Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961)

a black-comic masterpiece

Histology, photography, electric bells, telescopes, birds, amperes, smoothing irons, etc.—this is only good for bouncing off the arse of humanity.

yeah it’s not really about a person named Moravagine. It’s fragmentary and self-reflexive in the high modernist style (but not a style): the writer’s acknowledgment that order and unity no longer pertain.

If one wants to live one is better to incline toward imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the show more absurd.

Where are we going? Insane asylums, the satirical American south, the Orinoco delta, an old fort. The attic of the Polytechnical Institute in Moscow, at the end of a sparkling fuse. I read Cendrars (née Frédéric-Louis Sauser) in the light of Walter Pater, whose aestheticism carried a hedonistic streak, and of Nabokov, who advised readers to pay attention to the artistry and creativity of the writer and not get drawn into banal generalizations about ‘character’ and ‘story.’ To read, wrote Pater, is to ‘follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process [of the writer], as one might witness a game of skill.’ Don’t watch Moravagine, watch Sauser. Moravagine is about Sauser’s response to the turn of the last European century, and about the presentation of that response. As he says in the fugitive pages appended to the end of the NYRB edition, ‘there is only one literary subject: Man. But which man? The man who writes.’ Sauser the prose poet has ‘Cendrars’ appear in the book as a one-armed airplane mechanic.

If one could believe him, he had seen everything, read everything, done everything. He had worked in every trade, tramped the whole world over, had friends everywhere. He had lived in all the great cities and been through several virgin countries, accompanying explorers or acting as guide to scientific expeditions. He knew houses by their numbers, mountains by their height, children by their birthdays, boats by their names, women by their lovers, men by their vices, animals by their virtues, plants by their healing qualities and the stars by their influence. He was superstitious as a savage, sly as a monkey, up-to-date as a man about town, and unscrupulous and cunning into the bargain.

How does an artist respond to the modern world, a scene of ruin? With a mad cackle. Not only is God dead, but his face was on the floor of a public pissoir, and we have stepped in it. The modern world embraced new faiths—in science, revolution, psychiatry—and those new faiths failed.

The latest discoveries of science are just sufficient enough to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally. And metaphysics belongs in a museum of folklore, says Cendrars.

Man, like music, is inscrutable. Wasting time is the only way to be free.
Our mounts died under us, and we rode on astride our own shadows. show less

There is no Santa Claus here. Cendrars traveled and wrote without sentimentality. He had a good eye for the kind of desperation and depravity that is almost inspirational. He could not condescend, but saw with a rough, open wonder that human eccentricities are evidence of a will to persevere in a world that offers little solace. In these twelve short vignettes, compiled in 1957, he related episodes from his travels circa 1910-1930: a pianist in New Zealand who, like Cendrars, left an arm in show more the war; a mock manger on a Chinese hillside, erected by troops under the command of General Ma, with the carcass of a water buffalo, Three disemboweled Kings, and a Blessed Virgin carrying her head in an apron reminds Cendrars of a forgotten novel by Jules Janin called The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman. The next year, having switched sides in the civil war, General Ma instructed his troops to build a boxing ring, where the bodies of beheaded prisoners were held upright on stakes and faced off against each other with sawed-off fists. The New Mexican Indians in a peyote crouch around the fire once raced horses down the lone road of the pueblo, pelted by watermelons, but now race cars bumper to bumper to the stateline to meditate under neon. Cendrars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on Christmas Eve, dazzled and disoriented, wanders into a ritual slaughterhouse, the sure stroke of the blade flashing against the bloody vest of the rabbi. Occasionally a headless chicken slips through bloody hands and flies into a pile of baskets waiting to be dropped on to the back of idling trucks. In a manger in Bahía, a black cock impaled on a golden sword takes the place of the star of Bethlehem and a little Negress wiggles in the straw. Bloody disfigured soldiers in trenches are promised a Christmas furlough in Paris if they can kill a German. Holiday revéillon at Le Boeuf sur le Toit with Jean Cocteau, Maurice Revel, and the aristocratic transvestite and patroness of the avant-garde the Duchess d’Uzes. The French Jewish poet who converted to Catholicism after a rapturous mystical experience and lived in such intense poverty that he buttoned his overcoat to the neck, even in summer, to conceal his nakedness. A gamekeeper in the Ardennes Forest claimed to have a shoeshine that when applied to his boots attracted dozens of rabbits that willingly followed him into his kitchen for Christmas stew. Christmas in Rio at the height of the austral summer, when giant blue butterflies from the collection of a paralytic Countess (who refuses to accept that death is the necessary and unavoidable prelude to the transmigration of souls) fall from the roof-garden at the Hotel Gloria into an abyss of heat, perplexed, tipsy with sunshine. show less

