The Fergus Dialogues: A Meditation on the Gender of Christ

by D. Keith Mano

A dark comedy, with a luminous ending, about the difficulty of representing God.

Genres: Religion

196 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1998

About the author

D. (David) Keith Mano graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 1963. He spent the next year as a Kellett Fellow in English at Clare College, Cambridge, and toured as an actor with the Marlowe Society of England. He came back to America in 1964 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Columbia. He has appeared in several off-Broadway productions and toured with the National Shakespeare Company. Mano married Jo Margaret McArthur on 3 August 1964, and they had two children before their divorce in 1979. Mano left the Episcopal church for the Eastern Orthodox in 1979. He lived, until his death in September 2016, in Manhattan with his second wife, actress Laurie Kennedy.

Mano's nine novels emphasize religious and ethical themes and focus on contemporary issues seen from the point of view of a conservative Episcopalian. The novels are rich with comic action and written in an energetic style that occasionally caves in on itself from too much straining for effect.

Reviews

[Mala · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thinking person's book as Dialogues by their very nature are.
Mano's final book presents a modern man's intelligent engagement with the issues of Christian faith & shows how religion & rationality don't always square off at opposite ends. It's also "about our miraculous transformation from predatory animal to—to a conscious being capable of love. Against all odds. Out of the void." (166)
It's a tightrope walk here in that the novelist's agenda shouldn't get overwhelmed by Mano the believer's, & the form of The Fergus Dialogues helps greatly with that.

This book is in the form of Platonic Dialogues: a series of energetic back & forth between Fergus Quirk, a middle-aged homeless man in New York with a once respectable life as a writer, & Dan Rusher, a voiceover artist with an interest in the theatre.
The dialogue form gives it a drama-like appearance & indeed Fergus Dialogues comes close to a mystery play: when we place the events of Genesis in their right context; we understand the immensity of Christ's sacrifice. By rethinking & re-evaluating the myth of the Original Sin, Mano changes the skewed male-female equation that followed it.
As a listener, by turns amused, intrigued, bewildered, & skeptical, Dan's responses sort of echo the reader's. Mano's narrative choice thus gloriously carries forward the Socratic tradition.

Divided into three sections, from a discussion of Jesus' gender & then the theophysical universe i.e., the close connection between theology & the physical universe, it moves on to a disturbing exploration of the dark hidden area of human sexuality in Sex and Cannibalism. Without spoilering it, let me just say that the ritual of Eucharist illuminates it.
As a non-Christian, I really don't understand why depicting Jesus on the cross as man-woman would be an unacceptable/controversial idea when in our Hindu pantheon, the most potent God, Lord Shiva, is often depicted as Ardhanarishvara. For those averse to clicking on links, here's the gist: "Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from (or the same as, according to some interpretations) Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root and womb of all creation. Another view is that Ardhanarishvara is a symbol of Shiva's all-pervasive nature."*
By encompassing both the male & female experience** in his dying moments, Christ redeemed the whole of humanity. I think that's a beautiful idea.

Fergus somewhat reminds me of the Ancient Mariner***, who, with his glittering eye, fixes the wedding guest to listen to his extraordinary tale. Despite Mano's earnestness & his extensive preparation on the subject, there's the earlier fact of Fergus' stroke & his impaired health hence the uneasy subtext of taking these dialogues either as ravings of a less than sound mind, or the vision of a truly remarkable man****: as the blurb states—"He (Fergus) has been forced by fiscal and physical deprivation to practise a rigorous (if involuntary) asceticism. But, from his long mortification, there have come spiritual insights of remarkable power**** (...) he (Dan) will ultimately allow Fergus to be his Virgil, as they travel by D train together through the daunting lower circles of our Collective Unconscious."
I think Vollmann would really love Mano's depiction of a homeless tramp - like him, Mano too never romanticises poverty & lets us feel the whole dehumanising horror of it.
I would gladly recommend it to both the believers & the cynics: a book written this thoughtfully; deserves an equally thoughtful response whether it be for or against the subject: "Sane or insane, if something had a compelling structure and an organic presence—if it obeyed a logic of its own—then, as metaphor at least, it deserved attention." (146)
Not for everyone of course; but here are questions we need to be asking. What's a life without reflection? The unexamined life is not worth living. The Fergus Dialogues shines with its passion for critical thinking & the need for solid arguments. Don't let the religious premise of the book put you off—it's quite entertaining in its own way.
After all, this is D. Keith Mano—you can't really expect less.
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(*) Joseph Campbell also shared this image:
"Shiva's right earring is a man's, his left, a woman's; for the God includes and is beyond the pairs of opposites. Shiva's facial expression is neither sorrowful nor joyous, but is the visage of the Unmoved Mover, beyond, yet present within, the world's bliss and pain. The wildly streaming locks represent the long-untended hair of the Indian Yogi, now flying in the dance of life; for the presence known in the joys and sorrows of life, and that found through withdrawn meditation, are but two aspects of the same, universal, non-dual, Being-Consciousness-Bliss."
The symbolism of this eloquent image has been well expounded by Anand a K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva (New York, 1917), pp. 56-66, and by Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, pp. 151-175. From The Hero with a thousand faces, p.118.

