Radical Hope

While reading McCarthy's The Road, we are given a glimpse into a grim post-apocalyptic future. We are thrown into a world of "what ifs," an imagined world, so horrifically foreign to us. In Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope we have an account of a similar apocalypse which has already occured for some, in the name of "progress", on this continent. This type of total destruction was inflicted upon the Crow People, the subject of Lear's book. To compare the two books, one fictional, one biographical, is not to hyperbolize the Crow's situation.

The most chilling parts of The Road are the moments of attempted self-reflection, moments when we hear the thoughts of the father ponder on his plan for the future, attempt to assess his possibilities, his intentions, his quest for meaning. The futility of this pondering is brought to light when his son interupts his thoughts to ask directly what he has planned for the future. He cannot answer. Plenty Coups, a leader of the Crow People, said that "when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." This quote informs most of Radical Hope. The sentence is clarified with an example: Imagine a world where someone goes into a restaurant to order a buffalo hamburger and the waiter tells the customer that this is an impossibility as the last buffalo has just been killed. This is what Taylor calls a "de facto impossibility." A different predicament would be one where we find ourselves in a future where no restaurants exist and words like "ordering" have lost any meaning they once had. Taylor calls this a "radical impossibility." The subjects in The Road and in Radical Hope both suffer the latter type of impossibility. The boy in The Road questions the Dad's terms, his memories, his language. This language no longer has any meaning, which is to say that there is no longer any way of speaking meaningfully. A culture is formed linguistically and this linguistic culture embodies a life's possibilities. When their tradition, their way of life, their language, terms, and concepts, are all altered so significantly that it is unrecognizable, that is is bereaved of meaning, the possibilities for the individuals in that culture end. The possibilities for the father have ended in The Road, just as they did for the Crow People. Their way of life has ended; in fact, their life, insofar as that concept consists of a linguistically formed identity, is over. Some fates are worse than death ... genocide would have been kinder.

However, both Plenty Coups, in Radical Hope and the father in The Road find a type of Radical Hope -- a realistic way of redefining their terms while acknowledging their past - avoiding both a romantic naive ignorance of the contemporary situation and an overzealous resignation or comfort with the current situation. Such a radical hope is virtually undefinable, but it requires a faith in something. It is this sense of faith (as scarce as it may be) that is important to both The Road and Radical Hope and which makes both books so extremely relevant to our time of ongoing cultural devastation.

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Charles Taylor's review of Radical Hope is in the newest New York Review of Books and online here.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Danilo Kiš fills his reticulate novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich with interlacing personal narratives, scattered excurses, conflicting geopolitical histories, and detail as broad and difficult as the history of the Soviet Union itself. Although much of this detail, while impressive, was obviously lost on me, it was the power of his unique style that arrested me most. He creates a novel which is most definitely not a collection of individual short stories, but, rather, a collection of fictional and non-fictional accounts of one story, a similar fate (some more deserving, some less deserving), each account willing to defer the existence of a final account, a final truth, onto another account. This continual reference sometimes points in the direction of other accounts located in Kiš's novel, sometimes to historical dates and places (which, to the lay reader, such as myself, are often indistinguishable from fictional dates and places), sometimes to other works (The Gulag Archipelago, Borges, Hope Against Hope). Alexsandar Hemon refers to this style of continual reference as "a link in a network of leitmotivs and in a larger network of the historic experience of the Soviet revolution."

In "The Sow That Eats Her Farrow", Kiš writes of Gould Vershoyle, a suspected saboteur who has recently emigrated to Ireland, and who, under the impression that he is to fix an onboard radio, is coerced onto a Soviet ship, the 'Ordzhonikidze.' This tale is one of seven; seven of one. In the following tale, "The Mechanical Lions," mention is briefly made of Vershoyle's capture in passing. The tales remain seemingly distinct and unrelated but are bound together in their use of the same historical event (Vershoyle boarding the Soviet cargo ship). This similarity of historical subjects between two seemingly distinct stories wouldn't be altogether noteworthy if it wasn't for the fact that Kiš undermines this "historical fact's" privileged presence. That is, he refuses to take for granted that it is exclusively in the way that it has been revealed to us -- instead its truth is an event, an event that involves a play between disclosure AND concealedness, not a proof through correspondence. Kiš removes such exclusivity to pure presence by casting doubt on his own account of his own story. Kis writes, "some of the sources," refering in this case to his own previous story, "are rightly suspect...[yet] even if the cited documents exude a certain unreliability...[they] nevertheless deserve to be recorded."
Here we see Kiš questioning his own authority, his own story's credibility, his own claim to authorial intention -- and in doing so, he hands the meaning over to the conversation that is had between the reader and the text... to the truth of the event of reading.

In much the way Kiš makes room for the disclosed as well as the concealed aspect of the truths in the stories, and the room he makes for the text and the reader to converse, he also makes way for the role of narrative in historical accounts. He starts "The Mechanical Lions" admitting that one of the two characters are historical, the "other person -- unhistorical though no less real" will play the largest role in the story. The 'unhistorical' narrative creation enters into a similar dialogue with the historical account.

This hermeneutic, circular style is what made A Tomb for Boris Davidovich one the richest books I've had the pleasure of reading recently.

Holy Saturday

There is no indication of a Holy Saturday in my personal daytime calendar. Saturday, as far as the calendar is concerned, is eventless...the day that stores are open between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I don't think I recall ever having gone to Church on Saturday as a child. Was there even a service? The day is somewhat misleadingly called the Great Sabbath in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, because it was the day Jesus Christ was to have "rested."

But Saturday was not merely a day of rest, spent decomposing in a tomb. Saturday was the day of Helreið, the 'Harrowing of Hell,' the day the Gospel of Nicodemus calls Descensus ad Infernos. Unfortunately it is now the most neglected day of the (popularly bipolarized) Paschal Triduum. But there is some reason to think that the time between Death and Resurrection is fundamental to the Triduum (the linchpin, in a way) and, thus, should be held with similar esteem and reverence. My favourite theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in his Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (as well as other works influenced by Adrienne Von Speyr), pointed out two of these reasons: 1) The descent to the dead shows the beginning of the Gloria before the Resurrection, and therefore cannot be neglected, and 2) The descent to Sheol shows the radical extremity of Christ's exinanitio, or 'self-emptying,' the suffering of the full fate of our sins. This is a point also stressed in Bulgakov's kenotic writings.

To focus on the latter reason, it will help to clarify this event - this silence of Saturday, Christ's hiatus - as a radical concealment. This radical concealment is also a radical disclosure, for it is incredibly apparent due to the radicality of its concealment. Its absence is present; it's present in its absence. This abyss is fully INSIDE Christ, for he takes up the sins of the damned into himself, but is also fully OUTSIDE of him, for sin is completely foreign to Him. He is, therefore, alienated from Himself on Saturday. Yet this is not to claim that God has died, for his transcendence is intact, established through his ability to endure even the depths of Godforesakenness. This Godforesakenness is the very definition of Hell, the state of separation from God -- and as God, this is Godforesakenness as ~God. Rowan Williams has read this event of Christ's enduring the exinanitio, his 'weakness', his "sinking not striding" as evidence of "Otherness [as] intrinsic to God."