UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

In his extensive work The Eternal Dilemma the moral and social philosopher Leo Barnard outlines the wide range of problems that human beings are likely to encounter on their journey through life and attempts to distil them, with the crude ease of the consummate logician, into the solitary quandary to which the title of the book alludes. ‘What is the eternal dilemma?’ he asks finally, on page seven hundred and sixty nine: ‘Why, it is simple. The eternal dilemma is this – do we smile as the ship goes down or do we empty water furiously in the hope of a few extra minutes?’

At this point, the reader can only struggle to suppress his or her disillusionment. Relieved though one may be that Barnard has at last broached the subject on which you supposed his book to be centred, the very obviousness and excessively coolly expressed nature of his conclusion can hardly be said to have been worth the wait. ‘Either you choose to be a pessimist’ he goes on to argue, ‘Or you decide to be an optimist’. I always thought the point of a philosopher was that they do the thinking so you don’t have to, not that they should simply be there to remind you of thoughts you had as a naïve idealistic teenager. Strangely enough, it appears that Barnard thinks the same way: ‘It sounds too simple, doesn’t it?’ he says, musing that ‘maybe there aren’t enough big words involved for it to seem plausible’. A fair comment, perhaps, but what I was thinking was – how about there being enough sense to make it plausible? But all credit to Barnard for risking his reputation as the Lake Baikal of deep thought. And dare I say it, I don’t mind conceding that there may be the smallest seed of sagacity concealed within his succinct supposition. What I draw the line at, however, is the clarity of his incision – there is one way and there is another, he seems to suggest, as if the world were divided into two distinct groups: the heavy-jawed pessimists on the one side and the high-cheeked optimists on the other. Or am I getting my facts wrong: is it perhaps the pessimists whose cheeks have risen from regular grinning? Barnard’s pessimists are the ones who are smiling as the ship goes down: they are pessimistic about the future, perhaps, but they enjoy the present. Barnard’s optimists, whilst not necessary miserable during the present, have little time to smile whilst they plan ahead for the future (with the happiness it will eventually bring). So maybe the theory isn’t quite so simple after all. I have tremendous trouble when testing it on myself – am I an optimist or a pessimist? This morning I thought myself the former; now I almost certain that I’m the latter. None of this is helped by the amount of time I’m currently spending working on a critical study of the Ukrainian novelist Jan Zbigwurt, famed as much for his positive thinking as he is for his negative.

I suppose the fact remains that the eternal dilemma, such as Barnard believes it is, is always a, well, dilemma. There are two groups, maybe, but no one ever belongs to either. We all drift like dead leaves in the purgatorial middle ground. And yet I cannot picture Zbigwurt as a leaf. Rather than floating in-between these two camps, he swings amid them like a pendulum, yet a pendulum that swings so fast the outsider can never quite tell where it is at any one time. Zbigwurt is not a man of half measures: if he is an optimist, he is the ultimate optimist – if he is a pessimist, he is the ultimate pessimist. And as soon as you start to imagine that he is either one, you immediately presume that he is merely being sarcastic and that he is really the other. And how can you ever know? Jan Zbigwurt is, after all, a novelist: a master of fiction. Though his work is undeniably informed by his own philosophy, you cannot treat his books as mere transcriptions of his personal beliefs. But if not transcriptions, what then? An upturned echo, a rough exaggeration, an ironic subversion, a hall of mirrors? What is the relationship between Smiling at Pylons and Zbigwurt’s attitude to life, the universe and everything? That, as they say, is the question.

Your typical Zbigwurt hero has lofty ambitions. He or she truly believes that they can change the world. They ‘think big’ as the saying goes, which explains why Zbigwurt’s books are often seen as being heavily ‘themed’. Here is a novelist who really seems to address the amplitudinous issues – who are we, why do we live, how should we live? In his first novel Calling the Shots (1989) he presented us with a man whose rejoinder to the above was to live as selfishly as possible, according to personal whims. In his second, Taking the Bullets (1993) he reversed the idea, with the creation of Victor Niŝek, the most selfless and insipid character ever to have graced the pages of a Ukrainian novel. 1997’s Well of Course There Isn’t No God, a dip in form, was yet his most complex work, delving into the subconscious of a female politician and looking at the idea of life as being ‘nothing more than a faintly amusing charade’. This was followed four years later by what many consider to be its companion piece – Smiling at Pylons, a book which deconstructs an inimically sincere young man’s attempt to introduce the world to his personal brand of positive thinking. To date, this represents the totality of Zbigwurt’s artistic legacy: a quartet of novels dedicated to chronicling a variety of attitudes towards the lively process of ‘existing’. Some might say these signify the writers attempt to solve the conundrum for himself. I continue to maintain, however, that the discrepancies between the manners in which he portrays each character make plausible the possibility that he is not using these narratives to search for an answer, but to qualify a long-held resolution. And being that Smiling at Pylons seems to me to be one of the most thorough and forgiving of the representations, I must speculate that it is within this book that we can at last glimpse the aforementioned resolution.

