"GET AQUINAS IN HERE!"
REVIEW: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams
I first came upon this novel in a post on another Substack called Book Brat. That post is one of the few things written about it to welcome the spirit of the book. Otherwise most of the reviews haven’t done it justice and have, in some cases, really gotten it wrong. The below is my contribution!
I found this interview with the author helpful, and this podcast had a good discussion of the book.
By day I read the saint and at night the nightmare, a book called The Doloriad, the first novel by Missouri Williams. Doloriad is for Dolores, one sister in a family that could be Earth’s last, or, if you ask the mother known as only as “the Matriarch,” Earth’s first in her dream of repopulating the world.
After a war some kind of cataclysm has exterminated all animal life and left only the Matriarch, her brother, and their children, born of incest. There’s also a man they call the Schoolmaster, who keeps the children occupied during the day with half-asleep lectures on texts from the pre-cataclysm world. In an early scene he quotes the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas:
In the first age of mankind the body was subject to the soul and nothing could happen in the body that would be contrary to the good of the soul, neither in its being nor in its operations.1
And further:
A diverse dignity of souls. It is necessary for the soul to be proportioned to the body. As form to matter, as mover to moved …2
These are from Aquinas’s commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the famous medieval theological textbook.3 The issue at hand is the serpent’s temptation of Eve. She was made not from the dust of the earth but from a rib out of Adam’s side; she has an inferior body and so a weaker soul, and thus is a better target for the serpent. Wasn’t the soul fully in command before the Fall, above the body’s weakness? Aquinas answers that even before the Fall woman was weaker. He abides by Aristotle’s sense that the soul is always proportioned to the body.
This is the backdrop of this novel’s vision of grotesque bodies and depraved souls. As if in direct response to Aquinas’s explanation, it shows us a humanity deformed in the extreme, in a new Garden of Eden at the end of the world. Bathed in a sickly white light, its characters are in thrall to the “unholy lethargy” of their bodies, to an incessant hunger for mindless violence and cruelty, and to a rapacious drive for sex.
This last point is actually encouraged by the Matriarch, who in her monomania wants her teenage children to couple with each other. To keep them sexually excited she shows them a TV show about — who else? — Thomas Aquinas. The saint the church calls the Angelic Doctor, who in his infinite patience and ox-like diligence could solve any problem, is called in by the show’s tagline “GET AQUINAS HERE!” to help people through different scenarios of demented sinfulness. The first we see is of a cheerleader who happens to be impaled by a metal pole interrogated by her school therapist about possibly losing her virginity to a jock named Brad. There are salacious and overwrought warnings about the pains of sex, and the children squirm with excitement — except one, that is, another sister named Agathe.
There is something in the young woman that resists the Matriarch’s control. Her mother sees her as
... a changeling from a dead city, a stone baby sent to the encampment by a god splitting his sides with laughter to parody the Matriarch and her dreams, a termite in the Ark.4
Like Dolores, Agathe has kept her virginity, but maybe it's also that she’s given to seizures, during which she’s delivered visions that she recounts afterwards in her halting speech. The Matriarch has never had a vision herself, and so when she claims to have had a premonition of another family on the other side of the woods, we may surmise that her anxiety over Agathe is behind it. This false vision, for which she commands Dolores be left in the woods as an offering to the other family's men, marks the end of the Matriarch's fragile control over the children.
It should be mentioned that because of a “poison in her” poor Dolores has no legs, and so has to be brought out to the woods in a wheelbarrow. Her body is huge and ungainly, with enormous breasts, a slackened jaw, pale skin, and round earnest eyes like a pig’s. Agathe’s speech is halting, but Dolores can’t speak at all. She only moans and clings to her family like a child, seems to long for physical closeness, as if all she knows is bodily experience. She is said to have no awareness of time. Her docility and her innocence make her a favorite of the Matriarch’s, but her siblings hate her, and they regularly insult, beat, and torture her. We don’t see Agathe join in the torment, but she in particular is repulsed by her sister, even as they seem to have a certain kinship. Their unlikely bond turns out to be a major theme of the book, though it is understated.
Though the book is named for Dolores, its central consciousness is Agathe’s. In addition to her visions, she has a certain mobility of perception that allows her to be in many places at once and even inside the thoughts of others. Dolores is said to have no experience of time, but to Agathe time is a map that she involuntarily traverses:
… even when she was in their world Agathe was flickering, unstable, and found it hard to collect her thoughts. She was aware of the disordered nature of her mind, the connectedness of substances, the extreme similitude of objects, the thin boundaries between times and places, so easy to get lost between, and she remembered the phrases their uncle had whispered when she'd told him those things: associative loosening, cognitive drift. It was the light that dizzied her, or the smell of the trees at night; these things unraveled her, and whatever was left was free to go places that the others could not because they were single points on the map, but she, Agathe, was the map herself.5
This doubles as a description of the novel’s style — it’s less a stream of consciousness and more a field, but one’s agency in this field is limited. We drift from one mind — or perhaps mindlessness — to another.
