{"id":84162,"date":"2015-03-27T12:12:13","date_gmt":"2015-03-27T16:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84162"},"modified":"2015-03-27T17:32:58","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T21:32:58","slug":"4-here-was-the-famous-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/27\/4-here-was-the-famous-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"4: \u201cHere Was the Famous Voice\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cA Farce Written in Human Blood,\u201d pp. 70\u201389<\/em><\/p>\n

\"mating\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the fourth entry in our\u00a0<\/em>Mating\u00a0Book Club<\/em><\/a>. Read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

So here he is, after all this setup: Denoon\u2014the anthropologist beyond anthropology, the man who until this chapter had been kept behind the margins as if in the wings, behind a curtain. Because his entrance here, now, is a stage entrance\u2014he\u2019s going to give us a performance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here we have a party whose entertainment consists of an anthropologist\u2019s lecture costumed as an anthropologist\u2019s debate\u2014with politicians, about politics\u2014in the thickly caked makeup of a play: \u201cA Farce Written in Human Blood: THE DESTRUCTION OF AFRICA ACCELERATED BY HER BENEFACTORS, PRESENT COMPANY NOT EXCEPTED.<\/small>\u201d The caps\u00a0are Rush\u2019s. Then there\u2019s this heading: Act II. But where\u00a0was Act I? Did we miss it? We did. Our unnamed narrator gives us access to Denoon only after he\u2019s finished (verbally) demolishing capitalism (rather, \u201cexcoriating the capitalist development mode for Africa\u201d)\u2014socialism is next.<\/p>\n

But before we get into Denoon\u2019s \u201cobjections to the socialist remedy for Africa,\u201d let\u2019s ask a question: Why did Rush write this section as a drama? Why not as a thoroughgoing narrated scene? <\/p>\n

One answer would be to avoid extended stretches of dialogue. Because dialogue takes us out of Mating<\/em>\u2019s true setting (the true setting of every first-person book): our narrator\u2019s head. When characters talk\u2014and this is the book\u2019s talkiest section\u2014Rush eschews quotation marks; as if the words of others were the narrator\u2019s own words; as if to say, all of life can seem like a play atop our mental proscenia.<\/p>\n

Another answer might be that drama (or the typographical appearance of drama) allows Rush to bring consciousness to action, like a guest brings a bottle to a party\u2014a particularly enlivening bottle. Consider this: In most books, especially in most first-person books, when the characters talk, interiority dies. A narrator can natter on and on, strut and fret across the boards of her own intellect, but then once she\u2019s out in the world and forced to socialize, as our narrator has been for a dozen pages now, she\u2019s subject to others (in the social sense); she has to make room in her brain, and so on her page, for those supporting cast creatures called Other People, those spear-bearing supernumeraries who keep trying to assert themselves by wanting, needing, doing\u2014saying.<\/p>\n

So, the page must be shared: other brains must be admitted. Our narrator is no attention-hog, or she has to prove she isn\u2019t. Her desire to give evidence of this is \u2026 desire. But to write (to permit) the traditional back and forth of dialogue would be to cede too much time, too much ground. So Denoon\u2019s claims (\u201csocialism is a rhetorical solution to real problems\u201d) are interrupted\u2014broken up. Our narrator comments on his comments in interpolated stage-directionish text, in italics.<\/p>\n

Just as Denoon announces that he\u2019s about to outline his five objections to socialism (he had nine objections to capitalism, we\u2019re told), our narrator\u2014delaying the listing of them\u2014gives voice to her Inner Font:<\/p>\n

\n

Thank god, I thought. I felt for him because up to now he had been having trouble getting the right level of discourse going. One problem was that he had too much to say. Also I could tell he liked the idea of proceeding by having enemies, manipulating people into goodnatured enmity toward him. I was on to him. Also showing through, I thought, was that he liked the people he was trying to jockey into antagonistic self-definitions. Also he was dealing with a very mixed group and was essentially uninterested in communicating with the most sophisticated members of it, for the obvious reason that their minds were already made up\u2014yet he needed to retain their respect and was resorting to little tricks of allusion to show that he was only using some portion of what he knew or could say. It was the youth he was going for, but there were pitfalls in that.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This technique preserves the primacy of our narrator\u2019s intelligence, even as the party\u2014an address to and about the Party\u2014unfolds.<\/p>\n

