Corporate Sinners and Crossover Saints
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Corporate Sinners and Crossover Saints By Lynne Sharon Schwartz IN A 1989 interview in Salmagundi, the Chilean writer and political activist Ariel Dorfman described one of his...
...In 1973, when Allende was ousted and succeeded by Pinochet, Dorfman was forced into exile...
...She is the scientific brains behind the corporation, while Blake is the managerial knowhow, the charm, the public relations—and the would-be benevolent dictator...
...The Church, he tells Father Jude, was mistaken in its efforts to convert the Ojibwe, because it helped dismantle a culture and left a void...
...Enter Dr...
...she has even been compared to Faulkner, Melville and Hawthorne...
...Is there any doubt that this is the matter we really need to address: who is in control...
...Identities are also misleading, but benignly so, in The Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse (HarperCollins, 361 pp., $26.00), Louise Erdrich's latest chronicle of the Ojib we (Chippewa) of North Dakota...
...runaway horses and grieving buffalo and an assembly of snakes...
...He places hidden cameras everywhere, spies on his lover, his children, his colleagues...
...Yet even in the grip of Tolgate and the powers he reports to (possibly Blake's business rival, or his best friend, or Rose's father, or Jessica, or none of the above), Blake tries to protest: "I deal with, affect, millions of people around the world...
...When her obsessive, erotic playing of Chopin disrupted the calm of the convent, she fled and became the common law wife of Berndt Vogel, a German farmer...
...The choice leaves Clean Earth Corporation in danger of a takeover by an unscrupulous rival, and frustrates Blake's associates, especially his partner and ex-wife, Jessica...
...Love Medicine (1984), Erdrich's superb first novel, covered some 50 years (19341984) in the lives of the Ojibwe and their neighbors...
...But events eerily accelerate...
...fake stigmata induced by a bread fork, genuine orgasms induced by playing Chopin...
...He trembles, hasn't slept in three months, suffers from a perpetual headache...
...the results of that difficult life were so dramatically good...
...Disguising his identity, he befriends her family...
...occasional visitations from Christ and the Devil (in the form of a black dog...
...We Change Mother Earth Without Hurting Her.'" In a sly satirical echo of a former General Motors president, Blake declares in all earnestness, "What's good for the earth, is good for the Company...
...At first, like the many executives who have preceded him, Blake refuses: The plan is immoral, he's leaving...
...And so it goes...
...this time he will use his power for good to improve their lot...
...At its finest moments it recaptures the incandescence of Love Medicine...
...Jude is speculating about Sister Leopolda, but the question really alludes to Father Damien...
...This was the germ of his empire and remains his nostalgic connection to a simpler past...
...The early scenario repeats itself as Rose attempts suicide and again Blake runs to the rescue...
...Anyone who knows Dorfman's prodigious body of work—novels, plays, social criticism, and the memoir, Heading South, Looking North (1998)—will infer a context of political repression, especially in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet...
...Suddenly, he saw that he was mistaken...
...Tolgate whisks Blake off to Philadelphia and installs—strictly speaking, confines—him in an apartment with hidden cameras trained on the other side of the wall...
...Graham Blake is coming apart when we meet him...
...Though a virtual prisoner, Blake has a staff at his command and full power to control the family's fate according to his whims...
...Their amorous idyll was shattered when Agnes was kidnapped by a bandit and Berndt was killed attempting to rescue her...
...Nowadays such deconstructions are no longer surprising...
...Beneath his outdated black cassock, the tenacious Father Damien, who has selflessly ministered to his reservation parish for the better part of a century, is a woman...
...This is Erdrich's only lapse into cultural one-upmanship, but Jude deserves it...
...The realsaint, we gradually realize, is Father Damien...
...And all because, under pressure to downsize, he has made the difficult, unpopular, yet seemingly humane decision to maintain the small, old-fashioned plant in Philadelphia left to him by his father...
...Its corporate setting happens to be supremely pertinent for our age, but this novel's real and enduring locale is the darkness within...
...Why resist...
...Blake comes to his senses only when his machinations drive Roxanna to a suicide attempt he witnesses through the hidden camera...
...As Agnes DeWitt, Sister Cecilia and Father Damien, the hero has led a life of passion, devotion and metamorphosis...
...Her real gift, though, is telling a marvelously compelling story, and in The Last Report she tells many of them...
...So I was forced," he adds, "to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy...
...His novels range from the vast and sprawling, streaked with the magical realism of his fellow Latin Americans (The Last Song of Manuel Sendern, 1987, Mascara, 1988) to the short and stark (Widows, 1983, discreetly set in Greece but actually about Chile's disappeared...
...like the best such works, it unfolds in an ambiance of unbearable anxiety, where fragile individual identity is crushed by huge abstract power...
