I have generally been full of praise for Eric Mader’s publications, but I’m sorry to say I didn’t find much to enjoy in his latest book, Minor Scratches.
It opens with a meditation on US gun laws based on the author’s nauseating adolescent experiences with pellet guns. He ends up lamenting all the animals and birds he killed. This is a sane and honest chapter, but after that sanity at least moves onto the back burner, and we are launched into the zany world of Mader at his most unapproachable.
There are narratives, some written by his Taipei students, in response to a bizarre sentence that contains a word the Taipei Times can’t print. There are several pages in Chinese. And there’s a story, some 65 pages long, about an ant in amber that manages to escape, and some anti-aging skin cream called ReJuve.
In a previous book, Idiocy, Ltd [reviewed in the Taipei Times on Aug. 15, 2015], Mader admitted to the influence of an early Soviet absurdist called Daniil Kharms. These items, however, were mixed with traditionally sober pieces, some of which I thought were extraordinarily good. Unfortunately there are no such items here, though the one on US guns, and by implication US gun laws, was certainly interesting.
I suspect I will not be alone in my aversion to this new book. The problem with the bizarre as a style, in my view, is that it lacks soul. And it seems to me that there is no soul, and no heart, in this book. This is strange, seeing that Mader is nowadays a Catholic, though there’s no reason why Catholics shouldn’t be surrealists as well.
This brings me to the definition of art that Mader offers at the end of the book: “a dialectic of mimesis and defamiliarization.” What this means, colloquially, is an inquiry (dialectic) into the imitation (mimesis) of the world we see around us, but rendered unfamiliar.
Thus, we all recognize a human body, but it’s made unfamiliar in the hands of, say, the painters Picasso or Francis Bacon. Musical instruments, similarly, imitate the human voice but change it in subtle ways. War and Peace presents us with recognizable human types, but in a unique and unrepeatable situation.
I found this definition of art very persuasive and I’m grateful to Mader for having come up with it. But unfortunately the pieces in the rest of the book manifestly don’t conform to the definition’s high aspirations.
Mader’s history as a writer seems to be in — what I hope is — temporary decline. He’s a Taipei resident and teacher, and someone who narrowly missed becoming a professional academic. He started off with A Taipei Mutt [reviewed on Dec. 14, 2003], a comic novel that had a lot to say about Taiwan in general. Then came Heretic Days [reviewed on Feb. 28, 2012], a collection of short pieces with many outstanding items, such as one on William Blake and the Muggletonians, a small Protestant sect that may have influenced him.
Idiocy, Ltd followed. Here the surreal element — if that’s the right word, and it may not be — made its first appearance, but was mixed in with many sober pieces such as “Making the Grade in Naples, Florida,” where the truly awful world of the suburban US was exposed with masterly incisiveness.
Now, in Minor Scratches (which Mader at one point intended to call “Minor Scratches: A Taiwan Miscellany”) the “surreal” has taken over almost completely.
Section Four of the book is itself titled “Minor Scratches.” Ah, here will be the book’s heart, I thought. But it turned out to be a series of jokes — many of them spoofs on old chestnuts like Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road and Knock Knock, Who’s There, the latter getting no reply. It seemed like a difficult task better left unattempted. A thought that came to mind was that the book as a whole was a series of insider jokes for a community of Taiwan insiders that may not exist.
Take one brief item, “Per Pound.” This is a two-line poem that imitates Ezra Pound’s imagist item “In a Station of the Metro.” Pound wrote as follows: The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/ Petals on a wet, black bough.
Mader comes up with the following: Those summerclad Ohio girls on the Taipei metro/ Pork chops on a wet silver bough. My reaction, I’m afraid, was “So what?” Are the girls over-weight? I’m sorry, but I didn’t get it. Yet Mader devotes a whole page to it.
Then there’s an extensive interview, conducted with the author of the vituperative novel set in modern China, Party Members [reviewed on March 2, 2017]. Its writer goes under the pseudonym of Arthur Meursault
Here the questions are straightforward but the answers generally convoluted. Interesting topics raised, but not expanded on, include “our now overly politicized universities” plus literary academia’s “ever-present Thought Police,” Mader’s religious history, why he opts for self-publication and his belief that Taipei’s is a culture “that knows how to study” (alluded to elsewhere as well).
But this was not my kind of book. In fact, I would like to appeal to Eric Mader to go back to his old, straightforward style. It’s a tradition that goes back 3,000 years after all, whereas this kind of absurdist humor has only a relatively short history, and could be regarded as a mere squib, an insignificant sideshow — and probably a cul-de-sac at that.
I wish I’d been able to praise this book. Mader has been good to me, contributing a long and insightful review of my own novel to amazon.com. But a reviewer has a responsibility to potential readers as well as to authors, and I’d be being dishonest if I suggested that Minor Scratches, by and large, was worth a great deal of anybody’s time.
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