Fb2 The Ass's Tale (Unbearable Books / Autonomedia) ePub

I'm going to try to place John Farris's wonderful new novel, The Ass's
Tale, into an historical context. The literary tradition that John's book
belongs to is the encyclopedic novel; the one that Gravity's Rainbow,
Ulysses and The Invisible Man are all part of. One of the things these
books have in common is that they ignore traditional plotting -- the `he
did this, she did that' thing; it's besides the point. Encyclopedic novels
are trying to tell you a whole bunch of stuff about culture and history
at the same time -- there's so much important information that the author
is trying to pass on that sometimes one chapter leads into another that
goes in an entirely different direction from the one you just finished.
John's book is also in the classical mode, in that it looks back to the
Roman writers -- more specifically; to The Satyricon (his main character
is originally named `Petronius,' after the author of The Satyricon), but
even more so to Apuleius' The Golden Ass (`Petronius' changes his name
to `Apuleius' on page 11 in the novel).
Both Farris and Apuleius have a similar goal; they want to examine
human nature and catalogue what people do to each other, but to do that,
you have to look at them unblinkingly, and we all know what staring at
folks gets you; trashed, slapped and sometimes even shot. So if you're
going to be a sociologist of the depths of human behavior, you have to
be surreptitious, even sneaky, which unfortunately adds some distance
between you and your object of study. Which also means that your
conclusions may be somewhat suspect.
However, if you trick yourself out as an animal, you can get in good
and close, and see what's actually going on without arousing suspicion.
Apuleius does this by transforming his main character into an ass. John
turns his narrator into a dog -- which happens when he hears Elvis
Presley's `You Ain't Nuthin But A Hound Dog' on a car radio! And it's
in this form that John/Apuleius `checks things out' -- Attica, racism,
Harlem, the Village, and tons of sex. The result is a report on the
Human Condition in the form of an ur-novel; a classic book in the
great tradition.

John Farris's The Ass's Tale is a pun. Meaning there are always two tales. The one tale Farris is obviously playing with is The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, or The Golden Ass, in which the narrator Lucius accidentally turns himself into an ass. In a DuBoisian turn of the screw, Farris tells of two tales--an ass's and a dog's. In Farris's tale, Petronius, renamed Lucius Apuleius, is turned by Elvis into a hound dog, hounded himself by the man, trying to look after his own black ass John. In the process, he lifts the veil on America's heroes and Uncle Sam--that is, the United States--that is, us.

Farris's America is a world of duplicity, overrun by Lucans (snakes) who can both save a dog's life in Attica and can steal a blind vet's gold. In this America, pop culture heroes like Elvis and Desi Arnaz work side-by-side with history's villains like Dr. Petoit and Edward Teller. Women have names like Woody and Peck. You can disguise yourself as your Wanted poster on Morton Street where everyone looks just as different as everyone else. A black ass passes for Red. In the punning and the doubling and duplicity, it all can get very complex and confusing. Confusion is indeed the name of the game.

At one point in the novel Uncle Sam asks Ras Tafari, Emperor Haille Selasi, to check on their rights in terms of their operations. The emperor pulls a quote from Genesis: "Let us go down and confuse them." The quote refers to the people building the Tower of Babel. The confusion specifically referred to is the problem of language. From the first page of the book, Lucius describes the dream of his Odyssey, "encountering strange tongues, odd voices coming at me from the radio." Indeed, the novel is one of strange tongues (klookamop and rreety-o-roony) and odd voices.

But it is this Babel that is precisely what makes reading The Ass's Tale so enjoyable. Roland Barthes writes, in The Pleasure of the Text, "The text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel." The pleasures of Farris's Babel are manifold, from intertextual games to culturally allusive tickling. Describing the pleasure of reading in the erotic terms of his exhibit, Sade, Barthes locates the pleasure of reading in "breaks" and "collisions," in antipathies in contact, in the two-edged. "Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic," he writes, "It is the seam between them...their [the works of our modernity] value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that they always have two edges." Farris takes his two-edged tail through America's duplicitous and multiplicitous voices, to some pleasingly powerful effects.

Until he himself becomes invisible, Lucius serves as seeing-eye dog to a blind man, a hard-working World War II vet from Harlem who gets duped out of his money by Lil' Eva and Uncle Sam himself. His is one of the odd voices we don't get often--and we know why. He can't see anyone about his problem, he has no voice, and drops out of the novel. The really odd voice, however, becomes the duplicitous Lil' Eva. We share Lucius's contempt for her in solidarity with the blind man, but at the end even Lil' Eva becomes pitiable, as, doped up and desperate for another shot, she futilely insists that she (a snake) is not a dog. Her final scene ends with Lucius, and the reader, feeling neither pity nor gladness. "It was a mess no matter which way you looked at it," Lucius says.

But what's so pleasurable about the mess? Like the pun, it doesn't matter which way you look at it, meaning you're at the seams. Barthes says that the pleasure is in the seams, and the ass is an anatomical seam. Bakhtin calls it "the face turned inside out." We don't get any big revelations, any huge unmasking--not of Uncle Sam, not of James Moody, not of Lucius. The pleasure we get is an ass's pleasure. Messy no matter which way you look at it. But the point is that you saw it. You've seen the ass in the face, and boy, what a tale!

Anitta Santiago, Brooklyn Rail, October 2010