He defines Homo moralis as intolerant, judgmental, and conflicted, “ Homo moralis wants to induce us to give our overcoat to someone else, but then he presses us, again in the name of morality, to strip others of their overcoats.” Conversely, Homo aestheticus is open-minded, independent, Nietzschian-in his capacity to think beyond good and evil. Borrowing theses terms from the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier, he sets forth a Weltanschauung that’s rather reductive. In this second example, Kosztolányi gestures implicitly toward his well-known hobbyhorse, which he discusses in “On Myself”: the distinction between Homo moralis (the man of morals) and Homo aestheticus (the man of aesthetic sensibility). I’m supposed to be refined? In that case, so’s the blacksmith." The fact that I retain my old, pure feelings-only and exclusively for purposes of expression-is a trick of the trade, a piece of technical wizardry, like that of the anatomist who can keep a heart or a section of brain tissue that hasn’t had a feeling or a thought for ages in formaldehyde for years and years… What feels ‘refined’ on paper, however, is only so because it’s precise, finely tooled, and I am behind it, I-curse it!. Incensed by her naiveté, the writer fumes to himself: “I’m not a good man,” Esti protested inwardly.
Though she has never met the writer before, she feels confident in her request because she conflates the sentiments in his work with his personal disposition. In an essay titled “On Myself,” published in 1933, he scoffs at the former notion, stating: “I am not willing… to append a medical certificate to my poems confirming that I do indeed suffer on their behalf, that what causes them pain causes me pain as well, that I bleed if stabbed, or if one of them is stabbed, that artistic creation always springs from human torments.” In his final novel, Kornél Esti-published the same year as the aforementioned essay-he unspools a yarn about a penniless widow who importunes a writer for financial assistance. You know that he must have been a tormented genius, or one for whom everything clicked as tidily as a safety pin. All the same, one detects that he was abundantly aware that his facility with words would prompt wobbly conjectures. Of course, to limn a man’s life in nothing but pastels is to sully it certainly, Kosztolányi had his own buffet of hardships-for one, his physical decline was a protracted affair due to cancer of the palate. D_ is linked in her mind to her older brother Terrell, whose five years of sadistic abuse left an indelible imprint on her body and mind, and to Laurel, another cult member, whom she loved. Mae’s thoughts dart back to the 1960s, when she was a 16-year-old runaway trading sex for food and fell in with D_, a Charles Manson-like cult leader. The day the Twin Towers fall, she spots the televised image of Laurel, a former lover, on her knees in the ruins, “her mouth a black hole, as if the Furies were lashing her breast with the scorpion whip. She spends her off hours stalking rabbits, coyotes, and rattlers in the desert.
Mae, Bell’s narrator, is an American demon she is a loner working as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.
The Color of Night is a pared-down novel from Bell, 224 pages compared to his epic 2,000-plus page voodoo-infused trilogy about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolution ( All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, The Stone That the Builder Refused). Madison Smartt Bell’s swift-moving and daring new novel follows one damaged woman’s trajectory from her involvement in a Manson family-like cult’s mass murders in 1969 to her unpredictable actions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
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