by John Updike
Even Vargas Llosa’s hablador, though he has an intent audience and an explicable social function, has obscurity problems, outside the small initiated circle. The anthropologist Edwin Schneil, privileged to audit two performances by a Machiguenga story-teller, had to fight against falling asleep in his boredom and bewilderment: “What a hodgepodge! A bit of everything, anything that came into his head … his travels, magic herbs, people he’d known; the gods, the little gods, and fabulous creatures of the tribe’s pantheon. Animals he’d seen and celestial geography, a maze of rivers with names nobody could possibly remember.” The rapture with which the Machiguengas hear the hablador and the interest with which we follow the sensitive revelations of our living authors require a cultural conditioning more extensive than we would like to think. The modern writer, perceiving that his reach is not wide, hopes that it is high. Priestly longings cling to writer-consciousness—pre-Vatican II priests, who kept their backs to the congregation while chanting in Latin. Perhaps what Harold Ross resisted was the imputation among writers that their shop talk is holy.
A Materialist Look at Eros
IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 149 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
Literature owes a debt to the Peruvian electorate for their recently declining to elect Mario Vargas Llosa to the thankless position of being their President. So elegant, pessimistic, and Europeanized a literary performer’s candidacy for this high office, amid the perils of terrorism and the sludge of daily speechifying, seems, at our distance, even more mysterious than Norman Mailer’s campaign for the New York mayoralty or Gore Vidal’s gracious offer, some years ago, to serve as a senator from California. Novelists presumably understand the workings of the world, and perhaps would govern no worse than lawyers, movie stars, or retired oilmen, but why anyone with an opportunity to create imperishable texts would want to exhaust his body and fry his brain in the daily sizzle of power brokerage lies quite beyond my own imagining. At any rate, the good people of Peru, with the masses’ customarily sound instinct, turned from the novelist, once the odds-on favorite, to a Japanese-Peruvian agronomical engineer, thereby releasing Vargas Llosa to the contemplative solitude and part-time irresponsibility necessary for artistic creation. He has been prolific, producing plays and criticism as well as novels. While he was hiking the mountainous campaign trail, a naughty butterfly of a book by him was flitting from couch to couch in the lamplit dens of Spanish-language readers. Now this book, billed on the jacket as “a classic of eroticism,” has been published in English, as In Praise of the Stepmother. It is, in our erotically retrenched nation, a startling document: not only would an American Presidential candidate not have written it, but the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn’t have given it a grant.
The stepmother is named Doña Lucrecia, and she lives in Lima and has just turned forty. Four months before her birthday, she married a widower, Don Rigoberto—a step taken with some trepidation, since “her first marriage had been a disaster and the divorce a nightmarish torment at the hands of money-grubbing shysters.” Don Rigoberto is the prosperous general manager of an insurance company, collects erotic art, and has one small son, Alfonso, by his previous marriage. The ages of the two males are never given, but Rigoberto seems at least fifty, or a lusty fifty-five, and his son, insistently described as a “little boy,” ten or so. Perhaps eleven or twelve, considering the sexual feats he comes to perform—but there is an artistic fudging here, tiptoeing as the writer is on the edge of the repulsively perverse. A comely black maid, Justiniana, rounds out the household, and devotees of erotica will perceive that this cast of characters allows for enough combinations to be satisfactory. Vargas Llosa, whose male-dominated fiction rarely possesses the aura of sensual saturation present in Gabriel García Márquez or Saul Bellow, has announced, in interviews, a liking for frank eroticism in fiction. In his superb homage to Madame Bovary and Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy—an extended critical work which also serves Vargas Llosa as a self-description—he states, “If I am left to choose between unrealities, the one closer to the concrete has my preference over the one that is abstract: I prefer pornography, for example, to science fiction, and sentimental stories to horror tales.” One of the traits he loves in Emma Bovary and in her novel is concreteness, an unashamed materialism, “something that she and I share intimately: our incurable materialism, our greater predilection for the pleasures of the body than for those of the soul, our respect for the senses and instinct, our preference for this earthly life over any other.” He goes on:
The ambitions that lead Emma to sin and death are precisely those that Western religion and morality have most savagely combated throughout history. Emma wants sexual pleasure, she is not resigned to repressing this profound sensual need that Charles is unable to satisfy because he doesn’t even know that it exists; she wants to surround her life with pleasing and superfluous things, elegance, refinement, to give concrete form by way of objects to that appetite for beauty that her imagination, her sensibility, and her reading have aroused in her.
One wonders whether Flaubert would have ascribed to his heroine quite such nobility of rebellion; but the passion of his disciple rings out with clarion effect, calling us all to realism, atheism, sensuality, and consumerism. Later in The Perpetual Orgy, however, Emma’s confusion of love and expenditure, which brings her down, is described in phrases that, though still enthusiastic, suggest a process gone awry:
When Emma is in love, she needs to surround herself with beautiful objects, to embellish the physical world, to create a setting for itself as lavish as her sentiments. She is a woman whose enjoyment is not complete unless it takes on material form: she projects her body’s pleasure into things, and things in their turn augment and prolong her body’s pleasure.
