edited by Peter Cockelbergh
Litteraria Pragensia (€12)

by Megan Burns

“There is no difference between inside and outside at the poem’s warp speed.”
—Pierre Joris, Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics

Cartographies of the In-Between collates a number of essays by various writers about Pierre Joris and his life as a translator, poet, and manifestor of “Nomad Poetics”; it’s a collection that should prompt a studious return to Joris’s own invaluable contributions to poetic discourse. Editor Peter Cockelbergh had previously drawn a line between two of these works in a 2010 essay for Jacket, in which he points out that A Nomad Poetics introduces the poetic concerns of Joris and that Justifying the Margins fleshes out these concerns more fully (a newer version of this essay appears in Section V of Cartographies). Continuing in that vein, I would argue that not only are these two collections of essays germane to an understanding of Joris’s poetry, translation, and thinking about poetry, but that Cartographies triangulates these two collections, opening up the conversation to many voices. In order to understand Joris’s work and his inclusive approach to poetry, it would stand to reason that a full appreciation of his work would include a reading through his work by others, as well as an enmeshed reading and dialogue with his own words and excavations.

One thread to follow into the labyrinth is Joris’s decades long research and interest in the poetry of the Maghreb. An interview entitled “Maghreb, Algeria- géographèmes” conducted by Peter Cockelbergh, provides one way to begin to frame Joris’s interest in this; in addition, Mohammaed Bennis’s essay investigates the “Arabic Islamic Turn” in Joris’s poetry, examining the recent collection Meditations of the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj. This in turn can be read in concert with Joris’s own essay “On the Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary Poetics” found in Justifying the Margins, where Joris outlines his interest in three Maghrebi writers: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Habib Tengour, and Driss Chraïbi. From there one can gaze back into Joris’s past, etching out where his initial experience with these writings were formed. “A Memoir for Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine” (from the second section of Justifying the Margins, which includes five essays for friends of Joris who have passed away—including a touching tribute to Jacques Derrida and an intense recollection of poet Douglas Oliver) can be read in connection with Jean Potante’s essay from Cartographies called “Justification of the Margin: Luxembourg in the Poetic Work of Pierre Joris,” which details the influence that Khaïr-Eddine had on Joris’s early adoption of a life dedicated to poetry as well as a poetry written in a language other than the languages of his youth.

And so, it is “in-between” the readings of these texts that we gather a rounder and more textually rich understanding of Joris’s continued interest in the poetry of the Maghreb as well as poetry written in the Arabic language. Some of this is informed by the early, intense relationship of a young Joris with Khaïr-Eddine, while another layer consists of Joris’s need to right what he sees as an earlier error on Pound’s part in not looking further than the Troubadours for the seeds of language that influenced the Modernist writers: “the Western refusal, century-long, to connect the Mediterranean to open up to the Arabic, to envisage our lyric as also a diasporic entity.” It is a poetics that reads and understands language “horizontally,” to use Joris’s term, and one that allows him to view the poetry of the Maghreb, the poetry of Pound, Duncan, Olson and the Beats, and his own poetry as contemporaneous and involved in an ever-deepening conversation about language.

It is this search that leads Joris from his own written languages of French, German, and English to seek to understand Arabic—and not just Arabic as a language but in the way that an ethnographer must investigate how the language functions in the culture and environment. To that end as a translator, Joris seeks to piece together the threads of the “textum” as he terms it, the invisible threads of language that are woven together to create the final document. In the case of Maghrebi writers such as novelist Driss Chraïbi, it is the langue fourche, the “forked tongue,” that draws Joris’s attention. Joris takes into account the choice to write in the language of the colonizer, French, while remaining on the lookout for the “ghostings of Arabic” in the writing: “The colonizer’s language too is caught in an irresolvable double bind: no language is a house the writer can simply inhabit, the only home is found in the ever-shifting force field of the spaces of its internal contradictions.” This “basic law of nomadicity,” as Joris calls it in Justifying the Margins, echoes his earlier writings in A Nomad Poetics and thrusts us further, if we choose, into our archeological dig into Joris’s poetics and poetic interests. For example, the poem “The Work of Al-Ishk,” collected in Poasis, ruminates on the various threads running through Arabic language and history that spark Joris’s curiosity. Joris tells us in his introduction to his newly released volume of translations of Maghrebi poet Habib Tengour, Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader, that “Maghreb¹” can be translated as “west” and following that path leads to the idea of traveling so far west that one becomes an exile—hence Tengour’s choice of a title for his reader. This etymology is another clue as to why Joris would be attracted to Maghrebi writers. While Joris has contended he believes translation is a responsibility, it’s no accident that he is drawn to “exiles” and to writers who choose to write in a language that is not their “mother tongue.”

To return to Cartographies, it is again Mohammed Bennis’s essay on Joris’s turn towards Arabic Islamic poetry that can further enrich our understanding of Joris’s own work. Bennis pays particular attention to Joris’s interest in early Sufi mystics, whose influence contributes an important tenet to Joris’s Nomad Poetics. The term “Mawqif,” which is used by Sufi Muslims to define the stopover or moment of rest between movements, is incorporated into Joris’s long poem Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj. Bennis points out that the idea of stations as resting places conflates a term used by the Sufi Poet Niffari, while the title of the poem alludes to another Sufi Poet of the 10th-century, Mansour Al-Hallaj, who was executed for his use of language. It is easy to see why this mystic’s “poethics”—to layer Joan Retallack’s modern term on an ancient history—would intrigue Joris. Al-Hallaj spoke the words that loosely translate “I am the Truth,” but more importantly, he deigned to weave together the vernacular and the sacred, eventually paying the ultimate price. Bennis points out that even physically, the dip into Arabic requires a change in movement, a reordering of senses in order to get “used to the traits of letters that begin at the right hand side and move to the left hand side.” This movement on the actual page is a vital point, emphasizing Joris’s nomadic notion that one should always be moving. It is when one becomes complacent that the language suffers.

Al-Hallaj’s story is linked to that of Nimrod, who was punished for attempting to reach God via the tower of Babel; his punishment was the break in language, the cut or slice that separated a unifying tongue. “Nimrod in Hell,” the opening piece in Justifying the Margins, takes up Dante’s version of the figure, a character babbling what appears on the surface to be nonsense. Joris sets up unanswerable questions: Is this the Babel-language that we lost or simply the post-Babylonian language that makes translation possible? In either case, Joris believes it is more than just nonsensical blather. If all poetry is its own language, as Joris avers via Robert Kelly, then it is a poem we have yet to translate. Joris uses Al-Hallaj’s mystic terms in Arabic next to his English translations and he incorporates this idea of the “mawqif” into the form of Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj, where he provides his readers with a contemporary landscape through which to view and embody this idea. He quite literally brings the form forward through a combination of translation and poetry and breathes new life into it, re-animating it as a viable “station” or meditative space for readers to experience. What the Meditations reveal is what Joris has always contended: that it all accrues and goes into the work. The research, the excavation of language, the translating of words at their most basic units, and the living that is done in between; these all join in the final “textum.”

