For the last two weeks, when people asked what I was reading, I would respond evasively—I was reading a book about Chile; it was a book about the overthrow of Salvador Allende; it was a mystery novel of sorts, and so on—I was careful not to share the title of the book, given its off-putting title: The Suicide Museum, written by Ariel Dorfman. If you find the title alarming, well, you should. The book is punishing, but one of the most compelling novels I read this year.
The essential premise is this: a Chilean exile, Ariel Dorfman, is tasked by a mysterious billionaire, Joseph Hortha, to investigate the circumstances of Salvador Allende’s death. There are competing versions of the story, and for reasons unknown, the billionaire wants to know whether Allende went down fighting during the coup or whether he took his own life. Dorfman travels around investigating and interviewing witnesses close to the revolution, almost in the style of a detective novel, measuring one account against another. Meanwhile, Ariel attempts to write a detective novel that addresses the “disappeared” and other unspoken horrors of Pinochet’s regime. Partway through, Hortha reveals the importance of Allende’s death: Hortha is building a Suicide Museum, a gruelling exhibit that leads its visitors through rooms and rooms of photographs of people who have taken their own lives, building towards an ecological exhibit of tree photographs. His message: we are all collectively involved in the suicide of our species and we need to be compelled to take action. Allende’s photograph (or lack of) will determine the impact of the project.
What I love about The Suicide Museum is that it draws from so many rich wells. There are any number of angles through which it could be discussed. With respect to literary theory alone, I could see essays written about it through a New Historical lens, a Marxist lens, a feminist lens, a Poststructuralist lens, an ecocritical lens, and beyond. I sometimes think about what makes books ‘classic’: how do we know they will endure? To me, Dorfman captures the spirit of a classic: a book that doesn’t shy away from engaging in important conversations across multiple fields and disciplines. The sheer breadth of the work makes it well-worth reading and, if our species doesn’t self-eradicate, it will continue to be a powerful work for years to come.
Conceptually, I found the book riveting, if sometimes challenging. It was sometimes hard to remember which character was which (i.e. who had what role in witnessing Allende’s death). I would not say that characterization is one of the strong points of the novel, but also I would make a very poor detective because I don’t keep the details straight. Nonetheless, I found myself engrossed in this mystery, which again—I’m not clear, entirely, on the truth of the matter. The ambiguity and lack of resolution is, in many ways, critical to the work itself.
The fictional Dorfman points towards the challenges of writing about history in a conversation with Hortha. The billionaire asks him whether Ariel has ever wanted to write a novel about Allende, to which he responds, “Not really [...] I’m much too close to the subject. If I respected him less, maybe. But that admiration would kill freedom, the ability to shape the story anywhere it took me. It would be a lazy book, full of myths and no transgressions. A novelist dealing with a real person from the past must be ready to betray that person, to lie in order to tell a deeper truth. I could never do that. It would be exploitative. Writers have to be ruthless” (38). This passage proves critical for The Suicide Museum as a text. At the core of the text is a challenging engagement with the “freedom” afforded by story. Without spoiling too much, Ariel makes use of stories strategically, with ambiguous ethical commitments. The “transgressions” of the book emerge in its own lack of certainty, and Dorfman refuses to “betray” the memory of Allende, and yet … it does appear that lies support a “deeper truth.” Dorfman points towards the challenge of writing about history, particularly when it’s so deeply political. How does one follow the writerly advice to “kill your darlings” if you still firmly believe in their ultimate goodness? The passage recalls to me, in some ways, the film Adaptation, where Nicolas Cage’s character explains his plans for a film adaptation of a book and outlines everything he doesn’t want it to be—which is what the film Adaptation becomes.
Throughout The Suicide Museum, the boundaries between fiction and reality are complex. As the aforementioned conversation continues, Hortha asks if writers really have to be ruthless and sacrifice everything, including their families. The fictional Dorfman answers as follows:
“You pray it won’t come to that sort of choice … But the truth is I’ve already left my family, those real people I most love, unattended while I spend hours—in fact, months—with fictional characters who—I mean, those imaginary men and women only exist because I can conjure them up, and if I don’t keep faith with them, they’ll wither away, like a plant that dies from lack of water. That total dedication to my creatures gives me the right to be ruthless, condemn them to death or ruin, failure or blindness or solitude, according to the needs of the story” (38-39).
There are two elements of the text that get highlighted here. In the first case, he refers to the need to leave his family to commit to his art. Indeed, throughout the book, the fictional Ariel is confronted on the perceptions about Chile he has instilled in his family and his wife perceptively reads through his own self-deceptions to help dictate the direction of the novel. For a man who claims to be “ruthless” in pursuit of the truth, he has some pretty significant blindspots which only his family is able to draw attention to. The second piece here is the idea of being ruthless for the needs of the story. The novel is framed as a true story that Dorfman could only release after the death of Hortha—Ariel says he would not write about Hortha, and he keeps that promise until after Hortha dies. When Hortha asks, Ariel says Allende could only be written about after a hundred years. The contradiction is that, in Ariel’s words, “Someone might fictionalize him successfully, access a simulacrum of his thoughts and feelings, a simulacrum because it wouldn’t be Allende, but somebody else, a postmortem figment of the imagination. Even so, that novelist would have trouble. Allende’s story is so unbelievable that the result would probably reek of implausibility. Readers would protest that no, this could never have happened. [...] There would be scant room for the ambiguity and nuance that a novel demands. [...] Nothing should be sacred” (39-40). Yet, here we are, with a novel that is clearly about Hortha. Reading The Suicide Museum is surreal because even in its fictionality it feels so plausible that this might well be a memoir.
