A House in the Country

...The Venturas know little enough about the noisome cellars where the lackeys sleep, and neither lackeys nor masters know of the salt mine beneath them, or the tunnel that leads to the native settlement on the river they pollute with their sewage, or the lightless room which still holds the brilliant feathered costumes confiscated from the natives generations ago, symbols of their pride as their nakedness is of their degradation...

...The imagination of writer and reader are to merge "in a world where the appearance of reality is always accepted as appearance, with an authority all its own...

...It is rare in empirical research in human behavior to find an outstandingly clear conclusion which makes sense...

...No, we're not meant to believe it...

...We could also read arm and disarm, not cheat and cheat, trust and betray, and so on through a very long series of human behaviors...

...The author has stationed himself at our elbow to warn us that in spite of the misleading verisimilitude of his narrative, we're re~ ting a fable, an "artifice...

...Vastness surrounds it...

...In the Ventura universe the dark and the unpleasant is simply declared nonexistent...

...Cox, then, is taking the pulse of the present...

...Thus the author commands us to distance ourselves from ,the substantial yet illusory horrors he has imagined -- not only the baroque quotidian cruelties of Ventura family life, but the far worse ones that ensue when adults and lackeys go off for a fete champ~tre and leave the children alone to release the imprisoned idealist, pull up the gold-tipped lances, Crime doesn't pay THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION Robert Axeirod Bask Books, $17.95, 241 pp...

...the ineradicable grass, accidentally introduced by an irresponsible ancestor of the irresponsible Venturas, became their collaborator in destroying the natives' economy and converting them into slaves to work the family gold mines...

...The prisoner's dilemma can be described very simply even without the familiar diagram...

...If one is bad, however, it pays the other to be bad, so they end up both being bad and both being worse off than if they both had been good...

...Although it pays both parties enormously to be good, the dynamics of the situation very frequently push them into the bad-bad box, where they are both very much worse off...

...Robert Axelrod notes that this was "invented in about 1950 by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher and formalized by A. W. Tucker shortly thereafter...

...In the last analysis, however, Cox thinks that fundamentalism will not provide a .context for postmodern religiousness because the movement seems incapable of bringing a critical spirit to the status quo...

...denial I side the fence of gold-tipped lances which protects its lawns, its lagoon, its roses, peacocks, and rare trees, there is nothing but sighing grasses until the far horizon of blue mountains...

...Schaeffer's writings are tendentious to an extreme but they do look squarely at modern culture...

...He may just have spotted one or two this time...

...Interaction" would perhaps be better...

...it is she who talks incessantly of the colors of paintings, fabrics, and flowers...

...They remain at the margins, but as they find their religious voice liberal theology remains bemused since it never spoke to this audience...

...One wonders for how long, and what Augusto Pinochet would make of this dark and various fable...

...The fundamentalist movement is treated honestly by Cox but not as incisively as Frances FitzGerald's reportage in the New Yorker a few years ago...

...Inside the lances, society is threetiered: adult Venturas, the children, and an army of servants who hate their masters as both masters and servants hate the naked natives...

...The idealistic brother-in-law who became too interested in the natives has been declared mad and imprisoned in a tower from which his shouts are declared inaudible...

...In the original story of the two prisoners, "good" was not squealing on the other...

...The single double decision is called a "game," a picturesque but not really very descriptive term...

...He recognizes that generalizations are dangerous to make because of vast cultural differences...

...The great house is a labyrinthine universe...

...Ignored except when they are petted, the thirty-three children are up to all sorts of tricks, sexual and otherwise...

...They reflect the religious hopes of the people who never had the chance to make their peace with modernity...

...What he does do well is prompt his readers to think about what is going on today in this period of religious ferment...

...It's crammed with characters and with plot, with information planted and withheld, with turns, twists, and surprises...

...Fifteen players participated in the first round and sixty-three in the second, both including a random strategy...

...If they are both good, they are both better off...

...who may be fleshing out a postmodern theology...

...Such was the idea of the two-person game, especially in its non-zero-sum form, and in the special case of the "prisoner's dilemma...

...Donoso, who published A House in the Country in Spain, has returned to Chile, where he is once again working and teaching...

...It is interesting that none of these three authors appears in the otherwise excellent bibliography, which suggests perhaps how little noticed it was at the time...

...Base communities in Latin America reflect a homogeneous Catholic experience of some centuries standing while the liberation theology, of Sri Lanka reflects a minority religion and its problems...

...Once the land was various and fertile, tilled by native farmers...

...outthe free hot meals, shelters for the homeless, centers for battered families, the mentally ill a.,,, ,he addicted, the home for families visiting prisoners, the organization to build low-costhousing are all sponsored by ecumenical church efforts or are heavily supported by them...

...He sees fundamentalism's demand for reason in theology (faith is not a leap but a reasonable choice), its fierce critique of the rootlessness of modernity, and its desire for alternatives to the faceless bureaucracies of both church and state as valid critiques...

...When plot matters, one doesn't give it away...

...Denial has worked for longer than anyone can remember...

