Dormant Beasts

by Mai Bellmer

Yugoslavia is in some ways a poignant nation. Not tragic, exactly, though it is that too. Russia, Germany, other places lead on that score, given their more extensive genocidal resumes. But body counts, per se, don't cast historical shadows or serve as a significant cultural seismograph. Yugoslavia always has, and still does.

Of course there is no Yugoslavia any longer. But the Serb-Croat-Muslim residents that survived it, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its predecessor, the Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire, still carry that Empire's quasi-international heritage, its cosmopolitan perspective.

And those habits are poignant. Because the Hapsburg Empire was as close as Europe ever came to being European. A nation of multiple languages, multiple cultures, various peoples, numerous philosophies, the Empire was more than a forerunner of the European Commonwealth. In many ways it was that Commonweath realized, even idealized. Not a collage reluctantly forced together for principally economic reasons, but a genuine nation. A cultural sensibility, not an ensemble of such.

Perhaps that explains the ferocity of the nationalism in that area; for national identity to a Yugoslav is something that requires assertion, struggle; it is not a given.

Though circumstances now conspire to contract them to the roles of Croat, Serb, and Bosnian Muslim, ex-Yugoslavs still retain a sense of what it meant to be part of something greater and more general. Which is why I think certain Yugoslav writers merit particular attention, exhibiting greater sensitivity than most to the meaning of the European.

That sensitivity, principally, is why I enjoyed The Dormant Beast, by Enki Bilal, and why it's very much worth reading.

I expect it will not get terribly many thoughtful readers, for Bilal's book is that thing of shame, a comic book. A 'graphic novel,' to be precise, Between thick hardcovers, though that of course will fool no one. No American critics, that is. Here, when it comes to comic art, form convicts content and there is no appeal.

But other nations are not quite as quick to condemn prior to sampling. To the Japanese, graphic narrative ('manga') is as valid a genre as any other, and among the French, Mobius is as highly regarded as Godard. This may well explain Bilal's ambitions in the form. Born in 1951 in Belgrade, he came to Paris in 1960, worked with Alain Resnais as scene designer for the film La vie est un novel, and himself directed the film La foire aux immortels.

The comics he also then produced -- penciled cinema, really -- became best sellers almost at once, notable for their brooding emphasis on history, society, politics. Partie de Chasse, for one: a story of leaders of the Soviet Bloc in a remote locale for a hunting trip. Their history of violence and subjugation unfolds through conversations and flashbacks till an appallling picture of the spiritually and politically destructive consequences of unbalanced power emerged.

Bilal's portraiture of the wretched roots of Europe's twentieth-century reality soon turned to its future branches.  His Nikopol trilogy depicted the Paris of the new century as an underground of crime, astronauts, aliens, destruction, resurrected ancient Egyptian gods, rotten political systems and violence, a smorgasbord that drew much critical attention.

Over there. To Americans, of course, Europe is not merely no more but barely ever was, serving at best as a picturesque vacation spot, backdrops for World War Two films, and the inspiration for shows like Les Miserables. And Americans know too that comic books are for kids, and would be even if Van Gogh were to draw it, Eisenstein set up the shots and angles, and Sophocles script the dialogue.

Thus Bilal's latest will not get anything like attention here it would have gotten had he written it in novel form. Which is more the pity for us.

It isn't a pleasant tale. The story of The Dormant Beast is a near-future story, which is to say, harsh, grubby, and convoluted. Bilal gives us the now-mandatory Blade Runner anticipations of days to come, the mise-en-scene a politically dystopian automobile graveyard draped with wiring and rife with multinational neon, omnipresent logos, and endless flickering security cameras and computer screens.

Bilal adds a few depressing though conceivable political developments of his own. Moslem, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalist elements have pooled to form a radical monotheist group/movement called the Obsurantis Order, whose Pol Pot-like goal is to exterminate capitalists, intellectuals and who or whatever else culturally embodies the modern, so as to drag mankind back to an animal Shatov-like herd existence 'pleasing to God'.

The Order plans to reduce human language to 499 words, all the better to protect people's minds from heretical concepts; but, tactically, it does not hesitate to use the high-tech it despises during the intermediary struggle for stupidity, and dispatches android duplicates, missile-carting SWAT teams, nano-based mechanical flies to serve as mobile brainwashers and political police. (One such bug, a mandatory attachment in Middle Eastern cabs, shaves off the head and pubic hair of all infidels fornicating in the back seat.) Less amusingly, the Order also kidnaps and converts infidels by force in mind control facilities half-Scientologist, half-Auchwitz in orientation.

