Issue #11/66, June 3 - 17, 1999  

By John Dolan

Diss Nietzsche and Die

The Clay Machine-Gun by Victor Pelevin translated by Andrew Bromfield London: Faber & Faber 1999

Victor Pelevin is not so much a writer as a symptom. His popularity--Clay Machine-Gun has already sold 200,000 copies--cannot be explained as the result of his talent, for he has no great gifts. His success has to do rather with the literary equivalent about real estate: Location, location, location. What Pelevin has done, in a very far-seeing way, is to stake out precisely the territory in which world literature is growing fastest. That territory can be defined, usefully though roughly, as science fiction with enough high-culture flourish to make it respectable reading for English majors.

This territory is imagined by its English-language audience as stretching from Pynchon to Philip K. Dick to Gibson. Its components are: "soft" (non-science-oriented) science fiction; hardboiled noir detective prose; animistic theology; computer imaging; and drugs. Lots of drugs. Pelevin has certainly learned, somewhere or other, to mimic the sound that speed gave the Beats, and his characters in Clay Machine-Gun use massive amounts of cocaine, mushrooms, opiates and whatever else they can find. This is typical, as is his association of drug use with the experience of an immanent god--a feature of American science fiction, and particularly the SF produced on the west coast of the US during the sixties and seventies. Dune, of course, is the best-known example, with "the spice" constituting at once a mystical revelation, a necessary part of civilized life, and a catalyst for self-improvement via extended life and "expanded consciousness"--a familiar program for anyone who went to an American high school.

The key to this emergent genre is that it is as indiscriminate and all-engulfing as an amoeba. It continually agglomerates to itself any culturally-exciting field. It is divided in many ways, but the most important for Pelevin is the matter of prose style.

The best way to illustrate this is to ask the reader this question: Whom do you prefer, Thomas Pynchon or Philip K. Dick? The answer determines a lot about one's placement within this huge genre. Pynchon is very much a "literary" writer, working very carefully over his writing at sentence level, willing to let his plot sit still for a while as he improvises on a theme. Dick is the opposite: the story and the dialogue alone interest him, and he's willing to let the prose simply do the job. Sometimes, indeed, he writes so roughly that the literary reader is offended. I remember loaning Mark Ames a PKD book and having him bring it back the next day, shaking his head and pointing to this sentence on page one of the novel: "'Hi!" she said friendlily." It was that "friendlily" that Mark couldn't handle.

I side with PKD over Pynchon. In fact, I consider Dick to be the one genius, the one absolute genius in US literature since 1945. I find Pynchon to be kind of an Uncle Tom, as a representative of science fiction, making pointless and protracted Faulknerian noises in his prose to suck up to a New-Yorker-sensibility. This is in part why I don't much like Pelevin's versions of science fiction. He does it Pynchon's way, with much less narrative invention and much more prose stylin' than I would like.

By "stylin'" I mean prose which is meant to be savored for itself; what Flann O'Brien called, in discussing Joyce, "his tour-de-forcity." This disorder of the literary ego, now reaching epidemic level, leads authors to desecrate their own works, slathering gaudy puns and pretentious jargon on what might have been interesting stories. "Tour-de-Forcity" is an STD (Seminar-Transmitted-Disease) which afflicts two groups especially severely: literary theorists attempting to write prose fiction (Umberto Eco is probably the most popular figure in this category, despite the fact that his novels are truly awful), and novelists overawed by belated exposure to the theory-glitz vocabulary, like Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie. Rushdie in particular has tried so hard to theory-up his work--even his children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories--that he seems to be becoming almost a caricature of himself by Naipaul, a caricature of the credulous hickcritique of "Native" mimicry. In short: there's a lot of this bug going around, folks. And no vaccine in sight.

Pelevin does a too-cool ironic/mystical take on the Russian Civil War, turning the strogii Bolshevik martyr Chapaev into a Buddhist cleric with a Socratic discussion-leader's manner. This improbable and not particularly resonant reworking gets a bit tedious. Pelevin chats at length with his famous interlocutors, Petya and the machine-gunner Anya, who featured in a thirties film canonizing Chapaev. The threesome somehow struck the Soviet audience as so absurd that a whole genre of sex jokes about Chapaev, Petya and Anya flourished. Even now, most Russians, even those born a half-century after the film, can tell these jokes.