In an age where book titles are perpetually beset by the twin spectres of amphigory and rakish references, it comes as a relief to some that Zbigwurt has long been in the habit of revealing the intellectual heart of his novel on its cover. The basis of the thought behind Smiling at Pylons is, therefore, is simply that life would be better if more people smiled at pylons, in the fashion of the book’s hero, chief-pylon-smiler Valery Argoriev. A new relationship between mankind and his electrical cable carriers is not, however, Argoriev’s single concern: it is merely a potent symbol for a more wide-ranging strategy of positive thinking built around the concept of getting people to modify their approach to those objects commonly thought of as ugly. Argoriev is no intellectual, but his no-nonsense approach supports a charming, if not hypothetically viable philosophy. Note the content of his first public speech:

‘Having exercised his larynx with a reboant sneeze, Argoriev began: “A thing is never anything more than something that people think it is. If I don’t believe that the world is going to the dogs, then it isn’t. It’s as simple as that. The only problem arises from the fact that people tend not to think in clusters. Opinions differ. Some people don’t think that the world is going to the dogs, others do. If we continue to think in different ways, it is no wonder we can never decide what is or isn’t”.’

Argoriev’s theory is straightforward at best. He doesn’t care to consider the grounds on which something is deemed to be beautiful or otherwise: he works only on the logic that if we train ourselves to think that everything is beautiful, then everything will be beautiful. So convinced is he that this concept will change the way the world works that he sets out onto the world to teach people the error of their ways. He encounters many people on the streets, but in his spare time he makes a greater effort to reach those whom he feels to be most deserving of his philosophy. In the evening, he scours the letters page on all international newspapers, looking out for people expressing distaste of this or that. Having discovered these characters, he then seeks them out and tries to convince them that the object of their hate is in fact something to be smiled at instead (for smiling, as Argoriev is fond of saying ‘is as healthy as hope’).

Being that this is a story, it turns out that many of his ‘victims’ agree with this theory. A man who once hyperventilated every time he saw an advertisement on the television is taught to enjoy the source of his irritation; a woman who suffers abuse from her evil husband learns to grin in its wake. Happiness (of a kind) is spread thickly, like lightly salted butter on a wholemeal muffin. But with what results? Clearly, many people take advantage of the situation, though Argoriev is not unwilling to address the problems. He reminds the woman that there is no reason why she shouldn’t take action against her husband; the only rule being that she should smile and be positive in whatever she does. Argoriev cannot, of course, be defeated. He is eternally positive: positive to a fault. Following the woman’s death, he concludes ‘Well, she lived longer than a lot of people’ (though she was only thirty two). He is aware that changing the world will not be easy, but confident that once he has everyone thinking positively, such abuse of his system will no longer be a barrier. In reference to Barnard we ought to consider – is Argoriev an optimist or a pessimist? He believes in positivity, yes, but does he believe in the future (the sign of the true optimist). The answer to this is yes: Argoriev is surely that rare thing – a positive optimist.

There are still flaws, evidently. Smiling at pylons is probably not the answer to all our problems. But on many levels, the Argoriev attitude is a success. For one thing, it certainly succeeds in convincing this reader that pylons are indeed astounding works of beauty. I regularly scoot along the motorway in the slow lane nowadays, to give myself the opportunity of fully admiring the steely magnificence of the passing pylons stalking the catwalk of dull English fields like svelte female giants. Argoriev also draws our attention to other normatively distasteful items and shines equally fresh light on them. Indeed, in this way he reminds me of many of the thinkers that support the literary journal in which this very review is appearing, not excluding its enthusiastic editor Georgy Riecke. Riecke has long supported the beauty of ugliness and, it being relatively common knowledge that he has devoted a room in one of his houses to photographs of dead rodents, I have little doubt that he also advocates the re-examination of the pylon as a major art form. Despite this, one would hardly consider Riecke’s attitude to be an example of positive thinking. He may like many of the things that other people don’t like, but he rarely likes any of those things that other people do like. Rather than all embracing, he is (like many of us) simply subversive.

