The Asiatics Book

"On the Road"-- in your dreams

A young proto-hippie in the 1920s journeys across Asia with little money and a tendency to get into trouble. He smuggles drugs, is robbed a few times, has numerous sexual adventures, lands in jail, escapes being shot, survives a plane crash, visits a maharaja, and works a short while for a weird doctor in the jungle. His often-reappearing acquaintances are mostly Westerners of the rich elite sort, though he meets the odd local who nearly always waxes philosophical. I read this book in 1955 when I was twelve. I find now that I didn't understand much. The writer was a homosexual who looked at male eyelashes a bit more than I was interested in, but whose experiences of life no doubt embittered him considerably. At age 12, this did not occur to me. Surprise, huh?

Prokosch's first novel, it attracted considerable attention in 1935 when it came out but has since sunk out of sight. Like an earlier, more mature "On the Road", it is highly philosophical, full of ponderings on the meaning of life, the need for love, the need "to be fragile, be tender, to humiliate yourself and let the discoloration of dream close in on you." However, the protagonist is even less focused than Kerouac. Such a seeker wants to "discover the way to live in this most fruitless and tantalizing of worlds." (p.145) People are cold because "nothing's left, because we never really believed anything, we never rose above the world of objects, we never deep down within us were alive. It's the age of inversion, the negative age." (p.206) His view peruses the perverse nature of Man, who longs for love but is doomed to wither, decay and die.

Being a gay man in a time when homosexuality was condemned and punished had severe repercussions on the author's views and his personality. It shows in such descriptions of an old comtesse in Tehran. "Seen from the outside she was a laughable creature, like everyone else in the world; pompous, decaying, mad. Seen from the inside, even if only for an instant, she grew like everyone else into a tragic and terrifying shape. That's the only difference between laughter and terror. Man resides in a shell of absurdity. It's the thing hiding inside that gives us shivers." (p.126)
"We're all Asiatics, we're lost, the race is dying...." Thus the title takes on new meaning if you read the book to the end.

But if you do choose to read THE ASIATICS, be aware of one thing. This is a total fantasy. Prokosch had never visited any part of Asia when he wrote it. Fascinated by geography, he guessed at the look of the countries and the ways of their peoples. That wasn't enough. The book is full of the wildest inaccuracies, olive oil in Burma, weirdly named Russians, Hindus with Muslim names or vice-versa, no idea of Islam whatsoever, the coconut palms of Punjab (don't exist), lilacs where none have ever been seen, sheep in tropical Asia---the list is endless. You can't recognize the foods, the clothing, the houses, the cities and their monuments, Nothing. If you have any idea of Edward Said's "Orientalism", Prokosch's book fits right in. For him, Asians are above all, "The Other", an amorphous mass which cannot be understood by the West, usually venal, highly superstitious, tricky, but also philosophical and possessing a childlike faith lost to us "sophisticates". Or perhaps we the Westerners are sunk in materialism while Asia is more spiritual---more orientalist balderdash. "Asiatics are afraid of almost everything. Afraid of life, afraid of death, of Europe, the mountains and the sea, of God.....of any sort of reality." (p.258) Total tripe. Since Prokosch never met the real Asia, his entire book is a reflection of pictures gleaned from other, also Orientalist writers or purely from his imagination. THE ASIATICS is a vehicle for his thoughts on life and represents a personal quest for understanding. That is the only reason you might read it, though it is an imaginary adventure tale too.