Paul Scott's "The Towers of Silence": Book Review

In this third installment of the "Raj Quartet," we witness through the perspective largely of Barbie Batchelor the reaction to the incidents which comprised the core of "The Jewel in the Crown." Daphne Manners has died and her mother and her child are off-stage for all but a glimpse or two here; Susan Layton marries Teddie Bingham and we learn more about their courtship and brief marriage. Similarly, we find her sister Sarah becoming friends with Barbie when she moves in Rose Cottage with the Layton step-grandmother-in-law Mabel, in the hill station of Pankot, sister encampment to Ranpur where the unrest over the trial of Hari Kumar and his compatriots accused of raping Daphne had not spread to Pankot.

Instead, we get the slow transfer of rumors and gossip, along with Barbie's prominence in relating what she knows from her fellow missionary, Edwina Crane. Her fate will parallel that of Barbie, perhaps, a decline from confidence in the mission and its evangelical rationale to an encounter with a less comforting, existential resignation to the loneliness of the British who choose to defend the spiritual campaign in India alongside the military and civil functionaries who populate Pankot. Scott gradually draws Barbie's situation parallel to that of the Second World War, and the struggles felt from the battle zone, while they do not reach the hills, echo with the fate of Robert Merrick, who had persecuted Hari and his comrades so relentlessly.

After his tragic attempt to rescue Teddie during the fighting in Burma, Merrick confides in Barbie. His role here is gentler, tempered by his own gallantry, and Scott excels in their conversation as it reveals the unease at the heart of the British civilizing enterprise. The book moves slowly. I think Scott for once overtipped his hand at the coda, in linking too tightly world events to Barbie's decline, but he may have done this to forge an imperial analogy of one Englishwoman's fall to that of the empire and its crown jewel. Most of the narrative stays subtler. Much of it takes place at Rose Cottage, with an almost Jane Austen-like attention to conversational shifts and character revelations barely perceived without intense scrutiny to tone and intent and what's said or unsaid.

Teddie's reaction to Merrick's talk about the Indian National Army which allies against the British with the Japanese reminds me of the book's structure. "Formless, almost shapeless, the beauty consisted in the subtle cohesion of what seemed like disparate parts and in the extraordinary flexibility of each arrangement made to bring them together." (Everyman's Library ed. 2007, p. 126) Scott features no high drama as in "Jewel" or especially its sequel which delved into Captain Merrick's interrogation of Hari, "The Day of the Scorpion," but we learn how both titular symbols endure here. The picture of Queen Victoria receiving homage of the world's peoples lacks, Barbie notes, an unknown Indian. The scorpion bites itself when surrounded by fire only due to its sensitivity to the heat, the sun, the light.

This book will unsettle you. Four hundred pages show Scott's narrative control, but it's grim much more than droll. It's to be read after the first two, naturally. It advances their timeline forward through the war, but those events remain dim and distant. While Scott characteristically filters the disintegrating coherence of Barbie powerfully, it's not pleasant: "the vision was shut off again by barriers of fleshy faces, arms, bosoms, chins and epaulettes, the bark and chirrup of the human voice manufacturing the words which created the illusion of intelligent existence." (195) Barbie looks at a swain for Sarah and sees "the enthusiastic expression of mediocrity which Barbie had learned to recognize from years of looking in a mirror." Unsparing in its glances at sex, birth, marriage, faith, and death, Scott provides in Barbie a disturbing depiction of the breakdown of belief and of order. (P.S. I also briefly reviewed the Everyman's Library ed. of vols. 1-2 combined. This review above was under a listing for "Towers" itself on Amazon US 6-29-12)

"The Mongoliad: Book Three": Review

I reviewed Part One in March and Part Two last week, so you can tell I raced through this. It sustains the authors' characteristic love for choreographed, blow-by-blow marathon fight scenes, adding lethal archery showdowns in the rocky ravines of Mongolia and continuing--as two of the four subplots finally begin to converge--equestrian chases across the steppes. It also incorporates real-life figures into the sprawling plot, which prefers combat to talk.

The tale of the Shield-Brethren venturing into the Mongolian heartlands to exact revenge--while stars Cnán and Percival from Part One are barely heard from, and newcomers from Part Two Raphael and Benjamin (of Tudela, a real-life figure I expected they'd make more use of) hunker down too low-profile--still has enough suspense with Vera and comrades outrunning Mongol hordes to continue the story as expected. The climactic showdown among rival archers remains vivid and well-staged. The authors late on excel at a couple of death scenes, and make them into truly moving moments.

A feature I liked was that you get a fair hearing for the Mongols, represented by Gansukh as always, and the power struggles based on true chronicles resonate, even if as I suppose in history they take their good time to come to fruition. This can bog down the pace, but it's necessary for verisimilitude. A compromise between action that dominates much of the book and background?

As for the Hünern struggle, it too is well-staged. Zug, Kim, and their Malaysian ally Lakshaman rally the valiant underdogs, and the conflicts between Livonian and other knights play out in the way one expects for an epic of intrigue. The long battle at the Mongolian fortress occupies much of the middle of the book, and it allows the tellers to expand their scope beyond the Circus of Skulls hand-to-hand combat of the earlier chapters and installments. Again, alternating between fighters makes for a more engaging way to see into the strategies and mindsets employed by rivals.

Finally, the plot based on the ascension and short reign of Pope Celestine V (before Pope Benedict XVI the only pontiff to resign--as opposed to one who abdicated) as the cardinals break the impasse to elect a successor to Gregory IX amidst the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick's Roman threat makes for another long depiction of intrigue under diplomatic rather than martial cover. Fr. Rodrigo's visions get worse, the Grail may make a cameo, and the Binders show how they deliver their messages. All this skullduggery does drag, but the wonderful performance of foul-mouthed (he sounds like a rags-to-riches street-smart "reality-t.v. CEO") Frederick as "stupor mundi" makes him the "wonder of the world" indeed to those who deal with him. A bonus: the authors have imagined a wonderful scene to show how a man who's told he's now pope appears to take on a confident aura and a rhetorical skill that dazzles those who try to foil him.

As one patient character reflects as she leaves Rome, she takes the "unknown road forward." I wonder if another installment will appear? A few are left standing on the "enemy's" side at the conclusion, so plenty of ambiguity remains--as in the side-story appended to the Kindle version, "Seer" with Andreas in the French Pyrenees as the Albigensian heretics are hemmed in--also shows. (5-9-13 to Amazon US)

"The Mongoliad: Book Two": Kindle Book Review

Compared to Book One, it's as lively, needing less plot exposition to set the Binders, Shield-Brethren and their Livonian foes, the Mongol horde, and the capitulation of Rus into medieval context. Book Two will diverge considerably. Little overlap concerning protagonists: it's mostly new figures stepping on stage to ride on, scheme, drink, skulk beneath the streets of Rome, parry in the revived Circus of Swords, and advance the Brethren eastward over the Don into the steppes.

There's almost no Cnan and in her place Ocyrhoe in Rome conspires with knight Raphael (who gets in the Kindle edition a nicely handled "Dreamer" novella where he tells the story of the Fifth Crusade's siege of Damietta to Brother Leo, tied into Francis of Assisi's real-life meeting with the Sultan Al-Kamir in 1219 mingled into an account of the saint's stigmata on LaVerna a few years later). Raphael and comrades venture east for revenge on the Mongols.

