Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

The unifying theme of these three novels is the embodiment of contradictions. It’s not exactly a rare theme in literature, and I’m no doubt committing certain literary sins by sitting Franz Kafka down at the same table as Orson Scott Card, but there they were in the pile. Although I didn’t really consider this when I grouped these novels, each one manages to contain all that dualism by way of manipulating the point of view, not going crazy with the narrative devices or anything, but employing the usual tools necessary to reveal enough about the opposing ideas. But choosing what to show is a lot like cheating the odds in favor of balance. How much evil in the world can be ascribed to the common acceptance of third-person omniscient storytelling, the one that so often balances the depth of thought equally with the depth of consequences? It legitimizes shoot-but-cry narratives; it pretends that the moral calculus in any act is fully known. It gives us a template on which to write our many apologia…

A student of chemistry may come across the German prefix zwitter at some point, signifying the embodiment of dual and opposing characteristics, and Tom Robbins embraces this concept philosophically (though probably not biologically) through his character Switters, finding a middle ground between light and dark, peace and war, purity and prurience, consciousness and delusion, id and ego, animal and divine. At the very center of that conention, where Apollo is bitching at that slob Dionysus over the racket of the incessant waves of yin pounding at the eternal shores of yang, Robbins discovers the cosmic joke. Or is it enlightenment? Are you going to tell me there’s a difference?

I don’t want to tell you this is anything new. It’s got to predate Hegel and Freud by three thousand years, the Manicheans (who doesn’t love a heretic?) and those crazy koan-spouting cats by at least a couple millennia. We’ve had midworlds between heavens and hells for as long as people imagined elsewheres for gods, and there’s no shortage of writers who like to play in that area of the sandbox. The humor is a newer angle, and Robbins takes it as what separates the modern from the primitive, what divides the enlightened from the subhuman tools who take shit too seriously. There are plenty of absurdist writers these days too, but Robbins does go a little beyond jokes as a defense mechanism or a social equalizer, and gives them metaphysical importance. (Also not new: an omnipotent god with a sense of humor is about the only way such a divine existence can be forgivingly supposed.) Robbins’ dichotomy as a writer is that he acts like he’s discovering all of these things for the first time, but also that he reinvents them so very well. It helps a lot that I buy into the whole idea of the humor in the middle.

This book is broken down into a multitude of sections not more than a couple pages long. Each of these is like a miniature essay or vignette or story, varying slightly in tone from one to another, and it allows the author to chuck in more than the usual variety of philosophical speculations, character sketches, drama elements, and jokes and still keep it looking natural. There’s some shaky moral ground that Robbins explores in there, and if Switters is a memorable character,* it’s a damn good thing we have all the opportunities we do to look into his head. His joie de vivre is infectious and all, but there’s a fine line between the rejection of false moralities (quite well and good) and on creepy amorality. A couple of times Robbins has to work hard to reveal his characters to be not quite over this divide. (The main character in Ender’s Game could only be absolved this way too. More on that shortly.) Robbins must also balance his humor with the storytelling, keeping it enlightening but not distracting, the playfulness looking genuine and not forced, and usually he steps right. The highly subdivided structure makes it easy to reject the couple of stinkers as outlying data points. I think it’s great that this works for him. I imagine him coming to the keyboard for a few hours a day and cranking one or a couple of these inspired little pieces out (it really makes for a lot of gems), inching his whole story along that way. Keeping the prose flowing over a long stretch is very difficult, and breaking it frequently is one of those things that the pros can do, but you can’t.

#

The Metamorphosis is so canonical, it’s hard to offer an honest review. A story like this one especially, which is loaded with bizarre props in an otherwise realistic setting, drives academic types to hunt hard for symbolism. The endnotes in my edition contain the most tedious sorts of observations, whether offering strong hints that it’s an allegory (the business with the father throwing apples at Gregor is like Original Sin, donchaknow), explaining the cultural symbolism of opening doors and windows, or providing dreary notes on technique (the three boarders are indistinguishable, see, and that cleverly adds to the spookiness of the story–sorry, if I saw the same thing used in a Bugs Bunny short, then I refuse to be awestruck). Although Kafka is certainly very careful about the mood he builds, the purpose of the story, this one anyway, isn’t quite so mind-boggling as all that. Kafka evokes emotions and conveys scenery with economy and skill, and The Metamorphosis deserves to be read once for pleasure before peeling it apart to find its deeper meanings. I think of it more as an odd exhibit to be admired than it is a puzzle to be solved.

Of course, any pointy-headed academic worth his tenure would be the first to tell you that the sturdy storytelling is part of what makes this story just so damn beguiling (and here I start off on my own wacky overanalysis). The style holds up against, and cleverly contrasts, the giant absurdity of the premise. Kafka avoids in his own language, as does Gregor himself, the predictable hysteria that would surround the appearance of a gigantic insect in Gregor’s bed one morning. His bugginess is by no means ignored, but there is, in places you’d otherwise expect it, a big, beetle-shaped hole in the exposition. It’s a different sort of balancing act than Robbins was into, one that gets the very structure of the narrative up onto the tightrope with everything else.

