Rebel Rebel

In his new collection The Encyclopedia of Rebels, Mel Freilicher interweaves historical discourse, autobiography, and pop culture satire. Set partly during the most virulent, statist excesses of the Bush era, these genre intersections form a sort of imaginative rampart, a refuge as the narrator shapes meaning across a history of American activism and dissent. This subaltern history is conveyed in the context of Freilicher’s own life story as an activist, writer and teacher, grounding these narratives in a life fully lived.

The collection begins with “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” which alternates the tragic biography of slave rebellion leader Denmark Vesey with a funny and sexy pastiche of the Nancy Drew mysteries. The Nancy Drew passages take the form of elaborately punned “blue” jokes, while the story of Denmark Vesey is truly harrowing: a freed slave, Vesey was long thought to be the leader of an early 19th century slave rebellion in Charleston, S. C. However, new historical evidence indicates that Vesey and the dozens of other black men arrested, tortured and executed in the suppression of this “rebellion” were the victims of a political plot hatched by Charleston mayor James Hamilton, Jr., who was later elected governor of South Carolina and became a Civil War secessionist leader. Freilicher’s juxtaposition of his ribald Nancy Drew pastiche with this brutal historical episode can be read as a way to leaven the sense of tragedy while still manifesting Freilicher’s agency as an activist writer.

The text “Saved by Hippolyte Havel, Anarchist” comingles the story of anarchist firebrand Hippolyte Havel with Freilcher’s autobiographical ruminations. Despondent, middle-aged (are the two synonymous?), Freilicher finds in Havel a symbol of an earlier, more socially dynamic era, a time in which it was still possible to imagine a better future. Havel seems to have personified the Bohemian culture early 20th Century Greenwich Village. A legendary drunk and provocateur, Havel seemingly knew everyone and was everywhere that mattered, socially and politically, at the center of hives of dissident political activity like the Ferrer Modern School. Yet he was more than a man about town: a displaced, nomadic European dissident, often imprisoned, near poverty; as a dissident always facing deportation, Havel was also prone to depression—leftist radical John Reed once prevented Havel’s suicide.

Havel’s portrait is interwoven with Freilicher’s honest, matter-of-fact self appraisal in which he documents his alienation from his own historical conditions. It is while engaged in his work as a writer that Freilicher feels most at home in the world; encouragingly, after a long bout with writer’s block, his research on and writing about Havel frees him to again pursue his true vocation. Certainly, while Freilicher finds inspiration in Havel, there is something else, some larger aesthetic process in operation here: it’s as if in Freilicher’s engagement with America’s subaltern past he grants himself access to these long suppressed currents of dissent, thus writing himself into this discourse. This would be, for any writer, no small task, and Freilicher is aided greatly by his facility with narrative pacing and his mastery of tone: he never comes off as self-aggrandizing or solipsistic, and here strikes a fine balance between close detailing and the use of narrative summary.

Further, what makes this collection so satisfying is the deftness and confidence with which Freilicher employs a variety of narrative modes. For example, the Pop, postmodern pastiche “Superman vs. Atom Man: a radio play” allows him to engage in the same sort of extended double entendres found in this above mentioned, “Stories We Tell Ourselves.” However, because it this is ostensibly a script for radio play, the narrative consists completely of dialog, with dialog being used sparsely throughout the rest of the collection.

Further expanding the range of the collection is the fantasy “120 Days in the FBI, My Untold Story, by Jane Eyre.” Here Freilicher appropriates the Charlotte Bronte novel to his own, humorous ends. Mysteriously transported to the 1960s, Jane Eyre takes a clerical job at FBI...