Meanwhile, Raphael's struggle in Egypt and after between compassion and anger is echoed by Fr. Rodrigo, who has found Ferenc on the graphically, mystically, nightmarishly rendered battlefield after the apocalyptic Magyar defeat at Mohi. "Crushing them between two lines, like a blacksmith crushing a fly between calloused palms" is how Rodrigo recalls the bloody effect of the Mongol invasion. It's still unclear as to why Rodrigo has gone to Rome, but he meets the cardinals imprisoned to vote for the successor to Gregory XI, who are in a deadlock as to his successor. There, the story of Ocyrhoe will intersect, although as much here, it's open-ended at the end.

Likewise, Lian and Gansukh come into their own from the first book as they try to evade the Mongol leaders while a Chinese guerrilla attack interrupts, or advances, their plans to escape. The night flight of lit arrows makes a great set-piece, and the tellers enjoy the dappled canvas they paint on. I admit that characterization may give way to action, but reading about archers, swordplay (we meet Kim from Korea at the Circus; the back-and-forth battle between him and Shield-Bearer Andreas is handled well to increase tension), and clerically driven backstabbing makes for entertainment.

The story lines in Rome, the steppes and Brethren, the Mongol-occupied Lignica in Rus, and the Mongol push itself all move along the second installment. It's no surprise that they are unresolved. For after all, this is the transition between the start and the finish of this epic. (Amazon US 5-2-13)

"The Mongoliad, Part One": Kindle Book Review

With a background studying medieval literature and a liking for such epic adventures in modern guise, I figured this might entertain. I didn't read any of the hundreds of {Amazon, where this was #250} reviews, preferring to judge for myself. The results after part one on my Kindle? I'll check out part two.

It's difficult to evaluate the impact of what's a third of a saga. This may cause impatience, but it's akin to the start of a long multi-season series on cable. So, I'm flexible and forgiving, knowing it takes a while to warm up and get the action rolling. There's action, don't worry, but there's also lots of exposition and cultural contexts that must be integrated.

Similar to a first panel of a triptych, or the first installment of a wartime saga, I find that the characters of Cnan the Binder, Zug the Japanese warrior, Percival the inspired knight, Lian the Chinese slave-girl, and Gansukh the restive Mongolian all add depth to the telling. But, it's challenging to weigh in on the impact of this as it's obviously a third (or less with the subplots and spinoffs of the Foreworld Saga in the making). You won't know a lot about them and their comrades so far, but that adds to the interest of the plot, as it lures you deeper ca. 1250 CE.

There's some tonal difference as this is written by committee, but no more than a series directed and written by different hands that you may watch on a network. No real poetry ("Sinner" had a lovely lunar metaphor one eerie early night, but the efficiently told, no-nonsense if sometimes effusively brawling and blustering main text never pauses for much elegance), but lots of martial play. You can tell that experts contribute to these portions. They provide blow-by-blow commentary. Zug and Haakon grapple for pages at the Circus of Swords, and you can follow every parry and thrust. Gansukh's fight a few pages on, by comparison, feels rushed and anticlimactic. Showdowns may wear down one's patience, even if the norm for a 500 pp. medieval epic.

Sufficient mystery awaits, as in Cnan's mindset and Percival's mysticism, for suspense. These people gradually emerge, but true to a medieval setting, they tend not to gush or emote. They hold back their feelings as they do their conversations: to remain watchful, wary, and cautious in an era when too much worn on one's sleeve results in that arm being severed, or one's helmeted head.

I find it intriguing this comprises a corporate-owned "secret history transmedia franchise"; certainly the Kindle version with a prequel, "Sinner," about the Shield-Brethren amidst the German arm of the Inquisition, and the map, cast of characters appended, and handsome line drawings all enhance the text on my Touch. It's a model likely to prove more common as people read on Kindles, smartphones, and PCs, and one to which fans can add content and comment on a story's creation. Let's hope quality control--as Neal Stephenson's editing skills were needed--continues. (Amazon US 3/29/13)

"Just Walk Into That Cloud:" Bhutan in Books & Film

North of India, south of Tibet, with fewer than a million people, this landlocked Swiss-sized monarchy, “sandwiched between Methuselahs,” Russ and Blyth Carpenter aver in a memorable if odd metaphor, “seems like a printer’s error.”  Most accounts nod to its historical impenetrability, its vast vistas, and its mix of colorful folk tradition and impassive sophistication. Its Buddhist ethos encourages the personal touch: there’s a lack of any “impersonal” stoplights in its capital, Thimphu, even as it exceeds a hundred thousand residents-- where Michel Peissel found in 1968 but three small buildings next to its dzong or monastery-fortress. No cities existed in Bhutan until recently. Rapidly modernizing while directing its Gross National Happiness strategy, the region’s last independent Buddhist enclave aims to balance economic opportunities and educational progress in what many Westerners mistake as still a semi-feudal, isolated Shangri-La. With diverse ecosystems and regional cultures, the nation hunkers in below the jagged Himalayas. A central expanse of rugged mountain valleys separate linguistically and culturally diverse Buddhists, who have evolved to farm and herd two miles or more high. They are unsuited to live in the tropical lowlands, where Nepali and Hindu-dominant peoples raise crops on terraces and fields.

It will be expensive to explore: a daily tariff imposed of $250 keeps tourism low and requires guides and itineraries approved in advance. However, lodging and food will be covered; a third of this fee funds sustainable development.  The fear of becoming another Nepal, with a degraded ecology and sullied infrastructure, impels Bhutan to enforce “high value, low volume” on its visitors, by jeep or on trek. It discourages settlement by foreigners and it commands national dress to be worn by guides, those in schools and public service, and those visiting the center of any district, the dzong, on official business. 

For those who have not seen Bhutan firsthand, this review article surveys the books and media available. I compiled this after not finding an equivalent resource on the Internet or in print. The reading lists in guidebooks, while helpful, left me wondering what else lay on the shelves. By investigating histories, travel narratives, novels, photo-journalism, film, and guidebooks, you can learn a lot from an armchair—which will likely encourage you to begin to save up and plan your own excursion.

Histories:

The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet by Kate Teltscher (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

Bhutan, through the middle of the last century, had only received thirteen Western expeditions. George Bogle reports on the first, in 1774-1775. He wished to connect the East India Company with China, via Tibet. In between lay Bhutan. In The High Road to China, Kate Teltscher retells in 2006 the young Scotsman Bogle’s journey. Out of cleverly chosen samples of British-made and Indian-exported goods, this first trade mission lobbied to sway the Panchen Lama. "How else to seduce a nation than with a tempting display of luxury goods, scientific instruments and mechanical toys?"

Views of Medieval Bhutan by Michael Aris (London: Serindia and Washington: Smithsonian, 1982)

However, Bhutan managed to dissuade the eager empires, Chinese, Tibetan, or British. Most Westerners further comparisons to "feudal" dzongs and "medieval" customs such as archery (the national sport, originally to repel Tibetan invaders) or unquestioned fealty when they encounter Bhutan. Its never-colonized, semi-feudal period under an absolute monarch lasted past when men landed on the moon. A handsome 1982 edition of Views of Medieval Bhutan features an introduction by Michael Aris, who tutored the Wangchuck royal family for six years when the nation was opening up to modernization. Aris (who would marry Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi) presents the meticulous observations of Samuel Davis. A surveyor and draftsman for the Bengal Army, he accompanied the second British embassy, in 1783, to Druk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon.

