From The Front List: Tobold The Burger King
Portrait Of The Artist As A Domesticated Animal by Lydie Salvayre. Translated from the French by William Pedersen. Dalkey Archive. Fiction. 2010. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 9781564785572. $13.95.
The fact is that several times I'd caught Tobold, transfixed, contemplating his immense portrait hanging in the main hall. In it he had a huge neck, his pectoral muscles were abnormally developed under his shirt (pumped up from steroids?), and he donned the triumphant face of a man who'd just bagged a wild animal (or a competitor). There was the most anachronistic halo around his head, like an enormous fried egg, just like the aura over the saints' heads in religious prints. It was totally ridiculous.
Salvayre's writing possesses an amazing ability to portray situations that are both comical and nauseating all at once. Portrait Of The Writer is a twofold tale of materialistically motivated torpor and the iron will that wins the spoils.
The story of Tobold the Burger King is what would be called a rags to riches sort of affair. Born incredibly poor, Tobold intimidated, swindled and dealt (his greatest love is the art of the deal) his way to become the wealthiest man in the world. Starting with a fast-food chain named King Size, which provided him with a war chest to buy and sell, build and outsource, create and destroy an empire that included telecommunications and burgers in equal measure.
Tobold is revealed to us by the book's narrator, who has been hired to be his biographer. She is a progressive minded novelist and sometime poet who never would have believed herself capable of writing an "authorized" biography of the world's most aggressive capitalist. Tobold disgusts her. He is an uncouth, misogynistic blow-hard who stands for nearly everything she despises and who belittles nearly everything she believes in.
And yet she finds herself unable to leave his side. In order to successfully write his book for him he insists that she be unnoticed by others, which is achieved (his idea) by her playing the part of his full-time prostitute.
Nearly every page contains something about her desire to rid herself of the debasing job writing his vile book and yet she stays there, nodding her head and yessiring every whim of his.
There relationship is never sexual, though she is forced to watch and abide his incredibly cruel treatment of his wife and his boastful conquest and discussion of the many female (all blond) supplicants that throw themselves upon his billionaire's throne.
So why does she stay? The money for one. And her Bob (De Niro), whose charisma she was floored by at the first party she attended with Tobold. A list of dizzying celebrities flit through the pages and hang around the massive Tobold like so many remora fish. One particularly harsh treatment is leveled at Sharon Stone, whose IQ of 133 induces her to believe it is both useful and important that she meet with Tobold three times a year to discuss world politics and business.
Bill (Clinton) and Bill (Gates) also grace the pages, often in unflattering lighting. The breech of fictional contract between reader and writer is seamlessly made, and though it may be wrong in some schools to fictionally portray celebrities doing less than flattering things it yet makes the book more accurate, more astute. Sharon Stone does think a little too much of herself.
So enamored as our writer is with the money and the strange currency of celebrity face-time she finds herself unable and perhaps fully willing to craft what Tobold's deems less a biography and more a "Gospel Of The Free Market." To Tobold the french fry is the only true Eucharist.
Despite her increasing obsequiousness the writer yet maintains a connection with her previous morality. Her disdain for a religion based on a unfettered Free Market (Tobold often reminds her to be sure to capitalize those two words) manifests, often to comic effect.
How long could I pretend to applaud his delirious optimism for the Free Market, which he proclaimed relentlessly? His optimism made me think of the erections men get when they're hanged.
It is perhaps because of her awareness, and that she struggles and loses the battle to stand for what she believes in, that makes the narrator particularly craven. The truly difficult realization comes when as a reader you realize that it isn't merely her cowardice that is unsettling. It is also the notion that her moral beliefs are somewhat hollow. Especially when they're confronted by the zealotry of Tobold the Burger King.
The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia once observed in his novel Equal Danger that though it may be libertines that prepare a revolution it is always the Puritans who will complete it. See it through. Make the deal.
That is the most disturbing aspect to Salvayre's novel. The reason the writer caves before the Free Market and its high priest is because the will of the latter is stronger.
Portrait Of The Writer lives comfortably (no irony there) among the hard questions of ethics and will. It has more to do with Schopenhauer than it does Joyce.
Lucky for us, Lydie Salvayre has a biting but generous sense of humor and that at least consoles during those moments of supreme critique.
From The Back List: Tea Party Edition
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy by Lewis Lapham. Penguin Press. 2004. Current Affairs/Political Science. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 0143035029. $13.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring
"Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth."
- Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco
Political writing centered around current affairs is perhaps the most difficult form of writing to gauge. Ninety-nine percent of the time it will be largely worthless two years after publication (assuming it had value to begin with).
In some cases and in the hands of a master polemicist, like say Thucydides, Thomas Paine or Lewis Lapham, it can be a powerful statement that will contain intrinsic truths useful now as well as later.
Unfortunately for we U.S. citizens (and I suppose also the world), Lewis Lapham's somewhat briefly lived book about the erosion of civil liberties during the dark times of George W. Bush's presidency is again a must read.
The right wing of American politics is back to playing its ground game. Small government. Fiscal responsibility. Tax cuts. Historically Republicans have maintained the largest deficits. In fact George W. Bush accrued more foreign debt than the combined total of the previous 42 presidents. Yes, that includes Reagan.
When they're out of the house though, they're talking small. This time around we have a particularly nasty strategy being formed and utilized by many of the same people who invented a war in Iraq and drove the country hard while running on what was essentially fumes.
History aside, I know want to talk about growing strength of the "Tea Party" movement on the right.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
- Thomas Jefferson
A quick google search of Tea Party slogans and posters will provide you with a quick introduction to the retro-themed nature of this movement, which of course applies to the Eco quote hovering above.
The Tea Party is increasingly drawing upon Revolutionary and Civil War rhetoric in order to paint a picture of both a nostalgic America that never was and a portrait of their patriotic authority.
Add in the jingoism of the above Jefferson quote and you of course have a dangerous mixture.
Lapham's slender essay (194 pages) is a wonderful reminder of the types of infractions made on the Constitution by many of the leaders of these would-be heroes. Less we forget.
It is disturbing to hear and see, but the frustration of some members of the right is beginning to increasingly resemble soccer hooliganism. This is doubly sad, because there are conservatives out there, those who for instance voted for Barack Obama or even John Kerry (or perhaps abstained from either election all together), who have become so disillusioned with a party that is increasingly capable only of belligerence and big budgets.
Lapham's erudite and thoroughly cited treatise, a sort of Common Sense for the modern political scene, is perhaps a unlikely friend for some of these folks too.
If you have your doubts just look to the Reichsmarschall's quote above and tell me who is trying to do what.
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