...Cox analyzes both the Latin American communities (where he has had firsthand experience both as teacher and observer) as well as liberationist movements in Europe and Asia...

...In both these rounds, however, a very simple strategy emerges at the top, interestingly enough, developed (Coi d on page 314) Commonweal: 310...

...In formal game theory, the word for good i s " cooperate" and for bad is "defect...

...Cox would agree that liberation theology from Latin America cannot be imported as a whole...

...After curfew their parents assign them to the control of the lackeys, who treat them with the servile cruelty natural when those defined as above them are, in fact, utterly in their power...

...This latter critique, ironically enough, is the same one used against Cox by Andrew Greeley regarding the reality of the "secular city" and "secular man...

...What the shape of that theology will be is not yet clear, so Cox is tentative and a bit blurred when it comes to specifics...

...Cannibals, they ca~ them, to justify their exploitation and to frigh ,~n the c . . . . ~n...

...bad" was squealing on the other...

...Each autumn the grasses emit a blizzard of thistledown which chokes everything that breathes, but by that time the Venturas' long cavalcade of carriages and wagons has returned to the far capital, carrying this year's supply of gold...

...Among crystal and 18 May 1984:309 brocade, rosewood and tromp-i'oeil frescos, the Venturas occupy themselves with the tedious rituals of idleness and hypercivilization...

...It's a nightmare from which, at the end, the author offers us a hope of awakening, a hope which though slight is on the positive side of infinitesimal...

...If they are both good, it may pay one of them to be bad, at convert them to weapons, let in the natives, and in a revolution for their parents to put down, only themselves to be . . . . But enough...

...He also recognizes that the persistence of religion in the postmodern period is a mixed blessing...

...least in the short run...

...The family "dark curtain" is dropped over the demise of eight-year-old Mignon after she roasts her sister Aida in the cellar oven and serves her with an apple in her mouth...

...It is these groups (and those like L'Arche, the Catholic Workers, etc...

...The Axelrod contribution consists, first, of two extraordinary experiments, two long series of individual games between pairs of players following a considerable variety of strategies...

...We have two people interacting, each of whom can either be "good" or "bad...

...One sister is blind...

...But not, as in the hundred-year solitude of Gabriel Marquez's Buendia farhily, history as dream and life as wonder, but history as nightmare...

...Donoso, who forsook the realism of his early work for the hallucinatory modernism of his Obscene Bird of Night, here addresses his readers with nineteenth-century directness and more than nineteenth-century frequency, asking us to acknowledge "that such old-fashioned machinery, now in discredit, may yet give results as substantial as those offered by more modem convent i o n s . . , with their secret arsenal of illusion...

...In my own very middle class university-cum-state-government town Rituals of idleness A ROUSE IN THE COUNTRY Jos~ Donoso I~opf, $16.95, 352 pp...

...Cox does well what he set out to do: scan the horizon from his ivory tower in Cambridge and venture forth on some field trips looking for signs and portents...

...Suffice it to say that there are survivors from this fictive past to history's continuing nightmare of present and future...

...Kenneth E. Boulding S OMETIMES in the course of the evolutionary process, whether biological, societal or intellectual, a mutation, an invention, or an idea that seems very simple and might not be noticed much at the time sets off an extraordinary phylum of development...

...His most vocal critics accuse him of suffering from a kind of intellectual AIDS: a defenseless susceptibility to every trendy virus current in the Zeitgeist...

...The Venturas only spend the summer in the house...

...He is much more sanguine about the potential of the liberationist base community movement in Latin America...

...He sees in American fundamentalism (of which Falwell is the synecdoche) one conspicuous counterforce to liberal theological presuppositions but judges that movement deficient as a basis for a new theology...

...Sadly enough he makes no use of the writings of Francis Schaeffer, who is the closest thing fundamentalism has to an intellectual, to buttress his case...

...I think he might also concede, pace Johannes Metz, that we must take into account the middle class church experience here...

...One point Cox makes seems unimpeachable: much of current religious vitality comes from small voluntaristic groups (many under the umbrella of the too easily despised parish) which come together both for a deepened spirituality and a passion for social justice...

...A House in /ie Country exists in an unsettling limbo between family chronicle and social allegory...

...Clara Claiborne Park S OSl~, DONOSO is a Chilean, but his house could be in any country where Europeans took over a vast land from its native inhabitants, recreated themselves as an aristocracy, and erected an elaborate superstructure of civilization over exploitation, ignorance, . contempt, and fear...

...His characters are the Venturas -seven middle-aged sisters and brothers, their spouses, their thirty-three children - - and his subject is history...

...The basic Christian communities and the liberation theology behind them hold more promise...

...I think that unfair...

...We applaud religion for bashing the Bolsh in Poland but are appalled at its use in Iran...

...What is to be said of all this with respect to North America...

...The concept stimulated in the interim a large amount of empirical research ':and has thrown light on an extraordinary variety of social situations...

...He further sees their demonizing of bureaucracies as setting up straw men since they have no sense of the myriad human communities which coexist in such large structures...