Fiction Friday: Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
“Hardly a pure science is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal differences between the hubandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”
Long before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code there was Tom Robbins and a mummified Jesus on display in Another Roadside Attraction. Robbins writes in a rambling and wildly fragmented fashion, telling his fantastically conceived stories in an almost mythical style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Though Robbins lacks the imagination of Borges, he does share the Argentinian’s gift for erecting curious outposts of cultural self-awareness. Throughout Another Roadside Attraction the reader feels less like a companion of the characters (like most fiction) and more like an anthropologist, peeking into the field notes of a colleague who has discovered a bizarre and deliciously intriguing foreign culture.
That culture turns out to be our own.
Our main characters are an unlikely collection of pluralistic creatures: a magician/artist/musician, a an earthy pagan princess, the specter of Modernity bearing the name “Marx,” and a martial arts expert disguised as an assassin-monk who wandered the catacombs of the Vatican only to discover the mummified secret at the heart of the world’s most powerful religion. Though Robbins skewers Christianity in this story, it would be a mistake to read this novel as merely an attack on that faith. Robbins project is more ambitious – Jesus just proves to be the fattest sacred cow in what he considers to be history’s husbanded barn of “bullshit.” Ultimately, all of it must get shoveled out. Robbins reflects, in his disjointed prose, a postmodern prejudice toward the wild complexity of life and the futility of linear narratives. The pervasive – yet somehow funny and lighthearted – skepticism toward authoritative meta-narratives lie at the heart of Robbin’s novel; he simply doesn’t believe the power-claims of history anymore. Jesus may be the most conspicuous casualty, but he’s not the only one.
Robbins wants us to question history as well. Are magical thunderstorms, assassin-monks, and a mummified Jesus in the catacombs of the Vatican any more implausible than Manifest Destiny, Western Cultural hegemony, and the story of Jesus’ resurrection? Robbin’s would have us see that compared to Western history, Another Roadside Attraction is possibly the saner narrative, or, at least, no more the husbanded product of cross-pollinated scat than history itself. Because he writes with more art and honesty than Dan Brown, his critique – though ultimately adolescent – comes across as more damaging.
Yet Robbins has tossed out too much. He shovels out possibility of a truth with any purchase on people, and thereby tosses out the very concept of history itself. Without history there is no heritage, no sense of self via the communal connections of a shared identity. Without history there is no ethnicity, either inborn or adopted; there is no culture or conversion, only the wildly individualized consumption of personally invented identity. There are no convincing alternatives teased out in the relationships and philosophies that are always clever but never authentic, always wry and witty, but never satisfying. He seeks to “enrich” the future through the selective breeding of fictionalized historical alternatives, but ends up bankrupting our future by looting our past.
I think it was CS Lewis who said, “try deconstructing yourself for a change.”
I am a product of emerging culture, so I am breathing in my native air when I read guys like this, but at some point I have realized that they do just utterly fail to actually say anything.
You are spot on with this:
“always clever but never authentic”