The reification of passion begins to feel like a mistake; so, too, In Praise of the Stepmother, exploring its sexual theme to rigorous, materialist extremes, brings the reader up against the possible limits of his or her own commitment to sensuality.
Don Rigoberto, in his systematic religion of bodily love, flirts with grotesquerie. He has large ears, and his weekly cycle of ritual ablutions includes, on Wednesdays, laboriously cleansing them of wax and stray hairs. Then he utilizes these perfected organs as instruments of bliss:
“Let me hear your breasts,” he would murmur, and amorously plugging his wife’s nipples, first one and then the other, into the hypersensitive cavern of his two ears—which they fit into as snugly as a foot into a moccasin—he would listen to them with his eyes closed, reverent and ecstatic, his mind worshipfully concentrated as at the Elevation of the Host, till he heard ascending to the earthy roughness of each button, from subterranean carnal depths, certain stifled cadences, the heavy breathing, perhaps, of her pores opening, the boiling, perhaps, of her excited blood.
Anticipating further adventures in aural sex, he imagines his ears “avidly flattened against her soft stomach” and “could already hear the lively burbling of that flatus, the joyous cracking of a fart, the gargle and yawn of her vagina, or the languid stretching of her serpentine intestine.” He anticipates, even, his marble tomb being engraved with the epitaph “Here lies Don Rigoberto, who contrived to love the epigastrium of his spouse as much as her vulva or her tongue.” Behind this Rabelaisian comedy of organs a serious question is raised: What is love if it stops short at the beloved’s digestive tract? Don Rigoberto’s methodical and fanatical achievement is “to fall in love with the whole and with each one of the parts of his wife, to love, separately and together, all the components of that cellular universe.” It is an achievement at which most mortals consciously or unconsciously balk, yet one which a thorough passion, in its fever of cherishing, seems to command. Vargas Llosa’s materialism defies us to set bounds to love’s rampage of possession, of sensory consumption. Ideal love is an omnivorous monster.
The chapters of narrative development in In Praise of the Stepmother altern
ate with chapters of pictorial meditation, each incorporating a rather dinky color reproduction of a painting. The author is fond of such layered fictions, which alternate a detached narrative voice with slices of another substance—radio soap operas (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), the hero’s consciousness (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta), Amazonian Indian recitations (The Storyteller). The added liveliness and the doubled perspective are obtained at the price of author-consciousness, a stilting awareness of deliberate experimentation. Here, the tale itself being fanciful and parodic, the art essays almost seamlessly blend into the gauze of artifice. The chapters on paintings of nudes by Jordaens, Boucher, and Titian seem a bit arch and mannered, but the one on a partially pink abstraction by Fernando de Szyszlo becomes a real poem on sexual merging, and the one on a bizarre head by Francis Bacon reawakens the central theme of erotic monstrosity. Bacon’s expressionistically distorted head is imagined as a full-bodied freak, with stumps instead of arms and legs, a slit of an ear, a hideous mouth, an eye next to his mouth. Yet his sex organ is intact, and he does not lack for lovers: “Women even come to love me, in fact, and youngsters become addicted to my ugliness. In the depths of her soul, Beauty was always fascinated by the Beast.” He gives his lovers “advanced instruction in the fine art of combining desire and the horrible so as to give pleasure”; they learn “that everything is and can be erogenous and that, associated with love, the basest organic functions, including those of the lower abdomen, become spiritualized and ennobled.” The concept of spiritualization is a surprising one, especially on the same page as the blithe sentence “It is possible that God exists, but at this point in history, with everything that has happened to us, does it matter?” It matters in that spirit/body dualism continues to give sex its spice, its sense of movement from one realm to another: sex is, our lovable monster tells us, a “descent into filth,” whereby we recognize ourselves.
No two erotic works are quite alike; each author comes to reveal, in the repetition that soon sets in, his or her fetishes and hot spots. Vargas Llosa, through his psychosexual anatomy of the stepmother, puts forth the idea that voyeurism is exciting not only to the seer but to the seen. Knowing that her enraptured young stepson is viewing her from the bathroom skylight, Doña Lucrecia determinedly displays herself and assumes poses of “indecent abandon,” as “a subtle way of punishing the precocious libertine crouched in the darkness up above, with images of an intimacy that would shatter, once and for all, that innocence that served him as an excuse for his boldness.” Afterwards, in bed, she experiences “hot flashes that, from time to time, electrified her nipples” and dreams a painterly dream of Titian’s Diana and her attendant, named Justiniana, making love in the forest while a little goatherd, called Foncín, watches. His silent witness is stimulating: “As I descend through the tunnel of sensation and quiver in delicious little spasms, I divine the presence of Foncín.… His innocent little body, glistening with sweat as he watches me and takes his pleasure by watching me, contributes a note of tenderness that subtly shades and sweetens mine.”
