Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1980)
If any major debut novel by an American writer is crying out for resuscitation and rediscovery it is assuredly Alexander Theroux’s Three Wogs from 1972, in some respects probably still the most astute and exemplary work of fiction I have read by this great writer from a distinguished clan—a dashing fraternity pledge who punches everybody’s lights out sentence by sentence—whose digressive nonfictions are where most of the magic gathers and stalls in heavy shifts of pressure, this rake’s proclivity being above all to hold a thing in the palm of his hand on a blood moon and throw a thousand compound angles of action at it. A triptych of tales each involving blithe unchecked racism in the clueless and ruthless middle classes of England, a land where Mrs. Probys and Reverend Which Therefores finally get theres, thanks to the beneficent interventions of literature. "Mrs. Proby Gets Hers," "Childe Roland," and "The Wife of God.” Three Wogs is the most clever and blistering thing I have ever read about the sort of lazy everyday unchecked prejudice that we know we see around us far more often than we do outright eugenicist hatred/disgust. The author’s thesis would appear to largely be that gabby self-satisfied white folks won’t ever step out of their own footwear long enough for proper sense to at long last detain them. In the first place, the way to not be racist is to address a person as a person, but then for some it became as though you cannot risk open communication because there is always the possibility of a faux pas or humiliating gaffe. Thus in short order these sad souls began to saddle people of different ethnicities with identities those folks never claimed for themselves or even had a say in. It’s a person. That person cannot tell you what a Chinese person is or what a Mexican person is or how somebody’s ancestors are de facto who that person presently has to serve from the catbird seat. Fuck that jangly-ass racket. The idea is that the person right in front of you might be interesting to get to know so long as you can manage to get out of your own way. Sardines and marmalade shall be the forever serum in the Palladium of Perverse Nuptials. [Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1980).] The disgrace of the racist’s worldview is that the racist hasn’t a worldview nor much of a world neither. In the body the flight instinct wants out, but it doesn’t know where to go…or who to blame. It’s like everybody has a sports franchise they must cheer on from birth or something, contract writ in India ink. Get wriggly and get wiggly…this is a creature feature. When le grand patron Jean Renoir insinuates himself in the hulking, shifty flesh into his masterful 1939 film maudit La règle du jeu to remind the swirl of amorous combatants around him that everybody has their reasons, he holds back a moment so that we might realize for ourselves that the cities are now overrun with violent crimes running around with no more criminals to attach them to like tags because everybody had their reasons and so we let them go. In his novel of fragments Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, maximally eccentric Spanish exile Felipe Alfau, who could never really bring himself to believe that his own writings were readable or coherent even though they definitely were, surmises that people are reluctant to have their fingerprints taken because they seem to vaguely intuit that it might ultimately cause them to be unable to suppress the commission of hopelessly self-incriminating crimes. There is also the possibility that your fingerprints are off committing heinous acts unbeknownst to you. If you believe in fingerprints you must concede that the crimes yours have committed off on their own are your crimes for which to answer. The law’s pretty clear on that. “The narrow, crooked, torturous streets fled from him, denying his path, mocking, snarling, like snakes in a jungle of bizarre structures …” The willful stride is stymied by phenomenal reality her blanket self. Matter and memory, needless to say, get away from the literary conspirators, the author witnessing it all from afar, up on a hillock cross-legged, “in as state of utter impotence and indignation.” Locos was written in the late 1920s in New York in English and was published, somewhat curiously, two years before Flann O’Brien’s delirious and divine At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel in which the narrator gets up every single day and goes into battle in a direct and corporeal way with his characters. Not knowing how to let well enough alone is how fruitfulness and prosperity happen. There is no map. I’m afraid you’re going to have to feel your way around and echolocate. “The discovery in any domain of a plurality of coexisting operations,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “is inseparable from a more profound discovery, that of difference, which denounces the negative and opposition itself as no more than appearances in relation to the problematic field of problematic multiplicity.”
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