These elegant depictions attest to the only foreign artist "of distinction" to show Bhutan, and the first outsider to paint scenes from these mountains. Aris notes that his fellow Englishman's "legacy played no part in the development of those imaginary utopias which the west continues to locate in the trans-Himalayan region." Aris annotates and excerpts Davis' journal, and nods to its secular, and largely un-Romantic tone, also a part of the naturalistic art Davis brings to the plates reproduced here. "If sublime and romantic qualities are sometimes found expressed in his art this is surely because Davis, like most of us, was constitutionally incapable of reacting otherwise to certain combinations of mountains, light, fortresses and forests."

Travel Narratives:

Lands of the Thunderbolt: Sikhim, Chumbi & Bhutan by the Earl of Ronaldshay (1923; Berkeley: Snow Lion Graphics, 1987)

The thunderbolt is the "dorje," the bell-like scepter wielded by lamas in the Vajrayana Tibetan tradition, the lands those of Sikkim, Chumbi, and Bhutan, the time, 1920. The Earl of Ronaldshay’s 1923 account, Lands of the Thunderbolt, while not free of its era’s imperial tone, given this "practicing Presbyterian" author, remains lively. In the footsteps of Bogle and Davis, the Earl shares their enthusiasm for leaving the humid plains of Bengal behind. He begins his ascent at Darjeeling into what at that time was a series of Buddhist-ruled principalities separate from the rest of patchwork British India's jurisdictions. One of the first visitors to the Eastern Himalayas who articulates a modern Western understanding of the unusual mindsets he analyzes, he combines wit with wonder, drollery with description.

Lords and Lamas: A Solitary Expedition across the Secret Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan by Michel Peissel (London: Heinemann, 1970)

Subtitled "A Solitary Expedition across the Secret Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan," Michel Peissel’s 1970 account, Lords and Lamas, of his September 1968 trek over four hundred miles of footpaths reveals a crucial moment of transition from a feudal, medieval fastness to a nation finishing the first span of an east-west highway that will change Bhutan irrevocably. India's fear, in the Cold War, of Chinese threats south of Tibet spurred them to fund a paved road to connect the shorter ones coming up steep valleys from the Gangetic Plain. Peissel, after six failed attempts to get royal and bureaucratic approval, finally is allowed in the country. Bhutan admits its first traveler to carry in foreign currency, and he resolves once inside to follow Captain Robert Boileau Pemberton's 1838 route across the six ranges and passes dividing the core of the corrugated and unstable realm.

Treasures of the Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan by Ashi Dorje Wangmo Wangchuck (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006) 

One of four sisters married to the fourth Dragon King, Ashi (an honorific for a royal woman) Dorje Wangmo Wangchuck takes us down paths Peissel yearned to follow, in what is now a constitutional monarchy. Treasures of the Thunder Dragon deftly introduces facts about its people; topography in the three zones (humid foothills, temperate valleys, and alpine highlands) as one follows the main lateral road west to east; history; monarchy, and modernity, all in twenty pages. This prefaces a necessarily "elevated" perspective, but a cogent 2006 overview. She then blends her family’s history with tales from treks to care for those neglected in its remote hamlets (see: Tarayana Foundation).

So Close to Heaven: the Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas by Barbara Crossette (New York: Vintage, 1996)

So Close to Heaven: the Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas focuses on the Wangchuck dynasty in its Bhutanese coverage. As a New York Times journalist based in India, Crossette favors a style akin to the Gray Lady. The 1996 book unfolds as if feature articles in a tone mixing personal encounters with interviews with diplomats, royalty, and, via translators at times, everyday folks. There's a distance between her and her interlocutors which is expected, given her position and strategy.

Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon: A Journey through Bhutan by Katie Hickman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988)

One of the first accounts by a Westerner who visited (as of the mid-1980s, although this is not specified) the then-less accessible eastern reaches, Katie Hickman's Dreams of the Peaceful  Dragon proceeds in expected fashion. That is, she's a competent travel writer and her integration of the remarks of earlier visitors helps give background for her own Raj-reminiscent trek by horseback. Oxford-educated, from a diplomatic family, with an international upbringing and dynastic sponsorship to cut red tape, she exudes the air of privilege.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa (New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 2000)

Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan by Ken Haigh (Edmonton: U. of Alberta P, 2008)

For longer tales from about the same relatively "early-modern" (the road paved, but not yet electricity, TV, phones, or the internet) period in the eastern region, the most popular remains Jamie Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan . Ken Haigh's Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan complements it well and deserves equal acclaim.   Both teachers of English from Canada, Zeppa and Haigh nearly overlap in place and time with Hickman, but their extended stints allow them a deeper insight into these districts. Their honest, unadorned reflections better the brief glimpses of many Westerners, on limited budgets and itineraries. Enriched by hindsight, Haigh and Zeppa apply literary sensibilities with precision to evoke wisdom and ponder lessons.

After Easter Sunday Mass in Khaling (despite the Buddhist state religion, teachers often come from India and Catholic regions), Haigh looks back over the scene. "There were bright green highlights on the pasture, almost yellow, and deeper green in the pastures of the ravines. A lone white cow ambled down the hillside and onto the road where it was struck by a passing truck."

What Haigh shares with Zeppa is a determination to avoid the soft-focus, combined with an acknowledgement of the love-hate feelings that may come once the initial confusion or infatuation wears off and the reality of separation from Canadian comfort sinks in.

Radio Shangri-La: What I Discovered on My Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth by Lisa Napoli (New York: Random House, 2011)

The Blessings of Bhutan by Russ and Blyth Carpenter (Honolulu: U. of Hawai'i P., 1999)

A decade or two later, Western narratives feature consultants who land in Thimphu and remain for assigned periods, as the royal civil service expands and foreign aid flows in to assist the Gross National Happiness program. Just before the introduction of television, The Blessings of Bhutan features rural Oregonians Russ and Blyth Carpenter. They arrived in the late 1990s to become freelance advisers and eloquent if agnostic analysts of its GNH mindset. Brooklyn-born L.A. transplant Lisa Napoli’s 2011 Radio Shangri-La presents a media-savvy journalist’s efforts to jumpstart a fledgling station in the capital. Her big-city hustle and mid-life ennui meet a slowdown, and impel reorientation. Yet, most memoirs arrive from guests chosen to work from outside the United States; Bhutan favors European, Canadian, or Down Under expertise.

Hidden Bhutan: Entering the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon by Martin Uitz (2006; London: Haus, 2008)

In a hundred pages of Hidden Bhutan, Austrian ex-pat Martin Uitz explores its off-road, off-beat side. Although he works in its Ministry of Finance, one of a hundred foreigners in its booming capital, Thimphu, he nods to the bureaucratic morass and civil service's perks only in the opening chapter. Rather, about the same time in the same place-- halfway through the past decade-- as Lisa Napoli’s radio endeavor, Uitz roams out of the city to explore scenery as close as a few hours walk up slopes to yak herders and a takin reserve.

Episodes on the Snowman Trek comprise a fast-paced chapter. Finding three recent accounts of “the toughest trek in the world” over twenty-five days and crossing many Himalayan passes over three miles high, I welcomed Trish Nicholson's Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon by Trish Nicholson (Collca e-books, 2012). She traveled there long before the other two writers I read--although she does not reveal this until an afterword. While Nicholson did not take the full Snowman Trek reported in diary form by Mark Horrell (Yakking with the Thunder Dragon: Walking Bhutan's Snowmen Trek, 2011 e-book), or at book length by Kevin Grange as Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World  (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 2009), this New Zealand-based anthropologist in her shorter, 100-mile expedition (with other Westerners and a few guides, ponies, and yaks) allows more coverage of the less secluded countryside seen before and after the trek than that witnessed by her two male counterparts twenty-odd years later.