The Order is interested in the book's protagonist, Nike Hatzfeld, ostensibly because Hatzfeld has perfect recall, and by rendering it imperfect or nonexistent he can be used to shore up their ongoing work of historical revisionism, followed by historical extermination. But in fact Hatzfeld is being used by them as a Trojan horse to carry a signalling device to their foes, whereupon a space-based laser will obliterate their top hierarchy. (If successful; the targets counter-plot to use Nike in the same way to obliterate his senders.)

Sounds complex and conspiratorial? It is. But that's not the core of the story. The core, for Hatzfeld, is that his perfect recall is imperfect. He can remember very far back, but not the first eighteen days after his birth, and he wants to them very badly, for he was born in Sarajevo's Kosevo Hospital during the bombings and the siege, and there he swore to protect two other orphans there with him, Amir and Leyla. Unable to recall their names or faces, he's been unable to keep that promise. But his memory over the years has gone progressively further back, till now the first eighteen days are at last rising to awareness.

Much of the book, then, consists of Hatzfeld's recollections of what its like to be a child, and institutionalized, and bombed. And this accurate and serious record is juxtaposed, and quietly and subtly linked, with its fruit, the coming European dystopia.

The meditations on those connections are interesting, but as actual prophecy goes, Bilal gives few surprises. Orwell once said that the fault of most political crystal-gazing was the tendency to take present trends as invariably persisting. The Huns, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, are on the march? Then clearly they're going to overrun the world tomorrow! In fact, such monoliths collapse like houses of cards, leaving nothing but scorched earth and enduring contempt.

Bilal persists in this debatable method of projection. The future he shows is our present, amped and extended: terrorists, reactionary fundamentalism, genocidal corporate and governmental bureaucrats, a disinforming press, 'preventative' covert action, etc. Not a useless exercise, for it tells us something about ourselves, if not about the future.

But though Bilal's picture of near-future Europe is a revealing and even plausible extension of its present, it's not the explicit aspects but the elements at the periphery of the vision, that make it interesting. Its visual griminess, its dirt, its chaos, for instance. Americans tend to think of the future in terms of McDonaldsization: everything clean, uniform; if not sparkling at least plastic. A future, in short, in which there is no past.

This isn't the European attitude. There the past persists with a vengeance. Bilal's cities to come are a wild collage of old buildings, nineteenth century flats and hotels and sidewalks, patched-up plumbing and rusting cars, shabby cafes and dented taxis, all punctuated with swatches and splashes of equally grubby graffiti-bearing future high-tech.

Another wonderfully un-American motif: I can think of nothing I've read recently in which money means so little as a motivator of action. A very few characters in The Dormant Beast do things for money, yes, but it's clearly perfunctory, and the payoffs prove grim. It's so clearly not an American product in this respect that it's enthralling.

It's a strange thing to say about a book so consistently grimy, but honor, family, loyalty, knowledge -- truth -- are prime values in Bilal's book. Belief, love, honor -- this is what moves these characters. The decor may be the sewers of Paris via I, Robot, but the protagonists are not robots in the least. Nor are they tragic. Good and evil are clearly demarcated in this volume, and the latter is not only despicable but vulnerable. The dormant beasts are pushed back, and held back.

It's rare to encounter a modern work where the outer dirt comes paired with such an inner cleanliness. But this is that sort of work. Which also is why I recommend it. The visual look is grubby and dark, the sociological prophecies iffy, but the actors are dominantly decent and brave. And, rarest thing of all, they prevail.

Do we learn something about the European sensibility from works like this? I think so. I, at least, have the feeling reading it that that sensibility is likely to survive. For I've read few things that stress so forcefully that the presence of the past is constant and ineradicable, and must be known and faced:  Bilal's Hatzfeld wants to know the past and to act honorably, and does both. I've also read few things that say as forcefully that the poisons and threats to come can be met, and overcome. This book does say so, and so ends very hopefully, almost happily.

And I like that sort of ending. In fact, the whole book.

Enki Bilal has an official home page in French at http://bilal.enki.free.fr/

The End