The Conference on Beautiful Moments (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Conference on Beautiful Moments Anis Shivani (bio) Richard Burgin . The Conference on Beautiful Moments. Johns Hopkins UP. To be liberal means to have overcome the urge to cruelty, latent in all of us. In the doctrinal, political sense, this theory was easier to articulate in the early centuries after the Renaissance when tyrannical abusers still roamed the continents, often inflicting barbarism just because they could, with impunity. For the individual, liberality of spirit is an earned practice, built up over time, from earliest awareness to the last days of maturity, much as Buddhists progressively refine concentration. Lapses along the path are often fatal, irrevocable. But what happens in a society so materially advanced that primary physical and psychological needs are easily met, the state never [End Page 188] subscribes to overt cruelty, and there is enough time left over to ponder the choice between generosity and cruelty? What is the nature of the pain involved in the choice, and how well may we predict the end result? This is the territory Burgin explores in this stunningly effective, tightly woven collection that contains some of the best stories of his accomplished career. Over and over again, we are made to ponder the limits of liberality in a culture given to stating its explicit beliefs at the loudest rostrums available, as we are put into the shoes of the protagonists and challenged to articulate our humanity in more effective terms, if we dare. Indeed, the whole book is contained by this explosive wager. Burgin is well past the initial shock of the discovery of the rapacious beast lurking beneath our glittering body armors in the civilized gathering places of our metropolitan centers. He has seen the monster, without whose defining presence we might as well not be human. So his characters are forever in search of the space and time of pure beauty, undiluted, unsullied, uninformed by cruelty, the original paradise without whose promise it is difficult to carry on the rituals of ordinary life. But to intensify the contradiction, he mostly operates with characters whose lives are unordinary, who have discarded predictable routines for the most part. Already inhabiting zones of risk and uncertainty, they confront cruelty magnified many times. This is a more daring narrative task than fixing cruelty within the confines of quotidian life, restricted by material constraints (the "dirty realism" of yesterday). Preexistent hells give way to unforeseen hells, while the ostensible discussion remains centered on forms of finding paradise. The saturation of cruelty as the provident antithesis of liberalism, its dialectical opponent predicted beforehand, seems to demand inevitable pairs of characters, often reflected in the story titles. "Jonathan and Lillian" describes the infatuation of a somewhat dull journalist, author of a failed novel, with the aging Hollywood actress Lillian Glass, operating in her worshipful milieu in Santa Barbara. Authorized to write Glass's biography, Jonathan is also quickly seduced by Lillian, even as her disgruntled earlier young lover, Kenneth, now working as the butler, hovers in the background, plotting revenge with the theft of a valuable painting. In this story, as in several others, Burgin fluidly lapses from the point of view of one character into another's to reinforce the idea of a pervasively latent ideology of cruelty informing the alleged individual consciousness. The meaning of this opening story is not fully clear until all the stories have been read: the question being posed is, who is being cruel to whom? Lillian, for exploiting a dullard wannabe writer like Jonathan? But Jonathan is being complicit in his own degraded seduction, so he has evident free choice. Kenneth, in his thievery and resentment, when he knew the deal with the fickle older lover going in? But we understand the necessity of cruelty from his point of view. Everywhere in this story, characters are afraid to look at their true physical and psychological characteristics, suspending belief in how matters have ended up. It is not so much sympathy or identification or forgiveness toward these flawed beings Burgin is after, not even withholding of moral judgment per se, but recognition that [End Page 189] knowledge begins in awareness of inherent evil: a very religious message, if...