And as much as I hate to dig into the comparative meaning of every-goddamn-thing here, Kafka does choose his language with precision. The opening, “as Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams” sets up his contrasting views splendidly. It’s not just an opposition between the concrete prose and absurd circumstances, there’s a deep division at work here between the intellectual (or realist) and emotional planes. Gregor is the thinker of the story, approaching his new body with (quite obtuse) rationalism. How will he open the door, he thinks, how will he explain to his boss that he’s late? He’s the character that is shown trying (and failing) to express himself with reason instead of the predictable alarm. But Gregor’s every action is verminous, and without the benefit his point of view (there it is again), he would only be seen as mindless: he exudes filth and craves garbage, scuttles about the ceiling and stuffs himself into dark places. To his family, he hisses uncontrollably in anger, and creeps around stealthily, surprising their conversations. The people in the story act, by contrast, emotional and un-intellectual when confronted with the monstrous Gregor–Kafka robs them of their reason in the face of horror–but their actions are all in the human realm. Kafka pulls all sorts of switcheroos with these dichotomies, playing with Gregor’s empathy, with physical strength, and morality.

The last contrast was perhaps Kafka’s most dearly expressed. It’s not hard to imagine how a young man working for an unappreciative, exploitive family (but one which is loyal in its fashion), could come to view himself as an unloved pest, with the story proceeds from there as a literal interpretation of that sentiment. He goes on to invert it however: Gregor’s efforts to keep his family afloat had been enabling them to be lazy and useless, and through the young man’s transformation and eventual death, they (especially the sister) grow, and become transformed themselves, in a positive and conventionally human way. I think this part lacked universality, frankly. Yes, it took some novelistic chutzpah to turn the blame for the family misfortunes on Gregor himself, and enable their growth only with his curse, but it read as more personal, more of a projection, than did the rest of the story. Kafka evidently hated the ending, and perhaps it was because this second transformation wasn’t as compelling as Gregor’s own.

#

In the decades before he became known as a tendentious political whacko, Orson Scott Card wrote decent science fiction novels, and Ender’s Game is probably his most well-known. It’s not bad, delivering something in excess of my expectations anyway, given that I’m not the sort of science fiction reader to go in for barracks philosophies or alien space battles, but this novel kept the interest up for its entirety, and contained characters that I cared about. It centers on a child, Ender Wiggin, who is lucky enough to get such an astounding grade on his career aptitude test that, at six years old, he’s drafted directly into military school. It’s not just any junior academy, but rather an intense and futuristic training program designed to identify and select kids with both incredible reflexes and that ineffable leadership quality that inspires tactical innovation, confidence, and obedience among the ranks.

If the premise looks silly (and it does–we’re talking zero-gravity Laser Tag as the best hope to save mankind here), Card gets away with it in context. These aren’t just any kids, but carefully-screened early prodigies selected for capability and maturity, and their environment is built to encourage those things. The school is regimented, isolated, and nearly adult-free. The kids are given something close to the life-or-death authority of real soldiers, constantly exposed to violent propaganda and unforgiving decisions. It produces adult behaviors,** but their inner childlike sensitivities are still revealed to the reader by authorial exercise. History has ample evidence of children behaving as murderously effective bastards, and even though your horrible memories of middle school might seem like a good enough starting point, the truth is that children have been soldiers for as long as there has been war. The evil of it, at least from a more enlightened cultural perspective, doesn’t negate the fact that kids can do this sort of thing, and certainly have. A different sort of writer (a deeper one) might have analyzed these labyrinthine moral contexts for hundreds of pages, but Card moves this novel forward as three-quarters adventure story, and whatever doubts arise do so from Ender’s own defensible point of view (of the three exculpatory internal viewpoints, Ender’s is the most egregious), and the briefly revealed conflicts of the administrators.

Tom Robbins could have had a conversation with Card about the cultural arbitrariness of adult/child boundaries. Or let’s maybe stretch and say that Card is examining real horrors against our rationalizations of them, the ways we insulate ourselves from their reality. Child abuse isn’t the only atrocity going on in this story. What the boy soldiers are training for is a civilizational war, a dishonorably pre-emptive one, with an ultimate resolution that is an abomination beyond description. The conflict itself is born out of the inability of two species to communicate with one another, and like most of the underlying ethical poses, it feels slightly more honest for the briefly revealing, but relatively unexamining, spotlight that the author offers. Card solves these dilemmas for the purposes of his story–every horror is conducted out of real necessary, every authoritarian abuse is verified as the lesser of evils, and every crime is repented, forgiven, inevitable, or committed without knowledge–but beyond the narrative, the ethical framework is left hanging, I think wisely, because exploring the depths of criminality here would require a very different sort of book. (The author, whatever political views he’d reveal 25 years later, deserves an ounce of credit for raising them.)

Old science fiction (Ender’s Game is over 30) is sometimes trippy to read because badly predicted technology has a habit of growing absurd as time proves it infeasible, and the stuff that was spot-on has a tendency to become invisible to modern readers. Orson Scott Card gets some geek cred for being the first writer (to my knowledge) to accurately guess what video games, simulators, and the internet would eventually look like. There’s an entertaining subplot in which Ender’s brother and sister (they’re as precocious as he is) scheme to take over the world by gaining political influence through, basically, their blogs. In the context of the review, I hope the humor there is evident.

*Some of you may know an online writer named switters as well. You could say he inspired me to read this book. The other two had similar inspirations.

**Except cursing. Even though everyone says fart all the time, and the word “bugger” is mentioned in 1129 separate instances, nary a shit or fuck to be found.

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