What about Jan Zbigwurt? Where does he fall on this issue? How much of Argoriev’s philosophy does he share, if any? Does he smile at pylons? Sometimes I detect an honest confidence behind Argoriev’s voice that can only come from the backing of his creator; on other occasions his idealist approach seems too rich for my palate, at which point I begin to consider him as a satirical figure. On these occasions, the writer is not so much backing him as stabbing a knife into his back. The reappearance of both of these perceptions might suggest that the writer is trying to strike a balance, but I would rather believe that one of these inclinations is erroneous rather than subscribe to this theory.

Before attempting to knot together, however crudely, the frayed strands of this journey through Zbigwurt’s Smiling at Pylons, it befalls to me to say a thing or two about Zbigwurt’s use of language, recently the subject of rather periphrastic chapter in Grosnor Padviconavic’s survey of Eastern European literature. In a piece beset by satiating diversions, the prized critic offers no more than a single telling comment on the subject in hand, on which I intend to elaborate. ‘Zbigwurt’s use of language,’ writes Padviconavic, ‘is like a stream punctuated by heavy boulders’. This is by no means a poor metaphor, but unfortunately the writer declines to explain it. Therefore, I shall do the honours.

Zbigwurt, as I have already mentioned, writes about life: about ‘big issues’. Despite this, he also writes perceptively and clearly. On the whole, his prose flows: thus the stream to which Padviconavic alludes. Regrettably, he does not take the time to elaborate on the exact nature of this stream. I would say, however, that it is a busy stream. The water flows relatively fast and consistently. That is, until it encounters one of these so-called boulders. To further explain, I have extracted another passage from Smiling at Pylons:

‘To please the heart was his intention: to allow the heart to be regularly pleased without the stern disruption of the brain, without the portcullis of alleged reason being lowered. Yes, that was what he wanted, Argoriev thought, as he munched steadily through his bowl of breakfast cereal. The inveterate amelioration of the temperament; the concatenation of gemütlich cogitations – that was what it was about: not having to mind when the milk in your cereal has gone warm through neglect.’

This may be one of the milder examples, but it serves the point well enough. Its mildness, in fact, stems from the translator’s unsurprising inability to respectfully deal with the problem to which I refer – sufficed to say, the argument would make much sense to someone reading the book in the Russian in which it was written. However, I daresay that the boulders in the stream of which I talk are easily spotted, if not to be so easily explained. Most writers indulge in the odd sesquipedalian word every now and again, but the frequency and manner with which Zbigwurt employs them is admittedly a little irregular, albeit increasingly less so with each novel. Even I will concede that it was hard to get through Calling the Shots without cantenary recourse to a ten-volume dictionary, though no such operation is required in Smiling at Pylons (your pocket dictionary should suffice). Why he works in this way, it is hard to say. Certainly, he never uses long words to explain anything that is essential to the plot. On the contrary, he almost always puts forward the central arguments in the simplest language possible; bringing out the big guns only to reinforce the message: through invariably the weight of these words manages either to confuse the issue or to demand that the reader ignores them, thereby rendering their existence futile. Where Padviconavic’s socially informed justification only adds to the confusion (him being a bit of a long-word abuser himself) all I can suggest that Zbigwurt is involved in gently satirising professional philosophy by following each of his effortlessly expressed ideas with their tortured vernacular, so as to remind his readers of the difference between two.

The protagonists of Zbigwurt’s first three novels all come to what may be described as a sticky end. Valery Agroriev, however, emerges partially triumphant. This is one of the reasons why I am inclined to believe that the philosophy of Smiling at Pylons is that closest to its author’s heart. But I am also inclined to go in the opposite direction and propose that the novel is ironic in tone; that Valery Agroriev is a pathetic comic figure.

I hear you retort (I have good ears) – does it matter what Zbigwurt thinks? I have already intimated that this may be a common rejoinder to my efforts. A colleague once asked me to contemplate the possibility that Zbigwurt is like a tennis coach standing on the opposite side of the net to a line of schoolchildren carrying a tennis ball, each of which represents an idea. One by one these children hit their ideas lightly across the net and watch as the novelist considers them in flight and then whacks them back across the net. I may have enjoyed his metaphor (baring in mind the fact that he had constructed it on the spot after having drunk half a bottle of wine) but I am nonetheless disinclined to accept it.

I am left, then, with a choice. Is Smiling at Pylons a positive book, extolling the values of positive thinking, or an ultimately negative tome that laughs, nay jeers in the face of optimism? Or how about a third option? I return to the words of Valery Agroriev: ‘a thing is never anything more than something that people think it is’. In which case I say, let us stop the swinging pendulum, proceeding without undue slothfulness to join the writer Jan Zbigwurt and Valery – his echo apparent – where we will smile wide without irony at the beauty of ugliness for evermore, regardless of the good it will cause (for it will cause good regardless, good being but a word).

Review by Caspar Nietcher

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