My Uncle Oswald

A childhood Dahl fan, after catching a sampling of Dahl's adult short stories as a young adult and particularly the two concerning Uncle Oswald (“The Visitor” and “Bitch”) which are both lousy, I was never motivated to read the Oswald novel. (Oswald seems to have gotten his name–at least in print–not long after the JFK assassination, if you want to read anything into that.) After reading the recent NYRB essay about Dahl's life and works, I thought I might as well get this one from the library and give it a quick run through. I also knew some details of the main plot, Oswald's scheme to retrieve, cold-store, and then sell the sperm of famous men, and that one of the men was Marcel Proust. So as a Proust fan I was curious what Dahl's portrayal of him would be.

It turns out that it is not as shitty as his worst work, but pretty close. Some of it is amusing. The best level on which the book works is as the story of an extremely stupid caper. Unfortunately the caper is rather simple to pull off, and more or less occurs the same way with every individual they steal the sperm from. Dahl (or his editor) seems to realize this and starts skipping through them quickly instead of fully narrating them all.

Dahl seems to be fascinated with the idea of a chemical that could cause a man to uncontrollably rape the nearest woman, and to think that this concept contains a lot of comedic potential, as a prank played on the very stuffiest, most respectable of men. In “Bitch” this is a perfume and in the Oswald novel it is an ingested powder. In this comic universe, arousal works on a scale something like a dog's supposed bite threshold; pass the threshold of too much arousal and one simply proceeds to violent rape. One gets a hint of Dahl's sexual inclinations when he has Oswald the lothario relate his preference to only sleep with a woman once, in a bender-like fashion, and then part ways sexually forever, no matter how satisfying the one experience was. Dahl seems to not contemplate (or at least doesn't have his narrator Oswald do so) that the arousal-rape powder is a gender-flipped portrayal of a date rape drug, replacing numbness/incapacity with uncontrollable sexual aggression, but that the mission in effect still involves a woman going around and raping George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud, etc., any time she gives the man the drug.

There is some effort made at historical plausibility. It seems like the year of the caper, 1919, was chosen to allow Dahl to include his thoughts about as many Great Men of the early 20th century as possible (obviously it couldn't have taken place during the war); Proust died in 1922, Puccini in 1924, etc., Renoir in late 1919 itself. To quibble with some aspects of the Proust chapter, it portrays him as anti-Semitic (at best debatable; Proust himself was half Jewish by lineage and writes at length about anti Semitism and the Dreyfus affair within his novel), and Oswald is knowledgable about his writing about homosexuality, which he didn't really pursue until the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, published in 1921 and 1922, the year he died.