Ask the Dust

Yesterday I intended to massage out some meaning from the etymology and definition of "disenfranchisement," as well as to write on Fante's Ask the Dust. In any case, I didn't get around to either.

One thing I find very interesting about the definition is that it relates pretty much excusively to voting and freedom. This shows the limiting power of language, as we know off-hand that we use the terminology of disenfranchisement well beyond one's right to vote. Beyond that, it sets up an interesting discourse on the ability to vote, freedom, and the Other that possibly transcends the duality conversation on "freedom from" and "freedom to."

Unfortunately, I don't feel secure in my language or in my understanding of the concept, as yet, to talk about that as pointedly as I'd like to, so hopefully over the course of the next several entries I can begin to approach a meaningful discourse on those terms and their relationships with one another.

The work towards that today consists of exploring disenfranchisement in Fante's Ask the Dust. I bought this book on the recommendation of Bukowski and I wasn't let down at all, even after Bukowski described Fante as his god and wrote of the book, "the beginning...was a wild and enormous miracle to me." The most interesting thing he writes on it, for my purposes, is "Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, 'Don't call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!'"

Arturo Bandini is Fante's young and struggling Los Angeles transport from the Mid-West there living on his destiny as a great writer and the publication of one short story by a critic and publisher he admires. He resides in a dump he can't afford and hates the way his talent goes so unappreciated, keeping his head in a world of cloudy delusions of granduer. He falls in love with a Mexican waitress, Camilla, who is in love with a dying bartender, Sammy, who moves to the Mojave desert and does not want that "little spick," Camilla in his shack. Bandini struggles with love, makes himself callous and isn't able to get his dick up with her. When another woman,Vera-a woman with great scars whom he takes pity on- wants him, though, he sleeps with her under the pretense that she is his Mayan Princess, Princess Camilla.

This is, in my reading, Fante's 1939 L.A. version of Dostoyevsky's underground man. (I should add that I intended to make Notes From Underground the first book for this class, reading Ask the Dusk for myself, before realizing its value.)It has the necessary parts to constitute an account of the educated, or at least well-read and intelligent, disenfranchised youth. There is the constant need for funds, the lack of family financial support that put the young genius where he finds himself, the sense of angry entitlement, the smug moral superiority that comes with misreading Nietzsche, a failure to acknowledge his own humanity, and the possibility for salvation by way of a whore, which combine to lead to disillusionment and what could be argued to be salvation.

As I only have to write as much as I want, I'm going to pretty much stop here so far as the theory goes, but will add quotes from the book that I think are important to the topic.

First Paragraph: One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle lof Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving accute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you.

The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot fire in your skull, that you are not to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you were poor, rambling the gutters of Los Angeles because you are por, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

At least she had identified him as a man.

You're cleaner than me because you've got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.

My plight drove me to the typewriter.

I wanted to hurt her.

Not everyone who comes into this dive is a bum.

There was none, there was none at all, only the retreat to Hackmuth's letter and thoughts that remained to be written, but no lust, only fear of her, and shame and humiliation.

Love wasn't everything.

You're dancing with a freah, an outcast from the world of man.

"Then you too know about me!" she said. "You're like the rest of them. You know about my wounds, and that's why you won't kiss me. Because I disgust you!"

I deserve more than your disgust.

She fell on her knees before me and begged me to tell her she was not disgusting.

There I let go, crying and unable to stop because God was such a dirty crook, such a contemptible skunk, that's what he was for doing that thing to that woman.

"You're a Mayan princess." "I am Princess Camilla."

It had to be my way or nothing.

She had been nice to Arturo Bandini, and she was poor.

Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths.

For all things there shall be forgiveness when I return to my homeland by the sea.

I ran a few steps towards the sea. Then I ran back.

Because this was being alive, this looking into the black eyes of Camilla, matching her scorn with hope and a brazen gloating.

I thought that would be delightful: order her hour, she so wonderfully beautiful in her own way, and forced to leave because I ordered her out.

Men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them...In my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence, toward which he was being hurled...I stood at the mailbox, my head against it, and grieved for Sammy, and for myself, and for all the living and the dead.

I helped her to her feet, dried her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face, and felt responsible for her.

I felt the pain, the sharp agony of the flesh of my feet torn by my own weight.