Being Dead
Crussi, Jim Crace F.Gonzalez_
ton's struggles with Tom Hayden over cies he believed to be both "insane and ringtori s religious life seriously, treat- drafts of the Port Huron Statement (the cruel." In response...
...The Other America, a work driven, ac- wavering devotion to socialism occa- He claimed that if he died on the opercording to Isserman, by Harrington's vi- sionally limited his recognition of other ating table and wound up in heaven, sion that the "alternative America of in- forms of American discourse-from the "he was going to accuse God face-totellectuals and students and artists and utopianism of SDS to Reaganism-that face of mumbling to humankind...
...the historic party of Eugene Victor For death is not empirical, but "metaDebs and Norman Thomas is today F. Gonzilez-Crussi empirical," as philosophers have redoing the work of Richard Nixon...
...He shows shared by relatively few was the meatext, Harrington offered an analysis of how Harrington surmounted the "Old sure of his vocation as a witness, if not a poverty that was both reasoned and im- Left" infighting of the 1950s and 1960s- prophet...
...Isserman also takes Har- versity Press...
...While the who concentrated his attention on the existential anguish in sex...
...But we know, not fail to evoke the somber links be- CORRESPONDENCE of course, that this is just a manner of tween eroticism and death...
...is good for the poor rests on a table Being Dead is all of this, as com- His novel does what only the highest that correlates higher per capita GNP pounded by the craft and the imagina- form of literature can do: it mesmerizes and HDI (Human Development Indition of a masterful novelist...
...Is this one factory, since no language can have sought, Harringtori s "moderate, prag- addition to the dauntingly prolific race of words for what is fundamentally inefmatic radicalism," Isserman argues, ex- "How To" books, if books they be called...
...Harrington's insistence that the concern to Harrington, while embrac- manistic imagination...
...Furthermore, according to Story there is, nonetheless: two mid- death itself, but our vision of life-that the World Bank itself, the worldwide Commonweal 28 July 14, 2000...
...other story...
...Isserman rington informed a cousin that after thirual sectarianism would limit his effec- suggests that Harrington's ability to ty years of atheism "he still deeply loved tiveness in the New Left during the mo- "speak American" was one of this na- the Catholic church and found its rituals mentous decade to come...
...the full ideological context for Michael son whose fidelity to a political vision Without mentioning socialism in the Harrington's socialist journey...
...The story, which forms the sus- this "beyond...
...fable, undescribable, and beyond possierted real influence within the Democ- What folly...
...The visitor themselves at a loss for words to say the Democratic Socialist Organizing to the bookstore or the pub- what it is, this thing that transcends all Committee and its successor, the DSA...
...But even the IMF and the WTO...
...o passioned...
...Who, indeed, can ex- The curious reader takes the book in stood why so many formerly Democra- pound on being dead...
...But is it tagonists, without much regard for a questionable assumptions, and he not true that any work setting forth linear chronological sequence...
...presidency in 1972, Harrington finally No theoretical foreknowledge here, and resigned his membership, alleging that no empirical savvy, either...
...Always, and all of us, tage George McGovern's bid for the Farrar, of raus £• Gima.i 521, 796 pp...
...It was a heady experience for a bohemian Socialist who suddenly became, in the words of Harrington's occasional patron APPROACHING THE UNKNOWABLE Robert Maynard Hutchins, "the only man ever to get rich off of poverty...
...lic library, ambulating through the stacks possible experience...
...Or is he perhaps a the dunes...
...The dead couple are left lying in lives in Chicago...
...A novel: not a technical, biomedical ing, and frightening...
...And by art- ratio between the incomes of the plot, the pace of its development, its cli- fully arranging all this, the novelist world's richest 20 percent and of the max and denouement, or the expecta- seems to tell us that, if we pay close at- world's poorest 20 percent was 30:1 in tions or surprises that it may afford the tention to the surroundings of death, 1960, that ratio increased to over 70:1 reader...
...His latest book is There Is a ference to most of us...
...without exception, must face this reality...
...There, the cadavers slowly World Elsewhere (Riverhead...
...Harrington overcame the psychic toll ers exist...
...And the tone reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Gril- dress the demonstrators' real targets, converse is also true: any novel taking let and the roman du regard...
...stages of LBJ's War on Poverty...
...assessing the average level of develJim Grace, who has already won many Grace cannot tell us what being dead opment in a society, they are not adeliterary awards, reasserts himself this means...
...That cult art of the novel...
...country can appear higher than it is if this novel displays it to the point of vir- We cannot even imagine, let alone see, the upper and middle classes are largtuosity...
...Instead, a work of fiction...
...El that are not known, cannot be known, they had their first erotic encounter, are and which, in any case, if they were surprised by a robber, who murders F. Gonzalez-Crussi, pathologist and writer, known, would probably make no dif- them...
...His latest and Harrington himself worked briefly authority that assumed international book is Catholics in America (Oxford Uniwith Sargent Shriver in the planning proportions...
...The Reagan years were an- no one has ever experienced and come nomena of the empirical realm...
...the 1970s Harrington finally assumed mong book titles, surely They mean that death is not an experiThomas's role as moral leader of the Being Dead ranks with the ence, properly so called, but they find non-Communist Left, as cofounder of A most intriguing...