For those not wanting to read a whole book about a two-hundred mile trek, Uitz’s chapter conveys the gist of this difficult journey. Uitz loves the "tsachu" hot springs which entice the traveler to Gasa and ease the burdens of a summer trek--the exception to the narrative rule as the three accounts above take place in the fall, hastening before the snows set in.

Dragon Bones: Two Years Beneath the Skin of a Himalayan Kingdom by Murray Gunn (Hong Kong: Blacksmith, 2011)

Seasons matter. Summers plague trekkers and hikers with leeches and monsoons. Winters close mountain passes. Spring has less rain, but more visitors. Likewise with autumn, but the roads may not be repaired from the landslides that constantly threaten to close off the lone lateral highway. Meanwhile, experts keep trying to assist Bhutan with its logistical challenges. In Dragon Bones (2011), Australian IT engineer Murray Gunn accompanies his new French wife to Bhutan for an extended consultancy, where she's hired to advise its dairy industry's agronomists.

Like his compatriot Launsell Taudevin's "With a Dzong in My Heart" (1994; CreateSpace e-book 2011) memoir set in 1988, Murray Gunn finds that advising the locals about Western methods clashes with rank-pulling bureaucrats, a more lackadaisical work ethic than he expected, and a series of culture clashes mixed with awe at the kingdom's beauty, Buddhist traditions, and courtly atmosphere. While Gunn repeats many of the trekking adventures others do in his account, unique to what I've read in other versions, he listens to his guide: "This is our life. We have to come up here no matter what the weather's like and we do the same trails over and over until our feet are sore. And we can never go anywhere else. There's no holiday for us."

So You Are Thinking of Going to Bhutan by James W. Gould (Amazon Kindle, 2012)

Reports by Gunn or Uitz should be chosen over the holiday taken in James W. Gould’s So You Are Thinking of Going to Bhutan. At 8400 words, this 2012 e-book relates too casually the history, religion, and culture of a bit of Bhutan as seen by the author over a week. Even if this duration must endure as most likely for a less affluent traveler, given the per diem tariff increase, choose longer books by those lucky enough to stay longer in Bhutan. I have not covered two popular, New Age-filtered, memoirs in print, all the same; both of their authors achieved a permanence few Westerners can, by marrying Bhutanese men so as to stay there forever.

Novels:

Cressida's Bed by Desmond Barry (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Almost all who enter Bhutan must leave. Based on a 1931 British expedition to award a knighthood to the King of Bhutan, Desmond Barry’s 2004 novel Cressida’s Bed features as its protagonist a character taken from a real-life doctor’s expedition, that of half-Irish expatriate Christina Devenish. In her early thirties in Calcutta, a free-love advocate, a Theosophist who finds no contradiction with the practice of medicine, she possesses her spirituality and her sexuality confidently. While Barry's depiction of her entry into a Bhutan divided between monarchy and theocracy lacks the sensual and visual evocations of many other writers who've visited this kingdom, it's refreshing to have a more physically rendered, less enraptured presence embarking there. "She set foot on the soil of Bhutan, Alice through the looking glass racked with menstrual cramps, the sweat cooling on her forehead and her back under her sticky frock, and she was desperate to empty her bladder in the shadows of the luxuriant rainforest."

The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005)

Kunzang Choden’s 2005 novel The Circle of Karma, the first in English by a Bhutanese woman, tells over forty years the story of Tsomo. At fifteen, in the remote region of Kurtai, she soon falls in love with another woman's husband. This leads soon to pregnancy, but the results spur her not to a happy marriage, but family strife. She flees to pound stones to pave the first roads across the kingdom, putting this section somewhere about ten years after the Chinese suppression of Tibet. Years aren't mentioned; the novel unfolds in an indirect narration by Tsomo, who finds unhappiness often, and exiles herself to India.

The Heart of the Buddha: A Novel by Elsie Sze (Austin: Emerald, 2009)

Hong Kong-born, Toronto-based Elsie Sze integrates information into The Heart of the Buddha (2009) to situate Marian and Ruthie within the admittedly challenging scenario they find as their paths intersect in Bhutan. Sisters and twins, the two protagonists reflect upon their Chinese Catholic upbringing, their Canadian identity, and their position in a realm where Buddhism is the state religion, where a benign monarchy and compliant press rule.

Photojournalism + Film: 

The Dragon Kingdom: Images of Bhutan by Blanche Christine Olschak with photography by Ursula Markus-Gansser and Augusto Gansser (Boston: Shambhala, 1984)

Since Tantric Buddhism dominates, until very recently as the state religion, it merits attention. A Swiss-based trio of scholars in The Dragon Kingdom reports from nascent stages of the kingdom's connections with the West. The Buddhist-based analysis is therefore very light on modernization, which had just begun in the period they visited in the early 1980s. It can be perused in a sitting, as a quick introduction to Bhutan’s traditions and panoramas.

Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods by Christian Schicklgruber and Françoise Pommaret (Boston: Shambhala, 1998)

A folio-format study, Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods commemorates a Viennese exhibition at the Museum für Völkerkunde in 1997-1998. While scholarly, and hefty in size and substance, it endures as a corrective to romance or brevity in Western accounts. As co-editor Christian Schicklgruber introduces the collection, it mirrors how a visitor would approach Bhutan. Visual impressions, "the lay of the land," flora and fauna, architecture, history, art, politics, and regional peoples and their distinctive dress unfold.

Not an exhibition catalogue in the usual sense, Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods instead presents an in-depth examination of the nation. While very factual in tone and heavily academic, the contributors serve as a cross-section of native and European scholars best able to explain this kingdom seriously to an audience for which fantasy and effusion seem to suffice given its dominant portrayal in certain media as a happy hideaway. (This book reincarnated as an award-winning 2001 Austrian website, but that's long defunct.)

Bhutan: Kingdom of the Dragon by Robert Dompnier (Hong Kong: Living Colour, 1999)

Robert Dompnier in Bhutan: Kingdom of the Dragon offers photography taken in the 1990s, emphasizing tradition, “tsechu” dances which enliven vivid rituals through the year at many a dzong, and crafts such as weaving, costumes, and intricate architecture which persist not as folklore for tourists but as organic expressions of Buddhist perceptions in everyday settings. While short on text, the presentation is handsomely arranged. The bright textiles, dresses, and painted facades leap out. The size allows a map far larger than in most books on Bhutan--but a tiny caption warns: "The borders as shown on this map are neither authentic or [sic] correct."

Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom by Michael Hawley (Cambridge MA: Friendly Planet, 2004) fact sheet from MIT and Friendly Planet

As for size, "Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom" as the younger sibling to the world's biggest book continued raising funds for medical and educational projects. Friendly Planet, Friendly Planet, a charity spinoff of M.I.T., generated income in an innovative fashion, as digital photography and bookbinding skill combined with high-tech expertise under a team led by Professor Michael Hawley, who ran the campus Media Lab's special projects division. The big brother book, 5' by 7' and weighing 150 lbs., dwarfed the two Bhutanese schoolchildren the team "adopted" on their initial November 2001 visit, when displayed at Harry Winston's gallery in Manhattan. This 2003 book symbolized the meeting of high rollers with a worthy cause, and demonstrated how a $15,000 volume could support other schoolchildren and families in the remote areas of this region, reached only by trails, far from the touristy areas the book documents.

