Book Review: The Divine Farce

The Divine Farce by Michael S.A. Graziano ✩✩✩✩✩ 

Genre(s): Horror, Philosophy

This is the first book review I’ll be posting on here, as it’s the most recent one I’ve finished. 

The Kindle app on my IPad recommended me this after I had read a David Peak book. I don’t usually read novellas because I always want the story to last forever. This book is 71 pages long and despite trying to hold off and savor it, I started and finished it in an evening. 

Spoiler free part: The Divine Farce is a gouged hole in the side of meaning. It’s shocking, absurd and vile. It will make you laugh. It will make you gag. It will turn you into the happiest of nihilists, or the most depressed of existentialists. It will make you want to hold onto the ones you love and never let go. Graziano’s use of human physicality to represent the pointless, endless rat race of life meshes seamlessly with the sardonic optimism of it all. What do we have, if not each other? What is the point of going on? In Platonic terms, is it really worth it to leave the cave, and should we even try? These questions may not have tangible answers, but this book takes a stab at it. It doesn’t waste a single word. It lingers on the graphic and disgusting just long enough to get the point across, then swiftly moves on, leaving your mind to neatly fill the blanks. The ending after less than one hundred pages feels hopeful rather than unsatisfying. Overall a wonderful, bizarre, disturbing and potentially paradigm-shifting read. 

Now... SPOILERS AHEAD

Three humans occupy a cylindrical hole two feet wide. There’s a metal grate at the bottom and holes for air at the top. Their nourishment, ambrosia, seeps down the walls. They are strangers. They don’t know how long they’ve been there. We are in the mind of Sage, named by his companions for his sporadic Confucianisms, as he explains to us the life that he lives in this prison. He describes the claustrophobic, maddening nature of being stuck skin-to-skin with two other beings, unable to sit down or move more than a few inches at a time. It is brutal and visceral. But more importantly, it is intimate– he is never alone. The longer they are stuck in this situation, the more normal it becomes. Your legs get used to standing. You get used to pissing on your feet. And you get used to your being intertwining with someone else’s. The first chapter is the only time where the characters’ voices aren’t distinguished by quotation; our main character has begun to accept them as no different from his own. 

So, when the trio discovers a soft, sandy spot in the wall, they have already spent weeks, months, or years living this way. It’s uncomfortable but comfortable. Hell, but a perfect heaven. Miserable but safe. But a desire for something better pushes them to dig at that sandy spot until the wall crumbles.

The optimistic symbolism doesn’t become apparent until you get all the way through. It’s designed that way, shocking you with the absurdity of each situation. We go from the tight intimacy of the oubliette-esqe cell to crashing into a vast system of caves, filled to the brim with naked, wandering humans (and animals, including prehistoric ones and the Loch Ness Monster). The trio feels hesitant but relieved to now be in a place where they can spread out and lie down. But eventually they want to escape this cave, too. There is a profound feeling of loss when Sage is separated from his companions in the process. You get the sense that Sage would almost prefer to be back in their rank cell together, with the only people who know him inside and out (both literally and physically). They were indeed fucking in there. In the caves are thousands of living creatures moving through tight corridors, their feet caked with the excrement that covers every traversable surface, living only by the will of survival. It’s reminiscent of the third circle of Dante’s hell, wherein gluttonous shades mindlessly wander through putrid filth as divine punishment. Speaking of hell– the term is mentioned a number of times throughout the story– however I don’t believe any of the places described so far are meant to represent any sort of afterlife. More on that later. Alone, Sage joins the masses, at first attempting altruism, then resigning to selfishness. He has to in order to survive. Food and water are scarce and brutally fought over. No friends are made, no one speaks, no one attempts to change the situation. 

It’s important to note that when Sage eventually does find devise a plan to escape, he is not necessarily changing the situation either. He is simply trying to better his own, after his attempts to get others to join him fail. Everyone else has either given up hope or already knows that it is futile through experience. Climbing up a rope he has made out of human and animal waste, Sage manages to knock his way out to the “roof” of this cave system. But the only thing on the other side is emptiness, aside from the machines dispensing food and water to the crowds below. There’s no one operating it. Instead, the strange world itself provides, and living beings take advantage of it. Once that realization hits, one might sink into despair. Another might seek out a way to give it purpose. Sage chooses the latter, effectively playing God as he distributes the food through the ceiling of deprived areas. He is clean, safe and comfortable. The thought of going back is inconceivable– who would want to return to that filthy, putrid, violent, crowded existence?