...This is one of the quate for determining the real level of time as supremely skilled in the diffi- infinite contradictions of the human poverty in a particular country...
...he creates a school of his own...
...down...
...The reader is therefore ping still-lifes, all rendered with ex- the World Trade Organization, the Inprepared to hear solemn speeches on quisite art, in which the inanimate ternational Monetary Fund, and the resignation or sober exhortations to for- bodies are gradually dissolved, returned World Bank last November and April titude, when, surprise!, the lowermost to dust, devoured by crabs and seagulls, were diverse...
...Words hit erful images, which in turn force re- The problem is that while both per their target directly and unerringly...
...It seems corpses, a few disjoined memories of tistics is the growing disparity bewrong to judge Being Dead by its story- their lives, and the desperate attempt tween rich and poor in these telling...
...A critic would be misguided of the victims' daughter to drown her countries, and in the world...
...In the process, he fails to adis necessarily a work of fiction...
...But he immediately line on the front of the jacket makes it tunnelled by insects, reclaimed by the oversimplifies their positions, making all clear...
...While undergoyoung militants were naive about the ing an "identity politics" with which he ing treatment for cancer in 1985, HarSoviets was surely accurate, but his resid- was never fully comfortable...
...In response the Democrats began ing his apostate Catholicism not as a veshistoric 1962 manifesto of SDS) is grip- their long retreat from issues of deep tige but as an ongoing source of his huping...
...cle that is at once grandiose, fascinat- posed views...
...agile, precise, and vigorous...
...Im- flection long after the book has been put capita GNP and the HDI are good for ages are colorful, evocative, forceful...
...ological reflection, but that was simply stricken and the dispossessed could Maurice Isserman is a leading histo- not Harringtori s line of work...
...Curiously, his as its central theme the condition of this comparison seems out of place: arguments end up being nearly as being dead, will inevitably foray into Grace is not classed with any literary critical of free trade as those of the sothe arid plains of metaphysics, the lofty school...
...But the novelist comes er or doing better than the upper and taining framework, and the very raison by and sets about collating a criminal middle class of a comparably poor d'etre of the traditional novel, takes on a act, two victims, their decomposing country...
...The style is the reader by the deployment of pow- cator) with higher per capita exports...
...Mystics and ascetics have rot and deliquesce, incongruously been telling us for ages that the goal of frozen in a gesture of caress that canlife is to learn how to die...
...The full title reads: Being Dead: life forms of the seashore, in a specta- it easy for him to criticize their supA Novel...
...The conflates arguments against corporate propositions on being dead, whether novel thus acquires not merely a visual globalization with antiglobalization in philosophical, theological, or scientific, quality, but a distinctly cinematographic general...
...In marked with their pretentious language...
...Then, the (Continued from page 4) speaking, since there is no possible reader is presented with a series of griplearning here...
...theologian...
...What is masked by these stamore modest function here...
...They must invent Though he never found the mass base and catching a fleeting sight of the title, new terms that are themselves unsatisfor "conscience politics" that he had long cannot but stop and wonder...
...ton's struggles with Tom Hayden over cies he believed to be both "insane and ringtori s religious life seriously, treatdrafts of the Port Huron Statement (the cruel...
...Is the author perCommonweal 2 7 July 14, 2000 haps a metaphysician, since it belongs dle-aged zoologists, husband and wife, other mystery-will be wondrously ento that species to discourse on things on a sentimental trip to the beach where hanced...
...This is the one con- his hands and glances at the jacket: Being tic voters embraced a leader whose poli- dition for which no instructors, no teach- Dead, by Jim Crace...
...And against this Along with this oversimplification, work, not a philosophical treatise, and awe-inspiring background, there are Mandle commits several other errors...
...When the Being Dead enact, but to which we shall come as igSocialist party peevishly tried to sabo- Jim Crace norant neophytes...
...tive radical's greatest gifts, yet his un- immensely beautiful and comforting...
...not an anthology of religious medita- flashbacks to the earlier life of the pro- His argument on poverty relies on tions...
...The book helped to shape virtually imperceptible to outsiders-to the antipoverty agendas of both the emerge as a revered leader of democra- James T. Fisher teaches American religious Kennedy and Johnson administrations, tic socialism in the 1970s with a moral history at Saint Louis University...
...we shall perceive absolutely nothing of by 1995...
...Harrington never under- back to tell about...
...called "antiglobalizers...
...No one can...
...realm of religion, or the unforgiving, one that, in my view, is going to con- Mandle's argument that free trade pitiless spotlight of biomedical science...
...Never...
...Out his Greenwich Village neighbors, and were more appealing to segments of the of such concerns has sprung much thethe excluded America of the poverty- nation than his own claims...
...Who can teach us that which ble comparison with objects or pheratic party...
...The one role that all of us, withof success but remained haunted by in- out exception, will one day be called to ternecine warfare on the Left...
...Technique is not condition: to be by nature curious, and is, the HDI (and per capita GNP) of a the least of his accomplishments, and to be condemned never to know...
...tinue deserving praise for a long time...
...In many unite in coalition with a democratic labor rian of the American Left who provides ways he was a very straightforward permovement," was also published in 1962...
Vol. 127 • July 2000 • No. 13
