Violence and Derision on Vacation

🗓 posted Nov 19, 2024 by Josh Erb
🔢 845 words
🏷

When I was living in D.C. I formed the bad habit of plucking books from little free libraries and then taking several months to get around to reading them. I put new books into circulation, though, and so I rarely feel too guilty about it. Besides, I think that the haphazard circulation of odd, half-remembered books is part of what makes these little libraries a special thing.[1]

This past week, we went on vacation to the backwaters of Kerala.[2] I spent nice chunks of time sitting by resort pools, breathing fresh air, and finally getting around to reading a book I had grabbed from a free little library[3] a month or two before we moved to India — The Jokers by Albert Cossery.

I can't say what led me to initially grab the book. Some admixture of: NYRB classics editions rarely miss, the summary on the back was interesting enough, and the author's background as an Egyptian who lived in Paris and only published novels in French, though all his characters and plots remained in Egypt, felt compelling in its own right.

I expected this to be a light, perhaps slightly dated read that I could breeze through by the pool. Instead, it touched on themes that feel especially pertinent and worth discussing.

Cossery's main characters are not gallant heroes or bold revolutionaries. They don't care at all about honor or dignity, in fact they exploit these self-serious tendencies for their own amusement. The novel's action peaks by showing you that: a) their diagnosis of power & how it sustains itself are accurate, and b) they'll be unhappy if they ever actually achieve their goal of absolute humiliation of whomever is in power.

One moment in particular has stayed with me since I finished reading this book. It happens as the novel's chief antagonist (because there are no protagonists in this novel) is going back and forth with a dogmatic revolutionary. As the debate goes on, the revolutionary stubbornly tries to demonstrate that the antagonist is wrong. The antagonist begins to see why the revolutionary cannot understand his actions or motivations:

He played the game of honor and dishonor, just as he was taught to do. He'd never escape. He was more a prisoner than a prisoner in a cell because he shared the same myths as his adversary; they grow and grow and surround everything like unbreachable walls. [p.114]

This immediately brought to mind Richard Rorty's concept of the political "ironist" and I went back to my old grad school copy of Contingency, irony, and solidarity to search out a passage I vaguely remembered but couldn't articulate.

The redescribing ironist, by threatening one's final vocabulary, and thus one's ability to make sense of oneself in one's own terms rather than hers, suggests that one's self and one's world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates. [p.90]

Cossery's main characters in this book are redescribing ironists par excellence. That point is indisputable. I think, however, Cossery's diagnosis is apt but his prescription — or the prescription his main characters proffer — falls short for me. His themes fail to map neatly onto Rorty's idea of the liberal ironist. In order to be happy, these characters must reject any positive notion of the future. They can only revel in the absurdity of the present, because this is the only certainty there can be in life. We see this in the ambivalence the main characters begin to feel when it looks as if their plans might actually lead to the end of their autocratic governor's political career. They're the kids shooting spitballs at the teacher. Their joie de vivre would evaporate if ever the teacher lost patience and abandoned the class room entirely.

But maybe that's the whole point? Main characters are not meant to be idealized forms. The work of the novelist isn't to draw a map to a better future or an improved way of "doing politics". Maybe it's enough to show that there there is something to be said about rejecting the received wisdom of the world you live in and taking the time to revel in its absurdity.

In any case, this isn't a perfect book — so few are. But it is refreshingly devoid of cliché and interesting in its premise. Worth checking out if you happen to see it in a little library some day.

  1. I have dreams some day of making an app where books I put into circulation can do, like, Foursquare check-ins and you can watch them move around in time and space. But that... is a project for another, more rainy day.

  2. I plan to write about this trip in a separate post. Fear not.

  3. I did preemptively put several books into the little library rotation before we moved, so I don't feel excessive guilt over taking this one out of circulation completely.

<< all notes.