In her essay “Before Babel” in Cartographies, Alice Notley returns to the image of Nimrod babbling and struggles with Joris’s contention that all writing is translation. Instead of translating, Notley defines her own writings as a “harnessing of the magic horse of sound, rhythm.” This in turn brings back the idea of babbling, the vibration that the body makes as it attempts to speak and our need to make sense of that which we find trapped in our minds. Notley’s stance is that before Babel is the same as after, in the sense that the poem travels out on sound, first and foremost. Translatable or not, the landscape of the poem allows us to transcend meaning and to function in a different realm than one defined by pure reason and narrative. This idea recalls another Arabic term favored by Joris, the “Barzakh,” which translates as barrier, veil, or curtain. It is used to name a connection from one to another or as the link between. In this example, I imagine that Notley accesses her poetry from a space similar to a “Barzakh,” a place hidden from us, and yet one in which the poet can move between, returning with the language. Notley and Joris would likely agree that there is a little magic involved in the exchange no matter what word is used to define it.

Joris’s interest in the Maghreb has reached a true pinnacle with the publication of his latest book of translations: Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader. Joris met Tengour at the University of Constantine while teaching there in the late 1970s. Presently, the two poets have been collaborating in editing the fourth volume of the indispensible Poems of the Millennium series of anthologies, due to be released later this year. In the “ReadySteadyBlog Interview” found in Justifying the Margins, Joris states “it is in questioning his [Tengour’s] work . . . that I recognize my own quests the most.” Tengour’s essay in Cartographies, “The Trace and the Echo,” describes their long friendship, and the editor notes that the descriptions are punctuated with passages from Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj, which Tengour translates into French when composing his essay. Moving across languages, Tengour says of Joris: “Transcriber in an alphabet pieced together well away from metropolises. To discover in all innocence what digs into language.” And from Exile is my Trade, Joris translating Tengour gives us this: “He has woven the poem in secrecy. Months of retreat in the desert, at the mercy of winds, so as to conform to the tradition. Chaffing and the whip. The echo’s harshness initiates into tonal ruptures.” If we take Joris at his word, then this new collection of translations of Tengour’s poetry and prose is another way of understanding and experiencing the quests dear to Pierre Joris.

¹ In Cartographies, “Maghreb” is spelled with an “e” while in Exile is My Trade, Joris begins to use the “Maghrib” spelling. The Arab spelling for al-maghreb is المغرب—consonants without vowels.

BOOKS BY PIERRE JORIS:

Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2012).

Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 (Salt Publishing, 2009)

A Nomad Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)

Poasis: Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

TRANSLATIONS BY PIERRE JORIS:

Habib Tengour, “Exile is My Trade:” A Habib Tengour Reader, (Black Widow Press, 2012).

Poems for the Millennium Volume 4, Diwan Iffrikya: An Anthology of North African Writings from Prehistory to Today, eds. Pierre Joris & Habib Tengour (University of California Press, 2012).

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With Selected Letters of Una Jeffers
Volume Two, 1931-1939
edited by James Karman
Stanford University Press ($95)

by Robert Zaller

When his reputation was at its height in the 1930s, Robinson Jeffers frequently received as much or more space in poetry anthologies as Frost, Stevens, Pound, or Eliot. In 1932, he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. By the time of his death thirty years later, he had almost disappeared from view, and for a while his work was nearly out of print. Since then, a slow but sure revival has been underway, much assisted by the splendid Stanford University Press editions of his work in verse and prose. For his admirers, Jeffers is, with Whitman, one of the two great prophets of American letters—the one of democracy’s optimism and the other of its pessimism. Of these two visions, the latter speaks particularly today. Jeffers foresaw America’s decline into empire, social dependency, and environmental degradation with uncanny prescience, and seems more contemporary now than many of his Modernist peers.

The second volume of James Karman’s edition of Jeffers’s letters follows his career from its apogee at the beginning of the 1930s to its crisis at the end of the decade, when Jeffers experienced a personal and poetic climacteric. As in Volume One, the voice is chiefly that of his wife Una, who handled most of the family correspondence. Jeffers himself was a superb but reluctant prose stylist, and his letters are often prefaced by apologies for their tardiness and general inadequacy. This is a strategy of tact, because he is frequently replying to prying scholars, solicitors for good causes, and the many eager poets who send him unsolicited books. To all he is invariably polite, although occasionally firm. What he refuses is literary politicking of any sort. When a query pricks his interest, he is illuminating about his own purposes, and his descriptions of people, places, and weathers are quick and shrewd. Of a sojourn in the remote northwest corner of Ireland he notes, “The scenery is magnificent, fine mountains and heather and little stone-walled fields, all spun through with lakes and arms of the sea; the people are well-nourished and look you in the eye; there is little history, few antiquities, no industry at all, except weaving in some of the cottages.”

Even when (relatively) expansive, however, Jeffers impresses most by his reticence. It is Una who is loquacious, and her long letters that supply most of the biographical detail of Jeffers’s chief decade of renown. Far from living reclusively—the popular image of Jeffers is still that of the eremite, alone on his beloved cliffs—the household saw a steady stream of visitors: here is Edna St. Vincent Millay coming by, and Langston Hughes picnicking, and Charlie Chaplin doing impressions over tea. Here, too, is the young Robert Lowell, soon to be the darling of the New Critics who would scorn Jeffers in the 1940s, soliciting an invitation and receiving a polite reply. Summers in Taos with Mabel Dodge Luhan, where Jeffers was never very comfortable, brought another set of celebrities, including Frieda Lawrence.

Mabel and Una were working at cross purposes with Jeffers; Una, herself intensely sociable, sought to screen him from company and protect the solitude he needed by nature and for his work, while Mabel saw him as a successor to D. H. Lawrence (Frieda’s presence was no accident) with a prophetic message for mankind. The consequence was that a third woman, Hildegarde Donaldson, captured his affections during a stay at Taos, precipitating a crisis in which Una attempted suicide. This coincided with a slowly developing writer’s block that left Jeffers desperate for fresh stimulus. Forced to choose, his loyalty to Una prevailed, but at cost. Only three more relatively slender volumes of verse would appear in his lifetime, plus an adaptation of Euripides’s Medea.

