Harmada starts in total disorientation, close to the ground: the narrator is lying down in the mud in a wooded area. After a brief conversation with a boy whose soccer ball rolls over to him, the narrator promptly “curl[s] around a tree trunk” and falls asleep:
I dreamed about something I don’t remember very well now, but I recall a shapeless force that was strong enough to drag me down, and that—despite being frightened at first—the thing that debased me was not turning me into an apostate per se, but was dissolving my self inside something like a warm passage that reminded me, astonishingly, of a sexual orgasm [. . .] I touched my groin, and it was wet.
Highly erotic and full of such gems, Noll’s novel explores the powerlessness of feeling both disoriented and aroused. The narrator’s ambition—which propels the plot—is nearly always based in desire, though the form and object of this desire exists in a state of constant transfiguration.
The novel itself shifts and morphs on every page; its occasional extended scenes comprised either of monologues that circumnavigate the world in one breath, or stretches of witty banter between two characters reminiscent of bunraku puppet plays. Harmada leaps through space and time in an almost oneiric way. By the time you’ve arrived at the next paragraph, you’re already late to the party. Take the following sequence, subject to extreme compression, where thought and action are hurriedly collapsed:
[A] sheet of newspaper came flying, hitting my legs. I grabbed it: first, I lifted it against the sun, as if intending to make a shade; then, I brought it close to my eyes, real close—for some time now, letters have been a bit washed-out for me, middle-age stuff.
It was a page of job listings. One of them was looking for someone with experience in typing and office chores.
It was the office of a salesman. His highest achievement: representing a canned food company from the capital, from Harmada. He sold those canned goods throughout the whole region, an old man, and he took my hand with frailty: Just a few more years here, in this profession, I am a widower with no children, he said, then I’ll retire, I’ll go live by the ocean, where I’m from...
I got the job.
No sooner has the narrator mentioned the job listing than he is in the interview, and the description, before it can blossom into a scene, is truncated. Or rather it trails off in ellipses, and we’re on to the next scene: the narrator starts his job, meets his boss’s niece, and wonders if he should marry her. By the next page, they’re waltzing at their wedding. The book carries on at this pace, depicting the dissolution of the marriage, the narrator’s time in an asylum, and his brief career as a stage director, with each new development hitting the reader as unexpectedly as a newspaper in the wind.
Yet for all its leaps and turns, the plot of Harmada still centres upon a familiar theme: the story of a middle-aged man facing his own mortality and wasted talents, told with the sort of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt that betrays the constructed nature of the man’s identity. However, this well-trodden tale takes a turn when, by sheer chance, Noll’s narrator encounters Cris, the orphaned daughter of a woman he’d once slept with. Feeling moved by both duty and eros, the narrator, a failed actor, takes it upon himself to make an actress out of Cris. In doing so, he becomes her lover and her keeper. This choice to set the narrator’s vanity, ambition, and power against Cris’s troubled past seems as much of a criticism as an indulgence, and therefore constitutes the book’s most complicated—and caustic—character dynamic, as the narrator’s overbearing attitude toward Cris eventually catalyzes her rebellion and abandonment of her “surrogate father” for another man. In his typical fashion, the narrator refuses to linger on his emotions after Cris leaves, noting simply that he had “a couple shots of whiskey” and moved on through the city—to a new apartment, to a bar, and into a rainstorm that once again culminates in carnal pleasure and transfiguration.
“[E]verything I do is like acting, you see?” the narrator explains early on. “If I grab a stone here and I take it over there, something happens inside me, as if the lie of carrying the stone was a trillion times heavier than the stone itself.” This motif of performance and deceit is a perfect set-up for staging the idiosyncrasies of Noll’s stylistic flair, for it is a structure that allows the narrative to digress into homespun tales. As for the other characters, acting affords them the permission to make up their own stories as they go. The novel is thus a craft lesson for writers in creating the conditions for improvisation. For instance, when a journalist interviews Cris and the narrator at a theater, Cris lies and says that the narrator is her father. The narrator immediately catches on, and the two start riffing:
“This is my father,” Cris said, moving her arm in the air right in front of me, as if introducing me to the journalist.
[. . .]
“My mother died a few months after I was born. I was raised by my father. He’d take me to the theater, let me sleep in the dressing rooms. [. . .]”
