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bizarre, violent, multi-leveled, occasionally creepy and wholly hilarious
The Symbionese Liberation Army was the worst revolutionary group to ever exist. Largely self-imagined and, save for several crimes in the mid-’70s, rather ineffective, the SLA were more literary than anything else. This fact is confirmed by their one-hit-wonder move of kidnapping Citizen Kane’s granddaughter.
In Brian Joseph Davis’ new novel, I, Tania (ECW Press, 116 pages, $19.95), he does what few have done yet — take the ambiguity of the SLA and Patricia Hearst’s embracing (and denial) of revolution and open it up with humour. Scatological, slapstick and Marxist humour at that.
I, Tania’s format is a fake memoir and that may strike some as an odd choice but at least Davis is upfront. An epigraph from master memoir forger Clifford Irving announces that a work’s worth should never be considered based on veracity but on whether “it’s a good fake or a bad fake.” I, Tania begins as a good fake, sounding like the confessions of a one-time radical who’s gone into deep cover as a Republican housewife, just waiting for the chance to strike again. By the middle, however, it moves beyond a fake into something entirely different.
Readers may find the first part of the book, set as it is in the moldiest corners of the ’70s in the SLA compound, the easiest to connect with. The funniest thing Davis has written yet is a relentless page-long joke that involves Edgar Winter, the band Yes, the film Convoy, Frank Franzetta paintings and masturbation clean-up. There’s also plentiful information about the land of Symbia (note to non-aficionados — there is no country named Symbia), a place apparently founded on hair-metal and tourism that “recently signed a treaty with neighbouring Narnia, pledging a unified defense against the axis of Middle Earth, Eternia, Woodstock Nation, Fraggle Rock and Belgium.” Running to the limits of satire, Davis’ sense of era bends to the needs of a joke and hence there are ideologically correct translations of Destiny’s Child lyrics and Karl Marx himself starring in Tom Vu–like infomercials (“Today I’m gonna show you how to drive a sports car. First, you need the means of production! Do you think these girls like me? No! They like my means of production!”).
Davis abruptly jumps ahead to the present day, where Tania (the name Hearst took when joining the SLA serves as legal cover) is selling and marketing her memoirs. This is told through a series of jarring devices ranging from editorial notes to intrusions from other books. That said, he’s not trying to be smarter than the reader — just funnier, and these techniques are closer to Richard Lester than Nabokov. I, Tania’s final section, a debate between Tania and Katie Couric on The Today Show, evokes the long dialogues of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent.
Politicized violence, as it was in Conrad’s time and is now, is the stickiest tar pit of empty morality and it’s either incredibly sad or incredibly funny that the perfect conduits of this dialogue in our age are a self-parodying heiress and a talk show host. In Davis’ hands, it’s easy to answer “both,” as he also finds the time for digressions into Couric’s stoner poetry and who really was the better band: Bratmobile or Huggy Bear?
Not satisfied with even this anarchist bouillabaisse, Davis appends an afterword that’s a review of a terrible film version of I, Tania directed by Tony Scott. The sharp readers out there will notice that it’s just a review of Scott’s Domino with the characters’ names changed. As a final question, Davis seems to be suggesting that with fractured narrative and other tricks of the smartass arts playing well at malls, it may be time to lay them to rest in the compost along with Che t-shirts and punk box sets.
A good satirist lets the subject guide the writing and here, the SLA had already done much of the work. I, Tania is all the more bizarre, violent, multi-leveled, occasionally creepy and wholly hilarious for it — no matter who “wrote” it.
Brian Joseph Davis launches I, Tania on Oct. 10, 8pm. Supermarket, 268 Augusta. Free.
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