But then Sage (and we by extension) remembers the oubliette. We remember that while cramped, it was never lonely. We remember the warmth of another’s touch, the knowing that someone else is there. The implicit understanding of what it means to be human. We might not all be thinking about it as concretely as Sage, but we know the struggle, the hunger, the desire, the will. It’s built into us. And no matter how much Sage tries to carve out a life for himself in the sterility of vast emptiness, he ultimately realizes that none of it really matters. For during all this time, he has never stopped searching every face for his companions. It’s a horrific realization, because the only way to continue that search is to go back. No amount of shouting their names into the pit will bring them to him. It’s simply impossible to find someone that way. This is where we may think of Plato, if we haven't already– Sage has left both the physical cave and the allegorical one. He has seen beyond the veil, and that veil is nothing, aside of what he makes of it. And it is crushingly lonely, all-consuming. The purpose he has given himself is indeed meaningless if he has no one to share it with. The maddening, claustrophobic forced intimacy of his first prison now sounds like heaven. They were all afraid to leave it, anyway. So Sage makes his choice: he’s going to leave the empty space, return to the squalor, and search for the two people he cares for most in the world. 

We don’t know if he ever finds them. Perhaps we hope he does– but then what? Find another hole to stay in forever? That wasn’t a true life either. What it was, though, was raw intimacy. Sage describes it as love, and it is. They were all together long enough that they went from strangers to something closer than anything they’d ever had. They were each other’s entire lives. It is incredibly rare to find something like that– and I believe that is what Graziano is trying to represent with the oubliette. We may not choose who we end up loving, but we are drawn to them anyway. You don’t always get along with the people who share pieces of your soul. But ultimately we can't bear to live without them. 

Exiting the oubliette is entering life outside of it. Life is messy, chaotic, disgusting, unrelenting, unfair, terrifying and exhausting. There are so many people in the world. You’ll only ever know a handful of them. Sage claims he’s never seen the same face twice, which statistically makes sense. I don’t think the impetus for escaping the oubliette was out of a desire to go their own separate ways. Instead, they were hoping to find something better, somewhere they could live together comfortably, stretch their legs. After all, they had reached the point of codependence, and that is hard to shake. This makes it all the more sad when they are eventually separated. We’ve all lost that one person that seemed to make it all make sense. The one you thought you’d know for the rest of time. Letting go is hard, and more often than not it is forced upon us by circumstances outside of our control. Sage becomes a realist-optimist; he’s got to do what he’s got to do, but he still carries the hope, love, and memory of the people he’s lost. It pushes him to try to finish their collective goal on his own. And miraculously, he does.

What follows in the empty plane above starts out as heaven, then becomes a cold slap in the face. The act of Sage playing God, as well as the “economy” and status quo down below, can all be seen as commentary on the nature of competition in the modern world. Perhaps the closest thing we have to God is he who controls the distribution of provisions– leaving us to fight over what is given. Or, perhaps, it has more to do with eldritch knowledge. Either way, both supply the puppeteer with inescapable loneliness. To have the most power or the most knowledge isolates you from everyone else. It makes you out of touch, unrelatable. Which is why Sage, who is only human, finds himself unable to bear that life. He thought the first phase was intolerable, but hindsight is 20/20. The will to learn more, to have more, and to see more– cultivated by the initial limitations of the oubliette–  pushed him up to that place of “mostness”. There was only one way to go without losing himself in the process. And that was back. 

So where does that leave us? Well, for me, it left me feeling profoundly affectionate towards the ones I care about. I could immediately draw the connections between Sage’s life and mine, though only in broad strokes, of course. I find myself annoyed by my loved ones at times. There are moments where I wish I could just live my life independently, with no one else to concern over me or be concerned over. But even doses of that fills me with that lonely, empty feeling, and I come crawling back to the sweet embrace of familiarity, eternally grateful that I have them. Graziano’s allegory uses the tangible– smell, space, touch, proximity– to comment on this excruciatingly, uniquely human phenomenon, and he does it in a way that denies a higher purpose. I believe to him, life’s real purpose is to embrace our need for each other. It is to hold tight to those bonds and never let go. The narrative framing is reflective, not actionable. He is commenting rather than imploring. And, as far as comments go, I find this one to be very compelling. It taps into what I have always felt to be true and combines it with a dash of gross-out horror. It’s ridiculously funny, depressingly real, and unabashed in its execution. I am thrilled to see what else this author has come up with.

Next review will be on Terminal Park by Gary J. Shipley.