Of course, one can make no facile inferences; Jeffers’s project, pursued with great intensity and extraordinary productivity over two decades, had been nothing less than a reckoning with the sources and implications of Western civilization, and it might be said that with his verse drama, “At the Birth of an Age” (1935), he had completed his conspectus. His later work would show no loss of authority and forms an important part of his canon, but the grand, sweeping narratives that had made his reputation were a thing of the past. This alone, for someone whose emotional balance depended so largely on the discipline of work and the shock of vision, would have been deeply traumatic; but, in addition, Jeffers felt keenly the approach of a new World War, and with it the ruin of his hopes for America as a citadel in an age of decline. It is unlikely that a love affair, however timely, would have accommodated all that.

Read with these issues in mind, Volume Two of the Letters is an unfolding marital drama, reaching a climax just short of tragedy. The marriage would endure until Una’s death in 1950, and Jeffers would be deeply faithful to her memory. These letters, again finely edited and comprehensively annotated by James Karman, reveal as never before the complex and often conflicted dynamic between one of the twentieth century’s great poets and the woman who in many ways enabled his achievement.

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Witold Gombrowicz
translated by Lillian Vallee
Yale University Press ($20)

by Steve Danzis

Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish writer who spent most of his adult life in Argentina, escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland and later the Communist regime. John Updike and Milan Kundera hailed him as one of the greatest modern writers; over the past dozen years his reputation has grown in the United States with the publication of new translations of his novels. Like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (who also happened to be émigrés), Gombrowicz was a master of stream-of-consciousness narration. His fiction may seem in some ways cartoonish, but it is undergirded by a consistent set of themes, particularly his view of the interdependence of youth and maturity. For Gombrowicz, youth is “the only, highest, and absolute value of life . . . If a philosopher says that ‘Man wants to be God,’ then I would add: ‘Man wants to be young.’”

Although Gombrowicz’s reputation is mainly based on his novels and plays, his Diary has also received much critical attention. Written between 1953 and 1969, it originally appeared in serial form in a Polish émigré magazine and was later published in three volumes, which were translated into English by Lillian Vallee. Now Vallee’s translation has been reissued as a single volume. She nicely captures Gombrowicz’s playfulness and satirical wit, but the sparse footnotes accompanying the translation are inadequate; hopefully they will be supplemented in a future edition.

If Gombrowicz were writing today, he almost certainly would publish a blog: his diary mingles confessional writing with polemics and essays on a wide variety of topics, including Polish nationalism, modern literature, classical music, visual art, existentialism, Catholicism, and Marxism. A self-declared provocateur, Gombrowicz makes no effort to censor himself. He dismisses most of his fellow émigré writers, who he feels have grown sterile through lack of contact with their homeland, but he is equally unsparing of writers who remained in Poland. Although he acknowledges the traumatic events Polish writers lived through, he says they have distilled nothing from them: “Proust found more in his cookie, servant, and counts than they found in years of smoking crematoria.”

Gombrowicz’s early years in Argentina were marked by insecurity, partly because he shunned his fellow émigrés but also because of his sexual inclinations. He was attracted to lower-class men—not surprisingly, young ones. Mostly he longed for sailors and other lower-class Argentineans, though he formed some relationships with aspiring writers. His entries about them are reminiscent of Gustave Aschenbach’s febrile longing in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: “I acted toward Gize somewhat like an old woman, delighted that his hunger outweighed his revulsion . . . I adored his freshness and he adored what I had made of myself . . . The closer I was to death, the more he adored me, because he saw all the more of my already expiring existence.” On one occasion, he stalks a shoeshine boy at night: “I felt on that empty street that there was no helping it, I had to murder something. I continued to walk, set on committing murder. I had to reduce him to the level of an animal and remain alone in my humanity.” Death and lust, lust and death: the two states are tightly braided together in Gombrowicz’s psyche.

Nothing escapes Gombrowicz’s critical gaze, not even his own diary writing: “I write this diary reluctantly. Its dishonest honesty wearies me. For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, why do I pretend that I am talking to myself? Are you talking to yourself so that others will hear you?” His most straightforward answer is that the diary is a way to revive a stalled literary career: “Three years ago, unfortunately, I broke with pure art, as my kind of art was not the kind that could be cultivated casually, on Sundays or holidays. I began to write this diary for the simple reason of saving myself, in fear of degradation and an ultimate inundation by the waves of a trivial life, which are already up to my neck.”

Gombrowicz doesn’t directly say so, but he seems to have started his diary in response to the publication of Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, which examines the moral conflicts of artists and intellectuals living in Communist states. He admires the book and shares Milosz’s assessment of the “bankruptcy of literature in Poland.” He also sees the potential for wisdom developing from direct experience of totalitarianism. Yet he feels that Milosz’s analysis lacks nuance: “In you, the boundlessness and richness of life are reduced to a few issues, and you use an oversimplified concept of the world, a concept you well know is provisional.”

Milosz’s moral authority and seriousness pose a challenge to Gombrowicz. Elsewhere in the diary, he declares that “a lack of seriousness is just as important to man as seriousness.” If he has stayed out of the fight against Communism, it is because “art must also serve people who have not had their teeth knocked out, their eyes blackened, or their jaws broken.” Gombrowicz doesn’t dismiss political writing, but he’s on another mission: “It would be stupid if I harbored ill feelings toward people who, upon seeing a fire, sound the alarm . . . Yet I am saying: let each person do what he was called to do and what he is capable of doing. Literature of a high caliber must aim high and concern itself chiefly with not allowing anything to impede its range.”

Gombrowicz’s exploration of immaturity led him to create a distinguished body of literature. But as he well recognized, immaturity should not be confused with innocence, and the diary offers many glimpses of his dark side. For example, Gombrowicz writes disparagingly of the renowned Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who died in the Holocaust: “Bruno was a man who was denying himself. I was a man seeking himself. He wanted annihilation. I wanted realization. He was born to be a slave. I was born to be a master. He wanted denigration. I wanted to be ‘above’ and ‘superior to.’ He was of the Jewish race. I was from a family of Polish gentry.” Perhaps Gombrowicz saw a rival in Schulz, whose work was being rediscovered at the time of this entry. But Gombrowicz’s spitefulness toward his dead friend and early supporter is inexcusable, especially when he goes on to declare absurdly, “I hail, as I have said, from the landed gentry, and this is a burden almost equally strong and only a bit less tragic than to have behind one those thousands of years of Jewish banishment.” In such instances, the diary reminds us that when immaturity outlasts youth, the results can be grotesque.

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Keith Tuma
Salt Publishing ($14.95)
by Stephen Burt

What a bad title for such a good—and, paradoxically, ambitious—book: though it presents itself as a low-pressure journal, the inconsequential deeds and recollections of a senior professor in a sabbatical year, On Leave unfolds to reveal a meditation on the anecdote as a form; an elegant sketch of grief, and of partial recovery; a calm revolt against the conventions of one-point-in-front-of-another, stiffly ineffective, argument about modern poetry; and (best of all) an amenable introduction to the sometimes prickly, too often unapproachable “avant-garde” (or, if you prefer, “post-avant”) poets in Britain, Ireland, and America, among whom Tuma has made his lit-crit career. If you are not already reading Trevor Joyce, Tom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, or Rae Armantrout with pleasure, or if you have tried and failed, Tuma’s offhand admiration for the poets and for their poems might let you try again.

