In answer to his own question--"who am I""--Bruno responds, "failed priest, fugitive monk, magus with a box of conjuring tricks, prevaricator, would-be torch bearer trudging through his own darkness, garrulous in language, viperous in debate." This is the last, one guesses, of the many versions of himself that West scattered through his fiction. Bruno's life had exercised him three decades before, when he wrote the play
The Heretic: A Play in Three Acts (1969). What West found in Bruno was a man of paradoxes, someone who believed himself to be a loyal son of the Catholic Church but found himself in persistent conflict with it.
The personal reference is clear, but West sought a wider understanding of Bruno's position. In 1996 he wrote that "the better I knew him, the more modern I found him." Even if people are no longer burned in public, torturers are still on the payroll (as West's fictions often depict). Further, "it is the illusion of our time that the nonconformist is in the ascendant, that the heretic is the hero and the revolutionary is the new redeemer." Instead, West believed, "the odd person out has never been so much at risk or so completely menaced by that conspiracy of power which we are pleased to call government." In his novels West regularly confronted and denounced the apparatus of state and private terror and the fate of prisoners of conscience and of the accidental, incidental victims of authoritarianism.
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