Torture and the Sublime

Page 16 American Book Review It may be the revelation of consciousness more than the telling of story that has always defined the novel. B O O K R e V i e W s TorTure and The Sublime Daniel Garrett the water Cure Percival Everett Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 246 pages; cloth, $22.00 Percival Everett’s novel The Water Cure, about a young girl’s sudden disappearance and her father’s attempts to come to terms with her sexual assault and violent death, is a work of sharp poetic and philosophical fragments, a work in which love, grief, rage, and vengeance are forces that move through the text the way wind and sunlight might move over land, caressing here, warming there, benevolent and destructive, uprooting what looked like a forest of sturdy reasons, and scorching contemporary understandings of morality. The Water Cure is intended to have—and does have—a special resonance for our time, as it asks: does the knowledge that someone chose to act in a way that brutally hurt another person , or other people, give us permission to disregard personal civility, social morality, and legal rights in order to verify the facts of what was done, and to institute punishment? Is torture acceptable? Although I have admired other books by Percival Everett (Cutting Lisa [1986], God’s Country [1994], Watershed [1996], Frenzy [1997], and Wounded [2005]), it was not first clear to me that The Water Cure would fulfill my idea of what a novel is. This novel of fragments begins with an illustration and few words—“so we induce and find the arduous nowhere”—spread out over a couple of pages, followed by a confession of the narrator’s personal guilt and his impersonal words analyzing language. That is a bold, impressive, but far from charming beginning. The fragments of the text, mixing scenes from the present and the past, have different objects of concern, factors that frustrate conventional narrative , simple connections, and easy understanding. The fragments of the text suggest the madness of mourning and conjure the chaos of a complex world. What unifies those fragments is the consciousness, the personality and purpose, of the lead character and narrator, Ishmael Kidder, a divorced man who lives alone atop a mountain and writes romance novels under another name, an eccentric writer who hates a ringing telephone and takes his own food into restaurants when dining with his agent; Ishmael Kidder, the bereaved father, a father who once found serenity in the face of his daughter, a sweet brown-skinned wildhaired child fond of her doll and bicycle and who feared heights. Ishmael’s consciousness transforms fragments into a unique story, into a novel. It may be the revelation of consciousness more than the telling of story that has always defined the novel: what is more secret, and more vital, than what we think and feel? Everett’s The Water Cure is a work offering a genuine moral challenge—and it is a challenge the narrator may or may not survive, but it is a challenge that not every reader will survive with the certainty of his or her own decency intact. For one, I wanted an ending yet more cruel than the author gives us: sometimes cruel and unusual punishment—and the ritual of vengeance—seems as satisfying as justice delivered (vengeance is a brute power, but it is a power, when one feels otherwise hurt, weak). The book forced me to know that—it brought me to an awareness of what I can accept; and in that awareness, I understood how a nation of supposedly sane, decent citizens can allow individuals to be picked up around the world, delivered to secret locations, and tortured: and in awareness, I saw the ways of moral error. The ancient philosopher Thales thought that the basic element in the world was water; and much of the human body is made up of water—and water can be used to torture. Waterboarding involves binding someone to a board and elevating feet above clothcovered head, with water poured over the covered head, until the held person fears he will drown (that the lungs are positioned above the...