Before we get to the parts about the poets, we have to get used to the journal as journal, whose disconnected paragraphs record disjoined parts from a year in Tuma’s life. We read about international travels, headline news (it’s 2007-08, and Obama runs hard), sports (the Cubs, up and down), and sadder life-changing events: Tuma’s mother grows ill and dies in the course of the year. We meet the critic as father and husband, as grieving son, as owner of an aged dog, taking walks by a river in southwest Ohio (Tuma teaches at Miami University Ohio), leading just the sort of “real life” that realist fiction emulates, the sort of life that some people think avant-garde poetry, with its opposition to transparency, to the picturesque, to the taken-for-granted, cannot present.

Those people, Tuma’s work implies, are wrong. “Avant-garde poets claim to hate anecdotes or the anecdotal style,” Tuma complains, “though what they really hate are the way those anecdotes are framed”: wrapped up with a moral like a gaudy bow, or slotted into a story of transformation, growth and epiphany. Framed in weirder ways, or just hung on the wall, the same anecdotes can provoke thought, lead us to read on, as they do (Tuma shows) in the disconnected, open-ended collections of anecdotes about artists and writers, from Drummond of Hawthornden onwards through Hazlitt and Elbert (not L. Ron) Hubbard, that Tuma intermittently emulates here. Avant-garde poets, this form says, are people too: even J. H. Prynne, the famously difficult, forbiddingly intellectual, Cambridge writer, is a person, and in his own person attracts the kind of storytelling that his poems repel.

“Only those who have personality and emotions,” says T. S. Eliot, “know what it means to want to escape from those things,” and to read a difficult modern poem—whether it’s Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922, or Armantrout’s Money Shot today—you could do worse than make educated guesses about what the poets have tried to escape. Tuma can help us guess: his stories about his favorite recent poets reflect on their work, and also thank them for their collaboration, their involvement with a literary community that is more than the sum of its poems: “that’s the spirit I associate with the world of small press poetry, the world I have been remembering here.”

Tuma can also gloss individual poems; he quotes them, appropriately and sparely, sets down his reactions and moves on, to the Cubs, or the dog, or back to Samuel Johnson, and to the next day. You won’t find high-energy interpretive arguments here, but rather a journal that shows how it feels to admire these poets, these poems: Tuma convinced me, as it were, by his presence, to try again with several rebarbative British and Irish writers (Trevor Joyce in particular) whose powers have not come across, or not to me, in Tuma’s earlier, more academic, attempts to select the best of their work.

Anecdotes seem to deny history—they stand on their own, they get traded like shells, or like coins—but they have a history, as do all forms: Tuma begins and ends with some self-consciousness about what “anecdote” means, a self-consciousness that works against the informality of his tone. There are other books about poets and poems that work this way, but unless you count The Grand Piano, the recent “collective autobiography” of the West Coast language writers, they are not books about the (cough) post-avant; they are books on the lives of the so-called confessional poets, prized for their anecdotes whatever else they contain (Eileen Simpson’s memoir Poets In Their Youth, for example), and nineteenth-century books about the Romantics (Hazlitt’s My First Acquaintance with Poets), and earlier collections of disconnected remarks and events, such as those around Dr. Johnson. It’s an exalted, as well as a casual, company; Tuma’s short, welcome book belongs there too.

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That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion
Rachel Herz
W. W. Norton & Co. ($26.95)

Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust
Daniel Kelly
A Bradford Book / MIT Press ($30)

The Meaning of Disgust
Colin McGinn
Oxford University Press ($35)

by Jeremy Biles

The cover of each of the three books under review here includes a photograph of someone making what is known as the “gape” or “yuck” face: upper lip curled, brow wrinkled, and nose scrunched in an expression of recoil, the universal signal for disgust. According to the authors, the very sight of the human countenance thus marred will function empathically in those who view it; beholding the signal of disgust engenders the emotion of disgust. If this is true, then emblazoning book covers with the gape face might seem an unwise marketing strategy; potential readers would be repelled by the images. But as Rachel Herz, Daniel Kelly, and Colin McGinn make clear, disgust is a highly complex emotion, a matter of both repulsion and attraction; there is something fascinating, even seductive, about disgust. Putting faces of disgust on the book covers is thus a means of intriguing an audience.

The authors themselves are clearly fascinated with disgust, each painting a distinctive portrait of the emotion—his or her own gape face. Though these portraits differ in important and sometimes irreconcilable ways, they are united in their participation in a wider current of intellectual investigation. As Kelly points out, disgust “has become relevant to discussions across the humanities, especially those engaging the cognitive sciences and those in the midst of the ‘affective turn.’” In fact, these three books are only among the most recent entries in a spate of publications evidencing the academic “turn” to affects and the bodies in which they’re grounded; numerous books on corporeality, emotions, and specifically disgust have appeared over the past three decades, with writers seeking to suture close a Cartesian wound long in healing.

Herz, Kelly, and McGinn are convinced that disgust is a distinctly human emotion; it therefore speaks intimately, if often troublingly, to our species-condition. Though each writer takes a different approach to the subject matter—Herz is a psychologist building on her expertise in olfaction and emotion; Kelly is a philosopher steeped in the cognitive sciences and dedicated to empirical study; and McGinn is professor of philosophy interested in metaphysical questions—all three find disgust to be crucial to understanding the human condition. Herz concludes her book by claiming that “disgust holds a mirror up to us. This is why, by unraveling disgust, we can more fully understand what it means to be human.” McGinn echoes the sentiment in his parting comment: “To a considerable extent, disgust makes us what we are.” And Kelly, though rather more circumspect, affirms that disgust is integral to “the cognitive economy of modern humans.” But what exactly does disgust reveal about us?

In responding to this question, Rachel Herz proposes to unravel the “mysteries of repulsion,” as the subtitle ofThat’s Disgusting indicates. Herz’s study is a fine work of popular science—informative, synthetic, insightful, and written in clear, light-handed, lively prose. (If, like me, you’ll be taking an overseas plane ride this summer, consider picking up Herz’s book for the trip.) It also brims with illustrative (and titillating) anecdotes and examples involving everything from mephitic feet, mutilated bodies, and competitive eating to creeping insects, nose-picking, and political ideologies—not to mention unavoidable discussions of bodily excreta: “urine, vomit, phlegm, saliva, sweat, blood, pus, feces.”