Reviewers have rightly praised the book for its poetic language, but they should have added praise for its humor. Once you get used to the gruesome violence and cruelty, a winning absurdist voice comes through, impish and harsh. Flat, funny lines like “The Matriarch turned to look at her youngest daughter with coldness in her pale eyes and thought about lack”6 or the poster on the wall in the Aquinas TV show that reads "If your dreams don't scare you they aren't big enough!” show the range of this book’s tone. The Schoolmaster in particular, who is accumulating a giant moth-infested mound of woolen clothes from which he plans to emerge as man-moth-God after another apocalypse, drives the book to hilarity. There are also disarming moments of humanity — impressive for a book so stylized and surreal — like when the Matriarch hugs Dolores close to her and thinks, Everybody else is dead and I'm all alone!7
The novel seems to delight in deranging its sources — you can throw different books at it and watch as they’re absorbed into the Schoolmaster’s hideous mound of woolen clothes, festering with moths. Comparisons with other post-apocalyptic fiction do little to illuminate it, and the science fiction elements are mostly tongue-in-cheek anyway. This means we can put aside Cormac McCarthy as well, even though the comparison on the level of style is reasonable at times.
If McCarthy gets his sense of doom regarding men and women and Western society in general from Faulkner, then The Doloriad has morphed the influence of Faulkner into something more strange. Dolores could be compared to Benjy, the lonely and disabled brother from The Sound and the Fury, and Agathe to Darl, the brother given to uncanny perceptions in As I Lay Dying, but to transpose those characters into a hyper-violent work of parodistic not-quite-science-fiction that uses depictions of grotesque bodies and harrowing cruelty to critique ideas found in Thomas Aquinas is to travel far afield indeed. The harsh humor and the link to Aquinas puts this book closer to Flannery O’Connor, who responded to readers’ accusations of nihilism over the violence in her books that she was no nihilist but in fact a “hillbilly Thomist” who wrote to shock the reader into an apprehension of grace, but O’Connor would not have been so audacious as to insert the saint himself as a character in her fiction, let alone an Aquinas attended by cartoon sheep.
In his preface to A Confederacy of Dunces, Walker Percy calls that novel’s protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, “a perverse Thomas Aquinas,” and I suspect Reilly, who longed for the philosophical unity and cosmic determinism of the Middle Ages, would have welcomed a slogan like “GET AQUINAS IN HERE!”. The Doloriad is no less knowing than Dunces regarding its medieval source, but is more combative.
Perhaps it would have found company with another medievalist, the American historian Henry Adams, who before his more famous autobiography wrote an idiosyncratic book on medieval architecture, history, and philosophy called Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams may be said to have been the first to look at the modern world and shout “GET AQUINAS IN HERE!”, but his treatment of Aquinas is ambivalent. He marvels at the cathedral-like architecture of Aquinas’s thought and praises its sense of unity, but he deplores too much accommodation of rationality into the church. He emphasizes the importance of simple faith, which he sees embodied in the saints and in the Virgin Mary, and largely absent from the modern world.
The characters in The Doloriad have hardly enough mind to be rational — Aquinas’s careful constructions are to them empty phrases — but Dolores, in her innocence and simplicity, is something like a saint upon whose love a new church could be built. Its prophet would be Agathe, who might be the only one absorbing anything from the Schoolmaster’s lessons.
If I could offer one more point of comparison, a turn to Thomas Pynchon, who found a starting point in Henry Adams, may bear some fruit. Starting in his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon elaborates a symbolism of light as a malevolent force — first as key to scientific discoveries that unleash an obsessive drive to impose rational order on Nature; then in its whiteness or non-color light becomes an emblem of European colonial empires; and lastly it is, at a cosmic scale, the Lord’s fiat of death, a destructive element innate in Creation itself. Pynchon’s characters are either possessed by the self-destructive belief that they can return to the light and so transcend Nature’s drive toward entropy, or they learn to flee it for realms of a more “feminine darkness,”8 closer to the Earth.
In The Doloriad the post-cataclysm light is omnipresent, a sickening glare that’s made everyone lethargic and violent. Perhaps it’s not unlike the light of our smartphone screens, illuminating the faces of a stupefied horde of young people, against which elders like the Schoolmaster can only rant and curse. Like a good Pynchon character, the Schoolmaster dreams of a cave of darkness into which he will huddle, but the dream is perverse, and the urgency of this escape is lost on the children, who are already acclimated to the glare of the light. This is maybe a bit of an interpretive stretch, but I think a revealing one. In reading The Doloriad with an eye for its possible influences, you will begin to feel its wish, as the Matriarch puts it, to be “free from the past and its language.”9
This book stands ambiguously at the threshold of the future. The “stone baby” of a pregnancy at the end of the novel is either a symbol of the departed past, emptied of life, or a repetition of the same metaphor used to describe Agathe’s alien hardness at the start of the novel. It would be, in the second reading, a defiant celebration of the power of the artist to dissolve all received authorities, church and family alike, and reform them into something new. It gathers together its materials and permutes them into hieroglyphs that read like threats of a new time to come.
If you liked this review, you might like others I’ve written about contemporary books:
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda
p. 6
p. 7
p. 14
p. 39
p 14
p. 86
p. 324 of Gravity’s Rainbow for this phrase. But this general pattern repeats in countless places in Pynchon.
p. 12
Amazingly written review!