Return to Park Hall (Part Four): "Rituals"

One year when I was an undergrad at UGA, I looked through the English Department’s course offerings and asked, “Where’s the Kafka?”   I remembered reading “A Hunger Artist” in high school and being absolutely tickled and I looked forward to reading more of his work in college.  What I learned, however, was that for the UGA English Department literature did not include translated literature.  For a text to come under the aegis of the English Department, it had to have been composed in English.   If I wanted more Kafka I would have to sign up for courses in an entirely different department, Comparative Literature, also in Park Hall, but its own little domain.  In the basement.  That’s where Kafka and Goethe and Cervantes and Flaubert lived.  

So I took the two sophomore surveys in Comparative Literature.   The second one, the “19th Century  to the present” segment, was taught by a visiting professor from Belgium.  I honestly cannot remember his name and don’t know how I would find out today what it was.  Let’s call him Dr.  Wouters.  The most generic Belgian name I can think of.    He was a nice enough fellow.  He took the whole class to O’Malley’s on a spring day near the end of the term.  In my mind’s eye I can see us on the deck over the river in that old mill repurposed for student boozing.  I vaguely recollect making an observation to him about something we had read.  We were probably on our second pitcher.   What I said was one of those observations that is so obvious that you might kid yourself that you’re saying something insightful but you’re really just trying to make an impression on the professor.  "Dr. Wouters" saw right through my pathetic attempt to play scholar and gave me an eye-rolling “Well, duh” sort of response.  A look that said, “They’d eat you alive in Ghent, Bubba.”   My recollection is that he probably found us a disappointing bunch as a whole.  I could imagine the pitch that had been made to him to lure him to Athens, some UGA Comp Lit honcho on a transatlantic call saying, “Oh yes, you’ll have our cream of the crop, hand-picked students”, with his fingers firmly crossed.

One of the books “Dr. Wouters” assigned us was a fairly new novel, Rituals, by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.   It had been published to much acclaim in 1980 and translated into English in 1983.  When I embarked on this re-read project it was one of the first books I selected.  I still have my original copy of Rituals from that class, but there’s more to my choice.  I know a great deal more about Nooteboom’s country than I used to, thanks mostly to the Dutch roots of my wife and my in-laws.  In recent years I’ve read: Simon Schama’s incredible The Embarrassment of Riches, a survey of the many complexities of the Dutch Golden Age;  sportswriter Simon Kuper’s Ajax, the Dutch, the War, a demythologizing of the Dutch resistance during World War II; and Thrifty Years, the biography of Dutch immigrant retail giant Henrik Meijer.  Also I’ve been to Amsterdam and Haarlem and Utrecht.  I root for the Oranje.  I’ve had a frisbee confiscated in the Rijksmuseum.  I’ve got a picture of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer on my classroom wall.  In short, I’m a little more invested in the Netherlands today than I was in 1985.  I was really anticipating something geweldig out of this particular rereading experience. 

To my disappointment but not to my surprise, what I discovered as I took up Rituals, is that I would not be rereading it.  I would be reading it.   I didn’t actually do the job the first time.  

Now “not doing the assigned reading and trying to get away with it” is a common experience in American schools and frequently a source of comedy.  At the memorial service of Athens musician Todd McBride one of his friends built his eulogy around the two of them bonding over faking book reports in high school, employing the classic method of watching the movie instead of reading the book.  They were ultimately busted when they identified “Jack Nicholson” as the narrative voice of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  

As anyone who has read Todd’s lyrics knows, he did OK as a writer - to say the least - without writing genuine book reports.  My case is different.  Moreover, I suppose not doing the reading becomes less funny if you’ve voluntarily enrolled in a class devoted to the study of literature and still try to get away with it.  But in those times my academic slovenliness was such that even in literature classes there were many times when necessity made me a most vigilant avoider of eye contact with the professor.   

I’m embarrassed to admit that, and what makes it even more embarrassing is that in my earliest classes at UGA I experienced a powerful rebuke to my laziness.  I took a couple of night courses.  They were taught in those bland, functional, fluorescently-lit classrooms in the journalism building.  One of the courses was U.S. History.   Night classes met less frequently, so they ran longer, a real challenge to the attention span of the typical undergraduate.  That’s what most of us were, enrolled not due to intellectual passion but because we were 18 or 19 and this was where we were supposed to be.  That was the apathetic vibe we gave off.  There were also two or three middle-aged women in that class.  I don’t know why they weren’t going to college until now – maybe they had started families young or they hadn’t had the money or they’d been hindered by old-fashioned gender expectations – but whatever the reason, it seemed to me that they were finally getting a chance to pursue something that had been denied them 20 years ago, they knew what they had been missing, and they were going after it the way a starving lion goes after an antelope.  They were relentlessly attentive.  They asked penetrating questions.  They got visibly annoyed when the professor ended class early.  Those ladies had waited a long time for this and they were going to get their by-god moneysworth!   

When you’ve been exposed to that kind of energy and you still don’t read the brand new novel assigned by a visiting professor, well, there’s not much to say for you.   But, as I say, it is not at all surprising to discover that I never really read Rituals.   That’s how I rolled in 1985.

This isn’t to say I was completely unengaged.  I played along a little.  I’ve got the receipts.  Or a couple of receipts, balled up in my pocket.  On page 30 of Rituals, 1985 me scribbled an annotation, a scraggly line from the word “madeleine” in the phrase “In this way the whiskey had become his madeleine” to a marginal note: “pg 75 anthology.”   The anthology must have featured an excerpt from Proust.  I probably didn’t read that, either.  I present this detail just to indicate that "Dr. Wouters" was doing his job even if I wasn’t doing mine.  I also had a vague recollection of a sex scene involving our hero, Inigo “Inni” Wintrop, with an adventurous young woman.  It was kind of reassuring to come across that scene and realize I hadn’t just imagined it.  It turns out that Inni meets a few willing young women and he has a lot of throwaway sex that he nevertheless ascribes meaning to.  Maybe “Nooteboom” is Dutch for “Updike.”  