But That’s Disgusting is by no means a mere gross-out fest. Drawing upon a breadth of scientific research (including her own work on the psychology of smell and emotion), Herz pursues large claims concerning disgust: disgust “teaches us about the inner workings of our brains and personality”; it is “uniquely complex among human emotions”; and it “reveals the fundamental concerns that underlie our existence.” Universal but not innate, disgust is based in biology and “influenced by learning, context, and complex thought.” The overarching aim of the book is to demonstrate the intimate association of disgust with death. Indeed, Herz claims that they are “fundamentally linked”: “disgust is fundamentally about our awareness of our own death and our terror of it.”

What precisely does death have to do with disgust? According to Herz, disgust has evolved as a form of fear, specifically the fear of our primary predator: pathogens. The emotion is an avoidance mechanism, the most “elemental purpose” of which is to “engender an avoidance of rotted and toxic food.” Of course, disgust may be elicited by a vast range and variety of things, far beyond food gone bad. Herz explains that the emotion has evolved from its “basic form” to include all manner of repulsions, from noxious fumes to immorality. Though its elicitors are many, what disgusting elements have in common is that they remind us of our vulnerable and imminently mortal bodies—our “animality.” In other words, the emotion arises when confronting things that make us aware of our fragile animal natures. Disgust is an avoidance response, and what it wants us to avoid is death. Unlike simple fear, however, disgust is a learned emotion, shaped by culture and context.

Daniel Kelly also trains attention on the interaction of evolutionary biology and culture in Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Potential readers should not be deceived by the goofy title of this book, which is distinctly at odds with the tone, subtlety, and sophistication of the book’s content. Kelly offers a highly nuanced philosophical account of disgust, in which readers will find themselves negotiating terms like “mood congruency,” “affect program,” “inferential signature,” and “antecedent functional overlap.” Despite (or perhaps because of) its highly technical nature, the discussion is lucid and the argument cogent, with the aims of each chapter stated clearly at the outset and rehearsed in each conclusion.

Kelly’s ambitious task in this concise but dense book is twofold. Surveying the rather disorganized state of research on disgust, one “primary goal . . . is to consolidate and organize the research on disgust.” This goal serves the larger ambition of constructing an integrated functional theory of disgust that would “bring order to the chaos.” With his first chapter, Kelly begins his procedure by delineating the “behavioral profile” of disgust, building upon and organizing data from a wide range of cognitive-science studies. He lays out three elements that must be accounted for in order to achieve a complete theory of disgust: unity of response (the characteristic features of disgust response occur as a unified cluster); variation of the elicitors (“a large amount of variation exists in what is found disgusting, and so in what types of elicitors activate individual disgust systems”); and diversity of the elicitors (a “surprisingly diverse range of elicitors . . . trigger disgust . . . from the brutely physical and inert to the highly social and interpersonal”).

The next three chapters proceed methodically in responding to these theoretical criteria. Chapter Two formulates Kelly’s “Entanglement thesis,” which explains how “different components of disgust . . . form a homeostatic cluster that we recognize as a single response type.” The hypothesis pursued here is that “two distinguishable cognitive mechanisms that were once distinct . . . in the cognitive architecture” of humans underlie disgust. These distinct but “entangled” mechanisms have to do with food regulation and the avoidance of pathogens and parasites. The successful defense of this hypothesis satisfies the requirement to explain the unity of response. Chapter Three describes disgust’s “sentimental signaling system,” and in doing so accounts for the “flexibility of disgust’s acquisition system and the variation . . . that it allows” —the second requirement. And Chapter Four outlines the “Co-opt thesis,” which explains how disgust works in conjunction with different cognitive systems,” and is “redeployedmultiple times, in multiple domains, and in combination with several other systems.” Explaining how a variety of things elicit disgust satisfies the final constraint on the theory. Conjoining the Entanglement and Co-opt theses in light of the behavioral profile allows Kelly to conclude his “construction of an integrated theory of disgust.”

In short, then, disgust is a complex but unified emotion whose joint basis is food regulation and pathogen aversion; but it evolves over time to respond to a variety of things, including moral matters. In his final chapter, Kelly addresses the role of disgust in normative ethics, asking what role disgust “should play in moral reflection, deliberation, justification, and beyond.” What follows is an incisive critique of “disgust advocates” like bioethicist and public intellectual Leon Kass, proponent of what Kelly terms the “Deep Wisdom theory,” which sees disgust as a reliable moral indicator. Kass has famously claimed that “in crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it . . . Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” Kelly decisively refutes this position, demonstrating that “the fact that something is disgusting is not even remotely a reliable indicator of moral foul play. Disgust is not wise about or acutely attuned to ethical considerations . . . rather, repugnance is simply irrelevant to moral justification.” In fact, disgust often presents ethical dangers, underwriting xenophobia, racism, and religious intolerance.

Kelly’s resounding conclusion concerning disgust and normative ethics nicely supplements Colin McGinn’s The Meaning of Disgust. McGinn dismisses the question of moral disgust as beyond the real purview of his study. Early in the book he notes (in terms that agree with Kelly’s account) that disgust has “become recruited by the moral faculty,” before remarking that he “shall not be much concerned with moral disgust from now on.” Instead, McGinn asks, “What does disgust mean? What is its pith and point?” In contrast to Kelly’s empirically grounded account, McGinn is not afraid to speculate about the nature—the very essence—of the emotion; he seeks to formulate a metaphysics of disgust. And whereas Herz draws upon colorful anecdotes to move her argument forward, McGinn is more inclined toward thought experiments and introspection. Of the three volumes considered here, McGinn’s is surely the most writerly. The author clearly delights in well-turned phrases; his eloquent language, though serving much speculation, is also evocative—at times even earthy—and, though hardly ribald, eschews euphemism. For instance, he is happy to correct Freud by insisting that snakes are less phallic than fecal symbols.

The pleasures of McGinn’s text are many, and they go beyond the elegant prose. Though there is a tendency at times to proceed by way of unsupported assumptions, subjective impressions, and generalizations (the margins of my copy are littered with question marks), there is nonetheless a deep persuasive force to McGinn’s account. The author opens by characterizing his text as a work of “impure philosophy” that blends philosophy, psychology, biology, and literature. In doing so, he “aims to uncover disagreeable truths about what we are, as self-conscious emotional beings with organic bodies.” But these truths are not just disagreeable; they are positively tragic, and thus what McGinn writes is an “essay in species self-criticism, and self-pity. It is a sort of lamentation.”

