Books this year: a book diary

I should probably post my thoughts on this book to /r/Rants, but then nobody would read them. Nobody may read them anyway, but at least here it will be my friends ignoring me and not strangers.

My biggest problem with this book is that Freud completely ignores reality, or at least doesn’t allow reality to stand in the way of his theories. The “fire and urethral eroticism” footnote is my favorite example. Firstly, there is no way an individual or group could put out even the smallest naturally-occurring fire by pissing on it. Secondly, there is no evidence that the desire to piss on fires is a universal male desire (or, at least, I don’t want to piss on every fire I see, though I may occasionally have wanted to piss on a fire). Thirdly, it would merely be difficult for a woman to piss on a fire, not impossible.

Though Freud has a point he’s trying to make - that people and societies have a “death principle” that works against the pleasure principle - this is a meandering and loosely-argued book. The whole first chapter is a sort of addendum to his previous book which segues awkwardly into the rest of the book. After dismissing religion as “patently infantile,” complaining that life is really hard, and declaring that life is meaningless, Freud finally gets around to the point. Sort of.

There are three sources from which unhappiness can come, Freud says - the external world, our own bodies, and our interactions with other people. He goes on to say that we have no control over the first two, but Civilization ought to take care of the third. Obviously it does not; why it does not is the question Freud attempts to answer.

Essentially, he argues that civilization diverts libidinal energy from sexual relationships into “aim-inhibited” relationships which bind together people who aren’t blood relatives - the command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” being the motto of this program. He refers to this process (somewhat loosely) as Eros, and posits an opposing “death drive” (or Thanatos), which is the source of our instinctual aggressiveness - because there has to be something interfering with Eros or we’d all be happy and contented, right?

Just like Eros/the life instinct/the pleasure principle occurs as full-on sexual lust and as “aim-inhibited affection,” Thanatos/the death instinct occurs in stronger and weaker forms. Freud argued that aggressiveness is almost always turned inward, where it becomes the superego or conscience. The conflict between the id and the superego on the individual level mirrors the conflict between Eros and Thanatos on the civilizational level - and, basically, we’re all fucked, either way. The end goal of “civilization” is the sublimation of all libidinal energy into “aim-inhibited affection” so we don’t all kill each other, and the end goal of the death instinct is, well, us all killing each other.

Of course, it’s all bullshit. If Freud had written some sort of fiction incorporating Eros and Thanatos - a novel, a poem, a play - then he might have been able to tell us something true about the human experience without having to worry about factuality. If he had been able to provide actual evidence for the life and death instincts - beyond “people like to fuck” and “people like to fight” - then he might have been able to contribute to our scientific understanding of human nature and human societies. He did neither. Instead, he tried to pass off an invented mythology as a scientific inquiry, and the book is worthless as either.

This was almost a good book. Almost.

It’s set in Athens, mostly, with detours into southern Greece, the Cyclades, the Middle East, and India. It takes place from about the middle of 1979 to the middle of 1980 (or right after the Iranian Revolution). It’s narrated by an American expatriate who works in risk analysis, gathering information about the political and economic climate in countries in the greater Middle East; the narrator - James Axton - is part of a small community of American expats who all work in similar fields (one’s a banker, one works for an insurance company, etc). There’s a subplot involving a Greek who may or may not work for a nationalist terrorist group who thinks Axton works for the CIA. There’s an interesting novel somewhere in all that, about the role of American corporations in American foreign policy, and the perceptions of and reactions to American economic hegemony during that particular (turbulent) historical moment. It’s not this novel, though - all of the the above elements are, if not strictly background, then a seriously underdeveloped subplot that trails off unceremoniously. (The real plot also trails of unceremoniously.)

The real plot (which doesn’t really get rolling until a third of the way into the novel) involves Axton’s pursuit of an esoteric, nomadic cult, obsessed with alphabets, who commit the occasional ritual murder. There are two others pursuing the cult, who are sometimes involved with Axton, but all three men are after different things. Volterra (a play on Voltaire that made me cringe every time I read it) is a pretentious avant-garde filmmaker (and old sort-of-friend of Axton’s) who wants to make a film … not really about the cult, but of the cult selecting, stalking, and murdering a victim - an arty snuff film, essentially. Owen Brademas, the obsessed-with-inscriptions-on-stone director of the archaeological dig on one of the small Cycladic islands where Axton’s estranged wife works, wants, if not to become a member of the cult, then at least to learn their secrets. He follows them to India, and there - though he doesn’t participate in the murder - he’s initiated into their secrets, such as they are.

The great disappointment of the novel is that the cult is essentially a group of crazy people who pick a feeble-bodied or feeble-minded individual, camp out near a village or town that has the same initials a their intended victim, and wait - wait for the person to wander into the town so they can kill them where the letters match. I don’t know what I was expecting, but something more than that.

There are a number of really interesting digressions: about the nature of alphabets, about the relationships of letters or words to physical objects, about the function and mystery of place-names, about inscriptions in stone, about human sacrifice, about the power of language. It reminded me at times of The Island of the Day Before - all of the best parts were superfluous to the plot, and the plot was dull, plodding, and unconvincingly ended.

I hate bad endings, and I have little tolerance for even mediocre endings. An ending ought to provide some sense of closure, even if it’s an ambiguous, open-ended sort of closure (which is quite possible; The Man in the High Castle, Watchmen, and Existenz all come to mind). This novel’s ending doesn’t provide any real closure; it just (as I said above) trails off. I’m sure it was intentional; I’m sure DeLillo is trying to communicate something about the messiness of life or some such thing. I get it; I still think the ending sucks. And ultimately, the bad ending outweighed the interesting pieces.