...But once the camera shows Roxanna, whose slow grace and natural healing powers signify the antithesis of corporate culture, he is hooked...
...Blake believes his therapy is over, but it has just begun...
...Sister Leopolda isno saint...
...just a weak and slender shoot...
...Besides breaking every priestly vow, Father Damien nurtures a Catholicism that would hardly pass muster in orthodox circles...
...Nevertheless, Blake's Therapy enriches the genre of nightmarish social parable...
...its heart is their struggle for survival amid poverty, illness, and land allotment policies that splinter their cultural and social heritage along with their territory...
...despite some marring confusions and anomalies, it is a powerful shock to the system, like being plunged into a vat of ice...
...In any event, the image is too splendid to quarrel with...
...If you lose your values," Dorfman went on, "you will not be able to tell the difference between your inner and your outer life, between the fictions that others weave around you and your own consciousness...
...Gratifying as it is to see so timely an issue nailed and dramatized, it would be even better to know where Dorfman thinks it is headed...
...Blake," Tolgate tells him...
...On Fiction Corporate Sinners and Crossover Saints By Lynne Sharon Schwartz IN A 1989 interview in Salmagundi, the Chilean writer and political activist Ariel Dorfman described one of his characters as caught in "the anguish of not being able to distinguish between his fears and his everyday life...
...Dorfman has devoted his writing life to revealing and excoriating the grosser forms of torture...
...Does he stick to his humanitarian guns and keep the factory open...
...His life has not been without error or sin in the Catholic sense, and yet, as Father Jude wonders, "Were saints only saints by virtue of their influence, their following, their reputation for the marvelous, or was there room for personal failure—especially when...
...Rose Monterò, from Colombia, is not quite as beautiful as the actress who played Roxanna, but far more authentic...
...Sister Leopolda, nee Pauline Puyat, the destructive, fanatical nun whom readers may remember from Tracks· (1988), is a candidate for canonization...
...She has made this improbable saga moving and luminous...
...When a strike at the factory threatens, Jessica implores Blake to behave sensibly (that is, corporately), not sentimentally...
...Everybody in the world is acting out some sort of role, Mr...
...In musing over how to write a hagiography, Father Jude offers, indirectly, a rationale for the novel's chaotic structure: "to tell the story as a story was to pull a single thread, only, from the pattern of this woman's life, leaving the rest—the beautiful and brutal tapestry of contradictions—to persist in the form of a lie...
...returns from the dead (randy old Nanapush, epitome of the tribal elder, comes back for a last night of love with his obstreperous but adored wife...
...We learn this at the outset when she, preparing for bed after writing yet another fruitless appeal to the Pope for counsel, unbinds her breasts...
...Or, just as likely, jump out the window in despair...
...Armed—or weakened—by this knowledge, Blake heads into the crucial corporate meeting that will settle the fate of the factory, indeed of Clean Earth itself...
...Yes," says Tolgate, "but the few I deal with determine what happens to those millions...
...He imagines the Catholic Church as a great oak tree, with one of its branches "boldly colored, beaded entirely, and ribboned...
...Ultimately, he assures himself, he'll give them all a happy ending...
...on the contrary, his company, Clean Earth, is a "leader in biodiversity, global excellence, responsibility...
...Beyond all its hubbub, The Last Report is a sober meditation on the nature of sainthood...
...robbery, polygamy, alcoholism...
...The endless anecdotes—picked up, dropped, picked up again—are endlessly seductive: Miracles and murders (one a choking by rosary beads strung on barbed wire...
...You, dear reader, must decide...
...At first the narrow-minded Jude is troubled, but then, too explicitly, he delivers the author's message: "Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love...
...Erdrich, who is also a poet, has been extravagantly praised for her rich, lyrical imagination...
...Bom in Buenos Aires and raised in the United States until the age of 12, he became a naturalized Chilean citizen in 1964, and wrote, taught, and produced radio and television programs under the Salvador Allende government...
...Where else can we find all this...
...Do the businesslike thing and close it...
...After her narrow escape she was swept away by a flooding river, then assumed the identity of Father Damien and found her way to the reservation, where she spends her days in devoted service (enjoying one more passion with a priest sent to assist her, then returning to her first love, Chopin, when the church acquires a piano...
...Blake has proven himself a good man who would do no lasting damage...
...The Faulkner analogy is reasonable, since she populates her world with recurring characters in a tight web of family ties and lasting antipathies...
...Father Jude Miller, the stiff-necked priest whose younger self appears in The Beet Queen (1986), has been sent to the reservation to investigate her credentials and substantiate her alleged miracles...
...He was also one of the earliest writers to apply political analysis to popular culture: How to Read Donald Duck (1975, written with Armand Mattelart) and The Empire's Old Clothes (1996) decipher capitalist and imperialist subtexts in Disney characters, or Babar and the Lone Ranger, among others...