What of that address? It begins smartly enough: Socialism won\u2019t work in Botswana\u2014in all of Africa, perhaps\u2014because:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Full employment by the government will lead to an unsustainable bureaucracy with the most talented people becoming useless bureaucrats (\u201c[\u2026] since you have lost the use of the market, which allocates everything gratis, you must set up a mechanism to allocate things by command. And you must pay people to do that, a lot of people.\u201d).<\/li>\n
  2. Botswana will still have to rely on capitalist countries to provide the bulk of its military\/industrial equipment and consumer goods (\u201c[\u2026] you are going to have to lay aside money to buy technology, ever newer and better technology, from the market states. And forever. Because under socialism unfortunately there is no invention, that is to say innovation.\u201d).<\/li>\n
  3. The opportunities for graft would be too numerous and the cost of its prosecution too high (\u201cThis is a cost superadded to the costs of dealing with general crime, which has not gone away yet in any socialist country. I am referring to the cost of suppressing a novel class of activities designated as economic crimes, such as giving people the death penalty for speculation or hoarding.\u201d).<\/li>\n
  4. Botswana will still have to rely on capitalist countries to provide the bulk of its food (\u201cOne reason you\u2019ll have to import food and pay cash for it is that as a socialist country you\u2019ll only get gift food if your people sink to the point of starvation as they have in Mozambique.\u201d).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And five?<\/p>\n

    \n

    Five was a mess. He couldn\u2019t get it schematic enough, and during it some people got bored to the hilt. My notes, which I made when I went home that night, say that there are two ways to extract the social surplus\u2014confiscatory via the state, or individual and voluntary, whereby people sweat and compel themselves to save <\/em>[…]<\/p>\n

    DENOON:
    I just want to say\u2014<\/p>\n

    More cries, including \u201cOw!\u201d and the word \u201cMenshevik.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

    DENOON:
    Comrades, I just want to say\u2014<\/p>\n

    If I search my mind for permanent marks I left on Denoon rather than vice versa, this is one I can be sure of: I made him stop overusing the intro \u201cI just this\u201d or \u201cI just that.\u201d I convinced him that it was always taken as preapologetic. I warned him especially about beginning phone conversations that way. He got the point and after a couple of false starts completely stopped.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Rush\u2019s playlet is now doing a very unplay-like thing: operating on multiple time lines. Though once the future is gestured at, our narrator stops\u2014she\u2019s gone too far, too fast. What Denoon continues with seems relatedly shaky, off the mark.<\/p>\n

    He begins advocating for \u201csolar democracy,\u201d yet never quite explains what that is. Rather, he proceeds from explaining renewable energy\u2014\u201cHeating, cooling, cooking, transport, water pumping, any process you might name, could be run directly or indirectly from this great tireless source\u201d\u2014to a vatic grandiosity that\u2019s unsettling:<\/p>\n

    \u201cYou could be the first nation to give its people lives of freedom to devote to art, science, scholarship, sport if you like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cYour villages could be like the great universities of Europe during the dark ages, and there is now a dark age of its own kind: your villages could be like suns or stars shining, because you could teach the use of the sun to the rest of Africa and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

    What is he, then\u2014this Denoon? Is he brilliant? Or crazy? Just another lakhoa, here in Africa to enslave again, but now with \u201cliberal\u201d \u201cprogress\u201d?<\/p>\n

    He is, at least by training, an anthropologist\u2014and our narrator is, too. Anthropology is the study of people, or perhaps a better definition would be that it\u2019s an occasion in which a person studies Other People while trying not to impact or influence them\u2014trying but ineluctably failing.<\/p>\n

    A woman remaining still and silently attentive while the men act out: perhaps the best definition of anthropology<\/em> is \u201ctheater.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Joshua Cohen\u2019s novel <\/em>Book of Numbers\u00a0will be published in June.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Norman Rush will receive <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Hadada Prize at this year\u2019s Spring Revel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Next week: Mark Krotov on Denoon\u2019s ex and our narrator\u2019s uric faux pas.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cA Farce Written in Human Blood,\u201d pp. 70\u201389 This is the fourth entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. Read along. So here he is, after all this setup: Denoon\u2014the anthropologist beyond anthropology, the man who until this chapter had been kept behind the margins as if in the wings, behind a curtain. Because his entrance here, now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17319],"tags":[8758,14345,425,17599,1526,6260,813,747,17600,17322,795,17566,8205,17597,17598,44],"class_list":["post-84162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mating-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-capitalism","tag-drama","tag-governance","tag-hadada-prize","tag-mating","tag-norman-rush","tag-novels","tag-political-philosophy","tag-reading-group","tag-revel","tag-rhetoric","tag-socialism","tag-speeches","tag-stage-directions","tag-theater"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cMating\u201d Book Club, Part 4: Socialism vs. Capitalism. 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