For the smaller companion, itself considerable at a foot by two feet and 15 lbs., this expands the original. It reproduces the immense photos and doubles their number, if in less stupendous manner, by explaining how the original was assembled, and how the team returned to Bhutan in 2003 to bring aid to villages and schools from the moneys raised by the big book. Now out-of-print, this follow-up 2004 volume also contributed its profits to Friendly Planet, and Hawley's text and captions, garnered from a cooperative of eleven photographers, conveys the appeal—if in rather soft-focus moods despite the digital accuracy--of the Buddhist kingdom and people.

Bhutan Heartland  by Libby Lloyd and Robert van Koesveld (Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle, 2010)

Libby Lloyd and Robert van Koesveld report in 2010 from spring times on the Lateral Road, the east-west connection across the vertiginous valleys and high passes that furrow between the Himalayas and the subtropical plantations. As these Australian-based photographers and social workers explain early on in Bhutan Heartland, the choice they faced, to move from west to east, is repeated, if perhaps in reverse, by the natives of this kingdom daily. That road, and increasingly the feeder routes paved along what have been yak trails and footpaths, represents for this constitutional monarchy's Gross National Happiness plan a way to increase access to within a day's hike of most of its still largely rural citizens.

The authors efficiently intersperse a lot of background (a glossary and too-short reading list are appended, and a link to van Koesveld's photo archive website) that some earlier authors have struggled to include. It's the right amount for a newcomer: less footnoted and less weighty than the Fortress study but more in-depth than Dompnier, and less-dated than Dragon Kingdom. For handsomely reproduced photographs and accessible text, it’s a great place to begin a virtual visit.

Dreaming Bhutan: Journey in the Land of the Thunder Dragon  by Nicole Grace (Santa Fe: Mani Press, 2011)

Nicole Grace’s Dreaming Bhutan presents in "a brief glimpse" over forty photos on the right side, and a spare text which could fit on a postcard on the left, leaving lots of blank space. Perhaps the slightly blurred resolution of some of the photographs fits the title, as she in promotional material for this 2011 book explains how she wants to show "dreaming" not "of" but "Bhutan" itself--as a portal to enlightenment. A romanticized approach directs Grace's gaze. It prefers "a world of enchantment, ancient rituals and dress that seems not to have changed in hundreds of years."

Bhutan: Between Heaven and Earth by Mary Peck (Santa Fe: Merlin Press, 2011)

From visits totaling seven months from 1999 to 2005 to this Himalayan kingdom, Mary Peck's fifty-six black-and-white photographs in Bhutan: Between Heaven and Earth, each on its own right-hand page facing a blank left, command attention. Many have captions as endnotes; a few do not. This 2011 removal of words from image (except four brief poems, one by Gary Snyder, another by W.S. Merwin, and a pair of his translations from Muso Soseki) allows the reader to look at the landscapes, people, ceremonies, and architecture as if witnessed first-hand. Grace’s captions inspire curiosity as to their short length; Peck’s pages suggest a trust in unpredictability ahead.

In her afterword, "Bhutan's Curve of Time," Peck relates how directions were given by Bhutanese. Each of her inquiries led to a local range of instructions--by a resident. "Just walk into that cloud." one man told her. Beyond circumscribed limits, hemmed in by gorges or peaks, paths or landmarks, the estimates faded, and new ones emerged with the next encounter, the next person down the trail.

Karma Ura situates his nation within these same furrowed contours. As a distinguished leader of  the monarchy’s think tank implementing the nation's evolving Gross National Happiness policy, Ura explains in his thoughtful forward the scope of GNH. He sums up the country, full of micro-climates dividing one valley from the next. He notes how "the food chain is more or less completed within one's own valley." Therefore, the mythology, community, and the land are integrated over generations to support the people in an intimate, in-depth knowledge-- differing from the fragmented skills promoted today as a solution to education and modernization.

Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness by John Wehrheim (Chicago: Serindia, 2nd ed. 2011)

John Wehrheim’s Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness gazes, through words and via a camera. While limited of course to his choice, the combination invites the reader to become a viewer. This Chicago-born, Kaua’i-based hydrologist who mingles narrative journeys with black-and-white silver gelatin photography between 1991 and 2006 in his afterword warns: "The words and events are true but not always in the order and sequence implied."

Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness (DVD Vendetti Productions, directed by Tom Vendetti, produced by Robert C. Stone and John Wehrheim, 2009)

Under the direction of its fifth king and such experts as Karma Ura, "Gross National Happiness" increasingly grows familiar as a catchphrase to sum up Bhutan's ambitions to orient itself within harmonious precepts as taught by Buddhism and shared equitably among its peoples to assure mutual comfort, educational advancement, and spiritual progress. Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness, a one-hour 2009 video produced by Thomas Vendetti and John Wehrheim, introduces GNH. This kingdom's initiative under its watchful monarchy seeks to promote wise globalization while nourishing traditional lifestyles, as Bhutan perches between a covetous China and a teeming India.

Bhutan: Land of Serenity by Matthieu Ricard (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008)

Unlike some photo-narratives on this often-mythologized kingdom, Matthieu Ricard’s Bhutan: Land of Serenity takes a sober, almost detached approach that reveals this monk’s calm. After a decade in the company of the Dalai Lama's tutor there (Tibetan refugee Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche), and now the Dalai Lama's French translator himself, French-born Ricard brings the same considered evaluation of Buddhist practice and culture that his sponsorship and appearance in the films Brilliant Moon and The Spirit of Tibet demonstrate about his devotion to his exiled mentors. What this has to do with Bhutan as a larger entity comes across more gradually. Three pages introducing each of these eight sections of his brilliantly reproduced color photography, 1980-2007, convey this more vividly than the miniscule font (too small, let alone the captions even smaller) do in this admittedly handsome, compact text, translated by Ruth Sharman.

Travellers and Magicians (feature film directed by Khyentse Norbu, 2003. DVD Zeitgeist Films, 2005)

As the first feature-length film from Bhutan, reincarnate lama-director Khyentse Norbu's 2003 follow-up to his festival success of soccer-mad Tibetan monks in 1999’s The Cup generates attention-- by that statement alone.

Travelers and Magicians nestles in a familiar frame: the varied cast hiking or hitching on the road hears a story along the way. The plot unfolds genially and gently. It's not fast-paced, and reflects the steady, shrewd sensibility of its makers and actors. Norbu wishes to offer the world and his own homeland a reflection of how Buddhist themes might enrich people, as if painting a traditional tapestry by the light of cinema. The bonus feature elucidates this philosophy as it underlies the film. For more backstory on the director, consult Lesley Ann Patten's nearly concurrent (if unevenly directed) documentary "Words of My Perfect Teacher" (2003, Festival Media 2008 DVD) about Norbu, under his Buddhist name, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.


(To link more interdependence in a small kingdom, while the cast of Travelers and Magicians--the first film in Dzongkha, the native language taught in schools there along with English--is billed as non-professionals, I understand that the lead character of Dondup is the exception. Played by Tshewang Dendup, a Thimphu-based radio actor, he appears in Jamie Zeppa's memoir, for Dondup in real life was the genial student with whom she as a young Canadian teacher fell in love. In turn, Martin Uitz discusses the reception of this and more low-budget films in Dzongkha during the past decade.)

Guidebooks:

The Rough Guide to First-Time Asia by Leslie Reader and Lucy Ridout (London: Rough Guide-Penguin, 5th ed. 2010){This is helpful for planning, checklists, advice, warnings, websites, and reading lists, even if Bhutan gets the same rapid coverage as two-dozen of its continental neighbors.}

Bhutan: Himalayan Mountain Kingdom (Odyssey Guide) by Françoise Pommaret (Hong Kong: Airphoto, 6th ed. 2009)

Bhutan Handbook (Footprint) by Gyurme Dorje (Bath: Footprint, 2nd ed. 2010)

Bhutan (Country Travel Guide) by Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown, and Anirban Mahapatra  (Oakland: Lonely Planet, 4th ed. 2011)

For those who want to see more of Bhutan than a film depicts, three guidebooks mediate between the armchair and the adventure. Gyurme Dorje, as a Himalayan expert, offers in Footprint’s Bhutan Handbook practicalities similar to Lonely Planet's Bhutan (Country Travel Guide) by Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown, and Anirban Mahapatra. The Footprint guidebook in format and layout resembles Lonely Planet, but Dorje’s background coverage in a separate chapter of religious, artistic, and literary contexts does not match the scope of Odyssey’s Bhutan: Himalayan Mountain Kingdom by fellow Tibetologist (and Bhutan-based scholar) Françoise Pommaret, who authored the first such guidebook, and co-edited Fortress. Rather, like Lonely Planet, Footprint provides a concise introduction; both in turn examine the capital Thimphu, followed by the western, central, and eastern regions.

Lonely Planet tallies nearly 300 pages; Footprint adds about 80 pages in a slightly larger font. Color photos are about equal; seven (blue-hued) Lonely Planet and nine (pink-shaded) Footprint chapters can be downloaded separately or together. I've sampled both guides in their PDF versions--they did not convert legibly to my Kindle Touch. Also, even kept as PDFs, a Kindle font cannot be matched to their format neatly or very legibly. On a PC, in color, the PDF files scan better; the maps hang together with the text, sidebars, and illustrations.

Footprint lacks Lonely Planet's verve and Odyssey's anthropological bent, but it instructs. Its background chapter delves into Buddhist contexts such as the auspicious symbols and prayer flags. Dorje explains: "The sparse population, the slow, measured pace of daily life and, in some sectors, an almost anarchical disdain for political involvement have encouraged the spiritual cultivation of Buddhism to such an extent that it has come to permeate the entire culture."

Bhutan: A Trekker's Guide by Bart Jordans (Milnthorpe, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2nd. rev. ed. 2012)

For those leaving its lateral highway behind, Bart Jordan’s Bhutan: A Trekker’s Guide (Cicerone; 2nd. rev. ed. 2012) details twenty-seven yak trails and footpaths across this vertically-biased kingdom. Jordans' "Dutch-English" describes affectionately and carefully (one drawback, if minor: a few glitches remain in his idiom, or the proofreading) many remote sights and dramatically situated sacred landscapes infused by belief. This same guidebook was taken along on the Snowman Trek by Kevin Grange; the practical itineraries and mythical lore it shares will reward anybody planning a few days--or weeks--in the unpaved northern or central regions.

Wrapping It Up

Leaving this short shelf, I wonder how Bhutan can welcome those of us who peer or edge in—through books, through videos, the authors and filmmakers introduce change-- without too many gatecrashers. Few Bhutanese deny themselves their new television, internet, or cellphones. The New York Times featured the kingdom as one of this year’s top destinations: luxury eco-resorts proliferate. Pico Iyer surmises how Bhutanese with formidable etiquette mingled with skillful deference-- inherited over centuries of civil service, monastic preferment, and feudal hierarchies--enforce customs which admit visitors at a polite distance. Traversing the east-west highway, one follows the ancient routes past the formidable dzong guarding each district. Housing monks and officials, these monastery-fortresses force any approaching along a single path through the vertiginous terrain of steep slopes and sudden ravines to reveal themselves. Travelers have to trudge through or ride by the dzong. Passes can be patrolled, and roads checked to monitor jeeps and tourists-- just as trails have always been, to protect princesses or to patrol among pilgrims.

Perhaps Bhutan will survive so both visitors and natives will coexist happily. In John Wehrheim's last chapter, at a bar in Thimphu, he tells an ambitious Indian who wishes to push Bhutan twenty years forward that such a jolt will leave it like Sikkim: invaded by immigrants, overrun by India. Forty years behind its neighboring fellow (ex-)Buddhist principality Bhutan may lag, but better that than the fate of tiny Sikkim--let alone giant Tibet during the past half-century. In a parallel conversation with a Tibetan-descended man, whose family in part escaped Chinese decimation, Wehrheim sums up his subject slyly. "Happy peasants in bountiful fields. A King who's too good to be true. The usual. I'm making photos, shooting video and collecting stories. Everybody in Bhutan's got a story--some of them might even be true."


(P.S. My budget and the limits of my local libraries narrowed what I could evaluate. Detailed reviews of each title above appear on my blog and Amazon US. This article in slightly edited form, different headings, and without hyperlinks appeared in Pop Matters as Just Walk Into That Cloud: Bhutan in Books & Film on March 19, 2013.)

P.P.S. For assistance, thanks to: Cathie Crooks (Alberta); Eliza Ferrier (Footprint); Harry Hall (Haus); Steve Hirashima (Hawai'i); Leah Koontz (Norton); Claire Miller (Fremantle) and Meaghan Miller (IPG); Patrick Rosca (Mani); Sarah Spencer (Cicerone); Pete Spurrier (Blacksmith); Britney VanBurkleo (Lonely Planet); Naomi Weinstein (Penguin). Veteran travelers to Bhutan, Kai von Hirschfeld and John Wehrheim, suggested superb selections. (Photo: #48 of 50 by John Wehrheim from the Bhutan book via Serindia.)

"Beckett, Buddhism, and the Void"

Neatly inscribed, as if in a handwriting-imitative font in its precision, at the back of a secondhand copy of Richard Seaver’s  I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader, I found this meditation:

In each moment there is a question, made up of smaller questions, made up of smaller sub-questions, divided by both the senses and by experience, held together by emotion, logic, reason...Herein lies the playground of the mind, to seek understanding, weighing each answer according to its source, and only by the receipt of information are these moments connected. If by chance the answers aren't enough, or the questions not right, there is no space between then and now, and certainly no time to tell the difference. There is only repetition. Question everything. Experience the best of everything. Forget the questions and remember how you asked them.

Seaver, Beckett's editor, provided a reminiscence. It concludes:

For in his dimming landscape, peopled with clowns and misfits, has-beens and ne'er-do-wells, the malformed and the deformed, those on the threshold of death or already on the other side (‘I don't remember when I died’), he has created a stark world far different from our own, hardly recognizable, a nether world, a purgatory, or perhaps Antepurgatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with us.

Our world. (xlv)

Wherever it originated, that (for me) anonymous statement alongside these editorial comments reminded me of Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. This former Zen and Tibetan monk clears clutter around Buddha, karma, rebirth, gurus, and temples. He favors a therapeutic approach akin to a psychologist in his non-denominational, non-theistic guidance. He admits we-- as with the Buddha-- do not know what happened or will happen regarding our place in the universe.

He leaves it at that. He pushes us past sterility, ritual, and codified belief into a mature, democratic, and communally responsible morality that renews what has frozen into mantra, temple, and guru. He proposes agnostic confrontation rather than consolation, derived not from salvation or reward but existential honesty. How do we go on when we feel we can't go on? How long, O Lord, how long, as the Psalmist cried out —long before Godot?