What turns a philosophical treatment of disgust into a lamentation? In short, McGinn believes that disgust is part of the tragedy of our human condition. We are a species whose self-consciousness is both a boon and a curse. Capable of reflection, we are also confronted inevitably by the mortality that haunts our incarnated selves. Formulating a set of characteristics common to all things disgusting, and revealing what he takes to be the shortcomings of previous theories of disgust, McGinn observes that disgust is not merely an emotional reflex, but rather “rests upon certain thoughts about the world, specifically in relation to life and death.” As McGinn claims in a stirring passage, disgust is linked to a profound ambivalence:

What is disgusting is death as presented in the form of living tissue. It is death in the context of life that disgusts—the death or dying of the living. Not death tout court, but death in the midst of life, surrounded by it. Or again, it is the living becoming dead, making that dreadful transition . . . Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are present in some form: it is not life per se or death per se that disgusts, but their uneasy juxtaposition . . . What disgusts is theinterpenetration of life and death.

The elaboration of McGinn’s “Death-in-Life” theory includes a critique of the theory that disgust arises with the recognition of animality and thus mortality (Herz’s basic position). It is rather the coincidence or “interpenetration” of the living and the dead that engenders the emotion. And if Kelly’s theory provides a rigorous account of the evolutionary function of disgust, McGinn provides a theory that illuminates the existential import of disgust: disgust involves the “tragic nature” of the “biological incarnation of consciousness.”

William James once remarked that rational proofs for the existence of God fail to move humans’ hearts, even if they produce notional assent. If McGinn’s account lacks the scientific rigor of Kelly’s theory, it nonetheless has the merit of speaking a truth with emotional resonance. Where it is least effective is not in its speculative but rather its more dogmatic moments. McGinn’s construal of the essence of art, for example, seems unaware of certain developments in contemporary art, and remains overly constrained by its weddedness to notions of classical beauty; it fails to take into account the history and possibilities of disgust within aesthetic production. “Art is intended to draw our attention away from our gross nature,” he writes, “to provide an alternative to that disturbing vision.”

A disturbing—and fascinating—vision emerges when these recent works by Herz, Kelly, and McGinn are read as a triad. What culminates in juxtaposing these accounts is a collective portrait of disgust more lively and nuanced than any single one. In this way, these three books, taken together, are like the obverse of Sir Francis Galton’s famous study in which photographed faces are superimposed, resolving in a symmetrical composite, the “golden mean” of beauty. Here it is rather the varying emphases, approaches, and conclusions—the unresolved bumps and warts—that really make salient what is interesting about the complex and ambivalent emotion each book scrutinizes. Such a lumpy, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory portrait seems entirely appropriate for beauty’s repellent yet seductive cousin, the disgusting.

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The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I
Colin Meloy
illustrated by Carson Ellis
Balzer + Bray ($17.99)

by Steve Bramucci

Wildwood tells the story of Prue McKeel, a fiercely independent twelve-year-old living in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Early in the book, Prue’s younger brother, Mac, is abducted by a murder of crows and carried into the Impassable Wilderness—a land filled with anthropomorphized animals, a bitter, exiled Governess, a band of outlaw woodsmen, and a nation of talking birds. Before she can save her brother, Prue and her quasi-friend Curtis must first help unknot a massive political stalemate that consumes all of The Wood (the insider-name for the Impassable Wilderness). Along the way, the reader is dropped into a world that Meloy (best known as the front man for the band The Decemberists) and his wife/illustrator Carson Ellis have crafted with considerable care. The narrator’s affection for The Wood is obvious and Ellis’s illustrations always feel tenderly drawn.

Though Meloy often focuses on quaint, Wes Anderson-esque set-design, the book’s true strength lies in its characters. Prue fits into the mold of a classic storybook heroine—she is always ready to take a stand, whether in the complex political dealings of talking birds or against her own parents’ recklessness. Sidekick Curtis is a walking contradiction—like so many boys his age—he’s a self-titled pacifist in one moment and a war hero in the next. The antagonists are similarly vivid and often refreshingly complex: the exiled queen vacillates wildly between charming and ruthless and the various politicos are maddeningly aloof. The leader of a gang of woodsmen named the Bandit King is as vivid and morally ambiguous as his literary antecedent, Robin Hood, and does a nice job ratcheting up the energy whenever he enters the proceedings. As the book hurtles toward the finish line, armies converge, new alliances are drawn, secrets are revealed, and mysteries unfold. Almost all of this hurtling is saved for the last 150 pages of the 541-page book, but dedicated readers who have done a good job retaining information will be gratified by the resolutions and will close the book excited to read Prue’s next adventure in The Wood.

At its best, Wildwood manages to be many things at once: it's a love story for Portland's Forest Park, the immense swath of protected greenery that gives the book its setting; it’s an ode to classic children’s books of the past, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Piers Anthony's Xanth series; and it’s a complex parable full of big ideas (the limits of government, the un-winnable nature of war, etc.) and even bigger words. Wildwood is even a beautiful piece of art, with illustrations, maps, and color plates by Ellis. As love story, ode, parable, and art piece, the book works beautifully. But read as a book for kids, the novel occasionally falters. Meloy’s twee details and focus on politics in Wildwood’s middle section create a pace that might prove frustrating for even precocious child readers. In this same vein, at times the author seems to choose difficult words when simple ones might have done the trick. Unlike M. T. Anderson (Octavian Nothing, The Game of Sunken Places), who uses big words in books for kids but also offers context clues so that young readers can decipher them, Meloy sometimes creates thickets of syllables that are tough to beat through and make the narrator feel a touch pedantic.

Meloy’s language and plotting force the question of Wildwood’s audience—it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the book will be more rabidly devoured by thirty-year-old fans of The Decemberists than by those in Prue’s age group. Yet whether its audience is still in school or looking back on it through a nostalgic lens, The Wildwood Chronicles are bound to gain a following—indeed, the movie rights have been sold and the next two books are on the way. One only hopes that they will show Meloy writing with the same sense of urgency that can be heard in his best songs.

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A Tragedy
Forrest Hylton
City Works Press ($12.95)

by Kristin Thiel

People often read to escape, but Forrest Hylton’s first book-length fiction reminds us how grounded we usually remain. Most books are written in one language, regardless of how many languages the characters speak, how far around the universe they themselves travel.Vanishing Acts is written in at least as much Spanish as it is English. Readers who don’t read Spanish may feel as the book’s clumsy minor character does when he visits a dance club: “Alejandro stuffs his ears with bits of napkins, takes another shot of rum, and, looking bewildered, fills his mouth with popcorn.” (If you prefer all English, just flip the book over—a monolingual version begins from the other side.)