“I remember once,” I said, “when I was onstage playing Redbeard, I heard her crying between my lines. I remember I started sweating profusely, everything in me grew watery, and I didn’t know what to do. About ten, fifteen minutes later, I wasn’t onstage for a few seconds, so I ran to the dressing room... and she was asleep.”
“I remember once,” Cris said, “when we went to an indigenous village. I couldn’t have been seven years old yet. My father’s troupe used to go to these tribal villages to perform a very funny Christmas play. Baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, all the human characters, were animals in the play. [. . .]”
This make-believe goes on for four pages while the journalist takes diligent notes. The refrains of “I remember” accumulate and take the tall tale to hyperbolic heights. The characters delight in confessing falsities, relishing in the birth and rebirth of their identities. Whereas the sequence with a wind-borne newspaper can be shortly summarized as narrative unreliability, this mode of dialogic self-fashioning counters such a reductive reading. In passages such as this, a voice besides the narrator’s enters, spars, and asserts its world-forming vision, transforming both Cris and the narrator from two people living in a specific time and place into almost godlike figures of myth.
The constant transfiguration and renegotiation of identity that occurs in Harmada takes on a different tone when considering the narrator’s relationship with the notion of home. The narrator is, from the outset, a displaced person, and though we do not know of what nation, it is clear that a feeling of exile underlies his peripatetic lifestyle. In characters’ anecdotes, place names both real and imagined are dropped in casually, almost incidentally, as if to say that where one has been is less important than the simple fact of mobility. In one scene, the narrator reminisces with a man named Bruce, an old friend and fellow actor who is one of the novel’s few recurring characters, second only to Cris. The narrator and Bruce recall Bruce’s mother’s death, which occurred while Bruce and the narrator were in North America:
“I also remember,” I continue, “one afternoon in a cheap hotel in Washington when you went down to the lobby to call your very sick mother in a Dallas hospital. You came back to the room and said she was in agony on the phone...”
“Yeah, I remember,” Bruce says with a little sigh. “I got on a plane to Dallas, and two days later she died...”
“And I remember waiting for you at that hotel in Washington so we could resume our trip together.”
“And I picked up the little box with my mother’s ashes and sent it to Harmada with a flight attendant friend of mine. I gave him the key to my apartment in Harmada and asked him to put the box on the desk next to my father’s picture. Then I flew back to Washington...”
“Yes, and we continued with the trip...”
In this exchange, a small ritual of grief is enacted through movement. The repatriation of Bruce’s mother’s ashes frames the return to Harmada as a kind of homegoing. Harmada is, however, a fictional place, described as “the capital city of an unnamed nation.” Its centrality in the narrative presents itself as a lacuna. What does it mean to be circling around a nothing-land? What does it mean to traverse a city that can be, simultaneously, any city and no city at all?
The narrator in Harmada is both flâneur and nomad. On the small scale of the city, he is a flâneur wandering between theaters and apartments. On the larger scale of the world, however, he is a nomad, aloof from any national context yet circumscribed by the conditions of displacement. When I think of the significance of place in Harmada, I think of the woodblock prints of the late Zarina Hashmi, the Indian-American artist who used minimalist forms to deconstruct the idea of a map, and whose works often depict “home” from an abstracted aerial view. A 2019 exhibition, Zarina: Atlas of Her World, installed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis, included a small portfolio of hers titled Delhi, (2000): three woodcuts, each featuring a different view of the city. The first resembles a map or blueprint, and in the second, the city, as seen from above, rises three-dimensionally from the ground. The third is the most minimal and abstract, for it contains a single jagged line. All three represent Delhi, a city Zarina constituted from memory and whose streets she could wander even when she was away.
It is this kind of wandering that sets up Harmada’s ending, in which place and person come together: a young boy who appears in the narrator’s apartment—and who is perhaps the boy from the beginning of the novel—leads the narrator to the residence of a man who says, simply, “Yes, I’m Pedro Harmada.” There the story ends. Identifying this figure as the city’s founder, Brazilian literary scholar Idelber Avelar suggests that the conclusion of Harmada serves as a meeting between myth and history.
Readers, however, are not privy to what is myth and what is history. All they know by the end is that causality does not direct this novel. While bunraku puppet theater is one way to understand the clearly constructed nature of the narrative, it is not so much that the narrator is a puppet, but rather that the city around him is hoisted up on strings that somebody—the narrator, the author, or even Pedro Harmada himself—is pulling. What remains with the reader of this novel, in which anything could have happened, is precisely this sense of unknowability.