Book Circle Reads 17

Title: [MORAVAGINE]

Author: [[BLAISE CENDRARS]]

Rating: 3 sickened stars of five

The Book Description: At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by show more his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."

This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."

My Review: Dr. Science, the eunuch-like shrink of mass-murdering rapist and all-around criminal Moravagine, relates this hideous tale of debauchery, rapine, pillage, murder, and all-around good times after springing the title character from the insane asylum where Science worked with him. Their world travels on the eve of the Great War involve blood, misery, and death for everyone but themselves.

Moravagine, literally “death by female genitalia,” is not someone you want to meet. Hannibal Lecter was positively cuddlesome by Moravagine's standards. Science, in his neutral and neutered language, presents the facts of their horrible, horrible crime spree in a way that left me nauseated but curiously unmoved: “Which mother would not prefer to kill and devour her children if she could be sure in doing so of binding to her and keeping her male, of being permeated by him, absorbing him from below, digesting him, letting him be macerated within her in a state reduced to that of foetus, and carrying him thus her life long in womb?”

This is a slasher movie waiting to happen. I've heard others describe it as funny. Not to me. Distastefully misogynistic. Appallingly bloody. I enjoyed one thing about reading the book: The author's evident fury and outrage at a world that tacitly accepts the dehumanizing and belittling effects of Modernity without so much as a bleat of resistance. Resistance, you see, is futile.

Revolting. Fascinating. Deeply unclean. show less

The narrator of this novel, freshly-graduated genius doctor Raymond la Science, lands a position at a renowned Swiss sanatorium for wealthy but criminally insane patients. This is where he meets one of the inmates, Moravagine, the last and very decrepit heir to a line of Central European nobility. The rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire have put him away to solidify their hold on the throne -- but also because he’s a psychopathic murderer with a near-inhuman psyche. Raymond and show more Moravagine discover they are kindred spirits, and decide to break out. Joined together like a pair of parasites they travel the unstable world of the early 1900s, hiding under a variety of spy-level disguises, aliases and false passports. Wherever they are -- masterminding the Revolution in Russia, rafting up the Orinoco, witnessing The Great War -- Raymond develops his anarchistic ideas in his journal, and Moravagine leaves behind a trail of butchered girls. They feed off each other, and as their picaresque voyages become increasingly deranged, they themselves become more and more unhinged.

The first chapter was great! It hit me with an unexpected twist that boosted my confidence in having found a wild reading experience. Wild it was, but I don’t think the momentum was adequately sustained: some parts dragged too much (the Russian Revolution sections in particular), and others felt more incoherently tacked on. As the novel wears on, unity and structure become looser and cease to apply; this is particularly clear in the WWI segments and everything after. And while this is absolutely intentional, I don’t think the various sequences lead all that well into each other.

Moravagine is a very angry book: it’s furious at the mechanised slaughter of WWI and the indifference of modern technology and the kind of societies they have created. It has no faith in any of the Great Narratives either, and even raving anarchy and a primeval pleasure at tearing down society’s values are ultimately unfulfilling and hollow.

I cannot help but think that this book would translate exceptionally well to the big screen -- its story and aesthetic would be much better served in a largely visual medium. I think it would make for an awesome movie in the hands of Ben Wheatley (A field in England) or Robert Eggers (The VVitch: A New England folktale and The lighthouse). show less