Continuing in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Fauci (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health) the real story just gets worse and worse as it goes on into the long and sordid history of the modern day Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil, leaving genocidal damage in his wake for generations to come. And yet, he was just the Devil’s tool…
Turning to fiction, Douglas Glover’s Elle fairly jumped off the shelf into my hands as I browsed the local bookstore, having just read the author’s self-reveal in an interview republished in a recent Substack post. I find it lives up to its award-winning reputation, as a rich feast of satire and creative license, and a sensuous recreation of a fascinating historial/geographical set seen through the writer’s fine-grained lens.
The dehumanizing treatment of the heroine, Elle, for her natural womanly urges and unrepentant intelligence serves well to brand the perpetrators of her exile, and the society they represent, for crimes against nature, freedom and love. Yet Elle is the spunky survivor who outlives them all. Notably in the interview when the question of politics arises, Glover parries it with a deft salute to the classics, admitting subversion of the “discourse of authority,” yet registering protection under the natural immunity of satire, and ultimate allegiance to the more neutral, witnessing role of “ironic discourse.”
‘GLOVER: Pretty much everything I have written about literature concentrates on the idea that art isn’t primarily a vehicle for meaning. Meaning, or what we call meaning, is idea-text (thematic passage) inserted into the work and manipulated the same way every other aspect of the text is manipulated to create an aesthetic experience (pleasure). Or it is external to the text and comes from the reader through association and interpretation. There are, of course, lots of writers who do think they are sending a message, but the writers I am interested in are more likely to be exploring the vectors of complexity and technical elaboration instead of politics.
‘Difficult, elaborated, satirical, parodic, mixed-form art has existed for millennia. I think here of the Menippean satire, or what is known of it. An ancient form. Elle is my version of a Menippean satire. I am not sure how you can nail a form that has existed for millennia to an ideology or economic system. I do like what Bakhtin says about Rabelais and the spirit of the novel, that the novel represents a conflict of discourses, and that the style of Rabelais is to make comedy of the conflict between low discourse (the body) and the discourse of authority. Perhaps one could say that many difficult books are difficult because they are trying to undermine some authoritative or received mode of thought. But I am not sure that beyond subverting an authoritative discourse, whatever that may be, that there is a political economic basis for ironic discourse.’
Writing briefly about Fauci the real-life demon and then more circumspectly of Glover the word-artist, is not to belittle either subject or method. If injustice in the world is to be described, it may be done in a courtroom or a barroom. Nor to belittle the efforts of the novelist, by identifying him with the “low discourse” he paints with. Humor is the secret weapon of the commoner to puncture pretensions, or of the satirist to disarm frontal defenses and slide daggers of truth in. Non-lethal, nonthreatening, but pricks of awakening, spark by spark.
Meanwhile Kennedy’s screed is impeccably researched and also poignant, pointed toward a clear case of criminal harm. Giving no mercy or forgiveness where all trust was long abused, the expert exposé implicitly calls for action to halt the ongoing evisceration of our health, our freedom, our very civilization (if such concept has any uncorrupted heart left). The cumulative evidence burns for justice, for redemption, for the light of truth to shine for all to see.
In this respect the aim of the very different approaches, however random or arbitrary in my choice of books, is similar. Recalling the classical dictum that the purpose of art is to educate and entertain, the Kennedy book is all-in on education while the Glover tale does both, leaning, as he explains, toward entertainment. Yet it is that overlapping interest in witnessing truth that appeals in the reading experience of both titles. After that, the desired action or aesthetic condition (presumably more passive but no less potent) is beyond the scope of the writer or the work, and left to the future choices of its audience. Perhaps changed now, for the better, which means… a more conscious life, more aware of its dangers and beauties, its injustices and redeeming characters. Affirming life, over deviltry in high and low places alike.