(**) This image is central to Mano's first argument.
In Ali Smith's book There but for the, at a crucial moment during Mark's reminiscences, Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas painting turns up & is followed by Mark's first homosexual encounter as an adolescent. Clearly Ali Smith also saw the sexual connotation of the spear wound.
I recently read Julien Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters where, the masterful story 'Shipwreck' recreates a tragic event from French naval history in the light of Géricault's 'Scene of Shipwreck' or 'The Raft of the Medusa'. It has something very interesting to say about depiction of cannibalism in Western art: "There is very little cannibalism in Western art. Prudishness? This seems unlikely: Western art is not prudish about gouged eyes, severed heads in bags, sacrificial mastectomy, circumcision, crucifixion. What’s more, cannibalism was a heathen practice which could be usefully condemned in paint while surreptitiously enflaming the spectator. But some subjects just seem to get painted more than others. Take officer-class Noah, for instance. There seem to be surprisingly few pictures of his Ark around. There is the odd jocular American primitive, and a murky Giacomo Bassano in the Prado, yet not much else springs to mind. Adam and Eve, the Expulsion, the Annunciation, the Last Judgment – you can have all these by major artists. But Noah and his Ark? A key moment in human history, a storm at sea, picturesque animals, divine intervention in human affairs: surely the necessary elements are there. What could account for this iconographical deficiency? Perhaps the lack of a single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself: maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn’t show God in the best possible light? Géricault made one sketch of cannibalism on the raft. The spotlit moment of anthropophagy shows a well-muscled survivor gnawing the elbow of a well-muscled cadaver. It is almost comic. Tone was always going to be the problem here."

(***) And I said Bingo! when on p. 77, the writer himself referred to the Ancient Mariner. I wasn't off the mark; Mano had thought of the connection.

(****) Across cultures, fasting is seen as the quintessential ritual of spiritual purification where the Being is made conscious of his spirit over the material body, but what if that fasting is taken to several notches higher as starvation—will it bring spiritual insight or hallucination? Among the Jain community in India; there is the ritual of Santhara where the aged willingly take to fasting to initiate the dying process. It's supposed to purify them. When you compare Fergus' theories across cultures, they make sense.

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A note on how I came by The Fergus Dialogues:

Sometimes books come to us in a roundabout way!
On my review of Mano's Take Five, NR had very thoughtfully provided Mano's page on Better World Books website. I took a look & was despondent—because TFD was available only from outside vendors & as much as I hate writing this, ('cause BWB's own service has always been impeccable) my experience with their outside sellers had never been good. So I asked someone dear in India to order this book on their Amazon India account & carry it with them when they travelled to Dubai in late June. The book arrived in due time but I could get to it only after returning from my holidays. Well, there are some things in life worth waiting for!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Here’s the alternate subtitle for D. Keith Mano’s Fergus Dialogues :: “Sex and Cannibalism; or, How to Out=Freud Freud.” In other words, this is how one engages Freud’s ideas. You will be pleasantly surprised to learn that it is not sex which functions as a cover for traumas xyz, but rather much more disturbing, that sex itself is a sublimate of eating. Oedipus is already a late=period screen. It is a miserable thing to be a human being, knowing that we are not what we were and cannot know what we are not yet. Return to nature? No thanks!

Which really begins to bring into question the distinction between liberal and conservative in today’s mis-guiding political demarcations, when liberals would return to the ‘natural’ and the conservative insist upon ‘culture and civilization.’ It is not a question of whence stems any give issue xyz, whether from nature or nurture, but rather what do we do in the way of responding to and solving issue xyz? More nature or more culture? Is civilization the cause of our problems? Maybe. Is a return to the ‘natural’ the solution? No. The wound is healed by the spear which smote it.

At any rate, one understands very well why The Fergus Dialogues is Mano’s son’s favorite Mano novel. You will read Take Five because you a novel reader ; and it is Mano’s greatest novel in the opinion of this novel reader. But then too do not miss what Mano gets himself up to in Fergus ; all is stripped away straight to the bone ; dialogue of the Platonic type, being perhaps the greatest Platonic dialogue of the twentieth century? Why not. And this Fergus character is as thoroughly Manoan as anything this or that side of Simon Lynxx. That good, yes.

Quail that Mano is BURIED.