The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Cardiff Team by Guy DavenportRobert L. McLaughlin
Guy Davenport. The Cardiff Team. New Directions, 1996. 192 pp. $22.95.
Not a lot happens in most of the stories in Guy Davenport’s The Cardiff Team. Instead of focusing on plot, Davenport focuses on moments that beautifully evoke innocence, experience, desire, or fulfillment. The stories can stand alone, but, read together, they overlap in characters and incident and interact thematically. The characters long for connection with others in societies that encourage alienation. From George Santayana seeking to connect with a British army officer, to Robinson Crusoe desperately striving to return to the deserted island he sought to escape, to Swedish boys at summer camp trying to accommodate their feelings of love, Davenport’s characters attempt to form make-shift teams, to become ad hoc families, to find a meaningful home. Indeed, the form of the book is a model of such connections. Davenport incorporates other texts, from poems to Scientific American articles, and characters from fiction and history. More complexly, the various stories bleed into one another, as characters from one story appear in or are discussed in others and whole episodes jump from story to story. The result is that as we read we’re treated to tiny revelations when we make connections and that we’re asked intellectually to create the bonds that the characters seek emotionally. This connects to a second shared theme: Davenport’s characters seem over and over to act out the conflict between the intellectual and the physical. Many of the main characters live in their minds and are contrasted with the men and boys around them who, while intellectually mundane, live in their bodies and with nature.
These themes come together and are supposed to be resolved in the long, troubling title story. Set in contemporary Paris, the story presents a twelve-year-old boy, Walt, as a synthesis of the intellectual and the physical: he is an acclaimed genius who is remarkably in touch with his own and others’ bodies, with the smells and the sights of nature. He is also the center of an odd ménage à cinq made up of Walt, his mother, her lover and Walt’s tutor, Marc, Walt’s friend Bee, who appears to the world dressed as a boy named Sam, and Cyril, an unhappily repressed rich boy who learns the joy of sex. Walt’s polymorphous perversity breaks down societal codes and replaces them with a structure in which the characters relate happily, guiltlessly, and selflessly. Marc tells Cyril, “Polycrates burnt the gymnasiums of Samos because he knew that every friendship forged in them were two revolutionaries. Our real families are our friends.” Unfortunately, this conclusion is problematic. A family based on sex between adults and children seems far from idyllic, and the constant talk of erections, masturbation, and so on is more tedious than revolutionary. Despite this reservation (and considering the story’s length, it’s a major one), the other stories in The Cardiff Team have much to recommend them: they are beautiful, intelligent, and thought-provoking. [Robert L. McLaughlin]