Rituals is in three parts, arranged non-chronologically.   The first part is set in Amsterdam in 1963.  Inni is married to Zita, a native of Namibia.  Inni has a small independent income, but he also trades in art, writes a horoscope for an Amsterdam newspaper, and follows the markets.  Inni broods on his directionless life and aimless pursuit of pleasure: “Under all this outward ignorance brewed the soft ferment of unrest, despair, and malice” (much of Inni’s thinking I hear in the voice of Mike Myers playing Dieter Sprocket).  Inni and Zita are cheating on each other.  She leaves him for her photographer lover.  Inni attempts to kill himself, unsuccessfully.   Kennedy gets shot and Inni’s investments prosper.

Then we go back to 1953.   Inni is an orphaned teenager.  A day spent with the eccentric aunt who is responsible for him brings him into contact with Arnold Taads, “the loneliest man in the Netherlands”, a Sartre-reading, one-eyed, schedule-obsessed, misanthropic crank who regards his time spent with his dog Athos as a solitary fire warden in a remote part of Canada as the highlight of his life.  “I have never cared much for people," Arnold Taads tells Inni.  “Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.”  Arnold nearly ruins a luncheon put on by Inni’s aunt by smugly arguing theology with a priest, but he does Inni a solid by shaming the aunt into granting him the small income he’s got coming to him.  Inni’s experience of Arnold Taads is brief – he hasn’t known him long when he learns that he froze to death in the Alps, probably on purpose.   

Then it is 1973.  We’re back in Amsterdam.  Inni is 40.  He has gotten over Zita and he’s on his way to sell some art to his friend Roozenboom.   On the way there he and a young woman witness the death of a dove.  They dispose of it.  Then they go to her place and have sex.  Why? Because Amsterdam.  Because 1973.  Because Updikean male novelist.  For an appraisal of one of the art pieces Roozenboom refers Inni to another dealer, one who specializes in Asian art.  There Inni encounters a peculiar man, another art enthusiast, who turns out to be (drum roll, please) Philip Taads, the son of old Arnold Taads!  Philip is half-Indonesian – Arnold had brought his mother back from the Dutch colony and then left them.  Inni learns that the two Taadses never met afterward.   Despite the brevity of his association with Arnold Taads, Inni has remained fascinated by him, so of course he is curious about the son.  Philip is definitely a chip off the old block, especially in his intellectualized, supremely alienated worldview.  When Philip says of his own death that it will merely be “an end to the bundle of circumstances that bore my name”, you can imagine old Arnold saying, “That’s my boy!”  Arnold’s great preoccupation, Inni learns, is the Japanese tea ceremony and its ritualistic formality.  He’s in search of a particular Raku bowl, a bowl of such transcendent perfection that it somehow seemed to have “created itself and ruled over itself and over anyone who looked at it.”   When Phillip finally obtains the bowl of his desires, at considerable expense, he invites Inni and their mutual art dealer friend to participate in the tea ceremony at the “homemade monastery” that is his apartment, afterwhich he destroys the bowl – the ritual demands it – and with nothing left to do, he drowns himself.   

Although I regret not having actually read Rituals the first time around, finally having read it leaves me wondering whether it would have been wasted on me the first time.  It is not that I could not have figured out everything I needed to for it to make sense, if I tried.  The world of the midcentury Netherlands would not have been too remote from my experience.  Reading it today it was nice to have first hand visual memories to connect to references to the Prinsengracht and other Amsterdam locations, but their absence in 1985 would not have been a real obstacle. The philosophical parts would have been hard, but not impossible.   I think I would have understood the troubled relationship of Taads Sr. and Jr. as an evocation of the Dutch colonial legacy.   Some of the religious references would have escaped me, such as Inni’s insertion of the eucharistic “Do this in remembrance of me” into his account of the tea ceremony, but even in my decidedly secular experience I would have understood something of what Nooteboom was up to in his merging of Christian and Japanese rituals (especially with Dr. Wouters’ help).   Around the same time I figured out all by myself that the broken pipe drama in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet was an extended allusion to the Great Flood in Genesis.   Why should reading Rituals have been any different, other than that it would have required me to pay attention to something I didn’t much feel like paying attention to?

What I could not have really understood back then, I think, are the aspects of Inni’s life that that are especially resonant in the lives of people who have some age and experience on them.  In many ways this book is about the passage of time and how we experience it.  The most famous line in the book – maybe the most famous line of Nooteboom’s oeuvre – is from the first page of Rituals:  “Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases” (see above).  When you’ve lived long enough for that dog to have 5000 couches to lie down on, a book like this one will hit differently.  One section in particular spoke to my older self.  During the time when Inni is indulging his fascination with Phillip Taads, he has a realization about the extent to which total immersion is essential for one to deeply understand a sphere of life, the experiential demands that must be met if one is to get beyond mere dilettantism, and that the capacity to meet those demands might run out before you even know it is gone:

There were things one had to renounce, even if they were possible.  Now that he had reached the age of forty, he would never become a pianist or learn Japanese, he was sure of it.   And at the same time this certainty made him feel sad, as if life was at last beginning to makes its limitations clear, and death was in sight.   It was not true that all things were possible.  Perhaps all things had been possible, but they were no longer . . . You did not have a thousand lives.  You had only one.  

Good thing to know.  Those middle aged women in night school U.S. History knew it.  

 Next: Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes