Many readers will remember David Barton as beginning an interview with the Taipei Times by recounting how in a bar a young Taiwanese held the tip of a knife between his ribs and Barton thought, “Go on then, are you going to push it in or aren’t you?” [page 18 Taipei Times, Nov. 25, 2007].
This would have been remarkable enough for any expatriate involved in a drunken brawl, but became truly sensational when you learned that Barton was a professor of literature at Taiwan’s National Central University.
The great American critic Harold Bloom once remarked that he didn’t understand a word of the French poet Mallarme (mentioned in Lazar and Leper, Barton’s new publication), but would continue reading him until the day he died. Difficulty in literature, in other words, doesn’t necessarily stand in the way of certain kinds of enjoyment.
Lazar and Leper is certainly difficult in some aspects. It consists of a series of dialogues between the two named characters while playing a game of cards. These are illustrated by paintings by Barton, ostensibly relating to the dialogue, on the opposite page. There are 18 such dialogues and paintings, and the whole book only consists of 39 pages.
The names Lazar and Leper are, of course, related. A “lazar-house” in medieval England was somewhere where lepers (sufferers from leprosy, then common in Europe) were treated and/or incarcerated. And indeed the two characters, always dressed differently in the different paintings, often seem to be wearing what could be medieval costumes.
But Lazar is also Lazarus, the man in the New Testament’s Gospel According to St. John, who Jesus raised from the dead. The second dialogue contains the phrase “because Lazar had died so often”, though in a later dialogue Lazar says “I wish I could die.”
At the end of the book is a list of “Messiahs and Martyrs.” Among these, alongside Caravaggio (who painted The Raising of Lazarus in around 1609) and Jesus and Wotan, clearly seen as comparable gods in a neo-Nietzschean system (see below), come Vladimir and Estragon. These are the names of the two central figures is Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, and it’s clear Lazar and Leper owe something to these forebears. Both pairs of figures await the passing of time, and debate its meaning, without coming to any very obvious conclusions.
If this book looks to Waiting for Godot as a model, it isn’t the first to do so. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was another. And Godot itself owed something to Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty, so there’s something of a tradition operating here.
Other names in the list are more enigmatic, not to say bizarre. They include “US Naval Servicemen,” “NASA” and “Korean Comfort Women.” Just David Barton’s little jokes, perhaps, something that his earlier novels, Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan and Saskatchewan, might well have prepared us for.
Central to Lazar and Leper is Frederick Nietzsche’s concept of recurring time, the idea that history goes in cycles and the same sort of phenomena repeat themselves. Thus, with reference to the giant stone carvings on Easter Island, the Moai, Lazar says “There are as many messiahs as there are Moai on Easter Island” which is followed by “New messiah, new name. They always arrive borne by first light and shine gloriously until they cool off and are changed into stone.”
So, while religions succeed one another in a cyclical manner, Lazar and Leper endlessly play cards, waiting for the end, hardly remembering the beginning, and consoling themselves with erudite jokes.
There’s a fatalism about this book that resembles some Hindu beliefs. The forces of creation are balanced by the forces of destruction, and it’s all a dance of the gods. Significantly, nuclear weapons are mentioned once. I half-expected Donald Trump to make an appearance.
And then there’s the question of the illustrations. These look like montages, with the card-players featuring in most of them, flanked by females who are invariably in modern dress, usually swim-wear. Various symbolic images, such as dragons and snakes, also make an appearance. Sometimes the painted figures of Lazar and Leper assume the look of something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Elsewhere the ensembles resemble Gauguin’s paintings of the Polynesians of Tahiti.
In response to an e-mail enquiry, Barton told me that the “Hazard” referred to in the text as the last name of Lazar and Leper came from a Mallarme poem Un Coup de Des (“A Throw of the Dice”). “Hasard” in French means “chance,” and the poem begins “Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard” (a throw of the dice will never abolish chance). This, Barton said, combined with Cezanne’s painting of two men playing cards — which I should have remembered as Cezanne is one of his messiahs and martyrs — to form the basis of the book.
Maybe the heart of Barton’s attitude lies in the following words: “But to stand in the midst of this discordant harmony and whole marvelous uncertainty and ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning … that is what I feel to be contemptible.”
So what is this intriguing little product? An intellectual comic-strip? The creative representation of a psychotic imagination? The latest product of Taiwan’s expat Samuel Beckett? Something of all three, perhaps, plus a great deal more besides.
However you look at it, this is a very unusual item to come out of Taiwan. There are several English-language writers living here, none without their interest. But Barton is certainly the most eccentric, and one of the most engaging.
To access Lazar and Leper, go to davidbartonart.weebly.com and download the product as an e-book. This way the text and illustrations will appear side by side, as intended. Hard copies are available at Caves Books at the National Central University.
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