The novel’s main character, Richard Melville, feels scared, awkward, and excited as he conducts fieldwork for his anthropology dissertation on urban warfare in Medellín, Colombia. “He’s not Colombian, didn’t grow up in mean streets, and acquired what little experience he has in Berkeley and New York City,” and it’s a disagreement between subject and verb in an overheard bombast that raises his ire. But he is also fluent in Spanish, including being able to hold his own with rebel and drug informants, and he cannot resist his hotel bellhop’s offer to get him “¿una señorita? ¿Cocaína?, ¿marihuana?” He is “pleased” to be in Colombia’s second-largest city, “where vices would be indulged and fantasies realized on the cheap.” Richard acts like a deep-undercover cop on a TV procedural; from the get-go, he tries (often unsuccessfully) to balance his background, work, and pleasure, and there are moments of magical realism (he is in South America, after all) when Richard feels he’s flying. “It isn’t really flying, though, more like some suspended animation catapult . . . floating but not free, cursed with the knowledge that he’ll have to land, and, from the ground, wind himself up again.”

Hylton writes the narration in English; most of the dialogue is in Spanish, although there is a tiny amount of play with Spanglish, Colombian slang, and Cajun-English. There is never direct translation, though a patient reader will find contextual clues to some of what characters say in Spanish paragraphs or pages later in the English narration.

Vanishing Acts is worth the read for its unapologetic bilingualism alone, but its compelling story and characters can stand on their own. Richard is such a mess—an aware mess, but a mess nonetheless—and the book is an interesting sociopolitical thriller with a startling and unresolved conclusion, yet it also recounts what is everyday life for many people in Medellín. Though he’s talking about an experience much, much different from reading, Richard’s description could fit what it’s like to read this novel: “overrun by a pleasure that hurt. The best kind.”

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Andrei Gelasimov
translated by Marian Schwartz
AmazonCrossing ($14.95)

by Amy Henry

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” she said. “My Nikita’s acting up. Please help me out this once. I can’t cope with him by myself.” . . .
The little guy shuddered and stared at me as if I were a ghost. He actually dropped his blocks.

A maimed and disfigured veteran from the war with Chechnya, Konstantin might as well be a ghost, given his frightening appearance; even the police suggest he stay indoors and hide himself away lest he frighten the neighborhood. Yet he performs the scare-tactic cited above as a favor to his neighbor Olga, and the child immediately heads to bed without a word. Konstantin acts as if the ability to incite terror doesn’t bother him. Only later, when alone, does he attempt to bury himself in vodka, the only escape from his lonely life in Moscow.

Despite the vodka, however, Konstantin is still conscious of the fact that he volunteered for the war just to avoid his controlling stepfather. That decision left him with the horrific wounds and scarring, but also created a new family for him among his fellow young soldiers. Their bond, created the moment a grenade landed in their tank, erased most of his past life as an artist and abandoned son. So he gives away his mirrors, tries to forget that he was the last one pulled from the wreckage of their tank, and drinks.

Things change when one of his comrades goes missing, and the former company reunites to search for him. In between their forays around Moscow, the men recollect their war days as well as their efforts to normalize their lives in a changing Russia. In a twisted version of Robin Hood, they check on old contacts and make sure everyone has food, medicine, and most of all, vodka. Konstantin also reconnects with his biological father and his new family, finding himself determined to dislike them but unable to do so:

I looked at them and thought, Why have things worked out for me this way? Why do some burn up and others get carried out? Why did other children end up getting the father I had? . . .
Actually, all this was probably too much for a single “why.” One question mark was obviously not going to cover it.

Complicating the search is the mysterious disappearance of a large sum of money, money that might be linked to events during the war. So while the men generously play good Samaritans, tension builds as their suspicions about each other are revealed in fragments loosened by the ever-present vodka. Konstantin is forced to accept that all his past memories may not be accurate, which requires him to reassess his future. This prompts him to return to his artistic roots, and in doing so, he comes to a new realization about the war and his friends.

Andrei Gelasimov writes lean prose, and the pace never slows. The plot of Thirst is fairly simple, essentially a Moscow road trip, but the complicated and secretive characters are cunningly revealed in each step of their quest. Never asking for pity, Konstantin makes it clear that not all scars are visible and that his identity is not found merely in his reflection.

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Lysley Tenorio
Ecco ($13.99)

by Robert Martin

The debate has been long, and inconclusive, and in many ways irrelevant: are MFA programs good for writing, or are they ruining American fiction? One thing is certain: regardless of whether the quality of letters suffers under the current academic model, it hasn’t kept writers away from graduate programs; it hasn’t kept writing programs from proliferating; and it hasn’t stopped agents and publishers from mining programs for fresh, young, marketable talent.

Mark McGurl’s 2009 book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, brought this debate to the attention of many creative writing programs, adding a new wrinkle to the equation: the “MFA-machine” itself is now firmly and eagerly cognizant of its own questionable worth. Writers come to MFA programs with full knowledge of—and participation in—the critiques against their own endeavors. McGurl hyperbolically summarizes these criticisms in a 2011 response to a review of his book:

A set of otherwise fair questions about creative writing are not so much asked as always-already answered: No, writing cannot be taught. Yes, writing programs are a scam—a kind of Ponzi scheme. Yes, writing programs make all writers sound alike. Yes, they turn writers away from the “real world,” where the real stories are, fastening their gazes to their navels. No, MFA students do not learn anything truly valuable.

McGurl’s overstatement of these observations proves a point: this extreme view is unreasonable, and has furthermore been disproved by many astounding and provocative products of MFA’d authors. The culprit for the debate’s persistence is the vast amount of mediocre work turned out by writing programs. The similarity of these mediocre works—the uniform conventions, the recycled situations and diminishing narrative devices—points the work, and writing programs as a whole, toward the disparagement of their detractors.

On its surface, there is a great amount of mediocrity in Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection of stories, Monstress. His prose seems safe, sometimes dull. His stories cycle through the same themes and plots repeatedly. While peculiar, semi-historical situations flavor his character studies (a fist-fight with the Beatles, a witch-doctor turned entrepreneur, an AWOL American soldier reaching celebrity status in a leper colony), they carry a whiff of formula, as though derived from exercises designed to help “make it new.” In short, this collection exudes all the attributes of an “MFA-machine” product. But oddly, it is this collection’s predictability, its strict coherence to a chosen convention, that enables Monstress to succeed where so many collections fall short.

The book’s homophonous title nicely exemplifies Tenorio’s achievement. Phonetically identical to “monstrous,” the invented word infuses familiar sounds with a softer connotation, a separate narrative. This double-meaning also informs our interpretation of the stories: every character, every story in Monstress, is an exploration of a marginalized, identity-torn individual. In sacrificing their native culture, these characters suffer as outsiders, foreign to the culture they find themselves in and unfit to return to the one they left behind. This is a plight shared by the migrant and the monstrous alike.

