Juan Francisco Ferré - El fiesta del asno (The Feast of the Ass)

[Stefan]

I'd like to point anyone who is new to Juan Francisco Ferré to a page we at And Other Stories put together to give you an introduction to his writing:
http://www.andotherstories.org/juan-f...

I have just read the book. I'm still reeling.

I don't quite know what to say yet. I reacted in many ways to this ferocious, dizzying, libertarian, shocking, libidinal piece, but I'll say one thing: it's the first book I've read from cover-to-cover in Spanish. It didn't let me go. (I read and translate Portuguese and German, and read French, but had never managed to read a whole book in Spanish till now, just that little bit too different from Portuguese.)
And I read it with a cold - but then maybe the book made me sick? It's the sort of book that could.

I realize this might not make you keen to read the book, but if you like edgy fiction by someone who is definitely practicing an art (and I wouldn't say that about a lot of 'literary fiction'), if you are up for reading Jelinek or Stewart Home or Sade, I wonder what you would make of this writer.

I'm going to let the experience sink in and post more at some future point.

[Stefan]

Now that a couple of weeks have passed I’d like to properly share some thoughts on the book.

A friend recommended El fiesta del asno by Ferré as a book that embodies the new media logic that has changed our experience. Within a few clicks (or even without clicks) it’s possible to see news, family snaps, porn, advertising in the form of drama, extreme politics, bomb-making or Pentagon-hacking do-it-yourself videos in Youtube – you never quite know what is next.
Ferre uses the fragmentary form that post-modernist authors have made much more familiar to readers, and uses it to say something about a world that the earlier post-modernists hadn’t yet seen. (Of course, if you called this book a collection of linked stories, it might seem less like a fragmentary narrative. But this book is very much about the media’s corruption of our lives and it is publishing’s own corruption to try to sell anything it can as a novel. Because novels sell.)

Some people say literature is too globally homogenous (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...), and post-modernism itself has been criticized for being a globalized trend in literature, which – while Borges, Calvino et al were there first – certainly has been developed and then ‘distributed’ via the US American books of a whole bunch of ‘po-mo’ writers – Barthelme, Pynchon et al. For example, the blogger of The Reading Experience laments the lack of the local in some po-mo works from Europe (http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_...). Ferré’s book is very much engaging with a local condition: the Basque independence movement and terrorist activity. I loved its parodic use of other art, for example the main character takes on Sade’s role in the asylum, then there is a scene reminiscent of Goya’s El tres de mayo de 1808 where a man with his arms raised is shot by the firing squad point-blank. I have a feeling there are many (Spanish and other) references I’ve not picked up on.

I said ‘engaging’ with a condition – ironically mocking it, to be precise.
It’s a book in the tradition of Sade, of writers who believe our society’s ideologies, politics, religions and morals are all hypocritical rubbish, there to oppress us and repress our urges. It’s a book that sees literature as a place to show these urges, to express everything prohibited. As in Stewart Home’s books, there is a sense of mischief, and a relish for transgression and political intrigue and subcultures.

Transgression is no more new than post-modernism, but Ferré is about as spiky as it gets. He really goes for it, there are no limits. So, as in Sade, there is rape without spending time on what effect this has on the victim, and extreme violence. This is, you can imagine, unsettling reading. In Ferré’s defence, his book is a highly stylized book, it focuses on people as vectors of desire, sites for the play of power and erotic relations. (I chose these words in imitation, the author is well-versed in philosophical and cultural thinking, and like Sade the theory is part of the fiction.) The book is only one perspective.

That perspective is not interested in characters’ idiosyncracies or what is commonly called their ‘humanity’ (the book aims to make people re-evaluate 'humanity'). No one worries in this book about gaining weight, about getting cancer, about what someone thinks of them, about a relationship, about someone else’s wellbeing. The book gives a stripped-down vision of carnal life without any quackery or mumbojumbo. There is an incredibly powerful scene with a ‘humanist’ pathologist who has an orgy of delight in grabbing around inside the dead (now female) Gorka on the slab ‘in search of something which had not been named exactly and which it would not be necessary to name because of its recognized non-existence’. This delight in proving the non-existence of anything other than the material perhaps encapsulates much of the book’s power to shock.

Yet as a reader unwilling to accept that society’s accepted ways of behaving (morals) are only an oppressive weight, and personally of the opinion that there is a wealth of artistic material to be found in human relations beyond obvious displays of power, violence and sex, I found myself chafing at what seemed to me like a reduced palette here (in spite of the excess). Not that there is anything wrong with a stylized, reduced palette – Greenaway films like the horrific Baby of Macon for example.
Maybe it is the amount of theory in the narration that made me want to object, to say ‘but!..’ In other words, maybe my response is not only a moral one (although that surfaced as I read), but also exasperation with a know-it-all tone, with a book that for all its carnality is very cerebral. There is a bullying tone in the repetitions that suggests that any other view of humanity is to be duped and not free. Is there preachiness to the libertarian thinking? It’s my hunch that Ferré would be very glad to see my ‘reactionary’ moral reading – it proves his book has power to shock, but maybe less glad that I find he has written moral lessons of his own kind.

I would be interested to hear other readers’ reactions to it. And if these things can be separated out: what do you think of the artistry of the book alone? Of its attempt to copy and use the full gamut of media experience?

The writing is also often very funny, mordantly, terribly funny, and is baroquely inventive in its situations and scenarios. (In this the palette is certainly not reduced.) Ferré is an artist, no doubt about that to me.

[Lechuza]

Not sure I'm writing this in the right place... but if anyone would like a real-life copy of this book then I have one I can send - let me know. Rosalind