The Chapaev of these jokes is a gullible, prating cuckold. Pelevin invents a new Chapaev, a Buddhist demigod posing as a Red general. Why? I have to confess I'm not sure I see the resonances here. Chapaev-the-Martyr--the Chapaev of the Soviet film--makes sense as a typically heavy-handed Bolshevik way; Chapaev-the-Cuckold--the Chapaev of the jokes--makes sense as a sharp critique, a cautionary peasant tale, about the risks of letting your ideology blind you to what's happening at home. But Chapaev as a Buddhist mystic posing as a Cavalry officer? It's certainly very quirky, very wry, but to what end? Pelevin, like many 90's ironists, doesn't seem to demand much more than the oxymorons, as Petya, Anka and Chapaev discuss epistemology and ontology. But Petya is not only a cavalry officer in the Russian Civil War: he keeps waking up in a mental hospital in Moscow in the 1990's.

Pelevin--not known for his light touch as an allegorist--wants to show us that all is illusion by the old wheeze in which the madmen's delusions aren't necessarily any more illusory than our daily constructs. He fills page upon page with Chapaev's remarkably fatuous wordplay. Here's a particularly lame quibble Chapaev uses to demolish the noun "condescension":

"All right then, try this for size--condescension is always movement down from something to something else. Like down into this little ravine here. So where does this condescension of yours go to--and from where?"

This is the sort of sophistry which got medieval European university students very excited. It still excites some people. I once worked with a very decent guy, a Mormon. He memorized dozens of religious conundrums popular with seminarians circa 1300 a.d. This was his favorite: "OK, here's something for you to think about: could God make a weight so heavy He couldn't lift it?" If you said "yes," you were questioning God's omnipotence (and upper body strength); if you said no, you were again conceding that God was limited. This Mormon would've gotten on with Pelevin's Chapaev very well. Readers acquainted with philosophy written in the last century will probably not be so impressed, since Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and those who followed them tried above all to cure the childish naivete about language which generated such controversies.

But if Pelevin is aware of Nietzsche and his followers at all, it seems to be as a villain, the ideologue of the mafia, the New Russians. Nietzsche has this uncanny way of drawing the hatred of provincial intellectuals--and Pelevin reveals himself as such in his ignorant, third-hand attack on Nietzsche. Mystics always hate Nietzsche as cockroaches hate light. And of course, they hate him so much they couldn't possibly bring themselves to read him. The mental-hospital patients, sages all, discuss Nietzsche, as this quotation will show, in a somewhat less than profound manner:

"See that Mercedes 600 standing over there?
"Yes," said Serdyuk.
"Are you telling me that's an illusion too?"
"Very probably."
"You know who drives around in that illusion? The commercial director of our madhouse....his nickname's 'The Nietzschean.'....That bandit could have killed a dozen men to buy himself a car like that..."

So--Nietzsche's the ideological source for Mafia capitalism in post-Soviet Moscow, Mr. Pelevin? Only if you've never read Nietzsche.

But the most offensive or ignorant attack on Nietzsche in the book That comes later, when three '90's Moscow mafia guys take hallucinogenic mushrooms and discuss God and the Russian soul and other equally fresh and sophisticated and worthwhile topics. These three men are cold blooded killers, the scum of the Earth--and therefore, Pelevin, in his formulaic oxymoronic way, means that they're going to be redeemed. After they've had a bad trip on the mushrooms, they lament the fact that they only experienced Nirvana for a brief period. Why were they booted after so brief a stay in bliss?

Volodin: "...You could say we climbed in through the back window. That's why the alarm went off."

"Some heavy alarm." said Shurik. "Real heavy stuff."

"That's nothing," said Volodin."They could easily have put us away. There are cases like that. Take that Nietzsche [we were] jawing about, that's exactly what happened to him..

So this formulaic, oxymoronic Brighton-Rock thug-saint says smugly that the organic illness which corrupted and destroyed the brain, the magnificent brain of Friedrich Nietzsche was in fact divine justice. Other, tamer philosophers are presumably allowed to die of natural causes in Mr. Pelevin's mind (a very healthy little mind, no doubt--quite tame and conventional in its safe, coy bohemianism.). But Nietzsche's brain disease is divine retribution. So presumably if we find that Bishop Berkeley died of heart disease, it would mean God found him heartless? But no, of course not. Only Nietzsche's fatal illness is divine justice.

And that's Buddhism, is it, Mr. Pelevin? Funny thing; I would've taken it for Fundamentalist Christianity. Because--and if you'd actually read any Nietzsche, which you clearly have not, you would know this already--one of the consistent cultural patterns first identified by Nietzsche was the way in which Christian "forbearance" concealed an infinitely vindictive anticipation of the tortures awaiting the opponents of Christian doctrine.

Of all the vindictive, petty, smug--ah, what's the use? I must be the only person in Russia to be revolted by this; Pelevin's rambling, tedious, self-righteous novel. It's already sold 200,000 copies. Lord Buddha would be very happy for you, I'm sure, Mr. Pelevin.