The idea of a homophone also provides a metaphor for the stories’ similarities: the characters in every story are Filipino. They either live in or are headed to California. The plots unanimously hinge on a betrayal. And this betrayal is borne of the isolation and dislocation. Like homophones, these stories hold disparate narratives in similar containers—eight versions of the same story, it would seem. This plays directly into the foremost criticism of MFA programs: they homogenize writers and styles, so that every story reads like every other story. Yet Tenorio’s examination and reexamination of these motifs and consequences extends the effect of each story beyond its respective arc: because of their similarities, these tales collude with each other across the table of contents. In this way, Monstress transcends its eight individual stories and reveals a larger guiding narrative at work. With this overarching agenda in mind, Tenorio’s style and language takes on a deeper significance.

Tenorio largely avoids idiom, especially compared to other lauded multicultural writers such as Junot Diaz or Zadie Smith. Rather, Tenorio’s prose is intentionally indistinct: straightforward, measured, simple, though careful and crafted with obvious skill. At times the lyrical elements are so spare they are hardly noticed, as when one character observes, “A slant of light stretches from the half-closed door, grazing the edge of my arm.” This prose seems designed not to distract the reader. More often than not, the transparency and ease of the language does its job: you can’t help but notice the similarities in theme and plot and character and setting, and you allow these similarities to expose inter-story connections. You read between the lines, because the lines aren’t designed to be the focus. Crossing the lines is the focus—a theme Tenorio explores both narratively and linguistically.

Another side effect of Tenorio’s largely homogenous prose is that any appearance of a culturally specific term tends to indicate the characters’ otherness, rather than their character. Witness how the protagonist of “Superassassin” (a character culled from Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in that he is a lonely, comics-obsessed immigrant dealing with an obstinate single mother) describes his mother’s romantic failings:

Her strategy was faulty: she had been making domestic offerings—a home-cooked meal of lumpia and pinakbet, Filipino delicacies she calls her love potions. But they lack any magical properties. Her men always see the food as alien and weird, a little too far from home.

These indigenous recipes are among the handful of non-English words employed in the collection’s 224 pages. The reason this character fails in maintaining a relationship, the narrator claims, is her reluctance to forego her Filipina identity: she resists crossing the culture line and fully assimilating, and this is why she remains alone. This is a consequence present in each ofMonstress’s offerings.

Tenorio’s characters never question whether they ought to desire America: the desire for America is simply a fact of their setting. In “Help,” an impressionable Filipino youth beseeches his uncle, an airport employee, to explain how the world is connected by air travel: “‘Where do they go?’ I asked. I was seven, maybe eight years old. ‘That way,’ he pointed skyward, then moved his hand to the side. ‘Then that way.’ I always assumed he meant to the States.” The result of this constant desire to incorporate an ideal of America into their identities (and to incorporate their identities into a new culture) is unfailingly betrayal. The characters betray each other to get to America, they betray each other to stay in America, they betray their countrymen by abandoning the Phillipines.

The lasting impact of Monstress is different for its readers and characters. The unfortunate men and women in Tenorio’s tales do not belong anywhere; there is no community they can access. Readers, however, achieve precisely that state the characters seek: they hold multiple narratives in mind simultaneously. As you read through this collection, each previous story remains in your memory and participates in your understanding. The characters try and fail to access this multiplicity, and as such Tenorio creates a coherent, subtle, and thorough portrait of what it means to be isolated, otherized, monstrous.

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José Maria de Eça de Queirós
translated by Gregory Rabassa
Tagus Press / UMass Dartmouth ($19.95)

by Douglas Messerli

Fradique Mendes, originally conceived as a Pessoa-like heteronym, was created by the great Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queirós and two friends in 1869 as a way to poke fun at their fellow countrymen. The invented poet wrote in a kind of satanic Baudelaire manner, an affectation of many younger Portuguese poets that Eça felt needed to be satirized. The persona so engaged him, however, that he continued to write through the pseudonym from 1888 onward, revising the work into a comical biography and collection of letters published in 1900, the year of Eça's death.

In many respects this work cannot be separated from his great fiction, The City and the Mountains, published in 1901. Both works swing between two extremes, between a kind of dandyish figure living in the center of Portuguese culture and a more retiring version of the same figure, returning to the quiet isolation and nostalgic innocence of a previous time. In the later book, Jacinto begins as a believer in change, embracing the most progressive developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a man who, when that world falls apart, retreats to his home in the mountains, where he rediscovers the quietude and order of an agricultural tradition.

So too does Fradique Mendes begin by being a man of the world, living in France and traveling to exciting exotic locales such as Arab countries and Brazil. Yet, like Jacinto, Fradique Mendes, whose great love fails him, gradually reverts to more conservative-based realities, often scolding his correspondents for their desire to become involved in urban life and their lack of religious values. Fradique Mendes finally disappears while traveling “on a very long and distant journey”—which, he declares, is no longer out of curiosity, “for there are no longer curiosities left, but to put an end in a most worthy and beautiful way to a relationship like ours.”

The letters of this fiction are fascinating for their swings between worldly knowledge and peasant pleasures, between a cultivated artistic sensibility and a craving for the simplicities of the past. In the end, because of this oscillation of values, Fradique Mendes is a grand failure, a made-up man who fails in life primarily because of his vicissitudes. Yet in The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, Eça forces us to compare this failed dreamer with an academic critic, so slavishly attracted to the “ecstasy” of Fradique Mendes' earlier poetic dabblings that he cannot see the failures of the man. Presenting his subject in metaphors even more Romantically inspired than the poet's later life, the critic of the fiction ridiculously drops names—from Ponce de León to Mozart and Beethoven, from Voltaire to Klopstock and Immanuel Kant—that reveal even-more confused notions of reality. Here's a sample:

Here I fell back, wide-eyed. Victor Hugo (everyone still remembers), exiled at the time on Guernsey, held for us idealists and democrats of 1867 the sublime and legendary proportions of a Saint John on Patmos. And I drew back in protest, eyes inflamed, so much it seemed to me beyond the realm of possibilities that a Portuguese, a Mendes, could have held in his the august hand that had written The Legend of the Centuries! Corresponding with Mazzini, camaraderie with Garibaldi, that was all very well! But a sojourn on the sacred isle, to the sound of the waves from the Channel, strolling, chatting, pondering with the sage of Les Misérables, looked to me like the impudent exaggerations of the Azorean islander who was trying to put one over on me . . .

If there were ever an example of literary hero-worship, this critic exemplifies it. Fradique Mendes is great because he associates with the great!

At times, this comic lavishing of metaphors and comparisons wears on the reader—as it is meant to. And The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes is, overall, not quite the masterwork that is The City and the Mountains. But the fiction remains a wonderful send-up of Portuguese cultural pretentions, and perhaps, to a certain degree, a revelation of the cultural tensions in Eça's own life. Given the depths of his literary contributions, it is well worth reading this satiric work.

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