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A Review of Guy Davenport's The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories |
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Employing a user-friendly version of between-the-wars-style modernism, Guy Davenport's The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories launches a head-on assault at two of the United States's most cherished delusions: 1] that children are asexual; and 2] that human sexuality is pretty much an either/or proposition. In the title novella and in a loosely linked group of stories including, especially, "The River" and "Concert Champetre in D Minor," Davenport posits two separate [though similar] groups of boys and young men, ranging in age from prepubescence through the late teens. Though these boys kiss, hug, fondle, smell and masturbate each other, Davenport's book is not a pedophile's fantasy. For one thing, there is far too much context, including specific conceptual links to the "golden age" of Athens and allusions to the stereotypical free-wheeling "Swede," as well as to Pythagorean philosophy, "primitive" ethnography, and the worlds of art and literature. ["The Cardiff Team" is a painting by Robert Delauney, from 1912-13.] Furthermore the boys themselves are not simply hormonally charged goats: their obsessions with their own bodies and the bodies of others are grounded in a larger fascination with the body of the world--the differing sounds of voices in a house, in a field, on a rural road; the wet smell of a stream; the textures and scents of wild plants; the scientific marvels of the Eiffel Tower and Mr. Ferris's first wheel. And there are other complications to a too simple "perverted boys" explanation of Davenport's group dynamic: the revelation midway through the novella "The Cardiff Team" that one of the "horny" boys is actually a girl in masquerade; the solid grounding of the central characters of each group in loving, happy families aware of their sons' explorations; the expectation by the boys' elders that they will grow up to marry and father children; the pointed non-issue of whether any [but one] of these boys is what Americans would characterize as "gay"; and the tacit connections to the non-erotic, yet essential, material involving tribal ethnographers and a vacationing Kafka. Davenport has constructed an extraordinarily frank and nonchalant picture of adolescent and pre-adolescent sexuality, sensuality, and sheer mammal affection. And he even makes the possibly bitter pill a little easier for his countrymen to swallow: all of these stories are set in that homeland of depravity, Europe. "The Cardiff Team" is not for the timid, but those willing to test the waters may find the swim of a lifetime. |
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