Of course, even the memoir’s truth-effect is called into question and rendered ambiguous. This crucial passage also identifies the motif of unfulfilled promises, both personal and political. Personal promises Ariel makes towards his wife, Hortha’s promises to not interfere with Ariel’s investigation, the promise of the Chilean revolution, and so on—all these are betrayed. Ariel tells Hortha that he’s “off-limits” and yet at the meta-level, this has clearly been betrayed. In Ariel’s defence, he says if he ever attempted such a literary experiment, he would have to be “brutal with my own self, merciless, ready to expose every weakness, invent weaknesses I don’t have. As long as it makes the book more interesting” (39). Even Ariel’s flaws may be “invented,” so there’s never the certainty Dorfman worries about for historical novels.
While this passage offers a map to the book, there are so many engaging moments that are hard to ignore. From the very beginning, the dynamic between Hortha and Ariel is compelling. The mystery that shrouds Hortha’s project is an effective hook that drew me in. The complicated relationship between them escalates naturally, and when Ariel consults with his wife on the project, she has a great moment of wisdom (actually, she may be the one character presented without flaws). She tells her husband, “This is what matters: he has to want this more than you do. Those are the rules of the game, of every game. In every relationship one of the parties wants something more than the other. And the one who wants it less gets the upper hand. So we’ll test him. See how engaged he really is, ready to bend over backward to get you on board” (133). The manipulation techniques that the two engage in add beautifully to the more espionage-y elements of the book. Later, Ariel and his wife run around playing detective and suspect they’re being followed. The two develop a plan where his wife engages in counter-spying and it’s maybe the most genre-fiction section of the book.
The book is an interesting project because it has the fun romp and thrills of a detective book, but has tonal shifts that are punishing—gruelling, even—that delve into more complex existential issues. I wish I could simply transcribe the entire outline of Hortha’s Suicide Museum. It goes on for pages and pages, not quite at the level of Bolaño’s 2666 but arguably more powerful. The entire process of walking through the museum is dispiriting and depressing as anything I’ve ever read. Yet, at the other side of the Suicide Museum is an optimism, or at least the potential for it. Reading through the Suicide Museum part is like a microcosm of the book itself—you get deeper and deeper into it, and it feels punishing, and then you come out on the other side with the message that we still have the potential to justify our lives by making life better for others.
Much of that motif emerges from Hortha’s experiences. He feels tremendous guilt over several formative moments in his life, and he recounts several times when he felt that he would commit suicide only to be spared by some miraculous sign. With a minor spoiler, Allende coming to power spared him at a pivotal moment. That said, though, the moment that most stands out to me is when Joseph fails to control himself in an interaction with bullies. For important context, Hortha was adopted during the Holocaust. I hope I remember this correctly, but following a school yard fight, his brother is actually taken and killed. He feels guilt over this, in spite of and maybe especially because his adoptive parents never fault him for it. That forms part of the impulse of having to justify his own life.
And yet even the truthfulness of our formative moments—the stories we tell ourselves—are not entirely reliable. Hortha notes,
“My adopted parents lied, explained it all away, claimed that Jan was arrested for having painted some obscenities on the Kommandant’s house on a dare, and that’s how I recalled it for years, they never made me feel responsible for that tragedy, they never said, We had a son and lost him because we treated you like a son, they never reproached me, they had taken me in willingly and continued to offer me warmth and love. Made it easy for me to mourn the loss of that elder brother as if I had no part in it, as if a tidal wave had swept him away, the earth had swallowed him, one more motive to hate the Nazis. So I never had to face what had been done to me, what I might have done to others, even less so after the war, when all people wanted was to forget the pain” (175).
The lingering guilt forms the backbone of many character motivations. Hortha feels guilt over this incident and also for working in plastics. There’s another fantastic moment in which Hortha catches a fish and discovers it filled with plastic: it’s a moment that he has to confront his own guilt and it forms the basis of his environmental concerns later. For Ariel, he feels guilt towards his commitment towards Chile, or lack thereof, his self-imposed exile, his lack of success and recognition.