Batchelor's brief but rich treatise can inform anyone. I think secular and atheist readers might benefit most. (I note his newest book — out last month — titled Confession of a Buddhist Atheist trumpets a blurb by Christopher Hitchens; this may indicate Batchelor’s desire to leap on a neo-atheist bandwagon waving a non-theist prayer flag.) In a section on ‘emptiness’, that fundamental dharma teaching, he tells us how:

much of the time we fail to register what is happening here and now. We are reliving an edited version of the past, planning an uncertain future, or indulging in being elsewhere. Or running on automatic pilot, without being conscious at all.

And instead of a coherent personality that stretches back into an unbroken line to a first memory and looks forward to an indefinite future, we discover a self ridden with gaps and ambiguities. Who ‘I am’ appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads. (24)

He explains that we are less the hero of a B-movie starring ourselves but as ‘more akin to the complex and ambiguous characters who emerge, develop, and suffer across the pages of a novel. There is nothing thing like about me at all. I am more like an unfolding narrative’. (82) Becoming aware of this impels us towards an ‘ethics of empathy’, refusing to cling to habits and routines. We cannot hold on to our ego to sustain our fragile and evanescent self; rather, Batchelor urges: ‘Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before’. (83)

‘The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait’. (99) This reminds me of moments in Shakespeare or Beckett, this bold staring down of ‘shunyata’, ‘emptiness’ that we cannot define satisfactorily for its own notion ‘falls prey to the very habit of mind it was intended to undermine.’ (81)

Whether in an article I wrote earlier in this decade on Beckett’s purgatories and liminality, a happenstance scrawl in a secondhand book, or my ‘nightstand Buddhist’ study, I try to make sense out of my own monologues, waking and dreaming. They vanish. But scripts remain, as Seaver, Batchelor, Beckett, and even the Buddha know, ‘dramaticules’ enacted by others after we die and head towards whatever ‘unnameable’ emptiness will embrace us again.

While studying Batchelor, I wondered about Beckett’s affinity, if any, with Buddhism. John Calder, Beckett’s publisher and friend, considers the influence upon Beckett’s early work by a Belgian follower of Descartes, Arnold Geulincx. Cited in Murphy, the source of the first words spoken in Waiting for Godot, ‘rien a faire’ or ‘nothing to be done’, Geulincx proposed a proto-meditative reaction. (4) Calder stresses Beckett’s youthful quest for truth within meditative philosophy rather than dogmatic theology. Christian mystics such as Geulincx, Calder suggests, edge near Buddhism ‘particularly in the denigration or merging of the individual self into the whole nature of the cosmos’. (5) Calder posits Murphy seeking nirvana as ‘Beckett’s most Buddhist creation’, yet he does not elaborate. Nor does Beckett himself on the influence of dharma.

Three massive biographies, by Deirdre Bair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson, make no mention of Buddhism within Beckett’s life; his works do not mention the teachings directly. Yet, Calder finds a connection, however tenuous. He claims that Beckett feared returning to life, and how ‘intellectual superiority of Buddhism over monotheistic religion, and the logic of reincarnation with the concept of even ethical justice, was not lost on him’. (43) Stoically, without religious belief yet never declaring himself an atheist, Beckett appears to Calder a dualist, between hope and despair, the material and immaterial. They might both have benefited from reading Batchelor.

Can philosophy align with Buddhist inquiry? Ben Howard cautions: ‘Zen questioning is not the same as rigorous philosophical inquiry. To be sure, Zen teachings engage metaphysical issues, most prominently the ‘Great Matter of life and death’. And insofar as they emphasize personal responsibility and freedom of choice, Zen teachings share common ground with existentialist thought. But unlike professional philosophy, Zen eschews definitions, abstract categories, and other components of systematic inquiry. Its way is more immediate, intuitive, personal, and concrete’.

I found one book-length study on the topic. Beckett and Zen by Paul Foster presents a challenging monograph on two difficult conceptions, one from that fearlessly inquisitive but honestly unbelieving writer, one from two millennia of authors known and unknown-- also distinguished for their refusal to speak but of the ultimately Unnam[e]able, of our fragile place in this enigmatically silent universe.

This aim nears an elusive target. Foster aligns Beckett's dilemma-- there is no God vs. we must seek God-- with the goal for Buddhism to veer away from a ‘monorail’ linear quest that traps Beckett’s characters to see only before or behind themselves in their existential exiles. Foster argues that their author, like his subjects, lacked the ability to exit this doomed road. There Beckett's dilemma's solved by leaving it and a/theism and existence as we know it and cannot know it otherwise all behind. Yet a true adept rejects mental constructs of a panicked ego. Zen searches for immersion into what’s beyond anguished thought, careless diversion, or misleading faith: into One Mind, the ultimate Unnameable.

In fact, Foster could have called it a ‘trilemma’, for not two but three horns rise. We face a senseless world without God, we lament our impotence, and we endure without solace. Foster, a longtime practitioner of Zen, employs Beckett's examinations of the mind in his major prose texts as a spiritual tool for exposing the ontological strengths, and ultimately weaknesses, of what happens when, as Beckett dared, you sit and contemplate your fate. Without bowing to a god, without killing yourself, without total despair or total comfort. A grim scenario for many of his characters and we his readers, but Foster delves into formidable narratives to apply his Zen-mind to Beckett's men and women who hesitate to make the ‘great leap’ demanded in Buddhism of those who would gain power over their impotent selves.

In Murphy, hints of Buddhism surface, but I agree with Foster that these are passing and rather inconsequential.  Still, there's a poetic sense of life's fragility amidst the sharpened exchanges of cruelty and cant. Three of my favorite passages: ‘He thought of the four caged owls in Battersea Park, whose joys and sorrows did not begin until dusk’. (106) ‘Is it its back that the moon can never turn to the earth, or its face?’ (131) ‘Each leaf as it fell had an access of new life, a sudden frenzy of freedom at contact with the earth, before it lay down with the others’. (150)

As with Scripture, one can read back into Beckett a myriad of critical intentions that the author may not have intended at all. For Watt, sophistry parodied wearyingly may veer near a Buddhist solution, however unintentional, when it comes to nothingness. ‘The difference is between the two is that where the one ends in brilliant but brick-wall theory, the other finds a way over the wall in practice. Where the one, like Watt, screams in an impasse of despair, the other initiates a revolution of mind that transcends both self and impasse’. (Foster, 150)

The prose trilogy that Foster takes on presents problems. With Molloy and Malone Dies, Foster ends his chapters on its first two installments at what to me appears a brick wall. Both novels break down, and while Foster excels at extracting fragments to shore up against ruin of the agonized narrators, I sense that he cannot solve the dilemmas that Beckett through his prose confronts without being able to resolve. The honesty of Beckett prevents him from doing so.

Foster, as with his subject, does not back down from what Beckett sneered or sighed at as ‘always the big questions’, and ‘the big answers’ that we all seek in our own exodus from meanings that comforted our ancestors, and may soothe our neighbors. For those among us who cannot be eased by such resolutions, the prose trilogy stands as an articulation of our refusal to submit, and of the pain this defiance by its honesty causes within the psyche. Can one say soul?

For Foster, no. As a Zen adept, he knows that Beckett's confrontation prevents the author from curing the dilemma that pierces him and his creations. The Unnamable tackles this in what superficially at times nears a Buddhist stance, but Foster knows that, given the cryptic and unstable narrative stance through which we hear the story, we cannot ascribe so reductively or summarily any pat solution to the momentous portents and baffling situations the protagonist-- if he indeed acts at all in the final judgment-- expresses so forlornly. It seems that Beckett steps back from the abyss, from what Zen would offer as obliteration within the One Mind.

