Eugene K. Garber

In Maison Cristina we encounter Peter Naughton, an old man whose son has committed him to the care of Catholic nuns in a New Orleans facility for mental patients. Author Eugene K. Garber shows off his protagonist’s learning throughout the book. He’s a teller of stories, a knower of arcane facts, an inveterate user and weaver of words. The nuns at the Maison enlist his help in treating a haunted young woman who has been scarred into silence. This is quirky, memorable, and affecting work.

Garber does not concern himself with clinical details as Naughton and the young woman, Charlene, become cured, or at least rehabilitated to the point of release. He spends his energy instead on twirling two spookily related narratives, the one with which Naughton regales the young patient, and the story of Naughton himself. As the novel progresses, these tales become intertwined, until at length, readers realize they have become one and the same. The quotation marks fall away; the character telling the story merges with the author. It’s an interesting effect, the author managing to bring greater immediacy to Naughton’s searching, yearning life, and his compelling stories.

I found the episodes describing his unstable family disturbing—they kept me at a distance. Clearly these are meant to ground Naughton’s own instability in the believable. For me, they felt diffuse and confusing. If Naughton is still hallucinating about dead or absent people, why is he being released from the hospital? The intermittent appearances of his personal demon is more of the same, in my view.

Naughton the character is the best thing in the book. Quite intelligent, supremely well-read, he acts with charity towards his fellow patients and unstinting deference towards the nuns charged with his care. Conversations with his therapist Sister Claire, and with Mother Martha, the director, unfold with kindliness and crackle with sagacity when dealing with recondite issues of language, mental health, and morals.

At length, these are what Maison Cristina is about. Don’t approach this book expecting logic when dealing with therapy or any dependable rendition of familial relations. If you seek startling images, elevated learning and language, and deep respect and affection between learned, well-meaning people, you will find these convincingly rendered, even instructive.

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I was a bit worried this book would pitch itself in that quasi-academic misanthrope realm inhabited by psychological monsters like Alexander Theroux, but no worries. Garber puts together a fascinating although sometimes schematic musing on what it means to take control of the world with words and how we are always, across our cultures and in our personal conflicts, to the end of our health and the breaking of our hearts, framing each ("The") ("O")ther.

K (polymorphously cute name--this book is always cute) is a flagbearer for an etic anthropology that I'm pretty sure only exists in this book, out to tweak the emics by his mighty patternization of the Roirua-peo, the tribe he lives with in deep Amazonia. (I like the way, when he gets caught up in the moment, he shakes his head and goes "Emic." Banishes his fancy or disgust like a sci-fi hunter-killer starting to feel sympathy for his prey.) But he can't get the fuck away from narrative, man, and as he starts to deculturate in ways that he can't even see for what they are (having sex with young boys, the deepest emicity under aetic pretexts), he is visited by a series of whites ("non-humans," the Roirua-peo say) representing a clef various aspects of unsere Tradition sometimes very hilariously and sometimes spuriously but often insightfully. A series of warnings about thinking you can step beyond frames. The first one is Derrida, of course--and a deconstruction of Garber's wise but sometimes clunkish thesis by the way would begin with that ephebe stuff mentioned upreview. Eschewing situatedness leads to the monstrosity that can't even see itself as such.

D (as a caricaturized Vietnam vet) is followed by Heidegger, Whorf, Karl Barth, and others, each with a perspective to trundle out. It's allegory and very often quite successful, as long as you don't need the hinges to be hidden. All of these philosoguys become tools with which K tries to disrupt the always-there-before-you framing of his opposite number Korakama, the tribe's mystery man, magus and Fool. This new K takes the naively magico-creative speechactification of the tribe on the whole ("They will not come. I Bowakawo say this.") and reveals it as not naive but an imensely flexible framework for providing understanding and making things happen. Say K is fascinated by a new non-human dipshit who is looking for orchids and obviously trying to steal our souls through some kind of indexical-symbolic plucking and seems to be Descartes; he can go to Korakama and say "oh Descartes wants to stay" and Korakama can say "the hekura will kill her if she tries to pick those flowers" and K can gamely try "NO HE TOLD ME HE WOULDNT" but Korakama brushes it aside like nothing "That was a leopard who wanted to eat her. The hekura will not communicate in this place." Smoothly boxing K in with an answer at every intersection of the Roirua-peo's reality with the physical conditions on the ground. Explaining the universe patiently but with infinite control. It seems like he's just making shit up but what it really is is it is power.

You get me? And then Werner Herzog comes around to film Aguirre the Wrath of God and gets his comeuppance, which is amazing as a climax both because I love Herzog but man we think he can do no wrong in the early decades of the new millennium in the West; and a lot gets said and powerfully brought to life about the composition and imposition of (filmic) narrative on people for whom everything is literally real (there are moments of broad postcolonial comedy here, but they give way to terror, as one may expect when Jungle Merlin (or Riddley Walker) and fictive Klaus Kinski clash). There is a bloodbath. And a twist ending.… (mehr)