Howlers

A review of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Primate behavior haunts The Lacuna. Specifically the work treats aspects of primate group dynamics--control of resources, composition of tribal groups, sexuality and its consequences--as almost-but-never-quite-surpassed foundations underlying issues related to the funding, distribution, and censorship of the arts and writing: manifestations that ostensibly separate humans from the other primates. Undoubtedly the novel is also about the cultural history of Mexico and the United States from approximately 1930-1950. But, as the novel's opening words state, "In the beginning were the howlers."

Over the course of this beautifully written book--read on for some of my favorite descriptions of Mexico from the novel--the "howler" evolves into a polysemantic allegory of communication among primates, including humans. First we learn of the "howlers" who are imagined to be demons shrieking at the dawn of tropical Mexican morns until the protagonist Harrison Shepherd, as a child, learns that they are in fact monkeys. Later the term takes on the meanings of "lies" and also the "liars" themselves, usually reporters or, gulp, book reviewers, who, just like so many simians, renew their racket of choral cacophony every morning. Humbly facing them down is Shepherd, always on the line between what is and what is not, who builds from bread-making to plaster-mixing to canvas-curating to novel-writing, struggling to assume and to creatively express an identity that is uniquely his but always uniquely other. The son of a Spanish-heritage Mexican woman and an Anglo-Saxon-heritage American man, long since separated, Shepherd grows up in unstable circumstances on both sides of the border. He writes, "the world paints its prejudices boldly across banners, and somehow I walk through them without seeing" (316).

Shepherd's ability to immerse himself in languages and cultures develops as an extension of his early boyhood experiences of immersion in the sea, with its reward of views to another world linked to penetration, sexual pleasure, and the rhythm of the tides. Passage through an underwater cave or lacuna, risking death by drowning, provides the growing boy Shepherd with insights literally unique to him alone. This knowledge of immersion and silence, in which the underlying arbitariness of language is exposed, sparks Shepherd's desire to write things down--to share, or perhaps to keep hidden.

Friend and comrade of Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky--and student of their experiments in art, government, and sexuality--Shepherd writes three novels about ancient Mexico from his abritrarily chosen home in Asheville, NC. Frida has warned him of the terrible power of words: the first two novels find wide appeal, but the third is buried under the repression of McCarthyism. When the suspiciously xenophilic Shepherd, whose cats' clever Spanish names seem to be willfully misunderstood, is finally summoned for inquisition by Richard Nixon and the other howlers on the Special Sub-Committee of the Committee on Un-American Activities, we read in the hearings transcript his impassioned and spontaneously sincere defense of art and its engagements: "The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit, or pay a surgeon's bill. Or both, really. It can help a person remember or forget. If your house doesn't have many windows in it, you can hang up a painting and have a view. [...] Art is one thing I do know about. A book has all the same uses I mentioned, especially for the house without enough windows. Art by itself is nothing, until it comes into that house" (488-89). 

Shepherd's life, he claims, has been devoted in various ways to transporting some of Mexico's abundant art to America, country of hope but house in need of windows: "I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful" (489). Indeed, readers who love Mexico's "color and songs" will relish Kingsolver's descriptions, such as this one of a small-town zócalo: "The girls wore striped wool skirts, lace blouses, and their narrow-waisted boyfriends. The mood of the fiesta was enclosed in a perfect square: four long lines of electric bulbs strung from posts at the corners, fencing out a bright piece of night just above everyone's heads" (8), and "They stopped to watch the mariachis on the platform, handsome men with puckered lips giving long kisses to their brass horns. Trails of silver buttons led down the sides of their tight black trousers" (10).

Kingsolver's mastery of women's perspectives in Mexico runs deep: the earthy, salty worldviews of Frida and Salomé (Shepherd's mother) help Shepherd's voice to balance his romanticized longings with a whiff of acrid reality: "Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime" (393), and "Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete 'grapefruit,' which does not even mean what it says" (393-94).

We never read Shepherd's novels of Mexico, only Kingsolver's, filtered through Shepherd's surprising assistant Violet Brown's resuscitation of his journal entries. But it is through this triple narrative voice of Kingsolver/Violet Brown/Harrison Shepherd that the triply layered historical context (pre-conquest Mexico/1930s and 40s US and Mexico/present day) gains a wondrous harmonic resonance or polychromatic illumination in which echoes and photons bounce around the heretofore hidden lair, where the howlers cannot go, just beyond the lacuna.