REVIEW: Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin

(First American Edition, Viking Penquin, 2002)

by Rod Amis

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Here's the skinny: Imagine Vonnegut meeting Gogol. Imagine a wonderful, sardonic, rueful, I've-been-there belly laugh. Now imagine that you take a magical mystery tour through Assyro-Babylonian, recent Soviet/Russian and Madison Avenue histories. Put it all in the same novel, spice with LSD, lots of vodka and hallucinogenic mushrooms and you might come close to Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens..

Victor Pelevin

. The centerpiece chapter of this novel is an analyis of modern television culture and advertising delivered via a ouija board by the "summoned" spirit of Ernesto Che Guevara. Here's a glimpse:

...the implications of oranus's existence as a whole requires its cellular structure to be bathed in a constantly increasing stream of money. Therefore oranus, in the process of its evolution (and it is located at a level of evolution close to that of a mollusk) develops a primitive nervous system, the so-called 'media'. This nervous system transmits throughout its virtual organism impulses that control the activity of the monadic cells.

These impulses are of three types, which are called oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses (from the commercial ejaculation 'wow!')

The oral wow-impulse induces a cell to ingest money in order to eliminate its suffering as a result of the conflict between its self-image and the image of the ideal 'super-self' created by advertising. Note that the point does not lie in the things that can be bought for money in order to embody this ideal 'self' - the point lies in the money itself. Certainly, many millionaires walk around in rags and drive cheap cars, but in order to be able to do that one has to be a millionaire. A poor man in the same circumstances would suffer inexpressible agonies as a result of cognitive dissonance, which is why poor people will spend their last penny in an effort to dress well.

The anal wow-impulse induces the cell to eliminate money in order to experience pleasure from the coicidence of the above-mentioned images.

Since the two actions described (the ingestion of money and it elimination) contradict each other, the anal wow-impulse acts in a concealed form, and individual genuinely believes that the pleasure is derived not from the act of spending money, but from the acquisition of a certain object. But of course it is quite obvious that as a physical object a watch that costs fifty thousand dollars cannot afford an individual any greater pleasure than a watch that costs fifty dollars -- the whole point lies in the amoung of money involved...

Our hero, protagonist Babelin (yes, derived from the word "Babylon" by his parents) Tatarsky is selling cigarettes in a kiosk near the metro (subway) in Moscow when a friend "rescues" him by convincing him that advertising is the wave of the future in the new (post-Cold War) Russia. This conceit allows Pelevin to have fun with the notion that advertising is the mother's milk of the new money game. In fact, he points out, the word for advertising in Spanish is "propaganda". This segues nicely into his notionn that advertising is just ideology. Babelin goes to work for a succession of increasingly powerful advertising agencies and , finally, for the arbiters of all Russian television image-making. Image-making, that greater craft that includes everyone from news readers to politicians, is what the core of this satirical romp is all about..

It's been taken as a given here in the United States for years that our politicians are marketed just like soap or corn flakes, often exhibiting the same intellectual depth. The cynical have come to accept that we deserve little better. But in Homo Zapiens, Pelevin takes this notion to the extreme, in the interests of both satire and truth. He shows how such cynicism about the political process is a new cynicism for people having grown up under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but also how it can be quickly and easily adopted. Jumping from the premise that politics are "created" by image-makers, Pelevin pushes on to conclusion that politics itself and our very world view can also be creations of the image makers.

The "concept scenarios" produced by Tatarsky and his peers will smack familiar if you've seen any billboards, bus kiosks, magazines or television advertisements (anywhere in the world) during the last decade. They are great fun. Best of all are scenarios Tatarsky is inspired to work on after his first psychedelic mushroom experience. As a member of "Generation P"(for Pepsi) Tatarsky has perfect pitch when he re-works old Russian concepts for his modern clients like Findlandia Vodka and Davidoff cigarettes.

For people interested in a glimpse of the landscape created in today's Russia during the Yeltsin era, Pelevin provides one inhabited by Chechan thugs, the Russian mob, transmogrified Soviet bureaucrats who embrace the black and grey economies brought on by "liberal economics" and up-and-coming young men on the make whose status symbols are Mercedes sedans and faux Rolex watches. It's a dangerous world where today's mover-and-shaker can be tomorrow's car-bombing victim if the right American dollars aren't delivered to the right hands on time. You have to pay someone for protection, after all.

But more to Pelevin's point, is the effect of global media not only on Russia, but on everyone's world view. Money, he suggests, is central to the new world view, and in the process we might just be losing our true selves. This notion of the self adrift infuses his portrayal of the characters we and Tatarsky encounter, from the Buddhist friend who supplies him the mushrooms to the UberBoss of Russian television -- who just happens to appear in lots of random ads and television newscasts in a series of guises. While poking fun at his characters, Pelevin is always sympathetic to their blight. That leads to insights like this:

The term 'involvement' didn't only come in useful at work. It also forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.

He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted to cult porn films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn't even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short, Blo's article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.

But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were good for was to tempt suburban Moscow's kids out of the Eden of childhood. In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult porn films, and was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo himself very well.

He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneously under three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky had invented the name 'Blo' together, borrowing the title of a bottle of bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they'd found under the bath (they were looking for the vodka Ed's wife had hidden)...

Leading in to this, later:

...Moscow probably had two or three hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol, as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with nappies and Moscows own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren't obsessed with arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism: they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, oe even any real readiness to drop a tab of acid occasionally -- despite their casual use of the term 'acid' every day of the week. What they did have were problems with digestion, money and housing, and in appearance they resembled not Gary Oldham, as the first acquaintance with their writing led you to believe, but Danny de Vito.

Pelevin has been a leading light of the "new" Russian literature since the 1980s, with books of criticism and a series of provocative novels to his credit. Only in recent years has his work begun to take off here in the West. This Viking Penquin translation, by Andrew Bromfield, is a good introduction to this talented writer's work. Pelevin's project in Homo Zapiens -- like that of so many Russian novelists preceding him -- is that of sussing out the metaphysical and spiritual gist (or should i say "grist"?) of life. He does it with a keen eye for absurdity and perfect-pitch parody. I believe it will whet your appetite for more. Only forty years of age this year, I suspect we shall have lots more of Pelevin's views from Russia's "Generation P" coming our way. I'd certainly call this book one to buy.