask, while the impression it gave was one of even greater obscurity and elusiveness”—muffle rather than illuminate what is going on among Mieko, Yasuko, and Harumé. Our sense of human event fights through, as it were, the wraps of decreed meaning.
The life that this delicate, mysterious book does have emerges in startling, grotesque gestures and images:
… Mieko patted and brushed back the cold sweat-soaked strands of hair along Yasuko’s brow. At the same time her legs began a smooth, rotary motion like that of paddle blades, softly stroking and enfolding Yasuko’s curled-up legs.
We read that Harumé suffered brain damage from the pressure of Akio’s feet in the womb, that Akio’s body when found after five months under the snow had been
torn to the bone along one side of his face, that Yasuko’s body after beginning her affair with Ibuki had in Mieko’s nostrils a peculiar smell—“the sharp pungency of a fish just taken from the sea.” Ibuki, after an interview with the mother and daughter-in-law, “recognized the viscid flow of emotion between Yasuko and Mieko as, he felt, unclean, yet he was aware also of his own paradoxical desire to enter that unclean moistness.” The Japanese psyche, without significant prompting from Christianity or Freud, seeks its own underworld, the fervid unclean flow behind the impassive mask. This restrained culture has produced, in its novels and films of this century, an art of violent imagery and painful beauty. Yasuko remembers how, searching for her husband beneath the snows of Mount Fuji, she thrust down the long steel rod she had been given and how it left each time “a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away”; and one night she dreams that she stabbed “his dead face straight in the eye.”
The transaction among the women of Masks is tortuously complex: Yasuko under Mieko’s spell causes Harumé to be impregnated by her own drugged lover, and the new life thus brought into the world in some way replaces and revenges the child that Mieko miscarried when she was tripped by a nail maliciously fixed at the head of a stair by her husband’s jealous mistress, Aguri. Jealousy, grief, sensuousness, and passivity contribute in inscrutable proportions to this “crime that only women could commit”; the mask of Fukai conceals a deep well indeed. As in Mr. Gustafsson’s brief novel, Americans are seen with a slant from another culture. Yasuko and Ibuki, about to commence their adulterous affair, observe a young American couple on a train—a woman with flaxen hair and a man whose hair “resembled the fur of a small animal.” The couple caress each other fondly and then “They were asleep, leaning against one another like a pair of tame animals.” To the Swede, as of 1974, we are killers; to the Japanese, as of 1958, we have the innocence of animals.