I add here my problem with Foster's presentation. Beckett has been said to gain whatever knowledge of Buddhism he revealed via Arthur Schopenhauer, but that philosopher may have confused the One Mind direction of Buddhism with a Hindu ‘atman’-into-Oversoul version that distorts Zen teaching. In turn, as Foster does not elaborate upon Schopenhauer's interpretations of Buddhism, one's left to puzzle over what echoed philosophies of Mind and Nothingness Beckett inculcated. Here's a point where more elucidation would have helped ease what, given the textual and intellectual challenges, remain tough questions to address let alone resolve.

In the last text treated, the despairing (even by previous standards) How It Is, we're faced with faceless terrain that Foster compares to a prehistoric creature clawing through primordial mud. Meditation approaches the ‘monster silences vast tracts of time perfect nothingness’ (cited 238) of How; Foster finds the abandonment of the narrator approaching that required by the contemplative. Yet, Beckett draws again away and thus this text as with his work's a ‘tragedy’.

It's all ‘doomed to failure’, for the monorail perspective locks his narrators into infinite space and time without change, undeviating from ‘mental tedium’ of memories. The failure's not artistic, but cerebral. Foster compares our self to an onion, peeled down to its own essence but leaving us with emptiness at its core.

This impasse, Foster argues, presents us with a poignant encounter with how far Beckett comes, yet also how far he still had to go. Beckett failed to overcome the predicament that ties him and his narrators to the demands of the questioning ego, the relentless inquirer, the despairing pawn. No practitioners, they may be by Zen reckoning indeed doomed if they cannot escape ‘samsara’ and the ties to the flesh, ego, and stubborn soul that keep us tethered, dragging, or bound to this plain, pained existence.

Foster borrows an image employed by Alan Watts. We’re two faces on opposite sides of a coin, subject-object attempting to figure each other out. Stuck in this binary opposition, the ‘coin's faces’ spin about, failing to realize the thickness, the whatness, the ‘quidditas’ of the coin's hidden dimension.

This third, unseen dimension for Watts (if not Beckett's searcher, dim-bulb as we more resemble Watt) equally runs in both — and permeates all — directions inside the coin to unite its two sides. The two sides do not know of another way out; locked side-by-side but on opposite ends, they lack understanding of unseen unity. A new perspective extends the coin's definition beyond obverse-reverse dichotomies. This awakening may then truly join us to what we live within but we mistake as without.

Foster tackles the definition of the Void. He corrects Beckett critics who misunderstood this notionless notion as if synonymous with nihilism. A Zen practitioner, Foster argues that the Void nears more Nirvana or better yet, what's beyond that extinguishment of categories or oppositions that we can conjure up from our Cartesian dilemma. We strive to escape this subject-object divide that traps us in ‘samsara’ and prevents us from attaining awakening into ‘samadhi’ that will eventually pull the disciplined and undeluded seeker into realization of release from our body-mind problem. Liberation that allows neither God nor universe, self nor soul. Perhaps an indescribable realm, but we are scared because we stay ignorant, small, and frail. Beckett's terrain crawls with stammering, cowed figures.

I wonder, then, how the Void that Foster finds Beckett and his characters wrestling with — Jacob in an endless night battle with his assailant angel, dawn breaking not with deliverance but death — fits into not only Batchelor’s ‘playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before’ or Seaver’s Antepurgatory but a cyclical universe? The place that we may ‘know’ or posit that we cannot grasp. It's in this search where a Buddhist tries to release the breakthrough beyond time and space, mind or body.

Recently I found in Brian Clegg’s Before the Big Bang the notion of a brane, a multifold, crumpled, floating dimension a hair’s breadth from ours that may, every ten or twenty billion years, brush against our realm and annihilate it all, to start again, nearly ‘ex nihilo’ as it obliterates any ‘anxiety of influence’, any progenitor prior to a recurring Big Bang all over again out of background radiation that has never not been. This may be a Big Splat, this spiralling and colliding dance of not spheres but these ethereal planes, these branes. I recall an ancient phrase: ‘the Mystic Law, uncreated and eternal, of the Buddha of beginningless time’.

Our sister universe drifts forever out of our reach. Clegg explores how ‘Groundhog Universes’ may exist along the Big Crumple, the dodahecadron-shaped possibility of a universe that eludes our whole perception due to our inability to ‘see’ some of its directions. The Big Bang may be replaced with a Steinhardt-Turok ‘bouncing branes’ model. This may show another universe a millimeter away from ours with enough ripples in the space-time fabric to allow for gravitational anamolies and a sort of mirror-pattern that shows perhaps a universe previous to the creation of our own.

A cyclically reoccurring, ekpyotic brane may float, like a flipped coin’s edge, near our own universe that by ‘quidditas’ or whatness hovers nearly at our own point of entry.  Our perception escapes us by our own incomprehension or inarticulation to utter it and to frame in words what cannot be perceived-- let alone conceived-- within language. Out of this encounter we cannot bear witness-- for in it lies our cosmic formation and termination.

Yet, we can't help but wonder where we came from. The Buddha mused about this life-essence out of the Void as form from emptiness: nirvana ‘Uncreated, Unformed, Unborn’. This search for our meaning, our purpose, our existence fits neatly with Beckett's own bold if quixotic quest. We must explore what we cannot explain, but what we're compelled to attain.

Works Cited:

Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism without Beliefs. New York: Riverhead, 1997.
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. 1938. New York: Grove, 1970.
Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. Edison NJ: Riverrun and London: Calder, 2001.
Foster, Paul. Beckett and Zen. Boston and London: Wisdom Publications, 1989.
Howard, Ben. ‘A Fundamental Perplexity’. One Time, One Meeting. Blog. 18 Feb. 2010. http://practiceofzen.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/53-a-fundamental-perplexity.
Seaver, Richard, ed. I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader.  New York: Grove, 1976.
Portions of this essay appeared on my ‘Blogtrotter’, http://fionnchu.blogspot.com
A postscript: on Buddha.net, out of five pages of poetically apropos observations uploaded by various hands (Emily Dickinson's three poems shine terribly pure), Beckett is he who dies with the most quotes wins. None explicitly about dharma or Buddha, but all the more apposite.

P.S. This 3000-word essay had existed until March 2012 at Horizon Magazine, where it appeared 2010 in issue number 4. Edited by Mark A. Williams. As that site is defunct, I retrieved it via the Wayback Machine, embedding links to titles reviewed.  It's inspired by--but does not duplicate-- material from my earlier article on Beckett's purgatorial ideas in relation to medieval concepts, which was published as "Beckett's Purgatories" in Beckett, Joyce, and the Art of the Negative. ed. Colleen Jaurretche. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 109-124. European Joyce Studies 16. My thinking evolves, and a related review article on Donald S. Lopez. Jr.'s The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (Yale UP, 2012) has transformed via The Non-Buddhist, "The Buddha as counter-evolutionary."

Apropos, I append this link and in a future revision/ expansion of this, it will shift my essay, as Paul Foster apparently was unaware of this crucial conversation, or his 1989 book had already been in press when this account appeared: Lawrence Shainberg, "Exorcising Beckett." The Paris Review 104 (1987).  See also Shainberg's 1997 Ambivalent Zen memoir. Thanks to Glenn Wallis for excavating Shainberg's essay via Wallis' "Samuel Beckett Stares at a Wall" at Speculative Non-Buddhism.

P.P.S. Image: Tate Gallery. "Nirvana" Augustus John. 1908. "In Buddhist theology Nirvana is the state of perfect beatitude. It is the state where all passions are dissolved, the extinction of individual existence and absorption into the Supreme Being."