...Meanwhile, he grows to relish the allure of power and full surveillance...
...Four more novels, none quite as successful, traced the earlier and later vicissitudes of the Nanapushes, Kashpaws, Morrisseys, Pillagers, et al.— which were tragic and comic by turns, but always passionate...
...Now he finds himself addicted to surveillance...
...Roxanna, Tolgate announces, will be Blake's therapy...
...Dorfman has spoken in interviews of his taste for open-ended fiction, but Blake's Therapy is a bit too open-ended...
...Its nerves and muscles are the ongoing dramas of the half-dozen Ojibwe clans already familiar to Erdrich's readers...
...He is cured, Tolgate proclaims...
...The transformation of young Agnes DeWitt—who was briefly Sister Cecilia in a Minnesota convent—into Father Damien is the backbone of the novel...
...Dorfman has set up a conundrum that brings Blake to the point where he cannot distinguish between his "inner and...
...It appears that way...
...Dorfman is too shrewd to make Blake a stereotypical avatar of greed...
...outer life, between the fictions that others weave around [him] and [his] own consciousness...
...Tolgate, the evil genius and latter-day Virgil who guides Blake through the stages of a treatment designed for corporate executives beset by moral crisis (the epigraphs to the novel's three sections are from Dante, but its path descends from deep to deeper inferno...
...Given the opportunity, what kind of God will Blake choose to play...
...the only surprise is that anything at all significant is still found in Disney's inanities...
...Blake's Therapy is in the short, stark mode...
...The question is who writes our words: if we write them or somebody else does...
...Watching her in bed with her boyfriend leaves him so fraught with sexual jealousy that he arranges for the man to be arrested on the spot, on phony drug charges...
...The Last Report, an ambitious epic with an unfortunate title, embraces the entire century on the reservation through the eyes of long-lived Father Damien...
...Next door lives Roxanna, a beautiful young Puerto Rican nurse who works in the factory in question, and her family...
...So the layers of deception, control and surveillance are unfathomable...
...You deal with just a few...
...Overcome with remorse, he crosses the forbidden barrier into the next apartment to save her and to confess—only to find the entire scenario has been just that: a series of scenes performed by actors, to elicit and test his moral fiber...
...Are Rose and her family actors too, merely another phase of Blake's therapy...
...The entire "tapestry of contradictions" becomes clear in Jude's and Father Damien's conversations, its dominantthread...
...The Last Report, too, comes from the "dictates of a great love," the author's for her land and her people...
...Never mind that the novel has little semblance of order, that the family relations are labyrinthine, that the time scheme defies analysis...
...Soon Blake has Roxanna's father fired from his security job, ruins her mother's food stand, and banishes an idle family hanger-on...
...sex—the heterosexual kind—between priests...
...Thus his "therapy," an excruciating concoction of intrigue and torturous manipulation...
...The tree was beaded all the way down to the center of the earth and the branch of his own beliefs, the dogma and history of the Catholic Church not even a branch...
...Dorfman's acclaimed 1991 play, Death and the Maiden, is a painful exploration of how a restored democracy in Chile should best deal with the ex-torturers...
...He yearns to be a good man, or rather, to feel he's a good man...
...Toward the close it is Jude, again, who bears Erdrich's vision, this time in a striking metaphor...
...The picture shifted...
...Here is his chance, says Tolgate, to learn his true nature...
...This is precisely what happens to Graham Blake, CEO of a vast empire, and hero (as well as villain and victim) of Blake s Therapy (Seven Stories Press, 172 pp., $21.95...
...Love alone never produced a fine novel, but Erdrich's gifts are abundant enough to subsume melodrama and quash disbelief...
...She and her family have been specially selected to fit his psychological needs, like joints in their sockets...
...But in Dorfman's latest and harrowing novel, the anguish is equally severe in an American corporate culture turned phantasmagoric...
...A willing reader—certainly this willing reader—will give up and give in, choose to be enchanted instead of exasperated...
...But his smug pride in his own ecumenical charity is cut short...
...He returned to the United States, where he teaches at Duke University· Of necessity, Dorfman was bicultural (and bilingual) before it became fashionable...
...He can go home to carry on his corporate duties with a clear conscience...
...famine, epidemic, floods...
...even with its slacker passages—indulgently rhapsodic, melodramatic, or sententious—it is a terrific read...
...Still entranced by Roxanna—or by the idea of Roxanna—he returns to Philadelphia to find the real woman she was based on...
...Blake hasn't utterly lost his values, but the enigmatic, invisible ruling powers (the same that loom in Kafka and Orwell) are doing their utmost to see he does...
...The teasing conclusion and a few needlessly baffling passages are irritating...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