The notion that being watched is aphrodisiac implies that sexuality has a social dimension: though closeted, we make love in a crowd—of predecessors, of simultaneous entanglements, of romantic images the culture has provided, of personified superegos. A lot of sex is “showing” others, and not just those who are present. Without a surrounding society to defy, adulterous passion often wilts, and a daring elopement sinks into the ranch-house funk of socially approved marriage. Sixties-style sexuality, with its hot tubs and bustling crash pads, was on to something; promiscuity, at least until it turns into a quasi-religious, obligatory form of exercise, suits our interior multiplicity. Our complex psyches generate complex structures of gratification. Doña Lucrecia, having committed adultery, feels certain that the new involvement, “however obscure and complicated, however difficult to explain, enriched her marital relation, taking it by surprise and thus giving it a fresh start.” She has attained, in a happy word, “sovereignty”:
One morning, on opening her eyes, the phrase “I have won sovereignty” came to her. She felt fortunate and emancipated, but could not have said what it was that she had been freed from.
Of course, like Emma Bovary, she is punished for her overreaching, and so is her unsuspecting husband; our erotic fabulist is a realistic novelist as well, and he does not exclude, as does the true pornographer, the tragic dimension. Yet we feel that Doña Lucrecia, by succumbing to the perverse and the dangerous, is more human than her husband, with his ridiculous, fussy, bowel-loving personal “utopia” of the body. She sins her way to sovereignty; he merely topples from paradise.
In Praise of the Stepmother is, like the author’s other books, somewhat nasty. And its dramatization of corrupting innocence is not quite convincing—wicked little Alfonsito doesn’t have the undeniable, quirky, heartbreaking sociological reality of Lolita. Vargas Llosa’s moral—emphasized by an epigraph, from César Moro’s Amour à mort—seems to be that innocence and beauty intrinsically have something sinister about them. To become human we must make the descent into filth, into time. God Himself, Christianity claims, descended into Mary’s womb. The last painting Vargas Llosa weaves into his text is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation; he imagines the young Mary, confronted with a shimmering youth of an angel, asking herself, “Why did he call me queen? Why did I discover a gleam of tears in his eyes when he prophesied that I would suffer?” Love is a labyrinth we must enter even knowing it contains the Minotaur of destruction and loss. We leave much behind: “altruistic sentiments, metaphysics and history, neutral reasoning, good intentions and charitable deeds, solidarity with the species, civic idealism, sympathy toward one’s fellow.” It is a rare candidate for President who can put civic idealism in its place; rarer still one who could hearken, in so impish and delicate yet fiercely serious a fiction as this, to the rumbling epigastrium of love.
* The Marxism of Western European intellectuals itself must be taken as a sign, a bit of plumage whereby they recognize one another, since surely with the dismal example of Eastern Europe next door they can’t really want to turn Italy into another Romania, or France into China.
† The name, strange for an Italian, invites comment. Its most illustrious real possessor was Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), a classical scholar born in Geneva of Huguenot parents exiled from France. As with Eco’s hero, his intensely bookish life was beset by a certain international peril: the contest between Calvinism and Catholicism impoverished his youth in Geneva, and complicated his patronage first by Henri IV of France and then by James I of England. Reputed to be, after Scaliger, the most learned man of the age, he was sought as a prize by the Ultramontane Catholics and subjected to stern criticism by the anti-Papist Reformed theologians. His own taste was for a halfway position, which he read into the early church fathers and found in the Church of England; after the assassination of Henri IV, he went to England in 1610 at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, becoming a favorite conversational companion of the British monarch. He did not speak English, however, and encountered hostility from cockneys and Jesuits. In an age of violent religious contention, scholarship had no safe nook. Casaubon’s chief scholarly monuments are his editions of Athenaeus and Theophrastus, with profuse commentary; his diary, edited and published by his son under the title Ephemerides, provides an unequalled record of the daily life of a sixteenth-century scholar.
A scholar mustier still, and perhaps more present to Eco’s mind, is Edward Casaubon, the fictional cleric who marries Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. A wealthy, prematurely aged man in his fifties, this Casaubon is engaged upon an interminable work of arcane research and learned controversy he calls the Key to all Mythologies. George Eliot, translator of Feuerbach and Strauss’s Life of Jesus and well versed in the religious controversies of her century, with eerily intense comedy conjures up the cobwebbed maze of Casaubon’s impossible endeavor to show “that all the mythical systems or erra
tic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.” (Cf. page 580, the similar endeavor of Father Jean-François Foucquet.) Though Dorothea initially “listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought against Mr. Casaubon’s entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities,” the youthful bride rather soon comes to feel that it is all a “sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge” and half-scornfully to pity her husband’s “plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world.” In the end, she quails before the task, bequeathed to her by the dying scholar, of “sifting these mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful,” of “sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins.” This claustrophobic atmosphere, of littered labyrinths futilely searched for a key to “the tossed ruins of the world,” is of course exactly that of Eco’s Casaubon’s demonstration, on behalf of Tres, of history as one gigantic, shadowy conspiracy—scholarship as dementia.