Cuban Phantasmagoria

The difficulty with programmatic or "committed" ficiton is that, as with plot-driven fiction (mysteries, for instance), all too often character and any true limning of the world sink into the program, as into a swamp. Popular and ambitious fiction distinguish themselves in that the former reassures its reader that the values he holds are correct ones, while the latter challenges those same values. In much the same way, programmatic fiction is limited, not by readers' expectations, but by the preconceptions and preoccupations of the writer.

Certainly there's considerable question whether fiction has any need to conform to mimetic ideals – or to any ideals at all. And just as certainly, every novel is a political novel, in the same sense that every novel is imagined biography.

Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) was Cuban. He fought with Castro's guerrillas, was subsequently jailed by the new regime for homosexuality, rode the Mariel boat lift to the United States in 1980 and died 10 years later, impoverished, still busy scribbling, tugging behind him this bodies of his past life, in New York City's Hell's Kitchen.

The Assault (Viking, 1994; translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley) is the final of a series of five novels Arenas calls his secret history of Cuba. Three have been published previously by Viking, with another in preparation. Viking also published Arenas's memoir Before Night Falls. The Doorman came out from Grove a couple of years back; two or three other books are available.

Here, in a land where language is almost gone, where memory has been obliterated and the people have become so dehumanized as to have "claws" and "snouts," where the Represident's merest whim is law, The Assault's anti-hero travels from Communal Prisons to ServoPerimeters to Concentrated Rehabilitation Famr Camps, sentencing whole populations to execution in his relentless search for whisperers, deviants, dissidents of every sort – and for the mother he lives to destroy.

Workers faltering in the fields are fed into a juicer, their liberated fluids delivered to the crops. Prisoners are given a monthly allowance of polish with which to shine their shaven heads. In observance of the anniversary of the Represident's ascension a great, nationwide clelbration is staged in which citizens flush out, pursue and stomp thousands of cockroaches.

Allegorical satire, then – Rabelaisian in its exuberant, often repellent physicality, profane in the purest sense of that word.

Remarking Arenas's sense of humor, his passion, purpose and anger, reviwers often cite Kafka, Swift, Beckett and Buñuel, but the writer this novel's hermetic, claustrophobic, fabulst style calls most urgently to mind, especially with its ritual pursuit and ravishing of the mother figure is Bruno Schulz (The Street of Crocodiles, Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass ). There's much here of Schulz's transmogrification of autobiography.

There's much here, too, of the intensity and concentration of the short story: that raying-out from a point of impact. Arenas's novels proceed not so much by narrative as by a kind of accretion, an openly experimental reiteration, or recycling, of basic themes and motives.

In its political aspect, its transliteration of an oppressive government, the novel recalls Kosinski's work. It shares with Konsinski, as well, that central paranoia and otherness. Oppression, says Arenas (as does Konsinski), is not simply an apparatus for regulating action, it strikes finally at perception itself, at the very borders where self and the world merge, mingle, reach accord.

At another level this novel might read as a fantastic projection of the infant's autistic, self-obsessed world, one in which he is at the same time absolutely powerful and powerless, and in which only the mother exists outside himself.

The Assault is finally, I think, for all its brilliance, unsuccessful, brought to ground by its stridency and dogged singlemindedness. The satire is too pat, the correspondences are too direct, the single thing it has to say repeated again and again like a barroom joke till the listener is lost.

For all that, for all its failures as much as for its felicities, for its refusal to put itself at a remove from, to truly reimagine, its subject (for removal and reimagining would be yet another lie), this book is to be praised: a spitball of purest spite, as irreverent of literature, finally, as of the political ideologies is so loudly satirizes and despises.

First published in The Washington Post (17 July 1994).