Throughout the book, characters have some wonderfully epiphanic moments in response to their internal guilt, one of my favourite being Hortha’s commentary on guilt itself. He describes a “moment of reckoning” (337). He says, “The whole of my life flashed in front of me, as if I were dying, as they say happens when you are about to die—and I was, in effect dying, the old me was dying. Things became crystal clear, what matters and what doesn’t. And at what matters, I had failed” (337). It’s a painful thing to experience, finally knowing what your priorities ought to be and simultaneously knowing that you haven’t succeeded. Hortha goes on to describe the guilt gnawing away at him: “That guilt made no sense [...] nothing I could have done to prevent the Nazis from … But you can’t argue with guilt. It devours reason” (337). In some ways, there’s a spirit in this book that defies reason. The bottomlessness of guilt is problematic and problematized: there’s a virtue in being ‘unreasonable.’ This unreasonable guilt makes Hortha “suppress” his painful memories, “and yet it must have persisted inside [him] driving [him] to make something of [himself], prove that [his] survival had been worthwhile” (337). It’s engaging to consider how we are formed by our mistakes, even when we don’t recognize them, and the idea of an unspoken undercurrent, an unconscious thread, is well-suited to a book about the ongoing ramifications of politics in Chile.
Hortha elevates the power of the imagination, that is, bringing those undercurrents to the surface. In describing his piscatorial epiphany, he recognizes that he needs to “make amends on an unheard-of scale” (340). He then talks about the spiritual experience and says it’s what authors and mystics experience “when caught in the fever of creativity” (340). He says, “The only way to save ourselves is to undo our civilization, unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for the last centuries. To remedy what I had wrought, I needed the colossal, monstrous power of the imagination, conceive something that would not succumb to the same deficiencies of the technical mind that had led us to this bottleneck” (340). In some ways, I see him as being involved in a similar project to Mark Fisher. He’s looking for an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to consumption and destruction. The moment is not without irony: a billionaire who made his money on plastics is the secret environmentalist hero. That’s all the more reason to double-down on the idea of justifying our lives by making other lives better. It seems unlikely that we have the imaginative faculties to compensate here. Jeez, this would also work with a Freudian reading surrounding guilt, the unconscious, and civilization and its discontents.
Before coming to the epilogue of the book, I just wanted to briefly comment on some brief details. For one, there’s another beautiful scene involving symbolic woodpeckers. Hortha’s mom is sick and continually perturbed by a noisy woodpecker. Hortha’s response is riveting and is really richly symbolic. The fact that the end of the book also presents two or three lengthy conflicting reports on Allende’s death is a wonderful culmination. The decision must be made, in some way a classic choice: tell the truth to your own detriment, or tell a lie that benefits all? The ethical ramifications are well-worth considering and deeply complex.
Despite all this darkness, though, I can’t write off The Suicide Museum as a depressing book. At its core, there’s a valuable optimism. Sure, the book is about the end of all life on the planet, but there are some conciliatory remarks in the epilogue. Ultimately, “we are not alone on this journey. In that brief moment of light we can hurt one another or we can alleviate the suffering, in that interval or interlude or flicker, there is the chance to fight the darkness. Even if we know how it will vanish, ourselves, this world, eventually the Universe itself. To relieve the pain of others, could that not be what justifies a birth we did not choose, gives meaning to the life that we stumble along as best we can, is that love not a consolation for the death that will come despite our best efforts to ignore its existence?” (651). I return here to the idea of classic literature. As fun as cynical novels can be, I think they won’t last. A book really needs to be edifying to last, it needs to have some kind of reason we should read it, and Dorfman presents some conclusions here. It’s not uncomplicated; I’m suspicious of the simply-stated moralism of the book, particularly because of the earlier passage which rejects unambiguous readings of history. Even so, it’s one of those fictions that is more helpful than the complex nuances of the full truth.
The epilogue takes place thirty years after the events of the book. At the end of the book, Dorfman is, regarding the death of Allende, “still unsure, after this exploratory voyage, of what the outcome is to be, with only this wake-up call of a novel as my small, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, contribution” (675). There’s a poetic conclusion that is self-reflective regarding the impact of literary works: “I will soon be dead. Swallowed by the solitude I feared as a child. Hoping only for the immortality of being a drop of water in a river that reaches the sea” (675). The focus on language really takes centre stage, where Dorfman breaks down the idea of an “epilogue” itself as logos (discourse, speech, word) and epi (in addition, in conclusion, also) (675). Even when the book is over, there is still more — and does that not reflect well on the idea that we can build something stronger by redeeming our own mistakes and improving things for others?
The epigraph is critical to the project of the book. The Suicide Museum resists definition, and the epigraph ensures that the final word has not yet been spoken—there is always more. It presents a future-focused ethos: “What future for humanity, who will write our epilogue, who will our descendants give thanks to? Like the ancient redwoods that sang to Joseph Hortha, Allende is still speaking to the future. The unborn are listening, calling out, calling out as if they were ancestors, for the avenues full of trees, the alamedas of tomorrow, to open” (676). It echoes to me the future-thinking of Indigenous people, who try to consider the impact of their actions for the next seven generations. The book here subverts the idea of an epilogue: an epilogue is not a statement on where things end, but instead serves as a new prologue—a call to action for our collective survival.
This is a book that will stick with me for quite some time. After all, as Dorfman writes, “The last word has not yet been said” (676).
No comments:
Post a Comment