More Deadly Than a Foe

Also: Escandalo!

Creatures, ave! In this edition, I read two lesser-known works by senators of that great vanished empire, The Catholic Literary Tradition (TM).

It Was Then I Felt the Stranger Kick Me Right Between the Eyes

They sat facing each other, drinking the tea that the waitress had brought, glancing over the menu, and exchanging trivial conversation. They did not mention either the book or [M.’s] death.

The only things I knew about Shusaku Endo’s Scandal when I picked it up were the things you could guess from the author and title: It’s about a Christian author who is accused of sexual impropriety. If you go to the copyright page you will also find citations to a book about Gilles de Rais. That is a much clearer indication of what this book is like!

Scandal, which I read in the Van Gessel translation, is about an aging and infirm novelist, whose doppelganger draws him into a sordid sadomasochistic world. I found it more interesting than compelling. It felt to me as though the characters existed to move the philosophical chesspieces around. I know part of the book’s point is that we may not have “interiority” in the standard literary sense—maybe we are just strips of kindness laid alongside strips of evil, like a papier-mache mask with no head underneath—but this is a hard proposition to make satisfying in a novel imho. There’s very little description, except for the weather, which is all snow and fog and nightfall. “Beyond the curtain he had drawn across the window darkness was already pressing in”: like the curtain we draw across our faces!!!! It’s marbled with literary references, in a way I did like, although the specific texts chosen were maybe a bit predictable—Dante lost in the middle of life’s journey, Edgar Allan Poe, et cetera.

But the ideas themselves, the ideas for which Endo’s characters and situations felt like mere illustrations, were just familiar enough to be intelligible and just strange enough to provoke. I know the idea that Japanese culture is all about “face” is a cliché, but this specific novel plays with that idea, and I think maybe suggests that Christians in 1980s Japan represented a kind of inflammation point of the honor vs. holiness dichotomy. To be a Christian, in Scandal, is to proclaim that sin may hide virtue or be a pathway toward salvation. There’s a blunt, publicly-stated rejection of respectability inherent in the religion. (This is a very Virginia Burrus point.) And yet Christians are also treated as upright to the point of being uptight. Suguro, the renowned Christian author in this book, has spent his whole career saying that sin may be the carapace of salvation, and yet he himself is just painfully respectable. You know how online people talk about somebody being “the most divorced man on Twitter” or whatever? Suguro is the most married man in Japan.

So—is his respectability impeding his salvation? At one point a character raises the possibility of a difference between “sin” and “evil,” where sin is always a distorted expression of the longing for salvation whereas evil is something more death-driven, blank and raging. When that distinction is raised it does feel very plausible, because this novel is nothing if not intermittently repellent. But the plot is designed to take you on a journey, to force you to consider whether the blank cold evil deeds of these characters are different, in their essence, from our familiar daily sins. And then there’s also a third category, a kind of numbness: Endo touches this point pretty lightly, but Suguro rarely goes to Mass and lies to his wife about everything. Is this sin, or is it too impenetrable to be sin?

On a literary level I guess this did raise the question, for me, of whether and how sexual sin can work as a synecdoche for evil generally. It’s fun to laugh at all those sad gutter-dwelling British novels that view the entirety of the spiritual life through the prism of adultery, and obviously I’m not innocent on this score myself, but Endo’s use of sexuality is much more… fetishistic? Faceless? No fun? I know it’s an intentional effort to strip away anything that might feel human, any element of reason or love, but it is no fun, and that did make it feel a little fake to me.

Endo basically tells you this is a novel about Passion Sunday. How could the crowds who waved palms become the crowds who hurled stones and invective at Jesus on the Way of the Cross? I’ll be honest, I did not find this the most insightful portrayal of that question—it felt like a loud version of the question. But it may be that you all will connect with the book in a way I didn’t.

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The Fortunate Fall (of Rome)

The oblivious Caesars fought on. They marched across frontiers, made treaties and broke them, decreed marriages and divorces and legitimizations, murdered their prisoners, betrayed their allies, deserted their dead and dying armies, boasted and despaired, fell on their swords or sued for mercy. All the tiny mechanism of power regularly revolved, like a watch still ticking on the wrist of a dead man.

There are those who say Evelyn Waugh’s Helena is his best thing. I’ve read it now, and I wouldn’t say that—the boring normie opinion is right, his best thing is Brideshead, although Sword of Honour is a more *~*mature*~* work and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a sordid personal favorite.

But Helena, about the mother of the Emperor Constantine and her quest for the True Cross, is fun. It trots along. Its harness is studded with little gems, whether expected from Waugh (the gibbon!) or unexpected (the sexy horse fantasy??? weird and delightful). It can get preachy, whether what’s being preached is the importance of graspable historical truth or the need to, as somebody or other recently said, build bridges rather than walls.

And, you know, I’m always here for books about how the Roman Empire was bad, actually. One of the big influences on the current novel draft was Kyle Harper’s Roman slavery book. He basically argues that Christianity mitigated the sex-slavery aspects of Roman culture (and elsewhere he outlines the revolutionary Christian antislavery arguments grounded in the dignity of enslaved people), but what toppled the Roman slave empire was not Christian faith, I’m sorry to say, but the fall of Rome. Or, more specifically, the loss of the communications and travel routes that had allowed acquisition, trade, and surveillance of massive numbers of slaves. “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else,” as the man said. Anyway I agree with this guy that we should talk more about the Roman influences on the American founding.

Helena, with its blood-drenched empire stumbling toward the cliff, reads a bit like The Leopard if Lampedusa weren’t wistful about it. Which casts an interesting light on both sentimental old lace-trimmed Brideshead and the more astringent Sword of Honour. I like seeing Waugh at every point on the nostalgia-to-glee spectrum.

Now Playing

Billy Joel, “The Stranger.” Why were you so surprised that you never saw the stranger? Did you ever let your wife whose only personality trait is arthritis see the stranger in yourself?

Gladiator mosaic from early 4th century via Wikimedia Commons.